Sypro, the Dragon

Just to stick with a gaming content, I’ve decided to present one OF MY FAVORITE GAMES from my childhood. And the very first thought went straight to “Sypro: Year of the Dragon”. What it’s all about? You play as a little purple dragon who needs to save his world. The game starts when dragons are celebrating “Year of the Dragon”, an event destined to new eggs brought to realm, which happened every 12 years. Badly, during the celebration, Bianca, mysterious little girl who happens to be a rabbit, invade the dragons world and stole all of the eggs for Sorceress. The Sorceress spreads the eggs throughout several worlds. As a Sypro, you have to travel to many locations, be fiery volcano, froze castles or Greek-styled ruins and what is the most important – collect diamonds and dragons eggs. During gameplay you also meet some animals who help you with your adventure. That’s why it is possible to play as a kangaroo kicking left and right or a penguin armed with rocket launchers! In fact, it’s an old game, so the graphics doesn’t make us speechless like the one in new games which looks pretty realistic and breathtaking. But for about 10 years old me it was quite impressive. I dived into this game, admiring all of fantastic creatures and following this marvelous journey of little dragon. For me it was out of this world, breathtaking and otherworldly experience. And the best part of playing was watching Spyro passing from one level to another, because he need to go through a gate and fly in the sky, above clouds. My imagination always went crazy. 

good SITE of facebook

This time I want to recommend you a very facebook page – the language nerds.

https://www.facebook.com/thelanguagenerds/

I guess that everybody appreciate some good jokes. And especially when you are a linguist, you have fun with word games, you get angry about someone making basic grammar mistakes (like your and you’re in English) and you want to find a bunch of people how also have typical struggle with learning second language. I promise you – this site is for you.

There, we can find memes mostly about English language (whose pronunciation is an evil). But sometimes people share with each other a words from every language they know, just to find some unique ones or those which make them feel proud to know. It’s really “refreshing” to learn about others languages and in consequences – about others cultures (just a little, but still). And all of this with a solid dose of humor! Check this out and you’ll be in linguistic heaven!

Sea otters

Some time ago, I found an interesting fact about otters. And that inspired me to find more fun facts about these cute animals.

I’ll begin with the most cute one. During sleep, otters hold their hands to not drift apart. Moreover, if it comes to their babies, when they are too small to swim on their own, they use their mother as a taxi (they’re lying on her stomach). 

Sea otters can juggle. Well, maybe juggling is too exaggerated, because it more like throwing up a stone, but still, it quite impressive. And they can do this with two or three rocks. They are playing like that while lying on their backs and they can even do it with their eyes closed.

But why exactly they are carrying a rock with them? In fact, sea otters have some kind of attachments to certain stones and it is possible that they keep their favorites rocks for a lifetime!

The last fact isn’t fun at all, but at the end give us a hope. It comes to extinction of otters. Because of the fur trade, sea otters was hunted nearly to extinction, in the early 1900s. By the time, there left around 2,000 of them). Today, they are still considered as an endangered species, but the number of otters has increased to about 106,000.

Eurovision

As everybody knows (I guess), recently we had a huge music event – Eurovision. First of all, I need to say that I’ve never been a zealous fan of this show due to two major reasons. I have never appreciated presented songs, because it was prepared, in most cases, on the basis of popular hits. In fact, it is nothing wrong, but authors of the songs are just trying too hard and by consequences, what they create is simply bland. If it comes to the songs, there is still one question that I don’t like. I think about choosing a current issues or problems, for instance feminism (like in this years song from North Macedonia). To be clear, I don’t criticize touching the problem in general – it is necessary to put it on the table and spread awareness. For me, it seems sometimes that people decided to take the topic just because it’s “popular” and people would like it and not because they really want to participate in discussion or want it to change. The second reason for which I don’t like Eurovision it’s voting. It’s seems that this contest isn’t about music, but politics. We can see this when neighbors countries vote for each other.

But this year, there were a couple of songs that I really appreciated. I want to share with you 2 of my favorites. 

Adverts are misleading and should be forbidden

Nowadays, advertising is very important strategy for a lot of companies. They create more and more divers adverts to sell their products. We can find adverts everywhere, in the Internet, on the streets and in the TV, so we can’t simply avoid them.

In my opinion, we can’t assume that all the adverts are misleading and should be forbidden. In fact, I think that some of them can be very useful, because we can find some products about which we thought that they don’t exist. In addition, adverts can have a very good quality and can be appreciable, because not every advert refers to selling products. For example, a few years ago, polish company Allegro made an avert in occasion of Christmas which was very moving and enjoyable. It was about a granddad who want to learn English to be able to speak with his grandson.

From the other hand, averts can be misleading, but they shouldn’t be forbidden. We simply need to be careful and reasonable while watching them. And we are all conscience that companies want to sell their products and that’s why they are doing their best to present it in a good way and sometimes they exaggerate the quality of their product. But I think this strategy of advertising isn’t worth anything, because costumers aren’t stupid and know when company lies which leads to avoid using products which come from this establishment.

