Leaving Duolingo + April 2024 Art Gallery Roundup + Nth City is Here!
The Raven Express #17 - 4/12/24
In this issue of The Raven Express, I talk about departing the Duolingo app for good, I check out the local galleries on First Friday and show off my first episode of my urban planning activism series: Nth City!
Leaving Duolingo
Duolingo broke my heart on a Sunday morning.
I’d awakened late in my somewhat regular attempt to relieve my sleep debt and was blasted by a troubling notification that my Friend Quest was in danger.
…what?
Every week, the language-learning app (and more, which I’ll explain) challenges you to partner with a friend and accomplish a mutual goal, whether it’s completing a certain number of lessons, acquiring a certain amount of experience points, etc. The prize is low stakes stuff, but success would allow me to continue a streak I’d dutifully maintained for over half a year. That week, I had completed the majority of our mutual lesson goal that week and they had not, leaving us with a 20-someodd lesson deficit.
It was a futile task, but I knew it was worth a shot. The theoretical loss of over half a year’s worth of diligent Duolingo tasking wasn’t a great idea!
I sat upright in bed, opened the app and as the critters scurried around wondering what the hell I was doing on my phone, I was trying to complete 20-someodd lessons in the roughly 25 minutes I had left before the weekly challenge concluded.
I took the quickest lessons I possibly could, but it was to no avail. If I’d had just an extra half an hour, I could have pulled it off and saved the day.
It would have been so easy to blame my Friend Quest partner for not keeping up their end of the social bargain, but it made far more sense to understand that the app had leveraged my fears of sunk costs through over-gamified app usage.
It was there in the smoldering ruins of a relatively meaningless defeat that I sought to address something much deeper: my relationship with a green bird.
It seems that Duolingo has culturally become the default application to learn any language, supplanting the much older and more inaccessible Rosetta Stone. It’s so popular that it was a character’s defining trait in last summer’s feminist blockbuster film Barbie.
Duolingo is free: you can just download it and use it. Whether you’re on your phone or in a computer browser, it provides simple lessons with beautiful art and interesting characters like Lily, Vikram, Junior and more to guide you to fluency. The app’s load screens have bragged about how they even teach rare languages like Navajo.
The app is partially the brainchild of Luis von Ahn, a Guatamalan entrepreneur. He also co-developed the CAPTCHA, a clever tool that’s asked you to identify crosswalks, buses and dogs in a series of pictures over and over to determine whether you’re a human solving a puzzle or a software robot brute-forcing a security checkpoint.
Starting a new language in Duolingo is simple in the same way any gentle grade can eventually grant you access to any mountain summit, which is the feeling I got starting out on my journey to learn Spanish with the app. With a colorful, uncluttered interface, you select and rearrange words, speak and type out sentences, match words to phrases, translate phrases from and into your desired language to drill understanding into your brain.
The experience is so intuitive that you begin building a daily streak with periodic milestones that you can share with others. The app brags that over three million users have a streak of 365 days or longer. Soon, you’ll not only be trying to maintain your language learning ritual, but you’ll be whipping out your credit card for some of “Super Duolingo”’s convenience features. The most important one to me, the one that sold me on the $80+ annual subscription, was the elimination of the “three strikes” mechanic that boots you from a lesson when you make too many mistakes.
For a very long time, life with Duolingo was good.
Eventually, the app changed in ways small and large. The “learning path”, which was a wavering hopscotch pattern of bundled lessons, would knot up into extremely repetitive blocks that slowed my progress dramatically, at least on a visual basis, because I insisted on completing the “legendary” challenge of each chapter before moving further. For weeks, I’d be staring at the same cluster of chapters as I worked through them.
In a sweeping change, Duolingo simplified the learning path down to a single lane resembling small stepping stones. Initially, it made me feel, psychologically, that I was making progress because I was unlocking chapters more quickly without multiple chapters tacking up two or three deep at a time. But as the language became more complex and began introducing things like the past tense and a variety of similar verbs in different forms, the “go go go” simplified path made me feel less confident about my learnings as it kept pushing me further along into more complex topics.
When I switched from Android to iPhone in 2022, it became apparent where Duolingo was focusing its development resources when a new Duolingo app for math became available. Yes, math. It quickly lured me away from my language lessons with simple quizzes about fractions, rounding, multiplication and geometry. It was middle-school level stuff, but it was fun to tackle and fast at the same time.
