4.9

Date: 04/09/2023 Last edited time: April 9, 2023 7:50 PM Weather: 🌞Sunny

I had a longed-for eight-hour sleep yesterday. Or today because I was awake around 2am. And I hurried to finish a unit in Duolingo as promised.

And I made the same mistake twice.

“에서” means “from”, and “에” means “to”. “가요” means “go” so it works with “to”. Meanwhile, “와요” — “come” — pairs with “from”. Next time it won’t beat me.

When I started the diary today, it became clear that I had not filled out the weather yesterday. I knew it was cloudy – I checked the weather. But I chose not to prefill it: I wanted to witness it myself.

And I witnessed a 100% sunny day today. It is 19C outside! Warmly lovely sun. I appreciate it. I can wear no tights without feeling cold today.

Are the flowers blooming? I want to check out the arboretum someday. A search through the Internet gave me nothing but rough dates, and even the arboretum home page gave me the image that its residents’ flimsy moods are unfathomable.

Instead, I found a planting calendar. It says that we should plant basil around the end of March here. I didn’t know it two years earlier. I received some basil seeds and a gardening tool set at the end of summer 2021. And I planted it after that. Despite basil being acknowledged as an easy plant, it couldn’t thrive. Its stems were slim and weak, its leaves small and yellow. The frigid winter in Wisconsin denied it the essential sunlight.

Like in Klara and the Sun, I wished the sun could bring it back to life. But in the end, it was in vain. After a year and a half, it dawned on me what went wrong.

Annoyed by Grammarly being fussy at small problems like punctuation, I found this article. It discusses the advantages and implications of these autocorrecting tools.

A generated summary of it:

This article is about the use of Grammarly, an automated written corrective feedback (AWCF) software, in the writing center. The author, who works as a Faculty Associate in the Writing Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, revisits the software five years after first trying it and discusses the potential implications of using the software in a writing center. Recent research has shown that students understand the limitations of Grammarly and use it strategically for final paper editing. However, the author has concerns about what this implies for linguistic justice, as it reinforces a rigid and harmful notion of a standard English that’s earned its status through global white supremacy. The author concludes that, while they wouldn’t advocate for students who aren’t already using Grammarly to start using it, they will consider sharing information about the research findings when working with students who are concerned about lower-order concerns.

This led me to think about a popular tweet I saw. “If you feel disregarded, you might well have some language problems. ” It quotes another tweet that recommends elementary language practices.

I do think they both share an interesting point: making a problem to solve it. Grammarly gives low scores to articles and offers solutions to those nonproblems, to make people appreciate it. This tweet thrives by making people question themselves. It shuffled the focus from “Do you make elementary-level mistakes?” to a broader problem.

Admittedly, they are useful: Grammarly can fix many grammar mistakes; doing simple practices may strengthen confidence. But we should know our problem and not get carried away.

As part of the memory-switching test, I put the stick into another slot. My laptop shut down two times in succession. Again, too early to enjoy.

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4.8

Date: 04/08/2023 Last edited time: April 9, 2023 9:58 PM Weather: ☁️Cloudy

The Internet is becoming our echo chamber. That is true. But anyone who is not satisfied with it, who goes out of their comfort zone to broaden their views, deserves respect, not hindrance.

Twitter does not allow anyone like or retweet Substack’s this tweet, nor my quoted retweet of it.

I felt sad for Twitter. It had to go out of its way to stop people from turning away.

Elon Musk promised it to be ‘open’, but social media can never be too closed — they want to close people inside them. It is a place where people only see what they agree with. If you already agree with it, why would you try to think otherwise? It is such a comfortable cage that you want to stay there forever.

I recall the Eagles’ Hotel California:

You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave

And all social media want to be our Hotel California.

While I use Twitter from time to time (for cute and sexy illustrations), I do not think it is good to be caged by it.

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Steam banned my review of Glare1more. When I read it again tonight, I thought it might be because I put the link to the developer’s home page.

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I happened to use Substack for a minute or two. I wanted to find a new place to put my writings in, and I searched everywhere.

