#odes'n verses

[schazardous]

I had a really good time yesterday playing @orbitaldropkick‘s Skull Wizard of the Chaos Caverns with my friends.

The best items I came up with were a +2 Ruby of Coveting, a cursed gem which compelled everyone who laid eyes on it to acquire it by any means necessary including murder, and (after one player couldn’t afford a +1 Firebox of Eternity from the shopkeep-with-a-permanently-aflame-storefront and asked for a cheaper item) the Torch of Two Hours.

The torch, thanks to a roll of 10 when used as a blunt weapon, inflicted two hours worth of bludgeoning damage to a monster with a single blow, and was finally used as a flashbang to stun the final boss of the dungeon.

10/10 great game would run again

[schazardous]

I told some of my kids that the movie they know as <Uncle Carl’s Flying House> is called “Up” in English and they didn’t believe me

When I showed them movie posters to prove it they lost their shit

[schazardous]

I think chimera are the best animal. Because, chimera has the head of a lion and a Goat's body, venomous tail. Chimera can vomit fire. But, it is a fictitious animal. That is OK because if they were real humans would die.

Extension English, “which animal is the best?”

[schazardous]

Conversation demonstrations

Second year students, getting to know someone: Our script starts with both students saying “nice to meet you”, then one person asks a bunch of questions to get to know someone and the other answers.

All pairs argued over who got the easy job of reading questions off the board and who got lumped with having to creatively use English. Most of them figured out their roles before they started, but then we got these two:

A: Nice to meet you. B: Nice to meet you. A: How are you? B: How are you? A: How are you? B: How are you?

The JTE intervenes at this point, they paper scissors rock it out.

A: Nice to meet you. B: Nice to meet you. A: How are you? B, with a deadpan expression: I’m angry.

[schazardous]

A student handed me back a used-up glue stick, struggling to find an English word for it. He went with "tired." Another student in response to "what did you do during spring break" answered "I battled flower powder" which has to be the second-best take I've heard, ever, on suffering from hayfever

[schazardous]

On a school outing to the local sports park, sitting on top of a climbing frame with some students. Another student climbs up to join us and she exclaims, "wow, the people look like bits of trash from way up here." Her friend: "isn't it usually 'ants'?" With conviction: "trash."

[schazardous]

If you had enough money, what would you buy?

I would buy many cats. I would buy a lion and two cats and two owls. I would buy a cow.

I would buy a supercar. I would buy a car and ship. I would buy a house and bike. I would buy a house and Toyota car. I would buy a Lexus and a puppy.

I would buy clothes and shoes and bags and makeup. I would buy at least three Master Balls. I would buy a pillow shaped like a tiger.

[schazardous]

If you had a time machine, what time period would you travel to? I would travel to the future, and I would see a robot. I would travel to the future, and I would meet friends. I would travel to the future and, I would take a picture. I would travel to ten years later and I would see myself. I would travel to the Sengoku period, and I would meet Date Masamune. I would travel to the Edo Period, and I would learn fighting moves. I would travel to the past, and I would be a samurai. I would travel to the parallel world, and I would talk to aliens. I would travel to the time I was two months old, and I would play tennis.

[schazardous]

I would travel to the time I was two months old, and I would play tennis.

Question 4: If you had a time machine, what time period would you travel to?

[schazardous]

My first year students had to give short oral presentations on the topic of “my dream”, I was asked to help grade them and had to follow up each one with a question for the student

One student’s speech was about how she wants to be an illustrator, so my question for her was “What thing is difficult for you to draw?”

I was anticipating  “buildings” or “humans” or “animals” or somesuch, and reassured her if she didn’t know the word in English but understood the question she could answer in Japanese, but then she tells me

“People... looking right.”

I just sigh with the satisfaction of having glimpsed a universal truth and tell her “oh man, me too” and anyway that’s how I bonded with a student today

[schazardous]

Sailor/Robin

11/30I should? probably be logging the results of this experiment? Lmao it feels really weird calling it that. Like mad scientist territory or those weird guys modding magnets into their fingertipsWould also pay to keep track of how much I told the interns and the lab manager

ANyway uuuuuh

where to start well I just woke up there's that I guessThe cleaning staff really don't bother going into locked offices, which is great because APPARENTLY I've been passed out on the floor for three whole days? I swear this was one of my pipe dreams as an undergrad

huh

i mean

that sounds legit but now I'm not sure? I mean I checked the school records and best as i could tell nobody died here recently so interference is unlikely but what ifholy fuck that would suck if I finally proved anima arcanics because my soul returned from beyond my meat chassis with memories of the dead from arcanic contamination

So nbd but I might have errant bits of dead people up in my psyche, get that checked out, so what else

I feel physically fine, blood is pumping, neurons are firing, some muscle aches but I think that's the sleeping on the floor, it's probably not normal that I can hear my are those my kidneysnook well I can tell where my kidneys are that is definitely not normal

---

Robin Pearson 1.0 Release Notes

Adrenal glands still where they belong, above kidneys

Hunger no longer detected

further testing necessary to see if starvation kicks in

Physiological functions now have manual override function 

(do not stress test this feature)

Now enrolled in distance-learning course for 1st year med school

You can't google every hormone in your body on the go so this is for your own good

Undergrads still intimidated in a manner consistent with professor and not walking corpse (sample size: 2)

Lab Manager Brent’s unrequited crush on me still a thing

Still requires peripherals to see ghosts+arcanic energy 

(good, not the aim of this project)

Still doesn't know jack about computers or how release notes are formatted

[schazardous]

In Japan, typhoons are simply numbered in order of appearance. My coworkers (a social studies, Japanese, and commerce teacher) learned that other countries have premade lists for them and are having a great time finding out what other people have named these murderstorms

[schazardous]

This week in schoolzardous:

Newts!

