(no subject)

Hilariously, ten days vacation ended up mostly without internet, as the wireless at the condos went out dramatically, and of course, my phone's 4G did not extend to the beach. There is something seriously wrong with that, for the record.

However, short version: I had a niqaeli for four days, in which we saw giant windmills (I am told they are now called turbines if you want to be fancy), a town I swear doesn't exist.

The town is called Sinton, and it does not exist. I know it doesn't because until we got there it was not showing in my googlemaps and all my life I have driven down to Mustang Island but into the town of Sinton we never went, nor do I remember anyone ever speaking of it. Yet we drove through it--and it had a brick Dairy Queen, which what the hell--and now it shows up. And everyone knows about it. Interesting, yes?

I have a theory that niqaeli drove us into an alternate dimension and my dimension--where I no longer am--has no Sinton but this one does, so everyone who tells me about their experience with Sinton (not kidding, at work a co-worker swears she taught there once. Really, I said, surprised; suspicious how 'Sinton' never came up in conversation before). Also, now that lack of wireless suddenly is suspicious, and I have no sunburn despite the fact I actually saw with my own eyes direct sunlight and even exposed it to my own skin, which right there tells me that this dimension has very different radiation from the sun.

So I'm in the wrong universe, and I must adapt to all of you being AU versions of my friends. I have some questions--for one, tell me of your sun and its UV rays, in my world I turn red and it would cause burnage and pain, yet here, no so much--and your customs and traditions, which are strange to me. I'll adapt, I'm sure, but in the future, if I seem wary of you upon meeting you, it's because you met my alternate self, not me, and in my world, you are not evil vampires, but I have no idea if you are here. It's a whole new world and your ways are strange to me. You all call this the internet, right? Was dreamwidth always spelled with a 'd' there?

In addition, Child met niqaeli and is in raptures for her Teen Wolf love and hysteria ensues. He's still threatening to run away to Phoenix. I want him to try. I would love to see how he'd go about it.

Random App Recs

No internet on the beach with minimal things to do during the heat of the day:
1..) duolingo - the crackiest language app ever. It helps if you have the very minimum high school level of a language somewhere in your memory, but it works pretty well even if you don't. It's also addictive as hell. It's split into sections and those into lessons with a final review at the end, and it's crack. A single lesson takes less than ten minutes, and failing a lesson is a do-over with similar but rearranged and interestingly reinterpreted questions. I learned more by failed lessons I did over than I would have if I'd gotten it right the first time, especially in multiple definitions and even source and contextual definitions of certain words which nailed them into my memory. La rueda is freaking burned into my brain now, you have no idea.

Also contains 'strengthening your skills' where you can click and get a random assortment of bits from past lessons. I use that a lot to calm down after Failure With Adverbs (All the -mente in the world). This is where being somewhat familiar with Spanish and the overlap with English is a huge problem. Reading it is easy; calling it from memory or spelling it kicked my ass like, a dozen times.

Highly, highly, highly recommended. Seriously, this is fun.

Teaches: Spanish, Italian, French, German, English, Portuguese

2.) Memrise - this is more difficult to define, since it says it's about languages, but it's kind of about everything that they can get someone to write a lesson for. Including history, art, Pokemon--yes, I mean that--and physics.

I tried the Russian; I do know Cyrillic from college both print and written forms, but it's been a while, and it nailed it the print back into me in less than an hour. The bigger problem with it is the same problem I had in class; the first basic words they teach you in Russian are fucking huge. There is no Hola or adios; hello, goodbye, please, and thank you are not only in Cyrillic but all greater than five letters, and hello is freaking eleven. For me, I needed to see the word and write it like a lot at the same time to get it, or at least hear it while writing it, which unfortunately for the spelling portion it did not do. I also did the quick lesson on shell scripting, which wasn't useful per se for anything I needed but just to see how it worked. I will say it was very good for learning commands I wouldn't use, but it did give me three or four that I didn't know that I could use.

Teaches: Kind of everything?
Website: memrise