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♥ mixed language

I was watching a Chinese vlogger open some mail and she was like, "If you can guess what's in this, leave a comment," and I immediately thought, "yi ben livre." Which is a combination of French and Chinese that I blame on Language Jones because youtube had just shown me a thumbnail of his video "Stop Mixing Languages." (And he speaks French, which I assume was the connection my brain made, since when I started learning Chinese it was ASL that I kept substituting with, probably because it was my most recent non-native working language.)

♥ language in dreams

The other funny thing about that is that it's a reminder of how differently we think, since I know a lot of people don't think in words and I definitely do. The other day I saw a discussion of dreaming in non-native languages, and several advanced language learners seemed convinced this phenomenon is either imaginary or "bogus" (not sure exactly what they meant by that), despite multilingual people assuring them it's real and normal. I remember my glee the first time I woke up and realized I'd been dreaming in Chinese. But I know a lot of people don't remember their dreams, either, so it must just be different brains with different experiences.

♥ AI face editing

Relatedly, I hadn't noticed any AI face editing until tonight, when I was watching my one of my favorite Taiwanese vloggers and suddenly thought, "wait, that's not a real face shape." (China has a relatively extreme "beauty filter" culture, and constant exposure to it may make people more likely to slide across the line from "very idealized" to "straight up anime" face without realizing it.) I googled AI face editing, and now I can't stop noticing people's teeth. I hope that passes quickly.

♥ AI face editing and faceblindness

Oh, but also, I found a helpful English video about a Chinese demonstration of AI face editing (the comments were definitely from non-Chinese viewers), and it included a demonstration of live AI face-swapping at the end. I'm faceblind, which I didn't think about at all until the face-swapping demonstration, because the face-editing was very clear to me. I could easily see the difference between the edited and unedited faces. But I could not see the difference between an original face and a face swap. It was amazing: the narrator would be like, "here's a Tom Cruise face swap" and I was like, "it's the same guy," and then the narrator would be like, "and here, obviously it's Scarlett Johannsen" and I was like, "what obviously; what are you talking about, it's obviously the same person."

So anyway, I don't know what that means, except that there's something different about AI face editing that's visible to me as a faceblind person in a way face-swapping isn't. (By comparison, I mean, I've never recognized editing without a comparison until tonight, and this wasn't "that face looks edited" or even "that face doesn't look real," but literally "that's not a normal human face shape." It looked perfectly real, it just wasn't biologically possible.)

♥ training with the pup

Finally, Daphne and I met with a dog trainer today, and as I told Marci, "I was impressed by him." She was like, "That's not a reaction you usually have to men." I know. So rare. (I often get along better with old men, and he says he's been training for 50 years, so maybe the pattern holds.) On the strength of our first meeting I agreed to a few "private" classes rather than a group class. No money was exchanged until the end of today's session, so I don't want to gush until we meet again, but he did everything right in the initial evaluation.

Star: She said the rent for sitting in the hammock was to move the coyotes, so I moved a coyote.
Marci: That's a great quote. It's even better without any context.

Angelic dog at the home improvement store tonight.



They didn't get me a cart for the plants. They got my dog a cart so she could ride on it ♥

Today Marci and I went on a vineyard tour. I was going to take Daphne for a walk first, but then the sun came out and she was like, no thanks. So I watered the fence gardens instead. Then we all went to the winery and got smoothies and walked around the vineyards to the river and back.

I can't believe I'm typing this, but Daphne was... an angel? We were seated on the deck while we ordered our smoothies, and Daphne sat calmly in my lap and pretended she'd never barked at anything in her life. There was literally no one else in the fields when we set off on our walk (I guess we were the only people who wanted to stroll in the hot sun today, but about half of it was shady and the vineyards and river were beautiful), and she happily walked half and was carried the other half.

When we came home I was like, I'll just have some lunch and then do a little work on the street garden. Then after lunch I was like, maybe I'll read a little first. After I read I went out and watered the porch plants and the front garden, and after that I was fully and completely done. Seems like the street garden's fine for now.

Neighbor: My plant isn't doing well in the shade; do you have a sunny spot for it?
Me: You know me, I never turn down a plant.
Neighbor: Yeah, that's our problem.