spiderwebsinzibbyshead

Latest Posts by spiderwebsinzibbyshead

Duolingo Sucks, Now What?: A Guide

Now that the quality of Duolingo has fallen (even more) due to AI and people are more willing to make the jump here are just some alternative apps and what languages they have:

"I just want an identical experience to DL"

Busuu (Languages: Spanish, Japanese, French, English, German, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Polish, Turkish, Russian, Arabic, Korean)

"I want a good audio-based app"

Language Transfer (Languages: French, Swahili, Italian, Greek, German, Turkish, Arabic, Spanish, English for Spanish Speakers)

"I want a good audio-based app and money's no object"

Pimsleur (Literally so many languages)

Glossika (Also a lot of languages, but minority languages are free)

*anecdote: I borrowed my brother's Japanese Pimsleur CD as a kid and I still remember how to say the weather is nice over a decade later. You can find the CDs at libraries and "other" places I'm sure.

"I have a pretty neat library card"

Mango (Languages: So many and the endangered/Indigenous courses are free even if you don't have a library that has a partnership with Mango)

Transparent Language: (Languages: THE MOST! Also the one that has the widest variety of African languages! Perhaps the most diverse in ESL and learning a foreign language not in English)

"I want SRS flashcards and have an android"

AnkiDroid: (Theoretically all languages, pre-made decks can be found easily)

"I want SRS flashcards and I have an iphone"

AnkiApp: It's almost as good as AnkiDroid and free compared to the official Anki app for iphone

"I don't mind ads and just want to learn Korean"

lingory

"I want an app made for Mandarin that's BETTER than DL and has multiple languages to learn Mandarin in"

ChineseSkill (You can use their older version of the course for free)

"I don't like any of these apps you mentioned already, give me one more"

Bunpo: (Languages: Japanese, Spanish, French, German, Korean, and Mandarin)

~The Marionette ~

I can't believe I'm so close to finishing this silly little series...

hello people of tumblr i return to this site with middle aged aventurine

looking for a ghost story?

his nerd swag and boob window have captivated me

faezou 🦌

”dr ratio loves humanity not in spite of its many flaws but because of them” and “dr ratio, at his core is a fucking hater” are two statements that can and should coexist

Idk if I or anyone else has asked you this before but would you forgive a TERF if they changed their mind?

“Forgive” is an interesting word here. I don’t think I’m entitled to forgive or condemn most people.

So honestly, the possibility of even broaching the topic would depend on the individual, their actions, their relationship to me personally, their impact, whether or not they apologized, whether or not their actions after the apology mirrored their words, and if they took steps to minimize or reverse any harm they’d done, if any. If you’re asking if I believe people can leave their harmful or bigoted views behind, the answer is yes.

I need to believe that people can change. That’s very important to me.

Equally important is that we do not punish people for doing better.

hoyo I crave more insight on their friendship plsss

[not ship]

”Are you an introvert or an extrovert? Do people energize you or drain you? Would you rather be at a party or a library?” Stop subscribing me to binaries. Social interaction is invigorating and makes my life better and I’m exhausted the whole time.

someday i will write an essay on the way fandom likes to recreate the exact same flavor of aggressively heteronormative relationship dynamics in every popular slash ship ever invented regardless of how the characters behave or interact with each other in canon.

I agree! This made me have a completely separate but related thought. I hope it's okay that I share it with you and I'm definitely open to disagreements and other ways of looking at it!

I look back at the original "the curtains are just blue" meme and find the process of what it morphed into really interesting. Originally, the meme was expressing the frustration of American (and in my experience, Canadian as well) highschool asking you to examine the themes of writing without really being giving you the tools to do so. We're told what a metaphor (and the metaphor's cousins, like similies) is and how to use it, but we weren't taught about the principles of examining themes. In my english class, we were given a handful of assignments that surrounded analyzing surface level themes, but no projects that really delve into it. The student has no idea how you know when something is symbolism or when it's just a description, how a single object can be symbolic of completely different things depending on the context and characters interacting with it, etc. The student doesn't know that they don't delve deeper into this stuff because school boards are largely driven by industrialists who want school to be about preparing you to work and don't find things like media analysis nessecary, so of course it feels like the teacher is just asking you to do the impossible task of reading the author's mind.

