Probably the same reason people get upset every time F1 or MotoGP add a new race to the calendar in some authoritarian country in the Middle East, but intensified because this time it’s happening at home and they feel like they have some skin in the game. Yeah, the race itself could be cool as a spectacle, but I’d rather series I enjoy didn’t keep signing up to sportswash the reputation of yet more authoritarian scum.

I’m sure there’s a cli program to just do batch audio conversion, but in favor of simple and least amount of hassle, it wouldn’t be that much work with fre:ac. You should be able to just open up the game’s directory in your file browser by going to the game properties in Steam, clicking “Installed Files”, and then clicking the browse button in the top right. Drag the wma files into an open window of fre:ac, make sure mp3 is selected for the output in your preferences and click convert. Or if you installed it in Wine, just browse to where you installed it, then continue the same once you have the wma files. Then just replace the wma files with your new mp3s, and you’re done. Honestly, you’ll probably spend more time waiting for your package manager to install fre:ac than you’ll spend on everything else in this process. Not as easy as just running out of the box, but really not as bad as it might sound at first.

In fairness, a lot of people will only experience or know what’s brought out as quintessential English for at holidays or other special occasions, which isn’t always the best thing there is to offer from the cuisine. It’s something else entirely if you actually go there for a couple of weeks and pay attention to all the delicious stuff you’ll eat while there.

Plus, you get plenty of weirdos from every country who seem to have Stockholm syndrome with the most bland/boring aspects of their cuisine and will wholeheartedly recommend their absolute most terrible dish as the pinnacle of their country’s cuisine. I have a coworker from Ireland who won’t touch a spice bag if his life depended on it, but will tell anyone who listens how wonderful beans on buttered brown bread is and that it should be more common everywhere.

I draw the line at whether it’s something that can be done naturally, as a result of playing the game and enjoying it enough to put in that much time. I’ll entertain trying to 100% a game that has an achievement to farm 1000 of some herb, if it’s something that I’ll just come across in due time by making full use of all the game mechanics, and presumably see some form of in-game payoff for my efforts. I’ll instantly become content with just seeing the credits if an achievement to get a similar quantity of something is just an excuse to pad play time by making me grind some monster drops just for the sake of getting that last achievement.

I think this might be a puzzle game getting too niche for its own good with a wider audience, in your case. I only played through to the one ending, but it had enough trappings of a VN for me to guess that you get most of your character growth or punishment after redoing the common route (basically the prologue leading up to where you get locked into one ending or another), once you get set on course for a particular ending and play it out. It’s common enough in visual novels for me to expect it and not be bothered or caught off-guard by those faults, but that’s obviously not going to play out with a wider audience if they’re not made aware of those conventions.

Well, clearly, you grind up beef chuck to make burgers, Chuck is a diminutive form of Charlie, ergo the libs at McDonald’s have been supplementing their burgers with the cultivated remains of Charlie Kirk. The fake moo is all a plan to make everyone go woke by tricking them into cannibalism. Where’s my poster board and red string?

This gives us the possibility for one of the funniest ends to this, where Trump gets in a pissing match with Italy over something, tries to extort them with tariffs, and the Italian mob takes him out for trying to squeeze in on their territory.

From all the Albanians that live in my neighborhood, I would sum them up saying if depressing brutalist buildings were to be personified, they’d probably be Albanian. Aside from the guys sitting outside the Albanian coffee shop that seem to be loving the life of drinking espresso and chain smoking, they seem kind of perpetually miserable. They do have some really good food, though, and the country itself looks like it has some pretty spots.

Honestly, the language itself seems pretty cool, too. Despite being a natural language, it manages to look like someone’s fantasy conlang when you see it written down.

Their beer has been terrible, from what I’ve tried of it. Tasted like musty bread and always seems to have free-floating goop in the bottle that should have been filtered out.

I came to the realization recently that most of my books I read are just as much disposable entertainment to me as watching sitcoms is for my parents. I’ll feel bad about forgetting the details of some light novel I read a month ago when they can provide a detailed summary of the rerun of Two and a Half Men or whatever it was they were watching a month ago.

I don’t know any context about the artist or anything that might change it, but my initial take was that it’s mocking the pearl clutching, not partaking in it.

For Spanish, at least, your ears deceive you. It’s /meɾˈsedes/ in the vast majority of the Spanish speaking world, and /meɾˈθedes/ for large parts of Spain. All 3 ‘e’ sounds are identical.

Spanish can be weird and nonsensical at times, but it’s mostly counterintuitive grammatical rules. Things like “antes de que” having to be followed by the subjunctive, even in the past tense when you’re speaking of an event you know for certain occurred as you’re saying. The relationship between phonology and orthography in English is just a mess that’s gone and contaminated this one.

Electricity could be more expensive per unit, but it also doesn’t generally have minimum amounts for delivery to keep the stove functioning, at least, so it’s a bit of a trade off. I remember growing up, we just stopped using the stove and oven and did everything on the grill, year round, because the company that served our area for cooking gas wouldn’t make a delivery for less than $200 worth of fuel. $200 was way more than my parents had to spare for it at the time, and also like pre-paying for 9-10 months at a time, versus month to month with the electricity bill.

