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If you use Duolingo, maybe don't anymore? The company is moving to be "AI-first" and is using AI to generate their content. Meaning, AI is now generating your language lessons.

They announced that they were going to use AI for this a while back but now they're annoucing that they're getting rid of the contractors reviewing the AI generated content. So, very soon Duolingo is just going to be AI generated slop that might not even be correct.

For alternatives, I'd recommend checking with your local library. For instance, mine offers Rosetta Stone for free if you have a library card.

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Shout out to the USA for pissing Canadians off so bad it flipped an entire election that was supposed to be a landslide for the center-right, forever in your debt o7

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I saw this and I thought Tumblr might enjoy it

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Animorphs #8: The Alien thoughts (pt. 3):

Eva [literally fighting for her life to say these words]: Peter... don't join the military... and you won't attract yeerk attention. Peter: Eva's dead, Imma join the military. Peter [10 minutes later]: So I just accidentally did Nobel Prize worthy science by collaborating with my kid's weird friend. Peter: I foresee no negative consequences to this whatsoever.

I really like how comparatively quiet and domestic this book is. Technically there's kind of a battle at the end, but 90% of it is Ax getting to know his fellow Animorphs, coming to grapple with some hard truths about andalites, and learning more than he wants to about yeerks and their hosts. It feels like a nice pause between the brutal pitched battles of #7-MM1 and #10-#13.

Tobias being snippy the entire time he helps Ax get to the radio telescope, and Ax being super literal to dodge his questions («I don't suppose you want to tell me what we're doing, huh?» «Doing? We're flying?») is peak them. Plus, Tobias dropping his annoyance the moment Ax starts to go on alone to say "Good luck" and "be careful" is adorable (p. 102).

The scene where Ax phones home is another one I've always loved. He almost immediately gets put in the position of defending the humans as "our allies, not our enemies," he's accused of destroying Elfangor's legacy by telling the truth, he gets pressured into a cover-up that would claim he let the humans morph, and then his dad sadly reminds him that he's supposed to die trying to kill Visser Three (p. 110). Ax called in the hope of an adult to "tell me what to do... give me instructions" (p. 89) and he gets instructions all right. None of them useful.

Animorphs books can be read here | Book Club schedule is here

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unfortunately no eclipse photography can ever outdo the waffle house one from 2017

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For the Star Wars Day (May the Fourth / May the Force Be With You) there was shared (with the permission of the Pratchett Estate ) a Terry Pratchett story from the Star Wars Universe that was only published in a newspaper 45 years ago! Very excited to read a new Terry's piece! :)❤ (tweet)

Also, Terry Pratchett writing fanfiction 45 years ago, can I hear a wahoo? :)

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I understand why a lot of fantasy settings with Ambiguously Catholic organised religions go the old "the Church officially forbids magic while practising it in secret in order to monopolise its power" route, but it's almost a shame because the reality of the situation was much funnier.

Like, yes, a lot of Catholic clergy during the Middle Ages did practice magic in secret, but they weren't keeping it secret as some sort of sinister top-down conspiracy to deny magic to the Common People: they were mostly keeping it secret from their own superiors. It wasn't one of those "well, it's okay when we do it" deals: the Church very much did not want its local priests doing wizard shit. We have official records of local priests being disciplined for getting caught doing wizard shit. And the preponderance of evidence is that most of them would take their lumps, promise to stop doing wizard shit, then go right back to doing wizard shit.

It turns out that if you give a bunch of dudes education, literacy, and a lot of time on their hands, some non-zero percentage of them are going to decide to be wizards, no matter how hard you try to stop them from being wizards.

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Q&A: Let's Have a Conclave!

Q: What happened to Pope Francis?

A: He got old and died.

Q: Why is your tag "#deadfrank 2k25"?

A: Because he died, he was called Francis (although his real first name was Jorge), and it's 2025.

Q: What's happening now?

A: The Catholic Church is preparing for a new Pope, who will be elected in a conclave, like from the noted book and movie Conclave. This conclave will be sometime between May 5 and May 10; what's going on until then is a series of funerary rituals and "general congregations," i.e. meetings of the cardinals to discuss their overall thoughts on what they might like to see for the Church when they start voting. The conclave is strictly secret but the general congregations aren't; however, the cardinals tend in practice to be cagey about both stages in the process. Cardinals who vote in the conclave itself have an age limit of eighty, but the general congregations are open to older cardinals as well.

Q: What are the important numbers to remember with the conclave?

A: The total number of cardinals voting is going to be somewhere in the low 130s; 135 are eligible, two said they couldn't make it for health reasons, and now it looks like one of those two might be able to make it after all, putting the current figure at 133 or 134. To get elected Pope you need two-thirds of that, which currently is either 89 or 90.

