ironic subtitle aside, life of mati the mati review is my new thing on here, where i write about more daily things. sometimes i don't feel like writing about linguistics or any other «scientific» topic at length, i just want to talk about how my week was and what music i've been listening to. anyway let's get to it

music; all links are to youtube

  • ノア noah, by phantom siita. this is their new song that they released a week ago, and oh my god it's so good… and of course it's good! no one other than hiiragi kirai themself wrote the song! and i love hiiragi kirai, they're one of my favorite vocaloid producers, genuinely. another of my favorite vocaloid producers also released a song recently,

  • タンガリンガロン tangaringaron, by takeaki wada. i can't exactly say this is takeaki wada's absolute peak, but it is a good song. if you like his newer songs — which are less «rock-like» and more vibey — you'll like this one too. it also has absolutely adorable animations (by wataru arimoto, who i didn't know before).

  • 合わせ鏡のウワサ awase-kagami no uwasa ('rumors of the infinity mirror'), by yomitan akane. if you know yomitan akane, you probably know them from nidaime enma ('yama the second'), their most popular song on youtube — and just like nidaime enma, awase-kagami is so catchy. it's so good please listen to it.

language things

i kind of want to get back to esperanto, but not in an engaging-with-the-community way, because i really don't like esperanto-speaking communities. they have a serious problem with something that they don't really have a name for, but that another conlang community, the lojban one, does: xekce /ˈxekʃe/. (i wish the font this website uses had better ipa support, but oh well.)

xekce is basically being pedantic about things that don't matter when correcting other people's grammar. the word itself is short for the first 3 letters of «xkcd», the webcomic, because xkcd comic #191 is about lojban:

two stick-figure characters talking to each other. one of them says, «if you learned to speak lojban, your communication would be completely unambiguous and logical.» the other one replies, «yeah, but it would all be with the kind of people who learn lojban.»

and «the kind of people who would learn lojban» are more or less the same kind of people who learn esperanto, except they're less likely to be interested in computer programming. the grammatical pedantry is still very much the same.

anyway, esperanto rant aside, you can tell that i've been interested in lojban recently myself just from this, right? there's places in the lojban community that aren't as pedantic as the stereotype — and i happened to find that place, and i've made a few friends over the language, although i can't exactly speak it that well.

i won't get much into what lojban is here — it's a conlang based on predicate logic that's supposed to be syntactically unambiguous; if you want to know more, please read the wikipedia article. but i may write a thing about it here once i get better at speaking it. all i have to say for now is that it's a very interesting language, precisely because of the unnaturalness and the quirks it has.

going back to esperanto, though: i kind of want to write cover lyrics for vocaloid songs in esperanto, but i don't have the vocabulary or the creativity for this. maybe i will finish something someday though.

what else

eh, not much — but my mom came over this weekend to visit me, before going on a trip to south africa that she's only going to come back from two weeks from now, and that was very nice of her. i love my mom.

anyway, that's all for today. have a nice day, friends, enemies and everything in between! ^^

— mati