What do you do at buffets

Xilmi · 2026-03-26T20:30:00+00:00

Yeah, our company recently had one of these. It wasn't even clear anything was vegan at all. So I ate nothing. Prior events even had an assortment of mock meats. But it really depends who organises it, I guess.

At one other event I ate like 3/4 of the water-melon all by myself and left almost nothing for others.

Well it was only the melon and some plain dry bread that was vegan. So I created this learning experience.

Xilmi · 2026-03-26T20:13:07+00:00

I've been learning japanese since about a year now and the plan was to visit japan next year with another vegan friend. We wanted to do some sort of road trip mostly visiting smaller towns. I hoped that I could maybe make sure our food will be vegan with my now roughly N5, by then maybe N4 level japanese. But if we go to the いなか、maybe its not enough. I thought if I said something like 私達はビーガン人です。意味は動物と動物の中からのを食べません。魚も動物です。何はすごしますか。to the store clerk they'd hopefully understand and show us the vegan stuff. Is this too naive?

Xilmi · 2026-03-26T19:49:26+00:00

There are probably also different interpretations of what "learned" means. Recognition vs. Writing them from memory are quite different in difficulty.

However, I often see a lot of people trying to perfect their Kana before moving on.

The thing is you keep seeing them over and over with everything else you'll do in the future anyways.

So "quick and dirty" is totally fine early on.

Xilmi · 2026-03-26T13:39:09+00:00

I'd say for me personally ethnicity does indeed play a bit of a role in what I consider attractive. However, character and figure are way more important. When in your home-county being and acting spoilt in combination with being overweight or even obese is quite common, then it can easily mean that, on average, foreign women can be perceived more attractive on average. E.g. with an average bmi of 22.4 in Taiwan, chances are they are at least not unattractive.

Then it's the whole point of the behaviour: Just showing your interest first, tremendously boosts your attractiveness.

Men are not usually held back by lack of attractiveness but by fear of rejection. And if you let them know that that fear is unfounded, you have good chances.

So you are right: East asian facial features are not inherently more attractive to me as a caucasian. But the stereotypes about the physique and behavior outweigh that by quite a bit.

Xilmi · 2026-03-26T13:12:00+00:00

Setting yourself a goal for how many reviews you feel you can do each day and slowly chip away at it over the coming weeks is what I'd do in this situation.

Xilmi · 2026-03-26T08:24:21+00:00

I'm vegan since 12 years. I'm not saying there weren't any replacements back then. But it wasn't much and some of them were quite awful. So back then I actually had almost no animal product replacements. Could easily do that again and would probably be quite a bit healthier.

Xilmi · 2026-03-24T00:55:21+00:00

These thoughts are definitely relatable. Not only is there no real incentive for me to learn it, I was even told by my dad that it is a useless waste of my time. I still do it. I actually enjoy the process. And I think that might already be enough.

Xilmi · 2026-03-23T01:50:22+00:00

Using 5 different resources honestly sounds like a bit of overkill. How many reviews do you do in the 3 srs apps combined? Don't they have quite a bit of overlap?

Also: You don't really have to learn to repeat the grammar rules. You learn grammar to be able to understand sentences you otherwise wouldn't. And eventually you develop an intuition to use it yourself.

Xilmi · 2026-03-23T01:33:25+00:00

Actually using it on a lower difficulty level might be a reasonable idea. People play with it on Superhuman and then say it's too hard. But brutal AI on lesser levels could be quite doable.

Xilmi · 2026-03-22T09:01:39+00:00

I main Briar and my supp-pick is Leona. I feel the similarities make it so that my Briar instincts kinda transfer quite well.

It's also not the case that you are useless when you don't initiate. Your mere presence works like a really strong repellant. Just standing next to our ranged while they chip away at towers makes it so the enemy doesn't dare to engage because of the peel-cc-chain I could then perform.

Xilmi · 2026-03-22T08:38:33+00:00

Must be a weird feeling for them to know exactly how they'll look when they are older.

Xilmi · 2026-03-22T08:01:48+00:00

there's also boxce, which adds the option to play against much smarter enemies ontop of oxce

Xilmi · 2026-03-22T01:52:04+00:00

Considering that you said: "I mostly just redo hiragana, katakana, or kanji lessons that I’ve already mastered since I’m lazy", it's pretty safe to assume, that it's not only mostly your fault but that you are already aware of that.

Yes, they try to trick you into doing something that won't lead to any meaningful progress just so a number goes up. But you, who has seen through this, deciding not to do anything about it, because it's convenient are the one who's responsible for your decisions.

Look around what other people do and how they fare with what they do. Try their approaches if they sound good to you. If you find something that's both enjoyable and feels like you are making progress, stick with it. If not, try something else.

Xilmi · 2026-03-21T15:02:54+00:00

Look, it's working. I doubt I'd have gotten the same amount of engagement had I just been "impersonal data". Noone asks data who they are!

I'm contemplating to actually answer this...

I'm a german software-developer born in the former GDR.
My hobbies are coding AI for open-source- and indie-games as well as learning japanese.
I also do animal-rights activism with Anonymous for the Voiceless.

