Otaku Life Blog #2: Ekphrasis and Starting Japanese Learning with AJATT/Khatzumoto

Okay, so there’s this concept called ekphrasis, which I’ve been reading about. It’s basically writing based on a picture, or more accurately, any kind of description of a visual artwork counts as ekphrasis.

I’ve been looking at poems that are based on certain pictures. But it got me thinking—maybe light novels and visual novels also practice a kind of ekphrasis in the sense that, in these mediums, I feel like the pictures come first. For me, at least, I often find the artwork more appealing than the stories.

Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that the stories used to be more appealing to me when I was younger and in the target audience, whereas the illustrations remain as beautiful as they were when I first saw them. In fact, sometimes I catch myself wondering about the stories which these illustrations suggest to me over the actual stories which they represent.

Maybe it’s just that it’s easier to appreciate an image because they usually represent one event rather than a series of them, as a poem or written narrative does. You don’t have to sit there and try to recollect what happened, like when you finished reading a story, the image is right before your eyes.

I really don’t want to end up like the kind of guy who has the most boring anime 3×3, you know the meme: one Ghibli movie, some classic anime, and so on. But what if that is actually my taste, and it’s not an attempt to seem smart? I don’t think I’m smart, really. And maybe that’s because you need to be smart to see the good in things which are not straightforwardly good.

I’m talking about the difference between “like” and “good”—things people like versus things people think are good. I understand there’s a difference, but I don’t always feel it. Most of the things I like are things I consider to be good as well. Or at least, when I liked them, I considered them good. Stuff like Shakugan no Shana and Zero no Tsukaima. On the other hand, I don’t want to become too arrogant and say that everything that I can’t feel the appeal of is not good.

This morning, I watched a bunch of Zoomers reacting to Oreimo. It was kind of disappointing. I won’t name the channel, but I don’t even know if I want to bother refuting what was said. What’s the point?

I’m spending more time learning Japanese with immersion. I’ve been slowly changing the language to Japanese on certain websites like YouTube. I don’t want to change it on my PC or phone yet—I don’t want to make them unusable. But I feel like that’s maybe the right direction to go to find out more about anime, because I’m kind of really disappointed in the content available in the West now.

The thing is, I’m not 100% sure that the Japanese have better takes. I’m kind of worried that I’ll end up learning Japanese and then the Japanese internet turns out to be the same as the Western one.

I feel like I’m always too late when it comes to trends and online conversations. I was late to imageboards, late to Discord. I didn’t have a Facebook account until everyone stopped using it, and now I don’t have one again because there’s no point.

Likewise, I’m kind of worried that Japanese websites are dead now. I’m thinking about things like 2channel and Nico Video. Watching that Oreimo reaction video reminded me of things that were popular about 15 years ago when it came out. The internet that the characters in Oreimo use is probably very different than the one we use now.

So I’m worried my attempt to learn Japanese will also come too late, and the new Japanese internet users might be as bad as the Western ones. That said, I think I’ll still have access to a lot of stuff I don’t currently have access to. Maybe the effort will be worth it. Even if AI gets to the point where it can translate Japanese to English perfectly, that is still not the same experience as being able to understand Japanese, so that’s one thing which AI can’t replicate.

I also came across a video of someone criticising anime for its portrayal of the church. It’s not like I am searching for these videos; it’s the YouTube algorithm trying ragebait me. I’m kind of worried that people in the anime industry will listen to these criticisms coming from every side and chisel away at all the rough edges in the medium until there will be nothing left of it. But then again, maybe I’m worrying about nothing. That’s probably the truth.

I’ve started doing Japanese immersion for the last couple of days, and I must say it’s been a bit hard to listen to audio for hours on end while only understanding a word or two here and there. I’ve also started making my own Anki sentence deck. I’m still using a couple of pre-made decks I found on AnkiWeb, but I think it would be helpful to also start making my own cards. I’m not doing that many cards per day for now, so I can manage more than one deck.

Another challenge is that since I’m making content in English, I end up having to watch stuff in English. So maybe I’ll have to reduce the amount of content I release, not only on this channel but also on my blog. Obviously, if I’m going to watch an anime or read a manga in Japanese, it’s going to take me much longer than if I read a translation.

But I think I’ve kind of said everything I have to say about anime in English. If I want to find out more, I probably need to learn Japanese to find more obscure sources. The other day, I saw someone make a video on Chikan Otoko/Molester Man, a manga I also wanted to talk about. I feel like all the stuff I thought was obscure is now getting talked about, even if not in an intelligent way. So I need to go even more obscure, and to do that, I need Japanese.

