but it took 5 minutes to accomplish and cost me nothing so why not

anonymous asked:

Hi I really loved your YOI fic "Call Everything on the Ice"! I was also just wondering, though, how long have you been studying Japanese? Could you give some advice or resources how you're learning? I'm planning on going to Japan for my Asian Studies degree and hope to learn Japanese (or at least get a head start) before taking that leap. Hope this isn't a bother!!! Thank you if you have the time to answer!!! <3

Okay, so perhaps people have noticed that I tend to overanswer things? Yes, yes, that happens.

Me: Maybe only explain this a little bit.
Me to me: Who are we kidding? Have five, count ‘em, five separate numbered lists.

Answer to question #1: I’m at about *glances at watch* four and a half months of studying Japanese, and while I’ve been spending about 3-4 hours a day on this, I’m still really new. This means that I am inevitably doing something inefficiently and so you should take everything I say with a grain of salt. I haven’t been doing this very long and other people are much better resources!

That being said, my tendency to overexplain, my general pedantry (own it if you are it, whatever), and my deeply weird overanalytical brain means that maybe something I’ve done in breaking down my experience thus far will be helpful to you.

All five numbered lists below the cut.

Keep reading

Raise your voice against tumblr’s latest (and shittiest) updates (ever)

FELLOW ARTISTS AND TUMBLR USERS

As you may already know, tumblr’s @staff recent updates have been more and more disappointing. The disappearance of the comment button, if it wasn’t dramatic (to me at least) was in no way improving this website - you could simply disable this function if you didn’t want it on your posts.

However, two other updates I learned about just today just FUCK UP EVERYTHING FOR US ARTISTS IN NEED TO GET POPULARITY. Namely, the tag tracking and the selective dashboard (or whatever you’ll call the fact of showing only some of the posts from the people you follow).

  • First of all, the Tracked Tag was an awesome tool to keep in touch with the tags/fandoms we liked, as well as artists. It was an easy and hella quick access to the newest posts (also with the information on about how many new posts were to be discovered). The staff proudly claims “Now you can follow a search, just like a blog”. If you don’t look twice, you’ll see it as a normal feature to compensate the old one. Except I find it problematic. Because when you have to track a tag, you have three ways of doing it (and none is as good as the old one):
  • Browse your dashboard: Which is something I don’t always have time and will to do. If I get back from work and just want to see what happens in my favorite fandom, I will have to scroll down and down and pay attention to every single post to be sure I won’t miss the tracked tag related post. I’d lose 20 minutes instead of the 5 I just wanted to spend - also at the ads if by any chance I were too stupid to use an adblocker (thanks God, I’m not, and thanks again, actual clever people exist and created those).
  • Actually search for the topic in the search bar, and then get the results by popularity (in the context of art and especially for the bigger fandoms, this is a Mount Olympus only artists who are already popular can achieve). There’s a way of sorting results by newest instead of popular but not everyone will set “newest” as default, also it’s one more button to hit before getting your result. And to think it only took 3 seconds to get them in the good old times!!
  • If you want the posts displayed in a single column, like in the dashboard, as it used to be, you can type the url in your browser, like this: www.tumblr.com/tagged/example and then you get the same result as before the update but this is not intuitive to people who didn’t knew this trick before and you also have to type it by yourself. Again, you lose time and energy thinking of a solution to get back your beloved tracked tags.
  • Including the tracked tag in the dashboard also apparently doesn’t let you see everything about the tag but only (randomly?) selected post that may or may not match with what you expect from the tracked tag. It backfires even worse: You end up ignoring the goddamn post and scroll away from it. Wow so useful.

The update mentioned above was already super shitty, but what now I find SCANDALOUS is the fact that the dashboard becomes somewhat “selective”?? Not all the posts from the people you follow will appear on the dashboard?

  • Okay then, first tell me why I should follow them? Why not keeping a notebook aside my computer with the list of all the artists and blogs I like and go check those manually if they have a update. It’d be so hipster and tumblr was designed for hipsters right?
  • Also it should seem obvious that artists with a little fanbase because they are not as talented / successful /experienced/famous as others have a hella hard time to get noticed. I see everyday artists that’d deserve a larger fanbase because they make original stories and art so unique, but all the popularity is for the ones who make fanarts from popular series or just have a plain artstyle that just happen to suit people who have no taste in art. Here on tumblr, they are people struggling to live from their art, and visibility is ESSENTIAL to them and the prosperity of their creative activity. If you hide their posts to their followers you may be putting in danger this prosperity because they’ll have to find other ways to get noticed. It may cost them time to find the solution, to get their fanbase aware of it (and many won’t see it as their problem) and even money if they need to pay for advertisement…Or premium account maybe? Because it all looks like the signs of some shitty premium advantages only the richest or most popular will afford. Because that’s how it works isn’t it?

I’m usually not into this so-called tumblr social justice but I now think enough is enough. DeviantArt’s latest updates were no less shitty than tumblr (let them eat Core!!!). To me and many other artists, tumblr is a source of inspiration and one of the windows by which I can contemplate the beauty of art today, and also a window by which people will look at mine. What made the success of tumblr was the freshness of the concept, a sort of twitter with unlimited post lenght and high quality, customizable blogs. Constant updates isn’t a synonym of constant progress and I think useless updates is the sign of a decline which will gradually play with the nerves of your users. They are probably here to relax, and if they can’t they’ll just move their content to another platform and tumblr will only be memories…of one more great website that ruined everything just for the sake of money.

So, if you are an artist, if you are a fan or a customers of artists here, if you are there because you liked keeping in touch with your favorite stuff, reblog this post and add your voice to the choir of miscontentment this stupid update led us to. Silent majority accomplishes nothing, but the minority who’ll rise and fight will.

3

Now with photographs! If people still do not get why you can’t compare white washing a Black character to building diversity by making one of the thousands of white characters Black, we will just have to wait for the racists to die out and work harder on educating the next generation. I’m going to go eat my rice now
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