i hear the voices when I'm dreaming

1) finally got around to subscribing to BritBox -- partly because I've been wanting to binge Poirot, partly because they have the old Doctor Who (which I've seen scattered episodes of but not even a quarter), partly because I'm grumpy at Disney/Hulu for raising prices. Britbox should keep me happy for a while though. And when I finish the 26 seasons of Old Who and 13 seasons of Poirot, it'll probably be somewhere around 2050... lol

2) I'm kind of annoyed that not all of Doctor Who is available right now. D+ has the Ncuti Gatwa ones, but nothing else. I own the first few seasons of New Who, which is rewatch for me, but when it was first airing I stopped having access partway through Matt Smith, and I haven't seen Peter Capaldi or Jodie Whittaker at all. Obviously I can watch out of order, but. Grump.

3) My current headcanon for Phantom of the Opera is that Erik is some flavor of asexual. He wants Christine as a bride, but it's a very child-ish "marrying means you're together forever" attitude, and if he knows newlyweds sleep together, he's oblivious to that being anything other than cuddling. He doesn't take advantage of Christine when she's down in his lair. And the sequence of "Either be with me forever or your boyfriend dies" "What if I kiss you?" "... ... ... ok you can leave" fits in, because in my head he's like "??? is this sex? Gross???" This amuses me way too much somehow...

4) I've pretty much decided to quit Duolingo when I hit 4000, which is in a bit over a month. The content is getting more irritating and while I am a little sad to not see how far I go, fuck Duolingo.

5) Am doing a daily drawing challenge (via Marc Brunet on YouTube -- he has a "learn to draw in 30 days" video with prompts. Posting the oh-so-exciting results to my instagram ... if you're desperate to see a bunch of squares and circles and cylinders and stuff, lol.

Today, duolingo informed me to say it updated my status to say "9+ years" (rather than 8).

I'm guessing it pinged today because I have a 3,285-day streak, which is 9x365; but my own records indicate it's since Nov 26 of 2014, not Dec 22. And anyway I'm grumpy because that doesn't include leap days.

(Technically, duo isn't *wrong*, because you can't hit a 3285-day streak in under 9 years. And coding checks for "multiples of 365" is easier than also storing associated dates.)

Anyway. Go me, except I need to learn not to look up if longer streaks exist because they do and then I feel pathetic for "only" having 9 years.

...ok I'm kinda confused.

Duo gave me a sentence that included "we have to thank him" (tenemos que agradecerle) and my brain screeched to a halt over the indirect object (-le, not -lo). English doesn't have different indirect/direct pronouns, but "him" sure felt like a direct object. Subject thanks object. And I looked it up and agredecer is a transitive verb, so why the pronoun...

???

Note to self, look that up.

Incidentally, helpful note for Duo folk: for refrigerator-magnet questions, where you're assembling sentences from provided words, there seem to always be four items left over. This won't help you find the *right* words, but e.g. if you have five left you probably left a word out.

...now if only there were a word count on freeform entry, lol. I have a bad habit of dropping estar (to be) from sentences structured as "to-be verbing". Duo asked for "we are buying them a ticket" and I typed "comprándoles un boleto" instead of "estamos comprándoles un boleto". Oops.

I can low-key feel myself getting burned out on Duolingo

and on one hand I've been doing it for literally years, largely because it's the sort of thing that works best for me (small commitment plus daily streak plus "streak saver" mechanism to protect against one forgetting), and neither Duo itself nor the Spanish I'm doing is really necessary in the long run

(and I don't really get around to doing things with my Spanish that would actually improve it... I'm kind of sitting at, idk, second year proficiency, but I keep never quite getting around to podcasts or movies en español, or practicing in real life settings)

but otoh I like being able to say what my streak is, and I'm pretty sure that if it breaks I'll just stop entirely but I can't bring myself to do that deliberately

Like, even when I've been too sick to really function, or migrainey, or at dog training camp, I squeezed out a practice (often just a repeat of early lesson), and so I should be able to do it when I'm feeling ok

and I can't tell if the urge to stop is self protective (because burnout) or self destructive / self sabotage

I'm a few weeks late for this, but my Duolingo streak has officially passed 3000.

*blinkblink*

I have no idea how, except that streak freezes help, but ... huh.

I really wish I could just ... install languages into my brain.

