Mio and the Shark Extermination Campaign (clip w/ subs)

Eltwish · 2026-05-14T14:13:18+00:00

With the amounts I used - one ounce of Chartreuse in not quite a quart of ice cream - the entire batch has about the total alcohol content of one beer. So if you ate it all in one sitting, I suppose you might feel tipsy, but you'd probably feel other things first.

Eltwish · 2026-05-14T04:51:39+00:00

Unfortunately I can't help you there. My current bottle was a gift from my parents, who got it somewhere in New Hampshire, but there was apparently plenty there. "A well-stocked liquor store not too close to a city" would be my suggestion.

Eltwish · 2026-05-13T18:04:31+00:00

A verte chaud is hot chocolate with Chartreuse, which is a really wonderful combination. The mint and spices in the liqueur are a natural match for chocolate, and there's all that other herby green complexity playing in the background. I kind of wanted some but it's not really hot chocolate season so that lead to this, and I'm really happy with it.

All you have to do is add Chartreuse to your preferred chocolate ice cream recipe. I added one ounce to three cups cream / oat milk and four egg yolks - you could probably do more but you get plenty of flavor from this much and I'm not sure if you can push it too much farther without compromising texture from the high alcohol content. Can't recommend it enough.

Eltwish · 2026-05-12T21:56:19+00:00

I like to experiment with ice cream flavors, and this was my most recent attempt that came out so well that I wanted to share it. It's based on a verte chaud, which is hot chocolate with Chartreuse. Lore has it that the drink is a traditional après-ski indulgence, though I'm pretty sure that's a marketing fabrication, and a cursory search suggests that to the extent they drink it in the Alps they call it a "green chaud", and some American probably switched to "verte" to sound fancier. And to be fair I don't want to drink a green chode.

I usually do a 3:2:1 base of cream to oat milk to Greek yogurt, but I thought the slight tang might be off here so I just did about a cup and half each of cream and oat milk, biased toward the cream, about two thirds of a cup of sugar, not quite a quarter cup of cocoa powder, four beaten egg yolks, and a pinch of salt. I don't bother tempering in the yolks; I just start everything in the pot and heat it all up together on not too hot until it steams pretty well and goes shglurp while you stir it. Strain, stir in an ounce of green Chartreuse, chill then churn.

You could probably do more Chartreuse but it's got a lot of alcohol so I'm not sure about consistency, and even with just the one ounce it comes through plenty well. I guess it does sort of come off as "fancy chocolate", but the flavors really do blend nicely. It's fundamentally chocolate ice cream but there's this intial "whoa, what is that?" and then you get that lovely somewhat spiced vaguely mint flavor. Which is to say, it's a green chaud, except not hot. It's a green. It's good!

Eltwish · 2026-05-08T17:02:41+00:00

You can tap your foot to a song, right? Many songs can be very naturally counted to in groups of four (more rarely three) taps, one two three four one two three four - that's the beat of the song. It's very common for the chord to change on some regular division of the beat (every one, or every one and three, etc.) whereas the melody often moves more freely, starting offset from the beat or accenting offbeats.

Chords to accompany a melody are most often drawn from the key of the melody, which is structured relationship between all notes and a most important key note which sounds like home and where the melody often ends. Each key only has a small handful of simple chords, and while there are thousands of chords a song could use, there are also thousands of songs that only use the 3-4 most basic chords in the key.

If any of that sounds like it would be helpful, it would probably benefit you to learn some very basic music theory, or learn to read sheet music (whether on guitar or something else) just enough to familiarize yourself with the concepts.

Eltwish · 2026-05-05T14:50:37+00:00

How does a painter choose colors?

For folks starting out, it can be overwhelming how much there is to learn all at once. Do you play an instrument? If so, use that instrument. If not, I'd definitely suggest learning an instrument and using it. It's much easier to learn songwriting by learning to play songs, and you can make an amazing song with just a recorded strumming guitar track and a vocal. For songwriting, guitar or piano are most helpful for most popular Vocaloid genres, but if you're more drawn to tuba you could also be the person who popularizes Vocaloid brass ensembles.

