A common complaint, I know, but I really feel like any one of these avocations could take up most of my free time. I can probably manage to do one and a half of them well, simultaneously ( Read more... )

Language learning is a funny thing. Today on the bus into London, I was sitting in front of a man talking in Russian on his mobile phone, and I realised that I could actually pick out a few words. Namely a familiar "how are you?" and also "let's go" (see above).

Yuri on Ice is a delightfully multilingual canon but writing fic for it does mean that ( Read more... )

Faroese Online has finally landed! It's based on Icelandic Online, which was one of my major learning resources (though I still haven't finished it). So far it's only the "survival course," which is a bit basic for me, but probably worth doing in order to grasp the pronunciation and a few basic differences in vocabulary. I don't expect to work ( Read more... )

Catching up on quite a few things here...

Television

• Killjoys. This is the Canadian television series that stormed Yuletide last year. It is basically as close to a Firefly ripoff as (presumably) the makers could get without being sued, only not particularly good.
( Read more... )

New Icelandic word of the day: gluggaveður, literally 'window-weather.' The sort of weather that looks great from your window, but is best enjoyed indoors. (I suspect that the Icelanders have particular use for this word ( Read more... )

On Sunday I started Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and I'm a third of the way through. In Icelandic, I hasten to add. I'm ridiculously proud of myself.

At the same time I feel like one of those famed 'reluctant readers' who is enticed into literacy via Harry Potter. It is indeed an accessible read that keeps you turning the pages ( Read more... )

Television

• Trapped. Finished last week, still missing it, might well re-watch at some point. I find the endings of most mysteries unsatisfying but this really worked for me.
• The People v. O. J. Simpson. Surprisingly good. Some of it is played, entirely fittingly, as a farce, but it also sensitively explores the complexity of the race and ( Read more... )