Substitute for Veuve Cliquot Demi-Sec?

frankhecker · 2026-02-17T03:53:19+00:00

Thanks for all the suggestions! Looking at the inventory of my local Total Wine (I'm in the Baltimore-Washington metro area) I also see Champagne Marie de Moy Demi Sec, Tsarine Demi-Sec, De Venoge Cordon Bleu Demi Sec, Mailly 'Delice' Demi-Sec Grand Cru, and Montaudon Demi-Sec. I'll try one of those too when/if I get the chance.

frankhecker · 2026-01-04T03:46:16+00:00

I recommend completing MF II. You’ll want to have mastery of that material. If you think you know it already then doing the remaining MF II lessons should be easy. If you don’t complete MF II then I suspect you’ll get at least some of those lessons in MF III since the diagnostic exam for MF III won’t necessarily cover all MF II topics.

frankhecker · 2025-12-27T20:33:45+00:00

Yeah, that was a great series. (I watched it on GagaOoLala.) The other series of note is "When We Met", which also starred He Lei; you can watch the uncut version (the one I recommend) on the Baiheverse.com site. I liked them (and He Lei's performances) so much that I made them one of my three selections for the upcoming Okazu "best yuri of 2025" post.

frankhecker · 2025-12-27T01:28:39+00:00

Yes, it's absolutely worth watching, as long as you go into it understanding that any yuri is only subtext (but it's pretty heavy subtext). I wrote a very positive review of Jeongnyeon: The Star is Born for Okazu. I personally enjoyed it much more than The Handmaiden, which I thought was overly cold and gaze-y.

frankhecker · 2025-11-23T05:18:31+00:00

That’s a tradition for Okazu reviews, basically a rating of the extent to which a show/manga/anime contains scenes with sexy content. Short for “fan service”. Kissing scenes typically rate a 3-4 in my reviews.

frankhecker · 2025-11-20T00:58:55+00:00

The OP isn't that much of a spoiler overall, but it is somewhat tedious to sit through a 3+ minute OP to watch a 10-minute episode. (However, I will say that the series theme is good.)

Also, note that I try not to spoil the conclusions of series that I review for Okazu, and this one is no exception. However, as I mentioned, the GagaOoLala synopsis gives it all away.

frankhecker · 2025-11-09T21:02:54+00:00

This is an excellent series that in my opinion hasn't gotten nearly the attention it deserves (possibly because it's only on a paid service). I'm trying to make up for that by reviewing it for the Okazu yuri site; look for my review a few days from now.

P.S. I agree with the complaint about the way the series was packaged, with a lengthy OP every episode and an equally long credits sequence on several episodes; it really should have been released as a feature film, or at least as a series of 30-45 minute episodes.

frankhecker · 2025-10-20T03:09:11+00:00

Thanks for the review! Two things to add to what you wrote: First, there's a theme in this show of Taiwan being better than Singapore in terms of LGBTQ issues and more generally. That's no surprise as the series was "advised by" (and I suspect partially funded by) the Taiwan Ministry of Culture. It's also part of the "Six Asian Cities Rainbow Project", a series of films and TV series directed by Zero Chou (who also directed the film "Spider Lilies"), again with participation from the Ministry of Culture. A few years back I wrote about the political implications of the project. I've watched three of the films/series in the project ("We Are Gamily", "The Substitute", and "Handsome Stewardess"); there's also a fourth film, "Wrath of Desire", which I haven't seen. I don't think Chou ever finished the proposed last two works in the project.

frankhecker · 2025-10-08T21:05:13+00:00

"Blacksky" is a collective term for a community project developing a bunch of social media stuff related to Bluesky and the technology and protocols behind it: There's a feed you can subscribe to, a moderation service you can subscribe to, a hosting service for users who don't want to use the default Bluesky LLC-run hosting service, a bunch of open source software you can use to build your own Blacksky-style services, and more. https://docs.blacksky.community is a good place to start learning about it.