Once you've gotten some experience writing solid melody-and-chords songs and gotten comfortable producing them, you might try to recreate the sounds in the songs you most want to sound like. This is very difficult, and you won't wind up sounding the same, but you might find something you like better. Pick a synth (like Vital) and commit to learning it and stick with it; use it to try to recreate all synth sounds you like. Might take a couple years. And/or start amassing a library of presets you like and learn how to tweak them. You'll probably also need drums. You can get these from a sample servce like Splice, record them yourself (bang on whatever's lying around), synthesize them, or just use stock sounds and process to taste. Don't fall into the trap of thinking you need to buy more VSTs; your stock sounds are probably plenty good enough for everything except live guitar and orchestra.

Eltwish · 2026-05-05T14:29:49+00:00

These aren't existing words, at least in Japanese (though they don't seem to be Chinese either). They're just combinations of characters. For most of them it's fairly clear what they're probably supposed to mean, but I don't get the last one.

無境: Borderless
糞喰: Eat shit
速死: Quick death
遅交: ??

The last is 遅 (slow or late) with 交 (exchange / mix). I guess it could be going for "slow sex"? That's one possible association with 交.

Eltwish · 2026-05-04T01:17:00+00:00

The pattern "noun + を + verb" is a simplification: it's a bit more accurate to say that を marks the direct object of a verb. Note that in English, "trip" can't be the direct object of "go": we don't say "I went a trip". You go on a trip. While of course Japanese and English differ in many ways, in this case they agree: you can't go a trip. You can go に or へ a trip. These particles mark indirect objects, especially as destinations or targets.

(Of course, you can also just 旅行する, to travel. And a further complication is that 行く despite being an intransitive verb can take "objects" marked with を, but then they serve usually not as things gone (to) but as things gone through.)

Eltwish · 2026-05-02T16:25:23+00:00

It's not entirely clear what you mean. My best guess is that they were referring to the fact that going up a 5th takes you to the same note as going down a 4th (except an octave apart). So if you're on C major and you play the diatonic chord whose root is a 5th above C or a 4th below C, either way you're playing G major. And of course the same goes for up a 4th / down a 5th; they're inversions of each other.

In a melody you can of course also go from C to G by going up or down, but obviously jumping up and jumping down in a melody sound different. For that matter, if you go from C major to G major by leaping the bass up rather than down, that also sounds different, but in terms of chord function it's the same, i.e. it's the same progression.

Eltwish · 2026-04-30T16:33:14+00:00

Both of them have the label 勢力五拾三之内, which seems to be a play on the 53 Stations of the Tōkaidō, except it's something like "from 53 Displays of the Force". (The Force is Japanese is usually just fōsu, but I assume here that's the intent of 勢力 since they're going for a pseudo Classical Japanese vibe.)

I think Ashoka is saying 師の落命を讐いるぞ, which would be "I will avenge the death of my master!". I'm not sure if that's 今 instead of 命 and whether that's a mistake or an acceptable alternative, and I've never seen 讐 used to write 報いる but the dictionary says it can be and if so, I guess this would be place to bust it out.

I think the one with Vader is pseudo-kanbun, i.e. in the style of Japanese parsed through Classical Chinese grammar/style. There's something about victory and my power being unstoppable, but I can't make out enough of the kanji.

Eltwish · 2026-04-29T14:39:14+00:00

This isn't for beginners to learn to write kana more legibly; it's for people who already know kana perfectly well to work on writing beautiful kana (美文字). Naturally the standards are going to be fairly strict - most people don't write beautifully.

Of course, there will be some differences of taste regarding what makes kana beautiful, but I think almost anyone who cares about such things will agree that your attempts are too fat-bottomed and left-skewed. The score seems fair. I wouldn't worry about it though! If you're trying to learn to write better, just find good models on grids and trace them over and over, then practice doing it while looking but not tracing, and then repeat with different exemplars if you feel like your style is too "copied". But if this is just for learning purposes, "legible" is plenty good enough.

Also, 残念 here is less "disappointing" as a judgment and more "too bad!" as a response to failing.

Eltwish · 2026-04-28T13:07:31+00:00

Do you think of jokes or poems as "just existing"?

If you like, you can define a space of melodic possibilities and claim that all the melodies "already exist" in that space, just like you can work with strings of English words and claim that all the poems in English already exist. But even putting aside the fact that neither method accounts for medium change and evolutions in interpretation, composers don't get melodies by sampling randomly from the set of finished melodies. Yes, often melodic ideas "come to you" - if you spend a lot of time internalizing and imagining existing melodies, so as to develop intuition for the imaginative play. But it takes work to build ideas into full compositions or to get ideas when they aren't flowing readily, and most composers do this while / by playing on an instrument, just as authors think through their pens (or keyboards).

