malvasia bianca

I’ve had my eye on Ni No Kuni DS ever since it was announced: I love Studio Ghibli, I generally have a favorable impression of Level 5, and the book sounded wonderful. I’d been idly waiting for news to trickle out about a U.S. release of the game; recently, there was an announcement that the [...]

There was a time towards the end of 2008 when it seemed like everybody in my twitter feed was talking about Yakuza 2. It was apparently a Shenmue-style action RPG (also published by Sega), but (as Steve Gaynor so eloquently outlined in the 2008 holiday confab) filled with delightfully quirky side missions, missions that added [...]

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been finding enough unusual projects imposing on my time that I think I’m going to have to shuffle my priorities, albeit temporarily. I’ve been wanting to do more programming at home than normal recently: aside from improving the memory project, I want to spend a bit of time getting [...]

It’s been ages since I blogged about learning Japanese, so I figured I’d give y’all an update. I finished the textbook I was using last November, which raised the question of what to do next. I have some manga around and even a couple of collections of essays/stories, but I wasn’t sure I’d be up [...]

I’ve been meaning for ages to write about Jim Womack’s article on Respect for People, but I don’t seem to be getting around to it, so I’ll mention it here. A TED talk on underwater astonishments; if the beginning doesn’t capture your fancy or you’re short on time, go to the 4:20 mark. Everything you’d [...]

From Pragmatic Thinking & Learning, p. 102: Cna yuo raed tihs? Aoccdrnig to rscheearch, it dseno’t mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are; the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses, and you can sitll raed it [...]

I’d been intending for a while to write a program to help me memorize stuff, most notably Japanese vocabulary. I’d been kind of goofing of for a while, reading much of the Rails book and taking the first few baby steps towards creating the Rails app, but nothing serious. Which is a problem, given that [...]

As regular readers are aware, I’m a big fan of JapanesePod101. On the off chance that any of my readers are thinking about learning a bit of Japanese, I wanted to let you know that they’ve just started new seasons of most or all their shows: in particular, they published the first episode of a [...]

I spent a little while yesterday poking around with getting Japanese input to work on my home Linux machine, since I’ll need that for entering vocabulary cards into the memory program. To make a long story short: largely, it Just Works. (At least under Ubuntu 8.04.) I was a bit confused at first by the [...]

I’m now two-thirds of the way through my Japanese textbook, and the second third went much more smoothly than the first third did. All but one of the chapters took two weeks each; that one took three weeks and, if you throw in the two vacation weeks, it only took me 23 weeks to go [...]

I read a book on neuro-linguistic programming recently. It’s basically a way to reprogram your brain (e.g. to strengthen motivations or weaken phobias), using techniques like visualizing the trigger in question, then changing the way you visualize the scene. (Moving the trigger object farther away from you or closer to you, adding colors, adding theme [...]

I spent the day at this month’s Bay Area Go Players Association tournament. It was my first tournament in recent memory playing as a 1 dan; I had a record of 1 win and 3 losses and got the impression that 1 dan is a more accurate rating for me than 1 kyu, but that [...]

The SuperMemo ideas don’t seem to be leaving my head, and I’ve finally gotten my todo backlog under control, so I think I’ll take a shot at implementing them. Some notes: What algorithm should I use to schedule the reminders? I’ll work under the theory that each item that I want to remember is best [...]

As I have, perhaps, alluded to previously, we spent the second half of April in Paris. Notes: It’s the most wonderful place in the world, but I’m actually not feeling particularly compelled to visit it again any time soon. Some of this has to do with the fact that I’ve been there eight times; some [...]

Jim pointed me to this article a few weeks ago, and I’m annoyed to say that I can’t get it out of my head. It’s about a guy who claims to have an algorithm (implemented by a computer program) to help you remember a lot more stuff a lot more solidly than you can with [...]

In honor of the release of the Wii version of Okami, I urge all of you who own a Wii (or a PS2) and who haven’t played the game yet to go out and buy a copy. More here, but the short version is: it’s an adventure game based on Japanese mythology with a beautiful [...]

Wow, I haven’t been blogging much recently, have I? Sorry about that; I do most of my blogging on weekends, and the last few weekends have been pretty busy. (And much of my weekday free time in the evenings has been spent watching Twelve Kingdoms.) Fortunately, I have not been slacking off on all of [...]

Eternal Sonata is a quite good Japanese RPG for the Xbox 360. Unfortunately, the main lesson that I’ve learned from it is that I don’t particularly like JRPG’s; I won’t say I’m swearing off of them forever (in fact, I’m glad I played this one), but I won’t give them the benefit of the doubt [...]

I’ve now hit the 200 kanji mark in my quest to memorize all 1945 Joyo Kanji. Where by “memorize” I mean that, if my memory is working well (which it usually is), I can write down the first 200 characters (actually, the first 217 characters: I’ve been procrastinating on writing this blog post) in the [...]

For the first time ever, or at least since the dawn of time, I listened to an episode of JapanesePod101 today that showed up in my RSS reader earlier this same month. So the end of that backlog is in sight! I’m not quite ready to declare victory yet—at my current rate, I still have [...]