But then, the "the curtains are just blue" meme kinda blew up and morphed into the version of the meme that you were (rightfully) complaining about (for lack of better words). It became very in-line with the views of the industrialists that (one could argue) caused the meme in the first place. Or atleast, caused the problem that inspired the meme. It became this idea that analyzing literature is boring, unnecessary, and does nothing to help you learn what's really important. A weird kind of cycle, yeah?

I'd like to do more research on this, but I really struggle to understand academic papers and stuff like that. I just think it's neat! Do you also think it's neat?

YES!

Harbingers series continues ✨️

Hate when mutuals reblog polls for a fandom I’ve never heard of and don’t put in the tags who they voted for. My leige how am I supposed to help rig the results in your favor?? 🥺

AI art 👎

commissioning artists 👍

Hi PNG lovers!

I hate to ask this but my wife and I are not going to have enough money to afford both rent and utilities this first month in our new apartment.

If there are any sweet souls who can help us out we would be so eternally grateful! 🥲

My PayPal is d.shep3398@gmail.com

My cash app is $riderandspider

We both love you guys so much and love running the blog for you!

mydei having a library is absolutely heartbreaking symbolism. it's a running gag that the kremnoan language doesn't have many words; there's no word for flee, no word for fear, even no word for love. i know the library was his family's, but still -- it is such a distinct symbol of how mydei wants to break kremnoan tradition. how he openly rejects the idea that violence is the only valid form of communication. how he always dismisses the baseless rumours surrounding his abilities, proving that he values truth over glory. we see mydei try to talk his people into reason. we see him apologize to tribbie for being rude. we even see him (begrudgingly) admit to phainon that he knows how to interpret poetry. time and time again, mydei chooses language -- and truth -- over violence. so when he invites phainon to visit his library in the next life, he's not just expressing hope -- he's asking phainon to remember him by what he really believes in. even if i become the avatar of strife, he's saying, even if you have to kill me one day -- in the next life, please see me as the person i've tried to become.

mydei knows the power of a name, perhaps because his language has so few of them. and that makes it doubly ironic that he personally has so many titles: son of gorgo. the patricidal crown prince. kingslayer. godslayer. the undying. but as krateros points out, the name he prefers is the one he uses with the chrysos heirs. and although mydei doesn't talk much, all his actions seem to say the same thing.

remember me as mydei, not mydeimos.

making ur pfp a pictue of ur favorite guy is great. the modern equivalent of some guy in the 50s pulling out his wallet and there being a picture of his wife inside and him sighing fondly at it

points and laughs at my mutuals getting famous posts while i remain safe in my relative obscurity

Me: *grinding for days on end in-game to find dozens of gems and ingots to get the fourth item I need to unlock the next section of mines*

Balor and Juniper: Wow. She sure is determined. It's inspiring and concerning.

Me, frantically breaking rocks: MY HUSBAND IS BEHIND THIS PLOT WALL I JUST KNOW IT!

this is how my brains been looking since last week

Comments like this are commission scam accounts/nft bots:

“Are you available for commission? DM me”

“Lovely artwork! DM me if commission open”

“Are your commissions open? DM me”

“I’m interested in purchasing artwork. DM me”

“Amazing work! I want to purchase DM me”

“DM me if commission open”

And so on

Ayo big Fields of Mistria spoiler below. Don't scroll until you've unlocked the Deep Woods area or scroll at your own risk.

So this is what happened to everyone else, right?

WHERE IS SHE?

WHERE DID THEY TOOK HER?

I unironically love being the guy that my friends can yap to. Like yeah buddy you talk abt how your day was you have my full attention.

*Drinks the art* Good soup

hunters 🐅🌾☀️

My default assumption whenever I see people pitching fits about how characters or ships or the color of the wallpaper or whatever else they don't like must be evil, is that they are a teenager.

They are a teenager who has never used anything other than an algorithmic feed on a social media app to find fannish content, they don't even know where the settings page is, and they're having a real bad time. They have to get up early in the morning, school is awful, all their clique-y peers have been mean to them about their weight, their teachers are impatient, they just got seven hours of homework and their last class was gym. And they are eternally frightened that they're secretly a bad person and their only current recourse against this is to be like, at least I know that pineapple on pizza is a sin.

Approaching things from this angle has never steered me wrong. Even when the person in question is not literally a teenager, they're still pretty much letting their inner kid drive the bus right now.

"A four year age gap is abusive!" okay champ. Screen time's up. Let's get you a protein shake and a nap.

I think all computers should have cd slots and all phones should have headphone ports send tumble