Tag: italian

Italian notes are migrated

Today I finished transferring all of my Italian language notes from OneNote to Obsidian. The last two pages of notes were complicated and needed a lot of reformatting, which was why I left them to last. They are my pages on verb tenses and conjugations, and a second page all about the subjunctive tense. I realised they needed a bit of revamping and reorganisation, so it was quite a job porting them across.

I also wrote a new batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips, ready for photographing on the weekend. I’m getting close to finishing off most of the theme storylines. My plan, as it is, is to hopefully write and produce one last batch during the Christmas break, which should hopefully mean that I finish making new comics before the New Year, although the comics will run into January, and maybe slightly into February.

And of course I had some ethics classes. The Alien Invasion topic is very fun and interesting, with some intriguing and amusing discussion from some of the kids.

On TV I’ve started rewatching the original series of Star Trek, which is on Netflix. I watched “The Cage” and “The Man Trap” the past two nights. Tonight I might do “Charlie X”. It’s been too long since I rewatched all of these. And I was somewhat surprised in a class this evening to have a girl mention while we were discussing aliens that she watched Star Trek too, with her parents, and it was one of her favourite shows.

New content today:

First play of Arcs

Firstly one thing I forgot to mention on Thursday: While waiting for my iPhone appointment at Apple, after having some lunch I went to the new Lego store. This one in the heart of the city is supposed to be the biggest Lego store in the world. Although honestly I’ve been in the Lego store in Cologne, and the one here isn’t really that much bigger; maybe 20 or 30% bigger in floor space. They had some cool giant models. I would have taken some photos to show, but I only had my old phone and it was about to be wiped when trading it in for the new one. (I suppose I could have uploaded them somewhere or emailed them to myself, but I couldn’t be bothered.)

Friday was board games night at a friend’s place. This particular occasion was special because one of my friends just got given the keys to his brand new house by the builders. He had his old house demolished and a new one built on the land. We got to christen it with a games night, even though he hasn’t moved in yet. He brought over a table and some chairs and some ice to throw in a sink to keep drinks cold (no refrigerator).

We played Arcs for the first time. We decided to make it a learning game and not try to play too seriously, and just see how far we got before we decided we’d learnt how to play, then stop ready to restart a proper game next time.

Arcs

It’s a space battle game over a set of planets in different systems. There are several different strategies for scoring points, some more aggressive and others more passive. We ended up playing 3 “chapters” of the possible 5 that makes a complete game. We were enjoying it, but felt it was getting a bit late and we’d learnt the game well enough by that point. Several players had made what later turned out to be strategically awful moves, so rather than play to completion we called the game done. In particular I tried attacking very early and aggressively, and ended up losing enough ships that I had to spend a long time simply recovering my position. Next time we’ll be prepared and ready for serious competition.

Today (Saturday) I got up a bit early. The sun is rising before 05:30, and the birds make noise way earlier. This changes tomorrow when daylight saving starts, so sunrise will be at a more sane 06:30. I went for a 5k run. It was already warm when I started at 8 o’clock. The day was a warm one. I made a new Darths & Droids comic.

In the afternoon my wife and I went for a long walk with Scully over to Cammeray. There’s a Mexican place there that does good margaritas and we had some during their happy hour, with some chips and guacamole. After relaxing for a bit we ordered some dinner. I got a plate of pork with corn various spicy bits and pieces, my wife got halloumi with broccolini and patatas bravas. Each plate came with tortillas to make little taco-like handfuls. The food was good and very filling.

Then we walked all the way home again as the sun went down. Venus and a super thin crescent moon were setting in the western sky, which was glowing orange. A nice way to end the evening.

New content yesterday:

New content today:

No nuts!

I learnt a weird new fact about Italian today while watching an Italian YouTube cooking video.

There’s no word for “nut” in Italian.

The language only has words for specific types of nuts: walnuts, almonds, peanuts, hazelnuts, etc. In a sense, this is logical, since most of the plant parts described in English as “nuts” are diverse and botanically and anatomically unrelated. A bag of mixed nuts in Italian is called a bag of frutta secca, which literally means “dry fruits”.

