UmbraVivi

They have to be or have been a US citizen.

magnificent, no notes

Pretty much title. I've seen this talked about a lot but I only very vaguely know what all this means, could someone elaborate on what happened, why it happened and what the consequences of it are?

Step 1: Learn Spanish

Step 2: Become a medium

Step 3: Move to Argentina

Step 4: Have a seánce with Javier Milei

Step 5: Tell him his dogs think that in order to truly free the markets, the means of production must be nationalized

Step 6: Tell him to stop dating his sister

Step 7: Communism has won

This is extremely cringe.

Rakuten Viki (a platform that has all kinds of Asian TV shows) used to have a feature that allowed you to watch videos with 2 sets of subtitles at the same time, which was ideal to learn languages. But for some reason, they just got rid of that feature?

Now there is "Language Reactor", which is a Chrome add-on that allows you the same feature on other platforms like Netflix, but none of those platforms have an even remotely decent catalogue of shows from mainland China (it's probably perfectly sufficient if you wanna learn Korean though). It's also a Chrome add-on and I'm using Firefox.

I'm looking into ways to pirate the shows and then add 2 layers of subtitles myself, which is probably gonna be a huge hassle because torrent hubs also don't seem to have many shows from mainland China.

Does anyone have a somewhat convenient way to a) Watch Chinese TV shows and b) Watch them with both English and Chinese subtitles? I specifically found this show I thought looked cute named 以家人之名 and it's on Rakuten Viki but alas, I can only watch it on there with either English or Chinese subs, not both simultaneously. And from my experience, you don't learn a lot at all when just reading English subs, especially with how difficult Chinese is from a listening comprehension standpoint.

Link

The thought of being remembered for something so bland and boring is weirdly scary to me. Maybe Felix was on to something when he talked about how settler-colonialism hollows out your soul and kills any culture, creativity or national identity you might've otherwise had.

Edit: 🔻 🔻 🔻 🔻 🔻 SETTLER DOWN 🔻 🔻 🔻 🔻 🔻

This is after they already tried to wrap her into it on October 19th https://twitter.com/Israel/status/1714922694414598419

Holy shit, I thought Ukraine propaganda was cringe but Israel is making them look sane and normal. How pathetic can a country get? https://twitter.com/Israel/status/1721074264671994178

We love our cringe twitter stans, don't we folks. I wonder how many Swifties had no strong opinions on this matter before Israel tried to claim their idol for their side and pissed them off in the process.

I don't know if asking for likes is against hexbear rules but it would be so freaking funny if the IDF refusing Swiftie post ratio'd the country of Israel itself, the reply is only 600 likes off.

https://twitter.com/arxxxxmand/status/1714991572612432346

Rare stan twitter W, also you can tell the real Swifties by them @'ing Tree Paine, Taylor's head of PR iirc

https://www.vice.com/en/article/gyazzj/meet-the-taylor-swift-stan-who-went-to-jail

Posting this partly because it's classic lore and partly because I was an actual stan twitter Swiftie at the time and not only that, I was friends with this girl and had met her irl when she went to prison.

She was an Israeli communist and while she was in prison, she'd write notes that her friend would post to twitter. I don't remember much of what she said about her time in prison but I do remember that she apparently got laid a lot while in there, so good for her.

Our friend group drifted apart over the years and I'm not in contact with her anymore. The story has gone viral a few times since then and I've seen a lot of upvoted comments say that it's fake and the girl was actually from Michigan or some shit?

I'm here to tell you that no, this girl was real, she was from Israel (I distinctly remember her having to quit a skype call because of a bomb alarm) and she really did go to prison for refusing to join the IDF. I remember her tweeting in hebrew on her main account and repeatedly posting pro-Palestine stuff. This story is 100% real and I can confirm it to you first-hand.

Also fun fact: "LegitTayUpdates" was a bit account. It was not a "real" update account that would post paparazzi shots with real things Taylor did today, it was mainly Swiftie shitposting. The content was not too dissimilar of c/taylorswift, honestly. Maybe that's why people thought the prison thing was fake? But no, that really did happen, she texted us about it ahead of time as well.

90% of her twitter is complaining about tankies and the uyghurs and the authoritarianism

someone in the comments says "im cuban and castro was not a real communist"

retweeted something about how can china eradicate poverty when people in hong kong live in tiny homes

I dunno, if the person with the most similar political development on Youtube was freaking Shoe0nhead, that would probably make me want to rethink my beliefs.

