I feel the heart of the giants.

TV: finished season 1 of 1670 with Kelly but then got sidetracked before continuing with season 2, the part I actually haven't seen. Have to get back on track!

Finished Amphibia and misted up a bit. That was a good show & I enjoyed it. I liked having a ten years later glimpse ;-;

Finished Hilda and also enjoyed that! They crammed so much backstory into the last few episodes, wow. I would have loved to see more seasons! I liked that they grew. Physically, I mean, but also, yk, in other ways. My biggest complaint at the start of the show was that I couldn't stand David's baby voice, and I don't even know when it changed but now I'm like oh obviously it was intentional :D all season three he is constantly eating something because he's a 13yo boy now, lolol.

I'm midway through Way of the House Husband, which is very lulzy.


Books: I remember reading. Kinda. Sorta. (Trying to come up with a plan to bring back reading in English without feeling like I should be doing something else because there are many books I want to be reading!!)


Games: still playing ACNH, still annoyed it's still snowy >:/


Music: this bad bunny parody about Canadian winters made me lol :P


In other music news, a lot of recs for Mexican emo on reddit today, I am time traveling, here. I don't think I will stick it out but I am enjoying the trip :D


Writing: I wrote?????? LOL. It was fun. A lil idea that's going nowhere, but I enjoyed writing a few hundred words about it. Been a long time!!

Gaaaames:

Been back in Animal Crossing: New Horizons for the 3.0 update! The hotel is just a less good version of the resort, lol. And they want me to craft? UGH :P I did all my rooms. I will say it is 🥹🥹🥹 so good 🥹 to see islanders that have moved away come to stay at the hotel and say hello 🥹

Did a slumber island visit with discord pals and it seemed pretty cool. Our host made a little study room where we can hang out and chill while learning but the switch doesn't like to just sit idle forever so some adjustments are needed. The same idea as that game "On Together" you can get on steam, hang out in a park or a library and body double while you're working. Basically already do that on discord pretty much every other day in voiceless voice chat (or on focumon)... I got it to try but I am having a really hard time figuring it out, lol. I hate keyboard/mouse controls in games (I immediately fell in the water). I should have thought this through lolol.



When you wake up from slumber island being disconnected you look so zonked 🤣 best sleep of my life

I think I'm already bored of ACNH tbh and it's the same problem I was having with New Leaf. They didn't need to add so much stuff. There's too many things to do and I end up feeling like I have to do them all and get overwhelmed. Why is there five games in my game. Yes, I realise this is a me problem :P



I have my switch set in Spanish for a discord challenge, and I will say that reading Animal Crossing is way harder than comics for 8 year olds. More frustrating than helpful, at this point! But anyway, this made me lol. Pigeon milk, anyone????

The 9 years with nintendo switch thing that they sent out: ( 2 images )


TV:

Since Kelly's been home we've been watching season 1 of 1670 with dinner (he's never seen it), it's a very silly fake documentary Polish comedy. This was on my goals for 2026 so knocking it out early :P

An overdue Kdrama review: Beautiful Gong Shim. This drama started out really strong!!! But then started to become the Dantae Show and we were like, well, I hope they get back to Shim soon, but Dantae is fun so, okay. They never got back to Shim. She became a side character and the Dantae Show got SO BIG. And it was tedious, too. And Dantae became mega un-fun. Every piece of the plot rolled out sooooo slowlyyyyyy. The pacing was insane, especially considering there were 20 eps, and in so many of them it seemed like nothing had really happened, just silly fakeouts.

Anyway, if I was the actor who played Gong Shim I would have been pissed, lol. Hired to be half of the main couple, character name in the title, and yet, she was an absolute afterthought after about halfway through. She loses all her abrasiveness, all her goals, and now she dreams of product design (and Dantae treating her like an actual adult he wants a relationship with, instead of the baby he keeps on the shelf). She seriously had no idea what was going on in the main plot 98% of the time. What could have been, etc etc.

I'm in the last season of Amphibia and really enjoying it. I liked the show a lot more while they were on earth, the opposite of Liam, haha. But then my tablet died and I don't really want to sit at my desk and watch it uncomfortably. We went out trying to find someone to fix my tablet and found out that generally only Apple can fix apple tablets because they're so thin and they have to go in thru the screen and 99.6% of the times the screen will shatter and add 400$ to your repair which the people do not want, lol. Anyway, there is an apple repair in the next town so we're going to see what they say. The cellphone repair guys in the mall said it was either the charging port or the battery connections. Alas.


