Duolingo rant

I love learning languages and learning about different cultures. I've used many tools over the years to try and develop my language skills with varying levels of success. Duolingo is far and away one of the most effective language learning tools but it's not without its limitations.

One of the things I don't like about Duolingo is that it relies on momentum to be effective. If you break that momentum then you start to fail miserably and the whole experience can become disheartening and discouraging very quickly. What I mean by momentum, is your continued use of the site. This is built into the design with the emphasis placed on daily streaks. Users are encouraged to return daily to complete lessons in their course or to practice for a few minutes at least to keep their streak alive. The longer your streak becomes the more imperative that impulse becomes. Now there are ways to freeze your streak and take a day or two off from lessons but there's a danger when you do this that you will lose the impulse to continue.

My Latest Project: The Tarot Trifecta

For the past 6 months or so I have been working on a book about Tarot Cards and I've finally published it. I've chosen a separate pen name for this publication, Caesar Devine, as it doesn't really fit with anything I have written under my current name S J Doran which so far has mostly been LGBTQ oriented fiction. I've also created a separate webpage for it where I will post Tarot related content, so if you're interested in learning more about Tarot cards you can hop over to caesardevine.com to find out more.

The Tarot Trifecta is available now only on Amazon

The Tarot Trifecta at Amazon.com

The Tarot Trifecta at Amazon.co.uk

Breaking The Circle

I think about the concept of confidence quite a bit, mainly because I have social anxiety and I have struggled with my self-confidence or lack of it for many years. In that time I have read many books around the subject but one text in particular has stood out, perhaps most surprisingly it isn't a book about anxiety at all but rather a book about Cold Reading that had a generic extract that at first pass was so specific I thought it had been written for me personally, but that was the point. The extract served to demonstrate how statements that seemed precise and personal were actually generic when you stepped back and considered them objectively, free from the original context in which they were made.

Whilst the purpose of this extract was to demonstrate the effectiveness of confidence trickery, the key take away for me was the fact that the specific insecurities the passage referred to were considered generic which alluded to the wider experiences that people have; or more succinctly the prevailing relationship to confidence that people have in general. If a fear of being judged and what other people might think of you is considered generic in this regard, then it had to be a fear that everyone, or at least the vast majority of people had.

10 tips to get the most out of Spotify

I have written a lot in the past about anxiety and depression, and the various coping mechanisms that I have used. Distraction techniques in particular have their successes and their failures; but in any case they are still useful.

Two of the ways I distract myself from anxiety, trying to prevent myself from over-thinking, are by playing games, or by listening to music. For the former I use Steam and for the latter I use Spotify. As part of my recent reflective mood I went back to take a look at my Spotify Wrapped from 2022 and wanted to share some tips on how to get the most out the app.

For context here are a few highlights from my 2022 wrapped. I spent 27,854 minutes spent listening to music, higher than 83% of other listeners in the UK. My most played track was 'Nothing Breaks Like A Heart - Darren Porter Remix' by Raz Nitzan which I played 208 times. I played 2,404 songs in total spanning 2,154 artists, so I think it's fair to say I get more than my moneys-worth out of the service.

Déjà vu

If you read my previous post you'll not be surprised to learn that I haven't been in a great place mentally for the past few days. I've been trying to make decisions about my future and where I want to go from here. In an attempt to understand where I am and how I got here I decided to look back at my journey. I have had several blogs over the years, all of which have been purged from the internet for various reasons, but I have backups of a few of them that were lucky to survive the hard drive crash a few years ago. The most popular of those blogs had over 600 posts when I took it down so there was quite a wealth of content to dive into.

Upon reflection I can honestly say that I have grown as a person for one simple reason, I hated what I read. It's not that any of it was particularly offensive or grating, far from it, most of it was quite benign, but that was part of the problem. I've always stressed the little things and let the big things take care of themselves, and my past writing really shows that. I didn't like what I read because most of it alluding to my daily struggles and although I am sure many people took comfort in knowing they weren't alone when they read it, for me looking back it just dredges up memories I would rather forget.

The Burden of Proof

I've been in two minds when it comes to just how much of this story I want to share but to be honest at this point I feel somewhat lost and unsure what to do. I don't expect a response to this post, I just wanted to put it out there into the Universe, if not for any other reason than maintaining my own sanity.

Almost a year ago I applied for a job and heard no reply; that's pretty standard as many job-seekers will tell you, the courtesy of a reply even a rejection seems to be something of a bygone era at this point. I originally thought nothing of this, it was just another application in a long line of applications that had been ignored. Then 5 months went by and out of nowhere I got an invitation for an interview. Now I know some places have backlogs but 5 months seems like quite the delay between a closing date and an invitation for an interview.

Steven has just signed in

The world has changed a lot in the last 20 years but one thing has remained constant and that is our desire to connect. In a recent post I wrote about the nostalgia for social media that actually served its purpose in creating social connections. I have thought about this a lot, the question of a world without social media and I've realised the emphasis on connections we form online today is very much public in nature. Whether you define that boundary as encompassing the world in its entirety of a limited subset of people from within it, the focus remains the same, to engage in a way that others can see.

In reflection I have come to realise that the death of platforms like MSN marked the point where this shift first occurred. In the days of MSN the emphasis was on one-to-one connections. You created an account and could add as many people as you liked but your conversations were one-to-one and private. Group conversations could be created but these were session based, ending when you closed the application requiring you to recreate them if you wanted to continue a conversation in a group. Despite the fact that apps like WhatsApp and Signal exist to fill the gap formed by the absence of the likes of MSN there is a fundamental difference between the two - you had to sign in to MSN. If you didn't sign in then you couldn't be reached, you weren't constantly connected available on demand.