In terms of my reading for my studies… I guess I did some reading on Ekphrasis. More importantly, I found a way to generate Japanese audio using a good AI text-to-speech that works locally, even on my crappy PC. It’s a program called Voicevox, and it has an Anki add-on now. With these solutions, the issue is always: will they stop working when Anki gets updated? These open-source programs get updated frequently, even if no new meaningful features are added, and that inevitably breaks third-party add-ons. But it works for now, and it’s pretty good. I’ll put links in the description. Basically, the good thing about Voicevox is that it let’s you generate Japanese audio locally on your computer.

So, I started this video talking about ekphrasis, which is the technical term for using words to describe a work of visual art. Honestly, I felt like we were wasting our time trying to define this increasingly vague term. It’s mostly people writing poetry based on paintings and so forth. A lot of the time, it reveals more about the poet’s point of view. These ekphrastic poems are analyses, but they’re also artworks themselves. Basically, you get the poet’s point of view, but you usually don’t get the painter’s, at least not directly. It’s not like a normal analysis that goes into the author’s history or motives.

We also spent a lot of time trying to define the difference between poetry and visual arts. The alleged difference was that images portray a still moment, whereas poetry can show a series of moments and how things change in time. A painting can trick you into feeling movement by capturing an action midway. We talked about film, but not comics. Western comics don’t focus on movement that much; there tend to be fewer panels per page, with more happening in each panel, so it’s more like a painting.

The way ekphrasis works changes depending on the genre. The oldest kind would be just a description of a picture—in the past, when people didn’t have photography, so they might read a description of a painting. Then there’s poetry that tries to create a narrative from the painting, contrasting the static image with a story. Writing inspired by cinema might also be considered ekphrasis. An article I read claimed it inspires a kind of dream world, giving an example from the film Kiss of the Spider Woman, where a gay prisoner describes imaginary films to another prisoner who’s part of some kind of anti-government resistance. These films then inspire the dreams the characters have in their sleep. The idea is that since films need to cut scenes, this leads to sudden changes in the environment, like in a dream. Likewise, when you tell someone the plot of the movie, it is easy to get the details wrong, or even to just put more emphasis on certain scenes, thus creating a narrative which is different from the film. I guess, now with AI, you get a similar reverse Ekphrasis when you write a prompt to create a picture or a video, and the AI hallucinates details which were not exactly there in your prompt.

Another distinction they try to make is that images, in the past at least, were made to copy nature, while words can’t capture how an image looks because they’re based on convention—there’s nothing “dog-like” in the word “dog.” Also, if you read a description of a scene, you’ll have a different picture in your mind than anyone else. Unless you have illustrations, as in a light novel, how characters look would also be different.

It’s always interesting to hear light novel authors in their afterwords. They usually thank the illustrator and sometimes comment on how they imagined the characters a bit differently than how they envisioned them. But often, the authors themselves start to see the characters the way the illustrator drew them.

However, this distinction between images and words—that words portray movement in time while images can only portray instances—falls apart after the invention of cinema. But I think it had already fallen apart by the time of the invention of comic books. Although it is true that comic and manga artists were inspired in their portrayal of motion and therefore the passing of time, by cinema.

In summary, ekphrastic poetry turns an image into a story that expresses the mind of the poet; and ekphrastic fiction turns the work of art – whether still or moving – into a story that mirrors the mind of a character.

The conclusion also claims that while traditional ekphrasis generates a narrative from a still, silent work of art, cinematic ekphrasis exploits the metamorphic power of film to conjure a dream world that rivals realistic fiction. I don’t know if that’s accurate… because you can make a still picture of something transforming, too. Just like you can portray a dream in a picture, too. The talk about metamorphic power is because some characters have shape-shifting dreams in the film, but you can portray that in a still picture as well.

The basic point remains true, though, that you can’t see a painting the same way once you’ve read a story or description about it; you notice things you didn’t before. The verbal version remakes the original. This is also a kind of justification for modern art, saying that because there’s so little there to go on, it gives the critic more freedom to come up with interpretations. Modern art is critic-centric, made with the expectation that people will come up with different interpretations, none of which is correct. You can get a big word count and draw all sorts of connections.