Q: Who's in charge in the meantime?

A: Kevin Farrell, the Camerlengo (chamberlain) of the Holy Roman Church, a frankly somewhat dislikeable old snake with an MBA who used to be Bishop of Dallas (yes, the one in Texas) before getting appointed to a central position in Rome.

Q: What is the next Pope going to be like?

A: Firm answer: Nobody knows.

My educated guess: It's going to be someone who continues a lot of Francis's priorities, but maybe not one of the big names and maybe not the priorities people in the First World tend to associate with him. The Western conservatives are alienating the sort of Global South wild cards they'd have to win over, and we're getting statements stressing continuity and finishing the work Francis started from people like Rwanda's Antoine Kambanda and Myanmar's Charles Maung Bo. These are people who are going to want to see more of Francis's informality, his populism, and probably his focus on climate action and poverty relief. What that would mean for women's or LGBT people's status in the Church could be almost anything, since plenty of people in the developing world with the above views are very socially conservative otherwise, but the full-on reactionaries seem pretty locked out.

Q: Who are some of the papabili ("pope-able") cardinals?

A: Tolentino de Mendonça, Tagle, Zuppi, Parolin, Grech, Prevost, López Romero, Aveline, Pizzaballa, Turkson, Arborelius, Ambongo, Ranjith, and Erdő are some of the names to look into here, listed vaguely from "left" to "right" (although these are tricky terms in this context and at least one voting cardinal, Malaysia's Sebastian Francis, avowedly thinks using them is a form of Eurocentrism). But it doesn't have to be one of them; in fact, it doesn't even have to be one of the cardinals voting; it just always is.

Q: Is he seriously named that?

A: Yes, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, the bishop responsible for (among other things) most Palestinian Christians, is really named Pierbattista Pizzaballa. I'm told it sounds silly even to native speakers of Italian.

Q: Is my fave [Tagle/Zuppi/Erdő if I have anyone like that following me/Pizzaballa/whoever] going to be Pope?

A: There's no one odds-on favorite, so probably not.

Q: Is my least fave going to be Pope?

A: See above.

Q: Who are you, monstrousgourmandizingcats, rooting for?

A: Zuppi, but it's not up to me.

Q: Is Kevin from Dallas a papabile?

A: Lmao no.

Q: Why are all these people men?

A: There ain't no rule that says a cardinal has to be a man, since a cardinal is technically a separate thing from a priest, but it would be very very difficult for all sorts of logistical and cultural reasons for a pope to actually appoint a woman as a cardinal, and not even Pope Francis ever seriously considered it. There is one woman, a nun called Simona Brambilla, who accidentally got an email inviting her to the general congregations because she's the head of a dicastery (a department of the Church's central government), but unfortunately she doesn't seem to have taken the mailing list up on it.

Q: Is the process fun to follow?

A: Very fun, yes, but also stressful for those of us who care a lot about the Church's direction.

Q: What's the talk among the cardinals focusing on so far?

A: According to Italian-language news, which is usually the most informed on this stuff, the big topics are migrant/refugee issues and how powerful the Church's central administration should be, not necessarily in that order.

Q: Any drama so far?

A: Yes! Angelo Becciu, a corrupt cardinal who resigned his right to sit in a conclave after a criminal conviction for fraud, had resignee's remorse, showed up for one of the general congregations, and had to be escorted out by the Swiss Guards. Kevin from Dallas got taken off Mass duty for (iirc) the sixth of the "Novemdiales" (nine days) of formal mourning for Pope Francis and they replaced him with Víctor Manuel Fernández, an Argentinian cardinal whom the right flank of the Church despises because he's the architect of kinda-sorta-if-you-squint allowing blessings of same-sex couples. Some conservative old guard cardinals supposedly descended on their safe deposit boxes for blinged-out gold pectoral crosses that Francis wouldn't let them wear while he was alive. I'm sure there's much much more to come!

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All these foolish pastoralists love to imagine a version of rural life that is easy, quaint, and free of oppressive traditional institutions and poverty in a way that has never existed. Unlike me, the wise and enlightened city dweller, who loves to imagine a version of cities that are purely liberatory along lines of race, class, and gender, free of nasty implications like ecological impact, opaque supply lines exploiting distant sacrifice zones to support high population density, and more modern technologies of social control. Which totally could exist bro

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Source

Video of Tama

Follow Ultrafacts for more facts

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Animorphs #8: The Alien thoughts (pt. 4):

It's perfect that Ax is the first person to encounter a semi-sympathic yeerk, of any Animorph. Eslin 359 is so... humanized, for lack of a better word. He's motivated out of love, and revenge. He's right that he and Ax have something in common: Visser Three killed someone they love, and now they're willing to risk everything killing him. Ax has just been slapped in the face with the reality of the andalites' imperialism. And now along comes this yeerk who — unlike Ithileran, unlike Lirem, unlike even Noorlin, very like Elfangor — is willing to break the rules in order to do the right thing. Maybe the war isn't as simple as he's been led to think.

