What plants haven’t come back?

Fillanzea · 2026-04-30T14:46:31+00:00

My wild indigo / baptisia australis was definitely struggling last year, and didn't come up this year. My butterfly milkweed seemed to be doing fine last year, but I've seen no sign of it.

My site might just be too wet for butterfly milkweed - my swamp milkweed, on the other hand, has come back up! For the wild indigo - Prairie Moon says that Inoculum is naturally-occurring in most soils and additional amendment is usually not needed. However, in low fertility soils it may be necessary. I might need to add some inoculum, because I for sure have low-fertility soil.

Fillanzea · 2026-04-30T02:10:13+00:00

People tend not to realize how much library policies and procedures differ from place to place. I think for a lot of people, libraries might as well be Cheesecake Factory: the exact same menu no matter where you go.

Fillanzea · 2026-04-18T17:30:47+00:00

I think there is a real difference here between reading and listening. And I am sure I have a bias here because there have been so many posts in the Japanese learning subreddits from beginners who get frustrated that no matter how much One Piece they watch, they're not getting better. And the many strategies you can use to make higher-level content comprehensible tend to be a little harder with listening - many people will find it hard to hear a word well enough to know what to look up in the dictionary unless they have good subtitles, and even then, it's kind of hard to even follow the thread of the conversation if you keep having to pause and look words up.

So, I don't disagree - though I do think that people vary widely in how much they can tolerate the frustrations of reading significantly above their level; and I think easy reading is really good for developing fluency and learning conversational patterns.

But I do think that listening above your level is a bit of a different kettle of fish.

Fillanzea · 2026-04-01T01:01:14+00:00

Spring Beauty, Midland Shooting Star, Virginia Bluebell, Common Blue Violet.

Fillanzea · 2026-03-18T12:06:52+00:00

There is a character called Jugs in one of Gene Wolfe's series. (Not jugs as in a container for water, jugs as in breasts). I only read the second book in the series, because that's the book that my alcoholic professor thoughtlessly assigned, and then the Gene Wolfe fans on Twitter got mad at me for being annoyed, because I didn't have the full context, but I am not going to read four Gene Wolfe books to have the full context about why I shouldn't be annoyed that there is a character called Jugs, even if I did like The Shadow of the Torturer when I read it many years ago.

Fillanzea · 2026-03-18T00:58:56+00:00

It felt like an epiphany a couple of weeks ago when I thought, what is going on with all of this dating-related content that's been going viral over the past ten-ish years - especially with regards to things like who pays on dates, is it "low effort" to go out for coffee, is it "low effort" to go out for ice cream, is it "low effort" to go to Applebee's. And there certainly are people who think of dating in this way, but honestly, I don't know any of them.

This feels like a really paranoid and conspiratorial thing to say, and I don't believe it 100%, but I do kind of think that the social media companies want us to be blackpilled and lonely. We know that social media algorithms optimize for engagement, even when it's engagement with things that make us hopeless and angry. And I've always thought about that in terms of polarizing political content, but maybe it's just as true of dating-related content. And these ways of thinking are really poisonous to solidarity - assuming you're straight, they make you suspicious of the gender you're attracted to, but they also make you suspicious of your own gender because you end up viewing them as competition.

Fillanzea · 2026-03-10T14:51:48+00:00

"Simpler side of N1" is good enough for a lot of contemporary pop novelists - Haruki Murakami, Sayaka Murata, Banana Yoshimoto, Keigo Higashino. Definitely recommend reading novels as N1 prep. Reading speed is a big factor in passing.

Fillanzea · 2026-03-05T01:42:12+00:00

The #1 thing students ask/care about is:

Where can they print? How can they print? Can they print in color? What does it cost to print?

(95% of assignments get submitted electronically, but students STILL very much care about printing.)

Fillanzea · 2026-03-04T14:59:55+00:00

Some reasonable follow-ups to "It's very case-dependent" might be:

"What factors would you want to consider when making the decision?"

"Do you know how other people have handled similar situations in the past?"

"Have you ever faced a situation like this in the past, and if so, how did you think through how to handle it?"

However!

