look on my works ye mighty, and despair

So far this year I've managed to watch a season of Orphan Black (which is very good! I have some complaints but on the whole it's pretty amazing) and play more Dragon Age: Inquisition (which is glitching annoyingly -- I killed the same dragon twice and it didn't die -- but I still love it) and... I haven't done much else really! We have reorganised the flat a bit, so now all our figurines have display space and most of our clothes fit in the wardrobes.

In Japanese-learning news, I really need to take WaniKani off hiatus, and also do the (very minimal) homework we were given for Japanese class, and maybe revise a bit before the next lesson on Tuesday.

And we're back on Atkins again! Meat meat meat meat meat...

2014 was an up-and-down year, like 2013 before it. Breaking it down:

( Work )
( Health )
( Travel )
( Home )
( Music )
( Cosplay )
( Fandom )
( Books/manga/comics )
( Videogames )
( TV/Film/anime )
( Theatre and Ballet )
( Other )

My posting here dropped off sharply, sigh. I was mostly on Tumblr this year, and a little on Facebook and Twitter (I am massively throttling twitter participation and basically don't add people any more; I do not want it to become my primary social outlet because I dislike the length restriction).

But I'll, uh. Try to post here more, again, at least.

Monday. October. Everyone is buying all the things for MCM Expo. I'm so tired. A big wig delivery might arrive tomorrow, but at least we're all set up for that -- we got our new storage boxes today and unpacked them after we'd sent all the deliveries out. It'll be very good to have the new wigs -- the stock's definitely getting rather low in some places!

We have another Japanese lesson tomorrow evening; we did our homework earlier and I'm going to have a flip through some of my books to revise a bit of grammar in a bit too. I got a bit frustrated over the homework because it's badly photocopied worksheets with minimal explanation, grumble, but Pez helped me work out what I was actually expected to do, bless her.

Wanikani continues; I'm about halfway through level 21 and learning such wondrously useful terms as polygamy and anthropology. (Also some which are probably useful, like 'no entrance' and 'butt' and 'to put on a hat'. But it's funnier to tell Pez about the less useful ones and watch her go ...but why??)

Meanwhile, I'm feeling like my fics are moving again. I gave Inui's wife a random japanese name and it took me literally an entire night to realise that 'Kaoru' was not perhaps the best female name I could have picked. Oops. Still, it's progress. I actually spent a chunk of this weekend writing little porn drabbles (for pairings I don't really have any investment in, which was probably a good thing) into friends' inboxes on tumblr, and that was interesting in terms of a) I can write actual things in that much space, gosh and b) getting immediate delighted feedback -- which is always motivational -- and also c) actually getting me writing properly again. Hooray! Words! I can put them in orders that please other people sometimes.

Level 18 was horrible -- I messed up a radical early on which stopped a few kanji unlocking and then I kept tangling up readings and basically every time I got close to finishing the level I would screw up and set myself back again -- but thankfully level 19 has been rather less unpleasant so far.

( Cut for pics )

I haven't talked a huge amount about kanji/Wanikani progress for a few weeks. Time for a photo post!

( Cut for pics )

The progress I'm making feels tangible to me; one of the best gauges I have in terms of monitoring my progress is attempting to read all the j-idol tweets on my twitter feed. I often completely understand short tweets now! And I can pick my way through enough of the longer ones to get the gist most of the time. The fact that there's so constantly a reminder of how far I've come is really satisfying. I can also understand more of the Japanese songs I own -- often I had the gist of meaning already but being able to follow word-by-word is really fun. Even simple things like: when I started this, I couldn't read most of the kanji in the usericon for this post. Now I can read them all!

I probably need to actually start devoting scheduled time to working through translations manually; maybe some doujins, maybe lyrics, whatever, really. I suspect it doesn't matter as long as I'm putting the effort in.

