Must Enemies Turn Into Lovers? Can't They Be The Mirror Of Each Other, Connected By A Defining Trait

(curse tumblrs img resolution, click for better viewing)

here are my illustrations for the rhymin’ zine and the hey judy zine! I’ve been holding onto these for a few years now so i’m excited to get to share them now that copies have been shipped out 💞 thank you to everyone who ordered the zine, i hope you enjoy all our work! these two will always be so special to me

💫⭐️🌟✨💜❤️💙2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣💙❤️💜🎸🎹🎼🌟✨⭐️💫

(i’ll also post the story i wrote a bit later)

yanyan my beloved

PSA

not romantic not platonic but a secret third thing [what would happen between earth and the moon if the earth stopped spinning as illustrated by xkcd randall munroe]

瑯琊榜 fanart

Duolingo is NOT what it used to be.

Nation.Cymru

Language learning app Duolingo to mothball Welsh course

Emily Price Language learning app Duolingo will mothball its Welsh course at the end of this month meaning it will no longer be edited or up

“Duolingo is ‘sunsetting the development of the Welsh course’ (and many others)”.

I’ve used Duolingo since 2013. It used to be about genuinely learning languages and preserving endangered ones. It used to have a vibrant community and forum where users were listened to. It used to have volunteers that dedicated countless hours and even years to making the best courses they could while also trying to explain extremely nuanced and complex grammar in simple terms.

In the past two years it feels like Von Ahn let the money talk instead of focusing on the original goal.

No one truly had a humongous problem with the subscription tier for SuperDuolingo. We understood it: if you can afford to pay, help keep Duolingo free for those who couldn’t.

It started when the company went public. Volunteers were leaving courses they created because they warned of differing longterm goals compared to Duolingo’s as a company; not long after it was announced that the incubator (how volunteers were able to make courses in the first place) would be shut down. A year goes by and the forums—the voice of the users and the way people were able to share tips and explanations—is discontinued. A year or two later, Duolingo gets a completely new makeover—the Tree is gone and you don’t control what lesson you start with. With the disappearance of the Tree, all grammar notes and explanations for courses not in the Big 8 (consisting of the courses made before the incubator like Spanish/French/German/etc. and of the most popular courses like Japanese/Korean/Chinese/etc.) are removed with it. Were you learning Vietnamese and have no idea how honorifics work without the grammar notes? Shit outta luck bud. Were you learning Polish and have absolutely no clue how one of the declensions newly thrown at you functions? Suck it up. In a Reddit AMA, Von Ahn claims that the new design resulted in more users utilizing the app/site. How he claims that statistic? By counting how many people log into their Duolingo account, as if an entire app renovation wouldn’t cause an uptick in numbers to even see what the fuck just happened to the courses.

Von Ahn announces next in a Reddit AMA that no more language courses will be added from what there already is available. His reasoning? No one uses the unpopular language courses — along with how Duolingo will now be doing upkeep with the courses already in place. And here I am, currently looking on the Duolingo website how there are 1.8 million active learners for Irish, 284 thousand active learners for Navajo, and even 934 thousand active learners for fucking High Valyrian. But yea, no one uses them. Not like the entire Navajo Nation population is 399k members or anything, or like 1.8 million people isn’t 36% of the entire population of Ireland or anything.

And now this. What happened to the upkeep of current courses? Oh, Von Ahn only meant the popular ones that already have infinite resources. Got it. Duolingo used to be a serious foundational resource for languages with little resources while also adding the relief of gamification.

It pisses me off. It really does. This was not what Duolingo started out as. And yea, maybe I shouldn’t get invested in a dingy little app. But as someone who spent most of her adolescence immersed in language learning to the point where it was literally keeping me alive at one point, to the point where languages felt like my only friend as a tween, and to the point where friendships on the Duolingo forums with likeminded individuals my age and other enthusiasts who even sent me books in other languages for free because they wanted people to learn it, the evolution of Duolingo hits a bitter nerve within me.

~End rant.

Proving a point to my boyfriend.

PLEASE REBLOG if you (male or female) believe it is perfectly okay and natural for a guy of any age to cry

Jiangzuo Alliance (sort of) Leverage AU?

For my @nif-exchange recipient, @star-shadows, who prompted “The brotherhood of the Jiangzuo Alliance”. Sadly I’m not good with words/art/ideas so I just made… this. I hope someone else fills your prompts because I’m also into them!

This is mostly animated because I can’t actually draw anything more complicated than basic shapes and wanted to distract people from looking too closely at the details. I also had to come up with increasingly contrived ways to cover up the hands, because hands.

Art references:

MCS & Li Gang

Gong Yu

Tong Lu

Zhen Ping

AO3 link if images don’t load (@ tumblr why): http://archiveofourown.org/works/12822456/

my favorite arcane screenshot redraw