Language stuff:

I keep meaning to post about this and then dithering but whatever, anyway. I spent a lot of 2025 learning Spanish through comprehensible input (dreaming spanish, with a minor in Polish, lol), and every month I looked back at how I'd spent the month. I wanted to be able to see a sense of how it was going, or that I was actually making progress. I locked them down as I went because, especially at the beginning of the year, I felt suuuuuper sensitive about it, with no idea if it would work, or how it would work. I really liked the idea of a comprehensible input based approach, but I really wasn't sure if it would work for me, not being a youtube-enjoyer. I was also afraid that I wouldn't even stick to it. That I'd flake out within the first few months. I am a great abandoner of hobbies, even though I always come back at some point.

Anyway, I've unlocked those posts now, and linked them in this index, if anyone is curious. You might have to be ME to find it interesting 🤔 Also made this small resource list in progress for general language learning things.

If anyone wants to learn Spanish and isn't on a time crunch (there are obviously faster ways), I think dreaming spanish is a great option (faq link). It has been, just, so SO fun. I spent an entire year just watching goofy videos every day while my brain did shit in the background like a baby with a shape sorter. That's so amazing, imo. Psyched to learn more this year!

Very pleased with December's effort!



Only two days under two hours and one of them was the 23rd, which I took completely off after exhausting myself doing the last big shop before xmas and snow made things inaccessible. I could have put on podcasts but I just wasn't feeling it. I needed a break! HUGE FAN of breaks.

December 2025

Polish -- I was supposed to be finishing that book I was reading, but I just didn't, lol. I watched an episode of smurfs. But mostly, I just kept up with Anki (mostly) - via discord, got pointed to this adorable, gamified anki add-on which turns your anki into a little restaurant you gain XP to expand. You can collect recipes for doing a certain number of cards a day. It's adorable.



93 hours of Spanish for December, which was not enough to get to 600 by the end of the year (I needed 120, lol), but I ended the year at almost 573. Pretty pleased! I think I had too many unique input sources because it didn't list them above the graph this time. So, more or less (def less)--

On dreaming spanish, I burned through the xmas content tag, and watched lots of content from them from all levels, in general. (Some faves: Agustina's interior design series, fashion thru the decades, global landmarks series, Natalia's bad dates series & her defining chapters series, Andres' animal culture series, Ester's evolution series, and the Barcelona in person series). With spanish boost gaming, I subscribed to their patreon for December, which has been nice. Watching Satisfactory and Minecraft and now watching Hollow Knight on the reg channel so I can watch Silksong. So I guess, a couple months of patreon, lol.

I listened to Español al Vuelo almost four hours, some relistens. It's starting to feel agonizingly slow in the beginnings of some episodes, lol. That's fun :D I remember when it was my "hard" podcast (it was the third one I listened to, after Cuentame and Chill Spanish). Also a bunch of Hablando con Vos (of Spanish with Gaia), which is great for crochet accompaniment. I'm caught up with the DS podcast, so mostly just listening to new eps weekly, relistened to some of the Spanish Boost podcast, started started Languatalk (Spain). A little Español a la Mexicana while cooking, but the short episodes have me looking elsewhere most of the time.

Non-learner content, I enjoyed -- on youtube, Cocinando Corea, watched a lot of this. Korean/Mexican food youtube. And a little Luisito Comunica (the episode about Svalbard!!).. on Netflix, a ton of Hilda (first two seasons and the movie, third season yet to go), and a bit of Amphibia on Disney (finished season 2). Trying to finish this asap so I can quit Disney.


Since I'm approaching level five of dreaming spanish (600 hours), where starting to read is recommended, I was very excited to get just a lil taste of that, and dipped in early.

On the sixth of December (pretty much right at 500 hours) I read my first book in Spanish, a children's comic called Bolita, about an alien who comes to earth and accidentally zaps a little chick with his grow ray gun. It was pretty cute and pretty fun. I did notice that my brain went straight into decryption mode, very much wanted to translate every word (a problem I almost never have when listening) and it reinforced for me that I wasn't QUITE there yet. Hoopla is STACKED with Spanish-language graphic novels for kids, though! I am very excited to dig in there. I did read a second book (Fitz y Cleo) around 65 hours later, and it was easier - both because of hours gone by, I think, and because I think it was written more for children to read and not children to be read to.