Like, there's non-tankie leftists online like hbomb, philosophytube, big joel, the chapos, contrapoints, hasanabi, but they talk about actual fucking left-wing ideals, the injustices in the present day and what could be done to fix them. They don't turn their entire online presence into "im one of the good lefties, not like these evil tankies, im one of the good and reasonable ones"

As we all know, Taylor Swift released her first, self-titled album at the age of 16 on October 24th in 2006.

The album is distinctly more country-flavored than her later music and attentive listeners will notice a very real and totally authentic rural accent which mysteriously disappeared as early as her 2nd album, Fearless.

The debut album didn't have any massive hits, it was before her breakthrough, but its most popular songs are definitely Our Song (which has the most 2000s video ever made, she looks like an actual barbie doll) and the charmingly corny Teardrops On My Guitar. While with her later albums, I usually like about 90% of songs (except Reputation but we don't talk about that), the debut album is 50/50 for me. If you want my personal hipster "I-liked-Taylor-Swift-before-she-was-cool" songs, it's definitely Picture To Burn and probably I'm Only Me When I'm With You.

Taylor Swift has never been an outstanding vocalist, and this was especially true when 15/16-year-old Taylor recorded the debut album. Her voice is kinda thin and you can hear her struggling to hit higher notes, but it makes it all the more endearing. The album doesn't have nearly the same mainstream appeal that her later albums had, but it was all the more authentic and the roots of what made her so popular, her ability to put her feelings on paper and make her audience relate to her, are already there.

To love Taylor Swift, the album, you kinda already have to love Taylor Swift, the singer. I hope she does remake it, she's sung a bunch of the songs from it as bonus songs on the current eras tour so it's not like she's trying to sweep it under the rug.

Fun Fact 1: There exists an original version of Picture To Burn where instead of "So go and tell your friends that I'm obsessive and crazy, that's fine, you won't mind if I say..." she sings "that's fine, I'll tell mine you're gay." If you read the comments, you'll find a lot of gay Swifties asking her to bring that version back.

Fun Fact 2: Drew, the guy who she wrote Teardrops On My Guitar about, went on to be arrested for child abuse a couple years later. Dodged a bullet there, Taytay!

In my subjective opinion, Stellaris' biggest issue is the lack of resource scarcity. The infinite abundance of resources means that there isn't much to fight over for most of the game, it means individual colonies will matter less and less as the game goes on and it often leads to games stagnating until a crisis shows up.

Wars are fought over resources, over material gains, and in Stellaris it rarely feels like that. I rarely feel compelled to go to war with another empire because between megastructures, ecumenopoli, habitats and ring worlds, i can generate infinite resources regardless of how many planets and systems I control. This wouldn't be as much of an issue if Stellaris had victory conditions outside of military victory, if you could win through diplomacy, science, faith or whatever like in Civilization, but with how the crises are designed, it's very apparent that you're supposed to win through combat. But wars don't feel "organically incentivized" to me a lot of the time, if that makes sense. I don't feel like I have much to gain from going to war, I just do it because that's the only way to make the game end.

I think the game would be more exciting, dynamic and strategic if colonies and system resource deposits had a limited amount of minerals, food and energy you could extract from them before their output greatly decreases.

That way, there would be a much bigger incentive to fight over colonies, especially in the lategame. Because when you have 20 colonies in the lategame, one more or less doesn't matter all that much, but when only 3 of these colonies are still running at full capacity, suddenly that one untapped planet becomes much, much more valuable. It would cause conflict much more organically, as eventually the exploitable galaxy gets smaller and smaller until there is only one last empire standing. While the crises are cool (and I don't think they should be removed), I think they are a very clunky way to force conflict, and it would be much nicer if the endgame was instead determined by the friends and enemies we made along the way rather than an outside entity randomly entering the playing field so you have to actually fight someone.

This is, again, subjective, as I'm sure a lot of people specifically enjoy Stellaris for its chill, relaxing pace that allows you to watch youtube on your second monitor while effectively playing stardew valley in space. I enjoy that aspect of it too sometimes, but still, it eventually always falls short for me. Wonder what you folks think about this.

Edit: I realize that this would be way too fundamental of a change to ever realistically make for the devs or a modder, as you would have to basically re-design and re-balance everything from scratch. This is purely theoretical.