it was certainly a day

So it has been a weird couple of weeks in the sense that firstly I stopped my long association with Duolingo, and that feels like a bit of a loss, and also the Little Dum Dum Club, which is a podcast I've been listening to for over a decade now, perhaps a slightly guilty pleasure and tbh also not always a pleasure, ended, suddenly and without warning (another tbh: I had been considering possibly it was time for me to stop listening, because I felt either it was losing its mojo or I was losing the mojo to listen to it). So... things which anchored me, are a little bit absent. 

Today I went to the SLV to look at some stuff I'd ordered. I am doing a conference paper about Island City, which was proposed to be built off the coast of South Melbourne for a brief period of time, then axed in an instant once the plans were released (February 1974). I was looking into some of the conservationist/activist groups around at that time and I checked this out. 

I do recall the controversy around the building of the Newport Power Station, which is of course a very real thing today and just sitting there on the banks of the Yarra not greatly upsetting anyone anymore. This publication, amongst other things, raises the case that I well remember for the 'heat bubble', the upshot of which seemed to me then and still seems this way now, to have been a warning to the comfortable and smug eastern suburbanites not to get too 'it's out of sight, should also be out of mind' about this structure because it was going to pollute the east. I don't really know if this happened. 

This: 

is a cool diagram someone spent a lot of time on in the mid-70s, and they published it in this newsletter:

I love the idea that there was a publication called Beach Use. The above is as glossy as it got (with the printed, um, letterhead? of the first page, and the rest I guess roneo'd or something. Anyway, pretty cool. 

Speaking of beach use, I saw a bit of Jacinta Allen promo today that talked about a young-ish man who was walking the length of all of Melbourne's 600km of railway to raise money for cancer research (I think), and it mentioned he walked to Stony Point from, I assume, central Melbourne and I thought well I wonder how long that would take. So I looked it up on mapsonmyphone and got this: 

Yes, according to mapsonmyphone the only way to walk to Stony Point from the CBD is via Phillip Island. Does that make sense to you? I wanted to set it to go via Hastings (for instance) but it wouldn't countenance that as a possibility. Anyway it's nonsense but there you go. 

Other things that happened today - I went shopping for my mother, who has covid (she feels fine). I had work meetings and listened to an interview with Sam Prekop, who I like, and also Marc Maron's interview with Elizabeth Olsen, which was a very enjoyable listen, actually. I also did admin and tied up some loose ends on a new book chapter that's coming out soon. 

So, it was certainly a day. 

bye duolingo

Weird goings on with Duolingo. I am sure I have mentioned that I was tired of using it, as it served me up the same stuff every day in a passive-aggressive way and clearly did not have any new vocab beyond what it took to jump through all the hoops. I decided to end my subscription. 

It kept me on, transferring me to the free version, then suddenly started giving me really difficult exercises, of either things I've forgotten because they were so long ago, or things I'd never actually seen before, can't remember obviously. I was then told I had run out of 'hearts' which might be a thing on the free version but was never a thing on the paid version. I wasn't going to pay, so I ended my streak. There you go!!!

Meanwhile, Drops, which you may recall was the app I chose instead of duolingo, is also putting me through my paces but I have paid a subscription to Drops for life, so as long as they don't suddenly put a ceiling on what they choose to present to me, I think I will continue to get a lot out of them. 

Of course, apps aren't the be all and end all. I am going to have to start being a bit more proactive about teaching myself Finnish if I'm going to be fluent by the time I'm 85. That doesn't leave much time. 

made it

So this is my triumph but I'm not sure I'm going to take it much further with duolingo. To be tested - just as I was probably in the first week - on the Finnish word for Australia ('Australia') and koala ('koala') (at least Egypt is 'Egypti' and camel is 'kameli' - got tested on both of those too today) demeans us both. It seems pretty obvious I am not about to unleash a whole swathe of new words and I guess the duolingo model must be something like: string the lower tier language learners along (most of them drop off early anyway, obviously, none the wiser that there is no great epic trove unfolding down the track) and perhaps a few who hang around and finally catch on to the deficiency will opt for a more popular, expansive language course. I mean before they started offering Finnish I was dabbling in Norwegian and German and Duo still hopes I might one day take one or the other of those further sometime. 

