old pursuits

[ironymaiden]

1. pirate D added me to his Duolingo Plus family plan, so i've been practicing French. it was my minor in college - my reading comprehension remains pretty good, but I haven't held a conversation for more than ten years. i'm enjoying the gamification of language learning but because this is a refresh rather than completely new, part of me is always analyzing their translation choices and how they introduce concepts. (in my head, "il mange" is usually "he eats" not "he is eating". or i think of "ça va?" as "how's it going?" instead of "how are you doing?". but i'm learning to give the owl the answer it wants.) it's been fun re-accessing dormant knowledge - i start a new area and all this stuff comes up out of cold storage. it's pretty cool. looking forward to getting into a place where i'm learning something new.


2. i quit playing most video games around Gamergate. (yeah, i know, that's what they wanted. but i have so many other hobbies.) on a whim i decided to look into Jedi: Fallen Order when they announced the sequel, and it was all of $10 on xbox. i have definitely gotten more than $10 of joy from it - it's an adventure game with more exploration than boss fights, really reminds me of the joy i got from Tomb Raider back in the day, but with SO MANY MAPS AND HINTS. what the hell, it even tells you where there are doors that you can open and highlights unexplored areas. :old-man-yelling-at-cloud: i wish Cal did backflips, but his lightsaber is cooler than dual Uzis, and driving an spoiler was way too much fun. also, look at this little droid companion:


3. my mother-in-law has been complaining about not being able to play Civilization II anymore for something like 10 years. so i made a VM image of Windows XP SP3 with CivII installed, had C play a few rounds to confirm it works well, and have written up instructions for the east coast kids to set it up for her. fingers crossed. it's a 1995 game - it starts with a setup dialog about how you need 16MB of RAM to use all the 3D effects.

and hey, i am typing on the laptop after taking it to the shop. i did, indeed, damage the ribbon connector for the trackpad. but there was also an overheating issue they fixed so it was still worthwhile to me.

Comments

[sistawendy]

Wow. Shipping a VM to yermom is a super sweet thing to do. I hope the east coast kids set it up.

[yourlibrarian]

Oh cool! I don't play a lot of video games but at that price that video game is something I might check out, especially if it doesn't have high hurdles to completion.

[ironymaiden]

i've mostly been playing on something called "Story Mode" which makes the fighting bits pretty easy. there are some times when you have to, say, hold something with the Force so that you can cross a dangerous area but if you die they take you back to the last safe point near what you're trying to do, not all the way back to your last save point, so for me that reduces a lot of frustration