glowing with fierce delight

[phoenix]

OH MY GOD.

Guys, I am breathless with love for Tokio Hotel today, Bill in particular. I've just watched the footage of their 'acceptance speech' from the 2008 Goldene Kamera awards -- this wonderfully audacious bitchy speech, and he's tense and apparently inches taller than usual and his eyes practically flash with proud anger.



It's (followed? preceded? Not sure) by a brilliant performance of 1000 Meere; again, Bill is on top form, proud and angry. Have you felt it yourself? Full of righteous anger, lit up with stars of rage within, backed by the people you love and you want to scream down the world and all who think you are a tool to be used? That's how I see him in these.



I have, by the way, had an excellent, excellent day! I didn't have much sleep -- four hours, maybe, because I was very concerned about the exam today and stayed up late studying. I'm generally good for nothing early in the morning unless I have to leave (or have people to annoy), simply keep going back to sleep and was alert till near 5am, so it didn't seem worth it to go to sleep earlier. Went to the exam, quite relaxed, feeling like I didn't know enough but giving myself over to the side of my brain that is mysterious and powerful and comes out with sharp focus when I most need it. And the exam was a walkover. (At least, so I thought -- might know better when we get the results!)

I headed home early -- like many of my classmates, I finished in much less than the time allowed, and even checking carefully couldn't keep me too much longer. I brought a book from the library, and sat outside in the sun reading it until it rained, then headed back to my home area and stopped to study in a lovely cafe (dar, that one with the couches and cupcakes!). Cupcake was disappointing (chocolate banana espresso and slightly stale, not trying that again even if it was better than it sounded), but I was great ;) Studied hard, focusedly, read the entire course textbook and all of the notes I had with me.

I stayed there for a few hours, drinking tea, and left after I'd finished all the reading I had. Bounced off home, in the once-again beautiful sunshine, and oh, I felt full of sun indeed. I then proceeded to tidy my room -- vacuuming, moving and disposing of lots of miscellaneous crap, unpacking (!) some things that'd been there since I moved in. It exhausted me, but, oh, good day. I feel like that Dresden Dolls song -- I took out the trash today and I'm on fire. (Which was my bitter anthem of recovery from depression, determinedly doing it by myself, but it's not bitter today, I'm joyous.) THEN my reward -- lots of Tokio Hotel and basking in the delightfulness of the above videos, and sharing the delight with midwintersong.

Good day. Good day. And I can see so clearly, it's not about the day that was in it, it's about how I felt -- moments of achievement, of light and life and laughter, but put them into someone else's life, they might go unnoticed; put them into mine on a dark day, and I'd sorrow through them. Today I was aware, and filled with brightness.

Comments

[damanique]

The second video, the host says "And of course we want to hear something from you; (something something) We heard the concert tickets now sell from 800 dollars but we still get to hear you for free."

So yeah, that followed up on the award.

Why's Bill all pissy? I don't really get it. XD Did he want to tick off all the posh people in the audience? (I think it worked, they look really uncomfortable during the speech XD) I like it though, I didn't think they had that much attitude.

[phoenix]

Apparently they were getting a whole load of shite from the press -- all of those things he said were rumours published about them. I'm not sure why he chose then to make that scene -- getting into a fandom a year late and in a different language is bad for context *g*

[damanique]

Haha, if it's like that, good on them. Don't take crap from the press. :D

I'm usually not aware of how much I understand German 'till I see a random video... it never occurs to me that others don't. English, German and French are mandatory languages at the Dutch higher levels of highschool (i.e. pre-university secondary education. French hasn't really stuck with me much (it's been replaced by Japanese) but I can follow German in speech and writing quite well. (Speaking and writing it myself, not so much.)

Are you gonna plan to learn German following your Tokio Hotel fangirling? ;)

[phoenix]

I aaaam. I seriously am considering it. So far I've just been picking up a few words from videos -- my German vocabulary has tripled, but that's not exactly hard given it consisted of little more than 'guten tag' and 'gesundheit' and 'schadenfreude' ;) I've never studied German. I did learn French well enough that I could *read* it, understand a few words if I heard it, and maybe buy a baguette, but it's not exactly coming in handy.