Anyway, I've signed up to another app called Drops, which is sort of the same but seems - at this early juncture anyway - a little more sophisticated. Drops exchanges a lot more English for pictures than Duolingo which is probably good. It also, of course, doesn't hurt my language confidence that about 80% of the words I'm currently being 'taught' I also know from Duolingo. So I have a 96% score at the moment (largely because of my mental block about the difference between a finger pointing to a small ball - which means I think 'this' ('tämä') as opposed to a finger pointing to a small ball next to a big block, which means 'small' ('pieni'). Speaking of 'pieni', it willl be a big relief to put 'Mr Blue Sky, why is that small tree dancing?' behind me forever. I'd tell you what that was in Finnish but I can't be bothered correcting autocorrect every word.   

is it a bear

Duolingo drives me mad, for instance when it tells me that varovainen is a 'weak word' for me. It's not. I know it means 'careful'. I am so freakin' sick of the above and 'ole varoveinen, tee on kylma' etc etc. 

weekend

I just get so tired. I have been extremely exhausted on weekends recently. But it might be because of the heatwaves. 

So, see below. Do you think this is fair? Do you think there is a big difference between 'all the coffee is gone' and 'the coffee is all gone'? I don't. I feel like I translated this perfectly adequately. 

Incidentally, the coffee was almost all gone. Woolworths has a special on 500g packs of the right coffee, ground, but they didn't actually have any on the shelves, I've been thrice now. 

This morning just before the sun came up Perry and I walked around Carlton. This is a dark laneway, but lightened by the phone camera. Looks good doesn't it. 

See ya later! 

'there is a black heart in the belt'

'Vyössä on musta sydän' = 'there is a black heart in the belt'. Of all the umpteen duolingo phrases I have had to endure over and over again, this one rubs me most the wrong way. I don't know why but possibly because I don't understand it. Duolingo, or at least the stage of the 'course'/torture I am at, goes on and on about fashion-related items eg there is a large diamond in that piece of jewellery (except it calls it 'jewelry'), and where is the changing room, and what kind of tie is now in fashion? I don't entirely begrudge the duolingerers all of this, because I can see how some of the phrases help to understand different kinds of sentence construction (eg the way that the large diamond phrase is constructed in Finnish is something along the lines of: in the piece of jewellery there is a large diamond, whereas of course in English our tendency would be to express it the other way around. Although it does get very far up my proverbial nose that duolingo insists that you translate 'korussa' as in the piece of jewelry, not just in the jewelry, I've been caught out with that a few times now and it sucks. 

I also can't stand the translation of 'limonadi' as 'soda pop', rather than what it obviously is, a transliteration of 'lemonade'. 

But actually all of this would be fine if it wasn't all so gruellingly repetitive but then again who am I railing against? Obviously learning a language is all about repetition and I will concede that occasionally I can find myself in a zone where I can effect a translation, a sentence construction, even very rarely a grammatical form, without thinking about it at all - it just seems natural. Now, I'm not kidding myself, I know that there's a lot more to learning a language than this, but it's a way in, isn't it, and doing it daily is valuable - as long as you are actually learning the right stuff (sometimes I am a bit alarmed when there is a discrepancy between duolingo's version of a word or phrase and google translate's - but I suppose it's possible they're both right - and that it doesn't suit their respective business models to allow for nuance. 

tiellä ei minnekään

I have previously kvetched about duolingo and particularly its competitive ('gamified') aspect but right now as the one who is riding high in I think Pearl League or whatever they call it, I can see the plus. What bothers me more is the repetition in duolingo, and I don't know if it's the same with other languages or just the very niche ones like Finnish. If I ever needed to say oh no the koalas are in trouble, well, I have it down. Similarly if I wanted to ask 'Mr Blue Sky? Why are those trees singing?' which I kid you not is a phrase that crops up very often, ditto 'the camel is trying to bite the tourist' and other preposterosities, well, I'm covered but the repetitiveness (and the fact that these phrases are in there at all) is really getting me down. I am sure the psychology is, in part, that you get something you're very familiar with so you can advance, practice and be reminded that you do know some things. Also, I can complain about the repetition and the lack of variety but it's not like I get it all right all the time. But still. Some new material would be pretty nice to see. 

