Ashtear

If an Internet infrastructure giant can't make MMOs work, I don't see how these smaller MMO projects that keep popping up are going to, either. Greg Street also recently just talked about how his isn't getting funding.

It's too bad, I think SpaceCraft looks interesting but I don't know if it's going to make to 1.0, much less stick around.

I ended up with a similar method. Images are the next step for me. I already tried them with Japan's prefectures, and I think it really helped what's kind of a tough slog.

A couple notes on his process:

You don't have to pay the premium for an Anki TTS addon. It's easy to set up an account with Azure's API and they have a free tier that is more than enough for this purpose. Requires a credit card on file, but it can always be locked with your bank (or a service like privacy.com).

AI phrase/sentence generation is an alternative to a Google Translate hook. I've got a running AI thread that knows my language level and knows I want silly/goofy/interesting sentences to make them memorable. And if you're doing i+1 learning, you don't have to worry about AI hallucination. You can verify the output since the generation is at a comprehensible level for you. I then have it convert it all into a CSV format right there in-thread for the Anki import.

Yeah, good call, I'll throw it up.

Vocab, grammar, and reading are proceeding apace. I made a change this week with Anki to speed up my per-card review time. I realized I was mixing modes a bit, wanting to shadow the voice lines on the cards for speaking practice. I decided instead I'll set up a more dedicated shadowing practice if I feel what I'm doing with my listening routine isn't enough. Results were immediate: I cut my daily Anki time by a third, probably more.

With how much vocab I have lined up, I'm actually thinking now I might go to every day for Anki; I'm six days a week right now. Curious to hear what pace everyone else has. Take a day or two off a week? Or instead reduce the rate of new cards when you need a bit of a break? Review timers wait for no one!

Speaking of separating my practice modes, ugh. Listening. I'm not happy with it. I started going through a podcast and went back and forth on how I felt about it for a while. The problem is, I'm very behind on listening. It's like a full tier below my reading. Available research is telling me I want a high comprehensibility level (over 90%) to train my ear on. And it's hard to find beginner/lower-intermediate content that:

• Has a transcript readily available
• Is at a consistent grammar/vocab level for its audience
• Doesn't speak too slow
• Is interesting

I've given up on the last one for now, and am considering up giving up on seeking a specific speech pace, but I'm not sure. The podcast I've been listening to, Sakura Tips, has been very inconsistent with grammar patterns. I'm regularly getting upper intermediate and even the occasional advanced grammar structure in the episodes, which is bizarre considering her vocab, pace, and even the topics are obviously geared towards beginners. I finally decided to bail on it and I'm going to do the audio recordings on NHK Easy. It's frustrating because, in print, those articles stopped being challenging for me long ago (aside from proper names and various esoterica), but my ear seems to need the bootstrapping.

I get the feeling the people at Aftermath are just hungry to poke the bear. I imagine it'll eventually catch up to them, but hey, more power to them for now.

Maybe it's because my experience with it goes well back into the print era, but very little of it is actual fact-finding capital "J" journalism, and even that part has only come on in the industry more recently. I've always put the games press in its proper buckets of "previews for access" and then game criticism. Quality for both varies, but I'm rarely disappointed when I stick to a publication I like (until the inevitable EIC churn, anyway).

If I had the money I'd definitely do the same, but for now I do RSS instead of link aggregator communities if I'm being serious about it. Takes some curation, but at the very least it's not being run through a vote algorithm first.

Ugh, the only thing I hate more than a few people I regularly talk with still using Messenger is having to deal with the desktop client. Now this 🙄

I moved to a web browser but I can't even get push notifications working.

More iteration on the combat would be good; Limit Breaks not being missable is my #1 request. I really did not like the combat in Remake and I was glad that they smoothed out a lot of the rough edges for me in Rebirth.

The soundtrack for Rebirth was an all-timer, too, so it'd be great if they kept that energy going.

Not even just party upgrades, but fun stuff from the original that gets gated by side content, too. I'm a huge fan of blue magic in general, which meant I had to do a lot of the maps to get my Enemy Skills. Even someone like me that enjoyed the open world and the side content was very, very done with it by the last two regions.

Yeah, I've heard the same. It'd be nice to have the option, at the least. I figure in the end it'll mostly be a freelancing certification, but eh, life's weird. I could end up back in Osaka for all I know.

Thanks!

I'm working on starting a new career, so I'm chaining my work productivity sprints with the first two language learning sprints especially. Had some major setbacks, so my career motivation has been in the toilet. I'll typically do either the third sprint or minor tasks (responding to emails, office/home cleaning) before lunch and get back to it after the break.

I don't know why, but something really clicked for me with Japanese in December, and it's been enough to prop up the other stuff. Even though it was less structured last year, over the past couple months with solid structure I really feel like I've actually learned how to work at home. It's been different!