Huh, here I thought English was the language I was better at 
Fascinating look into localization, thanks. I get the logic but I can’t help thinking this feels like a little much.
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Brings back Beowulf flashbacks. Though I guess this tablet is more Middle English than Old English.
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Ok this current update is related to Japanese in that it’s causing my plans to get delayed lol. Mostly I just want to complain again!
TW? Only a general mention but, emetophobia
Coming hot on the heels of the blood clot situation (that might imply it’s resolved and it’s not even a little), tonight I’m up at 6am vomiting! My wife is as well, food poisoning seems unlikely and the way it just keeps coming back suggests a virus to me, probably? Currently seeking a little advice for how to handle this probably making my blood thinners not stay down for a bit so… oh boy! I have kind of a phobia about throwing up; I did way too much as a kid so I feel like I have a bit of trauma from all that, oops. So I’m happy I made it several years in between times, but also irrational as it may be, this is in some ways one of the worst things that could happen, personally. Sigh.
Bit of a punching bag, health-wise.
Currently Cruelty Squad vibes
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SAME. I’ve had emetophobia pretty much my whole life, and it’s shockingly debilitating! It’s affected so many random things in my life, like it’ll often make travel way more stressful, or being among crowds of people. Not even because the phobia is necessarily getting triggered at that moment, but because I’m afraid of the possibility of it getting triggered… ugh!
I don’t know if I have any advice, unfortunately, because I haven’t thrown up for any reason since I was, like, 11 years old, I think? Not sure how exactly I’ve avoided it besides the iron grip of my phobia lol holding it at bay, plus I guess avoiding alcohol, and then just getting lucky with illnesses.
One thing that might help mentally, though, is to view it as sort of exposure therapy 
. That is apparently the way they treat emetophobia: with induced vomiting. If you can get through this and come out alright on the other side of it, maybe it’ll make the phobia a little weaker in the future.
Sorry to hear about your health problems continuing, though, and I hope for some good things to come your way soon to balance out all of the bad 
.
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But look at that screaming face! Isn’t it enticing to give in!
Ok yeah what you’re saying makes sense, haha. Maybe that’ll work when it’s over… can’t say I’ve had much of an “oh this isn’t as bad as I thought!” experience yet and the worst part is just knowing that it’s going to come back, while the nausea slowly builds over and over… 
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I wanna add (I’m a rambling mess right now between the sickness and not having a moment of sleep so far) that mine isn’t as bad as yours, that sounds rough! Awesome that you’ve avoided it for so long, though sorry about the anxiety. I usually soften it a little because of that, but I guess any severity of a phobia is valid, heh. I don’t usually have it on my mind unless I am specifically prompted to think about it – and within that sphere I can’t be near anyone doing it or see it or I get halfway to joining them. It’s just once it’s on my mind, oh god I’d do most anything to ward it off. Hope me mentioning it wasn’t too bad; the usual reaction is “oh that sucks” at most so it didn’t really cross my mind that I probably shouldn’t put it in other people’s heads, just in case. Tried to at least be not too direct and gross about it, but oops. I’ll go collapse it with a little warning for whatever it’s worth.
Interestingly I CAN handle it in movies, kind of. I have a pretty ironclad resistance to any sort of violence, grossness, extreme fucked up content (ok the exception is real animal cruelty which pops up too much, ugh), but that is the one thing that really gets under my skin and grosses me out. Not enough that I can’t handle watching it usually though, I guess the distance is enough. And I’ve uhh, seen some more experimental movies where that kinda thing goes on for minutes so I think I proved myself.
Is that a weird thing to bring up? I always feel weird when it comes to art but I imagine you get it somewhat lol, most people don’t quite approach it the way I do so I avoid mentioning anything that’s not straightforward entertainment. I truly am rambling but I’m not gonna be sleeping so… this is helping me stay distracted.