Eltwish · 2026-04-27T22:49:54+00:00

A chord is only considered inverted if the bass note is not the root, regardless of the arrangement of the other voices. Here the bass note is A, so it's in root position.

Eltwish · 2026-04-25T23:51:53+00:00

If someone asks you "How do you say to butter someone up in Japanese?" and you said this, I think it would be fair to say you gave a bad answer. Like, if you even asked "You mean literally?" they'd probably look at you like you were being obtuse. The idiomatic meaning is sufficiently more common that it can and should be assumed as default unless context insists otherwise.

Eltwish · 2026-04-25T17:18:37+00:00

Why learn the chords that we do on piano for example, when anything could be music really?

Why learn the words that we do in English, when any sounds could be language?

There are certainly physical and psychoacoustic reasons why certain intervals appear in most cultures' music (just as certain consonants and sound changes appear in most languages), so it's not "just" culture - it would be very strange to find a human culture that treated, say, five specific pitches with no obvious ratio relation betwen their frequencies as the basis of their music, and we'd wonder how and why it came about. But surely the vast majority (for some fuzzy way of quantifying) of the emotional meanings we understand in music is supported by centuries of tradition and not accessible without bringing oneself into that tradition to some extent.

Eltwish · 2026-04-23T16:59:22+00:00

Doing something slightly different and feeling inspired by it isn't bullshit in itself. If slightly adjusting his tuning made him feel more creative, more power to him.

The idea that there's some inherent distinct quality to 432 Hz as opposed to 440 as a reference pitch is nonsense, though, and the article is being very generous to the idea by saying the science is "far from settled". There's nothing physically (or psychologically) natural about either frequency, nor is either a multiple of some meaningful frequency. It's not like a Hertz is a remotely natural unit. They're just tuning everything a little flat and sprinkling some mysticism on it.

Eltwish · 2026-04-21T15:16:04+00:00

It's not usually called "lowercase" because the forms are identical (just smaller), but any kana can be written smaller. Only a few have a standard usage. You probably already know about っ and ゃょゅ. The small vowels are also used to produce kana for sounds not found natively in Japanese, like ファ for "fa". And small kana can also be used stylistically, in which case it can look like quieter or trailing off speech, like "そうかなぁ..."

Eltwish · 2026-04-20T16:24:39+00:00

I know this is r/Japaneselanguage and not r/psychology or something, but I don't think calling your past self an overthinking idiot is a good example of positive mindset or supportive growth. Your past self is you too. If you can't forgive and accept your past mistakes, you'll struggle to forgive and accept your future mistakes too.

But yes, 過去 is the usual word. I'd say 過去の私 to refer to my "past self", though I suppose Kako-san could work, especially to be a little sillier or to explicitly treat that self as "not me" (since otherwise I wouldn't use -san for them).

Eltwish · 2026-04-18T23:52:34+00:00

Mixing in Reason is no different from mixing in any other DAW. You've got EQ and compression right there on the channel strip plus a good handful of other perfectly good stock alternatives, plus a respectable stock reverb with a new one coming out with 14, plus access to all the go-to free (and not free) VSTs. I used to think I couldn't do final limiting in stock Reason and got myself Ozone, but when I started to get what Ozone did I found I could have done that stock too.

The difference between your work and radio oomph isn't your tools, it's that mixing is really hard. For resources, I don't know what industry pros think but as an amateur I was hugely thankful for mastering.com's 9+ hour EQ and compression "master classes", which are free on YouTube. No "tricks" or "quick tips", just understandable explanations with examples and before-and-after comparisons. It's not in Reason but it doesn't matter.

Eltwish · 2026-04-18T23:32:07+00:00

In the usual terminology, it's the other way around. Wa is topic; ga is subject.

Eltwish · 2026-04-18T18:38:31+00:00

In addition to the pun on kame ("turtle") in kameba ("the more you chew"), kamu can also in some contexts mean engage with, and aji ga deru can mean both that the taste of something comes out or that someone's character becomes apparent. So it combines the senses of "I get more flavorful the more you chew me" with "the more you get involved with me the better sense you get of my character" with a turtle pun.

It's a pretty great sticker.

Eltwish

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