#I'm trying very hard it's just very difficult to learn when you have zero chances for immersion

[krakenartificer]

Just saw that multilingualism poll you reblogged and... well bhuel... aon scéal agat?

Roinnt scéal agam ach ní cumas teanga agam 😅 (prays I haven't screwed up the grammar too badly 🤞)

An bhfuil Gaeilge agat?

[timpac-capstone]

Week 7

So I tried making a completely new story because my original idea was just way too ambitious for the amount of time I have and where my skills are currently. Writing my script like this is difficult, it's hard to keep up with the flow of ideas that pop into my head and write them out in this style. I've tried looking up some videos online on how to write a screenplay but they're so long, 10 to 15 minutes, when all I really want to know is how do I format my words when describing the setting, where the camera is, and characters actions; which does not take 15 minutes to explain, just say if it's bold or italicized and where I should align these things. I started getting somewhat of a writer's block, I know the story I want to tell but describing it to others is difficult.

Finally finished Keep Your Hands Off Eizoken, it was actually pretty useful regarding this project. I went more in-depth in my week 5 post regarding the plot, but I didn't really get a chance to talk about the characters themselves. I really related to Asakusa because often I will have this idea for a video that I really find enjoyable but once I start typing out ideas I start to think, "People will think this is cringe" and then I start to pivot away from what I originally wanted and I slowly start to lose passion for it. That's when the producer, Kanamori, steps in to stop Asakusa from pivoting and procrastinating not because she's a concerned friend but because they are trying to make a substantial business. Mizusaki also has the same struggles as Asakusa because she is very much a perfectionist, she doesn't care that average people won't see the cut corners of their projects because she cares about the anime enthusiasts that will and in return it creates a lot of stresses on her and the team. It is relieving to see that this is something that all artists share on a professional level and it's not an exclusive thing to me. But despite these personal challenges we are still able to make amazing works that can have everlasting impacts on people.

I went to a Redshift meeting Wednesday night that was about making zines. I've never made a zine before and loosely know what they look like so I thought it would be a good idea to go because I think I'm going to have to make a zine eventually for my Capstone or if not for some project in the future. It's a pretty easy process especially when you have the proper tools so it only took like 5 minutes to make the booklet itself. Afterwards, I didn't really know what to do, I saw people writing in their zines but I wasn't really sure what to do for mine so I just made a comic. This was an eye-opener for me because it showed that I can still tell a story without developing a script first or with super amazing drawings. I'm not a reader and certainly not a writer so why was I trying to create a story the way a writer would. So I'm going to work backwards from how I usually do things which is making the visuals first and then I'll write the script around those visuals.

This is a podcast episode that my capstone professor recommended to the class to help us get over our roadblocks in doing research and experiments for our capstone. I am definitely a perfectionist, usually whenever I do an edit in a video that I'm really proud of I will watch that one edit hundreds of times as I'm working on the video just to make sure it has absolutely zero mistakes which you can tell causes a lot of delay. I definitely feel that perfectionism is getting in the way of me trying to learn digital art or animation, it is a mixture of making sure I find the perfect program and trying to use my time more efficiently, which is ironic cause I never make time in my schedule to try and learn Krita. My OCD definitely plays a part in this but not everybody in my class is diagnosed with OCD so there is something more at play here which up until this podcast I couldn't quite put my finger on it. It's that feeling of failure that I'm desperately trying to avoid, there are two instances in my life that really stick out to me when it comes to trying to make creative projects. There was one video that I made with my friends called "Why I Haven't Uploaded in a While", I was really excited because up until that point I was only making videos by myself and it was going to be a parting gift for my friend Brett who was going to the military in a couple of weeks. However, I soon realized that explaining the ideas in my head to a group of people is a lot harder than expected and as they got frustrated I got even more frustrated, not to mention I wasn't prepared for the battery in my camera to run out or the SD card to get full. I was just such an asshole, it was supposed to be a fun thing me and my friends would do before we all went our separate ways after we graduate but the video never came out the way I wanted it to and it's just a bad memory for me even though I'm still friends with these guys to this day. Another video I made, called "I'm Innocent", took me several months to make and it's where I really pushed myself in terms of editing and why my skills are so good today. I still consider this video to be my magnum opus even though the subject matter and jokes would probably get me in trouble today but I'm still really proud of what I was able to make. But when I sat down to watch it with my friends they didn't laugh at a lot of the jokes that I thought they would find hilarious and it didn't get a lot of views on YouTube. For a while after that, I was just so discouraged from making another project because of that feeling of failure constantly lingering in me, just waiting to rise up again. It wasn't until I had a video project for my "Moving Image: On Screen" class that my passion for video-making resurfaced. The fact that I treated it more as a project that had to get done before a deadline rather than a masterpiece that would define me for the rest of my life really helped me get things in motion. There were a lot of rewrites and a lot of last-minute touches but I got several compliments despite it not being as perfect as I wanted it to be. So the point of this very long tangent is that you can't always focus on the optimal route and that doing something is better than doing nothing.

Finally, I have a story! It took me a while but I finally got something out of my head and onto paper. Here's the premise, everybody's brain likes to constantly remind them of the embarrassing things they did years ago but I feel that I tend to think about them way more than other people do and I certainly react a lot more violently. I will swear at the top of my lungs, I will smash my fist on my desk as hard as I can, I will punch my own head, and sometimes I just want to shoot myself. In this storyboard, we have a character who is trying to go to sleep but the brain cells in his brain find a huge bag of VHS tapes with all his embarrassing memories and they start watching them. As the brain cells watch these tapes the main character gets more and more uncomfortable and agitated. The brain cells find these tapes hilarious and continue to watch and rewind them at the expense of the main character's sanity. Eventually, the main character has enough and heads toward his closet, meanwhile, the brain cells run out of VHS tapes from the initial bag but don't worry they drag in another huge bag. When the closet door is opened we see a shotgun and some shells; the main character grabs the shotgun, starts loading it, and puts it in his mouth ready to pull the trigger. Meanwhile, the brain cells are loading up another tape as they sit back with their popcorn in hand readily anticipating what's about to play. However, they are shocked to see that it is a happy memory and as soon as that happy memory plays the main character takes the shotgun out of his mouth with confusion, as if he just snapped out of a trance. The Brain Cells realize that this bag is filled with only happy memories which to them is boring and walk away from the TV out of lack of interest. The main character finally has peace in his mind and as he stares at the clock he smashed earlier he sees that despite its cracks and discrepancies it still functions and with that, he happily goes to sleep.

Writing a script for this became 1000 times easier with the rough storyboard by my side. I also found the Rick and Morty scripts from season 1 which gave me a reference as to how things are formatted in a screenplay for an animation. Every time I had a hard time trying to describe a scene I would just look at the storyboards and describe what I see there. This method allowed me to focus more on the dialogue for this animation since I purposefully left it out of the storyboard for that reason. I want to see if people can tell what the story is about just from my rough drawings and because I'm not 100% certain if I am going to use embarrassing moments from my life or use embarrassing moments that people can relate to but if I ever do decide to change it it will be easier to edit this way.

REFLECTION:

There was a lot of progress this week, I feel that this breakthrough of working backwards has lifted a lot of tension off my shoulders and I also feel like I'm halfway through this project. Obviously, I need to get some second opinions before I put things into motion but at the very least I have something I can use to practice character animation or start recording myself so that I can see if my scenes work.

[enigmalea]

Why I Contributed to FujoGuide

If you follow me here or mastodon you may have noticed that I've been reblogging/boosting a lot of posts for something called The Fujoshi Guide to Web Development (@fujowebdev). There's a good chance you followed me or know me from the Dragon Age fandom where I run communities, events, and zines and write fanfic, and you might be wondering why the sudden and drastic departure from my normal content. Why would a writer contribute to something related to webdev? Why have you stopped seeing thirst for Dragon Age characters and started seeing… whatever a FujoGuide is?

The answers to those questions (and more!) are below the cut.

My Coding Journey

I wrote my first lines of code in 1996 (yes, I'm old AF). It was the early days of the internet and tutorials for how to make your own websites were literally everywhere. You couldn't go more than two clicks without finding a how-to written in plain language. But it was painstaking and tedious. CSS didn't exist yet (literally, I started coding about six months before it was released) and even when it appeared it wasn't widely adopted or supported.

It was the "glory days" of Geocities, Myspace themes, Neopets, and Livejournal. If there was a cool site, you could use HTML and/or CSS to customize it. I honed my skills by coding so many tables character profiles for RPs, creating themes, painstakingly laying out user info pages, and building my own site.

Gradually, things changed. Web 2.0 showed up with locked down profiles and feeds you couldn't customize, free website hosts became more difficult to find, and point and click page builders became the way of the web. Shortly after, I took a long break from fandom; frustrated and disappointed with site closures, lost communities, and general fandom wank… it felt like it just wasn't worth it anymore.

I eventually came back, and when I did it meant customizing themes, figuring out how to create tools for my communities, coding tumblr pages (and learning they're not really supported on mobile), and looking at automations for my common tasks. One day, I woke up and thought, "I'm going to make a Discord bot… it can't be that hard."

So, I did it.

An Unexpected Friendship

About a month after I launched my bot to the public, I received a random Discord message from @essential-randomness. A friend had told her about my bot, and she was working on BobaBoard which needed volunteers. I was shocked. First, people were talking about my bot. Second, I wasn't a real coder. I didn't know anything! I just googled a bunch of stuff and got something working. I had no idea what I was doing.

She assured me it was okay. She was willing to teach me what I didn't know - and most of all, that she wanted my help. I took a day or two to think it over, and fatefully filled out the volunteer form. I didn't know if I could be useful or how I could be useful, but I wanted to try.

Programming Is Awful

In the years months that followed, I spent a lot of time in @essential-randomness' DMs complaining about programming… at least once I realized she wouldn't judge me. I was still very much doing things the hard way, taking hours to update a site to add a single link on all the pages. I knew there were easier methods, but I either couldn't find them or once I found them, they were filled with dense jargon which was terrifying.

"An all-in-one zero-javascript frontend architecture framework!" Is that even English? "A headless open-source CMS." Cool. Sounds good. "A full-stack SSG based on Jamstack extending React and integrating Rust-based JS." Those sure are words. With meanings. That someone knows. Not me, though.

I spent so much time looking at what sites claimed was documentation and losing my mind because I had no idea where to even start most of the time. With @essential-randomness' encouragement, I kept at it, experimenting with new things, and jumping in headfirst even when I had no idea what I was doing. And I was so glad. Where I used to struggle keeping one website updated, last year I managed to deploy and update 7 websites. Yeah, you read that right. It was amazing.

The new stuff made it all much, much easier.

An Idea Is Born

Meanwhile, we spent hours discussing why it was difficult to get fandom to try coding. Part of the barrier was the belief you must be some sort of genius or know math or that creative/humanities people can't do it. It is also partially coding communities being unfriendly to newbies and hobbyists; a culture which often thrives on debasing people's choices, deriding them for not understanding, and shouting rtfm (read the fucking manual) and lmgtfy (let me google that for you)- all of which are unhelpful at best and humiliating and abusive at worst. The tech dudebro culture can be unforgiving and mean.

The number of coding-based Discords I've left far outnumbers the ones I've stayed in.

We determined what fandom needed was a place for coders of all skill levels to come together to help and support one another; where they could learn to code and how to join open-source projects they love, and where they could make friends and connections and show off their projects whether they were new or experienced programmers.

And thus… Fandom Coders was born.

What About FujoGuide?

Of course, running a coding group and working on BobaBoard together means we spent a lot of time talking about the state of the web. We both lamented over poor documentation, jargon-rich tutorials, and guides which assume a baseline of knowledge most people don't have. What we needed to do was provide tutorials which start at the beginning… from the ground up (what is a terminal and how do I open it?) without skipping steps. What we needed to do was make those tutorials fun and appealing.

I don't remember exactly the journey it took to get us here if I'm honest. I have no clue who said it first. But I do remember I first started thinking about anthropomorphizing programming languages when we attempted to cast the languages as the Ouran High School boys… and again when I suggested we do a [TOP SECRET IN CASE WE DO IT] group project in Fandom Coders to help people learn about programming.

What I do know is that as last year ended, @essential-randomness became laser-focused on creating our gijinka and moving forward with FujoGuide… and I couldn't say no.

Okay, But… Why Contribute?

To be honest, it's not just that I was around for the birth of the idea. It's ALL of the things in this post - the culmination of three years of frustration trying to figure out what I'm doing with coding, of wading through dense documentation, of wanting to give up before I even start. It's three years of dipping my toes into toxic techbro culture before running away. All added to decades of watching the web become corporate-sanitized, frustratingly difficult to customize, increasingly less fun, and overtly hostile to fans who dare enjoy sexual content.

To sum all of this up, it's the firm belief that we desperately need a resource like this. Something that's for us, by us. Something that builds fans up, instead of tears them down; that empowers them to create for themselves and their communities what no one is creating for them. It is a project I'm deeply passionate about.

And I can't wait until we can bring it to life for you all.

[omoi-no-hoka]

Hello! I'm sorry if this has been asked before, but how do you become proficient at handling conversations in Japanese/handling grammar very well? I read your post on the JLPT, and it addressed issues I have been tip toe-ing around--indeed, passive actions such as listening or reading are easier than the active ones. How did you go about that? Did you write a bunch of sentences daily? Did you have a conversation partner? What would you rec. to someone who lives outside Japan? Thank you!

This is an excellent question, and one that I get asked a lot irl by Japanese people in particular. Let’s talk about gaining fluency and the ways we can go about it!

How to Gain Fluency in Japanese (and Other Languages)

Speaking Fluency versus Accuracy

Language proficiency is divided into two separate categories:

Fluency: Although there are no widely agreed-upon definitions or measures of language fluency, someone is typically said to be fluent if their use of the language appears fluid, or natural, coherent, and easy as opposed to slow, halting use. In other words, fluency is often described as the ability to produce language on demand and be understood.

Accuracy: Correctness of language use, especially grammatical correctness and word choice.

By the above definitions, a “fluent” speaker may make grammatical mistakes, but they can speak without having to stop and think too much about conjugations, word choice, etc.

An “accurate” speaker can speak with nearly zero grammatical/word choice mistakes. However, the speed of their utterances isn’t generally taken into account, so it could take an “accurate” person twice as long to articulate the same idea as a “fluent” person. 

Ideally, you need to strike a good balance between these two qualities when speaking. I have a boss, God bless him, who is 100% fluency and 0% accuracy and…man is it hard to understand what he’s saying sometimes, but he can generally get his point across just barely. I have another coworker who is 100% accuracy and takes about 3 minutes to form a sentence because he wants it to be perfect. 

How to Increase Speaking/Writing Accuracy

First, let’s talk about the easiest thing to improve, which is accuracy. It’s also (in my opinion) the least fun thing to improve, because it means grammar books and vocabulary memorization. 

You can only use a language accurately if you know what is correct and what is incorrect, and you can only learn that by studying grammar and vocabulary (or if you’re a native speaker and picked it up innately, you lucky bastard).

So here’s some things you can do to increase your accuracy:

For example, if you’re having a hard time using the passive, you need to review that part of your textbook and find some exercises to drill it into your head. 

Say the correct thing aloud. Lots. Sometimes I just walk around my apartment and narrate everything I see/do like a crazy person, but that’s good practice. 

