Ed Marshall @esm@mastodon.social

I ordered a CD from a seller on Discogs in Austria, to be shipped to the US. Pretty normal transaction, nothing I haven't done dozens of times before.

The package sat in a USPS customs warehouse for *9 days* before being released. For a CD. Because we're in a trade war with the whole world.

We see outragrous news every day, but that's fairly disconnected from our everyday lives; maybe more personal impacts like this will make people go "wait, this isn't normal, right?"

My storage array just emailed me to let me know that a volume is running dangerously low on space, as it only has 1.2TB of free space left

The future is weird

When your local McDonald's really hates the local homeless population.

I've been wondering how I'm going to deal with sandboxing of web apps on the #librem5 when it arrives, since the default browser is Epiphany, and nearly every service I use now is going to require me to use their web interface.

And then I remembered that this is a real Linux machine, running Wayland, and there's no reason I can't (eventually, anyway) run Firefox with container tabs, just like on my desktop.

I haven't been this excited about a nerdy tech gadget in a long time.

When I said keep it 💯 I swear I didn't mean fahrenheit

It is proven! I am logic on Keybase: https://keybase.io/logic/sigchain#71086ae2e7601ae7a880e4994c975acd923fccbd57982e486422251b0ddaadaf0f

Visiting Japan has taught me that it was a mistake to focus on kanji/vocab and hiragana and not worry about katakana; katakana is used at least as much as hiragana from what I've seen, and because almost all loanwords are written that way, words I'd normally recognize are unreadable or slow to register.

I'm cramming katakana flashcards on the shin to Kyoto as penance.

I feel like I've been on some sort of personal improvement bender since the year started: losing (a lot of) weight, learning 日本語, "swiping right" again, even stopped biting my nails.

It seems I'm coming to a critical juncture though: I would cut someone for a little pasta, Japanese makes me feel dumber every day, I remain desperately lonely, and my goddamn fingertips itch.

(Not really looking for advice or help here, just having a shitty night and screaming into the void a little. It'll pass.)

Your April Fools Day joke isn't funny.

Still having fun. 🙂 #日本製

Also, jisho.org is an international treasure. I don't even have the words to explain how good their dictionary is.

The GNOME 日本製 IME is tremendously good with a Latin keyboard: type romaji, get hiragana/katakana/kanji automatically. Even an idiot like me can use it.

I'm similarly impressed with Google's IME for Android: it's basically T9, but for hiragana. I'm guessing this a pretty common input arrangement on mobile in Japan?

(It'd be easier to use if my instant recall of hiragana was better. 😛 I have so much work to do here; I'm still not sure why I thought learning a new language was a good idea.)

If I once had the notion that I was modestly intelligent, and perhaps even capable of learning new things, I have thoroughly driven those ideas away by trying to learn a new language.

(But I still think Japanese is a ton of fun.)

Holiday traditions should be delicious