A Week of German, Gaming, and Linux
Oct. 9th, 2015 10:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tcpipWednesday night ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
caseopaya went to the first lesson of our short course in German at the city College of Advanced Education. The teacher was jet-lagged and a little dotty as a result, but the content for the first day (introduction to language, alphabet and sounds, greetings, numbers) was right. It has also inspired me to revive usage of my duolingo account, a rather effective online method of study. I cannot honestly say that I find German a particularly beautiful language and its grammar, whilst I am sure is terribly logical, is enough to send me quite mad - in a statement consisting of one main clause the finite verb is always the second idea, except with questions and commands where it is the first word. Got that? We have a some unplanned intention to visit relatives in the Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate regions in the not too distant future.
With a notGerman empasis, last Sunday was our regular 7th Sea Freiburg game where I tried to replicate the Great Fire of London (a truly epic event), but instead the PCs outsmarted me, hiring some despised mercenaries who they were supposed to in conflict with, and then set up a city bank to bypass the evil banker-landlord monopolist. Neglected to mention a recent review of Eisen for said game system which I recently wrote. I somehow managed to neglect also mentioning fellow playerusekh's absolutely awesome birthday gathering a couple of weeks back which included the opportunity to catch up with many old friends. Apropos, Thursday night was our regular gaming evening, this time a new story using The Secret Lives of Cats. It is a narrative-heavy system, which we set in a Gippsland country town and with a theme of "cats against Cthulhu", deriving from Neil Gaiman's The Price.
It has also been a heavy week for IT and Linux related activities as well. On Monday night caught up withstrangedave who was in town for an Internet governance conference. In a typically wide-ranging discussion we ended up at The Lounge, an absolute mainstay of a location. That day I put in the submission of Linux Users of Victoria on the Trans Pacific Partnership, possibly the last submission prior to the TPP being signed. The following night was the monthly meeting of said organisation, which included two excellent talks, of which the latter is now available. In addition to this, I have done some investigations on storage on Android devices, and installation of Julia on clusters with MPI. The former is a household necessity, the latter I am fascinated with as an alternative to Octave, R, and Maxima.
caseopaya went to the first lesson of our short course in German at the city College of Advanced Education. The teacher was jet-lagged and a little dotty as a result, but the content for the first day (introduction to language, alphabet and sounds, greetings, numbers) was right. It has also inspired me to revive usage of my duolingo account, a rather effective online method of study. I cannot honestly say that I find German a particularly beautiful language and its grammar, whilst I am sure is terribly logical, is enough to send me quite mad - in a statement consisting of one main clause the finite verb is always the second idea, except with questions and commands where it is the first word. Got that? We have a some unplanned intention to visit relatives in the Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate regions in the not too distant future.With a notGerman empasis, last Sunday was our regular 7th Sea Freiburg game where I tried to replicate the Great Fire of London (a truly epic event), but instead the PCs outsmarted me, hiring some despised mercenaries who they were supposed to in conflict with, and then set up a city bank to bypass the evil banker-landlord monopolist. Neglected to mention a recent review of Eisen for said game system which I recently wrote. I somehow managed to neglect also mentioning fellow player
usekh's absolutely awesome birthday gathering a couple of weeks back which included the opportunity to catch up with many old friends. Apropos, Thursday night was our regular gaming evening, this time a new story using The Secret Lives of Cats. It is a narrative-heavy system, which we set in a Gippsland country town and with a theme of "cats against Cthulhu", deriving from Neil Gaiman's The Price. It has also been a heavy week for IT and Linux related activities as well. On Monday night caught up with
strangedave who was in town for an Internet governance conference. In a typically wide-ranging discussion we ended up at The Lounge, an absolute mainstay of a location. That day I put in the submission of Linux Users of Victoria on the Trans Pacific Partnership, possibly the last submission prior to the TPP being signed. The following night was the monthly meeting of said organisation, which included two excellent talks, of which the latter is now available. In addition to this, I have done some investigations on storage on Android devices, and installation of Julia on clusters with MPI. The former is a household necessity, the latter I am fascinated with as an alternative to Octave, R, and Maxima.
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no subject
Date: 2015-10-13 04:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-13 04:44 am (UTC)There are certain words I like that I've picked up for the social sciences, such as kommunikationsgemeinschaft, spätkapitalismus, etc which seem quite delightful in their logical construction, and others like aufhebung which have an air of mystery about them.
But most of the time when I think of German I think of the delightful poetry of love.
no subject
Date: 2015-10-13 04:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-13 04:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-09 12:43 pm (UTC)How did you create a duolingo account?
no subject
Date: 2015-10-09 09:50 pm (UTC)Start here:
https://ru.duolingo.com/register
no subject
Date: 2015-10-10 06:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-10 09:57 pm (UTC)