💾 Archived View for tilde.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2023 › 5-22.gmi captured on 2024-08-25 at 00:23:11. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Dia duit!
Two weeks into Duolingo and I'm now in the Gold League (there's like, five or six tiers). Do enough lessons/get enough points each week, and you move up. So I have. I won my Bronze League by the skin of my teeth, then Silver last week pretty easily. I assume it will just get progressively harder. But, I'm sort of impressed. So many achievements! Gems! Shiny things! Challenges, and practices! The product managers have absolutely mastered the gamification of language learning, holy hell. Incredibly slick, engaging, no rough edges. And even a wicked sense of humour. One of my old online friends, much more fluent in Irish than me, started up again after a few months away. The first sentence Duolingo gave her: "I don't have time for five minutes a day."
I paid for a year of Super (unlimited hearts/you don't have to care about mistakes) because it flips it from stressful to fun. And for the price of a handful of books? Sure.
As an aside, I've been trying to place what Irish's sentence structure (which for basic stuff is VSO) reminds me of, and I just realized that it's first order logic. Predicate(Subject, Object). I found it immediately intuitive but couldn't understand why.
My leg is healing. Still a little sore, still some awkwardness walking, but something happened during the day yesterday where most of the discomfort went away. I can now lift my leg up and around to step over things, I have the full range of motion bending my knee, etc. Glad this is coming around quickly. Still have a wicked bruise, though.
Out with friends yesterday. Needed to buy some new, more formal clothes for some stuff coming up next month. Both my partner and I were in the same boat. Had to open the wallet, but: I look sharp. And she looks downright hot. We're going to look good.
Last night I ordered a USB mic for my phone. I'm trying out some recordings, and sadly my Pixel seems to have audio issues, at least with playing the fiddle close to the phone. I'm going to try a few things tonight, but yeah, yesterday I listened and it was bad - distortion, clipping, etc. It's not like I'm running a jet engine. Googling this (and adding +reddit, of course), it seems to be an issue endemic in newer Pixels. Oof. This was all for convenience more than anything else, hoping to record with video and upload it to my tiny YouTube channel where my videos have had, at best, dozens of hits in the past year. So I'll try the mic, and failing that, some other things (Open Camera instead of the default Camera app, lower FPS, lower quality).
If they're going to put a magic engagement device in my pocket you'd think they'd make me want to use it. See: the owl app.
Ah well. Today: supper with friends. A long walk with the dogs. The younger one will run down to the pond, go in up to his waist, consider whether he wants to swim. Maybe one day he will.
Slán, bheith go maith!