I started reading more spanish on Bluesky, too. Just here and there. I was talking to people about this, how it's funny that often my eyes just glaze right over Spanish that I see, my brain is like "that's not for u, lil dumdum," or else it attacks it like a word puzzle and it's 100% etymology searching-for-clues brain, not even trying to take it in like a sentence, more like just collecting puzzle pieces (like Reading Instructions in French mode, lol). But if I look at it to READ, I'll be like "idk understand any of this, I've never seen this word in my LIFE," BUT if I "read" it in my head voiced by a spanish speaker I'm used to, I'm like orite, I do know all these words lol. I have no internal spanish voice, I have to borrow one :D It's really slow to read like this, but it's getting faster. I tried to rewatch the series "Extr@ en español" because it's so stupid and lulzy, but IMMEDIATELY the exaggerated learner accent of the "American" character took over my internal spanish reading voice LOLOL. I was like, NOPE NOPE NOPE, NOPERS, no more Extra!!!

2025 Reflections

In December 2024, I watched this playlist of Pablo explaining the thinking behind dreaming spanish (with subtitles, at the time) and was like, what if DOES work? What if it would work for French?????? Should I test it and find out if it works for me? And a year later, that playlist is easily understandable, no subtitles in sight. (And dreaming french exists now, though it's still fairly small!)



So, look at that. Everyone says how easy it is to get more hours the further along you go, and that's true. It got easier when I could listen to podcasts, when I could look away from the screen or the whiteboard, when I could crochet while listening or drive while listening. And it's easier to stay focused for longer every month. In the beginning you make it fifteen minutes and want a nap. But look at that heat map. That's my favourite part. Consistencyyy✨



Polish definitely slowed down as Spanish got easier and easier (and more rewarding, because of the amount of content that was available, more all the time as my understanding grew) but I still got around 96 hours for the year. I look forward to rewatching a lot of the content I started the year with (Peppa, Blue) understanding 50, 60% of, and seeing if six months of Anki will change those numbers, I don't know. But I'm also content to just keep Polish in a cozy second place. It will probably continue to be second place for at least five years. It is basically my hobby of love. LOOOOVE.



I started off spotting myself fifty hours before starting because of prior knowledge of some random shit and my limited french experience, but when I went from level 3 to 4, I didn't feel ready and took it back. I feel the same "I don't feel ready" here going into level five, or I did. This sense of "do I really understand? Am I just faking it somehow?" but it's already fading. Inevitably, I will learn Spanish. And honestly, the hours don't really matter, they're just a frame. I found them to be somewhat paralyzing somewhere in the middle of the year, and so I stopped logging outside hours on the dreaming spanish website and only logged on lingotrack where you have to scroll down to see your overall hours. I find that a lot better. I like to only think about the month, or the week, or the day, and not too deeply, either.

But the hours can also be inspiring because now I'm like, what else can I sink five hundred hours into?? What else do I want to learn? I feel like literally anything that I want to do is open to me if I just put in the hours. Like, maybe I'll learn to play an instrument finally?? I don't know! Not in 2026, but maybe sometime! I am inspired. Maybe I'll go back to drawing? Who knows! I'm definitely going to learn French after Spanish, though. I'm coming for u, Quebec >:D with a romance language booster pack >:D

Anyway, here's to 2026! Let's go!

「 November 2025 | Index | January 2026 」

I wasn't my usual fandom-adjacent self, but more fandom-absent in 2025, so I ended up taking out some of the usual questions that didn't really apply. My year was devoted to language learning (post coming on that sooooon), so I knew this was going to happen. Somehow, I still found a lot of shit to talk about, though :P

( an extra long media post! )

We have been absolutely DUMPED ON the last couple days here. Sooo so much snow. I have shoveled so much. The neighbour took pity and helped me with half of the driveway again (he has a snowblower - the entire street has snowblowers). Why do none of these snowblower people help me with the ton of snow compressed from the plow??? ;_;

Anyway, I went to two different grocery stores the day before the snow so we are STOCKED. It's snowing again on Saturday, though. :/



The sunlight through the ice and snow this morning is bringing me joy.