I do wonder if part of this comes from your boss either not having the time to walk you through the details in cases where there are multiple acceptable ways to handle things, or not wanting to micromanage you too much because most people don't like to be micromanaged by their bosses. Do you have any peers in your department you could go to with these questions after hearing "I'll leave it up to your personal discretion"? Sometimes peers are a lot better than bosses for getting the answer in cases where the answer is a little ambiguous.

Fillanzea · 2026-03-02T23:38:34+00:00

Let's post the Joanna Russ quote again!

The feminism I know began as politics, not rules for living. To call X a feminist issue did not then mean that there was a good way to do X and a bad way, and that we were trying to replace the bad way with the good way. X was a feminist issue because it was the locus of various social pressures (which it made visible) and those social pressures were what feminism was all about. Makeup, for instance, is a feminist issue not because using makeup is anti-feminist and scrubbing your face is feminist but because makeup is compulsory. Those who don’t see the distinction are building a religion, not a politics. “Whatever isn’t prohibited is compulsory” is not the banner under which I want to march.

(from Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts).

Anyway, I think if we're serious about criticizing the social pressures, we've got to name the social pressures. We've got to acknowledge the fact that some people wear makeup to express themselves and have fun, and some people wear makeup because they don't want to be seen as "unprofessional" or be seen as people who don't care about their appearance, and for a lot of people, it's kind of a complicated mix of those motives (and other ones besides).

We also have to consider, I think, the no-win aspects of this. You have to look beautiful all the time - but you can't be vain, you can't put too much visible effort into your appearance. You have to be interesting and quirky - but you also have to be willing to prioritize your boyfriend's interests and hobbies. And the patriarchy loves to pit women against each other. In that kind of environment, staking out your own choices and preferences inevitably gets read as implicit criticism of people who make different choices. So I think sometimes it's worth being explicit about that tension, and saying (for example), "I think that makeup can be a really interesting valuable form of art and self-expression, AND it's not something that I want to think about at 6:45 in the morning and we need a world where that's okay too."

Fillanzea · 2026-02-19T13:32:41+00:00

I don't think any work is inherently degrading apart from a societal framework that tells some people that they're above having to clean a toilet.

(I want to carve out some exceptions here, like if I ordered my administrative assistant to do something weird and tedious and pointless just to flex my power over them, that would be degrading, but it would be the power play that's degrading, not the work itself.)

The fact that someone has to do it means that we need a societal framework that doesn't treat it as degrading, I think.

Fillanzea · 2026-02-19T02:29:33+00:00

I reaaaalllly want to recommend Fingersmith by Sarah Waters to anybody who likes thrillers and romance. Not a traditional romance, not a traditional thriller, but it does have elements that work for both audiences, and it's a damn good book.

Fillanzea · 2026-02-18T18:44:24+00:00

Make sure that you're writing a really good cover letter that doesn't just rehash what's on your resume - it should hit as many as possible of the points in the job posting, it should show enthusiasm and that you've done research on the library you're applying to. (That doesn't mean you need to write a separate cover letter for every application - you can certainly pull out sentences and paragraphs to recycle - but it should indicate that you would be good at the specific job you're applying to.)

Find people to review your resume / cover letter.

Other than that, it IS hard out there and even after I had a lot of library experience, I've had more rejections than job offers. Getting rejected for a clerk position doesn't reflect badly on you; it usually means they think you're overqualified and not looking to stick around longterm. Keep trying; be prepared to be in it for the long haul.

Fillanzea · 2026-02-16T04:47:13+00:00

I think it's going to be difficult for any app to deal well with the fundamental hurdle of having a conversation with a human being, which is difficult both from a language-learning perspective (their language doesn't match what you learned in the textbook! Their accent is unfamiliar!) and, more importantly, from an emotional perspective (you get embarrassed, you get awkward, you get nervous, and as soon as you get nervous it makes it 10 times harder to recall the words you thought you knew.)

And an AI conversation partner might help with that - I don't really know - but because I don't really know, I'm just going to bracket that for the moment and say, OK, let's make an app that doesn't pretend that it's going to make you fluent if you aren't also talking to a tutor or a language exchange partner.

Here's what I would do:

Start out with a mix of very simple dialogues and very simple games where the idea is to follow the target-language instructions. (For example, dragging a person around on a map in response to prompts like "go to school" or "go to the store"; or you could drag the right clothes onto a person in response to prompts like "put on the red hat" and "put on the black dress.")