Non-verbal communication

Body language plays a very important part in our daily life. By observing others people behavior we can simply find out their real attitude towards us. For example we can see when people lying because in fact, when somebody lies he seems to be nervous and has shaking hands and he avoids eye contact with person with whom he talks.

Sometimes body language can have a lot of significant consequences. We could see that in the debate between two candidates in the presidential election in 1960 – the first ever presidential debate between Kennedy and Nixon. Kennedy was well-prepared and he was looking very confident. We could see this in his gestures, because of the way that he operated with his hands. In addiction he was straightforward which only highlighted his self-esteem. We can also mention his general look, because knowing that it was presented in black and white television, he decided to wear a navy blue suit which caused that he stood out against the background of the scene. From the other side, we had Nixon who wasn’t as well prepared as Kennedy. He looked stressed, he was sweating and because of some leg injury he was limping. What’s more he wore a grey suit which caused that he was blending with the background. And seeing all of this elements, Nixon was doomed to failure, because the voters didn’t see in him a self-controlled and form future president. I think that it is the best example to underline the importance of body language.

The things we regret in life.

I guess that everybody at least one time in lifetime had that annoying thought that “oh, I wish I did it better”. The most common situations in which this happens are these ones related with a lot of emotions. It comes to situations like oral exams when because of stress we forget something that we know for sure and we can end up with worst note. Or like after the important argument when we need to convince somebody to our opinion, but we fail in it and after a while later we have so many better ideas. That’s why we often regret.

But going more deeply in this topic, the feeling of regret is inseparable in our life. First of all, we have so many ways that we can follow. I think about career’s choices. It is not like we are good only in one specific domain of work, but I think that we can find ourselves in a many different types. And choosing only one thing that we will be doing all our life is always related with some kind of regret. We choose something and after a while doing this, when it become more normal or habitual for us, we start thinking about others potentially better choices that we could make.  

What music would you play to an alien?

To tell the truth, it is a funny thing to wonder about. First of all, we have some questions to answer: if aliens really exist, when meeting them – wouldn’t we be too frightened to even say ‘hi’ to them, do they perceive sound in the same way as we do and the last one – what is our aim to play them some music? As we can’t give any really answer to these questions, we can find out what type of music would we play to an alien. My first thought about it bring me to consider some classic music as a first pick. Maybe because I have watched too many films in which aliens try to invade our planet and I know that classic music has some good relaxing vibes, that’s why I thought about it. But supposing that they have a friendly approach, we can consider playing them one, the most popular song from every kind of music to see what they like. After that, our task is easier – we turn our Spotify and choose appropriate playlist and we run away to not see them get angry. Just kidding. To give some more serious answer, I would choose to play them some music which I like. I think that it is easier to talk about something that you are passionate about and about what you have definitely more knowledge than about smooth jazz which according to your opinion exists only during Christmas time.

Reading is old fashioned entertainment.

In fact, we are living in the times of Internet thanks to which we can find all necessary information in short time. That’s why people are more used to check everything online instead of turning pages of some heavy book. Sometimes, we simply don’t have time to read. Our society has a very fast way of living, which means that we has to work a lot while studying not only during university time, but also later when we have to develop others competences to have a good job. Adding others daily duties, we don’t have a while to read or we are too exhausted and we are more convinced to choose something which requires less time, like watching films. We also want to spend some time with our friends, so we choose going to the cinema, concerts or places like escape rooms, playing with them in board games. In addition, the technology development gives a lot of opportunities to entertainment. The most common thing are computer games which in this time are in very good quality and with an amazing story. In VR game we can forget about reality and spend some time in a place out of this world which sounds really appealing. But even all of this mentioned arguments, that we have others ways to entertain ourselves, I don’t think that reading is old fashioned way to spend some time. There are a lot of people who still read a lot. In my opinion, what has changed is the form of books that we are more able to choose. What I mean, there are audiobooks or e-books which become more and more popular. Seeing that we have less time to read, we choose audiobooks which we can listen to in our way to work or e-books which we can simply download form the Internet instead of going to the library or bookshops. There is one more thing which appeals to people – podcasts. And it is similar thing with audiobooks, it requires only our mobile phone and we can listen to it in every place possible.

                                  

New Year's resolutions

Almost week ago, we celebrated New Year (good point, Sherlock). But after this week, I have thought if I had chosen my New Year’s resolution. The answer is obviously no. The second question is do we really need this kind of motivation? Personally, it never work for me. Even if I take any resolution, even if it is the simplest one like ‘drink more water’, ‘eat more healthy’ – I always forget that something like this came to my mind. Literally, it is always not because I have changed my mind, but because I have forget (the most often after 2 days). From the other hand, I just consider New Year’s resolutions, or resolutions in general, like something doomed to failure. And the reason is that we use to take them by necessity, not because we want to. That’s why I’m more concentrated about living my life instead of trying make any New Year’s resolutions.

What is your opinion about it? Have you made any New Year’s resolution?