As learning Spanish became more difficult and some days I just didn’t feel like using the app at all, Duolingo was merciful in that it only required me to do a single lesson a day — even though I’d dedicated 15 minutes a day to my learning when I created my profile — to maintain the streak. When the prime Duolingo app eventually included the Math and then Music modules, you could continue your streak by completing any Duolingo lesson. By 2024, I’d largely given up learning Spanish at all — except to game the language module’s various modes to continue my Friend Quest streak for easy points — as I tapped out notes on a virtual piano or matched equivalent fractions every day to continue my personal streak.
But it ate at me: what was I even doing on Duolingo anymore except making a couple of numbers go up on a daily basis?
With the rise of Web 2.0, social networks and the ubiquity of smartphones, the idea of turning the most simple or tedious life activities into virtual games became very real. If your phone knows where you’re at on the planet thanks to GPS, you can build an app that identifies whether you’re at a bar or a convert venue or a zoo thanks to crowdsourced data.
Foursquare was an app that did just that, but they added a gamification layer that enticed you to “check in” to each location. It gave each user a fun game to play, in which repeated visits to a place allowed you to become a “mayor” of that location and earn points and badges. On the back end, it gave Foursquare a ton of data to sell to others as a service with specialized API hookups. Imagine you’re an advertiser: how much would you pay to know what bars are popular in town because users were voluntarily and passionately checking into locations for virtual points?
That’s the question companies like Facebook wanted to answer, even if they didn’t have a “game” to play, by letting their users check in to places through social media posts. But there were other games on that platform. Farmville and Cityville intentionally limited gameplay, requiring players to not just engage on a daily basis, but annoy their friends through increasingly voluminous and irritating notifications.
Eventually users got tired of gamification as it became clear they were being fleeced for their data with little in the way of fun gameplay or dopamine-squirting rewards in return. But it never quite died out. Various health apps used hardware trackers to gauge fitness and exercise through step counts and runs and let you build up friends lists to compete with them in a sensical, organic way.
Gamification survived its first major extinction event and Duolingo, among other learning apps like Codecademy and Khan Academy, rode the formula to their own success, like amphibians crawling out of the water for the first time.
It is years later and I am sitting up in bed, perched over Duolingo, trying to do roughly a lesson a minute to save my Friends Quest streak. The task is impossible and I know it. The objective is no longer education, it’s… I don’t know.
I don’t even know anymore.
I’m at a nearly thousand-day streak and I’m wondering if that’s what I’m celebrating. In the earliest days of my learning journey, it was great to be able to ask Donde esta mi boligrafo? when I was genuinely missing my pen or Quiero un trabajo disfruto when I was trying to get out of my awful warehouse job. These were primitive sentences, yes, the limits of my understanding, absolutely, but ones I could understand and generate without strict memorization because I understood each word separately and the grammar together.
Duolingo had embraced gamification across so many strata, across its several modes, that I was no longer curious about learning. The learning was busywork. Multiplying 3 sets of numbers together was a drag. Having my virtual keyboard in the Music section reset as it expanded into each new range of notes hindered any ability to build a muscle memory. I was there to appease the badge delivery service, the gamification, that deposited wards and ranks in my digital hands for being a diligent user and not because I was doing something that satisfied me. And then that became busywork, too.
It became a panicked rush on a Sunday morning that amounted to nothing; literally, less than nothing.
The April 2024 Gallery Roundup
The weather is warming and local galleries are blooming with vibrant new artistic offerings this spring. While there’s plenty of new sights, sounds and experiences in the Pikes Peak region this month, here’s a highlight reel of some art destinations you should visit from Manitou to Downtown.
Relics of Astraction by Amy Guadagnoli and Jerry Rhodes
Commonwheel Artists Co-op
102 Cañon Ave
Through April 29
Commonwheel.com
Commonwheel’s gallery may be small, but this month they punch above their weight class with a weaving set of 2D and 3D offerings from an artistic duo. Amy Guadagnoli’s bold, chaotic and colorful woodprints, usually framed in long compositions, are abstract spans of excited imagination. They’re an effective complement to Jerry Rhodes’ intricately crafted ceramic pottery featuring bonsai trees, spartan helmets and a cluster of skyscrapers as toppers.
