Promiseland

[Fetian]

Happy sparky sparky boom day

[Fetian]

So duolingo has two features in addition to your standard lessons: challenges, and leagues. Challenges are one of three timed quizzes that pull a random set of questions from lessons you've completed, and if you finish the quiz within the time limit you get (up to) 40 xp. Leagues are a ranking system of users, the more XP you have, the higher ranking league you're in. Diamond is the top league, and there's a badge/achievement you can unlock by finishing #1 in Diamond

I am a completionist and want that badge, but there are some complications with how duolingo has implemented all of this -- which is to say they did it badly

For a start, main criticism that everyone has: neither the way XP is implemented nor the leagues actually incentivises you to learn a language -- in fact, as I'll get to in a second, it disincentivises that. Aside from the XP boosts you get occasionally, the timed quizzes are the best way to get XP, and as you may note they are explicitly quizzing you on things you've already learned

They also have a set amount of time to finish regardless of how far you are in your lessons, and can pull from any unit in those lessons, meaning that you'll sometimes get a series of "what does [word] mean" questions, and sometimes get "translate this entire sentence" questions, and the latter -- especially as you get further and the sentences get more complicated -- are often actually impossible to finish in the given time, no matter how fast you answer

This means that being further in your lessons can make it impossible to finish at #1, especially in the higher-tiered leagues where people are naturally going to be more competitive (you don't exactly reach diamond by accident, see), and so it's more advantageous to finish just enough units to unlock the timed quizzes and then stay there, racking up XP by answering the same simple questions over and over again

And all this means is that I've been incentivised to reset my lesson progress so I can stay at a lower unit until I get the Finish #1 In Diamond badge, at which point I can (I hope) stop caring about leagues and XP entirely and just learn lessons

It's a bad system, that requires gaming to be competitive at, so that's what I'm doing

[Fetian]

I considered (and attempted) starting a third language, but it turns out that Japanese is a really strategic language to use for this because duolingo doesn't want to assume you have a Japanese-compatible keyboard, so never forces you to type out answers in the earlier lessons. Having to type rather than select a multiple-choice option is a disadvantage in a timed trial, so

Could probably have tried a language with a cyrillic alphabet or something, but I'll just test back up to where I left off when I'm done cheating. It is after all also advantageous to be learning a language you already know, and I know Japanese up to the point I'm stopping

[Fetian]

I just need to sharpen a knife and take a shower and I will have done everything I set for myself today

[Fetian]

Knife sharpening isn't happening tonight but I'm going to jump in the shower here in a minute. But yeah! Cleaned the doors, the microwave, the kitchen counters, the kitchen windows, the stove, the sink, the cabinets, the kitchen-utensil-holders (and organised them though I don't expect them to stay that way); emptied the dishwasher, ran it again, emptied it again, got it half-full, and cleaned the couple of dishes that the dishwasher didn't get. Obviously I am very low on spoons after all that

During dinner, ash and I watched a few episodes of Steven Universe, he's now gone to bed and I'm hanging out in my room about to take that shower I mentioned. Then I'll just chill until bedtime

[Fetian]

Oh wow my twitter RSS feeds have spontaneously started working again and also dumped everything I haven't seen yet into my feed at once

Which is, a lot, since they were out for, uh, a week

 
This is preferable to the items just disappearing into the ether, I suppose, but it's a lot to suddenly have to go through

 
The question is if this is intentional or another weird fuckup. Will these still work another week from now

[Fetian]

Had someone yell at me for wearing a mask for the first time! Getting ready to go into a store, a coward in a car yelled "You don't need a mask! Go back to the bay area!" as they drove off

[Fetian]

I am in Tahoe with a Sor! It's very nice here and we're having a good time. Tomorrow we take a train down to Sacramento where I will continue having a Sor for about a week

[Fetian]

We have walked from California to Nevada

[Fetian]

Okay! I am free from social obligations once more!