In media news:

I just finished the first season of Hilda, what a cute and fun show. Fun folklore. Nice animation.

Our ongoing kdrama is Beautiful Gong Shim which started out really strong (huuuuuuge ND4ND vibes, two of the most autistic leads ever) but seems to be wobbling around 8 or 9, and we're not halfway through. A 20 ep drama?! Pretty rare. I'm not sure they have the story for it, but we'll see!


An update!!! My other neighbour helped me chop up the plow snow and shovel it enough that my car can be moved. He also gave me all the hot neighbourhood gossip, hell yeah. 🥹

TV: I finished watching the first season of Amphibia and started on the second. It's good! I continue to enjoy it. Not as much as L would like me to enjoy it, but I enjoy it enough!

( Kdrama: Business Proposal with mostly vague spoilers )

( Kdrama: Love to Hate You with rage spoilers )

So anyway. LOLOL. Continuing,

Books - Just finished Mickey7 (Edward Ashton), a book about an Expendable on a colonization mission. Expendables do the suicide missions and other dangerous jobs or medical experimentation, and when they die, they get remade - so, when he gets waylaid on the way back to camp surviving something he probably should have died from, he finds Mickey8 already there. It's a very fun book. It's also a movie (Mickey17, bc I guess six terrifying deaths are not drama enough??) and now I want to see it. There's also a sequel book so I guess I'll look that up, too.

And Movies: ( a few )

Games - Been playing Animal Crossing: New Leaf on the 3DS lately! There is so much game in that game. Too much to do every day. But it's fun and I missed it. :D

90.5 hours language learning in October - 85 of them being Spanish. Hit 400 hours in Spanish at the end of the month, which was fun!



Only a couple days I didn't get at least an hour, which I think is pretty cool.




A couple more episodes of the Smurfs, but mostly still just Anki! This is already changing in November, but still, I'm pretty cozy with Polish continuing to be in far second place for now.




On dreaming spanish I went deep in on "Pablo in the park" intermediate videos - especially language learning videos and the old livestreams. Basically devoured the language learning tag. Also enjoyed lots of travel/nature stuff: Agustina's Asia vlogs, Michelle in Yucután, the beginning of Natalia in Italy, Natalia's Colombia series, etc. Thirty hours of October were in dreaming spanish, vs usually being around the teens somewhere these days. Also another twenty hours for their podcast o_o! A very dreaming spanish month.

Also a very spanish boost gaming month - almost 28 hours. Games I enjoyed watching:

Resident Evil 4 is an awful game, lol, but was very funny to watch someone play it who had obviously played it an infinite number of times before. It's gross as hell though :D The protagonist looks like he's modeled on Jensen Ackles.

STRAY! What a cool game! I'm glad I waited and I'll definitely watch it again at some point. Kitty <3 a lot of the emotional journey was undercut by the lols but that's okay, still a great experience.

Breath of the Wild via livestream recordings, so they were three hours each and the time just flies. He didn't get very far before he stopped playing it, I hope he goes back at some point.

And Undertale!! I knew I'd like this game, but I was never going to get around to playing it, lol. The youths are right! The game is good! And very funny & the music is excellent. I hope he plays it again for the pacifist ending. I know nothing about it, I'm am pretty much unspoiled about all of it because things like that fall out of my brain. Maybe I'll play my own pacifist route.. (in English, lol)

For podcasts, I had a steady stream of the Dreaming Spanish podcast throughout the month (boooo, being caught up sucks), caught up on the new Español al vuelo episodes, listened to an episode of español a la mexicana about the lady of guadalupe, which was cool. Started Español desde el Sur.

I had a funny moment with that one - I'd heard it was a little more challenging, but because I have a lot of familiarity with the Argentinian accent I thought I'd try anyway. I put it on in the car and was immediately like O_O oh nooooo, the aspirated s's really up the difficulty in a more natural speed of speaking o_o so I was like okay, maybe come back to this next month, or maybe slow it down a little? I'll find a different podcast for my drive! But in the time it took me to open my app and try to find an episode of an easier podcast I noticed that in the meantime I'd been hearing and understanding it just fine while my mind was half on the search. LOL. Just had to stop panicking :P Sometimes she does lose me occasionally, and it does require a little more focus, but it's doable!

