Here’s a website with those FSI courses I referenced earlier, as well as Peace Corps training materials. This is going to be the boring route. Drill drill drill, but you get good at it.

As a general strategy - on the Omniglot forums a billion years ago there was a method called Listen-Read which I think does wonders for me. You pick a longer book, preferably one you have enjoyed and read already in English. You get a copy of that book in English and your target language, as well as audiobook (let’s go with say, French), then you listen to the audio book in French while reading the book in English, then switch to listening to an English audiobook while reading the French book, then the audiobook in French while reading the French.

Librivox and Project Gutenberg are godsends. I did Candide this way, and part of Les Miserables. This is obviously less immediate fun/dopamine satisfying than Duolingo is, but will teach you to read better than Duolingo will. It’s not great at expressive language - while I can read Proust, my « je voudrais un Diet Coke » was not well received in Paris.

If you have a language in mind I can probably point you in some other directions.

Duolingo is a tragedy. They really quickly realized that you don’t make money teaching things - you make it on retention and gamification.

Mango languages is great if your library has a subscription. I believe the US’s foreign service materials are also really good, if you want effective but boring.

He had that fetish roleplay account where he pretended to be his toddler…

Yeah - the real freaks left because moot dated like Brianna Wu or something stupid and weird like that. 8chan was the place for a bit.

4chan is owned by an anime figma company at the moment - i think Nendroid?

I can’t think of a single online space ever that has catered to trans men. It’s always infinitely easier to just act like a cis dude 99% of the time.

I guess there is Hudson’s Guide lol.

The current state seems to be that only big corporations have IP protections.

Most of the biggest channels on YouTube and TikTok are people who steal other folks content, and this has the tacit approval of the platforms (look at how YouTube handled Sssniperwolf versus jacksfilms. She just records herself laughing at TikToks, he called her out for not crediting folks, she showed up at his house and YouTube said ‘uh uh, seems like both sides are in the wrong here’ because they make buckets of money on her stolen content.)

YouTube figured out that you can’t host full movies, because Paramount can afford the lawyers. Small time content creators though - fuck them.

Similarly, look at how Facebook’s LLM was trained on Anna’s Archive. I use Anna’s, because I’m broke, but Facebook could afford to pay for those pdf’s legitimately. (I love how they also claimed that it was okay because they didn’t seed…)

Current IP law seems to only honor the IP of corporations.

No, it’s his wife, who has collaborated in a bunch of his fucked up endeavors, likely including helping with sex trafficking.

I’m not really seeing connections being drawn here at all, other than the reflexive USSR bashing that happens any time Soviet history comes up?

Is the argument the Spartans and the Soviets were similar in that they were both bad? Can we pick eras we want to compare at least?

Might as well dump some A1 on every IEP in a state on the wrong side of the Mason Dixon line…. (and lord knows that ‘AI’ is already involved)

What I love about being a broke bitch retro gamer is that I own my games. I have a Tetris cartridge that is older than I am and still works. The batteries on some of my GB and GBA carts have died, but that’s something I can fix. No one can send a stealth update to my Sega Genesis that forces me to create on an account to play or even bricks it somehow. There’s no room for human shit behavior, just a war against the realities of mechanical decay. (And it’s easy to rip ROMs in case of the inevitable.)

Older generations of gaming are well preserved. I don’t think the past ten years or the future will be. “Games as a service” is too big a draw - the goal is to turn everything into a subscription model because why make money once when you can make it forever?

I really don’t think that works. Basically any human system of government is going to group people and have hierarchies. Same with mass movements.

Sparta was basically an aristocratic oligarchy/monarchy. This series of articles is an amazing breakdown of the history of Sparta and the way its government was organized.

When we talk about “Spartans” we are referring to a very small group of men who held held a form of aristocratic status. Sparta was a slave society - the vast majority of those living in Sparta were helots, slaves, who had little rights or recourse against the Spartans.

I don’t think there was really anything analogous to a soviet. Society wasn’t really organized around economic production. I don’t think you can really compare the education systems either - Spartans had little internet in creating poets, artists or engineers.

Really, the goal of the Spartans was to be lazy aristocratic fucks who played soldier while the helots did the work. They were pretty shit at it too. But all about warriors and honor, “return with your shield or on it” at least in theory. Terrorize the helots every once in a while to keep them in line and make your dick feel big.

The goal of the Soviet project was rapid industrial development to set up the conditions necessary for the abolishment of the state/“true communism.” Stalin was an autocratic fuckwad that quickly gave up on anything resembling values in part because Jews and gays are icky, and steered that project straight into a wall.

I guess one commonality is the the USSR was one of the first states to legalize same sex intercourse, and the Spartans were all about mansex.

Also the real world attempt at Spartan values (in philosophy) was the USSR

???

You are going to really have to expand on the argument there.

But what about things like the Pokémon GTS or Wonder Trade? I know you can make fake GTS servers to get event ‘mons, but it was really fun to complete the Pokédex legitimately putting up starters for trade.

Will Wright after seeing everything he owned in ashes after a series of major wildfires in the Palisades: “what if I made a virtual dollhouse for people to explore sexual and violent fantasies that would make Freud say, ‘no, that’s too much.’”

The prison mod is great for running the “re education” camps in the Handmaid’s Tale scenarios. I usually rezone all of the lots in Downtown to residential, and then explode a series of bombs across them (+ enhance with some assets ripped from the Fallout games). Occasionally I add in a zombie apocalypse to shake it up.

My Utah Mormons I play out the generation after they moved from Nauvoo. Clothing is period accurate, as much as possible. The goal is to populate an empty map, and find something to do with all of the extra men (wars, Indian raids…)

When I was ten and playing the original Sims, it was Roman families with historically accurate slavery (minus the sex stuff.)

I play heavily modded Elder Scrolls, where my character never touches the main story.

My favorite Morrowind run was a princess who ended up creating an agricultural baron, buying up every plantation and owning probably hundreds of slaves. She also got into the skooma business on the side (needed money for all of her dresses). Morrowind had a ton of wacky mods that were just fun to play in general - people made Star Wars and LOTR questlines. There’s also the work of Tommy Khajiit (RIP), which is something unique and which has never gotten the respect it deserved. (Or Lady Rae - she liked to recolor the game bright neon colors, and basically got bullied out of the modding community.)

Skyrim is a hunting/vagrant simulator for me. I usually play a Dunmer refugee and avoid the in-game quests entirely. Survival and economy mods to make the focus of the gameplay getting enough gold to afford a room for the night, tweaks to loot to make things more “mundane.”

The Sims for me is either 1800s Utah polygamous Mormons, post apocalyptic Handmaid’s Tale scenarios, or prisons.

In a video taken from a Cybertruck of a man throwing American cheese slices at the windshield of a Cybertruck, many comments suggest filing a police report and attempting to dox the man by posting a screengrab of his face to social media: “Freeze frame and blow up his face. Go on all the social media platforms and post your video. I would file a police report stating that if he is willing to do this in public, then he obviously has some type of vendetta against me, and therefore, I feel threatened and fearful for my life… the only way these people will learn [is] if they are shamed,” one comment reads. “Can you make an 8 x 11 print out of his face with a QR code that leads to the video so everybody in your city will know who this guy is and what he did?? can’t we just make him famous?”

I like this “throwing slices of American cheese” at Cybertrucks. It’s barely even food, so it’s not really that wasteful. I’m sure the synthetic oilly shit has a wonderful reaction with that unprotected stainless steel. It’s also fucking hilarious - “hey police, someone threw cheese at my car, I’m in fear for my life.”