Hi there! I call myself Shounenbat. I'm likely to post a lot of things about a lot of different topics. I love to learn and will share just about anything! I'm new to the world of cryptocurrency, so I'll be reading about it way more than writing about it. I enjoy programing (I love making indie games), writing, language learning, history, science, and philosophy. I'm always picking up new hobbies, too, because I can't be content with anything forever. Nice to meet you all!
I'm Beginning My Crypto Journey I’m celebrating today. A few good things have happened after such a long stretch of misfortune. Firstly, I started rekindling my interest in cryptocurrency. Sheer amounts of life setbacks, catastrophes, etc. have kept me from working for way too long, so I wasn’t able to invest in any crypto back in the day. I won’t get into it, but I’ve been in dire straights for an interminably long time, but the Libertarian in me was still interested in…
Diving Back into Ecco the Dolphin If you're around my age (perhaps a bit older) or younger, you'll of course have those games from your childhood that intrigued you, but you just didn't “get”, for lack of a better word. They were supposed to be fun, and they started out so interesting, or scary, or funny, but then that wretched, difficult gameplay stepped in and made the whole thing feel like a chore with no reward. You go through life, that one game occasionally breaching…
Brutality, Women's Rights, and the Rise of Suffrajitsu Happy International Women's Day! Sorry for the tardiness of this article. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTYv4wT8g4E There's something very unfortunate about the narrative of women's rights. First of all, when I was in school the suffrage movement wasn't covered at all. We neither learned of Mrs. Pankhurst and the struggle for the vote in England or about the horrors faced by American suffragettes. We didn't know that…
Life Hacks: Featuring Epicurus I originally wrote this article for Medium, which you can read here. I think I'll sometimes be posting an article on both places if I particularly enjoyed writing it. This will serve as my first cross-post, so hooray for me! https://medium.com/@marketingwhirlwind/life-hacks-featuring-epicurus-d42f4e9cc794 What Made Epicurus Different Once upon a time, there was a crazy group of Greek hippies called the sophists, headed by a guy called…
Living Your Passion – In Memory of Moses McCormick aka Laoshu50500 I'm so new to this platform that I haven't had the opportunity to write about one of my greatest passions in life: language learning. I caught the language bug when I was around 13-years-old, independently studying Japanese and Italian. I put Italian on hold to study Japanese better (let's face it, it takes longer to learn), then I went back to Italian and moved on to Finnish, Norwegian, Ancient Greek, Old…
Gooddollar: The Future or a Failure? As part of my brand new, earnest foray into crypto, I have discovered the Gooddollar project. Apparently, G$ is a new stablecoin that uses the Fuse.io, an Etherium side-chain and is backed by Dai, a cryptocurrency that aims to keep its value close to that of the USD. Its purpose is to bring a universal basic income to the masses via cryptocurrency. https://wallet.gooddollar.org?inviteCode=2ExJ8oDDT7 **A Noble Goal** Andrew Yang's run for…
The Baker's Cat This story is part of a collection of original fairy tales I put together, mostly cobbled together from the stories my grandmother would make up and tell me. I published them on Amazon, and you can check them out here if you want. This is just one story. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1703433831 There once was a baker who was renowned for his incredible pastries. His cakes were mildly decorated, but their taste was impeccable. He'd come to own his shop through…
The Joy of Fairy Tales There's something that's a load of fun when it comes to fairy tales. Fairy tales aren't just short stories that are set in a fantastic storybook land, they aren't always just little morality tales, often wrapped in gruesome scenery; nor are they public domain cash cows for the Disney company to make bank on; they're something else entirely. They're older than we imagine (barring fairy tales written by more contemporary authors), often illogical, and…
First Impressions of Assimil's Russian with Ease For me, Russian is intimidating. This is coming from someone whose first earnest (and successful) attempt at learning a foreign language was Japanese. Perhaps stemming from my love of the culture and many bits of media I could use to fuel my drive to keep learning, Japanese was a tedious but relatively easy language for me to learn. I started on Norwegian next, and I'm about an A2-B1 (around intermediate) level in that…
