Personnal stuff

honestly fandom has ruined me because now any time i'm in the desert and i see two vast and trunkless legs of stone or a half-sunk shattered visage i'm like "omg just like in Ozymandias" and its like come on girl not every half-sunk shattered visage is Ozymandias

huge coming from the site who is so against black art that 'tumblr users are afraid of rap' has been a meme for the best part of a decade. You know that yall are 4channers with pronouns right?

Checking out the state of duolingo as I do sometimes. The optional end of chapter tests have words in them that weren’t covered in the lessons for some reason.

I started Haitian Creole recently, and it's a mess. President is "prezidan" in all questions except one, where it randomly ends in a T. I can't find evidence that it's ever written with a t, but prezidan isn't accepted. Some words aren't translated into English, like Creole always being written as Kreyol regardless of the language (though if you type "creole" it's accepted, so that's better than the president one). Also, "kola" is frequently translated as "kola champagne", both a spelling (kola instead of cola) and phrase (champagne for a non-alcoholic drink) that I've never heard in my life. There are two words (ki le and kiles) that seem to be swapped sometimes in the audio. I found a sentence with a word randomly added on the end that didn't match the translation. And, worst of all, there are no more lessons you can look at on why anything happens in the language. They used to have that (at least in French). Now, they just have lists of sentences for each lesson. This may be because in the more popular languages (e.g. French) you have to have an upgraded account to see an explanation of the answer, and they don't want to give it out for free. I have yet to see this option in the Creole course, though. I was always told that Duolingo is no good for learning a new language on, only practicing ones you know some of, but it's definitely gotten worse.

IT GOT BETTER

The RomCom Aunties!

there's this weird thing people fall into online a lot, where people assume that if the [perceived-to-be-inferior] version of [activity] is discouraged then people will, naturally, do [perceived-to-be-superior] version of [activity] instead. When really it's just as (or more) likely that if [perceived-to-be-inferior] version of [activity] is discouraged people just won't do it at all.

audiobook listeners are not necessarily people who would otherwise do a lot of traditional reading if audiobooks did not exist, many are people who simply would experience zero books. Booktok romance readers would not necessarily be reading the classics if booktok did not exist, many of them would simply not read. Fanfiction writers would not necessarily be novelists if fanfic wasn't an option, many would just be people who didn't write. You know?

If the only thing that has kept you going was outliving Mitch McConnell, imma need yall to pick a new person to outlive and fast. Your mission is not over.