i feel like i’ve discovered a superpower,
the shift from 1000 to 2000 characters known is huge !

or maybe just forcing myself to read more chinese regardless has greatly increased my tolerance for stumbling through stuff I can only half read

feels like a snowball where i recognize more of the characters (stopping 10x an article vs 50x an article), so it’s more pleasant to read, so i read more

yesterday i read through a bbc chinese article in full, as in i read it at the dinner table and was getting tired, scrolled down, and saw i only had one paragraph left & finished it off

usually that happens when i’m only halfway through the article and i feel overwhelmed and just quit

i spend way too much time on reddit (i hate myself so much for this) so i made an effort to find chinese reddit, after browsing a bunch of poorly formatted semi-spam filled BBS’s, it appears to be /r/China_irl

i also saw wechat has “moments” and so i apparently have contacts who post in-joke posts about boston, like the kinda silly nyc vs boston, sports teams kinda quality posts

there’s scientific american as i mentioned earlier

occasionally the local chinese newspapers have an article or two in chinese

OH the other big source is with enough digging i found webtoons (which i also spend way too much time on…) has not just traditional chinese translation (which i read about 50+ ep of how to become a dragon on… fml, thanks pleco ocr for making this possible since traditional was an uphill struggle) but also a simplified version!

this simplified version made me understand the importance of CDNs, which I guess in one case are just servers on this side of the atlantic caching content in china, because it. is. like. dialup, but worse. you can’t just put the page there and assume it’ll load the images eventually, it’ll usually time out.

i sorted it out (a post for another time — VPN + some software called hakuneko / OR data and cellphone browser, but hakuneko is more reliable) and i was literally refreshing my page every few hours waiting for an update so i could exercise my chinese reading skills on this new source

it’s fun to be able to compare the english / chinese side-by-side, learn all the onamatopoeia

anyway it feels like a superpower to be able to read blocks of text in another language haha, it’s like you have a bunch of blurred images on a page (aka text you can’t understand) and then BAM you put on glasses and everything’s clear

I just woke up from an hour long nap on the ground of my office after I locked myself out of my own bedroom (on purpose) – even though I got seven hours of sleep last night –

SO

as a reminder to myself that I’m not just excuse-seeking, I do actually fall into above-average sleepiness category, (even with the diagnosis after a sleep study it feels hand wavy), here are recollections from my napping days

— skipping lunch and then finding a disused hallway and napping on the stored classroom furniture in high school, with the awkward stress of hoping no one walked in and found me
— getting woken up by alarmed teachers after napping on my backpack under my poofy jacket in the stairwell after school let out — in retrospect I probably looked like a homeless person
— napping curled up one of the mini-stairs alongside the sidewalk along Mass Ave and getting woken up by alarmed stranger – I learned that people think you’ve fainted if you pick places like that to nap

none of this is a serious issue unless it impacts me, so, what is the impact?

it’s not clear right now since i’ve sort of finagled my way into situations where naps during the day are pretty okay, but i remember the ~1 year I spent working in an office for reals (vs as a high school student unpaid summer intern, I think I just napped at my desk), and just staring at my screen uncomfortably at an office and scrolling just to try to stay awake after lunch. just totally not there for an hour. miserable.

worried as places exit* pandemic mode and I seek to exit academia that i’ll land myself someplace where it does matter, i need to be awake in the office 8 hours a day consistently (I think most jobs I might seek are in the office)

exit*: I say this because Harvard announced intentions to resume in-person schooling this semester, not because I have strong faith things will go back to normal in the world soon

well that’s all, just trying to go for papers right now, hence the long silence, maybe have a deadline in 10 days