For native content: a tiny bit of Curiosamente youtube, a little Coreano Vlogs, a little Amphibia, since Liam wants me to watch it so bad, I thought 🤔 2 birds? I can mostly keep up, but I am definitely missing jokes. A fun show, though!

And yeah, hit 400 hours at the end of October! November and December are going to be harder to get a lot of input, Kelly's going to be home and on vacation for three weeks, so I'll not want to be COMPLETELY antisocial, considering :P

Also doing a "season of stories" challenge again on Discord for Nov & Dec! It's just reading a little bit every day (in any language, even your native one), and checking a box with the community. Looking forward to reading some of my Polish kids' books and maybe making some ANKI cards so I can be freeeeeee of premade decks. The other 50% of me is like, ehhhhh, that sounds like kinda a lot >_>

「 September 2025 | Index | November 2025 」

There is something about me that really drives old people to initiate agonizingly oversharing conversations. Like, I'm kinda glad I could be there for the old lady in the grocery store who is still really going thru it with her mother's death just before 2020. And her declining mobility. The last old lady I chatted with at the lake was also having extremely valid big feelings about her declining mobility. And tbf, I do not have enough adults to talk to IRL so like. Maybe it works out for both of us?? Still, hard to guard my natural O_O face when I am feeling very "why are you telling me this, a complete stranger, please," when the conversation maybe should have ended with "after you!"

This woman, in particular reminded me of my grandma, who would just have really strong opinions about things and charge in with them like you had been arguing against them or maybe she could tell you intended to (whether you did or not, or even knew wtf she was talking about lol) - either way, she was already deep in the trenches 😅

My neighbour was another one, with the awful details of his cat's death. I mean. O_O He was obviously suffering, too. And also, I liked that cat a lot. He was very noisy and had much to say about us being in our his backyard.


These pics have probably far less broad appeal than northern animals, but when I was at the grocery store we were getting buzzed by planes and I was like "THERE ARE HORNETS IN MY TOWN!" and very upset I was doing the stupid shopping when I could be lookin at em. LOL. The grocery store is right beside the airport, so the planes all land and take off right over the parking lot. We don't often get fighter jets!

But!! I got outside finally (after hearing the hornets 4x and a globemaster once), and they were just doing a final lap before landing. You can see their little feetsies sticking out:

( 2 cf-18 hornets )

In unrelated news, one of my peppers started turning red ON THE VINE! I had lost hope completely and was going to bring them all inside anyway, just to see what happens. AHHH a baby 🥹



Off to go buy Pokemon Z-A with L! I did not like Arceus so I'm not going in on this with him, but he is very excited.

Almost 87 hours of language in September! Almost 81 being Spanish, haha. The second half of the month was the Log Ur Listenz (LULz) challenge on discord, which was fun again. I had a pretty good showing on the leaderboard this time, finishing in third place! :-O



You can tell that in the last week of the month is where I discovered that sims4 was free. The 22nd, lol. Half as much as the day before.




Spanish - hit level four (300+ hours) in dreaming spanish in September. It's 300 hours again to level 5, so it's a biggie.




Absolute ton of SBG content was watched and listened to. Tried a couple of Martín's "Advanced" series' - the Wrap House sim and Schedule 1 because I could keep up fine at his "natural speed" on his podcast (though obviously he watches his vocabulary and tbqh he is a very slow speaker in general) and yeah, they were fine. Maybe easier than some of the lower level stuff because it's never him that's hard to understand, it's when the games have too much reading. Often he'll summarise what he's just read but not always - this is what keeps making me wait on watching Stray. I want to understand more! Anyway, not much reading (or very simple reading) in those two advanced series'.

Finished some podcasts and tried some new ones: a couple Mexican ones I'll probably continue with when I'm caught up on Spanish Boost and the DS podcast. InterSpanish seems fairly accessible but I have to be concentrating, and Español a la mexicana seemed good, if very short eps, which I'm not a huge fan of.




Podcasts were already increasing but I went crazy with podcasts in September. I am not a natural youtube-watcher. Tbf, I'm not a natural podcast-listener, either, aside from when I am cleaning or cooking. It's a kitchen thing, solely. But now it is a walk thing, a car thing, a crochet thing. I kinda miss silence a lot, lol. I can't wait to kick youtube to the fucking curb after this. (After this is more of the same with French, lol, but maybe at a slower pace.)