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Yeah, in the past, my emetophobia was bad enough that just mentions of it would trigger me, but thankfully I’ve managed to get to a point where just reading a vague description isn’t too bad! There was a point where I could probably list every single scene in every single book I’d ever read, haha . Now, though, it no longer leaves enough of an impression on me to stick in my memory like that, and I think I’ve even been able to allude to characters in my own stories vomiting, so that’s progress.
Movies are unfortunately absolutely still a problem for me, though. In the past, I’ve struggled a bit with gore and such, but I’ve gotten a lot better with that (pro wrestling legitimately got me more comfortable with the sight of blood, lol. I watched Cody vs Dustin Rhodes in 2019 and was a changed person after that…). Vomit, though, nope. Can’t handle it. I guess I have improved to the point where I won’t not watch movies because of just one scene, but I will still very much dread the scene the whole time…
There’s actually a tumblr blog, emetophobiahelp.tumblr.com, which compiles warnings for movies and shows that trigger the phobia (as well as lets you know if they have no triggering scenes so that you can watch with peace of mind). That blog helps a lot because then I can relax while watching without getting caught off guard, and I can watch shows/movies with triggering scenes and be prepared for them in advance, which makes it less stressful.
I wish to one day reach the point where you’ve reached haha where I can handle it better in movies. I do feel like it affects me less than it used to. I still remember once having an extremely long and unpleasant panic attack thanks to an episode of Glee 
.
Yeah, I totally get it, haha! Maybe it’s weird for people who don’t have this phobia, but I think it makes total sense for those of us who do.
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You know, I am aware wrestling is “fake” and there are at least efforts at safeguards but I almost wonder if among those pretenses it would be enough to make me go “oh no that person is hurt stop it!” haha. And looking into this I learned that there are real intentional cuts at times so… ouch.
Seems I don’t quite need that but yeah, it’s super nice that a resource that like is out there! Very good.
Oh that’s awful, I’m so sorry :\ . Panic attacks are terrible.
For me I kinda went through a lot of my young life watching only very “safe” things and at a certain point got interested in pushing myself to get used to horror and I guess from there as I started digging deep into movies/other artforms I had this kinda teenager impulse to seek out the “hard to watch” stuff and I guess challenge myself with it. It was kinda dumb, but school mostly failed me on that front so while I was developing a taste for the offbeat, I only a little later developed the proper media literacy to see it’s dumb at best if done for no real purpose and got better at reading into themes. Luckily what I watched was mostly well regarded (or, like, controversial but with a sizeable portion of adamant fans) so for the most part I got to, say, go back to Salo and go “yeah fascism sure does suck huh.” (ok that’s still a bit of a surface reading but it’s been a while and I’m not getting into it right now haha)
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Putting this under a cut because it's off-topic and also potentially distressing to people, because there's a lot of talk about blood and intentional injury for art...
Ahaha, yeah, pro wrestling is “fake” in the sense that the results are predetermined, and most of what you see is a carefully constructed illusion where the wrestlers make the moves look real by acting like they got hurt when they really didn’t (we call this “selling”), but there are for sure real injuries that happen, and some moves, like chops, the wrestlers basically are just getting hit real hard by their opponent’s hand! There might be some exaggerated selling there, but the chop itself is very real, haha. Matches with lots of chops will often end with the wrestler’s chest being super red and a bit bloody… The thing with chops, though, is that the damage is all superficial because it’s normally just on your chest, and you’ll heal from it pretty easily. So chops are way safer to take than a lot of the more acrobatic stuff where you could land wrong on your head or something…
I have a tendency to assume that a wrestler is just selling when I see them acting hurt, mostly for my own peace of mind. Usually that assumption turns out to be correct, though! Injuries do happen, but are moderately uncommon.
Ah, yes, in pro wrestling, we call this “blading”… I have some amount of mixed feelings on it as a practice. I don’t really like it, though I get why wrestlers do it.
