watched "cowboys vs aliens" and "i am legend" (the latter only because my wife wanted to rewatch it). first movie was pretty alright but not exactly memorable; it felt sorta like a fanfiction author wrote it, because it skipped all the normal time-wasting dialogue and got straight to the point and then moved on to the next scene. i had been hoping it was a sort of parody but if it was it was more like a "serious parody". second movie was god-awful and i BOTH sped it up and skipped through it.

i found a chrome add-on that you can use to speed up "any" HTML5 video, including netflix, and it starts in small increments so i can use it to speed everything up and save a bit of time when i watch stuff... for a while now, as long as it's in english i've been speeding up all youtube videos to 1,5x speed but now i can do the same elsewhere. if i do it with japanese i'll get even faster at reading the subs and probably get better at hearing muddled/fast words...

feels like i've been in japan for at the very least a half year, but actually it's only been 3 1/2 months. my japanese has improved sooo much already, it's kind of mind-blowing, but still i need to improve faster...!! i really need to get japanese friends i can just hang out with all the time. after buying yarn at the yarn shop we noticed a flyer inside the yarn package advertising a knitting group there so my wife might go there and make some old-lady friends of her own at least...

my older sister (8 years older than me, long-time drug addict, dropped out of college after 1 semester, living in a camping trailer without electricity, history of abusive boyfriends etc) emailed me just asking how i was doing, this is the first contact i've gotten from her in 10 years so it was pretty surprizing. i replied but she hasn't replied back yet, i'm assuming she doesn't actually have internet at home. she has a new email, "(name)'s fresh start" so i assume that means she's trying to quit drugs...?

turns out you can make soup stock out of anything (onion peels, carrot butts, shrimp shells) and air-dry anything (pears, meat, potatoes...) and, somehow, eat basically anything (banana peels) but the problem is finding other people who are doing a ton stuff with these same ingredients. for example i only found like 3 banana recipes where you actually use the peels, but i have no oven, have no blender, am not gonna deep-fry anything, can't drink milk etc. even if the money you save is really minimal, or maybe even negated by the fact that you have to use the stove/electricity more or something, i get excited thinking that i can find more ways to save money. the problem is i tend to get a bit fanatic and be like some great-great-grandma who says "ok now we can only use 1 square of toilet paper no matter what because it'll save money" on some subject for a while - ignoring that my wife hates it, it actually makes you feel bad morally after a while when you don't make your own goals/rules.

anyway i'm just really restless lately, it might be the fish sauce i've been eating... sigh. it's certainly healthy and helping my skin and stuff but at the same time i think it's probably pasteurized and causing this concentration issue...