Rewinding to this morning, after I did my two ethics classes I backed up my iPhone and then went into the city to the Apple store to buy myself a new release iPhone 16. My current phone was an 11, so six years old, and the battery life was really starting to degrade noticeably. In fact for the walk I did on Tuesday I started with a fully charged phone, and it was almost empty by the time I got home. So I decided it was a good time to upgrade.

I traded in the old phone for partial credit on the new one. I got an iPhone 16 Pro model, with the superior camera. I take a lot of photos, and the extra telephoto focal lengths are the biggest feature for me. When I got home I spent some time checking out the camera features and I’m pretty impressed. Also the new camera control button is pretty cool and should be extremely useful.

I had to restore the phone from my backup, which went smoothly, but took some time. My old phone had a leather case which I liked. but I noticed the cases for the 16 only come in silicone, which I dislike the feel of, and polycarbonate plastic, which seems tacky to me. Also the case doesn’t allow the phone to lie flat like my old one did, due to the protruding camera lenses on the back. That was one of the main reasons I had a case on the old one. So I opted not to get a case at this stage. I’ll see how I go with the naked phone for a while before deciding if I want a case or not.

New content today:

Full day of teaching and Lego

After four ethics classes this morning, I took Scully for a walk to the post office, where I had to mail a couple of things, and the to the fish & chip shop for some lunch. I ate at my usual favourite spot, in the small park on the hill overlooking the harbour. The day was sunny and mild, really nice.

They were very generous with the fish today. Normally it’s one fillet piece, but today the pieces were smaller, about half the usual size or a little more. But they didn’t just give me two pieces, they gave me three!

Back at home I spent the rest of the afternoon photographing the next batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips, that I’d written over the weekend. That took almost three hours of effort. By which time my wife was home from work. She took Scully out for a walk while I finished off photographing the last few strips.

Then I made pizza dough for dinner. While that was rising, I assembled a few strips and uploaded them to the server, ready for the first new update of the week tonight. And then it was time to make the pizza, rolling out the dough, topping it with tomato paste, herbs, cheese, and the regular diced pumpkin, walnuts, feta, and some chilli flakes. into a super hot oven and five minutes later it was ready to eat!

Then I had a shower, before two more classes in the evening. In between those I’m writing this. The first evening class has two kids in it who are very talkative. Either one of them I could probably ask one or two questions and they would be happy talking for the remainder of the lesson. But because there are two other kids in the class as well, I have to keep interrupting them to let those kids have a say too.

I’ve also just done my daily Japanese and Italian practice. I’m using Duolingo for Japanese now, and have moved to listening exercises on YouTube for Italian. I just watched a five-minute cake recipe video in Italian and made note of some new vocabulary words, like mescolare (to mix), versare (to pour), stampo (cake mould), impasto (dough), manciata (handful), dattero (date, as in the fruit), and my favourite new word of the day: sbizzarrire (to indulge) and the related sbizzarrirsi (to indulge oneself).

New content today:

Getting into Italian videos

So I’ve been watching more Italian YouTube videos to improve my listening skills and get exposed to more vocabulary. Yesterday I watched one of the videos from a channel I follow, where the guy suggested putting on Italian stuff in the background while doing other things, just to have the sounds enter your head, even while you’re not concentrating on them. He said the best YouTube channel for this is QVC Italia, which is an Italian home shopping network!

He said it’s great because (1) they are speaking standard Italian with no regional dialect or accent, or slang words, (2) what they are saying is very descriptive, they’re talking about a particular thing, and (3) the thing they’re talking about is shown on the screen. This makes it a lot better than, say, watching in Italian movie, where the people will usually be talking about stuff that isn’t visible on the screen. And you can play games with it such as trying to figure out what they’re talking about without looking, and then confirm by taking a glance at the video. So I started watching a few of the QVC Italia videos and they’re quite fun actually. They have some cooking segments which are cool to watch.

Today I didn’t do much particularly interesting. A 5k run, for which I tried to go a bit faster than yesterday, which I managed, but it was a bit of a struggle. I wonder if it’s the slightly warmer weather that’s making it tougher.

Because it’s really feeling like spring now. There are cherry blossoms out everywhere, and the magnolias are losing their flowers and starting to sprout new green leaves. Azaleas are blooming everywhere. And birds are starting to nest and produce young. The brushturkeys in particular have started making huge messes of leaf litter everywhere.

