Green leaves, yellow skies
Apr. 25th, 2022 07:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
allekhaI have now been told twice that I have dental insurance. I do not. I don't know why the dental company keeps telling Employer I am active in their system when I'm not. I am pretty sure the poor HR person who sends me extremely perky emails doesn't know why, either. Mostly I am just hoping that when May 1st comes around, I don't lose status in all my insurances again.
Yesterday, I went out for a walk and ended up crossing over the tiny creek next to the cemetery park to the riverside area. In retrospect, I'm not sure I was supposed to be there, but there's no sign or anything saying KEEP OUT or PRIVATE PROPERTY and I literally had to step less than a foot over the water, so.... (<- probably bad logic) I tried not to step on anything that looked too green and stayed away from the birds. The geese don't appear to have goslings yet, but I still didn't want to annoy them! It was a bit weird because I was surrounded by nature and yet could still hear cars the whole time, but I enjoyed poking around, and I picked up a rubber ball that someone had left behind.
Been practicing reading Japanese more lately. I remembered I had an account on this site called Natively, which tries to use an Elo system to rank the difficulty of reading materials, and it turns out that a) they updated the site and b) I find the being able to grade things against each other slightly addicting? I figured out that they mostly want you to compare books against ones with well-established ratings, so I wasn't getting many grading requests because I was reading mostly stuff I put on their system and nobody else had read and thus didn't have solid ratings. Once I added a couple more quick reads with lots of ratings, I suddenly got to grade several volumes that hadn't come up before, haha. Been trying to leave reviews, too. This sort of stuff is always tricky, because everyone has different background vocabularies and so on, but it's nice to have at least a vague guideline beyond 'idk try reading this next?', especially for manga, which you can't run a text analyzer on.
Man, even though some Japanese learners can be kind of insufferable, it's nice to have SO MANY resources for it because so many of us are also giant nerds. Z's heritage language has so little in comparison that US military language training manuals from decades ago are put forth as a reasonable free option. (Not that some of the people into that language aren't also insufferable; last time I went looking for a textbook recommendation, I ran into some very nasty sneering from native speakers at heritage speakers wanting to learn it, which, fuck you guys.)
Anyway, today I read the free コンビニエンスストア様, which I think is related to Convenience Store Woman in some manner (GoodReads even lists it as an edition of it, though it's not) - and I hated it, so maybe I shouldn't read the book. What I disliked is that it's weird, but in a way that doesn't have a weird internal logic, so it comes off as being for shock value. The narrator is in love with a convenience store and it's definitely still a building, but there's repeated references to the store having a blushing face and red skin and whatnot that I found confusing, and other than that one twist, it honestly wasn't that interesting a read.
I've read through enough of my library that I rewarded myself by picking up another four manga volumes. Thankfully, buying through Kobo still works! I picked up a oneshot (Look Back - I had already read it in English, which is legally available for free; if you haven't, it's very good and has some incredible paneling, though also heavy themes, including a reference to the KyoAni attack), the second volume of 夕凪に舞え、僕のリボン, and a couple of first volumes from my wishlist to try out. Need to read some of the offline stuff too, of course!
Yesterday, I went out for a walk and ended up crossing over the tiny creek next to the cemetery park to the riverside area. In retrospect, I'm not sure I was supposed to be there, but there's no sign or anything saying KEEP OUT or PRIVATE PROPERTY and I literally had to step less than a foot over the water, so.... (<- probably bad logic) I tried not to step on anything that looked too green and stayed away from the birds. The geese don't appear to have goslings yet, but I still didn't want to annoy them! It was a bit weird because I was surrounded by nature and yet could still hear cars the whole time, but I enjoyed poking around, and I picked up a rubber ball that someone had left behind.
Been practicing reading Japanese more lately. I remembered I had an account on this site called Natively, which tries to use an Elo system to rank the difficulty of reading materials, and it turns out that a) they updated the site and b) I find the being able to grade things against each other slightly addicting? I figured out that they mostly want you to compare books against ones with well-established ratings, so I wasn't getting many grading requests because I was reading mostly stuff I put on their system and nobody else had read and thus didn't have solid ratings. Once I added a couple more quick reads with lots of ratings, I suddenly got to grade several volumes that hadn't come up before, haha. Been trying to leave reviews, too. This sort of stuff is always tricky, because everyone has different background vocabularies and so on, but it's nice to have at least a vague guideline beyond 'idk try reading this next?', especially for manga, which you can't run a text analyzer on.
Man, even though some Japanese learners can be kind of insufferable, it's nice to have SO MANY resources for it because so many of us are also giant nerds. Z's heritage language has so little in comparison that US military language training manuals from decades ago are put forth as a reasonable free option. (Not that some of the people into that language aren't also insufferable; last time I went looking for a textbook recommendation, I ran into some very nasty sneering from native speakers at heritage speakers wanting to learn it, which, fuck you guys.)
Anyway, today I read the free コンビニエンスストア様, which I think is related to Convenience Store Woman in some manner (GoodReads even lists it as an edition of it, though it's not) - and I hated it, so maybe I shouldn't read the book. What I disliked is that it's weird, but in a way that doesn't have a weird internal logic, so it comes off as being for shock value. The narrator is in love with a convenience store and it's definitely still a building, but there's repeated references to the store having a blushing face and red skin and whatnot that I found confusing, and other than that one twist, it honestly wasn't that interesting a read.
I've read through enough of my library that I rewarded myself by picking up another four manga volumes. Thankfully, buying through Kobo still works! I picked up a oneshot (Look Back - I had already read it in English, which is legally available for free; if you haven't, it's very good and has some incredible paneling, though also heavy themes, including a reference to the KyoAni attack), the second volume of 夕凪に舞え、僕のリボン, and a couple of first volumes from my wishlist to try out. Need to read some of the offline stuff too, of course!