Gina Carano, Cancel Culture, and the New Puritan Model According to Forbes, the firing of Gina Carano was a huge mistake for the Disney company. Likely, it was also a bad mistake for Lucasfilm, too. Gina Carano first garnered controversy when she politely declined to put pronouns in her bio, as many Twitter uses also don't do, and the outrage mob began harassing her. After the attacks went on for some time, she, as a joke, decided to put beep/bop/boop as her pronouns.…
5 Mistakes Newbie Entrepreneurs Make I haven't touched on marketing at all on this site. I'm trying to touch on everything I enjoy writing about, and that includes entrepreneurship. I'm celebrating finally being able to accept cryptocurrency on my site, so this post is an extension of that! This particular article isn't geared for the eCommerce space, which is the focus of my celebration, but it will help out everyone.…
Lamenting the Lack of Crypto Marketplaces Do you want to know what sucks? The fact that places like Amazon, Etsy, and eBay don't accept any cryptocurrencies. Now, I recently got my own website to accept crypto, but, let's face it, people are far more likely to trust a place like eBay and Amazon. As of right now, there are three marketplaces I can think of where average people can sell their thrift or other wares for crypto: OpenBazaar/Haven, Bitify, and Particl. That's the…
An Ancient Greek Horror Story Before you ask, no, this isn't an original tale of mine. This is a look at one of the earliest ghost stories we have on record, and I'm sure that there are many other eerie, haunting tales that predate this one – they just didn't have the luck to be recorded and preserved throughout the canyon of time. In modern times, around 46% of Americans believe that ghosts are real. You may be thinking that that's an impressive number, or perhaps you're…
Amazon's Delve Into Crypto? My last article was about ancient ghost stories, and I planned to follow up on that today. However, research is taking a little longer than I anticipated, so I decided to follow up instead on a different article in which I bemoaned the lack of marketplaces where one can buy things with crypto or sell things with crypto. In it, I lamented that Amazon didn't accept crypto, but someone on Reddit pointed out that Amazon had been laying the groundwork…
The Mill - Part 1 *Time for another fairy tale. Again, this fairy tale is part of a collection I've self-published. I'll be revising the publication, so I won't link it right now, but maybe I'll edit it in later. In the meantime, please enjoy this, and if you like it, you may like my* *previous fairy tale also**.* https://read.cash/@Shounenbat/the-bakers-cat-0f2c4a87 The old mill had stood there for at least one hundred years, maybe more. It depended on who you asked and how…
The Mill Part 2 Part 1 can be read here. https://read.cash/@Shounenbat/the-mill-part-1-b66e8a6c He knew somewhere in his jumbled mind that he must sound incredibly foolish, perhaps even inebriated, which no royal would ever stoop among the common folk, but the innkeeper paid no mind. He handed a key over and said, “Second door up the stairs, Highness.” After seeing that the prince was managing to climb the stairs all right, he retired to his own bed in the back room. The…
The Myth of Useless Languages This article was originally written by me for Medium.com, but I wanted to post it here in case any of you are interested in language learning! Too bad there's no community for it. I perused our ever-boring newspaper in search of anything worth reading when I came across an article about our local school's experiment with implementing German classes in its curriculum. For years they'd offered only Spanish, and since I was teaching myself Japanese…
Ancient Roman Vampires?!? Okay, before I veered off into sharing old stories, I wrote about an Ancient Greek ghost story (totally true, according to Pliny the Younger) and how many of our modern tropes regarding ghosts and the stories they partake in are actually very old. Today I'm going to look at a sort of ancient vampire, although many other ancient cultures also had similar stories. https://read.cash/@Shounenbat/an-ancient-greek-horror-story-09e54c6f No, I'm not talking…
Sloths are Amazing! I'm an animal lover. Specifically of the variety who prefer the companionship of animals to humans. You know, the best kind of people! We live in our houses with our animal family members and eschew the rest of the world until it becomes impossible to do so. This isn't going to be a post about pets, though. I was tempted to write about dog breeds, language learning, or some other subject I know so well that I don't have to research, as I'm currently deep…
Undoing Extinction? How Russia Plans to Resurrect the Woolly Mammoth I originally posted this article on Medium.com. It's a subject I'm fascinated by, so I'm also posting it here! https://marketingwhirlwind.medium.com/undoing-extinction-how-russia-plan-to-resurrect-the-woolly-mammoth-cb252a229f4f I was a kid when *Jurassic Park* came out, allowing me and many other moviegoers to see, for the first time, how a living and breathing dinosaur might have actually looked and…
@Shounenbat