I use the Smart RSS extension for Firefox. I like FOSS for this because I require next to no features for an RSS aggregator. It’s not maintained anymore and I’m sure there’s something better out there but I haven’t been bothered enough to look.

There is some very high quality writing and gameplay in the genre right now. A lot of talented people are working on these games. And generally speaking, yes, you don’t need to spend a dime to see the main content.

I tend not to recommend them because you never know who has a gambling problem (and sometimes people don’t know until they are exposed to it for the first time). There’s also the other odd quirk–not just in gacha, but in live-service and other self-insert media in general lately–where character romance is omitted from the game world because they don’t want to offend insecure people. Can make things feel flat at times.

If one knows they are fine with both of those issues, there’s a lot of great content out there.

Close enough

The game’s press kit has a few hints. Sounds like a similar RPG style as Larian’s last few games, the question is what kind of combat.

This past week, I picked up a random short manga, started reading it, and…kept going to the end. I’ve never done that before, always ended up stopping. And I understood almost every last bit of it! Huge dopamine hit. I can already tell I’m going to be brimming with confidence by the time I finish my textbook in the Spring.

I also heard some wild stories about the JLPT through the grapevine. People getting disqualified because of their phones because of new rules and such. It’s freaking me out a bit, hah.

So real, lol. I can’t even get the big models to reliably give me shorter output.

Hope it went well!

Their reviews aren’t frequent. This is more of a “we ask around the org for what everyone liked this year.” It’s a consistently good list year after year.

Being picky about it seems like a good idea. I do the same with Japanese; the only thing I don’t fail myself on is pitch accent (Japanese has a high/low pitch thing). Everything else has to be right.

I do catch myself sitting on a card longer than I should at times, though if a session goes long for me it usually means I’m shadowing a lot of sentences out loud. I don’t think I’ve seen specific guidance on how long per card is too long, although if I go longer than around 10 seconds on a card it does start to feel like I’ve lost flow.

I finished Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles. I’m a nerd for this game in a particular so I have many nits to pick, but I was happy with it overall. That said, I don’t recommend the hard difficulty; I didn’t get much out of it.

The voice acting, though. Wow. Chapter 1 hit hard this time, especially Milleuda’s and Ramza’s performances. Joe Pitts is excellent in this role, and you can really feel now how much of a turning point the Plateau was for the character. I appreciated the additional dialogue too, although it got oversold in the marketing. Pretty sure most of the script size increase Matsuno was talking up ended up in menus.

Not anticipating playing anything in the genre. I’m sucked into Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader currently, and I’ve got Trails Beyond the Horizon next month anyway.

Edit: scratch that, after seeing a recommendation I ended up picking up Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch to play in Japanese. I’ll be playing a little here and there.

Slightly different? Comparing a dead simple plot of employment vs. the performance of the S&P to a DID Poisson regression event study is the coughing baby vs. hydrogen bomb meme.

This Stanford study is just one in a very active field of economic research, so it’s reasonable to be skeptical, but I really hope you don’t think people make decisions based on the kind of thing in that Tiktok video.

Rewatching the original Law and Order for the umpteenth time, season 3. Episodes about corporate responsibility and exploitation of immigrants. The more things change…

If it wasn’t for the payphones it’d feel timeless.

This study controls for the post-COVID hiring spike in three ways: the researchers generated results without including the tech sector, they separated out remote work, and compared trends from 2018-2022 to those after. The hypothesis holds in all cases. The primary regression analysis also included a standard set of controls for hiring trends (such as interest rate fluctuation).

There’s enough here to find a negative correlation between generative AI and entry-level employment.

An hour is quite a bit of time for 100 cards. What’s your recall percentage like? Do your cards have context clues, like phrases, sentences, or even voice clips?

I’ve felt a lot better about my progress once I cut my Anki time down myself, so I certainly agree with the idea of trying to budget more time elsewhere.

Dude, I just heard of Chill With You (from Denfaminicogamer actually) and I’m itching to try it out. Probably tomorrow. I had never seen the concept before, are there more decent ones other than Spirit City?

And yeah, I certainly also feel it when I’ve got other processes tugging on me during the week. Takes a toll.

In my experience this is the biggest knock against it, and it can be fatal for multiplayer games. I had to wait several days for a patch to get pushed to continue my Baldur’s Gate 3 campaign with a friend because she’d picked it up on Steam. We eventually had her keep Steam offline.

Considering the condition games can be released in lately, it can really suck to wait in general, too.

Hell, why not? Something to be said for mild self-accountability when you’re telling people you’re doing something.

I added a monolingual dictionary to my web browser lookup tool (Yomitan). There have been a few undeniable signs recently that my language learning has progressed the farthest it’s ever gone (I started in 2000!), but this is the most glaring, obvious one. It’s kind of surreal, honestly.

Not sure how you got to that conclusion. The survey prompt was “Please indicate whether or not you ever use the following websites or apps.” 29% responded that they do not use the platform, less than 1% did not respond. That’s 70%.

I’d love to see an un-bungled True Detective again.