My few dips into native content: Danna Alquati for an animal crossing island tour, Richan Gondra for some sims4 content, Coreano Vlogs. I also watched a "documentary" about Canadá that I'm pretty sure was AI, it was kinda just off in multiple ways.

At the end of the first week in September, Liam came upstairs to eat his middle of the night snack or whatever, and the lights woke me up, but I was in such a state of confusion. I was staring at the light in the door like "where the fuck am I?" in that way, where in dreams, you're in a weird amalgamation of all the houses you've every lived in or when you wake up too early after you've just moved and try to place out where everything is with your eyes closed. Anyway, I got up to talk to him, and then when I was getting back into bed my brain (marinated in too much Spanish Boost Gaming) was tossing around "es broma. ES BROMA!" which happens a lot with phrases or words, like a constant earworm. Anyway, my brain was like, "es broma, and also, PS: you say 'es' wrong, and also you say like 90% of e's wrong." AND IT WAS RIGHT, LOL

My brain: U know, e makes an [e] sound right, not an [Ɛ] sound
Me: Yes, obviously
Me: ............intellectually
My brain, helpfully: It's like a cat emoji
Me: what
My brain: 😸s... 😸spañol... 😸mperador..

I had been thinking about how much more forward Spanish sounds are than English sounds, I was thinking about it last month as I contemplated the d sound being so very different in Spanish.

"It's like a cat emoji," is also kinda similar to the epiphany I've been teetering on the precipice in Polish for forever re: cz/ć, sz/ś

Also, in Español al vuelo I learned you can give someone a piña, which is a punch, at least in Argentina. :D I was like, what is with these violent foods? It reminded me of a SBG video where he was giving someone a potato, repeatedly, and I knew it was a kick, but then when I went to look that up it turns out it was patada, not patata, and I just couldn't hear the difference, LOL.

Language learning is so humbling! But I have a lot of practise being a dumdum, and I shall continue. :D




Polish - still continuing with ANKI, basically ten mins a day, on average. Added a little Smerfy during LULz! (And continuing that in October. It taught me a new english word today, looking up Brainy Smurf's name, Ważniak, google translate gave me "panjandrum" which made me look to check if I'd set the translate to language to something other than English. It's a pompous person! Which is way more fitting than "Brainy" for the character, imo! Panjandrum was also an experimental British weapon in WWII, jsyk. Maybe "panjandrum" is old hat to everyone else, lol.)

Gonna vaguely try to keep up the pace for October, since November will be a big question mark w/Kelly having his holidays home!


「 August 2025 | Index | October 2025 」

2 posts in one day?? This friday five looked fun.

1. Have you ever stayed in a hostel? If so, where? Did you like it? If you haven't stayed in a hostel, would you?

I stayed in a hostel the summer before I turned 18. Going with a few friends to a music festival at Thunderbird Stadium in Vancouver. My mother was very panicked about the whole adventure :D & we had a great time. It was a nice place (Jericho Beach Hostel). I think that's the only time I've stayed in a hostel, though.

2. What is your favourite airport that you've been to? Why?

Vancouver Airport because it's just super chill and has tons of great art. No other airport has ever measured up.

3. What is the best museum you have visited on vacation?

I always enjoy the natural history museum in Ottawa, and the history museum across the river in Gatineau is pretty great, too. (Also just very cool to look at!)

4. Have you ever made friends while travelling whom you keep in touch with on a regular basis?

I don't think I've ever made friends on vacation. I tend to bring friends/family.

5. Have you ever had a conversation with a seatmate on a plane?

I don't tend to travel alone so I don't think I ever have! Maybe briefly. I think, generally, planes are too loud for conversations and I have movies to sob through.

Cherry tomato break!



In related news, my cucumbers abruptly stopped making cucumbers :( I don't know if that's normal. They made a dozen or so, I'd guess?? they were so good while they lasted though!

and in UNrelated news, I got some nice spam on dw today from donnapsencer who had a few ideas they wanted to tell me about my story (I don't even have my ao3 linked here anymore... What? Story?), but it made me lol. The same art/ai commission scam that's all over ao3 & ffn & discord, I'd assume. Lulzy.