Gurgling

Interestingly enough, I love fictional movies, TV shows and comics/graphic novels/manga. It’s just with books where I get bored extremely easily if I don’t feel like there’s a tangible connection with the real world.

I guess I approach books with a “time to learn” mindset, and not necessarily as sources of entertainment. Even though I very much enjoy learning about history, and find it entertaining.

I read a lot, too, just not much fiction. If you look at my Kindle library, I have bought like 50 books since I got it, around 10 are fiction, and all are about 30-40% through, none are finished. The remaining 40 are either history books or textbooks for my other hobbies. I have only dropped 2 of them.

I have a handful of fictional books that I have finished and thoroughly enjoyed: Hundred Years of Solitude by Garcia Marquez, Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa, the Harry Potter Series (when I was younger), the Feast of the Goat by Vargas Llosa and the Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe.

That has been me in the past. Not to my wife, but as a younger person, I only read history books and stuff (still do) and felt superior because I did that (I don’t do that anymore of course), so I would sneer at my friends’ fiction and stuff because it was “worthless” compared to “real history” where you “actually learned stuff”.

It’s a dumb mindset, and I definitely don’t feel like that anymore. I still don’t read fiction or enjoy it, but it’s just a hobby like any other, or like my thing with history.

That is me. I have a poor sense of color and have needed to be restrained in the past.

Jokes on my wife though because her sense of pitch is shaky, while I sure can sing.

Then again, she’s an artist and I’m a musician. She has taught me how to avoid the really bad combinations and some theory of color while I have taught her to stay on pitch when there’s a background voice doing something else.

Truly the wackiest of birbs. They’re so cute.

Honestly, with adequate governance, companies would be required to submit reports on how much labor they’re doing using AI, and pay those wages to either their employees or to a sort of “Universal Income” fund to prop up families in poverty. It should be called the AI tax.

The problem is that, with the current state of affairs, asking for regulation from anyone is impossible, and also even if the law were enacted, getting the money from the companies to people who need it instead of the ultra-rich is a major hurdle.

But at the very least, I don’t think we should allow companies to simply cut down on human labor without also contributing economically to the employees they cut off.

I don’t think anyone is dying to fill in Excel spreadsheets or to write corporate emails. No one is complaining about AI doing those jobs, but about people who lost their livelihoods because of it.

It’s quite poetic innit

Japan is still a treasure trove to this day for magazine enjoyers. If you ever stop by Tokyo, I genuinely suggest you visit Jinbocho and take a look at all the used magazines from the 80’s and 90’s. They have absolutely wonderful complete collections for minimal cost.

If you have an amazon.jp account, you can also buy Japanese books for the kindle for a pretty low price. Though obviously Kindle books aren’t something you really own, so I prefer them for stuff I’m okay eventually losing.

I had a similar experience. I first went to Japan when I had just passed N3 back in 2015. Needless to say, it wasn’t quite enough to be a competent adult, but it also wasn’t so poor I didn’t understand anything around me.

Some things I realized on my first trip there: Katakana is far more essential than you’d think, and conversely, Hiragana is far more useless as well. There are lots of 丁寧語 and 敬語 structures that will get thrown around even in the most common situations.

But then I returned to Japan in 2019, and I was already an N2 by that point (for a couple years already), and it was a completely different experience. My Japanese had improved a lot by then, and I was solidly making good every day conversation with all sorts of people. The leap was really noticeable too, with my main limitation being that my kanji knowledge was still somewhat lacking for a functional adult. Some people even complimented me asking how long I had lived in Japan and whatnot.

So the main takeaway, is that it’s normal to struggle a lot at an N3 level, but at the same time, you’re really not that far away from being able to use Japanese comfortably. Just a little more and you’ll get there for sure!