'well it's something in your life'

When I got married my grandmother congratulated me and I mumbled some response and she said, 'well, it's something in your life'. I am well aware that this is one of those comments that are just basically the mundane icing on a mundane cake, but it's stuck with me. 

Here are a few things in my life:

On the weekend Laura, Leonard and I went to some Open House places she chose from research. This one is a block away from us, the Ukrainian church c. 1962, and it was amazing inside, but I'll wait for Laura to blog about it, her pictures were better than mine. 

This is bullshit as all bullshit - well - I'll hold off on opinionating about the concept of building an apartment block purely for renters but the whole 'we're local' thing is just preposterous. So League of Gentleman, mainly I mean in the sense of local shop for local people rather than Pappa Lazarou but perhaps a bit that too. I note that the building site has some indigenous-styled art on it as well but I won't make any appropriation accusations in that dept either, I have no information. 

Home life 

If I may indulge in a little more duolingo paranoia I'm coming up to my one-year streak and I have a strong feeling it's making things much easier for me (I will do the above no worries) in preparation for me feeling good about renewing my superduolingo subscription. I probably will.  

duofrigginlingo

I don't entirely understand how Duolingo works but what I do know is that lately it's been asking me for money to enable me to cheat at the rote learning I've been so dedicated to for the last almostayear. I am at the point where I am no longer doing actual lessons, I guess, just revision stuff which is basically the hard yards of earning the third of these stars. I think there are 18 of these little three-star clusters which help you revise a range of somewhat ridiculous (but obviously the content is not the point) questions/statements.  

My weakness in Finnish is spelling, and so I probably take longer than most people would on the tapping out of the dictation part of the test* - a small component of the overall, most of which is selecting words from a cluster, most of which are wholly inappropriate. But I always get to about three exercises away from finishing the last section of the third start test before it calls time. It then offers me a minute's extension to the exercise (which would be ample; I would usually only need 20 seconds) for a ridiculously inflated sum of money (I want to say something like $7.99, which is presumably $US) just to get over this hurdle. 

What I don't get is why anyone (except Duolingo's bank manager) would think this is a good idea. I imagine it confirms the reality that there are two kinds of people in the world: the stubborn types who, like Sims, just bash into the same closed door over and over, and the people who figure 'the system's stacked against me, time to pay up to push through'. Maybe some people actually have language learning success tied to work targets or something? In which case I can see why they might not want to persist or figure near enough is good enough. 

But weirdly there is a plus, though it's a stupid one that I hate myself for. Every time you attempt to gain a star, you go through three stages each of which gets you points (aka 'XP'). So, my multitude of failed attempts to get the final star in the first section of Section 2 ('Explorer') has put me top of the pearl league, at least for the moment. 

I would love to know who the other people are, and what their motivation is to be here doing this (there are plenty more than just these seven, btw). I mean Deemarie has been doing this for over a year, apparently, what's that about!? Oh, wait, so have I, almost. 

So the gamifying of Duolingo is, apparently, part of its success, and I have always been more or less resistant to this kind of thing, but of course once you start to become convinced that actually you are possibly arguably a bit good at something, even accidentally, you start to want to do it more. I assume that, within the obvious reality that I will never even get the slightest competency in Finnish, there are some positives here. 

* Also I'm constantly tapping 's' for the second 'a'. Fortunately or otherwise, it lets you get through unumlauting the umlauted words which it probably shouldn't. 

i should be embarrassed but nah

So the fact is that I have recently - without even actually noticing the moment - achieved half a million silver fish in Neko Atsume. I think I have been 'playing' this 'game' (I don't really think it is a game - it's unbelievably meaningless and has no competitive aspect to it, though I gather there is an option - ffs - to actually buy more stuff with your real money to put into the game). (I am similarly bothered by the fact that it is possible to buy 'time extensions' in Duolingo so you can, effectively, skew your time-sensitive tests and move up the competitive ladder... but... why would you and how do you think it helps you learn anything???). 

