Ashtear

This is where I've been at on it. On top of that, the stuff that's not directly exploiting human actors (like drawn or animated content) or pushing their boundaries is still coming out of studios that aren't exactly known for healthy work/life balance. To say nothing of the kind of fetish content that might come out of those places too, which surely takes its own toll on creators.

If we can offload all of that potential trauma onto computers, I'm all for it.

Didn't finish any JRPGs this month (again!). I'd actually been going at a decent rate the past few years, finishing around 9-10 JRPGs in a year, but I don't think I'm hitting that mark again. In October I got sucked into Hades 2, which is probably going to be my personal game of the year.

Right now I'm playing Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles, having a good time overall and settling into a very familiar old rhythm with it. Playing through on Tactician difficulty, I just finished Chapter 2. I've been frustrated by it here and there, but I did want a challenge on replay #15 or whatever the hell it is for me at this point. A couple of minor changes caught me off guard, like how the best/worst zodiac compatibility works now. That's going to force me to rethink my Riovanes Castle strategy.

Speaking of which, I can't believe they omitted the in-battle zodiac reference chart. At first I thought they'd color coded, which seemed like a great addition...until I realized it was just cosmetic. Overall, the UIs are very thin compared to the earlier versions. You used to be able to hit SELECT and get info on literally every single part of the UI, and that's all gone now. I was pretty surprised by this considering how it looked in early screenshots. Looks pretty, but functionally, it's a big downgrade.

That said, there are good additions. The revamped poaching system is a nice QoL upgrade. The way job info is presented now should be great to help out new players. However, the voice acting is the standout: it is phenomenal. It's a step up from Tactics Ogre Reborn, which was already largely good; I think Creative Studio 3 might have the best dubbing team in the business right now. Ramza, Agrias, Milleuda, and Folmarv have been great so far. It's funny, a long time ago I used to think Chapter 1 was on the weak side, but it hit so damn hard this time. That part of the story is just a fantastic stretch of the game now, wire to wire.

Yeah, I'm also considering doing Chained Echoes for Seventh Heaven's game of the month. My track record with indie JRPGs isn't great though 😅

Staff shake-up last year. Phil Savage and Tyler Wilde have really stepped it up and let their writers sound off.

Like any of the major sites though, the news side still has its share of articles generated from one-liners sourced from interviews ran elsewhere.

It is even a valid strategy early on to have your characters throw rocks at each other and have one character with the monk class use Chakra to heal and revive anyone. This is quite literally aura farming.

Cute.

I'm playing this now. I've played the earlier versions so many times that I used to be able to get through with minimal grinding if I wanted, but hoo boy, not on Tactician mode. Those enemy Summoners in Chapter 2 are no joke now. I didn't go the full Arithmetician route but I definitely couldn't mess around. It helped out that Mystic Arts got like a +20% hit rate buff, a nice workaround for the reduced damage my party does on this difficulty. Also got a nasty surprise with the zodiac changes. It used to be that Pisces was the safest route for Ramza on certain bosses, but in The Ivalice Chronicles, it's the most dangerous.

I just got to Chapter 3, so with poaching open I can do all the busted things, including Chantage, which everyone (!) can equip now. Chapter 3's also a lot easier than 2. Well, until THAT part, anyway.

A well-known Japanese Internet chat thing is the use of "w," which translated into "lol." It comes from warau or a similar word, for laugh. Can tack on multiple wwwww, which led to 草 becoming shorthand for big laughs, because multiple W's look like grass!

I'm still plugging away. Still struggling with listening comprehension a bit. Noticed I'm having a focus problem, so I've started looking up ADHD strategies for active listening, see how that goes.

I started to go down this rabbit hole with templating/media but recognized it was getting a little out of control. It's funny how I stuck with an obsolete SRS program for years because I didn't want to deal with how complicated Anki seemed, I coincidentally take a refresher course on HTML/CSS/JS last year and now I'm ready to go digging into card code. 🤦🏻‍♀️

Still a little interested in attaching images though...

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.