New content today:

Some new language learning

It rained for most of today, though not heavily. I had to take Scully out in it a few times and the bathroom is full of wet umbrellas, shoes, and her doggy raincoat.

The morning I spent making a new Darths & Droids strip. Then after lunch I sorted out some more Magic: the Gathering cards, ready for selling online. I’m up to going through huge stacks of common cards form the expansions and sets I bought back in the 90s, when I was trying to collect full sets of cards. This meant buying a lot to get all the rare cards, resulting in having piles and piles of the common cards. They’re not worth much each, but if you can find someone to buy hundreds of them they add up. Finding those someones requires doing a proper inventory so I can list the cards properly.

Also today I started a new Italian learning regime. Duolingo isn’t really doing much for me any more as I’ve completed its Italian course, and now it only ever gives me the option of “revision” and it seems bugged in that it just repeats the same very small pool of exercises over and over again, rather than sampling its entire set.

I found an Italian learning channel on YouTube a while back and kept meaning to watch more of the videos, but now I’m going to make an effort to watch something in Italian every day. The channel is here: Italy Made Easy. Today I watched this short video about how to wash dishes, narrated in Italian! I like this guy; his videos are amusing and fun.

New content today:

A beautiful evening run

I didn’t do a 5k run yesterday because of the foul weather. Although rain was forecast today, and there were a few showers around, it was mostly pleasant and sunny. My wife came home from work a bit earlier than usual, and I took the opportunity to go for a run before sunset. At the halfway mark the view was so nice I had to pull out my phone and take a photo.

The city from halfway

I now have 6 ethics classes on Mondays, and that takes up a lot of the day. After the first four I had a break for lunch and took Scully for a walk to the post office. There’s usually not much of a wait, but today there was a queue of ten other people there before me, so I had to wait a bit. One guy had a whole hand-trolley with multiple boxes containing packages he wanted sent off. He just kept pulling them out one after the other and was still getting through them by the time I left.

During the afternoon I took a break to assemble part 9 of the Lego D&D set.

Lego D&D set stage 9

This adds a castle tower construction on one end, with a door accessed by the ladder. It’s a prison cell. And inside…

Lego D&D set stage 9

And from the other side we can see a mushroom patch in what looks like it might be an outdoor area.

Lego D&D set stage 9

In other news, I’ve burnt through all of my gems in Duolingo. When they converted to this gem reward system a while back, I had something like 40,000 of them, and I thought it would last me ages. But you need to use them up to keep practising when you make too many mistakes, or to access the mastery review exercises, so I’ve been slowly spending them faster than gaining them. And now they’ve run out. I can’t do any of those things any more without spending money. So it might be time to find an alternative to using Duolingo to keep up with my Italian practice.

New content today:

Working on a new combat system for D&D

Today while doing my daily Italian practice, I learnt that in Italian you don’t walk in the rain (nella pioggia). The proper expression is that you walk under the rain (sotto la pioggia).

It was a busy day with ethics classes. Thursdays are still my busiest with 5. At lunch I walked with Scully up to the shops, though I had lunch at home and didn’t buy anything other than restocking some medication from the pharmacy. It was very windy and when I got into the area near the shops where there are London plane trees my hay fever went berserk. I didn’t stop sneezing until we walked halfway back home into an area with different types of trees.

This afternoon I worked on a new combat system for my Dungeons & Dragons game. I’ve been thinking for some time about making all combat dice rolls player-facing. This is a term meaning that the players make dice rolls instead of the Dungeon Master. To explain:

Normally in the D&D rules (specifically the Basic/Expert Set rules that we are using, from 1981), during combat the action proceeds as follows:

  • There is an initiative roll to determine which side acts first, the adventurers (played by the players) or the monsters (played by the DM). (I’m not messing with this bit; I mention it only for completeness.)
  • Let’s say the heroes go first. Each one chooses a monster to attack and makes a die roll to see if they hit it with their weapon. This die roll uses the armour class of the monster as a target number to roll. Roll equal to or higher than the number and you hit the monster. (Note: this is a variant “ascending armour class” system that differs from the canonical rulebook version in what numbers are used, but the result is statistically identical. Many modern players use this variant as the bookkeeping is somewhat easier.)
  • Now the monsters get their attack. The DM chooses which hero each monster attacks, and rolls dice for the monsters, trying to hit the target armour class number of the defending heroes. Note that this is essentially identical to what the players do when they are attacking, except now it’s the DM rolling dice.