I kind of feel like it’s a cop-out by painters because photography came along. A photograph is a more accurate depiction of the world, so artists were forced by technology to go the other way and be less realistic, more stylised, to do something that photography could not do. Now, according to this paper, it’s the critics who bring ordinary things back into these modern paintings by interpreting, say, a white line on a dark background as a closed eye. A less charitable way of looking at this would be to say that they are inserting things which are not there in the artwork. Then again, I am not sure if there’s anything necessarily wrong with this from time to time, because I think low-definition art can help stimulate your imagination.

Come to think of it, I used AI to help create cards for my Japanese Anki deck. I didn’t ask it to make cards by itself, but I found sentences from various sources and asked it to translate them and provide the kana. It’s much faster than looking things up one word at a time. We’ll see how it goes. At this point, I’m just trying to get basic comprehension, but ultimately I hope to be able to create monolingual sentence cards. Basically cards where the definition at the back of the flashcard is also in Japanese.

I have never tried to consciously study a language. In fact, I hate the words “study” and “learn”, which begs the question of why I have them in my usernames. Basically, I want to make a deck of sentences I find interesting. I’m worried, though, that I’ll end up as I did with English: I kind of know it, but I don’t really. When I try to write, it’s a mess. I don’t know where to put commas—that’s my biggest problem. I either add too many or not enough. I also reuse the same words a lot, like “for example” and “for instance,” and basically a lot of repetition due to a limited vocabulary.

I’ve also been listening to a series of articles narrated by a fan of “AJATT.” It’s by a guy called Khatzumoto who ran a blog called “All Japanese All The Time.” I think I’ve talked about this before. I’ve run out of useful articles to listen to for immersion. There are about 600 articles narrated like a podcast, and I have gone past 100 articles. I’m trying to follow his method, but it’s difficult for various reasons I don’t want to talk about yet because it’s too early and it would be just a bunch of complaining.

From what I’ve heard, Khatzumoto seems pretty cool, but he has an article complaining about colonialism. He’s from Utah, the Mormon state, but seems to be an atheist. He didn’t have many positive things to say about Christianity. The funny thing is, even though he doesn’t believe in God, he still sounds overly positive, kind of like Mormon folks. There’s also a self-help feel to it. One thing he repeatedly says is that your background and genetics don’t matter. It probably doesn’t matter for learning a language, but he goes a bit too far when he says things like if you put in the effort, you can be in the NBA. He apparently sold products related to learning Japanese on his website; make of that what you will, but it’s his blog, which is influential. The fact that someone would go through the effort of narrating 600 blogs says a lot about the devotion of his followers.

It’s also interesting because this was from a time when people actually read blogs, and many found it through Google searches. That doesn’t really happen now. The last blog like that I read was by Mark Manson, another self-help guru who transitioned to YouTube. These days, if you have a blog and want people to read it, you need to promote it on social media. People aren’t searching on Google as much, or if they do, they don’t return to the website.

I think the reason is not only that it’s easier to find and follow stuff on social media, but also the lack of consistency in web design. People don’t care what a website looks like after a couple of visits; only the content matters. A unique design only gets in the way of reading. If that bothers you, there are browser extensions or features like speed readers that convert articles to a bland template. Brave Browser has it. You can also get used to website templates after reading a few articles, but it’s a tiny barrier to entry that people in the so-called indy-web community ignore. Then again, their goal is not to get as many views as possible, so it’s fine. I have heard there used to be a time when it was web browsers which determined the styling of websites.

I was wondering whether to make a video recommending websites, like “10 anime websites,” but the problem is the websites and blogs I read are so random, and I don’t always agree with them. I don’t have ten anime blogs I read; it’s more like two or three, plus some personal blogs. It’s not enough for a list, and a list of random websites wouldn’t be useful. This idea came to me after listening to Khatzumoto’s list of articles.

Looking at Khatzumoto’s articles, he’s constantly trying to come up with new topics: recommending Japanese music bands, comedians, and TV shows. It sometimes turns into a motivational or generic Japan blog. An accusation that he answers by saying you do need some motivation because you are a human with emotions and not a machine. This blog came out before AI, so he must have spent many hours writing these long articles. He also talks about the blog medium in general, which is interesting to me since I run a blog. He says the good thing about blogs is that they let you release content little by little; you don’t need to write a whole book. But I don’t think his blog would make a good book, as he points out. He made a table of contents page on his website, but it’s obvious it wasn’t planned. You can feel the same in academic books that are anthologies of essays; the essays weren’t written with regard to each other, they can exist independently, and it doesn’t feel like they are building to some climax or conclusion at the end of the book.