[damanique]

For me it also helps that Dutch and German are just incredibly alike - it's actually possible for us to go to Germany, speak Dutch with a German accent and be understandable. Of course, Germans would consider us to be morons but at least we'd be understandable on a tourist level.

I'm considering trying my hand at Russian right now. I don't know, just for the heck of it. (Actually because the lyrics of 'Bratja' sound so pretty, and I always thought Russian was a much throatier language.) I've got a talent for language when I want to, so...

Basically when self-teaching I'd start out with vocabulary and work my way up to reading simple sentences, noun/verb structures, and watching subbed tv/movies. Then more reading and listening. Learning a new language is fun when it's not all boring in highschool. (I typically fell asleep during French class >_>)

[phoenix]

Having something interesting to learn from is incredibly important. I think I'm going to start by picking out words in TH-related German writing (or songs? I know someone who initially starting learning a language because she wanted to properly translate a beautiful song). I learn best by immersion, diving in far above my head, I'm beginning to believe.

[damanique]

It's interesting how people learn the same thing differently. Says a lot about the standardized teaching in highschool - and how some people could learn much more from a different approach.

I do well with systematic approaches and lots of practice with language; simply being exposed to it by reading and listening to it. With programming languages however, I need to get examples - an API reference is almost useless if I don't have a code example of the implementation. But just as with normal languages, the best way to learn coding is to do it.

[phoenix]

I've spent so long fighting with the process of learning. I want to feel the knowledge going in, if that makes any sense, to feel it settle into my brain and become available. Instead it happens invisibly: I read, read, practice, then some situation comes up that requires a skill or piece of knowledge I have, and I just respond. Which is cool in itself, but I don't want to trust it, I want to control it. Well, that sounds bad, but I mean direct it much more than I can currently.

[damanique]

Hmmm... I'm not sure what you mean. For me it's typically the other way around: I don't know something, so I look it up. I don't have the knowledge or the skill, so I try to get it. I never find myself already having the knowledge there. I think for me there's a necessary process of 'solidifying' knowledge by applying it to a real situation, which is what happens when I really code something. I can read books about a programming language all day, I can read an API reference, but it will never sink in until I start typing.

[phoenix]

I wasn't very clear at all, maybe because it's something I've tossed around in my mind until it lost most meaning outside of it. I don't really ever feel things sink in. I read about them (loads and loads) then try them out (less often, because it's slower than thought), then feel bored of the topic and restless and yet like I've learned nothing. But then something comes up that requires the information I've read, and it's there. It comes out, and I'm surprised and energised.

[phoenix]

Gotta say, though, code is /hard/ for me. I find it fascinating, but the heavy thinking involved is something I shy away from. I enjoy it and feel challenged and invigorated by it when I catch myself, sit myself down, and go into the zone rather than into a butterfly mood, but it's hard to make myself do that.

[damanique]

I recognise the whole setting-yourself-to-do-it difficulty. But once I get started, it's great.

However, I've been trying to learn how to *think* like a coder for the past six years, and what contributed the most to that was a year of job experience; not college classes. Well, of course Android helped make the final click being my brain and object-oriented thinking, but it took on-the-job practice (with the associated pressure and deadlines you get in the Real World) to give me the basic 'feel' for code - how objects, methods and variables all relate to each other, how the information is supposed to flow between them.

One book that did help me was 'The Object-Oriented Thought Process'. Because that's what it is: a certain way of thinking. Learning the syntax alone won't do it... at some point you get a feel for the code. A lot of senior coders who learned to code on their own don't get this: they learned how to think like that as they went along, or maybe they already did. But I had to learn it the hard way, it didn't come naturally.

There's still a lot of heavy thinking involved and there's always a point where I can't figure it out anymore. Then, I go to sleep, I wake up the next day and somehow my subconscious has processed further and I can tackle the problem again. It sounds silly but it's worked for me at least a dozen times.

I'm interested in how the female coders experience learning how to code, and the thought process involved; I've realized that my own thought process differs radically from that of male programmers. They think in abstractions (like the code is supposed to be, logically, rational, abstract) but when I code I see and feel the flow, the connections between different bits, which information is supposed to go where and which other bit requires that information, etc. I sense that flow the same way I sense connections between people, although the skill is underdeveloped.

I wonder if other female coders have the same thing; it's a more contextual, semantic way of thinking.

