Hey language-learners, what's your tip for improving your ear? I can read French pretty well, with a glossary, and I can write it OK, but my hearing is garbage.
@ZachWeinersmith listen to radio France Inter. When I moved to France it helped me get attuned to the sounds of the language. You have to immerse in the language. It’s the only way.
@ZachWeinersmith you have to know the weird sounds. For example as French it’s hard to differentiate the voiced and voiceless uvular fricative (German, modern Hebrew…). Once you know it, you can work on it specifically and overcome the difficulty eventually. Language teachers and linguists are great to point you those difficulties and to help you overcome them.
"The music industry has been silent on Palestine. Star athletes, so central to the Black Lives Matter movement, have largely been too scared to speak. Most of Hollywood has kept quiet. I know artists and athletes who want to speak up for Palestine but are correctly concerned that they would be putting their careers in danger."
What happened to the artist?
What d'you got to say?
If I was on a label,
you could drop me today
I'd be fine with it
'cause the heart
fed my page
I want a ceasefire,
fuck a response from Drake
if Macklemore isn't with a label, it explains what's he's doing. this might be his biggest gamble at striking it out as an indy. how that will affect him given the monopsony Ticketmaster and the labels have on music venues, we'll see. but it's an interesting point he makes in the song.
@hotdogsladies I loved hearing about Spider-man and how he was contracted for 3 movies, but thought it was over when they killed off his character only to be brought back 17 years later! I still can't believe they pulled that movie off so well. Loved it.
I have a weird fascination with HOA’s, they seem like such a weird thing to me. I have never lived anywhere where there is an HOA and never would but I enjoy hearing stories about them. Are you guys pro or anti HOA’s? Or no opinion? Any good stories?
@Catlynn
We’re in Colorado, and there are state laws here that regulate and tend to prevent a lot of the egregious behavior of the HOAs that get all the publicity. Again, perfect? No. Good enough? Yes. As always, your mileage may vary.
@Green_Footballs He’s a very unbalanced person who has enough money to sustain both his imbalance and protection from anyone or anything that would rein him in. I’m getting a real strong “Phil Spector” vibe from this guy.
Incoming! A severe G4 Geomagnetic Storm is expected to arrive around 02:00 UTC Friday night / Saturday morning.
At least 5 Coronal Mass Ejections took place over the past 24 hours, directed towards Earth. These originated from a large and magnetically complex sunspot cluster (NOAA region 3664).
There is potential for disruption of communications, the electric power grid, navigation, radio and satellite operations.
Let's keep in mind that we are approaching the peak of the current 11-year solar cycle #25. Hence, the increase in the number of sunspots, solar flares and CMEs in the past year. And there will more such events over the course of the next year.
We have experienced stronger cycles in the recent past as shown in the graph below. This cycle seems to be acting stronger than predictions and peaking earlier.
To relax before the solar storm arrives, please take a look at this fascinating time-lapse video of the surface of the Sun. The video was created using images taken by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory SDO, which keeps a keen eye on the Sun 24/7.
Beautiful and frightening as it may appear, it is what provides the energy to sustain life on earth. The earth's magnetic field helps deflect the dangerous flares and energetic particles away from earth and our atmosphere.
Prolly not, as “Communism” came well after multiple waves of immigration. They’d just have called it a community. Farmers in Europe would share tools and resources.
@GhostOnTheHalfShell@artemis@StillIRise1963 No argument at all. The point is that the normal function of human beings was tidily packaged for people who were automatically something less, and the argument between the haves and have-nots continues because of selfishness. Selfishness is a cultural problem that wasn't solved by fancy talk.
@JamesGleick they will arrest you, but the supreme Court will say that it wasn't actually a bribe unless the bag has a giant cartoon dollar sign on it and you then took it and were still holding it in your hand as you cast a vote or signed an executive order. Otherwise, the supreme Court has said that that is just sparkling politics and there's nothing illegal about it.
@nixCraft Major Vehicle Exchange
Buy Premium Quality Used Shuttle Buses For Sale that are fully reconditioned from bumper to bumper by a used bus dealer that is inspected, serviced, and road tested.
One clear sign of how ignorant and immature the college protesters are is how they all don't seem to want to be held accountable for the crimes they committed.
I wish that our U.S. campuses would at least still assign students to read MLK's Letter from a Birmingham jail, and Thoreau's essay on Civil Disobedience.
I think these protesters have failed the guidelines of: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self-purification; and effective direct action.
You raise a crucial point, Clara. According to a recent extensive @TheEconomist podcast, the Sunni leaders are not really interested in a stable situation in #Israel, as that would endanger their own position. They need the #Palestinians as a destabilizing force.
This reminds me of l British foreign policy from the 16th-19rh century pioneered by Henry VIII, when the UK would switch...
...alliances with Continental European powers so that one would not become predominant. (As Emperor Napoleon's French did until Waterloo and the Congress of Vienna.)
An awkward thing about buying things mail order from USA in Canada is you don't actually wind up paying the import fee. Instead, the shipper has a "broker", who stands there at the border when the package passes over and negotiates a reduced import fee. Then you pay the broker fee. As far as I know, this fee really is reduced usually. But it means you never have any idea how much import you'll be paying, and sometimes something bizarre like this (near 100% import duty) happens.
I call UPS's "international shipping support" to ask if I can appeal this fee. The robot says it cannot connect me with a representative unless I provide an "account number". I say I do not know my "account number". The robot says my "account number" is at the top of my invoice. There is no account number at the top of the invoice. I am not a number. I am a free woman. The robot says "thank you for calling" and disconnects my call.
Wanted to try the too good to go from the Polish place for ages. Very fun (one of the donuts is missing, I ate it on the way)! There is definitely some truly weird stuff in here, not sure what to do with the fish in the glass 😳
it occured to me that if the web is full of junk (like ai-generated seo content etc), are there search engines where you can create and share with others your own (potentially big) sets of domains to include in the search? (edit for clarification: people would cobble together their own curated subset(s) of the web and just ignore the junk)
Just turned 18 year old Barron is a FL delegate, and…
“Donald Trump's other children, Donald Trump, Jr. and Tiffany Trump Boulos, will also serve as delegates while Eric Trump was listed as chair.
Tiffany Boulos's husband, Michael Boulos, is also a Florida delegate. Kimberly Guilfoyle, who is engaged to Donald Trump, Jr., sits on the platform committee for the Republican National Convention.”
The problem with outsourcing your chat or forum to third parties is that you don't own them. That is correct
The problem with self hosting those things yourself is that 1. nobody will use them because why aren't you just using this 3rd party app that everyone is already using and 2. have fun doing your own spam control
Seems like a bit of a damned if you do damned if you don't situation if you ask me
Like yeah sure hosting all your own stuff is great in principle but let's take gamedev, something I am particularly familiar with
If I host my games on my own site browsers like Chrome will scream "this is a file that isn't regularly downloaded ARE YOU SURE??" at anyone who tries to download them, with a very scary interface. There's jack and also shit I can do about this. So most lay people just... won't download my games from my own site
I then also need to sign my binaries which is bullshit to start with but if I put my games on Steam or itch and people use their launchers it's always fine
I also also do not receive any of the passive traffic afforded to me by those platforms so slash the proportion of people who manage to download and run my games again by a factor of 1000 because of lack of discoverability
So in summary you should definitely self host video games if you wanna make sure literally nobody will ever play them