There are some unintentionally funny moments listening to Khatzumoto’s blog, like him recommending using chopsticks to learn Japanese, listening to Japanese in your sleep, or when you’re out with your girlfriend. He also says you should think of yourself as Japanese. I kind of get what he’s saying—if you surround yourself with the language, you can’t escape it, and it makes learning easier—but it’s funny. He also says you need to sleep on the floor and sit on the ground like Japanese people did, at least in the early 2000s, if anime is anything to go by. I don’t know if Japanese people still do that often.

The fact that he’s a Kenyan guy also makes it a bit funnier. When you think of the stereotypical weeaboo, you don’t think of an African guy. But the fact that he was a computer science student checks out.

One thing I agree with Khatzumoto about is my dislike for classes. Classes are useless. Maybe one-on-one classes aren’t useless, but they’re still not great. Even one-on-one classes can be toxic too because you are constantly trying to appease this stranger. One thing Khatzumoto suggested was integrating Anki into a normal class setting, where people wouldn’t meet as often or would be tested with Anki. Testing people with Anki might not be a bad idea because they could use it to practice for the test as well. I’ve never understood why some people look down on using past papers to practice. You would know exactly what would be on the exam if you used Anki. It would make sense, but I don’t think it will happen precisely because it makes sense. I don’t want to get all philosophical about it, so I’ll stop.

Earlier, I complained about people criticising anime. But then again, I don’t like the people who complain about anime tourists either. I don’t want to be one of them. I don’t want to be part of the “anime defense force,” spending all my time defending works that aren’t even my own. It’s not that they’re not my own, but also, I don’t feel like they’re adding anything in terms of analysis or understanding. They’re not explaining why something is good. I won’t name any names but there is a youtuber who created his own comic book series but the fan service in it was so unerotic because it felt like the only reason it was included was to own the SJWs. Maybe it works at filtering people who’s politics you don’t like but it kind of feels like they don’t know, or have forgotten, why they like what they like.

Reading Khatzumoto’s blog has also given me nostalgia for the time when people used RSS Feed Readers and actually wrote comments on blogs. If you’re starting a blog these days, you probably shouldn’t have a comments section open or maybe have a guestbook at most. If you want to talk with readers, do it through email. For a while, what discouraged me from blogging was never getting any comments. Even if stats say people read your blog, you never know if they’re bots or if someone actually read it. You might say, “Why do you care? You’re writing for yourself.” But if you’re publishing it online, you’re obviously expecting someone to read it.

I don’t think anyone could do what Khatzumoto did with just a blog these days. You can’t really go back. I’m making it sound like a wonderful time, but I remember websites were full of ads. They still are, but I use an ad blocker now, whereas back in the day I didn’t. The blogosphere was a nice decentralized thing where people could say whatever they wanted on their own blogs. Now, you have to cater not just to your audience but to platforms as well. For example, if YouTube suddenly said you can’t include links in the description to websites outside of YouTube then that wouldn’t stop people from using this video sharing website.

I’ve been trying to bring back the blog for myself. I thought it might be useful to talk about things I consume, to reflect. So much of our lives is based around consumption and production. You can separate the two, but you can’t necessarily say one is better than the other. You need production to have consumption, true, but if no one consumed anything then what would be the point of production beyond mere survival.

I was thinking of maybe subscribing to Howard Blast’s Patreon. I don’t usually subscribe to Patreons, but I was thinking about it since I came across Khatzumoto through Howard Blast. Howard Blast claims to want to carry the torch of Khatzumoto. I don’t know if I should talk about things on his Patreon because I don’t agree with everything he says, and I don’t want to get into drama. But I might do it. His Patreon is mostly about drawing in an anime style, and I’m not interested in drawing anymore; I’m more into writing. He does give writing advice, but it feels a bit generic. He can read Japanese, so what I hope for is more of a Japanese perspective. But then again, maybe it’s better to just learn Japanese.

I’ve been thinking about my motives for learning Japanese. I guess that’s what this blog has been about. Part of it is that I feel it’s good for my brain to learn a language. Obviously, you don’t own every word you memorise, but I have a pretty bad memory, and maybe practising memorising words and sentences might help. If I’m going to memorise anything, a language is useful. Some things only available in the language are interesting to me as well. I don’t have any final goals, though. I’m not one of those people who expects everything to be different in Japan. I don’t even know if I want to visit Japan. Wherever you go, work is work and play is play. I don’t necessarily think working in Japan would be better than working here in the UK. In fact, I’ve heard the employee-employer relationship is skewed toward the employer there. But I’m just repeating things I’ve heard; I don’t know how accurate that is.