That Cody vs Dustin Rhodes match in 2019 was my first time ever seeing a blade job in wrestling, and my first time seeing more blood than than, like, a minor bloody nose in a match. Before that match, my level of being able to tolerate looking at blood was: I’d literally almost fainted upon seeing a couple bloody photos of real people in a class I took once on martyrdom (in this case, it was similar to wrestling in that they were bleeding intentionally, except it was for a religious celebration, not for the weird sports/performance art combination medium that is pro wrestling).
Dustin bladed in that match, and it was a bit deeper of a blade job than he’d probably intended, so he was bleeding a lot (it’s kind of funny seeing photos of him afterward, though, because he had like a little bandage on his head and that was it, haha). I don’t think his health was ever seriously threatened, though. The thing about blading in wrestling is that they do it because it looks very dramatic, while also being a relatively safe way to bleed (compared to bleeding “hardway”, like when a move goes wrong during the match and a wrestler gets busted open unintentionally…).
I remember feeling very overwhelmed by the blood as I watched, but I was also so drawn in by the whole spectacle of it, I couldn’t really look away (Cody is Dustin’s real-life half-brother. They both cut some absolutely fantastic promos before the match, and Cody did this one in particular that was just four minutes long, but it was so spectacular, it honestly sold me on the concept of AEW as a company).
And yeah, not only did I successfully watch the whole match, it legitimately made a huge emotional impact on me and was one of my favorite matches that year . So I sort of had to revise my own position on the role of blood in wrestling because of that. It’s still like not my favorite thing, and I’ll often have a hard time watching, but also like… some of my favorite matches have blood in them! I do try to strategically choose photos for my wrestling journal that aren’t super bloody in those cases, though, because I know other people are uncomfortable by it, haha.
But yeah, thanks to pro wrestling, movie blood basically no longer has a strong effect on me, lol.
One of my favorite wrestling fan writers wrote a really neat essay on blood, sweat, and tears in wrestling. Here’s another essay on the practice of blading specifically. This may or may not be good reading for when you’re feeling sick, haha .
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fallynleaf response
Yeah for sure, I did know this much more or less! Like when I talk about it being “fake” injuries and safety measures I know for a lot of it people really are putting their bodies on the line which comes with some real pain and sometimes injuries. Was totally unfamiliar with the blading though… doesn’t sound great to me but I really appreciate you describing your experience with it and I’ll defer to there being a potential appeal. I’ll try to take a look at those articles later but yeah – beyond the queasiness, I’ve been in and out of consciousness all day and don’t think I’d absorb much.
Well I still feel unwell – stomach hurts, feverish, achey, headaches, didn’t sleep much so I just find myself passing out a lot. But after getting sick 4 times 
I haven’t since this morning so here’s hoping I’m past the worst of it.
Don’t have the mental acuity right now to do much, but I need to do something or I’m gonna go a bit crazy, so let’s post earlier a few thoughts I was saving on what I’m maybe doing next.
Before this all happened, I started playing a little Okami in Japanese! I’ve had it in my backlog for a bit but never really played it, and it seemed like it fit what I’m in the mood for now. That being, Tears of the Kingdom got me in the mood for a classic Zelda dungeon experience, but I wonder if I’d burn out on playing literal Zelda after 100+ hours of totk, so this seems to fit nicely. That said, the language, oof.
On one hand I know I CAN do it. The lines are really short and not too complicated. But because the game features a lot of gods and mythology, it’s all archaic super polite/humble words and grammar that’s no longer used. In a really short sentence I might need to look up 4 things, and these are words that I sometimes have to dig deeper for because my usual lazy jisho method doesn’t even always have them.
On one hand, yeah, I want to learn this stuff. Depending on how you want to frame it, I’m “good” or “bad” at the language, but I have a long long long way to go. All the same, I don’t need to worry about learning 冷蔵庫 and 遊ぶ and 友達. I want to read and play somewhat obnoxiously written things like this so at some point I’ve gotta learn this stuff. Unfortunately I think my overall interests are broad enough there isn’t much I get to opt out of, heh. My problem is it clusters so hard. People don’t drop in occasional archaic words into contemporary sentences – it’s a trip back to dealing with several unknowns every time. And that is a real pain. I guess this game is good for that because the text box is truly so small… jt’s just even here, it’s slow going and a bit of a drag. I’m not certain if I’ll stick with it, but I need to get feeling better and give it another session or two.