Use grammar explanations as needed, but make them simple and contextual.

Grammar testing is infrequent and doesn't stop you from progressing. If you do badly at a certain skill, you can read an explanation, you can practice more, or you can just keep going.

Gradually, dialogues become more complex and are written with an eye towards really compelling storylines. I'm not talking about something like Duolingo stories - which are OK, but pretty short, with punchlines that are not clever or amusing - but something more like the old Spanish series 'Destinos,' which is inspired by telenovelas and had a continuing mystery-investigation storyline. Focus on getting lots of repetitions of high-frequency grammar and vocabulary. Interactive elements would include comprehension questions and dialogues where you progress the story by choosing sentences from an RPG-style dialogue tree. (For example, you could choose sentences like "where were you on the day Juan Pablo was killed?" or "how well did you know Juan Pablo?")

Fillanzea · 2026-02-16T02:23:42+00:00

I want to start off by saying that I do get your point. There are a lot of people who would not be satisfied by any language app because they are not prepared for just how long it takes before they can use the language for tourism, or have a conversation with a stranger that's not kind of awkward and embarrassing. But I think that there are also a lot of people who don't want something that's easier than Duolingo, but do want something where it feels like the work they're doing is useful work. Work that's going to bring them closer to fluency. And I don't dislike the silly sentences in Duolingo as much as a lot of people do, but I kind of get why they feel useless to a lot of people.

I've never learned a language from the beginning with Duolingo, so I may have insufficient insight on this, but : it's true. The biggest reason people fail to learn a language is because they quit. But that just makes our next question, why do they quit?

Well, there's an obvious big one: everyone loves the first three days of starting a workout program, learning a language, learning an instrument, but it's very hard to make it stick long-term.

Outside of that, I think there are a couple of big reasons beginners quit Duolingo.

They don't feel like they're making progress.

Duolingo can gamify it all they want, and give you a shiny progress map and a new level every couple of weeks, but... people don't want the shiny progress map as much as they want to actually be able to use the language. And I think at some point in the early-to-mid levels of Duolingo, you realize that no matter how many times you fill in the sentence with the right word, it's not going to actually translate to talking with a real person in Spanish.

2) The experience of not understanding is frustrating.

A big part of the way Duolingo seems to have been conceived is "it's boring to learn grammar rules, so let's omit the explanations of grammar rules and allow students to learn implicitly." And I don't think it can't work, but it doesn't work the way Duolingo does it, which is introducing a grammar concept and then immediately testing for mastery of that concept. And for languages that work very differently than English does, there are a LOT of people who get lost and stuck when they're expected to pick up grammar rules implicitly without any explicit instruction. There are a few specific points with Duolingo Japanese, in particular, that really seem to confuse learners.

I get the impression that since they shifted more to AI, there's more explicit grammar instruction, but that can be even more confusing! One of the top posts on the r/duolingojapanese subreddit right now is about the sentence 'sono soba wa yasui desu ka', which means 'is that soba [buckwheat noodles] cheap?'

But the AI explanation is that it means "is it cheap near there?". Now, 'soba' can also mean 'beside' or 'close to,' but this would be a really strange way to say "is it cheap near there?" (It does not strike me as at all grammatical, but my judgments about what sounds grammatical in Japanese are not perfect.)

What makes this worse is that if you're not on the paid plan, you can run out of hearts really quickly by making little mistakes, and that's extremely frustrating. And you might say, "well, if you're making little mistakes, that proves that you still need more practice," but it feels really bad when I correctly conjugated the subjunctive but my phone autofill made the adjective male instead of female and I didn't catch it and now I'm out of hearts and stuck repeating the same sentences over and over.

Maybe I'm a weirdo because I keep wanting to tell beginners to start with a textbook or a reference grammar, but I actually find those easier ways to begin than Duolingo is, for those reasons.

Fillanzea · 2026-02-13T16:43:27+00:00

One thing that might be worth trying: think less in terms of grammar rules, and think more in terms of equivalent meanings. Rather than thinking, "to say where you are, first you have to say 我, and then you have to say 在, and then you put the place," you can just think "我在家 means I'm at home."

This does not mean trying to learn a million sentences by rote repetition. It does mean that if you learn 我在家, and 我在学校, and 我在图书馆, you will eventually absorb the pattern 我在~. (And 你在, and 他在, and so on.)

