adamusprime:

i don’t know if i can pinpoint exactly what i didn’t like about that book

it just didn’t seem as real as his other books to me? i was just acutely aware that what i was reading was a work of fiction, and that’s fine for more fantastical stuff, but like…i dunno. when you’re going for realism…

i feel kinda nervous talking about this because people seem to take it as a personal attack on them or john green when i say i don’t like it. it’s ok for other people to like it!! LOTS of other people like it! just not me.

I think I know what you mean. personally I liked it, but there were bits where it felt like kind of a pastiche of his other books and overall writing style.

battledad:

I’m gonna become friends with John Darnielle one day and I’ll sign all important documents as Lloyd D. Pyes, Personal Friend of John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats.

Before he started playing at the Evening of Awesome, John Darnielle said that he wanted to thank John Green for relentlessly recommending the Mountain Goats to his readers, but I wanted you to know that I got into the Mountain Goats’ music because of your unrelenting blogging about them.

Lloyd Pyes: arguably more influential than John Green.

Learning languages is weird.

I don’t mean, like, wanting to learn a language is weird, that’d be a stupid thing to think. But the way language learning is set up is weird. Like if you want to learn a language, you’d better hope that a lot of other people also want to learn that language or fuck you.

I’ve been learning Lithuanian for ~half a year, and I’ve kind of struggled to find any resources for it. I’ve got a couple of dictionaries, but they’re really more tailored for native Lithuanian speakers learning English, and are just like adequate for doing the inverse.

Even other than Lithuanian, if you look at most websites or products that offer foreign language courses (like Rosetta Stone or duolingo or whatever) the list is usually really small. It’s the same in school, too - or at least from my experience it is. In school I only had the chance to learn French, Spanish or German; and not at university I can take foreign language classes for free, but only in French, Spanish or Mandarin Chinese.

And it’s weird, ‘cause it sort of suggests that some languages are more valid than others just because they have a greater number of native speakers, or because people want to go to places where they’re spoken more than other places. Which I guess makes some sense, but I sure don’t agree with it.

Also it must be even weirder for people who don’t speak English as their first language and want to learn another language, because almost all the resources I’ve found for learning languages are for English speakers. I mean, obviously I’m not likely to stumble onto a website for teaching Lithuanian to, say, Urdu speakers. But the podcast I listen to to learn Lithuanian frequently has commenters from the Netherlands or Spain or Germany who are using the same podcast to learn English.

By contrast, I just discovered Byki, which seems fairly good from what I’ve used of it, and actually has a pretty broad range of languages to learn.

(Oh and the podcast I use is Lithuanian Out Loud, if anyone was looking for something to learn Lithuanian from. It’s not updating very frequently any more, but there’s loads of stuff from basic to advanced in the archives, and I’m not even halfway through it yet.)