wolfe but sad @wolfgang@awoo.space

every history book or video or podcast should start with "warning! contains spoilers for the years [xxx]-[yyy], if you haven't learned about those years yet, pause now and go learn about them before continuing"

this is what my neutral facial expression looks like:

this makes me fantasize about working with people in the local deaf community to create a series of videos inspired by the duolingo podcasts, where there's some context given by the narrator in english (or in this case, in text+voiceover, or maybe simcom or something), so even if you lose the thread in the language you're still learning, you can still try to jump back in for the next cut/segment/soundbite

but i'm absolutely terrible at working with people, and i'm too burned out to undertake anything this creative anyway, and also we just so happen to be in the hellscape of the 2020s where everyone is stretched incredibly thin and constantly busy; so this is never going to happen

i think my level is now firmly in The Swamp of Intermediate:

the terrible uncertain level where i'm still pretty bad at the language, and most actual Content is still way too unapproachable for me; but most "learn sign language content" is already way too basic and assumes too little knowledge

@else because shopping is cheaper than therapy

ASL: "no"
Israeli: "(doesn't) speak"

(ASL "no" is usually signed together with a head shake, which in Israeli Sign can be used to negate verbs)

<R> is such a weird concept across languages. Speakers of lots of different languages seem to have a concept of <R>, despite those languages using all kinds of different writing systems.

Language learners use sounds from their own native language, and they're mostly understood by others. For sounds like /t/ and /g/ and /f/, where the differences between accents are relatively minor, it's not surprising that we can understand people with foreign accents.

But for <R> sounds, it boggles my mind how we can all understand each other. Because <R> can stand for So. Many. Different. Things!!!

- alveolar trill [r] (Most of Eastern Europe, Spanish, Arabic)
- alveolar tap [ɾ] (Spanish, Arabic, Scots, Japanese)
- uvular fricatives and trills [ʀ~ʁ~χ] (Parisian French, Standard German, Danish)
- uvular approximant [ɰ̙~ʁ̞] (Modern Hebrew, sometimes)
- labial approximant(?) [w] (English, almost everywhere, sometimes)
- alveolar approximant [ɹ] (English, almost everywhere, sometimes; Dutch, sometimes)
- retroflex approximant [ɻ~ɻʷ~ɻ̃ʷ] (Southern US English)
- lateral approximant [l] (Japanese, sometimes)
- glottal fricative [h~ɦ] (Portuguese, sometimes)
- weird tongue-folded vowel thingy [ɚ~ɚ̃] (Most US English, sometimes)
- literally just the vowel [a~ɐ] (Standard German, Danish)
- <R> itself has no sound, but makes the previous vowel longer (Most non-American English, most of the time; Danish, most of the time)
- <R> itself has no sound, but makes the next consonant after it a retroflex consonant (Swedish, sometimes)

Like, what? How are these in any way all "the same"???? Actually not even that! How are these all "vaguely related" even????

trying to define what counts as a "normal" human brain is like trying to define what counts as a "normal" dog size

my sibling in deity,

am i making sense? these are some serious weed inspired big brain connect the dots with red strings on a cork board type thoughts, and they rely pretty heavily on some hyperlocal context that i'm not sure i managed to appropriately give

the tech sector is usually regarded as the best paying (or best price-per-effort?) sector of the job market here, and the governments over the years have been making a big deal out of getting as many people working in tech as possible, "to combat rising prices" (this is not exclusive to here, but what seems to be different from other places, is how extremely prominent it is in our public debate)

this obsession, combined with the worldwide trend of destroying whole job sectors that billionaires don't like (journalism, music, writing, social studies, etc), and our already spiraling real estate and food markets, leads to a lot of people either leaving other career paths or simply never even aiming for other career paths that would actually benefit the local community more, and instead learning to be programmers

some of my friends work in tech, helping billionaires get richer through ads and tracking (which i did too to survive up until a few years ago, so no judgement) but they would so obviously could have been doing so much more good for our city/country/society and probably(?) for themselves -- if only they could work in non-tech fields and still maintain a middle class standard of living in a non-car-dependent, urban environment

listening to podcasts from the 2010s: "haha yeah life is kinda difficult you know? but it's like mostly good :)"

listening to episodes of those same podcasts with those same hosts from the 2020s: "haha everything is terrible and we're all just trying to get through each day ⦂)"

i don't REALLY want to play cities skylines, i want professional traffic simulation software but as a game

and i haven't seen a mod that fixes the underlying scale issue that bothers me so much. i suspect it might be difficult to change something so deep down within the core of the game without changing that actual source code

and sure there's mods that will let me manually move every piece of road with pinpoint precision, but if i make it look even close to realistic then it comes out all cursed and causes rendering issues and weird bugs with the driving simulation

real life highways merge in long stretches where the small road slowly matches the angle of the big road then seamlessly merges into it; but cities skylines always treats it like a regular junction, and doesn't let the roads get close enough to each other to truly merge

i looked at some 3d models of the real life city i live in and its various roadways and highways and it cemented in my head the idea that Cities: Skylines needs narrower roads, and highway merges/splits at less obtuse angles