I was talking to an aide today about stuff relating to when I was in undergrad, and mentioned the thing where I used to be near-fluent in German but then didn't practice it enough and basically have nothing left but residual pronunciation and a few random words and phrases. Also my last German class was in the 90s anyway so I have no internet terms.

I've tried resurrecting it with casual Duolingo use, but these days I can't remember new stuff easily, especially gender and cases. I'm managing Spanish ok, with two genders and four words for "the" (gender x plurality), but German has three genders (plus plural, though IIRC plural isn't gendered, so it's sort of a fourth gender) and at least four cases (nom gen dat acc) and therefore a fuckton of words for "the" (five unique ones, der die das den dem, but der is masc nom and also fem dat/gen, and den is masc acc and also plural dat) and while I can chant "der die das die, den die das die, dem der dem den, des der des der" all I want, I can't make it stick, and even more I can't make it stuck in practice because I can't remember the gender of nouns to save my life. And Duo treats all errors the same -- ich lese eine Buch [should be ein] is counted as wrong as ich lese ein Apfel -- which isn't fair because I'm pretty sure people would understand what I'm saying with the first one even if it sounds wrong!

But I miss German. And my Spanish is ... okay at understanding written, but weak at generating. Especially if I'm put on the spot; my mind goes blank. And I can't understand fast spoken. And I'm crap at tenses.

Plus I'm goofing off with both Yiddish and Ukrainian on duo, but at some point it will get too hard and I'll stop. And I used to do Japanese, at least able to read hirigana and was working on learning the kanji, but that's gone poof, and I didn't even get to the grammar. And I'd love to be able to learn Korean, but ... at least I had some familiarity with Yiddish alphabet (because Jewish stuff) and Cyrillic (because of the Russian I took in college). I don't need yet another completely different alphabet system.

I haven't done any serious language study in a while, either. One lesson per day on Duolingo, sure. But learning languages takes repetition, all the more so because I can't learn by (hand) writing any more. So I could maybe get my German back if a) I didn't let myself get distracted with other languages, b) I typed stuff up and made neat charts and whatnot, c) I wrote down Every Fucking Vocab Word with its greenery and referred back until it stuck, and ... basically treated it as A Job.

But I'm too lazy and too tired and too braindead for all that.

Sigh.

I keep not getting around to posting here. Not sure how much is "typing is hard" (this entry took an hour! On my tablet, which I can type on faster than on my computer!) and how much is just being out of the habit.

Ended up not doing turkey day at my dad's, mostly for mental health (I have Opinions about people who choose not to get vaccinated during a pandemic "because freedom", and I didn't want to spend the entire time watching what I said) but also because... I'd made a comment on twitter about wanting to do Hanukkah this year, so my dad offered to do latkes and candles last Sunday, aka the first night, and sent me home with the menorah and candles and some thanksgiving leftovers, which ended up being pretty close to perfect.

The candles, incidentally, claimed to be dripless. They... uh... well... weren't. I'll upload photos at some point.

I'm also sort of getting into Yiddish on duolingo, though I'm shaky on some of the alphabet (duo uses the Hebrew lettering for Yiddish, not the transliteration into Ronan lettering) ... I've got the consonants pretty well, but the vowels are killing me. And for the language itself, it's Germanic enough that I'm both doing okay and hella confused. There's a vowel shift going on, making words sound like other words.

From memory -- at least in the Hungarian Yiddish dialect duo is using, the word for "you" is /dee/ instead of German du. The word for here is either /du/ or /doh/, i forget which, instead of German da, and I keep wanting to translate doh as there (German dort). I also get into trouble with /vee/ and /voh/; in German the first (wie) is how and the second (wo) is who, but in Yiddish /vee/ is who. (Amusingly, how many -- in German wieviel -- sounds like wiffle, just with v instead of w.)

It's kind of like the German interference I had learning Russian. The word /ya/ is yes in German and I in Russian; /da/ is yes in Russian and here in German; all very frequently used words. So inevitably I'd use the wrong one ...

Sometimes it's not confusing between words, just hard to remember. I can after a second remember that /daan/ in Yiddish is your (in German it's dein, pronounced /dayn/ rhyming with wine) but trying to generate the Yiddish is harder, both because remembering THAT the vowel shifts isn't the same as remembering HOW, and because the vowel letters are hard for me to remember.

Anyway, at least duolingo has taught me how to say that things like "a zebra in a pyramid". So helpful?