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Yeah, it’s… well, I can’t say I like blading, or that I want it to happen, but wrestlers will probably keep doing it. There were (and still are, I think?) rules against it on WWE, at least in the modern age. Though it’s probably not even among the top ten most dangerous things that the performers regularly do (compared to things that put them at risk of head trauma, for example). I guess for me, as long as the performers have full agency in the matter, I can’t find it strongly morally objectionable.
Cody and Dustin’s case is a good example because they had pretty much as full control over that match as it is possible for two wrestlers to have, since (at the time) Cody was an executive vice president at AEW, so he and Dustin had almost total freedom to do what they wanted with that match. The blading specifically was probably at least in part a reference to their father, Dusty Rhodes, who bled a lot in his own matches back in the day. So as weird and as messed up as it is to say, the blood was sort of a love letter to their father and his impact on the industry. Only in pro wrestling do you show your love for your family through having a very violent match and then tenderly crying and hugging it out afterward while covered in your brother’s blood, haha .
AEW sort of has a reputation for using a lot of blood, lol, to the point where someone in WWE criticized them by basically calling them the “blood and guts” promotion (this isn’t a good way to criticize a rival company if you are in an industry where many fans think that having bloody matches is super cool actually). Naturally, AEW responded by… registering a trademark for “blood and guts”, haha, and producing a show with that name.
I think there are legitimate criticisms for the use of intentional bleeding in a performance, but AEW gets a lot of criticism specifically for having bloody matches featuring women, and that criticism does really bother me, because at the end of the day it’s people criticizing because they think that women are delicate beings whose bodies shouldn’t be marred by blood and violence. And screw that, tbh.
I guess that also sort of gets into the concept of deathmatches, which also involve blood, though usually directly from onscreen objects and not from blading, which always tries to pass itself off like the blood came from something else the wrestlers did. Deathmatches are extremely not my kind of thing, generally. But some wrestlers really love doing them!
With women wrestlers in particular, there can be kind of a stigma there, too, because deathmatches do show on your body if you do enough of them. Hikari Noa in TJPW, for example, is also an idol. But she really loves deathmatches, and had wanted for years to get the chance to do one. She just got to do her first real deathmatch this April, and her back got cut up pretty badly from it, which’ll leave some scars. She herself was super excited at the prospect of getting scars, haha (she wants her back to look like deathmatch legend Jun Kasai’s), but I can’t imagine her idol agency is the most enthused about this prospect .
It’s a weird, complicated world…
Good luck with Okami! I played a bit of that game when it originally came out, but haven’t touched it since then. I can imagine why it would be a bit tricky in Japanese, haha. Tobira actually told the 天照大神 in one of the chapters, and I was like “hey I know this goddess!” Maybe I’ll try revisiting that game someday, too, though I think I might prepare myself beforehand by reading a regular book about the myth first, haha, so that I have some familiarity with some of the specialized words and specific characters going into it. I imagine that words like 岩戸 aren’t super common outside of the context of that story, haha.
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I’ve been thinking I’m pretty overdue for looking into these myths myself, could really use the cultural background so that I’m not just recognizing names at best. Another thing to add to the pile that I’d like to do…
I played a little more and it’s neat but it’s also very hard to not just kinda whitenoise some of this to be honest. Like, what in the world is this?
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I’ve been posting a lot – lots to talk about these days. Just want to share an, umm, interesting story from my little corner of interests intersecting with Japanese.
So apparently a guy purchased enough stocks in Nintendo to go to their recent shareholder meeting in order to directly ask the president why they are giving preferential treatment to the female avatar in Splatoon. 
