Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

Over at covidcoffeecorner, today's discussion question is about what games people are playing right now, in person or otherwise, and one of the examples liv used was gamified self-improvement stuff like Duolingo, and I wrote:

I'm mostly, and deliberately, ignoring the gamified parts of Duolingo, at least for now. "Maintain your streak" is gamified talk for "do at least a little every day," and I want to keep that up, because it's easier to maintain that sort of habit than "I will do French at least four days a week" or the like.

I was looking at the "league promotion" bit when I first started, because I had a bunch of free time, and found the early lessons extremely easy. Right now, I'm doing intro French as much for listening practice as vocabulary. It's still at the point where I know most of the words before Duolingo "teaches" them to me, many via Spanish cognates or borrowed English (it has me practicing that the French for "weekend" is "week-end") or picked up from menus and signs in Montreal. But I can't go too fast right now, because typing can strain my left hand.

I suspect the gamification would work better for me if I was doing this with people, friends or in a class, or if all those "lingots" I earn for things like meeting my daily goal were usable for anything I remotely wanted.

covidcoffeecorner is for anyone who wants to chat/have some more social interaction during the pandemic. Drop by if that sounds interesting.

I had my more-or-less usual session with Emilie on Thursday, this time after spending some time at the office holiday party. That was slightly weird: around Thanksgiving they sent around email saying that instead of an off-site party, they were going to donate to some good causes (and they did seem like good causes) and just give us a lunch. Then about a week ago there was a message with the subject "Re: Holiday party (revised)" saying that no, there was going to be a holiday party in the afternoon on 12/16, lunch in the office and then a "cocktail reception," reply by 12/10 if you planned to attend the off-site party. I decided to go, in part for the hope of a raffle prize (I didn't win).

In the end, I had some good conversation with a bunch of people while eating ziti and lasagna and salad; and then talked about books with one coworker, and then gyms and exercise with a couple of others, until the drawing. Then I left (bars are always loud, and they were playing music, making conversation even less plausible, and wandered up to the gym via the library.

( gym details, and some introspection about the process )

This morning (Saturday) I had an appointment with my dentist. The dentist I think of as "my dentist," who I've been seeing at least since 1995, is only seeing patients on Saturdays now. I don't like his partner (the partner is competent, but not as patient with me as Dr. Mahindra), so I went downtown this morning. So, I have clean teeth, and apparently there's a tiny bit of cavity that he wants to keep an eye on (seen on X-rays). The dentist is near my branch of the gym, so I worked out afterward.

( more details, mostly numerical )