a blog about tech stuff, media, and other things i find online
Gonna write about learning Cantonese this time - surprise! You thought this was a tech blog?! Think again, bitch! Next month I start taking classes at the local Chinese school. Not a university, but a real brick-and-mortar language school. They teach both Mandarin and Cantonese, but I'm studying Cantonese. It's going to be an extremely small class of either 2 or 3 people (including me), and I am…
I wrote a post on the forums about whether people should disclose their use/non-use of LLMs ( https://basementcommunity.com/threads/671 ). I'm conflicted: on one hand, it's nice to see a "no AI" disclaimer so I don't have to do my own detective work and can spend my brain power simply appreciating your work. Alternatively, it's pathetic that we've come this far that everyone feels the need to…
Last week, I installed OpenVPN on a server I was already renting for file backups, so I could "surf the seas" and download some music from a retired Myspace musician that doesn't offer his music for sale and is only available through Spotify. Maybe this is wrong on my part, but seriously, if you have a product that I would gladly pay money for, and only offer it through a subscription service,…
Towards the end of last year, I started learning " Stay Away From My Friends " by Pierce the Veil (a freaking banger) and made amazing progress, but after a while, I got lazy and busy all at the same time, quit the lessons with my instructor, and took a break from practicing. But now I'm getting back into it and have a better relationship with playing this time around. If you're interested, the…
This is part two of my Japan / Taiwan trip. Part one is here . Last I left off, I wasn't liking Tokyo so much. I was tired, hot, cranky, and overwhelmed. After day one, I genuinely thought I wasn't cut out for international travel. But day two was when we started to get our bearings and enjoy ourselves a little more. We woke up at 4am, despite getting to bed at a normal time. We showered and…
I went to Japan and Taiwan for 3 weeks back at the end of March into April, and it was so amazing and overwhelming. I wanted to write about it so I didn't forget anything, but I didn't blog here. I instead bought a physical journal my first day in Asia and wrote at the end of each night. But here on this blog, I'm just gonna write about some highlights and summarize my raw thoughts from the…
Actually I just hate the fact that it's now in the dictionary under 2 completely different meanings because of people misusing the word. "Bi-annually" means twice a year and "bi-monthly" means twice a month. So logically, you could assume that "bi-weekly" would mean twice a week. People are putting on clown makeup and going out in the world and using "bi-weekly" to mean "once every 2 weeks." Can…
Damn. My mortality is catching up to me already. Today I took my first (prescribed) hairloss pill, and it's weird coming to terms with the idea of using a pill for the rest of my life. Almost 1 and 3/4 years ago, I went through a rough breakup and 3 months later, I lost a bunch of hair in the span of 2 weeks. Some hair from both my hairline and temples fell out in my brush, and I was freaking out.…
When I was reaching my late-20s, the general sentiment I got from others was that your 30s are a great time because you have more financial freedom and independence. I'm turning 32 this year, and something I think isn't talked about enough is that it's a lot harder to find big milestones to hit, which means you need to find purpose in other things. When I graduated college, I was looking forward…
Recently, I've been going way back in the Bearblog discovery feed trying to add a bunch of old Bearbloggers to my RSS feed. Some of these blogs are most likely never going to be updated again, so I wanted to have a catalogue of people I enjoyed reading when I first made my account. There's one blog that I cannot find and I'm hoping someone else on the site has a lead. Here are the fuzzy facts I…