I like to think that I have a flair for the dramatic. I feel like Lady Fuchsia at times, performing to a dark room to an imaginary audience.

When I reached a thousand day streak in the Waffle game, I thought it would be fun to just, the day before, at day 999, just stop, one day short, and let the streak fall. I told my sisters, and they couldn’t see the point to that. So I just continued on, and my streak is at 1,094 days as of last night. I didn’t go through with it.

My streak with Duolingo stands at 1933 days – just 67 (almost nice) short of 2000. I’ve learned Japanese and German and now chess, with the app, and although it got annoying to have to do it every day, I’ve been pretty good about spending at least a few minutes with it, every day, no matter where I’ve been or what I’ve been doing.

I’ve been goin through my monthly expenses, seeing what I could do without. Times are getting hard, and it’s best to focus on the necessary things. I’ve gotten rid of a lot of my streaming service subscriptions, some of the Patreons. I’m living now with the occasional Spotify ad. It’s fine, although the ads seem to think I might live in Texas, or Florida, or some other place where I don’t live.

I cancelled my super Duolingo subscription when it came due; well over a hundred dollars for the year. Duolingo was very usable without paying, a couple of years ago. It was “energy” based, and you could only do a few lessons before the app cut you off, but that didn’t really get in the way.

Cancelling this time, though – the app panicked. Ads between everything I did – for me to sign up again, and not only to sign up for me, but to get the family plan and sign up everyone I knew. It would be free for the first month, and they would 100% totally let me know when it was about to run out!

It was so fricken’ annoying. I just wanted to go back to the app as it was before I subscribed; a free tier that let you get in a couple of lessons before it shut you off. Now, though, it was such a hard sell that I could only choose to resubscribe, or quit entirely.

I’m trying to cut down on expenses. So if I have to choose… it’s not going to go the way Duo wants. And they are forcing a choice, and so it’s goodbye.

Goodbye, Duo. It’s been a fun few years. I’ll miss Lily. I won’t miss you.