Maybe I’m hoping learning Japanese will breathe some life back into my anime-watching hobby.

I feel like lately a lot of things have been giving me diminishing returns. I need to get deeper into them if I want to get something out of them, and one way I hope to do that is by learning Japanese. The question is, what else should I focus on learning? Howard Blast has decent drawing tutorials, so I wonder if I should try to learn to draw as well. I’m not sure if I even want to get good at drawing at this point. I’m mostly doing things for kind of selfish, personal, contemplative motives. I don’t expect to get good; it’s more like meditation.

Khatzumoto compared doing Anki to gambling, which isn’t a bad metaphor. He just wants it to be addictive. It does look like people playing pachinko, pressing the same button over and over. But you do need to press more than one button with Anki.

I used to look down on people who made Japanese their entire personality. Part of it was because there’s a whole country of Japanese people, so what’s the point of learning the language if I’m never going to be as good as them? There isn’t much point in that sense. I’m not as optimistic as Khatzumoto. But there are personal benefits to it, just as there are personal benefits to learning to draw.

I like writing, but most of my writing is in English. When it comes to drawing, there’s no language barrier. Well, not necessarily.

Anki is a form of gamification. I’ve thought of applying it to other subjects I want to learn, but it just doesn’t work. It’s good for memorising facts, but I wouldn’t use it to memorise quotes. I’ve tried; that’s how I know it doesn’t work for a lot of things. When you’re studying literature, it’s more about analysis than memorising what critics said. You can have a whole passage about what a critic said, but that’s not good for Anki.

Another reason I didn’t like those Japanese-learning folk is that it felt like they were making a martial arts-like devotion out of something millions of people in another country do without effort. It seems silly. I also don’t feel people are necessarily that much better in different countries. There are differences depending on class, but on a personal level, it doesn’t matter because wherever you live, you’ll interact with people of a similar socioeconomic class. I would say I have noticed more differences between people of different generations, or age brackets, than between whole countries.

Today is going to be a long day. I wonder if I can really work a blog post out of this mess. I probably shouldn’t just talk like this because it will make editing the transcript even worse. I should try to find some through-line.

Even if I were drawing, I think the main benefit for me would be to build patience. You need a lot of patience to draw. If you don’t like what you’re drawing, you just give up. But maybe it’s not just amateurs like me who have to look at creative pursuits from a personal perspective. As AI gets better, there will be fewer opportunities for people to be professionals and fewer reasons for people to do things for professional reasons.

The question is, what kind of satisfaction do you get from making something for your own benefit? If your motives are social—like you think you’ll get some social benefit or “self-improvement” to look better in others’ eyes—that’s different. I don’t like those terms because even though it’s called “self-improvement,” it’s often for the sake of others. For whose sake? To what end? Usually, it’s about how you can look better in others’ eyes.

Yesterday, I watched an “Academic Agent” video where a DIY guy talked about a 12-step plan to revive British industry using steam engines and making charcoal from garbage. His goal was to create a community by being useful to others. I’m not saying there isn’t an issue with doing things just for yourself without trying to benefit the community. But if you do everything just for the sake of others, you might end up being used and hating people. That’s why I’m against self-improvement for the sake of others, whether for their benefit, your benefit, or both.

I don’t know if it’s still recording now that the screen is closed. Trying to record while driving… my brain is kind of empty while I’m driving. I do have thoughts, but they’re more like blips in a sea of emptiness.

I had a whole blog about Battle Angel Alita, but now that I’ve done the discussion, I don’t know if I want to release that rambling blog I made.

Oh, God, the weather has been awful. Completely awful. I don’t usually complain about the weather, but, God, absolutely awful. I am soaking wet.

I think I should be able to reach there in about 10 minutes. I don’t know if I want to, though. Maybe I could release the Battle Angel Alita post just as a blog post—a disordered kind of discourse about the theme of courage, which we also discussed in the group on my YouTube channel.