25th Annual Wunderkind
Manitou Art Center
513 Manitou Ave
Through April 27
Manitouartcenter.org
You don’t have to wander long around the MAC’s Hagnauer Gallery before it becomes apparent how Pikes Peak-area High School Juniors and Seniors have carried the juried Wunderkind exhibition for a quarter-century now. An excellent collection of mixed-media offerings — paintings, photography, sculpture, digital and more — doesn’t just highlight young, local talent. It effectively surfaces a myriad of thoughts and feelings of how these students see their world through a different lens than the snarky, overly brief takes we get on a modern social media diet.
Assemblage by Gary Weston, Michelle Bracewell, Liz McCombs and Michael Cellan
The Bridge Gallery
218 W Colorado Ave
Through April 27
The Bridge Gallery attracted a crowd on First Friday for Assemblage, an exhibition pulled together by a quartet of local artists and lots more plundered bits and bobs. Liz McComb’s sculptures combining biological once-living components and mechanical never-living ones may seem macabre, but McComb presents them as natural expressions. Gary Weston’s fun, retro-futuristic sculptures evoke a 40s science fiction-fantasy aesthetic that looks like it could’ve inspired the Jetsons.
Exhibits by Brett Fox, Deb Prewitt, Lori DiPasquale, Nichole Montanez and Shannon Dunn
Auric Gallery
125 E Boulder St
Through April
Auricgallery.com
Newcomers to Auric may not realize that the powerhouse gallery was once two separate powerhouse galleries, so describing their galaxy of offerings is… a lot. In a good way!
Lori Dipasquale’s Redefine presents textured “landscapes” that are bucolic in one piece, but bleak elsewhere. Nichole Montanez’s In Lieu of Flowers are new, small and colorful flower bulbs on super-glossy black reflecting a superposition of life and death, of suffering and relief. The bright paintings of Deb Prewitt’s The Stories We Tell, accented with black swirls and marks, collectively feel like an out of focus kaleidoscope on life repainted back into an abstract clarity. Brett Foxx’s paintings for Walk This Way are humanist, gritty abstracts based on a literal twist.
Auric’s physical centerpiece this month is the maximalist cornucopia of Shannon Dunn’s Paradox. Her aquatic-themed works and goopy horizons join studies of space and nature in ways that are a departure from her relatively subtle works last year at G44 Gallery (now part of Auric). Portions of topographically exaggerated river slices — made partially from foam and resin — leap out at you while a a trio of individual square lights project through sculpted ripples. Each work feels like its own world — a loud, imaginative statement.
I DO WRITE THESE EVERY- MY DAD DOES WRITE THESE EVERY SO OFTEN, SO ARE YOU SUBSCRIBED?
- Captain Kirby Jack Raven, a.k.a. I have no idea how I’m able to brush this much hair off of you.
Nth City is here!
The first episode of my new YouTube urban activist series Nth City has landed featuring an interview with our very own councilmember Nancy Henjum, among others! I pitched the show last month, so here’s what I wrote as a synopsis:
The last time I wrote a Raven Express, I mentioned my problems with urbanist YouTube and how they don’t motivate their viewers to engage civically to make where they live better places. In the time since, I’ve conducted a series of interviews with civic leaders to begin production on a new YouTube channel (that you can subscribe to!) that spells out how even the layperson can get involved with making their local transit/zoning/policy/government better.
I’m excited by how this first episode came out, in which I talk about city governments and how you can engage them, and I have a few more in the planning stages. I’m hoping to release them on a somewhat-monthly basis, but my time is divvied up quite a bit for the immediate future.
Check it out and let me know what you think!
The Raven’s Recommendation
This is something I’ve munched on since the last time we’ve chatted that I want to share with you.
Turmoil+ is a light strategy game about the 19th century oil rush that dominated my last weekend. A new inclusion to the Apple Arcade — the game’s been out for nearly a decade on nearly every platform you can think of — Turmoil+ casts you as one of a quartet of oil entrepreneurs. You bid for land parcels, probe their depths for Texas Tea and then build the machinery and infrastructure to get it out of the ground.
It’s not environmentally sound in the real world, but as a strategy game, it’s so lightweight and effective that my mind is blown that I hadn’t heard of it earlier. Even if you’re not an Apple Arcade subscriber, you should give this game a play — it will suck you right in.