RAMΞNJVNKIΞ🍜 2024-12-04 09:03:41
RAMΞNJVNKIΞ🍜 Here is the regular card. I kind of hate how artist is not listed next to the songs. Top two are Lauren Mayberry, the bottom 3 are Aurora.
Hobbies
RAMΞNJVNKIΞ🍜 2024-12-04 08:59:27
I would not have guessed I would be that high for either of these for "Top Fan %"
おにぎり (Onigiri) aka, “Rice Balls”
Ramen Junkie I’ve been doing some experimenting recently making おにぎり (Onigiri) aka, “rice balls”. I’ve been taking it very literally as being a ball and have not added any Nori wrapping yet. I’ve been just sticking with variations of tuna and mayo that I read about online. It’s a pretty simple and easy dish to make, and I end up with enough for 2-3 meals from one batch, which is nice. Cook a cup (uncooked) or rice int he rice maker, dump it in a bowl with a can or two of tuna, spoon some mayo in, add whatever flavoring I want to try out, use an ice cream scoop to drop them onto a plate in “ball form”, and stick them in the fridge for an hour to cool.
Technically speaking, the ball part is kind of optional, but it feels “fancy” and makes them work really well with chopsticks.
Also, prepare for a bunch of images that all mostly look the same!
The first go at it was very basic, literally just tuna, mayo, white rice, and some teriyaki sauce. I didn’t have any soy sauce, so I figured the teriyaki would be close enough. They actually came out pretty tasty.
For Round 2, I invested in some proper soy sauce, and added some garlic to them.
I mixed it up again for round three, sticking with the soy sauce, but this time adding some curry powder to the mix. These were probably my favorite of all the flavors I have tested so far.
My last attempt was much less great.
For the 4th try, I had some Hoisin sauce floating around and decided to see how it would fare. The result wasn’t awful, but it was just kind of flavorless. Like very vaguely sweet maybe. This sauce also gave the rice balls a slightly more gooey consistency, so they didn’t stick together in ball form quite as well, which made them annoying to eat.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
Duolingo’s Music and Math Courses
Man, talk about both exciting and frustrating all at once. Duolingo launched both a Math and Music course recently, but it was iOS only, initially, and I use Android. It would come eventually though, and it apparently has, and I missed it, or at least, missed the announcement, if there was one. I have been periodically checking and they were not there until fairly recently.
I don’t really have a lot of need or interest in the Math course, but I wasn’t in a good place to try out the music course, so I started off on the Math one for a bit. I am already great at math, I mean, seriously, I have probably done more math than most people have, between school and hobbies and work. But hey, why not.
From what I have done, it’s, kind of weird? It’s all pretty basic Adding, subtracting, multiplying, and fractions so far. But there are often these blocks instead of actual numbers. Which I kind of get is intended to encourage counting, but some of the presentation on the groupings isn’t as consistent as it could be. Plus it just, feels like adding an extra counting step to slow you down. And no, I am not individually counting blocks, I used to count as a job, I can count groups very quickly. Which is also why I noticed the occasional inconsistency that almost felt like it was done purposely as a trip.
Maybe it was.
The real fun part though is that, it’s smart enough to recognize “goofy answers”. Like it has a block of squares to shade, 3/5ths or something. You can shade a random assortment of the 100 squares, just so long as it’s 60 total shaded. Or if it gives you an open ended question like “2/6+1/6”. Sure, you could put 3/6, or 1/2, but it will also take 3987/7974.
But enough math nonsense, my real interest is in the Music course. I really want to learn music, it was one of my “Decade resolutions” in 2020. To be done by 2030. I have really been looking forward to the music course.
And I like it. Even if so far it’s just banging out C, D, and E on the scales. It’s that repetition I want so I can better read sheet music.
But oh my God it’s frustrating as hell to actually do.
And not because it’s hard, but because there is a lot of weird lag and stutter. Every few courses you do a song snipped using notes you know, and so many times I miss a few because it… Just… rand… om… ly… stop…s and… stu… tt…ers…. As it slides along.
At the bare minimum, it’s distracting.
I don’t honestly understand WHY either. I would blame processing power, but I have a decent enough phone that can do other rhythm based games, just fine, often at a much much faster BPM.
I feel like part of the problem is the weird “holding” it sometimes asks for on notes. Like if I could just tap the notes to the beat, everything would run fine, but it often requires these half beat holds, which only exacerbates the stuttering issue since it causes more stutter, and means you can’t just move on and get the next note and try to compensate for the stutter.
It’s just really frustrating. I doubt I go very far in the course as is, as much as I really want to.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
2023 – Language Learning and A Five Year Duolingo Streak
I’ve posted a few times on this blog, sometimes in passing about my language learning goals. How language has always been interesting, but then, I feel like I find EVERYTHING at least somewhat interesting, which is kind of a curse. In 2023, I vowed to become, not fluent, but at least, “pretty good” with at least two other languages by 2030. My New Decade’s Resolution, among a few other (I have not learned any piano yet).
Duo does Year in Review deals, like a lot of apps. Here’s mine.
I’ve actually been super slacking on my learning this year, sometimes barely doing one lesson each day. This has become even more apparent because my Aunt and Uncle recently started using Duo and we became, whatever Duolingo Friends would be called. My uncle made like 2x my yearly total XP within a few months. Granted, they are both retired and thus have more time to learn. Also they both travel, they recently took a trip to Europe, which I am pretty sure inspired their learning.
At least I still have them beat for the streak, because that one increases at the same rate for everyone. Technically by the end of the year I was at a 1826 day streak.
Exactly 5 years.
I’ve primarily been learning Spanish in those 5 years, and the middle half of this last year, though Duo keeps changing the tree layout (it’s been like 3 layouts since I started) and it’s a little disenfranchising when it happens because it feels like I’m losing progress. I actually have an achievement for getting level 1 nodes in an entire tree. But that was like 2 revisions ago when each note had 5 levels to it. The current tree is literally a path with no choices, which sucks because I always would skip around the pain in the ass verb crap en Español.
I started off the year still on my Norwegian kick. I’m less excited about that one these days, mostly because it’s less practical in a lot of ways.
For the last month or so, I’ve picked up my third choice to learn with Duo, Japanese. I’ve actually been enjoying learning again, so it was a good course. I’m not super sure Duo is the best choice for a beginner to learn Japanese with, some of the methods don’t feel like they are very clear on some thing, but fortunately for me, I took Japanese in High School. While I don’t remember a lot of it, but it feels like “riding a bike.”
It’s all very familiar, and I breezed through a lot of the “learn the Hiragana page.”
I don’t only learn using Duo, but it’s the main conduit. For Spanish I’ve read through some books in Spanish, and occasionally watch movies in Spanish. I’m still not great at the hearing part, but I’m pretty good at the reading part. Case and point a bit, on New Years Ever, I was poking around on streaming looking for some New Years shows, and Hulu had a stream from New York going. The part I caught was doing a ball drop for the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, and was almost entirely in Spanish. With the closed captioning on, I could read and understand the majority of what was going on. Which was fun.
Anyway, I don’t plan to drop Duo anytime soon, and I have more than the normal number of Streak Freezes because it occasionally gives you bonus freezes, if I get caught up and can’t learn. I’ll probably do most of 2024 in Japanese over Spanish though, I kind of feel like I’ve plateaued there for a bit.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.