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Thoughts: March 2021

31.03.2021


22:05 Running XP on VirtualBox to try FrontPage 98. This is wonderful!

theme 1 theme 2

I NEED more pictures like these:



With that in mind, I went ahead and made some in GIMP with Dithering tool.

18:02 Listening to online radios got me thinking - it would be kinda funny if internet radios didn't work from countries that are too far away from the country where the radio is hosted; kinda like real radios but with a larger coverage area. Or perhaps the more far away the listener's country is from the host country, the worse the audio quality becomes. Of course it would kill the purpose of an online radio, but hey, at least it would feel more like a radio! Virtual analogueness in a digital world. What a dumb thought.

15:42 Perhaps after a quick glance on my website one might think I'm a big fan of NUMBER GIRL. That's not really true - I only really like two of their songs, 透明少女 and OMOIDE IN MY HEAD (but I love them a lot), and find their vocalist hella cute and sexy, but that's just about it. I should probably listen to them some more though.

15:36 I love strolling after lunch before I return to the office. I always feel great after doing this, especially when the weather is good. Spring has come so...

I'm experimenting with Nokia's camera's photo resolutions to find out which quality I like the best. Interestingly enough, this particular model, Nokia 6300 (the 2007 one), doesn't upscale zoomed photos, so I have to do it manually with smaller resolution. However, today I tried 1280x960, and zoomed-in photos look fine on 800x600.

30.03.2021


23:57 Decided to upload an album of pics from 2017. Even though they don't really fit with the rest of my photos here, they are too important for me to not be here, and I still think this album has a nice feeling to it.

19:40 Something nice happened today; I had a tiny conversation with a Japanese photographer on Twitter. I made a small mistake, and that person explained my mistake to me, gave me an example and then followed up with an encouraging message for me to not give up learning Japanese. ~~>_<~~ I don't deserve this kind of kindness...

Also the guy I ordered the film camera from has shipped it, along with some expired film for me to play with.

Finally, today I took my Nokia for a spin for the first time in a while. It's in a rather poor condition; perhaps I need to get a new feature phone soon - fortunately Nokia still produces some models, and their 0.3 mp cameras should suit my needs.

28.03.2021


23:02 So I guess I'll share some photography that inspires me. I'm mostly talking about the colors here; I'm not sure what kind of digital post-processing they use, or perhaps those are film shots combined with some developing techniques, but the colors here are absolutely incredible. This is what I, a dilettante hobbyist, am aspiting to achieve in the future (so far I'm fairly inconsistent with my editing, as you can clearly see). I especially love the blue and light blue hues. https://twitter.com/Taishi_Arashida/status/1372130938264547328 https://twitter.com/metaphor_472/status/1373930008851271685 https://twitter.com/mitsuyuka_lp/status/1312686594067816449 https://twitter.com/bec_irhs/status/1332636469765181441 https://twitter.com/Taishi_Arashida/status/1350031862240985088 (these used to be embedded, but it was too heavy on network traffic)

20:42 Not much happened today, just a little walk and some massive procrastination.



My current candle (which started tunneling on the first burn - I hate it when they do this) lost it's grip on the glass and detached - I found it mildly interesting.

27.03.2021


19:11 Got reminded of this today; listening to Ryo Fukui's "Scenery" at night. Those were good times indeed... It was the summer of 2019, when I got to live alone. Even thought it lasted just for three weeks, I still remember those times with great fondness.
This album also was one of the albums that pushed me into the abyss of exploring Japanese music.



Also, today I ordered my very first film camera - the Pentax Espio 60s! It's a cheap and fairly simple compact camera, but I think it's good for a beginner like me; maybe I'll buy something more advanced later on when I get comfortable with film, which is very different from digital.

26.03.2021


18:55 Today was finally a warm and sunny day; they've kept me waiting for a while. Took a detour on the way home and took some pics.

For some reason the only music YouTube keeps recommending to me is 80's Japanese city pop. While I am indeed a big fan of the genre, it makes up only a small part of all the music I love and listen to (on YouTube as well!)

