iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

I see the texts, the signs, hear the passers-by, and I can't possibly ignore the rich cultural complexity underlying all of this! I must learn, I will learn

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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Incredible things are happening in the Singlish Dictionary

"Recently Added Terms" includes words such as leehsienlowkenuinely and leekuanyewinely

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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

btw as of 2026 there are a total of 3953 emoji in Unicode For comparison, 2136 kanji are considered to be in common use in Japan. A corresponding number in Chinese is 3500 or so. Thus, if we wanted to make logographic English real, we should be able to do so now!

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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

A "Billion Laughs Attack" sounds like an anime villain kind of thing, maybe a bit JoJo-esque, so it's disappointing to look it up and learn that it's just an exponentially expanding XML or Yaml

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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Maybe not as much, but I keep thinking of 尝 (to taste, try out, experience) as making a 😋 or 😛 sort of face, if you squint

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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

I'm going to Hong Kong next week Everyone is telling me the following ahead of my trip: East Asian? | speak Cantonese | speak Mandarin no | 😲😲🥳🥳🎉 | 😲🎉 yes | 😃 | 🙅🙅👎🤬🤬 So even though I'm not East Asian, I'm still slightly scared to attempt Mandarin there I think

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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

魔 is one of my favourite characters to think of it. Something about it really visually embodies the awe and terror and the bewitching mystery of magic, were it to exist

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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

I want to say that it's been 4 years for the technology to prove itself for humanity and it failed. Software: worse. Writing: worse. Graphics: worse. Brains: fried. People: deskilled. Diseases cured: 0. How can "but any moment now" be treated seriously? The counterpoint though..

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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

I think I actually just don't want to see any AI image ever again. I don't want to have to second-guess every image I see for inhumanity. And those eldritch creations started to make their way into my dreams too. Begone.

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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

An actually embarrassing thing about Japanese is how drawn out it can get in comparison. 「なければなりません」in Chinese that's like two characters tops

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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Accidentally wrote a bullet point in this form earlier today. Just a glimpse etc.

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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

It's cute how there's often a meta-process for a process. E.g when tidying things up it's difficult to know where you want the things to be in the first place, but a sweep of one area at a time won't hurt, and that's how you slowly figure things out while making visible progress!

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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

So now I know that the Sinosphere equivalent to Christmas decorations in early November is Mid-Autumn decorations starting mid-August

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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

It's difficult to forget that China is being evil about a few things at least when any time you load one of their maps they make sure to remind you with the prominent dashed line

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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

the Tetris effect for language learning is that words echo through my head words like 你想吃什么 and 我要去旅行

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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Looking up words on Pleco is so fun because it always goes <the word you were looking for> (internet slang) <a perfect one-character homophonic substitution in the word you were looking for that adds a hilariously accurate shade of meaning>

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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

I can't be a woke, I can't be a chud, I can't be an abundance lib, I can't be a don't-tread-on-me libertarian, I can't be a sewer socialist, I can't be a rationalist, I can't be an accelerationist, I can't be a doomer, I can't be a CCP shill, I can't be an LKY shill

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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

Singapore CBD could go so hard if only they had the guts to pedestrianise it

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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

Lee Kuan Yew: unlike those dirty overcrowded cities of Asia, I'll make Singapore a Garden City also Lee Kuan Yew: draws giant stroads through central SG what did he mean by this

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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

Not been posting politically recently because my opinions once again have entered the nuance hat stage

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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

Dipped prata in sugar today and it tasted so much like Polish faworki

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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Did you know that they broke the display of images over there at X dot com? you get to enjoy the exclusivity of good-looking image grids here now!

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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

In some way, learning Chinese in Singapore is like what I imagine learning Dutch in the Netherlands must be like. You can see it everywhere, but no-one will ever speak it to you

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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

I've come to associate this type of font with Singapore. I like it

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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

A recurring brainworm of mine is that people would see malformed sentences from me and think it's a sign of ESL, when actually it's just me being a sloppy typist, randomly dropping words, or making an incomplete edit

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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

At the cliff edge of the business core, arcologies stand like giants, and face the eerie emptiness ... what a stupid city

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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

The possibility I'm scared off the most is that it's actually too late for me now and I would never be able to internalise another language's inner workings again, only twist it at the surface level. One purpose for the latter project is to prove to myself that's not the case

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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

I wonder if some of my Japanese grammar gaps are from never having done a high-quality textbook. I'm having a revelation after a revelation right now!

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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

I wonder if some of my Japanese grammar gaps are from never having done a high-quality textbook. I'm having a revelation after a revelation right now!

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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Another friend's Discord account got hacked

xkcd #2057 cropped "I wonder if today will be the day everyone gets hacked and it all finally collapses"

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Reposted by Maya ☁️➡️🌸

Vampirical Critter 🏴‍☠️ @dejectedvole.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

Woman goes to endocrinologist, says she's very dysphoric. She needs HRT to transition. The endo says "The great clown Pagliacci is in town. Go see him. That will make you happy". The woman cries and says "Can I just have HRT please?". The endo replies: "Get the fuck out or I'm calling security"

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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

in fairness, I'm kind of spreading myself thin between the two distinct research projects of "how do I speedrun Mandarin to where my Japanese currently is" and "can I become acceptably fluent in Japanese at all"

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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

So to expand the innermost frontier now I'm getting AI to produce me 100 sentences to translate from English -> Japanese, it grades my attempts, it recommends fill-in-the-blank exercises for the common errors, I do 100 of those, repeat

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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

I'm dismayed that I'm now finding Mandarin more fun to say out loud than Japanese. The latter feels bland now. My muscles are not being exercised

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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

I had a nightmare that somebody was explaining to me that in this Mandarin word the characters on their own have the tones 4 and 2 respectively, but put together a pronunciation shift made them be pronounced 2-4 in that particular word only

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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

I had shui kueh today and the main thing I'd like to report is that it hits the exact flavour profile of pierogi ruskie, just with different base ingredients. We really are more alike than we're different

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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

One thing that mathematics teaches us is that it doesn't stop at one object-level and one meta-level; the meta continues. Just because you discovered lvl2 past the lvl1, doesn't mean it stops there. Oh, you discovered the levels go indefinitely? lvlω is waiting for you!

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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

I'm unable to internalise that at least some people find at least some of what I write interesting at least some of the time. I treat it as merely an empirical observation, but I don't really believe it, and thus publishing always brings a tiny moment of dissociation

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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

I dream of putting up a personal website for appreciation by yet-unknown visitors. But without an external reference it would be nothing. Dialogue with the world is how ideas develop, and hence I post on Twitter

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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

current hubris levels: quadrilingual by 2027

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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

At some point in Earth's history aura-farming became a viable evolutionary strategy and we've never recovered since then

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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Apparently picking a food-based nickname for oneself is a very English-speaking Southeast Asian thing to do. Today was like the 3rd time I encountered this phenomenon

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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Singapore is where the "primary school globalism" lives on. Every poster makes sure to include the 3 or 4 races, smiling in harmony. For better or worse.

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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Crazy how programming starts off as "oh, I can make a computer follow commands, how neat" and then 10 years later you end up like "what is the nature of computation? of systems? of life? of the universe?" solely in the pursuit of creating slightly better software

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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

The two currents are at their best when they coexist, nominally set against each other but each becoming better for it

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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

I fed this as a prompt into an LLM and it spit out Lisbon as the natural candidate. Make of that what you will

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Maya ☁️➡️🌸 @mayaofspring.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

All other concerns aside, if the Chinese century were to result in a reverse Singapore/Hong Kong (a Western city speaking European-accented Mandarin), that would go quite hard

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