Continuing from the topic of “if not Duolingo then what”, we have discussed comprehensive voluntary reading. The Reader may well be thinking, “but I don’t know a single word in Arabic; surely you can’t expect me to pick up lesbian smut in Arabic and learn the language from scratch? No matter how much I’m addicted to lesbian smut, I wouldn’t be able to make heads or tails of it”. Yes, dear Reader, I feel you; who among us hasn't lamented our inability to enjoy Lebanese yuri fanfics in the original Levantine vernacular?
Acquiring a language from comprehensive input is a highly effective approach, but it assumes you’re already done with a “bootstrap” period, where you've gathered enough basic vocabulary and grammar to be able to understand the gist of the input. But if you're starting from zero, how are you are supposed to complete the “bootstrapping”, then? There are many methods, but I want to talk about one of my favourites: tandem learning.
Today’s news was about the stock market crash of Duolingo, and I was talking about how this is one of the few positive things about “AI”: It accelerates the enshittification cycle so much that it may end up killing stuff that is detrimental to society in the first place. Speaking as a linguist who has read the literature on second language acquisition and understands 4 languages, I’ve always maintained that Duolingo is a trap; it will keep you spinning on wheels and feeling as if you’re learning a language, but you can spend infinite hours on it and fully gold a tree and you’ll get nowhere. You would have progressed way more if you had spent the same amount of effort with any other method of language learning, including old-fashioned pen-and-paper grammar drills from textbooks. And the grammar drills suck, too. It’s just that Duolingo sucks ass.
Which brings us to the topic of which methods are actually good. And a commenter gave me the perfect answer: Warrior Cats.
Continuing from Part 1, we're now in the 1990s and will take a look at the videogame boom of home consoles, at a time when it was still difficult to find games where you could be a girl at all—let alone a girl who kisses others girls. Nonetheless, there’s a few early cases of lesbian feelings portrayed to varying degrees of overtness, and in fascinating ways (I ended up writing an entire mini-essay about SaGa Frontier below).
Being irrationally interested in the question of what was the First Yuri Game, I thought being able to read Japanese would make this a simple question, but my naïveté crashed against a messy reality—how much queerbaiting does it take to count something as “lesbian”? how much subtext do I need to assume text? what to do which games that are very obviously sapphic but the author dismisses the notion? are adaptations toned down from a textually yuri original media still yuri? Are porn games made by-men-for-men yuri? if your answer is “no”—how many of the alleged men are closeted trans women? is an empty field of grass the yuri of absence?
Anyway, I'm jotting down my discoveries so far before I forget them.
The way this list ended up is; in this first part I summarise what I found about porn games I never played, from the late 1980s to the early 1990s; in Part 2 I talk about console games with non-pornographic sapphic content from the late 1990s, including my own memories/reviews of those I played back in the day.
Touching Grass: The Game is a solo journaling game played with pen and paper, a deck of Tarot cards, and the plants outside. Touching Grass: The Game is a ludditoludic technoparanoid hallucinatory amusement about the notions of modern technology as a mind-controlling conspiracy; of proximity to plants as magically inducing psychological growth; of “touching grass” as a demanding ascetic exercise in a world of addictive distractions. I have distilled these common feelings until the exhortation to touch grass became an exercise in recreational psychosis.
To finish Touching Grass: The Game, you will need to go outside somewhere between 8 to 78 times, depending on how you play it, the phase of the moon, and your luck. I suggest planning for one outing a day for a couple lunar cycles. If you complete Touching Grass: The Game at least once, you may publicly present yourself as a Phytocultist of the Green Gate.
One of the biggest reliefs ever for me was to find out that native English speakers often can't make out the lyrics of songs either. That native English speakers also feel like modern TV is better watched with subtitles. In the same way, one of the biggest reliefs was finding out that native Japanese gamer also have no fucking clue what the hell Amakusa Shirō-Tokisada is mumbling on Samurai Shodown IV (=Ten-samu). The voice capabilities of the old videogames was quite crunchy, and recordings often only vaguely resembled the original sample. (Somebody could probably do a phonetics paper on this.)
We live in a society that incentivises productivity and consumption, and devalues maintenance, cleaning, repurposing, degrowth; even though the first type of thing is destroying the world and the second type of thing is what is needed to avert collapse. In fact, perversely, the more problems are created by productive labour the greater its prestige, because doubling down is a method of denial.
I was looking at my bright, artistic, sensitive daughter bringing me tea after I watched her play the latest seasonal event in Animal Crossing, and thinking that the caregiving relationship already started to shift directions without even me realising it. I don't remember when it was that she started cooking for us more often than I do; then, at some point, it had just become the norm. At some point she was caring for me when I’m sick and giving pep talks when Ḯ’m sad, as if mirroring back our caring of her. I mean I still expect that at some point she'll leave the nest since she's an adult now and the capitalistic nuclear family has undermined the natural order of things, but we still experience it like this, on the edges.
And what this made me think of is of when she was born. This tiny red little thing, unable to cry or breathe. Of her first 15 days of life in these vaguely dystopic-looking but literally life-saving incubators,¹ her skin now bright yellow from jaundice, her face stuffed with plastic-metal tentacles. What a delicate dance of flesh and machine it must be, to calculate the precise parameters to pump a newborn's lung. To engineer breath in, breath out.²
](https://files.transmom.love/yurige-pt2/asellus.jpeg)
