Yeah this is a normal phrase in British English too. Today you learned!

It probably depends on which language you’re learning and whether there’s a good deck available but I’ve moved onto flashcards with Anki.

The main problem with Duo (before all of its current problems) used to be that it didn’t really give much context unless you were on the full website and clicked through to read the grammar rules, but the card deck I’m using for basic Spanish has all of that built in and visible from the start so it’s been a good foundation on the language.

I’ve also heard excellent things about something called the “pimsleur” method but that seems expensive to access through official means. I’m sure there are other ways to try it out, of course…

Exactly!

Kept it going for a while, making sure to take a day off once a month to avoid building another stressful streak. But I kinda got to the end of its usefulness and wandered off to other things.

Just started learning Spanish and I thought about firing it up again but the app is such a mess these days I actually can’t face it.

Edit: Remember getting rid of the streak doesn’t actually lose your “progress” in learning the language, which is presumably the important part. It’s just a meaningless number. You can do it!

Ngl that damn streak took over my life at one point, I was over 1000 days and climbing. Decided one day to just…let it go on purpose. To no longer be caged by the tyranny of the owl.

Highly recommend it, the sense of freedom is unreal.

Starting my day off with this absolutely cursed image, thank you OP.

I’ve thought about it an uncomfortable amount and decided you might be right.

You’re welcome.

Andy Serkis and Liv Tyler

It’s been common for a lot longer than that in the UK, we’re very lazy :D

Yeah I’m trying to remember how we used to do it (the last time I went through a normal checkout with a full shop was probably 10 years ago) and this seems right.

Gotta have the heavy stuff handy so you can put it straight into the bottom of the bags. Anything else is wasting time!

Alas, not really! I have a cheap shuttle and am still trying to get the hang of “the flip” but I’ll get it eventually. I did manage a sort of wonky snowflake but that’s about it so far. Trouble is, as you know, all the other hobbies getting in the way 😄

Currently working on cross stitching a dragon from the Discworld books, knitting some crazy speckly socks and a shawl that is way behind where it needs to be to be finished on time, and planning various sewing projects. RIP my free time.

Just left another comment with links to some of the more active craft communities on here, we’d love to see what you’re working on if you ever want to share!

We do a lot of hanging out and gossiping on fedi tbf. Mastodon is really big on crafts, and on Lemmy we have places like [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] etc for specific crafts.

For the crafts a bit too niche to have their own active community, [email protected] loves to see completed projects!

Gonna tag @[email protected] and @[email protected] too because I feel like a lot of folks don’t realise how much craft stuff we have on here!

I’ve taught a few people to crochet and all it really takes is patience, and and accepting that you’re going to feel like you’ve somehow got both too many and also not enough hands for the first little while. There’s no shortage of tutorials online so it’s just a question of finding a beginner one that clicks with you and going from there.

And if you get stuck, need to ask newbie questions, or just want to show off the first few wonky rows of stitches you make to people who will understand what an achievement it is, [email protected] is the community for you!

I immediately thought of tatting just because it’s kind of interesting that you can do it two such different ways with such different tools, and also because using a shuttle looks like actual witchcraft.

Honestly this was on my mind because I saw a clickbait YT title the other day claiming that the creator had one chance to do a thing or would have to “be a janitor forever” which…a) that’s ridiculous and b) doesn’t sound half bad to me at all 🤷‍♀️

Interesting! I worked with both men and women at that job, but admittedly it was a long time ago now (and not in the US which I know most people here are) so I honestly had no idea this was a thing!

Still miss that free hot chocolate tho.

I’ve done this a couple times. Some reasons off the top of my head:

• The content was specific to Mastodon and the people following me there, so there wasn’t much point posting it somewhere else.

• It started off as a normal toot well within my server’s character limit (1500, my server is awesome that way) but then I wanted to add more thoughts later without annoying everyone who already boosted the original.

• The individual toots in a thread are sometimes posted quite far apart, but make sense to be viewed together, e.g. standalone progress updates on the same project.

Of course there are plenty people doing it just because the microblogging is the only tool they have so they have to make the content fit. But there’s a few more potential reasons to add to the list.

This is definitely a cool but very niche feature that I and nerds like me would use, but the vast majority of normal* folk never would. So for that reason it’s probably not going to be any kind of priority to add. But hey, in the meantime, we’ve always got footnotes!

* “normal” by Lemming standards, anyway

I’ve done all kinds of random jobs but like to tell anyone who will listen that my time as a cleaner was possibly the best of them all.

I worked in a building that was entirely dedicated to operating and adminning a traffic tunnel, so there were normal office rooms but also cool control rooms full of flashing lights and interesting displays and friendly people who were only too happy to infodump about it all.

The top floor was entirely given over to a conference room featuring a massive scale model of our tunnel but also the surrounding road system, complete with tiny toy cars. That room also had a hot drinks machine that was entirely free to employees so most of my breaks were spent up there with a book drinking hot chocolate.

Yeah, cleaning toilets and buffing floors is not exactly going to keep your mind occupied, but that just means it’s free to wander to more interesting places. No stress, nothing to take home at the end of the day.

If you can get by on the generally lower pay and get to clean somewhere interesting there are a lot of unexpected perks, tbh.