Happy New Year’s! It’s been a busy week, so I figured I’d keep it simple: food photos. Winter holidays are, after all, celebrated with food.
(That’s orange juice and cranberry juice combined. I like the way the colors mixed! And, of course, the flavors.)
Happy holidays! Let’s talk about learning. OmniSets is a free digital study platform. There are a few of these, and I actually started on a different one, but when I came back to that in recent years I found it had paywalled its services, so I went looking for an alternative. What I found was OmniSets, and it’s been serving me well ever since.
The main tool is the digital flashcards. You can search the library for StudySets other people have made, or make your own! It’s really easy, and if you already made the set on another platform you can import it! (I thought I’d have to transcribe my 100+ flashcards individually, so this in particular was a delightful surprise.)
From there, you have several practice options. You can just use them as flashcards, plain and simple; you can Study, which provides a mix of true/false, multiple choice, and written response questions until you’re consistently correct; Quiz functions as a practice test; Match is, of course, a matching game; and Spell is purely written response. You can also pick and choose which types of questions you get in Study, and Favorite cards to if you want to just study those! The only caveat is that Match works much better with smaller StudySets; it uses your whole set, so when that’s 370 cards like mine, it’s kind of clunky. That’s on me for not splitting it out at all, though.
The rest of the site really centers around making the sets as helpful as possible: you can customize how your sets are sorted, decide whether they’re public or private, decide whether they can be copied by other users (“forked”), and set StudyPlans that account for factors like when your test is to best help you memorize everything! I can’t speak to the efficacy of StudyPlans, because my flashcards aren’t for a class, but I do think it’s awesome that they’re an option.
Somehow, despite years of watching Smosh videos, I’ve yet to write a post about them! I’d say Smosh is a YouTube channel, but it’s actually three: there’s the main channel, for scripted content; Smosh Pit, for unscripted shenanigans; and Smosh Games, which, as the name implies, is all gaming! I mostly watch the latter two, but I fondly remember the main channel’s Every [Blank] Ever saga, and more recently, the Funeral Roasts in which one of them plays the “deceased” and their friends surprise them (and each other) with hilarious eulogies. There’s a lot of friendly ribbing, including a traditional counter-roast from the “dead”!
Smosh Pit definitely has a similar chaotic energy, with shows like Try Not To Laugh, Eat It Or Yeet It, and Beopardy! They also recently started a Culinary Crimes series, which aligns nicely with my interest in food videos. (So does Eat It Or Yeet It, but Culinary Crimes is collaborative and deductive, whereas Eat It Or Yeet It is more… ah, “hope you get something good, or the bad option isn’t too gross.”) I look forward to seeing them continue it!
Smosh Games, meanwhile, features a mix of board, card, and video games, often with a twist. The Board AF videos remind me of TableTop! Which I really need to rewatch.
Regardless of which Smosh channel you favor, you’ll find them all to be hilarious and hilariously creative.
I discovered Globle: Capitals when I was writing my post on Metazooa and Metaflora a few weeks back, and it immediately joined my regular rotation.
Capitals has, unsurprisingly, the same basic mechanics as the original Globle (post with those here), with two changes. One, you’re deducing national capitals instead of the nations themselves. Assuming the average person knows more countries than countries’ capitals, this is inherently the harder game. The second difference makes it a bit easier; an arc appears between each guess and the previous, and like the capitals themselves, the arc is color-coded! This is especially useful if the correct answer falls somewhere between your entries.
Unsurprisingly, I like Capitals for the same reasons I like Globle (and Metazooa, and Metaflora). It’s a low-pressure deduction game that teaches me more about the world every day! And this world is such a fascinating place.
It has, once again, been A Week, so instead of trying to get words in order, I’m just going to share some neat plants I’ve taken photos of. One had a guest!
