This week: a nice movie, a good TV show, and some thoughts about learning German on Duolingo.

For folks not in the know, this is a weekly stream of consciousness zero-agenda “here’s what’s happening” or “here’s what’s interesting” post. Read my first entry from the week before.

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What’s been happening

• This week we took my wife’s brother’s kids to the arcade at a mall here. It was really nice watching them play around. We didn’t have things like this as a kid. I remember the first time I was at a bowling alley was in Kochi in the 2000s at the now defunct Esplenade, but now you get these experiences everywhere.

• We also completed the trifecta of great Malayalam movie releases recently by watching Manjummel Boys, a disaster rescue flick inspired by true events. This is going to be a refrain from previous weeks, but again, the music and art direction, and the acting is just brilliant. The movie remarkably is more about their friendship and sacrifice than about the nerve-biting rescue, which is saying something.

• I’m reading and enjoying Savage Awakening, a LitRPG serial released at Royal Road. I continue to think that amateur fiction like this will eventually take over normal publishing.

• I’m also watching a couple of Korean series: Doctor Slump and Castaway Diva. Both are typical Korean fare, with its share of silly comedy and downright cringey scenes, but one thing I like about them is how both don’t shy away from tackling complex issues like depression, burnout, and getting help for improving mental health. I find a lot of themes in these two shows relevant for a lot of folks from our current generation, where the lack of empathy and compassion for yourself is often a cause for sorrow. I also loved Diva’s Park Eun-bin in Extraordinary Attorney Woo, another show that you should watch.

• I’ve been learning German on Duolingo for 130 days now, and while I like how they’ve gamified learning a language, I do feel that progression is incredibly slow. I still can’t manage to read or make sense of anything I watch or hear, except perhaps a few words here and there. One thing I felt really lacking was a lack of exposition: everything is taught by example, and while I like the ?show, don’t tell” approach, I feel like most of the mistakes I’m making now is because I lack some fundamentals like for example: when to use the proper suffixes for cases. It’s also probably a result of their subscription model: unless you string learners along, you don’t have recurring revenue. Will there ever be a learning app that aligns their revenue model with their customers goals?
• At work, this week I merged 3 different PRs to 3 separate repositories just to get a single, small API endpoint working. This made me reflect on how true Conway’s law is to programming.

Links of the Week

• I’m not sure when it’s going to be shut down, but Demus seems to be a great way to listen to music streaming for free. It’s like Youtube Music, but a real native app for iOS.
• Apple’s missteps and general angst about European DMA seems to continue with its recent blocking (& reversal) of Epic’s developer account. I wish they would do the sensible thing like they’ve done on the Mac on every platform. Allow folks to install any kind of signed app.

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