asakiyume: (Iowa Girl)
I heard this song last Saturday, during the 3:00–5:00 Portuguese radio program on WTCC, Springfield Technical Community College's radio station. I liked the melancholy air, I liked that I could understand snatches of it, even though it was Portuguese Portuguese instead of Brazilian Portuguese, which is what Duolingo teaches. It's got the sort of melancholy abandon that really speaks to me right now (Nossa vida é bem curta e um dia se vai "Our life is very short and one day is gone"--so you might as well be dancing kizomba.)

"Africana Vem Dançar"

On a more amusing note, Duolingo has been feeding me some interesting sentences in Portuguese. First there was this:



Like whoa! What happens next??

And then this:



(The unused words add to the story: I imagine that the place she's being asked to wear that dress is maybe called "Sunny Beer Today")

And then, ominously... this:



Perhaps that's the threat the owner of Sunny Beer Today issued--the protagonist's mother maybe works at the establishment as a cleaner or something, and if the protagonist won't put on the skimpy dress, the boss may fire the mother. What an asshole! I agree, unused words, pleasure nothing at view!

But how does the affair fit in? The unused words tell us that within the thin walls of the lovers' chilly rendezvous spot there's only banana heating--I mean that's somewhere between charcoal and propane, right? Questions, questions. Maybe tonight's lessons will provide some answers.

3%

Sep. 4th, 2020 06:44 pm
asakiyume: (feathers on the line)
I talked about this Brazilian SF show once before, in 2017, when just one season was out and I started watching it. It's now complete at four seasons. The premise is that 97% of the world (or at least the portion we're focused on) live in poverty in a desertified "Inland" (Continente), but 3% live in a tropical paradise, the Offshore (Maralto; probably based on the actual island of Fernando do Noronha based on its location on the map that plays in the opening credits). When people turn twenty, they get a chance to participate in "the process," a series of tests that separate the worthy 3% from the unworthy 97%.

Over the course of the four seasons, the characters find out the hidden history of how this process started and put into action various plans to counter the injustices of this system. All the characters end up doing things they deeply regret, in a way that sometimes feels like the creators jerking them around, but on the other hand gives them all a chastened human fallibility that's identifiable even when the decisions it resulted from are hard to credit.

There are problems with the setup that I could never quite get past (how both these places are provisioned, mainly), and one direction for a solution that's actually explored in the middle seasons (creation of an alternative to the Offshore) seems like it could have been explored more, in more different ways--basically I thought there were always more directions for change than the characters imagined--but within the limitations that the show marked out, I really wanted to see how the characters were going to sort things out--both societally and personally.

Brief aside: Everyone in the inland dresses in improbably fabulous rags--take a look at these sneakers!



I was super moved by the final episode (in spite of a plot mechanic that frustrated me) because it spoke to how I feel about the social situation in the United States right now (even though the show is Brazilian). It gave me the ending I want for us. Spoiler cut ahead! But if you're not going to see the show or don't mind about spoilers, read on ahead, or better yet, just watch the first few moments of the video of the final scene, because it's beautiful and uplifting.

spoilers )
asakiyume: created by the ninja girl (Default)
This'll be the fourth year running that I post resolutions.

I didn't do a good job with last year's. I didn't find a way to incorporate conversational Spanish practice into my learning, and I didn't work on the novel twice a week. However, this year I have two possible leads for conversational practice, so even though I failed last year, I think I'll try again with that this year:

(1) Continue to practice Spanish every day, and find a way to work in conversational Spanish every week. Grace period of a month to get that up and running.

As for the novel, what I found helpful was what I did in November, slip-streaming along with the NaNo crew--namely, keeping a tally of words written each day. When I did that, I put much more effort into at least opening the document and turning attention to it. So this year the goal will be ...

(2) to open the document each day and to record words written. If I don't write anything, but I stare at it, musing at possibilities, that's still something (I'll record zero words but note that I opened the document). If I undo a bunch of words and tinker, that's still something too.

A third, less-important-to-me resolution is to continue with Duolingo Portuguese. Still, it's a resolution.

(3) Do Duolingo Portuguese each day

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