This has been a long couple of weeks -- fun, but a lot all in a row. On the 8th we had company for the first time in a long time, a few friends coming over for snacks and dinner and games and just general chitchat. We're definitely hoping to do it again, possibly on an every-other-monthly basis. I also played some jackbox games for the first time, because Sarah suggested it, ash bought one of the boxes, and we all messed around with it for a while.

The very next day, I took the train from here to Truckee and then a shuttle from there to Tahoe, where I spent a couple days in a hotel with a Sor, who was in town for a wedding (I was not invited to the wedding, so was arriving post-that). Tahoe is a gorgeous place with a very interesting layout, and free buses that will take you to the various locations that are on the other side of enormous swaths of nothing (or golf courses). Those locations are in and of themselves extremely walkable, but obviously transit of some kind is required for getting out of them

It's now hard to pin down what exactly we did on which days, but we did a lot of walking, ate ice cream at two Voted Best Ice Cream In Tahoe joints that were a half-block away from each other (one of them was clearly the superior), walked to the California/Nevada state line -- this was an Adventure when we realised our path was going through a gated community, with an open gate at one end and a closed one at the other, which we decided to hop, and due to this also decided to shuttle back to the hotel -- played a couple rounds of minigolf, and just generally enjoyed the weather and the view and being able to walk to one of a dozen different restaurants when we got hungry. A+ vacation, would love to do it again some time.

On the following Tuesday, we shuttled back to Truckee, where we also did a fair bit of walking around and looking at stuff. I would love to do more just, taking the train to someplace nearish to a train station, staying for a day or two, and then training back home, it seems a neat way to see and experience different places.

We also did a lot a lot of waiting for the train, because it was several hours late, and much of that was unfortunately in the sun because the boarding area was unsheltered and obviously we didn't want to be waiting somewhere else. I actually got sunburned, which is a rare occurrence

The train remained delayed, of course, as it travelled from Truckee to Sacramento, so we also got in further into the afternoon than expected (except that you do just expect amtrak to be delayed), and it was Very Warm in Sacramento by then (unfortunately the wedding had decided to happen just before Sacramento was due to get hit by an extremely nasty heat wave, meaning Sor just missed the extremely nice weather we had the week before), but we successfully took the lightrail train from the station to my house, where we proceeded to hang out for a week

Again, what happened when is murky, but we walked to the donut place for breakfast and the grocery store for groceries, we went to the zoo, we went minigolfing at an underground minigolf course (very nice in the heat, and pretty empty on a tuesday morning, predicted to be insufferable when crowded due to echoes), we wandered around Old Sac, did some shopping, wandered around the Commons, drank some smoothies. We spent a fair amount of time in the pool, and playing video games -- more jackbox, and I introduced Sor to Plate Up! and Stanley Parable, both of which went over well. During our Plate Up!s, I learned a lot about conveyor belts and automation, and now have plans for a conveyor-belt sushi restaurant for my solo play. We also played with ash, first a pie place that among other names was called Fast Pies at Ridgemont Hi (character limits), and a coffee place that was called, among other names, The Ghost Pees (and Fluids, and Lizard Lactate). The coffee shop content is new to me, and turns out to possibly be designed for solo play, meaning that it was a much more relaxed experience than the game usually offers, which was very funny in its own way

(Sor's and my restaurants had names including "Sweet Glue! For Babies!" and "We're a Little Drunk"; specifically our pizza place had names including "House of Broccoli" and "Pizza is the Only Thing")

Yesterday we (ash, specifically) drove Sor to the airport where goodbyes were made, and I came home and locked myself in my room to be asocial for a while. Today I am easing back into a routine that doesn't have to include a second person, but while Sor was here I was pretty consistently waking up at around 9, which I am okay with trying to carry forward

I also am sloooowly catching up on things I missed by not being on the internet for a while, but I'm also okay with taking a few days to do that.