Eight months of Chinese to go

Minus a few days, actually, but work has kept me too busy to feel like posting.

Today I made it to the end of the vocabulary introduction exercises in HelloChinese!



Which is of course not the same thing as learning all the vocabulary yet; I need to keep doing the review exercises and there's a bunch of auxiliary material yet to go (note the incomplete circles).

Around the time of my last post, HelloChinese veered into a lot of office vocabulary that I'm sure is useful to people who are trying to learn Chinese for serious business reasons but was tedious for me to wade through. The last couple weeks, though, have been dominated by common sentence patterns, which feel a whole lot more useful to me.

I have been to the Chinese-language section at Powell's a couple times now, and it doesn't appear to carry any Chinese science fiction. Poking about online has pointed me to one possible Chinese bookstore which may or may not still exist way off in southeast Portland.

Today's random word figured out from the Chengdu Worldcon site: 会员 (huìyuán), "member".

Miniatures

The local game store finally opened its new play space at the end of September. I am now running games in person there (yes, wearing a mask) for the local Pathfinder Society chapter. Which means: it's time to start painting my collection of miniatures!

I originally ordered a bunch of minis in the spring of 2021, figuring to use the warm weather over the summer to sit out back and paint them. But then they didn't arrive until fall, and none of the game stores were reopening their play spaces anyway at that point, and the minis languished, except for a couple I painted at a workshop at Orycon that year. The SO did give me a beginning miniatures painting set for Christmas, though.

So I finally opened that and started on the animals, and now I'm working on the monsters. Some of them have turned out okay.



Not shown: quite a few that didn't turn out so well.

Meanwhile at Twitter

I haven't quoted from Money Stuff in over a month, so I can give you part of Matt Levine's reaction to the news that Elon Musk wants to hire a new CEO for Twitter but also keep control of the hardware and software engineering teams:

Also if Musk does a bad job as head of software and servers, can the new CEO fire him? To be clear I would never, ever, ever want to be CEO of Twitter — even before Musk took it over, and certainly not after — but wouldn’t it be a little tempting to be CEO just so you could fire Musk? Like obviously he would then fire you, more or less immediately; you are both his boss (you’re the CEO and he is the head of a division) and his employee (you’re a manager and he’s the majority shareholder). But you’d have, like, 15 minutes. You could order security to escort him out of the building; you could put out a press release; you could tweet from the official account “Elon has been fired for not being hardcore enough, let that sink out.” Oh then he’d fire you and deny you severance and call you a sex criminal; your life would be horrible forever. But for a minute it would be very funny.

The same column also speculates how a normal human being would react if someone they thought was dead kept sending them a check every month. This is in regard to an enforcement action against Wells Fargo, whose computer systems were poorly integrated enough not to notice that some people who were marked dead in its records were still paying of their mortgages, but it seems like a great fantasy or horror story hook.