25.03.2021


22:47 I am currently in a state of fighting the urge to ignore every single responsibility I have and start replaying Persona 3. ...( _ _)ノ|

08:23 Oh my god, I just remembered that time around 2012 when everyone and their dog had a Minecraft let's play channel, and I decided to start one too. Of course it was tremendously cringy, but somehow one video where I explained the basics of IndustrialCraft managed to get a couple of thousands of views. Luckily I don't remember the email or password from that account, but I remember that at some point I unlisted all the videos. Good thing, otherwise I'd die of cringe if someone I know found them.

23.03.2021


18:09 This cherry tree blossomed exactly 1 year ago today! This spring has been rather chilly so far, but according to the forecast, it's going to get warmer, albeit cloudy.

22.03.2021


17:55 Yays, today wasn't as hard as I thought it would be.
I wonder how much time should pass until my teamlead notices just how abysmal my performance is.
As I was ready to dig in my meal at a pan-Asian cuisine joint I frequent for lunches, I realized that during the weekend I totally forgot how to eat with chopsticks ~(>_<。)\. I had to pretend I was drinking tea while actually I was frantically trying to remember how the hell did I hold chopsticks mere 3 days ago. No thoughts, head empty...

18:05 Damn I listened to this song a bit too much today lol.

Keep on Loving You
And I meant
Every word I said
When I said that I loved you I meant that I loved you forever
And I'm gonna keep on lovin' you
'Cause it's the only thing I want to do
I don't want to sleep, I just want to keep on lovin' you

22:35 Recently I've been enjoying the 90's - 00's Russian sketch show "Gorodok" (lit. small town). Some of these sketches are retellings of popular jokes, and some just make fun of Russia's everyday life of the time. For those of you who happen to understand Russian, here's one of my favorites:

23:18 Shutoku Mukai of NUMBER GIRL.
That's all I wanted to tell you about in this entry.

21.03.2021


22:50 Exploring other people's wonderful websites makes me think that I should try to make my own website more unique. It's hard, especially when you're as uncreative as me, but I'm trying! I've already made a custom layout for my Japanese practice blog and I'm currently working on my first shrine.

20:00 A small stroll today (even though I had no plans to leave home in the first place).
Tomorrow is going to be a very tough day on work, so I'm just making sure I get enough mental rest.
One day I'll learn to point my old Nokia phone at stuff without going "oh no what are the people gonna think, they'll probably think I'm a psycho or something, taking photos with this"

Also made a chart of albums I consider to be my favorite. They're in no particular order, and don't represent a good part of my taste in music, as it doesn't include albums from which I only like 1-2 songs.
chart

20.03.2021


23:33 After an unexpected series of events this evening I ended up in a coastal town of Zelenogradsk. I haven't been here in a while, and the town has changed a lot, it looks so tidy and cozy now, somewhat like these Polish or Lithuanian towns. Of course there's still a ways to go before it can rival those cities, but I think the right steps are being taken.

Oh, also the town is famous for it's cats! There's lots of cats-themed stuff here! (๑ↀᆺↀ๑)✧

19.03.2021


19:56 The best album cover ever; it's absolutely impossible to not give him a thumbs up back!

20:54 It's getting warmer; I guess I should finally fix my bicycle now that I have some money.
A couple of years ago I took part in a large community bike ride into a town ~35 km away from the city and back; on the way back, some fastener conencting the pedals and the frame went loose, and I had to manually put it back every once in a while. Did it mention that it was raining on the way back? My hands didn't exactly enjoy it lol. The ride was still hella fun though.

Here's a pic of my ol' trusty from back 2018 when I cycled a lot every day.

21:18 When I was very active on GTAForums, I met a great guy from Canada with whom I later became friends with. We chatted about stuff; he was okay with me being rather stiff in conversations; we even worked a bit on his ambitious GTA mod he named "GTA: Quebec". Sounds like a nice story so far...

But of course I had to fuck shit up. When my social anxiety hit it's high, I started ignoring him. I was so afraid that he'd become bored of me or that I'll end up saying saying something that might upset him that I ended up thinking it's better that way. It was almost 3 years ago.

I still think about him rather often; yet I don't have the courage to even hit him up, explain myself and thoroughly apologize. He always was understanding; I'm sure he'd understand me, but I just... can't. What an asshole I am.

David, if somehow you're reading this, I'm sorry.

21:50 Time for more positivity! I wish everyone reading this a great weekend.

