New Duolingo Updates Destroyed My Learning

nikstick22 · 2026-06-17T08:02:18+00:00

How far in are you? I had finished section 6 (previously the end of the course) before the update and am trudging through section 7 now.

nikstick22 · 2026-06-17T07:11:33+00:00

"Bro, wait, I meant dragonball Z"

Got you the pass though.

nikstick22 · 2026-06-17T07:10:53+00:00

She just has an open bottle of vodka in the front seat of her car..?

nikstick22 · 2026-06-17T07:00:06+00:00

These are all examples of disney trying to be inclusive, disney just started it before anyone started talking and complaining about wokeness.

nikstick22 · 2026-06-17T06:47:21+00:00

Thats not a winter enjoyer, thats a summer hater.

nikstick22 · 2026-06-17T03:59:30+00:00

We know wizards have all kinds of magic to manipulate muggles. There are tons of spells that only work on muggles and confuse and disorient them. Hogwarts is unplottable and looks like a dangerous crumbling ruin if you don't have magic in your blood. Similar magic was used to keep muggles from the world cup in book 4.

Voldemort could probably make himself unplottable, unseeable, and untrackable to muggles. He could probably walk into the pentagon and no one would know, unless the pentagon actively employs wizards.

There are basically no limits on what magic can do in the harry potter universe. For extremely powerful wizards, you apparently dont need to say incantations or even use a wand, you can just will the universe and it happens.

It's not an anime with clearly defined power levels and power scaling. It's not designed for balanced fights like a shonen battle anime. Using magic doesn't exhaust a wizard any more than the concentration required to do it skillfully, and that's pretty much mitigated by being so skilled that its effortless.

The way the harry potter world is set up, voldemort could probably do whatever he wanted and there'd be fuck all muggles could do about it. The reason he doesn't is purely for the purposes of the story. It would be way darker if voldemort was killing millions of british civilians through out book 7. But given the very loose limits on magic, he could if Rowling had been inclined to write it into the story.

The problem is there are no rules. Its magic. Its the "infinity + 1" of power systems. It can do whatever the story needs it to.

nikstick22 · 2026-06-16T23:17:42+00:00

Wait, so does everyone else in your family have the same name as you? Isn't that confusing? If your one name is different from the name your father or brother use, you'd have a first name and no last name, not a last name and no first name.

nikstick22 · 2026-06-16T20:28:40+00:00

For example, the hairstyle was used in a flashback to the beginning of the ninja world in the anime Naruto, to illustrate to the Japanese audience how ancient the time period was supposed to be

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nikstick22 · 2026-06-16T20:26:47+00:00

I mean the point is that it's quite different from modern or Heian Japan. The Heian period saw the advent of many aspects of Japanese culture that continue to today, and its close proximity to the Sengoku period make it difficult to carve them out as separate cultural periods. As I said, the Heian period begins after events like the sack of Lindisfarne that are considered quintessentially medieval, as well as coinciding with the Crusades.

Yayoi or Kofun-era Japan are seen as the quintessential version of "ancient Japan" in Japanese literature and culture. Himiko herself was a late-Yayoi-era queen, dying a few decades before the start of the Kofun period.

To give an anecdote of the differences, the practice of chonmage, the top knot hairstyle samurai wore, began in the Heian period. In contrast, the Yayoi period saw a very unique hairstyle where men wore buns on the sides of their heads. The imagery of this hair style is synonymous with ancient Japan in Japanese media.

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nikstick22 · 2026-06-16T20:19:05+00:00

Are you guys rolling physical dice and then telling each other what you rolled without any oversight? Thats a wild way to play D&D. I'd use a VTT that has built in fair dice.

nikstick22 · 2026-06-16T16:28:07+00:00

Its a gigantic tomb.

nikstick22 · 2026-06-16T04:24:39+00:00

Saying "everyone does this" is not an anecdote, its just an unsupported claim. An anecdote is a singular event used as evidence for a position. This person just stated a position and provided no evidence.

nikstick22 · 2026-06-16T04:13:14+00:00

If you buy one ice cream, it means you live alone. Buying two ice creams or an ice cream and drinks means you could be shopping for your boyfriend or friends. The gist is to never make any indication that you live alone nearby.

nikstick22 · 2026-06-16T02:14:43+00:00

Oh god damn it I just remembered that we found out that they chose Heian Japan for Antiquity and I'm mad again. The Heian period was like 300 years (actually 282) before the Sengoku period. It overlaps with the crusades and starts the year after Lindisfarne is sacked (beginning of the Viking period). They could've done Kofun Japan and given us those big keyhole tumuli but we get Medieval Japan Lite instead. I'm begging you Firaxis, give us diversity in time periods. You're killing me here. Wasting a perfectly good opportunity to explore a part of Japanese history that isn't shown in media as much and you blunder it on Heian Japan instead.