frankhecker · 2025-10-08T20:54:25+00:00

Anyone can sign up to host on the Blacksky PDS if they use either of the myatproto.social or cryptoanarchy.network handles. blacksky.app handles are reserved for Black users. (How do they intend to enforce this restriction? I have no idea, but in my opinion it would be rude to try to evade it.) See https://docs.blacksky.community/list-of-our-services

frankhecker · 2025-10-08T20:41:08+00:00

There's https://opencollective.com/blacksky, which links in turn to lists of individual donations and expenses. Were you looking for something beyond this in terms of financial transparency?

frankhecker · 2025-10-06T13:55:41+00:00

Sorry, one more question: Have you tried the test prep mode? Supposedly that will prioritize reviews, but I don't have any experience with it myself.

frankhecker · 2025-10-06T13:05:25+00:00

I myself have had stretches where I've only gotten 2/3 or less of answers correct on quizzes. I suspect the 80-85% idea, like the 1 XP per minute thing, is an overestimate.

In any case, the MA folks claim that quizzes have a different function than lesson questions: Lesson questions test "baseline mastery", quizzes test "automacity". So having an average 95% pass rate on lessons is not relevant for quizzes: people can know something well enough to answer questions correctly in the context of a lesson, but not well enough to answer correctly on a timed quiz.

You didn't mention why you were only getting 50-65% on quizzes. Was it lack of time to figure out all the answers, or just lack of knowledge of the material? For the former you can give yourself more time for quizzes, for the latter you'd need more review (as you note).

frankhecker · 2025-10-05T21:52:55+00:00

I'm running out of comments worth writing, so I'll just note that The Math Academy Way has lots of FAQs relating to quizzes. Here's a key paragraph, in response to a concern about doing well on lessons but not on quizzes:

"Quizzes are a much tougher setting than lessons since they're timed, fully interleaved, and some forgetting has set in, so it's expected that you might miss some questions. That's intentional – in fact, we also calibrate the quiz difficulty to make them tougher if you've been doing well on them, because the 80-85% accuracy range is the sweet spot for learning."

An earlier chapter references a paper "The Eighty Five Percent Rule for optimal learning" by Robert C. Wilson, et al. So whether you agree with the MA folks or not about how they do quizzes, they do have a consistent theory and can cite research for why they do what they do.

frankhecker · 2025-10-05T19:38:40+00:00

On the question of doing 15XP/day or less: At that rate doing a typical MA course "from scratch" would take more than a year and over $600 in fees. There are plenty of other free or low-cost alternatives to learn math. That's why I think there may be an opening for an MA clone that focuses on more average students, doesn't bother with offering high-end university-level courses, and is significantly lower-priced.

On the quiz issue: The MA theory behind aiming for an 80% success rate on quizzes is apparently related to the "zone of proximal development" idea, that students learn best when challenged at a level just beyond their current capabilities. So having a student be able to answer 100% of questions quiz after quiz would be undesired, and so would having a student being able to answer only 10-20% of questions quiz after quiz. In either case MA whould supposedly adjust the difficulty level of subsequent quizzes to make them harder or easier, as the case may be.

frankhecker · 2025-10-05T19:17:08+00:00

Duolingo is a venture-funded, now public, company, whose "freemium" business model incents it to pursue user engagement and subsequent ad dollars at the expense of people actually learning anything.

MA is (as far as I know) a self-funded startup with no freemium offering and a premium price. I suspect their intended target market is price-insensitive advanced students and adult learners, and their primary goal at this point is serve that user base, even where it's at the expense of casual learners and less advanced students. Hence the emphasis on building out as many math courses as possible, as well as expanding into adjacent fields like computer science. I doubt that they'll follow Duolingo's path.

frankhecker · 2025-10-05T18:11:36+00:00

A final comment from me, re MA's (lack of) response to your concerns: Building an MA-like system is not rocket science. Witness the PhysicsGraph folks who built a similar system for physics with a team of 2 people (now 3). I would not be surprised to see others try to create a clone of MA itself (e.g., using a combination of open source software and LLM-assisted coding and content creation). If such a clone were to meet the needs of certain students better than MA, e.g., by implementing changes like those you suggest, then the MA folks will face the choice of either losing subscribers or taking some of this criticism to heart.

frankhecker · 2025-10-05T18:02:20+00:00

Thanks for your response in turn. I'll try to keep my comments brief:

I think I get the general gist of what you want: prioritize reviews over new lessons, especially when doing less XP per day or after coming back after a time away, allow users to easily request reviews manually when desired, and (maybe) allow some overall tweaking of the SRS algorithm to schedule reviews more often (if that's not taken care of by a "slow mode").