I think learning Japanese is probably going to help my ability to read background material for the discussions but not in the short term. For example, there’s an Alexander the Great discussion planned for February. If I tried to read content about Alexander the Great in Japanese… I don’t know if I’ll be able to get through a Wikipedia article in a month. But I could sentence mind the Wikipedia article. No, I want to have sentences I find interesting. I’m already reading sentences I don’t find interesting through the generic Japanese Anki decks I got from AnkiWeb. I’m going to make my own cards. I don’t know if I’m being too selective.

I won’t embarrass myself. The number of cards involved is pretty low. I am writing history before making it. You could say it’s propaganda. Khatzumoto said that back when he was learning the language, he wouldn’t have been able to focus on content creation at the same time. So you see the conflict between content creation and learning. But then again, without content creation, nothing is happening. They are just there for my own benefit, so I can pick and choose what to focus on.

Looks like I might just miss today’s tutorial. I’ll try to be there, although maybe it’s not such a long walk. It’s probably not far; it’s 7 o’clock. Which day of the week is it? Wednesday? Yeah.

I don’t know if I’m oversharing here. I think it’s undoubtedly true that back when blogs were popular, they were only popular when they were profitable—when you could make money from advertising. So maybe when people maintained them, it wasn’t for the traffic. Most of the non-profit content on the internet was probably on forums and platforms like LiveJournal.

I need to find a way to reliably spend time on writing. It’s always tempting to try to combine my hobbies, but obviously, I’m way too far from being able to write in Japanese. To be honest, I’m not sure if that’s too big of a goal. The biggest challenge will be vocabulary for me. I often find myself unable to find the right words, or I’ll recall the meaning of a word but not the word itself. I don’t know if this happens to others.

I guess these “otaku life” blogs are a way to try to combine my hobbies into one thing because it gives me a chance to talk about everything.

I also watched—listened to—a two-hour video by an artist formerly known as Digibro, reading and basically charting the progress in writing skills all the time. Unfortunately, it made me realise my level of writing is pretty bad and lacking in detail. Like their early writing. I am grateful that Trixie has decided to leave their content up, but just as Digi charted their progress in this video, it was difficult not to try to think of their decline as a creator since then. Sometimes I feel a bit silly when I catch myself thinking about Digibro with the same seriousness as one would when trying to determine the cause of the fall of the Roman Empire or of the First World War.

As I said about Khatzumoto, what makes some of these blogs impressive is that it all happened before AI. Not that sheer volume in slop didn’t exist before AI. There were websites like eHow. The difference is that eHow paid people to write, so they would write about anything, resulting in content mills. Then social media discovered they could make people do things for free. Most people on YouTube and other platforms do it for free. They give you hope that if you get a lot of views, you might get paid, but the platforms still profit from it.

What killed the old websites? Another content mill website was HubPages. You can still write for them and get a share of ad revenue, but it’s nothing because banner ads don’t pay. But even before ad rates collapsed, what killed small internet websites was the collapse of banner ads. What killed larger content mills was also Google’s Panda update. A lot of websites that were at the top of search engines went to the bottom. There used to be a cottage industry of SEO (search engine optimization), the equivalent of trying to game an algorithm to go viral on social media. But it was mostly a grift and made websites worse as they tried to maintain their Google position rather than make anything interesting.

I don’t know why I went on this tangent. This video is just a series of tangents. I don’t know if much of it will make sense or be of much use. There are silent moments, too, so it won’t be that much to edit.

I’m like 20 minutes late. I still have two-thirds of the lesson to go. I don’t know if I want to enter so late.

Another thing I wonder is whether I should even name people I watch, especially on YouTube, because I really want to avoid getting into nonsensical debates with people.

In terms of work, there’s more content I could make based on my hobbies. If I’m learning Japanese, I could try to comment on stuff not available in English—stuff that hasn’t been translated. There are a few people who do that, but there wouldn’t be anyone talking about things that haven’t been translated. So that’s another possible use for Japanese.

Having said all this, I have exhausted the things which I have been doing over the last few days,  and with that, I have gone over the 6000-word mark. The next Otaku Life Blog (if there is going to be one) will probably be next week. Bye.

Links

VOICEVOX – Generate High Quality Sentence Audio In Anki For Free:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-V3pnCuEIxw

VOICEVOX Japanese Text To Speech Audio Generator – AnkiWeb

https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/366960193

The Ekphrasis paper I talked about:

https://files.catbox.moe/jjb8b2.pdf

Google Panda Update
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Panda

Digi’s video going over their writing history?

Khatzumoto’s AJATT blog video narrations