28 April 2017 @ 10:29 pm
goods + photos  
today i'm being experimental! i tend to post photos on my twitter so i'm just copy-pasting the links here and seeing how well they show up on dreamwidth.

for the past couple days i've been playing the sims 4 in japanese. overall it's "pretty" good for practice, you get both really common words (chair, bed, eat) and uncommon (fingerprints, clues) but the main problem has been that, as usual, the font's too small for me. so i've changed the UI to 54 instead of 100 and also messed with the resolution and things got a lot bigger. some stuff breaks a little but i've found ways around most of it, for example if you can't access the "exit" button you just hit the escape key. if you own the game you can change it to a ton of different languages so if you're studying french or swedish or something, try it!



i found "korean pepper" at the grocery store and after adding it to my kimchi (which was only ginger, onion, water, salt and cabbage) it turned out really tasty! THIS is what makes kimchi taste actually good/like kimchi! it was about $4 for a container that only lasts for 4-5 cabbage heads, but it didn't strike me until after i'd already bought it that i could probably buy a huge bag of this spice off ebay for super cheap.

 

before when the kimchi tasted disgusting, i chopped it up and put it in an omlette with leek like this:



almost all the stuff i ordered off ebay's arrived now! some pics:

shoes

— elastic shoelaces so that we can take on/off our shoes in two seconds. i bought them so we wouldn't have to buy special slip-on shoes when living in japan, but i've already noticed how, wow, shoes aren't an ANNOYANCE anymore! it's weird how such a small change can make you feel like you have less stress....
— "book fingers", they spread the book pages out really well and makes things easier to read, i've been using them a lot. they're a bit less useful with manga though, because you have to turn the page a lot faster than with a novel so it ends up getting kinda annoying.
— "rubber ears" so my glasses don't slide off. they work PERFECTLY. and if your glasses get forcibly pulled off or something the rubber will just bend and you won't get injured.
— USB phone cord (came just in time because our existing charger cord is almost completely broken); some other less useful stuff.

it is (or was) easter season so there's stuff like this all around town, which is "nordic easter decorations":







i use this on my phone / 3DS to magnify things when i feel like it:



and here's my walking stick (at the library):



this kind of thing is ALL OVER the woods here, i think it's "forts" people make for "forest orientation" (the schools teach you how to not get lost when in nature):



this apparently marks that you're entering a nature preserve. my wife grew up here and didn't even know that until we saw a sign with a matching logo later on.



this is the famous scandinavian (or swedish?) "sandwich cake", apparently if you google in english you can't find any authentic info on it. it's just a giant sandwich. i took this photo at the grocery store but anyone with sense makes it at home... these things pre-made can cost $20-40 USD but the ingredients probably cost $5-8.



i often eat stuff like this (fermented rye/oat flour + egg = dough; + tomatoes & meat = pizza):



and finally i'm still studying with "readthekanji". i've made my own site layout for it now so it's a bit easier to use:


 
 
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lusentoj[personal profile] lusentoj on April 29th, 2017 09:26 pm (UTC)
i knooooow! once i started playing i wasted THREE DAYS playing.

but at the same time, at least i'm still seeing/reading japanese when i play. a few years ago i made it a rule that i can ONLY play videogames in foreign languages so "even if i do waste the whole day, at least it's still not a total waste". so i bought a japanese 3DS and stuff. it's been a pretty good rule so far and has definitely improved my japanese. it's been way harder to break my manga-reading habit... i now need to make a rule where "if i want to read manga it has to be in a foreign language".