Snail's Microblog

14 Jun 2023 #

some more thoughts on learning japanese/a second language…

as a native english speaker, I guess the inevitable question is “why should I bother learning a second language at all?” to have learnt english as my first language puts me in a position of privilege in a lot of ways.

but the answer for me lies in a simple broadening of understanding, I guess? a lot of the media I consume in my downtime is in japanese, to the point that it’s the obvious choice for a second language. I guess if I were to consider candidates for a 3rd language, maybe spanish, chinese, thai, french or german?

09 Jun 2023 #

I’ve been studying japanese lately. I’m not very good at it yet, but I am getting somewhere, I think? I’m really good at falling down rabbitholes and learning random stuff and that’s more or less how I got here… I learned hiragana so I’d have a better time doing UTAU stuff and then was like… why not just keep going? learning hiragana is already the first hurdle in terms of learning japanese as an english speaker, so like? bit of a waste if I only used it on UTAU stuff ^^’

18 Sept 2022 #

saw a slow worm in the garden today! they are so cute, I love slow worms so much.

11 Sept 2022 #

so much of the media I consume is american that I actually get some sort of weird culture shock when I find something that’s british,

for example - I know, hypothetically, that 7/11 is a chain of american convenience shops, but I’ve never been to one. for all I know they don’t exist beyond the media that references them. but tesco? I have stepped foot in many a tesco. tesco feels real.

26 Aug 2022 #

I have updates on moon jellyfish kiss! in hopes of having act 1 ready for an event I’m tabling at in september, I made some decisions I regretted… I’ve got a video planned where I’ll hopefully talk more about it but tl:dr; I sacrificed sketch layers for colour layers, didn’t like the results, and am redrawing most of the 18 pages :'-)

but hey, sometimes you gotta learn things the hard way… RIP 2 weeks of work on the comic. (I’d taken those weeks off of work-work so when I say 2 weeks… we’re talking 80+ hours here)