Here's a list of resources I used to complete Dragon Quest VII. I played the game in Japanese, a language i am not fluent in, which is pretty difficult for such a text-heavy, quest-flag-dependent game. What I mean to say is there's a lot of them here, and they're dang good.
Updating the list as I complete the game. Stay tuned.
More fun news today: my four part short short sequence (my flash fiction quadriptych) titled (shadows) has completed its four-day publication on Defenestrationism's website. you can check it out here.
Make sure, also, to read the other stories in this year's contest, and when voting comes around, vote for your faves
Hopefully more good publication news to come.
Oh how time moves: I’ve been published in Vamp Cat for a month or so now, and I didn’t realize.
You can check out a link to the story here. It’s called Song for a Father. It’s an obvious retelling, but I still like it.
I've also added a publications section to my sidebar now, which you can also see here.
Just a quick update, one I still find difficult to believe:
This week a story of mine was awarded the Fred Shaw prize for fiction at my graduate school, University of Miami. What does this mean? I don’t know. I’m still trying to figure that out. In a very practical sense though, it means of the ten or so stories submitted to the contest, all from fellow students in my program, mine was picked as the winner, and I have been awarded a small amount of money and three small notebooks, which is nice, and more than I’d ever expect.
The winning story–“The Poor Man Needs No Capital”–has not been published yet, so anyone who’s stumbled upon this page (I don’t know if anyone has yet), if you’d like to read it, shoot me an email (hit the contact link on the side), and I’ll send you a copy to read. Once the story’s published, I’ll update this with a link to where you can read it online, or order a copy.
This a very exciting small surprise.
If it’s not obvious from some of my other posts, I’ve been learning Japanese. It’s pretty tough. I’ve reached the point where I can read Japanese books fairly well (if very slowly), but whenever I do this–read full books in Japanese–I never know if I’m quite reading everything correctly. I can misread an entire book and not realize it. (Arguably I could do the same in English, but let’s pretend for the moment I’m blissfully unaware of my own limits.)
To make up for this worry of mine, I’ve taken up the entirely not at all nerdy or uncool hobby of playing Japanese RPGs in their original Japanese. This is cool and impressive and awesome. This is the first thing I tell strangers about me. The reason I do this is actually pretty simple: RPGs are not only incredibly text heavy–especially JRPGs, which I swear to God never shut up–but also because if I read something incorrectly, the game will give me feedback right away. If I misread what a spell does, for example, I will see my mistake immediately, because the game will react to my input.
Yeah, anyways, the point is: I had a lot of difficulty with …
Something I’ve never posted about here (I never post here) is that I’ve been working to learn Japanese since January of last year. I use a great flashcard program to study–Anki, a spaced repetition study app–which allows you to create your own html/css templates, and as long as I’ve used the app, I’ve been tinkering with a useful template for my study needs, specifically one that allows me to focus my study on a lot sentence reading and listening practice, but to keep my information well-organized. Yep, well-organized. I don’t know why, but I find that important.
I wrote some quick documentation and posted my template to github. You can check it out and download it here. You can also read the whole documentation here, because I’ve decided to post it below. Who knows why. I guess I just feel the need to fill this blog.
–
A useful vocabulary flashcard template for Anki that creates cards for variety of study methods from one note.
Note: because I’ve been using Anki to study Japanese from English, all examples on this page will reference either Japanese or English. For your own use, …
