The Queue: Going the distance

I’m going for speed today. But the Queuemunity has not left me alone in my time of need.

This is The Queue, our daily column where you ask us questions but in time our memory faded so we’ll see about the answers.

(ah AH)

Death by a thousand cuts, mostly.

I currently have a 980-something day streak, so I’ve been Duo-ing through a bunch of different sets of changes to both the learning and gamification of the app. There is a very fine line between being sticky and predatory, and over time the peer pressure has gradually become less supportive and more competitive in a bad way. I haven’t felt like I was progressing in French in a long time, and a big part of that was them switching the ability to practice older content to a paid-only track, making it so that new material just kept piling up but I wasn’t really retaining a lot of the last few units. They also took away — and then reinstated? — the monthly quest completion badge just this month, which was a really good at-a-glance metric to show me I was being consistent over time.

Funnily enough, while I was thinking about quitting I fell off a bit, and then Duo started bombarding me in such a way that it cemented the decision. The absolute last straw was them changing the reminder notification sound from the little bird I assigned it to, which was unique to Duo and reminded me of Duo specifically, to an abrupt klaxxon at 10 pm. It’s not often I curse out loud at my phone.

And then the CEO says, gleefully, that they’re cutting people in favor of AI, when there’s been a marked decline in lesson quality as they’ve added more and more AI to the courses? Let alone the ethics of the whole thing? Nah, man. Nah. I’m just done.

Elementals aren’t nearly as strong, others have bounced up a bit by comparison. Also, because it’s Trinkets, every time I think to myself “hmm, Quilboars seem pretty weak,” I’ll go into a match and get completely shellacked by some dude who happened to pull, say, the Avenge bloodgem booster and the divine shield trinket. I also tend to find the Trinkets metas frustrating because I always feel less able to pivot even from my very early game picks.

I will say that I didn’t mind Elementals being strong per se, because APM statball is always my personal favorite strategy to play out. But now I’m much more into Pirates than Elementals (they are wackier and thereby much more fun). From my end I’m finding it really difficult to be consistently successful with Dragons, Beasts, and Quilboar.

I’m also at a point where I usually want to multitask, and it’s a rare game which allows you to plunk out a minute or two worth of words in between gameplay rounds, so HSBGs always has a special place in my heart.

Irises. Purpley blue with a little hidden splash of yellow is so fun, and they’re such an easy flower to maintain once you’ve established them.

Also, a shout out to the spring ephemerals, like wild garlic. They’re such unique little guys, and their lifespan is so short if you blink you’ll miss em.

Also, if it makes you feel better our last frost date is April 1 and my parsley and cilantro has already bolted, and I’m pretty sure none of my curcubits are going to survive the slugs, not even the zucchini. And I put out a lot lot of cucumbers, because I really wanted to put up pickles (and my jalapeno plants for pickled jalapenos also look awful).