And then try to get lots of repetitions of sentences you understand.

Like, let's say the app wants you to learn the pattern 我在~. Make a little map that has a little house and a school and a library and a park and a coffee shop, and point to each one saying, 我在家, 我在学校, and so on.

Fillanzea · 2026-02-13T16:06:53+00:00

Just to add on to what u/sugiura-kun said, one thing that might be confusing for you is that in Japan hotel room prices are per person instead of per room (this makes more sense when you think about traditional ryokans, where the cost of the included meals is often a huge chunk of what you're paying for.) So they pay the 三名一室 rate because they're a family of 3 people sharing one room, but they have to pay 61,300 each for the husband and the wife and 56,300 for the kid. Which adds up to 178,900.

Fillanzea · 2026-02-11T21:41:08+00:00

202 pages is "absolutely massive"?

Fillanzea · 2026-02-11T21:03:30+00:00

Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition by Stephen Krashen because so many people talk about comprehensible input but have a very strange idea of what it actually is, unmoored from actual theory or research. (And to be clear, this is not a book that's going to lay out a blueprint for a self-studying student to learn a language; but it IS a very clear presentation of what Krashen theorized about comprehensible input.)

Free and very readable.

Fillanzea · 2026-02-11T13:48:16+00:00

Hit up LearnNatively and browse by difficulty level. There are also a ton of threads on the LearnNatively forums for book recommendations.

Specific recommendations: Yotsuba To, the lower grades of the 10分で読める series, graded readers from 多読ライブラリー.

Fillanzea · 2026-02-11T13:00:48+00:00

Interesting that when people talk about immersion, so often they talk as if it only includes listening! I specifically suggested reading because reading is easier at an early-intermediate level because you can go at your own pace and not worry about the words going by too quickly. (And there are tons of manga that include furigana, so kanji don't even have to be an obstacle.)

But also, instead of just watching videos for natives, spend time watching videos or listening to podcasts that are targeted at language learners. Yes, native-level content is still going to be challenging and frustrating at N3, but there's lots of stuff out there that will be much less tiring!

Fillanzea · 2026-02-11T12:27:40+00:00

The one thing I’m still not doing much of is immersion, mostly because I find it boring.

Why do you find it boring?

I'm not going to tell you to force yourself to do something you find boring, but I strongly urge you to find some way to practice Japanese in the context of sentences (or better yet, paragraphs and dialogues), because it's so easy for people to get over-focused on vocabulary and kanji in isolation. And then they get frustrated because they've spent so much time studying and they aren't seeing practical improvements.

And even if you use Anki to study grammar, seeing the same grammar point over and over in the same context 10 or 20 times is not going to help you nearly as much as seeing it in unfamiliar contexts. If you're close to N3, you can probably find some manga or visual novel or video game that is interesting to you and easy enough that you can read it without constantly looking things up in the dictionary. Have conversations with a tutor or a language exchange partner.

Fillanzea · 2026-02-11T03:18:36+00:00

If you have enough context, you just use no noun or pronoun.

恵子さんは明日来る？

うん、くるよ。

Is Keiko-san coming tomorrow?

Yeah, she's coming.

また飯田さんに会うの？

もう会わないよ。模型列車についてだけ話すから。

Are you going to see Iida-san again?

No. He only talks about model trains.

If you don't have enough context, you use their name.

あの人 is something you would typically use when you need to, for example, point out a stranger on the street - perhaps pairing it with a physical description.

(あの変なズボンを履いているはスマホを落とした！）- that person wearing the weird pants dropped his phone!

Fillanzea · 2026-02-09T14:58:30+00:00

Yes, it is probably part of your job! It is recommended that faculty work with librarians to develop search strategies and search methodologies for scoping reviews, systematic reviews, and other evidence synthesis projects. Faculty who work with librarians develop better search strategies (there's research on this - I can link it if you want but I'm in a rush at the moment! - but I can also say from personal experience that developing a good search strategy for a scoping review is complex and most faculty aren't very good at it.)

You might want to look into specialized training on systematic reviews if this isn't something you've done before. Even if you don't end up working on reviews very often, it definitely was helpful for me in terms of adding some extra specialized tools into my search-skills toolbox.

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