Welcome to 5 Quick Things that I saw since last month that I thought were interesting enough to share with you. None of them are particularly timely so feel free to just enjoy 🙂

Welcome to 5 Quick Things that I saw since last month that I thought were interesting enough to share with you. None of them are particularly timely so feel free to just enjoy 🙂

This time it’s the proper November update 🙂

>Number One<

Technically all words are made up

This is just a cute article about how they made the Duolingo course in Yiddish which was made particularly difficult by a large amount of Yiddish variety and also a high differentiation between academic Yiddish and street-level Yiddish. That’s not uncommon for languages but in a language that is spoken widely across the globe but with a limited number of speakers with no singular language council it actually is a real challenge. It’s another reason to remember that once you take your language learning from a sterile environment to the real world you will definitely encounter some fun bumps.

>Number Two<

Midsommar is not a happy tale

I’ve been kind of sitting with a bunch of feelings lately about some of the “art” and “writing” and “work” I’ve been doing and how it feels meaningless in the face of all the things going on all the time. This article doesn’t dissuade me from that but it does make me sit with this quote:

It’s no wonder at all that so much of our creative work gravitates toward trauma. We have not yet found a way to escape its clutches.

>Number Three<

A World Without JarJar

I absolute cannot remember if I’ve actually linked to Royal Ocean Film Society or not. I’ve been doing these posts for two years now so if I didn’t just discover a channel it’s kind of a crap shoot if I remember linking to them or not. Anyway, more important he’s been making some top notch videos about film for a while and this one is about the odd intersection of fandom and editing and I am just in love with it. I was aware of fan edits in a very broad sense but I spend most of my time in the fanfic realm of fandom so this introduced me to some cool concepts and communities I wasn’t aware of.

>Number Four<

Ups and Downs

As I grow older the complexities of how to grieve and how to mourn only grow more complicated and there was a lot to mourn over this past year. This article ostensibly about the death of Bernie Madoff and a movie about saying Kaddish for him gives me pause and some space to think about how there is no room in this world for only up, only ever growing joy without these stops, these stumbling blocks. I hope to eventually see this movie but even reading this article has given me a lot to think about in terms of faith and gathering and grief and of course, how all strangely connected we are.

>Number Five<

Downer Ending

I would wax poetic about how I feel about the pandemic ending but I think broke my neck on this quote:

There’s no life hack that gets around the knowledge your government was happy to let a vast swath of its population die, no radical acceptance of such a monumental chain of loss.

We’re always told how we cannot help other countries and other peoples because we have to help the folks at home and while I have spent my life trying to patch system in America that do not serve the folks at home (and have been failed personally by those systems in turn), there is just a grim note that America, and many other countries, choose to bloody their hands. There are no reasons. There is just loss. Now get back to work.

Alright folks, that’s it for this month, see you next month!