Hatena, Medium, Note, Substack, Blogger, Ghost, and the list goes on.

Depending on my mood, sometimes I write in Chinese. And when I do, I want it to look good. These blogs share a feature, “What you see is what you get”. So, when I saw Chinese characters stand out like Yao Ming among some kindergarten kids, I knew everyone would see the same. It hurts my eyes so much that I want to cry.

It takes no effort to give Chinese characters a closer look to Japanese ones, so they look good side by side.

But none of them cares.

Or it is just me — my computers and my phone use English because I prefer everything to be in the same language. And being English, they do not know about Chinese characters, so they do their best — which is another way of saying do their worst.

Using English on my phone also hurts me in a way I haven’t thought of:

I bought most of my Japanese books through Bookwalker. But Bookwalker must be unhappy with me using English — it does not want to show the Japanese books but its translated books in stead. I like reading books or playing games in their original languages. And it’s 12pm now. I missed Duolingo’s booster. I will get it tomorrow.

The restaurant that I wanted to visit closes on Saturdays — I will be back…

I had hot pot with my roommate for dinner. Recently we ate together twice, but not in the last two years. That is something notable.

After dinner I went to school — I feel it better than spending time at home, looking at social media. If only I could read books at home.

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I bought Fedora Remix for WSL. I feel the urge to support. Dev tool companies need money to run, but people are much less fancied by the thought of paying them even if the asking price is as few as ten dollars.

For the first time this week — ok not the first time I’m sorry — I did Duolingo in the morning. Recently it has introduced a new mechanism: if you use it before 12pm, you can get an experience booster after 6pm; and if you use the app after 9pm you will be awarded another one the following morning. It is super powerful as it doubles the experience for 15 minutes, so people are encouraged to do it once in the morning and once at night. It is such a neat way to motivate people to form good habits.

I asked ChatGPT for some wearing advice, and I found out my need for leggings or tights — they seem so helpful for a ten degrees Celsius day like today, but only women are known to wear them. This fact bothers me so much.

I listened to the Framework staff’s advice and took away a memory stick from the laptop. The result: it just worked. No Bluetooth lag or disconnection, no forceful shutdown — I am just over the moon.

On my way to the school, I checked passersby’s bottoms for reference. Most women wear leggings or jeans. Men wear jeans and trousers — I can’t see through them, but they should be thermal underwear. And there are people wearing shorts! How brave! If they are brave enough to wear shorts on a cool day like today, wearing leggings should be a piece of cake. When I charged the laptop, the Bluetooth mouse was unwilling to talk to it again. It is too early for joy. Speaking of joy, I have a gathering to attend tonight. Have some drinks and play some Mahjong. I’m really looking forward to it.

Who would have thought the problem a student ran into took an extra hour?

Anyways, I arrived at my friend’s apartment at 7pm. We played a lot of pizza and ate a lot of Mahjong. The pizzas are two macaroni — I mean pepperoni — and one vegetable. They were tasty. And I drank a can of Coors Light. I played until 12:48am, biked my way home, and am deadly sleepy now. If I wrote something wrong, please forgive me.

We played Yonma and in the last, Sanma. In the final game I played, I won a hand of toitoi hatsu dora 5 which was worth 24000 points. But the player dealt in 24000 managed to pull a comeback to second place by winning a 12000 hand from the other player. “Rrrrrrrigged!” He happily said it when opening his hand. A large part of Mahjong is based on luck, so they often say it is “rigged”, parodying Trump’s claim of a rigged election.

Speaking of Trump, now he turned himself to the court. Although I do not hold a good impression of him, I do hope that he gets what he legally deserves. “We are embarrassing ourselves,” Trump said in a speech after the hearing. But he himself is the man who made the spectacles first.

