The Queue: bird

My daughter is working on her Silver award for Girl Scouts. The gist of it is that she has to find a way to make her community a better place, then take action to do it. So, she’s working on a project to bring bird houses to (among others) retirement homes and libraries, as a way to make it more pleasant for both humans and strengthening the ecosystem as a whole, not just the birds. As such, I am helping her research which birds live in the area, which bird predators live in the area, and how to make a bird house safe and relatively predator-proof. You could call me a real bird brain right now.

This is The Queue, our daily column where you ask us questions, and — wait, I didn’t mean it like that.

Yep! We published an article yesterday discussing some of the ways we’ll be able to earn and collect player housing decor. One of the ways is with achievements from older content. They explicitly said they don’t want us to have to go back to old instances and raids after literally 20 years worth of farming mounts and pets and music sheets and transmog and and and. We’ve already been there and done that. As such, if you were already there and did that and have the achievement to prove it, that’s a great way to reward you for having done it back in the day, without making you go murder Kael’thas one last time to get the couch he drops or whatever.

I will say I’m not sure how this is going to work in terms of Warband-wide stuff, and duplications and all that, since they’ve also said that you need multiples of things if you want to display multiples — if you want 4 chairs for a cozy breakfast nook, you need to find 4 chairs — and multiple-multiples if you have several houses and want the same stuff in all of them. We’ll see when we get our grubby mitts on it, I suppose.

Tired. This is not the first time Duolingo has done this, and for this exact reason. The first time was back when they introduced their AI-centric beaucoup price tier Max, and it was also at the very beginning of the year, just after their only subscription sale of the year and pricing lock-in, and a huge natural cashflow bump from people making new years resolutions. I was skeptical then, because language learning and translation has always been incredibly tricky. Just ask Jimmy Carter, whose translator told once told the people of Poland he never wanted to return to the US, and also he wanted to know them all biblically.

And since that first AI announcement I’ve been actively looking for a replacement, and nothing really cuts it. Some lean too hard into the gamification and not into the language (Lingo Legends), while some are just centered around learning, which is good, but it doesn’t provide the little dopamine carrot stuff like friends list peer pressure does (Memrise). Rosetta Stone is better for actually learning a language, purportedly, but I wouldn’t know because I’m not plunking down $50 just to see if I might like it.

I started with Duo because I felt like it was more enriching and better for my brain than spending that 15 minutes a day scrolling reddit or playing some shovelware app game, and that remains true. But man am I tired of the constant trend of trying out some fun little app or game, and then they turn around and either find a way to use the fun little diversion for evil (but profit!) or sell the brand to a bigger fish who will.

I’m only judging you because you waited a full year, until it was relevant again and she’d miss it and know you were the culprit. If you indulged at like, Thanksgiving, she wouldn’t have realized it was missing until Easter, and then you could’ve gaslit her into thinking she ate it herself but forgot.

Also, my kids never ate the chocolate bunnies in a timely fashion, so we started doing post-Easter smores. Peeps roasting on an open fire is great fun. Even better is microwaving them on a graham cracker for 15 seconds or so until they swell. Then punk it into a bed of smashed up chocolate bunny, bam, Easter smore. If a Victorian child heard of it they would drop dead.

I’d suggest purchasing (or thrifting) a huge frame, then getting a sheet of metal — steel, probably — cut to fit it. You can lean into the industrial aesthetic and leave the metal bare, or paint it, or cover it in a thin fabric before you insert it in the frame. Then, get a whole bunch of rare earth magnetic hooks and throw em up there, arrange and re-arrange however you’d like.

Make sure you find a couple studs and anchor your frame at least twice, and probably swap out the hardware for piano wire or something, because that’s gonna be heavy.