Also, I love all the andalite lip service to "freedom" in combination with their obsession with rule-following. Ax has to pledge allegiance perform a ritual to "freedom" every morning and will be reprimanded if he rushes it. Lirem cites the importance of "defending freedom" to explain why they let the hork-bajir get enslaved. The War Council says "our freedom" is the reason they can never communicate freely with other species. Applegate couldn't possibly be satirizing a different hyper-militarized imperialistic society, now could she?

"'I can almost understand the part about not giving us... megaweapons or whatever' Prince Jake said. 'But why all the other secrets?'... 'It's about keeping control of us,' Marco said. 'It's about power,' Rachel agreed. ...'No,' Cassie said... 'It's about guilt. Shame.'" —p. 128 A+ character-establishing, 10/10, no notes.

Actual Rules Lawyer Tobias Fangor! He promised Ax he wouldn't tell anyone about their mission... so he doesn't. He just shows up in Cassie's barn with a bloody piece of shirt, and tells them that only Ax can answer their questions about why. He promised Ax to follow andalite law on promises... so he does. He just hints that Jake should probably order him to tell the truth until Jake does, and then whoopsie, he's been ordered by his prince to spill the beans so he has no choice. Sir, I love him.

Animorphs books can be read here | Book Club schedule is here

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So I just found the most useful photo album in existence for tumblr arguments

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i feel like it says something about us as a species that somebody worked real hard to invent 3D printing when i think anyone who has ever used a printer would agree with me that we have not really gotten our arms around 2D printing yet. we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

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This is an interesting thing I'm noticing as I'm reading but it kinda seems to me like a lot of the Tolkien characters all seem to have elemental symbolism that seems to follow their characterization.

Like Gandalf and Bilbo both seem to have a lot of fire symbolism that follows them around. Gandalf uses light and fire as kind of his two go to weapons and he's the keeper of the ring of Narya which is the fire one. And of course Gandalf the White is forged out of flame. And then Bilbo's introduced in the middle of smoking, and he spends a lot of time hanging around campfires and hearths, like the campfire storyteller he is. He seems to like hanging out in the Hall of Fire at Rivendell, and his conflict with Smaug obviously also involves a lot of fire. He's also arguably the character who is closest to Gandalf.

Frodo on the other hand is like all water imagery. One of the first things we learn about Frodo is his parents were weirdos who hung out in boats and then drowned, and he's introduced filling drinks at Bilbo's party. He makes his stand against the Nazgul at the river. He himself nearly drowns like three times in the story, and spends a lot of time in boats, being haunted by dark waters, and the sound of the ocean (and of course ends the story going over the sea). Like the water symbolism with Frodo is nonstop and he shares that in common with Gollum, who specifically is characterized by pools, rivers, and lakes, as well as fish, worms, mud and roots and caves—very wet and slimy compared to Frodo's more mariner/wayfinder imagery. But they're still kind of two sides of the same coin.

Pippin and Merry get a lot of plant and tree symbolism. Besides hanging out with ents and drinking tree wine and that time they both got eaten by a tree, it's clear Merry grew up wandering forests and knows a lot about wild plants (and writes a book on it later) and Pippin gets a ton of association with Gondor, y'know, that place that is represented by a big ol' tree. Their tobacco leaves too actually kinda play a pivotal role, and are again, very plant focused.

You'd think Sam would also be more earth oriented, being he's a gardener, but not really? Unlike Merry who's out here spitting plant facts 24/7 and working on his plant book, Sam's interest in plants seems like to only be around when he's on the clock. His symbolism is all very celestial. He's the guy who ends up using the Star of Earendil. He sees Earendil while he and Frodo are walking through Mordor. He evokes Elbereth, the Star Goddess like multiple times. He names his daughter after the star-sun shaped flower Elanor which literally means "Sun and Stars." And if you think about it, Gardener is actually kind of a perfect role for a star-guy when you remember how dependent plants are on the sun. He also seems to share some kind of connection with Galadriel who is also caked in a lot of star imagery. It also tracks he'd be paired with Frodo thematically as he serves as a guiding light to a mariner, in contrast to how Gollum represents the depths.

IDK what all that means, I just think it's neat!

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Something so profoundly fucked up between the inverse ratio of shrinking middle class and ever increasing aggression of advertisement