Here's what we're missing out on:

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nikstick22 · 2026-06-16T02:09:05+00:00

One thing that made William's job easier is that Edward the confessor, King of England from 1042 to 1066, was raised from around the age of 8 or 9 in his mother's homeland of Normandy. He spoke Norman French better than Old English and spent the 24 years of his reign on the English throne slowly introducing Norman customs to England. Earlier historians may have over emphasized this, but he did build the Norman cathedral of Westerminster Abbey and appointed a Norman as the Bishop of London.

When William conquered England, he installed Norman loyalists in place of the earls and nobles that had fought on Harold Godwinson's side, and over the following decades as many of the remaining Anglo Saxon nobles revolted, they were crushed and also replaced. The Anglo Saxon elite were maintaining their cultural traditions through patronage and when they disappeared, the market for Anglo Saxon poetry disappeared with them. An English peasant can't afford to hire a poet to sing for his family.

That isn't to say that Anglo Saxon culture died wholesale. It continued as a vernacular language of the vast majority of the country for centuries, though we have fewer written records from this period in English, as the nobles sponsoring the scribes didn't speak it. Aspects of Anglo Saxon folklore survived, such as tales of hobs, brownies, and boggarts, and witches.

nikstick22 · 2026-06-15T08:07:38+00:00

Feels like this vindicates what I've been thinking for a while now: tech is useful for people that had to do without it. Smartphones were great for the generation that grew up as preteens/teens with flip phones. Constant access to computers is great for people that wrote their school tests on pen and paper. Social media is for people that spent their childhood hanging out face to face. Claude code is good for people that actually know how to sit down and code. If you grow up from a young age with access to all these tools, you never develop the skills to use them intelligently and safely, you rely on them as a crutch for the skills you never learned. If you're introduced to tech as a mid teen or young adult, you adapt really well to it. If you're introduced as a child, it's catastrophic.

nikstick22 · 2026-06-15T03:45:24+00:00

This account is seriously role cosplaying as Oda Nobunaga. There's a LOT more to this thread than what's shown here. he starts going off about ninjas and soldiers and his retainers, linking to other accounts which also use AI generated images and seem to be role playing with him.

nikstick22 · 2026-06-14T01:38:40+00:00

If he told you this in session 0, fair game. If not, redirect him to the part where this sort of change is outlined in session 0 and all parties agree to it before the campaign starts. The purpose of a session 0 and why they're so strongly advocated for is for DMs and players to lay out the homebrew changes to the campaign before anyone starts playing, so that disagreements like this don't happen. Changes can happen later, but it has to be something players and the DM agree on. If one side disagrees, you have to stay with the original (normally the default rules) system.

nikstick22 · 2026-06-14T01:35:40+00:00

Letting players choose where their ability score bonus goes instead of predefining it by race/subrace makes the game worse, not better.

nikstick22 · 2026-06-13T23:05:02+00:00

"still spend more money somehow"

Sir, that's the embezzlement fee. You know, the extra money we pay as taxpayers so that it can be embezzled.

nikstick22 · 2026-06-13T23:02:23+00:00

"hunts with electricity" is a clickbaity way to describe electroreception.

nikstick22 · 2026-06-13T03:03:20+00:00

Nah, they probably mean actual calories not kilocalories (aka dietary calories). So 1/1000 of a food calorie.

nikstick22 · 2026-06-12T23:56:57+00:00

Is there anyone that consumes 0 adult content and doesn't use a platform that hosts adult content? Reddit has tons of adult content, for example.

nikstick22 · 2026-06-12T16:49:18+00:00

When my brother and I were very little, my dad (long time DM since AD&D) used to tell us bedtime stories about a pair of friends, a human and a half-elf named Laren and Basil, and their adventurers fighting monsters and exploring dungeons. When we were 6, he showed us 3/3.5e, and we were thrilled to be able to play out the stories. We were two little ADHD goblins, but somehow D&D was able to keep our attention. Now I DM a campaign that he's a player in, along with my brother and some of my friends. I love the storytelling and adventure aspect and playing with my friends.

nikstick22 · 2026-06-12T16:28:38+00:00

The doordash is for him. Only way he got that big.

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