Anyway, I've been nervous-habitly filling two virtual cat bowls for seven years now, and it brings the cats to my yard. Kudos to the creators of this game for the sense of peace it brings. 
 

duolingo is a dag

I have been on Duolingo's Finnish course for over 200 days straight now, obviously (?) I know more Finnish every day than than I did the day before, but I don't expect to ever 'get there'. I'm at the stage where I can see Finnish words on TV or hear them in songs and recognise them as words I 'know' but it takes me an age to work out/recall what they actually are. 

Anyway whoever created Duolingo is crafty and I take my hat off to them. The ideal way to create an illusion of progress by what are essentially word games (nine times out of ten, it's at least as much 'what sentence can you make from these English words' as it is 'translate this sentence'). Anyway I am not opposed to it obviously, and I keep doing it, as frustrating as it often is. 

Today I got onto discussion of the internet. I initially got the below wrong because I didn't put a 'The' in front of 'Net', because I assumed the capital N must have meant it was OK to start the sentence with 'Net' though that also seemed a bit ridic. 

 

When did you last see the word 'Net' used for 'internet' and when did you last see it capitalised?! 

Also, what do you make of this one:

I mean, great question, right?! I think the answer is 'no'. Or, perhaps, 'No'. So then we got into the product placement, and we learnt the Finnish word for 'Duolingo' - always useful. 

Finally, we got to the heart of the situation: a complaint we have all had at some point. Can you believe I got stuck on the difference between 'even though' and 'although', and to be honest, I am still not really sure what that difference is. 

More kvetching myöhempänä ajankohtana! 

duolingo, guitar, drone

I have a forty-day streak on duolingo learning Finnish. True, I know many more Finnish words than I did forty days ago, and have a better understanding of its structure, though I am certain that there are a lot of things that duo is keeping from me until l am better invested in it all. However, I'm moderately pleased with how I've gone so far and I feel good that it is kind of moreish (though sometimes you feel really patronised by duo - the times where it asks you to translate a word and gives you one word as an option - and other times it's like a word game because the route to translating things is essentially a logical choice. It's easier than wordle in that sense.*

Still, there is a lot to enjoy about learning a language and all the - not exactly false friends - actually real enemies - of comprehension (in Finnish, 'ja' means 'and', not 'yes'; 'on' means 'it' not 'on'; and so on). I'm reminded constantly what a literal, positivistic dullard I am by my inability to remember words for abstract concepts. 

It's also really interesting to me how I ebb and flow in actual capacity - so in the morning, I can really hit a 'winning' streak, but by the afternoon I am just flailing. It's in there somewhere, but I can't access it. 

Anyway really what I've decided is that it's boring to be the person who is just interested in what they can't do, and why it can't be done, and instead, I'm just going to do it. I'm not just looking at duolingo constantly like a dweeb. I'm also reading an old teach-yourself-finnish book. I have a car trip coming up and I have t-y-f stuff on audible. Soon I'm going to start translating some Finnish materials I have lying around, via a dictionary (i.e. not typing/photographing big wads of text into google translate). 

So inspired was I by my Finnish successes (I am doing pretty well, or so duo says) I got my guitar out again and when I stop writing this blow-by-blow account of how magnificent I am, I'm going to go and play with that again for a short time. I have the amp in the bathroom I don't use, and it sounds good playing in there. I can sit on my bed and do it. 

Third success, if you don't mind, is to have finally not exactly but nearly mastered the drone I bought in, um, probably August and was unable to use in WA because it was always raining or blowing a gale. Plus I was a bit scared of it and didn't have propellor guards. Now I do, and with the help of others (Laura in particular but also Jason and Lenny) I've got a reasonable handle on it. I know at very least by the law of averages - you know like you do with your phone when you take 50 pictures a day - I'll get some good results from that thing. 

In other news, here's a funny thing. I have my name down on discogs for a few records I want, not many, but a few rarities. Two Pintandwefall CDRs (CDRs!) came up today, both the same price, this is one of them:

A hundred euro, really? Really? Would you? Would anyone? 

Apart from anything else, what's its provenance i.e. if I had this, I could make ten faked copies of it pretty easily I am sure. But it's not worth it in any case. So, not buying that. 

OK, off to play guitar. Getting some new episodes of Homicide tomorrow. In the meantime please enjoy some more of 'my' art. 

* I assume, have never tried that.