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Patreon Newsletter #42: April 2023!
🕑 Added 2023-04-04 14:44:17 +0000 UTCFrom Adal:
Hey Future Lizards!
Jemma and I have had an incredible 2 weeks traveling and are pretty much burnt out and ready to get home after we stop in LA. It’s almost 1am Wednesday morning in Sydney at the moment and we leave in a few hours to travel back in time. I’m too tired to recap everything but I’m excited to give a run down in next month's newsletter. In quick summary; Tokyo is a marvel and my new favorite city. I’m already trying to crunch the numbers to try and get back in the next year or so. Australia has been a delight but I can’t sleep for more than an hour before I jolt awake because I think I feel a spider on me. I’m like Indiana Jones but instead of snakes it’s spiders….but I also hate snakes.
March 7th we celebrated our little Coco as he turned one year old! Coco aka Coconut, aka Coco Bean, aka Scream Bean, aka Scream Machine, aka Loco Coco, aka Special Fatty Tuna. He’s still pretty rowdy but we love him dearly.
Jemma and I watched and cheered on the Princeton men’s and women’s basketball team as they did INCREDIBLY well in March Madness. If anyone was at the Magic Tavern Discord Meet n’ Greet then you’ll know I ate my fucking words as I said the men’s team would absolutely get bounced the first round. Jemma’s taking me to Princeton next month for ‘Reunions’ and I’m mostly excited to eat more Hoagie Haven.
I’m excited to do a Magic Tavern retreat next week and then Jemma and I are headed back to London at the end of the month to go see The Burnt City a few more times as well as check out some other immersive events; including Phantom Peak. Other than that, I'm looking forward to spending as much time as humanly possible at home with the boyz (Fries, Brisket & Coco…..aka…you know).
Very excited to see JPC & Erin (and some of you!) in person Friday!
Here’s what I consumed in March:
TV:
- Band of Brothers - I saw it all in college when it first came out but had never revisited and I gotta say it’s really fantastic. There’s also an embarrassing amount of famous UK actors sprinkled across all the eps; many who I think were pretty much unknown at the time at least to American audiences (Damien Lewis, Simon Pegg, Michael Fassbender, Tom Hardy SWOON!, James McAvoy, Stephen Graham, Dominic Cooper, Andrew Scott and more)
- Mandalorian season 3
- Ted Lasso season 3
- Survivor season 44
- Top Chef season 20
- Lucky Hank
- History of the World: Part 2
- 2023 Oscars
Movies:
- Triangle of Sadness
- Luther: The Fallen Sun
Other Stuffs:
- I was a guest again on The Restricted Section podcast (one of my favorites to pop in on!), I also did a quick guest audio spot on Nature Talks podcast and was interviewed on Content & Capable podcast
- I started reading the book Feral Creatures (the sequel to Hollow Kingdom)
- I’ve been enjoying the album Untrue by Burial and listening to lots of Gorillaz lately.
- Had fun but was very bad my first time playing Among Us for JPC’s fundraising stream (although him and I had a killer round towards the end).
Please let me know what you’ve been enjoying!
Love
Adal
7:17pm
From JPC:
Hey Riddiots,
It's your boy JPC here reporting that another March has come and gone. I'm going to start out my entry this month with a request for a recommendation. This last month I've been trying to practice learning some Spanish and I've mostly used Duolingo. I did the trial of their premium service and I didn't love it so I'm wondering if anyone out there has had any success with e-learning Spanish. I also just started using Pimsleur but I don't have an opinion on it yet. My goal would be less vocab and more conversational.
And since you all were so nice to recommend something for me, I'll recommend seeing John Wick 4. Now, the caveat here is that you should only see it IF you enjoyed John Wicks 1-3. If those movies were not your cup of tea, you might want to skip this one. I had a good time watching Keanu Reeves go bang bang bang.
Oh, and if you're in Chicago and want to go to a cool ice cream place, check out The Chocolate Shoppe Ice Cream on Devon and Central. This may be too obscure of a recommendation for most of you. But if Adal reads this part, I think he'd like it. (Adal chiming in here; I've been 3 or 4 times! This place absolutely rules!)
Okay, see you all in the funny papers.
JPC
HRR Updates/News
1. We’re very excited to see some of you at Dynasty Typewriter in LA this Friday April 7th at 7:30pm! There’s a handful of in person tickets left and unlimited Livestream tickets to be purchased here: https://www.heyriddleriddle.com/live
2. Our April Review Crew episode (watching Thomas & Friends: The Mystery of Lookout Mountain on Netflix) will be dropping on Monday April 17th.
3. Our April Livestream for Review Crew tier will be at 7:30pm CT on Tuesday April 11th
Love and thank you for the support!
Adal, Erin & JPC
Comments
JPC, I recommend the book Fluent Forever by Gabriel Wyner! It has a lot of great info on learning languages. There is a corresponding app that goes with it too which I found useful for memorizing the sounds + spelling rules of italian and french. I’ve also listened to the podcast Coffee Break Italian, but they have a spanish one too that I imagine is similar. Good luck!
Emma
JPC, my best online resource for learning Spanish was the YouTube channel Butterfly Spanish. The most useful bite size lessons I’ve ever found.
Michael Smith
Really impressed with the lack of exclamation marks. You have definitely learned something from either Elaine Benes or myself or both which is fantastic.
May not be exactly what you're looking for but a good resource for language learning is italki, it's a website that can connect you with professional language tutors from around the world. So you get one-on-one personalized lessons and practice talking with a native speaker. It's a good supplement to apps like duo/pimsleur because they can correct your pronunciation and help with topics that other apps don't explain well. You can usually find tutors that are $20 per lesson or less
History of The World: Part 2 was one of the biggest disappointments in a looooooong time. I wanted so badly to love it as Mel Brooks is truly one of a kind-
Aidan G
Yeah, Duolingo is sadly pretty dang useless for actual conversation.
Max
Gary Busey made a pet centered court show on Amazon tv and it feels like a lobotomy happened to me after watching. You should check it out! It could make an amazing review crew episode
Jake Klopfenstein
I've used the Spanish courses on Memrise. Similar feel to what you've had with the Japanese.
Holly Hilton
Gasp! My library had to drop Mango because it was too expensive. Pronunciator is a pale imitation.
Iona
Adal: as you've just watched band of brothers I can't recommend the fellow headgum podcast dead eyes highly enough https://headgum.com/dead-eyes extremely worth listening to if you get the chance! It's about a guy trying to understand what happened 20 years ago when he was fired from a small part in band of brothers by Tom Hanks for having "dead eyes." (It's not at all bitter, just curious and funny) JPC: for just drilling vocab an SRS tool like anki https://apps.ankiweb.net/ is great, but I also like memrise's course for japanese, I have no idea what their Spanish course is like but they have a lot more useful sentences and building blocks when compared to Duolingo for their japanese
Emily
Chicago Public Library does offer Mango. If JPC doesn't live in CPL's service area for some reason he can contact me and I can get him a digital only card for my county. Anyone else too who would like one. In addition to Mango we have a huge ebook, eaudiobook and magazine library as well as access to resources such as Creativebug and Hoopla.
Hey jpc! I’ve been using duolingo for almost a year now (just the free version, I don’t think premium is necessary) and I can form basic sentences, the progress seems very slow but it is there. Although the fastest way i still think would be one on one tutoring with a Spanish speaker, but that is usually not as convenient
Holly Hilton
JPC- If your library offers access to Mango Languages, I highly recommend it. It’s a beautiful language learning app, way more robust than Duo, way more engaging than Rosetta Stone.