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…っと勢いで言ったものの、なにか書くこともないので実際無謀だった。

これは、日本語の練習として発案された。私にとって日本語は母語でもないし、英語みたいに学校で勉強したこともない、ほぼ自学です。なので練習する必要がある。じゃないかな。だからこうして言葉を綴るのも一つの勉強ではないか。とりあえず、何も考えずに書くだけ。

真っ先に考えられるのは、どうすればこの文章を長く書ける方法だ。最近さくらもゆ遊んでるので、そこに言い換えることが多いのが気になる。そして、これも一つ文章を長くする形ではないか。しかし、それを読む人はどう思うのだろうか。私自身の感想は、言い換えれば言い換えるほど、会話の流れが連続ではなくなる。加えて、話し手が頻繁に言い換えることは、自信がないではないでしょうか。私英語でしゃべるときもよくあることだから。このワードで正しく伝えているのかって反射的に悩んで、もう一つの言葉を思い浮かべたならそれを即採用する傾向がある。しかし、言い換えてもなんの用もない場合は多数だな、と顧みてはそう思う。

よく考えれば、これも、小さなパニックではないか。なにか言い間違ってないかってパニックして、そして優先事項を見失ったではないか。だから、これはパニックは最悪につながるの、もう一つの証拠です。

でも、よくないって思っても、試してみたい心は私にはある。だから、これから、私もすこし言い換えて、言葉を遊びましょうか。

日記においては、近況報告もひとつの慣用のトピックだ。日常生活になにかを感じて、霊感、あるいは、ひらめくことも多いではないか。とはいえ、あんまりプライベートなことは報告しないつもりでいる。秘め事はやはり、自分に全く関心のない人や、自分に気遣いできる人に限って言う。

どこか出かけたら報告の材料にもなるが、残念ながら今のアメリカではそれは難しい。今はひたすら家（アパート）にいって、コロナ暴露の数字を眺めるだけ。最近が０になってる、数週前７や８もあったので、感染者みんな病院に移住したか、治ったかなんでしょう。ちなみに、二週前食料買いに出たら、そと盛大なパーティーも上げていたんだ、百人はあると思う。学生みんなマスクしてない、食い物飲み物していて、ごく普通のパーティー。彼らにとって、唯一異常なものは、このご時世だろう。終わっただと思うから、終わっていない、そういうこと。

もう一つは、韓国語を勉強してることかな。日本語で韓国語のこと言ってるのは確かにおかしいだが、言語はいろんなどこ似ている。例えば、数字の言い方も二つある、一つは中国語の発音から来た(il, i, sam, sa, o)、もう一つは自ら発明した言い方で、主に数える時に使う(hana, dul, set, net, daseot)。もう一つは曜日を使ってること、例えば、日曜日は il-yoil（ilは日で、yoは曜）。文法も少し似ているような気がしますが、あまり文法について勉強してないので割愛。

一か月前くらいで、ピアノを買ってました、ヤマハのP71です。グリーンハンド、初心者なので、それに適するではないかな。主に、音ゲーやる時間があるなら、一つ楽器でも勉強した方がいいではないかと思った。以前やってないのがちょっと悔やまれるが、それはそれでもっと自由の幼年を過ごせたので、どっちがいいか簡単に言えない。興味というのは、いつでも、当時のやりたいことを重んじることだと思う。興味が変わればそれに従い、現在を楽しめること。 Carpe diem といって、同じ名前のゲームが steam にあります。遊んではいないので、おすすめできないが。

思いついたことはこれくらい、すみません、言い換えることあんまり出来ていなくて、これから本番で、最後のチャンスです。しかし、雑談なので、どうやって括ろうかを悩む。最近、村上の UT（一応ユニクロのシャーツと説明しよう）出てるんですけど、すぐに完売してる。カフカのシャーツとか。20日現在 1q84 以外ほとんどなくなって、 Ebay で二倍の価額で転がっている。ノルウェーの森のカバー色柄のシャーツも全部売れたのに（英語版は赤と白と黒で、日本語のと違う）、なぜ 1q84 は売れていない。みんなもっと 1q84 を買おう、と世界の中心で叫びたいが、自分一服も買っていない。配送料が高いのでやめた。

これをブログにアプロードしようとした時、WSL がネットに繋がらない、めんどい。

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