For instance, I find metasyntactic variables actually *less* useful because they are already too abstract and devoid of semantic meaning, distracting me from understanding the rest of the code. I prefer using words like "variableone" and "testfunction" rather than "foo" and "bar".

[phoenix]

It occurred to me very recently that I'd been blindly assuming that having English as my native tongue was a pure advantage. I was in IRC, talking about this, and realised that I was talking to people who were not only fluent in my native language, but in their own and perhaps more, who never seemed to make a mistake I hadn't seen a native speaker make, or made myself; who have the English world and the worlds of other languages. I know there's more to a mother-tongue than being able to speak it fluently, but it brought me up short there. I sound a bit confused -- really, the thought's just sinking into my head, primed by the very multilingual TH fandom as well as IRC.

[damanique]

I've had actual English people come up to me (one from Scotland and one from Blackburne, at least) and tell me that my English was better than theirs. My English teacher said the same thing. I'm still very proud of it and not afraid to brag, haha.

But the fact is, English is an important part of Dutch education as far as I know - you already get a little of it in primary school, all the shows are *subbed* - not children's shows, but certainly 13+ series and movies are.

This in contrast with Germany, France and Spain where even shows and movies for adults are dubbed in their own language. I personally think that's not a smart thing to do because it keeps the national level of English proficiency too low (which is particularly noticeable in areas that depend on tourism).

Either way, that's why even the non-academic Dutch folks, even those who dropped out of highschool, still manage to pick up and speak English. It's something we're proud of and we want to speak English at every opportunity (says so in Wikipedia and it's true!)

But when it comes to online communication, English is the language of almost all major sites, it's the most wellknown and shared amongst people and communities; I believe that's why many fandom folks, no matter what their mother tongue, eventually become more fluent in English if they aren't already. Writing in English for years online - on forums, chats, journals - it's all practice even when you don't know it. When I look at my first journal entries it's scary how much my English has improved.

I'm only fluent in Dutch and English myself; my German speaking and writing is full of flaws and I'd need a dictionary to express myself. (Or use Google Translate and correct what I think is off.) I'd quickly get better at it with practice though, because I learned it once, and just have to get that knowledge back. French, I don't know; I completely suck at it now to the point where I can't remember basic words at all. It may come back with practice as well. My Japanese is at tourist level, meaning I could ask my way around Japan without too much difficulty, but wouldn't be able to carry on a decent conversation yet because my grasp and knowledge of verbs is still far behind. That's about it; I really don't count the five words of Spanish I know or the Latin I forgot after a year.

There's one gap between mother tongue and English even I can't cross, though. When attempting to write stories, I can get the dialogue down, as well as lengthy technical/systematical explanations, but descriptions of atmosphere, of feeling and senses, I'm completely blocked. I can barely imagine it, let alone put it into words. I do the same in Dutch and the whole atmosphere of a scene just flows into language by itself. I think I lack some essential knowledge of adjectives and synonyms, but using a thesaurus doesn't help much.

[midwintersong]

I think the Netherlands is the only European country that does subtitling for TV shows and movies instead of dubbing, no? I'm grateful for it--I've had English classes since I was ten years old, but hearing a lot of English on a daily basis has helped me expand my vocabulary tremendously. I feel kind of sorry for the people who have to deal with dubs :P. My dad watches a lot of German TV, but I honestly can't stand it--the voices don't match the people I'm watching and it's just all kinds of awkward. I can't imagine almost never hearing my favorite actor's real voice!

I'm only fluent in Dutch and English myself; my German speaking and writing is full of flaws and I'd need a dictionary to express myself.

Yeah, same here. I can follow and read German just fine, but speaking (and writing) it is a whole different matter. I've also long forgotten the vast majority of grammar rules that I've been taught in high school. Since I live close to the German border, I do get a fair amount of German customers on any given day, but conversations with them are limited to just, "hi, how are you? Your total's ___, have a nice day!" and occasionally giving directions.

Watching Tokio Hotel videos, though (to get back on topic!) is helping with my grasp of the German language :P. I can follow ~90% of their interviews without any real issues, even with Bill talking as fast as he does (and as phoenix once mentioned in irc, that boy talks in paragraphs), and I can feel my German vocabulary get bigger. Which is nifty :D