(Ok to be fair they were teaching similar-to-English words for alphabet practice .. /a zehbra een a piramid/ or /a kehmul een London/ are easier to decipher than, uh, other things.)

+ + +

Totally unrelatedly, the Babylon 5 rewatch I'm doing with my mom -- so slowwww because I have limited mom stamina, especially when she Lingers so one episode takes 2-3 hrs of mom exposure, and she doesn't want to watch separately -- got to A Voice in the Wilderness, which is one of my favorites from S1. I'd forgotten that was the episode with the Ivanovo-is-God speech, lol. Also Londo's Hokey-Pokey rant.

Next up is Babylon Squared. Also among my favorites!

(Shadows and Portents is up there too, although in rewatch I got annoyed at the cc text -- when the Centauri dude is laughing about how his seer aunt predicted he'd be killed by shadows ha ha how silly, and he ends up being killed by a mysterious vessel later that episode, snd the point of him disbelieving the prophecy to begin with is that he thinks she means shadows, i.e. darkness on the wall, not knowing that the Shadows are an old race recently reawaken ... and the first time around that's what the viewer thinks too. Only, the closed captioning text capitalizes "Shadows" in that line...)

B5's special effects and title sequence both look 90s as hell.

+ + +

Speaking of my mom ... she wants to know what I want to do for Christmas. My gut reaction is "introvert party with me and the pets where I play animal crossing and watch die hard and nothing else" but I don't think she'd be happy with that, lol. I'm just ... idek. I'm cynical about how commercialized and ubiquitous Christmas is these days, carol singing makes me miss the harp I can't play any more, there's no magic any more, and I realized one of the things making me dissatisfied with Christianity is that if Jesus fixed things (and I know that's a big if but it's also central to Christianity) why are things so fucked up. And my increasing dissatisfaction with Christianity means that the "prepare for and celebrate the birth of the Baby Who Will Save The World" aspect of Christmas is less gripping, and the family aspect of Christmas is awkward when my mom is a lonely energy suck and my dad is married to someone who thinks I hate her and my sister has kids who are cute but exhausting, and I'm an introvert anyway, and I'm awkward about giving and receiving gifts. And there's also the "pagan holiday they got papered over with Christianity labels" factor, and my increasing awareness of Shitty White-People Behavior.

But I'll probably end up doing something with my mom anyway.

+ + +

For some reason I am remarkably chatty today. Talked my aides' ears off; even posting here is a reflection of that. No clue why but it's better than the sheer exhaustion I've mostly been feeling.

Yay I guess?

+ + +

Got Covid booster today. In home, which was nice and convenient. My initial vax was J&J so I asked for (and got) Pfizer.

Yay for another layer of Swiss cheese protection, boo for needing it.

Duolingo has a league system -- the closest thing to pvp it has -- where each week you're in a group of 50 people, and at the end of the week you get ranked according to how much XP you've done. The top 10 advance to the next league level; bottom 5 drop a league level; the other 35 remain in the same league rank. There are 10 levels (bronze, silver, gold, blue, red, green, amythest (purple), pearl (pink), obsidian (black), and diamond (light aqua).

Now, I tend to loathe pvp. Even pvp that's just competing with other people indirectly. But thee were achievements, and I'm a huge completionist, so ... doomed.

( tl;dr: 3000 points is a lot )

Several of my Ravelry forums have a thing where you can declare "thread bankruptcy", usually with fast moving chatter threads, which basically means "I'm so far behind on this thread that I have no chance of catching up so I'm just going to start reading/interacting here, and I know I may have missed things but I'm not ignoring on purpose"

I realized that part of why I have trouble re-engaging with Dreamwidth peeps is that I'm so far behind (at least a year now, aside from random spurts with individual journals) that the backlog is overwhelming, but I feel obligated to catch up old stuff before I start reading regularly. But there's no way I'm going to catch up with everyone I care about.

So I'm declaring "Dreamwidth bankruptcy". I'm going to pretend there is no backlog, and just start fresh.

If there are things that have happened in your life that you want me to know, or that is important in your life, please comment! You don't even need to go into detail (if you give me clues of when to look in your journal, I don't mind specific archive-diving). I care about y'all, even though I've been quiet 💜

My version of catching y'all up--

Health

I have new bone growth in my back, which is slightly changing the position of my left arm -- there wasn't any mobility in any of the joints (shoulder or elbow) but there was some amount of flexibility in the shoulder blade, and that's changed so my arm is somewhat more retracted. It makes things like holding my choir iPad, or crocheting and knitting, harder and more awkward.

