Category: Program

Surprisingly, I’m not talking about mine this time. Rather, I’m talking about one of the cool new things to come out of quarantine, which is the Bringing The Zoo To You program! Since March 2020, several zoos across the US have joined the BringingTheZooToYou hashtag on Facebook with videos and Facebook Live streams, providing a mix of entertaining updates – such as Minnesota Zoo’s wolves howling along to the local siren test – and educational presentations on various animals, ecosystems (Symbiosis On The Reef), and aspects of care and maintenance. Of the selection I’ve watched so far, my personal favorite is Brookfield Zoo’s chat about Leo Red Panda – they trained him to use a paintbrush!

So yeah, this post is effectively an advertisement for a whole archive of (p)awesome animals and fascinating facts. Go wild!

Yep, I’m talking about Duolingo. As some of you know, I’ve already posted about Rosetta Stone — another language platform. Yes, I’ve used both, and no, I’m not going to slam either. They’re both good, for different reasons.

Rosetta Stone offers a lot of languages (I provided a list in my post). So does Duolingo. As of when I’m writing this, they have Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Italian, Korean, Chinese, Russian, Portuguese, Arabic, Turkish, Dutch, Swedish, Hindi, Greek, Irish, Polish, Norwegian (Bokmal), High Valyrian, Hebrew, Latin, Vietnamese, Hawaiian, Danish, Romanian, Czech, Welsh, Indonesian, Swahili, Klingon, Hungarian, Ukrainian, Navajo, Esperanto, and Scottish Gaelic, organized by number of learners. As you may have noticed, some of these languages are from fictional universes, like Klingon. No, that’s not a joke. Yes, they legitimately cover those.

I also made a point of saying, “As of when I’m writing this,” because Duolingo is always adding new courses. They also add them faster than Rosetta Stone, namely because, as a subscription service, Rosetta Stone has to have the full course ready before they make it available. Duolingo, on the other hand, puts it up in beta and keeps adding to it.

That’s another point — Rosetta Stone costs money, Duolingo is free. Like I said, they’re both good, but, again, for different reasons. Rosetta Stone has the breakdowns I mentioned in that post, focusing on different parts of each lesson, whereas Duolingo really doesn’t (the closest they get is Tinycards). On the flip side, because there’s not a set amount of time until your subscription runs out, with Duolingo you don’t feel pressured the same way, which allows you to pick up multiple languages without concern over money and time management. I’m currently taking five.

Duolingo lessons also tend to be, in my experience, more… bite sized, I suppose. They’re faster and have less content per lesson to memorize, which allows me to binge Hawaiian lessons without running out of steam. Rosetta Stone lessons tend to be longer, taking an estimated ten minutes for most of the exercises.

As a final note between the two, Rosetta Stone gives you words in the target language and a picture to match it, whereas Duo gives you the English translations for the words. As I said in my Rosetta post, I don’t really know how to feel about that, or which I prefer, but they both work.

Overall, I’d say if you’re seriously intending to put a lot of focus and effort into learning a language, Rosetta Stone is the way to go, but if you just want something that you can work on in your spare time, or for fun (I picked up Hawaiian on a whim, for instance) you might prefer Duolingo.

I wrote “For All Time” (parts 1, 2, and 3 here) for a short story contest. I told you about the contest in the first of the three posts linked above. What I didn’t tell you was how I found out about that contest.

My editor/publicist/manager/mother also writes, largely short stories, and at some point she stumbled across Almond Press and their list of writing competitions. What they do is make a list of creative writing competitions that other groups have set up, take the highlight information and a link to the page, and they put them all in one place for easy access. This is how I found out about the Felix Dennis competition that I wrote “For All Time” for.

When I say “highlight information,” I mean just that. They have the competitions ordered by deadline, with their name/title (unsurprisingly), followed by where they’ll accept entries from, the entry fee, if there is one, the maximum word count, and the top prize. Each block doubles as a link to more information about their corresponding contest, with more about the theme and requirements. That page has a link to the website that’s actually running the competition for entry.

Soundrown is one of those small, obscure internet programs that turns out to be immensely helpful. It is exactly what it sounds like: a site for sore ears. Tired of listening to a conversation when you want to be reading? Soundrown! Want the calming effect of listening to a coffee shop on fire with birds in the background? Soundrown! Want to write and need the right sounds to get in the mood? You guessed it… Soundrown!

Okay, in all fairness, I think the only intended purpose is the last one. But hey, they’re all fun. And you can relax, it isn’t like they recorded a coffee shop on fire. What they do have are multiple audio tracks you can listen to, multiple at a time if you’d like. Presently, these are Coffee Shop, Rain, Waves, Fire, Birds, Night, Train, Fountain, White Noise, and Playground. Each has its own volume bar, so you can adjust them accordingly. They have a random button if you don’t want to select one yourself, as well as music, which is currently in Beta and has exactly one song. I’ve listened to that song a lot.

They also have links to a couple of articles in the Menu, Knowledge section. Quite honestly, I haven’t gotten to reading them yet, but they look interesting and I’ll likely be reading them soon. I mainly use this site for the song; it’s just under six minutes of gentle instrumental music, which I’ve found to be the best music for me to read or write to without getting distracted.

We’ve all had moments where there was a word, we knew what it meant, maybe approximately how long it was or what it started with, but we couldn’t for the life of us remember what the word was. Where it’s right there, right on the tip of your tongue, but you can’t remember what exactly it is. It’s infuriating to say the least, and if you’re obsessive like I am, you then spend the rest of the day on and off contemplating what that word might have been.

Not anymore! As random information that I stumbled across while browsing the Internet has so enlightened me, there is a website called, shocker, Tip of My Tongue, made for this exact purpose. Forgot a word? Just go to Tip Of My Tongue! It can take a few tries to match up the definitions, and it isn’t perfect, but it’s quite helpful nonetheless.

Here’s how it works: There are four rows, Partial Word, Letters, Word Meaning, and Refine Search. Partial Word allows you to type in what it may start and end with, or contain somewhere in the middle. Letters also has three functional settings, Unscramble, Must have, and Can’t have. Word Meaning hypothetically allows for multiple meanings to the word, but I’ve found it easier to just use one and adjust how I word it until it matches up. Refine Search is for the minimum length, maximum length, and whatever the word may sound like.

As an author, and just a compulsive human in general, this has saved me multiple headaches of trying to find the word I want to use, whether it’s in a story, an essay, or a speech.