Write example sentences using the grammar you’re struggling with and say them aloud too. 

There’s a bunch of cool apps that connect you with native speakers that can help correct you too! I used to use HelloTalk, I think. 

If you’re a creative soul, when I was studying for the JLPT, I took 1 grammar point and 5 vocabulary words from my JLPT study books and used them to write a 2-page short story about the adventures of ネギ, a stray black cat that smelled like green onions because she napped in an onion field. Then I had a Japanese friend check it over for me and mark mistakes. I hand-wrote them to improve my abysmal handwriting at the same time. It was really fun! I sometimes think about doing it again just for funsies.

When someone corrects you, don’t feel like your entire life is over and you’re a failure and you’ll never get it right haha. I’ve seen people fall into that hopeless mindset, and that’s just nonsense. It’s a good opportunity for learning and nothing more! Say the correct thing you’ve just been taught out loud, then write it down if you can. And, if possible, find a chance to use it in conversation asap.

How to Increase Speaking/Writing Fluency

Now this is the hard one. Especially for those learners who do not have native speakers nearby. 

I’m going to be dead honest with you. I started formally studying Japanese at uni, and I had a Japanese roommate/best friend since year one. I had a 4.0 GPA in my Japanese classes (and only my Japanese classes lol) because I was and still am a MEGA NERD about it. 

...But it wasn’t until I studied abroad in Japan my 4th year of uni that I gained fluency. 

There are a lot of things that can hold us back from fluency. An interesting thing I’ve noted is that Foreign Language is perhaps the only subject in which a student’s personality can directly affect their progress. To gain fluency, you have to go forth and speak, but if you are naturally a shy person, that is going to hinder you. If you are the kind of person who takes mistakes/failures poorly, you will be less likely to take risks and try to say harder sentences. In contrast, you can get full marks in math regardless of the above personality traits. 

I’m not saying that you have to be an outgoing explosion of a human being in order to gain fluency. But what I am saying is that you have to be willing to seek out conversations, and you have to be willing to take chances. Get out of your comfort zone. Use that new word you picked up the other day. Try to explain something that is difficult for you. 

My problem was that, while I lived with a native speaker who would have happily taught me anything I asked, her English proficiency was much higher than my Japanese proficiency. And when I struggled to say something in Japanese, I’d fall back onto English. And when she told me something I didn’t understand in Japanese, she’d repeat it in English instead of Japanese, because that was easier for us both. The same thing happened when I was in Japanese class as well. I always had the assurance that I could fall back on English.

But when I elected to study abroad in Japan for 3 months, I knew that this was my big chance. So on the host family form in the “other requests” area, I wrote that I specifically wanted a host family that could not speak English. I was setting fire to my crutches, and I was scared but excited to see them burn. 

By the end of my three months in Japan, I had gone from “Chotto matte kudasai” and needing a minute to form my reply, to “Okay, yeah I see that movie too and I liked the action scenes, but I didn’t care for the story little.” (I’ve underlined mistakes that I would have made in Japanese, to show you that I sacrificed some accuracy to obtain higher fluency.)

So, in short, the easiest and quickest way to increase your spoken fluency is to throw away all the crutches you can and use the language as much as possible. Every single day. Even if you’re just having an imaginary conversation with yourself! And like I said, there are a bunch of cool apps that connect you with Japanese people who want to learn English and you can do language exchanges with them. I had a lot of fun with those in the past. 

As for increasing writing fluency...well. That’s a tough question with Japanese, because I can type Japanese at like 100 wpm, but my Japanese handwriting fluency is at a 10/100. I can read and type at the level of a native Japanese high school student, but I can only write the kanji that 7 year old can write. That’s no exaggeration.

The big reason for that dichotomy is that my work is paper-free. 100% of my work is done on screen, so about the only time I have to write out something is when I’m filling out a form, which includes my name (katakana), address, and maybe occupation. 