(I have a fairly half-assed comprehension of Japanese grammar -- enough grasp of it to decipher things but not to really utilise it properly -- and I should work on that. But this is a yay post, not a scolding-myself post. :D)

To conclude: this system has worked for me quite well so far! I'm hitting milestones regularly both within the system and on a personal level, and that's keeping me motivated and enthused. The app and the fear of huge piles of reviews keeps me nagged into not slacking off. I'm quite proud of myself, really. :)

Well, on my birthday we worked because it was a weekday and so we had to -- but not for long, it was thankfully a very light day of packing. Then we got food/cake in Colchester (and avoided the sudden rain) before travelling into London. For my birthday dinner a big bunch of us went for dinner in Chinatown -- kahochan arranged the restaurant, bless him -- and then for dessert at the Candy Cafe afterwards. It was pretty much perfect from my point of view; food and conversation and happiness.

(I also got a bunch of presents because people are lovely, bless them all <3.)

( for my own recollection purposes )

Today I've mostly been lazing about -- very extreme laziness, really I haven't done much of anything except finally hit lvl 14 on Wanikani. There's been a lot of chatting on twitter (I woke up to more amazing art involving Qubine) and watching Pez play TLR and chatting on Skype and thinking about fic ideas. I had an absurdly coherent D1-friendship dream this morning which I will write up into a ficlet because oh student council president Yagyuu in flirt mode is fun for my brain.

So that's my weekend, hooray hooray. Happiness all around. Being 34 is great so far!

Well.



That hasn't happened in a while, usually my longest gap between kanji reviews is like 3 hours (yes, I just let 'em build up while I sleep, I don't actually wake up to do reviews).

I'm not sure I know what to do with this sudden stretch of NO REVIEWS time. I'll actually wake up tomorrow morning without any reviews waiting for me. So eerie!

(Also I hit level 9 in WaniKani -- having stuck the thing in vacation mode while I was away -- so apparently yay I have not completely forgotten all the stuff I learned before the holiday, hooray!)

I hit level 8 on WaniKani last night, yay! Waking up to ~130 reviews queued for me this morning was a bit overwhelming, yikes. Still, on several occasions today I have been able to correctly read the kanji in a) people's names and b) song titles so clearly all these reviews are paying off.

Meanwhile I'm making Pez sit through Masa's acoustic live concert. She loves me really (actually it's better from about the halfway point onwards, but for a while there I was wishing Masa would just skip his early catalogue).

...also wtf have you done to the interface now lj?

Ugh the past week has just been illness all the way. Flu and migraine and nausea. Yesterday evening it seemed to break, however, after a truly miserable day of migraine headaches and throwing up, so I'm hoping that was the last of the worst of it.

On a more positive note, moving stuff into the Enlightened category on WaniKani is very satisfying hooray! I kind of needed the ego boost, right now. I'm a very slow learner when it comes to visual things. Sigh. Oh well. I'll get there, even if it's slooooow.

I keep meaning to post more but I don't have much to post about, really. Attempting to write fic, reviewing things on WaniKani (note to self: SERIOUSLY you need to read what you've just typed before hitting return because typos, oh god), poking at videogames and cooking and working: this is 99% of what I do at the moment.

This weekend we're going to see Neil Hannon's Guide to the Organ at the Southbank Centre, though, which should be interesting! There'll likely be a lot of hymnals but I quite like hymn music when it's detached from context.

I've signed up for WaniKani, a mnemonics-and-spaced-repetition-system japanese learning course mostly focused on Kanji and vocabulary. Those are precisely the two areas I want to actually focus on and study, huzzah.

I like the concept of SRS, and it worked for me for learning kana pretty effectively. It's something I find hard to manage properly for myself, however -- I have Anki (and various useful cards for it) but I forget it's there and never review stuff in it. Emails and phone apps and reminders are all super useful prods for me. I'm also pleased that the site is upfront about a few quirks: they don't teach stroke order because they figure most people won't be handwriting most of the time, they don't do multi-choice answers because it encourages laziness (yes), and they expect it to take a couple of years to learn their content (but by then you should be a reasonably fluent reader of non-esoteric materials). I'm reassured! Promises of 'fast learning' always discourage me from trusting teaching methods.

We'll see; the first few levels are free and should take a couple of weeks to get through, and if I'm still happy then I may even shell out for this. Gasp.