18.03.2021


22:56 Had an interesting dream where I was teaching Russian language in English to some foreigners. Spent my walk from work, then from work to uni and from uni back home explaining the Russian alphabet as I would explain it to students... Kinda enjoyed doing it!

Also today I saw a very peculiar occurence today - a car with a Québec license plate! Québec is my favorite Canadian province, so I was glad when I saw it, but it's also interesting just how this car got there, especially considering that Kaliningrad is rather far away from Canada and the car didn't have any kind of Russian plates.

Quebec plate

17.03.2021


21:06 Having a short workday as a developer is weird. Even though my workday is officially 5 hours long, I usually work for 6-7 hours. No, I'm not forced to, we don't really have strict deadlines, it's more that I feel some kind of guilt because everyone else's workday is 9 hours long (the company allows me to work for 5 hours because I'm still a university student) and leaving home much earlier than them doesn't feel right, even though I've explicitly asked my teamlead if he and everyone else is ok with it and he said that it's totally fine.
And even when I do leave early, I still lurk our corporate portal to check if something requires my attention.

One might think that I love my job, but ehh... not really. Coding for yourself is very fun, but doing it professionally is a whole other deal and not fun at all. The biggest problem is I can't really do anything else that would bring me money. Perhaps when I was a 16 years old schoolboy in 11th grade, I made a mistake when I was facing a hard chooies between pursuing a degree in IT/engineering or something related to linguistics. Here in Russia we divide people into "techies" and "humanities" depending on their mindset; well I'm definitely not the former.

Who cares. It's too late to make changes anyway.

16.03.2021


21:25 Had a little stroll today since it was a day off. Tomorrow is a workday again, and for the first time in a while I really don't want to go.

I've been thinking about whether editing my photos is fine or not, and I came to a conclusion that it's totally fine. Some arguments against that might sound like "you're covering up for your complete lack of any skill or creativity" or "you're making them look unrealistic". Both are true; however, I do not deny the fact that I have no skill whatsoever, let alone creativity. Furthermore, if I wanted stuff to look realistic, I'd just go outside and look at the real world, which I happen to do rather often. I'm trying to make something that looks good in my eyes; something that makes me happy. If this implies "adjusting" the world that is reflected in my photos, then so be it.

15.03.2021


00:08 Perhaps I should consider writing short blog entries in Japanese somewhere here as an exercise; after all, this is my corner in the Web and I can do whatever I want. Freedom!

14.03.2021


23:42 I truly want to practice my Japanese more, but every time I want to hop into the chat on the language exchange server in Discord I end up lurking and not writing anything at all. Why does it have to be so hard?..
It's not that I'm not confident in my skills; after all, that's what the language learning server is for - improving your skill; it's more that I have no idea how to have a conversation. I don't know how do people do it; for me that's terribly overwhelming. I'm not even talking about joining the voice chat - I'd literally rather die than do this.
Frankly speaking, my spoken English could use some practice too, but I can't do it for exactly the same reason. It's devastating, yet I can't do shit about it.
Oh great, now I forgot all the negative words I was gonna use in this rant. There's this perfect word, similar to "embarassing" and "overwhelming" in it's meaning, but of course I can't for the love of God recall it now. How pityful and pathetic, just like me in general. Rant over.

13.03.2021


22:25 I really should get back to watching The X-Files. The atmosphere was stunning at times; I remember enjoying it a lot. And I also miss Scully... scully

11.03.2021


16:04 A large (the largest I think) Russian digital lo-fi photography public page has shared some of my pics! I am honored o(* ̄▽ ̄*)ブ.

wall post

23:11 Want hugs. Haven't hugged anyone in ages...

10.03.2021


21:47 I am now in posession of the holy Frog Hat.

me with the frog hat

09.03.2021


17:23 このフォントは日本語でかっこいいそうだね

18:25

Mary Elizabeth Frye
Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning's hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there. I did not die.

08.03.2021


Digital lo-fi photos gain extra charm when they have the sun in direct sight.

I also enjoy shooting era-neutral things so that it's hard to tell whether a photo was taken recently or in the 00s

07.03.2021


Yesterday's sunset was stunningly gorgeous. Days like that leave a long-lasting footprint on one's mind.

This pink sky is unedited.