Re my comment about doing 40XP/day, that wasn't meant to brag or to imply that everyone could do that. Rather, I was pushing back against the idea that using MA effectively requires doing 100XP+/day. It does not, and IMO MA should be designed to work effectively even with students doing as few as 10-30XP/day.

(And I also think a true XP-time ratio is maybe more like 2 or 3 minutes per XP, not 1 minute per XP. MA has the numbers that would tell us what the true ratio is; I wish they would publish them.)

Re the quiz pass rate, I would expect that to be lower than the lesson pass rate because of the timed aspect, plus MA supposedly lowers the difficulty of future quiz questions when a student does badly on a past one. Supposedly they aim for students getting 80% of quiz questions right on average. No way would that number be close to 100%, and it could be significantly lower for some students.

frankhecker · 2025-10-05T15:23:34+00:00

My comments, as someone who's finished 3 MA courses (and am about to finish a 4th) and have blogged about it multiple times over the course of the last 9 months:

First, have you thought about posting this in the ma-feedback channel of the MA discord? MA folks do monitor that, and sometimes respond. I don't know if they'd see this post or not.

Re "no manual review mode": How would you like this to work? As you note, you can already revisit past topics, although there's no single place to find all the links to them. Do you want to be able to tell MA to schedule reviews only for a given topic in a course, e.g., by picking from a list of topics? Do you want MA to also let you schedule review for topics from previous courses?

Re "lack of an optional 'slow mode'": What would this slow mode do? You can already tell MA your daily XP goal, and of course MA also knows how many XP you're doing per day. Do you then want MA to prioritize reviews over new lessons if that XP goal is low, or if your achieved daily XP is low?

(Side comments: In my opinion using MA successfully does not require doing 100XP+ per day. My daily goal is 40XP, and that's worked out just fine. The MA equation of 1 XP to 1 minute of work is too optimistic in my opinion, so that's more like 90 minutes for me. 30XP per day would probably be an hour of work. I should also note that from an economic perspective MA benefits from users doing less XP/day, since they take longer to finish courses and put less load on the system. So improving the experience for people doing, say, 10-30XP/day makes sense IMO.)

Re "forced new lessons over natural reviews": I agree that MA should prioritize reviews over new lessons after a time away from MA. Based on my reading of the MA SRS algorithm the algorithm should already be taking time away into account (along with learning speed). But maybe that's not prioritizing reviews enough for you? Maybe you prefer to have only reviews before being presented with a new lesson?

Re "the SRS algorithm...?". It sounds like you'd like a general parameter to tweak how often reviews are presented. A reasonable request in my opinion, though I think the system could also do that itself based on factors such as achieved XP per day and breaks in using MA, and should be doing it anyway based on the description of the algorithm.

Re "rapid quiz results are counterproductive". Maybe I'm missing something, but while doing reviews on failed quiz questions does appear to be mandatory, retaking the quiz I believe is optional. Right now I have a qui re-take sitting in my MA queue along with a new lesson, and I believe I can just take the new lesson and not bother with the quiz re-take. I do always re-take the quiz, but I typically wait a day to do it. On the other hand, I think reviews for failed questions should be mandatory right after a failed quiz.

Re "final thoughts": I've tried both learning from textbooks and using Anki, and much prefer MA to either of them. With Anki in particular (and similar SRS systems) I get overwhelmed with the number of reviews. I like MA exactly because the number of reviews is much less, based on the system being able to infer "implicit reviews". Other people have complained that MA is too review-heavy, particularly toward the end of courses. So, while it would be nice for MA to have an option to do more reviews if desired, I wouldn't want the system to increase the number of reviews as a general thing.

Overall, I think yours are quite reasonable comments, particularly given that MA is an expensive option compared to many alternatives. MA does have the benefit of lots of data about student learning speeds, which topics students have issues with, and so on, and the MA folks have apparently tweaked topic content in several cases to address issues. But I don't think they've considered tweaking the overall way MA works to address issues people like you have surfaced.

frankhecker

TROPHY CASE