If you want to increase your Japanese handwriting speed, just keep on writing. Write those little short stories about ネギ like I did, or find some writing prompts (I just started a side-blog with writing prompts yesterday btw) or keep a little diary. Make opportunities to write. 

How to Have Nice Handwriting in Japanese

Okay, full disclaimer: I am the absolute LAST person qualified to talk about this, because I have awful handwriting in Japanese. 

Unless you have prior experience with a different language that uses kanji, or you lack the keen eye of an artist, you will likely struggle to develop neat handwriting. 

Personally, I really like using this app called Japanese Kanji Sensei. It’s on Android (not sure about iOS), and if you pay just a few bucks you can make your own kanji sets and stuff. Anyways, it will show you how to write the characters prettily. It gives you a good frame of reference for what nice, pencil/pen-written characters (versus calligraphy characters). It has hiragana and katakana on it too!

I get a stylus and write out the characters on this app for the muscle memory, so my hands remember the sensation of writing a certain character. (The muscle memory is different if you only use your fingertip.) This muscle memory and repetition is how Japanese people learn how to internalize kanji as well. I really enjoy and recommend this app. I’m sure that there are others out there like it too.

Summary

TL;DR: Review your textbooks, take risks, use every resource available or make your own, and just have fun with it! 💗

[youarestellarverse]

Main is @melancholic-pigeon.

It started with a super kinky oneshot. 

the rest of the musing is under a cut for length, because this is now a pinned post.

My fandom philosophy can be found here. TL;DR: antis get blocked on sight. I have a zero tolerance policy against fascist bullshit dressed up in a fake-woke mustache. "Proshipping" doesn't mean what tiktok thinks it means.

Series map here.

Send me asks anytime, about anything! (Just, yknow, don't be a dick.) If you want me to answer it privately, just let me know. 💜

Let me know if you want me to ping you when I post updates or excerpts! Also let me know if you want me to stop pinging you for updates, too.

I try to tag for fic spoilers, but I'm not very good at it. 😅

some content is mature content, tagged as "mature content" so I don't have to keep going "ok is this actually not safe for work, or is it semi-not safe for work???" Please mind and block the tag accordingly; the overall series is 18+ and a significant amount of the content on this blog is as well.

tags on this post are for easy perusing!

(That super kinky oneshot is why the series is called what it's called; it was previously titled "fate or something better" after another Incubus song, but that was hard to shorten to a tag for tumblr— "fateverse" seems to be an established tag for a different fandom— so I went back to the inaugural fic and found it rolled off my mind-tongue quite nicely!)

It was stupendously fun to write and I was riddled with ideas for the backstory and had every intention of writing it all out. Life took over after that and shat on all of my plans.

The fandom developed some issues with some serious toxicity, and tumblr fandom as a whole developed some serious issues with puritan fearmongering and authoritarian fake-woke pseudoactivism, which actually just meant bullying people for shipping the wrong ship or having the wrong headcanon or liking a character who has not been Approved as Certified Wholesome by the Board of Moral Fanwork Engagement. So I ghosted. (I'm not super proud of that.)

I stopped writing for a long while after that. Then a dear friend got me back into posting and I tossed up a brief little thing and learned people still remembered me. 

So I started a kinktober project, figuring it'd be another little collection of oneshots, and it ballooned into an actual novel and holy shit.

Here I am. Here we are. 

I had never actually stopped working on this series, I just stopped writing it down. I think that's a large part of how I've been churning it out; I spent four years digging up a huge pile of clay, and now I've fallen into the rhythm of sculpting with it and I have a pottery wheel and thirty dishes of varying sizes and complexities on one side of me and clay on the other and also I now know how to dig for more!

There's a lot of it, though.

This might be counterproductive and make my life more difficult, but there's a chance it'll help, and I'm taking anything I can get at this point in a desperate attempt to keep track of myself. At the moment, I think it's likely I'll just reblog stuff to it so it's all contained in one place.

We shall see where the journey takes us. 💜