After playing Thimbleweed park, it became clear to me that Ron's a huge fan of David Lynch, whose films often explore Buddhist or Hindu themes of reality as a dream we create inside our heads. I think that this theme appears in most of his games, and the endings of MI2 and Return are no different. When I finished MI2 as a teenager, I felt cheated too, but now as an adult that has spent a lot of time meditating and exploring eastern philosophy, I think there's a lot more to it than I could appreciate at that age.
Starting Strength is a great program, but I can't understand how beginners are doing power cleans without any kind of guidance from a trainer. Power cleans are really hard to learn - it took me months of going to Olympic weightlifting classes to get even close to good form on them. How did you manage to learn this from a book?
Also, you need to be doing them on a lifting platform for the end of the lift, when you have to drop the weight all the way to the floor. Not too many gyms (in the UK, at least) seem to have these.
I think my failure was more due to me using Anki, then abandoning it rather than anything else. It's a really good system. I tried Heisig for a bit, but KanjiDamage worked a lot better for me. Perhaps if I'd have combined it with something like the goldlist method it would have worked better for me.
I used the KanjiDamage method, which is similar to Heisig but available online: http://www.kanjidamage.com/. The advantage is that the mnemonics also help you remember the on-yomi for each character. It's not for everyone, though: the author has a filthy sense of humour! Personally, I found that made the mnemonics even more effective.
I was adding 5 new cards a day, which seems to be quite common amongst language learners. I figured the SRS algorithm would take care of giving me a manageable frequency.
I think you're absolutely right there: constant immersion is needed to provide the context for learning. My mistake was that I wasn't reading enough Japanese to make use of the memorised characters from Anki, so they were quickly forgotten.
There still remains the problem of review card creep, though. After adding about 5 new cards a day for a year and reviewing them every day, I ended up having to review hundreds of cards a day. Your suggestion might fix this too, though, now I think about it. If I'm using the memorised information outside of Anki (by reading Japanese articles, etc), I'll remember them better, leading to less reviews of those cards in the future.
I used Anki for 30 minutes to an hour each day for about a year to memorise around 1500 Japanese characters and their readings, with the aid of a mnemonic technique. So long as you have an hour a day to dedicate to the flashcards without fail, you will retain the memorised information.
My problem was that a job and location change altered my daily routine entirely, so I stopped reviewing the cards. One year later, I have forgotten most of the characters I knew. However, the characters I learned while living in Japan, in context, are still fresh in my mind.
I think that spaced repetition isn't the memory panacea it's always touted to be. It's a great tool for cramming, but soon becomes a pain when you have hundreds of cards to review every day. I've heard good things about the goldlist method, a much more low-tech pen and paper approach. Does anyone have any experience with this technique? It claims to be better for long-term memory: http://huliganov.tv/goldlist-eu/
This was actually the keyboard I was looking for. All I've been able to find here (UK) are the new-style chiclet ones. Looks like the ones you linked have been phased out. I can't even find them on ebay.
Having said that, the IBM one I do have is far better than I even expected. Top-notch build quality, even better than the keyboard on my Lenovo x200.