In each of these games you could make a character, boy or girl, though 3 went with the trend that’s becoming a bit more common of going more just “type A or B” and making everything usable by all characters instead of locking clothing or emotes by gender. Nonetheless… I guess the female characters are being marketed more / showing up in the art book more / the emotes are feminine or something / etc. Learning Japanese helped me to roughly get through this guy’s manifesto on Twitter for better or worse. People’s brains are really broken about this stuff!
At least he took his little squid boy there; that picture with the ticket is cute.
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Y’all still here for me rambling a bit more? Ok cool. Sickness recovery has been slow with me super fatigued (stacking with the fatigue I already had) and fairly depressed too – probably as much a physical product of my gut being destroyed as any reflection of bad situations. Seems like every few weeks I hear more about how gut health determines a ton about mental state and whatnot. Anyway, I think being able to just have more places to say things is useful for me, so I keep coming back.
I think I’m dropping Okami. Game seems cool enough but it’s got enough of that kind of thing that I posted the screenshot from that might as well just be me wasting my time right now. I wonder if I may need to look into some of the basics and directly study older Japanese some day, the way kids there are surely taught it in school. Sounds kind of annoying, but jumping in and figuring it out for yourself seems nonviable or at least painful enough I don’t want to do it. I get the impression elements of it are going to be rather common in things I’m interested in. I’m not doing it right now, but it’s another potential avenue for a little later. At least learning that in Japanese is some extra contemporary Japanese practice on top too.
Looking to just shake up my bad mood and being a bit irresponsible, I went ahead and bought Final Fantasy 16. Seems really cool! It is also kinda loaded with words I don’t know, seems like a little more knowledge on the military/warfare terminology side would be beneficial, but oh well. Always gonna be lacking stuff. I can pause and look things up, which is a bit of a drag but works. Whenever I get a little more energy back it probably will go more smoothly. I feel like I can make myself manage it; it’s ultimately just sentences with an unknown or two, which has been my life for the last 2 years so it is what it is. However, it is very much proving that point about how the word you don’t know is the word you need to know in most cases.
Anything resembling comfortable unassisted Japanese understanding outside media with especially simple language is quite distant… hopefully it’ll get closer quicker because I picked Anki back up the other day so I’m back on that grind. 20 words a day right now, we’ll see how I feel when it picks up. Still, so far. I see the years stretching out, heh. 
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Ok, it took a little time and experimentation, but I think I’ve finally found the things I’m doing for now –
First off, I think I’m going to stop FF16 in Japanese. The type of vocab is too much of a struggle to do in real time for me right now. My wife seems very interested in the game too (if for no reason other than how gorgeous it looks haha) so I’m probably going to just restart it in English and hang out with her while I very slowly work through it here and there. However… I’ve been occasionally watching a playthrough of the first Judgment game, which I previously played in English, and I’ve noticed just how easily I can follow most of everything that’s being said. So I decided it’s time to revisit the sequel, Lost Judgment, having dropped that some months ago. And, yeah, in this first hour anyway, it’s mostly easy! I was mostly only tripped up by a few slang terms related to crime and the yakuza, but even that was sparse enough. Compared to my previous attempt, this felt really smooth, so I guess I really have improved. (At least with subtitles) my general processing of how conversational Japanese is structured is SO much more streamlined than back then. Felt like I was fighting to hang onto the lines before, and now it just makes sense, assuming no surprise unknowns. Compared to FF16, modern day “real world” type writing is so much simpler for me right now. Assuming I can stick with this, it’ll be a pretty big goal from a while back finally being met!
In order to also grab something I can easily mine from without thinking about it too much on days when I’m not reading VNs, the other day I went to https://www.sosekiproject.org/ and started reading Ten Nights of Dreams. That’s pretty slow going with the old style writing, but on top of my usual tools, it’s nice how this site can hold your hold if you need. I had also felt strangely drawn to reading Soseki and especially what seemed like a pretty surreal collection of stories here, so that’s another cool one to be finally getting to. There are more obvious choices for the author, but nonetheless, he feels like a good point for digging more into important pieces of Japanese art and culture. Good vibes all around for these projects.
On a whim last night I decided to toss in my own contribution to a thread on the Japanese side of the forums. It’s not anything remarkable and there were some points I’d like to have expressed better that the words weren’t coming to me for – but I’m feeling pretty energized about having done it since I quite literally do not output ever. My neuroticism made me double check some words after I typed them but everything there came from what I could actively recall. Having not tried this sort of thing since I was new and working through Genki or something, it feels good to have varied structure and not just go “XはYです” over and over, haha. Writing that took me some time, I don’t have the practice to think on my feet… but I also think this is excellent proof that, if you don’t particularly need/want to rush into producing the language, simply consuming and working on understanding for a long time will inevitably lead to a time where the words can flow out (obviously with practice to make that more and more natural, but still).
As frustrating as a lot of the sort of stuff I’ve been trying recently can become, I guess I also have continued to get a whole lot better. Somehow that surprises me, haha. It can be so hard to tell.
The only other point I want to add I guess is that I’ve been avoiding most of the talk about Wanikani changes outside of a single post I made trying to be fair enough about the kana vocab additions. I’m pretty sympathetic to the side that’s frustrated with what WK is doing, but the stuff doesn’t affect me cause I don’t use it anymore. As a forum user though, god, I wish they would figure out how to communicate and smooth things over already. Feels like any time I glance at the WK section it’s just this festering pile of anger from both people who hate the changes and people who hate that other people hate the changes and the whole vibe on this site outside of the specific corners I keep myself in is rather unpleasant.
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I muted the category earlier this week for the exact reason you mentioned.
I don’t have a strong need to keep up with the product updates at this point, anyway, and I got tired of seeing the cycle of negativity repeated ad nauseum across the category. Heh.
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I read that some time ago and created a reading thread for it. I‘d be chuffed to read your comments over there 
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Thank you for linking this! Really cool project. It reminds me a bit of the Read Real Japanese series in terms of the level of support it offers, and it seems like a good way to sort of dip your toes into some older writing that might be harder for learners to parse than more modern works.
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Same, at this point I have no interest at all in WK itself, and I muted the whole category at some point a while ago, but then that meant missing the Lv60 threads (I think back then the celebrations category didn’t exist yet) which I like to throw a like here and there when I spot them so I opened it back again. What I do now is check new posted threads every day but quickly dismiss them if I don’t see anything that catches my eye regardless of category, which ends up being most days. WK category posts I mostly fully ignore.
The occasional drama is also entertaining for a whole two minutes when it happens. But that aside I like to see the general direction and feel of the community as a whole so I still kinda like to be informed of what’s going on around if there’s a hot topic. It’s also interesting, there’s a fairly big chunk of the community who don’t really care about WK much, I’d guess that’s mostly where most of us here find ourselves in. I too pretty much only interact in a few threads and that’s it (also part of the reason why I was considering starting a study log and whatnot, these are nice hub places to interact with regulars while still keeping the discussion centred around language study for the most part or things that affect people learning Japanese, what’s going on in their minds, lives, etc).
When I was doing WK myself I also didn’t care much about discussing the tool itself tbh, I only looked for scripts that seemed useful for my study but otherwise I kept doing my lessons and reviews and that’s it. Of course a big reason I didn’t care was because I was on a monthly plan and I always had in mind that I could stop paying and quit anytime so my attachment to WK was already almost non-existent. It’s unfortunate for people who paid yearly or lifetime and feel let down, though.
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Yeah, I’ve been reading the update threads because I can’t help myself 
. I try to stay out of the discussions unless I feel like I have something productive to offer, though. I think the most measured and nuanced interactions on the subject are happening in people’s study logs haha, for the reason that you said.
You should start a study log! I think it’s really helpful to just have a thread where you can talk about everything that’s going on in your personal studies/life, and the WK community as a whole is way more chill than most Japanese language learning communities (not counting the recent update drama ). I know that I’d probably be nowhere without my own study log; it really has been a nice grounding force for me over the past couple years.
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