(It's also painful, especially when it presses against the chair back or the sling I use for transfers. My right hip and thigh are also super cranky because of bone buildup. Turns out having lots of extra bone where it doesn't belong tends to be painful, who knew.)

I also had a really craptastic couple of weeks starting just before Thanksgiving. I don't know how much was FOP, how much was atypical stomach bug, how much was maybe atypical migraine, and how much was atypical UTI. Details, including some amount of tmi, under cut...

( Read more... )

Teal deer = the last month or so has SUCKED healthwise. But I'm alive, so yay.

Pets

Fur family is still good, even though they're getting older -- both Yahtzee and Monkey seem more inclined to snooze than be active. Loki is a dork face, as per usual.

And speaking of: I'll do a proper post about this, but I am getting a puppy (PUPPY!!!) to train up as a new service dog. Er, obviously I can't do puppy myself, so am hiring a puppy raiser + trainer, but it's super exciting. Litter is eight weeks old, English (cream) golden retriever, absolutely freaking adorable.

Other stuff

Mental health issues (depression and anxiety) are still problems, though Impending Puppy is a decent antidepressant (except when I'm being anxiety-flaily about all the things that could possibly go wrong). And I've found a new phone app, Woebot, that is a robot that does CBT exercises with you; it's pretty awesome.

I somehow managed to maintain my Duolingo streak even with being sick (there was one day I missed, but streak freeze caught it). It's a crazy high streak. I'm mostly just idly refreshing Spanish, but not with any major effort.

Haven't done much crocheting or knitting lately. (Scary thing about zombie week: I was so sick I didn't care about yarn. Not just didn't have the energy to even fondle yarn, let alone work with it, though both those were true, but didn't even care about it. I'm pretty sure someone could have come taken my entire stash and my reaction would have just been "...whatever". Of course, I'd've been pretty miffed once I recovered, but.)

Haven't done much writing, either, though a few of my story wips (especially "no-magic-cure variant of Secret Garden" and "disabled Beauty and autistic Beast") are still rattling around in my head.

And ... um ... think that's it. Cookies for anyone who read the whole thing!

What's up with y'all?

...why is update a word br downdate isn't?

Anyway.

1. Hit 1000 day streak in Duolingo (!], which also means that -- given my previous streaks -- I've done more than 2k total days (!!). That's a lot. ...of course, two days later i missed a day, but streak freeze caught that one. Still, I'm likely to lose it st some point.

2. The book I was hate reading? I finished it and kind of wish I hadn't. CW abuse:

( Read more... )

Needless to say, I don't recommend it.

2b. (Or not 2b, that is the question) -- er, I mean, one good thing is that the book has resparked my interest in working on the 50 Shades of Ace project (aka rewriting fsog with sensible characters and an ace protagonist who discovers that she loves kink).

3. I tried listening to the audiobook I have checked out from the library, but the narrator is the same guy that does the version of Watership Down that I utterly adore, to the point of listening to it a ton of times. IF's my default going-to-sleep hook, because soothing narrator and a story I know well that's nicely compartmentalized so it doesn't matter if I drift in and out. And I keep having this brain short listening to this other one *because he's not narrating rabbits aaahhhhh*. I may have to read that book instead of listening, lol.

4. My self-imposed yarn diet (because I have way more yarn than I could ever use) is conflicting with my need buy rainbow yarn. (I have only one rainbow skein and it's gone missing along with the partial shawl. I think the black widows stole it.) Also, someone on rav is making various queer sea creatures for pride season -- octobi, genderflusquid, pridetopus -- and one of the ones is an aceopus, and now I have a mighty need to make one. Though *that* I can scrounge up yarn for (grey white black purple).

5. At what point does feeling like I'm drowning in life crises stop becoming an acknowledgment of stressful reality and start becoming a crutch? Asking for a friend.

6. Mark Harmon is pretty. I've been rewatching NCIS -- not so much a binge as ragged uneven spurts -- and i am very 😍 at Gibbs. Very aesthetically pleasing.

7. There is apparently a new Men In Black movie, starring Thor and the Valkyrie. The trailer makes it look astoundingly stupid. I think I will rewatch the original mib instead.