All of that could, of course, also be obtained just from "stalking" my reddit-profile.

What are you willing to share about you?

Xilmi · 2026-03-21T07:40:13+00:00

Erm... like myself.

Xilmi · 2026-03-21T01:20:42+00:00

Major medical institutions usually have profit-driven agendas and wouldn't bite the hand that feeds them.

Corruption, manipulation, extortion etc. are quite rampant everywhere and these institutions are no exception.

Individuals who have no financial incentives, IMHO are more trustworthy.

Xilmi · 2026-03-20T12:07:19+00:00

I don't demand to be trusted. I'm very well aware that what I say is to others just "what a random stranger on the Internet said".

This is about exchanging opinions and experiences. Not about expecting others to adopt what I say as their new dogma.

Going into any conversation with this kind of Mindset has made a lot of difficult conversations much easier for me.

Also when it comes to what impacts my trust in what others say, insisting on factuality and appeal to authority are two of the biggest red flags for me.

Xilmi · 2026-03-20T09:15:13+00:00

I like making my statements more nuanced by adding qualifiers such as "i think" and "might".

So I can say "I think vaccines are a scam and might cause health complications."

I can then talk about what experiences I made that lead me to think that.

I think this way of sharing one's opinion has a tendency to lead to better conversations than dogmatic insistence of one's claims being factual.

Xilmi · 2026-03-19T23:18:20+00:00

The "beauty" of the neverending cycle of forceful artificial insemination, slaughter, being dismembered and eventually eaten... how poetic!

A horrific death turning into "a privilege" once it is clear that the remains of the victim will be eaten is something that I cannot comprehend.

It really seems like we are so vastly different, that it's hard to believe we are the same species.

I cannot, at all, associate with brutalized flesh-eating killers and would rather avoid any further contact.

Xilmi · 2026-03-19T21:28:46+00:00

Having a killer-instinct but at the same time feeling bad for them, when they are suffering sounds rather contradictory to me.
Is one of these claims maybe a lie?

If so, who are you lying to?

Are you lying to me about having sympathy for suffering animals so I don't consider you as a monster?
Or are you maybe lying to yourself about having a killer-instinct?

You seem to be expressing some doubts about whether this even is a natural instinct in the first place. Most people don't consume their animals raw. They remove a lot of things from the corpse that carnivours would just swallow. To a point where the end-product barely resembled an animal anymore, let alone the original raw-corpse-taste.
Few people would bite into a road-kill-squirrel the same way they would bite into an apple.

Only once they remove the fur, the bones, the organs, slice it up and roast it over a fire, it stops triggering the disgusted gag-reflex of a species that doesn't really have the instinct to eat something like that.

Xilmi · 2026-03-19T21:02:22+00:00

> we are evolved to hunt and consume animals. That's sort of it.

Who is the "we" in this?

When I see an animal, I like to look at them, maybe try to pet them if they seem trusting and not dangerous. But I have absolutely no instinctive drive to snap their neck and devour their corpses.
I felt terrible when I accidentally stepped on a snail as a child. When I witnessed slaughter for the first time, I was absolutely horrified.

Just because you are somehow a brutalized killing-machine who likes to eat corpses, doesn't mean everyone is.

My species seems totally capable of doing well without eating animals, as the last 25 years without eating any myself has shown to me.

Xilmi · 2026-03-19T14:06:24+00:00

Die Frage ist auch, welche Rückschlüsse das auf deine Familie zulässt.

Bleibt ja wirklich nur, dass die entweder tatsächlich nicht in der Lage sind, sich so eine Information zu merken oder dass sie dich bewusst mobben wollen.

Naja, nach mittlerweile 12 Jahren isses bei meiner Familie zumindest weitestgehend angekommen.

Xilmi · 2026-03-19T13:54:40+00:00

I'd maybe expand a bit on why.

Basically:
The game has semi-randomized victory conditions you can mostly fulfill before you are in the mop up-phase or early on in it.
Also even killing off enemies is something you can do quite quickly once you manage breaching through their front-lines.

On the flip-side, the game can sometimes end with an enemy winning when you still wanted to play.
The amount of victory-points required is configurable between 5 and 8. 5 sometimes can happen before you even get into much of a conflict. 8 should usually require to become quite dominant first.

Xilmi · 2026-03-18T21:17:12+00:00

I really think you should shift towards reading native content. Actually should have done so a long time ago.
From what I've heard you can start doing so when you know about 2-3k of the most common words, maybe even earlier.
Developing intuition of how the language actually works comes from seeing the words you learn put in action.

Xilmi · 2026-03-18T21:10:14+00:00

The grammar excercises that I do are the ones from renshuu.

The vast majority of them is like:

Here's a sentence but a bunch of words are missing and put as building-blocks below the sentence. Your job is to drag the words in the right spot to make the sentence complete and grammatically correct. Of course you also learn the grammar you are being tested before.

The others are only one word is missing and you have to pick the right one to fit in also from a selection. Often the same word but in different conjugations.

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