The system I’m working on is identical in the first two points, but modifies the third one, the monster attack. Instead of the DM rolling dice for the monster attack, I want to change it so that instead it’s the player of the defending hero who rolls to defend themselves against the attack. This way, the players get to roll more dice (which is fun for them) and the DM doesn’t need to roll for the attack. The DM will still roll for damage if the player fails the defence roll.

I ran the numbers, and it works out statistically identical if a defending player needs to roll under their own armour class to defend successfully. I also converted it to a roll-equal-to-or-higher system, but this requires recording a “defence target” number for each hero (which is equal to 22 minus their armour class), so it adds another complication. Overall I prefer the simplicity of just using the armour class, even if it means for attacking requires rolling high while defending requires rolling low.

Now I have the basic system, I want to break up the defence into different types:

  • Block – you block the attack with a shield.
  • Parry – you parry the attack with a weapon.
  • Evade – you evade the attack by moving out of the way, or in such a way that the blow lands harmlessly on your armour.

I’m modifying these ideas from GURPS, with the intention that they will separate into different tactical choices. The base die roll chances will be the same, but may be modified – for example a dwarf character might get a bonus to blocking with a shield, and a penalty to parrying, while elves get the opposite. Some weapons might be better at parrying, but cause less damage (a rapier) or worse at parrying but inflict more damage (a 2-handed sword).

It’s still work in progress at this point, but I think I have the essentials of a workable system. I’ve discussed it with my players and I think we’ll try it in our next session, to see how it works in actual play. And then we’ll decide if it’s more fun than the old system.

New content today:

Gearing up for early rising

I have an ISO Photography Standards meeting to attend this week. The physical meeting is at Apple Park in Cupertino, but I am not travelling there. I really did not relish the thought of being in the USA on this mid-term election day, and with COVID still being such an issue.

So I am attending via Webex meeting (kind of like Zoom, for those of you who don’t know it). The issue of course is that the meeting runs from 9am to 5pm, California time. Which is 4am to midday here in Sydney. So on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday morning I am going to have to get up about 3:45am and get my brain into gear for highly technical meetings. Since my sleep schedule lately has been fairly late nights of around 11pm, waking around 7am, this is going to be tricky and not fun.

To help adjust, my plan is to get to bed a bit earlier in the preceding days, but given tonight I have an online ethics class running from 9:00-9:45pm, I’m not going to get to bed much earlier tonight, by the time I take Scully out for a final toilet before bed, brush my teeth, and unwind and read in bed a little until I get sleepy.

In other news, I was switched to Duolingo’s new user interface the other day, and it’s horrible. Ryan North (Dinosaur Comics) summed it up in this tweet thread:

Transcript for when/if Twitter goes offline:

@duolingo just got switched to the new version. is there anyway to undo progress? I tested out of a unit but realized I shouldn’t’ve, so I’d been going back and pushing 1* lessons to 5. But in the new version they’re all maxed out at fully completed and I’m lost lol

@duolingo Please, it’s unusable. I keep flunking lessons and there’s no clue as to where the material I skipped is, because now every past lesson looks the same, and it says I’ve fully passed them all. I freely admit my hubris, I’m just tired of all these petards hoisting me

I guess the new UI might be okay for new learners, but for where I’m at with Italian, having completed the course and using the practice reminders for out-of-date skills to reinforce those, it’s impossible. I have no idea what skills I need to practise, or where to find specific grammar or vocabulary in the new “learning path”. It’s basically made it useless for my purposes any more.

So I was prompted today to look at some new method of reinforcing and learning Italian. I decided to check YouTube, and found this channel, Italy Made Easy. I watched one of the intermediate level conversation videos and found it about the right level for me – I could follow most of it, with a bit of help from the subtitles, and also learnt a few things. So this seems promising and aI’ll try to convert my Duolingo time to YouTube time every day from now on.

My new ethics classes tonight are on the topic of Secrets, and I spent this morning writing the lesson outline. This seems to be a good and interesting lesson so far, with two classes down already.

New content today: