音時雨 ～Regentropfen～

Two months from the last post, it's all the weather's fault. Over 30°C for July and August burnt all my motivation of doing anything.

But after the long period of emptiness again, I'm expressing nothing more than complaints about the book "German For Dummies" that I bought many years ago. Haven't touched German at all in the past few years so this book -- which I never finished -- could be a good point to restart. I started reading it at the beginning of this month, but after just a few chapters, I began to lose patience, and I rushed to finish it this weekend. Feeling relieved, now I can just return to my antique 1950s book that uses the beautiful yet hard-to-read gothic font!

So, about the problems. Just like other For Dummies books, the authors are too "talkative". Too much nonsense, I mean. But I get that they want to give a casual feeling so I will just accept this as a minor problem to me.

Then, some more serious issues other than typos -- have found at least five so far -- since they didn't affect me I'll just neglect them. First, the whole book lacks organisation. (Too) Many examples use grammar/words that are never explained clearly in the same section. For the "Fun Games", which are supposed to serve as exercises, they often require words NEVER appear in the same chapter also. Besides, they're often repeating the exact same sentences as in the chapter. What's the point? Good exercises should be giving similar things so one can apply and derive from what they learned. To me, I'd just repeat the sentence that's important when I read it in the main text.

Next, the book doesn't cover what I, and probably most German learners, want to find. It does cover some basic grammar but that's all. The (literally) whole book, is about the present tense, absolutely unnecessary. The book claims that the present tense is the most common, but it doesn't mean that not touching other tenses at all is acceptable. It covers a bit in the past/future tense, but the information is too little and I don't get even a vague idea of how they look like. In contrast, the book does a good job teaching you how to make "Ich möchte" sentences, such examples are everywhere and really made me bored. It doesn't mention enough about many important things either, such as the second possessive case, and how to change adjectives according to the case/gender.

Finally, it gives you false hope. It says the book is for you if you don't want to memorise lots of words. False. How one can learn a language, even the most basic, without memorising words?? I didn't pick up this book because of this, but just hearing irritates me.
I'm okay with the bad illustrations (not the sectional cartoons, which are meaningless anyway).

This book is the worst so far among all paid books I've read (if including free books the worst would be a Python book that I deleted after reading 3 pages).
At least, I can now enjoy the intriguing German Gothics!
I have one more For Dummies, hope that can be better, but when I'll read it would remain unknown...

Was going to resume at least weekly writing habit, but couldn't mostly due to the extreme over-30°C heat that burnt many of my brain cells.
It will take some time to fully go back to normal, I know it.

Déraciné. I have to say it's the worst From game because you're forced to get a VR. Since I'm not interested in first-person ones and never want a VR, I chose to cloud-play it and indeed enjoyed it this January. During that special and a little hard period, it brought me so much peace, and I also can't forget its ending music, not the common version of the Scarborough Fair I know, maybe a different version or not, I love that more. Therefore, today on the very special day, that melody came across my mind again and I finally added this little gem to my collection.

Hopefully I can someday transcribe it -- Not very confident at the moment though. But if I could finish the majority of it, how nice the ensemble would be!
-- I really need a cello. No, this isn't the point...

Then, the reality.
Have been coding for the past weeks, mostly in R -- that I never knew I'd do so much R even in the last year -- then some Perl and Bash. It's fun actually, and I love what I'm doing.
Meanwhile, I've got many thoughts. Maybe I've said them before, but here, I'll make them clear, again.
-- Code never betrays you. It's always the coder's fault when it goes malfunctioning.
-- Never trust Reddit and Quora regarding coding questions, and I never understand why people ask such tech stuff there.

It's getting much cooler this weekend and following, so I can finally turn on my PS4 and get irritated by the Elden Pest! (°ω°”)

At last...
↓

Only at such times do I wish my phone had a better camera or I brought my semi-pro Sony...
Still haven't organised its memory card for nearly 1.5 years! -- Too lazy...

I was (sort of) expecting this, but at least it's something today.
For too long I haven't written much and it's all of a weird feeling right now.

Though the plan to resume was kind of settled back to this March, the truth was I got more hooked with git than working on the content itself! Still I get an issue with how to properly tag stuff, or maybe I should just stick with the long version strings.. it's not how I'm supposed to write right now.

Anyway, earlier this week, I finally got another push. I was working on a website earlier this week, which was not built with source code but a WYSIWYG tool that stupidly doesn't support much of css/custom codes, which brought my expectations to a dead end. However, on my own end, I was rather motivated, as I finally come back to look at the main page again.
For a while I've been using the official twitter widget -- regardless that I'm not a social media person -- and I'm never happy with how it looks nor how it arranges stuff. Previously I was using a 2 or 3-column layout for it that was retired as I revised my whole site content. While my experience told me multi-column won't be my type, I was also too lazy to redo the barely-used twitter stuff, until this time.
Probably because of the multi-column design I had to extract all tweet content into an individual file before arranging them (there has to be a better way but I don't remember why I couldn't make one, again, laziness it seems). This time with the much simpler one-column layout, there were no more issues and I was able to do it without any problem. Meanwhile, also noticed that in inspector mode you can create a temporary CSS file instead of inserting each rule individually.

So that was it, hopefully I can now move on to the beta stage -- some visual works that I've been planning since this February but had totally no progress!
And Elden Ring is all blame should point to...

I'm not planning at all to talk about my thoughts toward Elden Ring, but in short I like it, mostly.
The point is, after this 90% blind run, I can finally listen to its soundtracks without worrying about spoilers. I do hope they will have a more formal release of it, as it's a shame there's no lossless format available at the moment. Besides, all field battle BGM, that should cross-fade well with normal field BGM, are missing -- I don't really care about most of them but I just like the drums in Caelid.

Then talk about the main dishes, the boss music. There are quite many that caught my love from the first time, especially...

Godskin Apostles
Top 1 love. It was engraved on my mind since the very first fight. The boss fight is okay, excluding the stressful duo -- Thanks to this BGM I didn't throw curses at it.
Also there's a trace of Akiko-taste from it, which is a nice experience.

Omen Illusion/Mohg, Lord of Blood
I prefer the illusion version more, probably because I enjoy vocal-less versions in general. Unlike the above, I like the first phase part more (and it's NOT because of him throwing blood-flame everywhere). The timpani are superb!

Godrick the Grafted
Even I myself don't believe it's on the list (though I can't explain why). But honestly, it's here only because of the first part.

Godfrey, First Elden Lord
A classical boss fight piece. This piece can be replaced naturally by Gascoigne's BGM.

extra: Starscourge Radahn
This one is a special assignment, as I love the piece each time I play it but can't recall the melody at all.

Still, others are great too, of course independent of how good/bad the fight itself isElden Pest, I mean you!.

Another shame is the ending music, if there were a song like those in DS1,2,3...
A rearranged medley isn't bad, but they didn't include all boss fights, which made this ending piece as a whole incomplete.

One more small thing, I wish I knew Windows Terminal much earlier. It's so nice to use, and more importantly, it's so visually appealing!

Time to bring things back to my weekly routines.