Even if you have a gas stove, most people aren’t going to have one that puts out the amount of BTUs to really make traditional wok cooking work anyway, so it’s a bit of a non-issue on at least that front. If I was going to bust out a wok and start trying to nail Chinese food, I’d skip right past my rapid-boil burner and go to one of the portable propane stoves they sell in Asian supermarkets. In the US, at least, I wouldn’t expect to see a stove that can deliver that sort of heat output (aside from something custom made) anymore than I would expect an off the shelf oven to be able to replicate the temps in the pizza oven at a pizzeria.

At least they haven’t started incorporating Judge Dredd side stories into their politics. Only a matter of time before one of them reads the Dark Judges stories and decides being tough on crime means killing everyone.

I mean, it’s a rambling response totally divorced from the context of the field she’s supposed to be studying, where she basically copied down her pastor’s word salad on the topic, so I wouldn’t qualify her response as anything like being thoughtful. The whole thing is a series of repetitive tangents that just abruptly end with her fundie non sequitur about how things would be better and problems would decrease if everyone just believed the same religious doctrine she does, a claim she makes with zero support. In light of this, I would struggle to call it clearly written. And it’s only 629 words, which was an automatic 10 point drop.

So, even if I’m feeling charitable and say that it shows a clear tie-in to the article and merits being called a thoughtful reaction, she’s still sitting at a 10/25 as soon as you dock 10 points for her inability to use a word count function in her word processor and the 5 points for being so terribly structured and written that I feel bad for having read it.

And if I were to say I feel even more charitable, and credit her with crushing all 3 criteria given in the assignment and earning full marks on the merits of her paper, she still has a 15/25, aka a failing grade, as soon as the professor sees she didn’t hit the word count.

I mean, even refugees and people on other exceptional visas should, after a certain point. Obviously, they’ll have more immediately pressing matters than language classes, but unless you wind up in some sort of ethnic enclave that permits you to be self-sufficient with just your native language, it’s ultimately in your best interests to learn the local language.

but I think Americans just aren’t sure which plan will work.

I don’t even think it’s that complicated. Look at the overlap between Trump voters and AOC or Mamdani voters, or Obama->Bernie->Trump guys. From my perspective, it seems like there are a lot of people who want massive change in how things operate in the US, and a good number of them are willing to vote for whoever says they’ll really shake things up in office, regardless of the details of said shaking or the candidate’s political affiliation.

The Democrats’ problem isn’t messaging, it’s their message. They destroy their credibility with voters when they claim they’ll be able to fix things and make life better on the campaign trail, yet once in office, they work tirelessly to maintain the status quo voters are already so unhappy with. And when they do have a candidate come along who promises the sort of change people are looking for, who people actually believe are being sincere when they say they’ll change things and deliver for the working class, the Democrats and DNC have shown they’ll do everything they can to prevent that person from actually winning and sideline them as much as possible in the event they do win. The politically engaged are tired of busting their asses to get people elected or promote their policies, only to see the Democrats shoot themselves in the foot, rolling over and watering down their goals in the name of bipartisanship, often before the Republicans even ask for it. If a Democratic Senator told me they were campaigning on free ice cream for everyone, I’d expect to be brought down to “One cup of skim milk for everyone at or below the federal poverty line, provided they can complete 20 pages of paperwork to prove they really deserve it, and submit this documentation on a website that’s only operating between 1-3pm on February 29th, but closed every other day during leap years and completely inoperable in regular calendar years,” by the time a draft materializes, much less after Republican obstruction and pushback.

It’s no wonder people have soured on them.

It’s a standard letter in Icelandic, so there are probably plenty of fonts incorporating thorn, even if not everyone uses them. Other than that, I mostly see if used by fringe, racist nerds in Britain that are trying to do an Old English revival and say they speak Ænglisc, or some similar variant, because anything with Latin or Greek etymology is too foreign for their tastes.

Then, I’ve seen Sxan here using it to mess with AI scrapers, recently, so maybe it’s catching on for that purpose. Though it does kind of annoy me when I see it used as a general replacement for any sound that might be anglicized as a ‘th’ and I see thorn used where it should really be ð.

I can’t really answer for anything other than ebikes, but that’s mostly because ebikes have attracted the same group of inconsiderate assholes that dirtbikes and quads in urban areas have attracted in the past. I’m sure there are plenty of people on ebikes that just ride them around as they’re meant to, and I’m all for using them for replacing cars and stuff for commutes. But if you ask me what I think of them, the first things that come to mind are assholes riding them at high speeds in the dark with no lights, cutting through grass, trails and anything else in the parks in my city and nearly running people down. Or people whipping around corners on crowded sidewalks on them. Or delivery drivers running red lights on them and taking people out in crosswalks that had the right of way.

None of these things are the fault of ebikes themselves, but when a huge portion of the ridership that someone comes in contact with consist of either inconsiderate assholes or desperate people whose livelihoods are determined by inconsiderate assholes, it shouldn’t be a shocker that it leads to an overall negative impression of people using them.

Depending on the state, you could also easily record the calls for documentation. Look up state laws, and if you happen to be in a one party consent state, have at it with the phone calls, too.