Low-key nbd coating my hands in tetradotoxin

chiding these fool noodles into eating their damn worms

Having a really good chat with two students in the science club

Explaining to one of said students the rough meanings of no less than half a dozen less-than-acceptable phrases she’d picked up from the tv shows she's using as an English study aid

Imparting quality English banter like “stop, thief” “how dare you” and the difference between “I can’t” and “I won’t”

“We call ウーパールーパー axolotls, which is actually a word stolen from a completely different language. English does this all the time and it’s why all the verb tense+spelling+pronunciation is terrible and I’m so sorry”

further popularising the use of “fool” as a feelgood insult

Learning a student owns five guitars and eleven airsoft guns, but doesn’t know how to play bass guitar

“let’s vote to decide: do eggs count as animals”

Scattergories:

Five minutes of spirited debate about how “T!K!G!” (tamago-kake-gohan/raw egg on rice) is not a valid entry for “food that starts with T”

Vocal censure against listing “Teacher” as “something in a classroom” because calling a teacher a “thing” is rude

Valid answers for “ways to travel”: space shuttle, segway, sea turtle, cow, “crawl on all fours”

[schazardous]

dark schaz show me the forbidden bugs

Multiple species of termite were tested and selectively bred at one point for state-funded bioterrorism. While the global transition to steel and concrete has rendered these strains “extinct in the wild”, they live on in select laboratories around the world. 

Particular rare beetles of genus Chalcosoma are of such girth, viewing them in full is heavily impractical. Despite their clearly anomalous properties - including the ability to slip relatively easily under rotten logs - “scientific” consensus is presumptuous enough as to propose the beetle - by mere trivialities as taxonomy, must be a rounded, three-dimensional entity. Here on the dark web, they’re known by their true name - Flatlas Beetles.

On the topic of large beetles: Chafer-clutches were at one point a sought-after accessory in Victorian England. The practice of converting a beetle’s innards into a purse and its elytra into heavily-ornamented clasps eventually fell out of favour, though not for the reasons you might expect. Traders of illicit substances - stardust, cyanide, opiates and ichors - lost shipments stored in these Chafer-clutches. The containers themselves would would launch themselves into the air without warning, flying away from startled ex-owners on wings made of dust.

A recently-germinated nest of deep millipedes can depodiate an area of approximately one square mile a night, with little regard for prey species. The collective name for deep millipedes is a “legendary”.

[schazardous]

1E’s teacher is away this week with her homeroom on the 2nd years’ school trip, so I got to teach them solo today

I mostly kept ‘em wrangled? They’re a smaller class (24 versus some of my larger classes of 40), and there’s at least a half-dozen who are decent at English, so things worked out. They’ll naturally ask me more questions when I’ve got a license to speak some-Japanese-where-necessary, so we ended up on a tangent of:

“can I become fluent in English on a month-long exchange” (probably not)

“what about a year-long one” (you’d make good progress, maybe in six if you really work at it)

“which is harder to learn, Japanese or English” (Japanese, for me)

“Is kanji hard” (yup)

“Is keigo hard” (omggggg yes)

“does English have keigo” (not quite like in Japan, but we have synonyms and depending on the situation, a word can be normal or polite or stilted or straight-up rude)

“omg why is English so hard” (hey, I’m native, and I can’t concretely explain the difference, so imo you should have a go and make mistakes and people shouldn’t be assholes about the tone being off and just tell you for next time)

“Life’s all about making mistakes” (right on, kid. How about we all get on with the worksheet now?)

There were multiple derailing attempts by asking “how do you say X in English” - for all irrelevant inquiries I said “ask me at the end of the class”. This was good and worth my while because a) This is the first class I’ve had all week and actual class time with students is the reason I have any love for this job, and b) they most often ask about insults in English, so I can (somewhat clumsily over the language barrier) explain that some words are hurtful and/or used near-exclusively to shock and offend, and offer alternatives.

Anyway, hopefully that class will start calling each other fools, and exclaiming how cheesed off they are.

[schazardous]

My aesthetic: 11pm jaunts to the laundromat driers (100yen coin for 10 minutes), because what is time management My laundry-doing often coincides with rain at night, so the traffic lights and fast food signage and lamps on passing trucks have a photo-Quality blur if the composition didn't suck whichever way you sliced it in my town Wash House plays J-pop and J-rap I've never heard the same song twice, never naming the tracks, interspersed with warnings to not wash pet goods and to call their headquarters if the machines eat your money In the warm months, there's bugs all over the windows. Mostly stink bugs but a good many are moths, chunky noctuids I take phone-snaps of if there's no other customers paying me attention. In the cool months the vending machine has hot canned coffee, which I shouldn't be drinking else I'm awake and making bad text posts at 1am on a worknight