Thai and Iranian. That’d cover a large spectrum of what I like.

Chichewa speakers were the people having trouble distinguishing the two when I was there, at least when it comes to words from other languages. I know that they can pronounce both R and L, they just often swapped the sounds

Haven’t been back for many years, but growing up, there was a McIran in Teheran. Where’s McDonar? And why the name? Döner’s called Turkish kebab in Iran, no?

Also, note the poor planning leading to having to shoehorn in the Malawi part. Man, Malawians are just the best.

Former military person, fear mongers about magic evil of TikTok tech mining everything and sending it to the scary Chinese, says that FB does the same but also claims that somehow “we at least can keep tabs on what they’re doing with your private data” (lol), while also admitting to still being on FB and using Google’s services. Not at all suspicious and incoherent I’d say.

We discovered that the app embedded itself deep in your phone’s hardware, granted itself full administrative access to your phone, then started trickling all your data to servers in China

Ok bud, that doesn’t sound stupid AF at all. This random military IT sysadmin knows this but all other cyber security experts in the world have somehow missed this crucial bit of info. And for some reason, this info hasn’t travelled up the chain through the intelligence agencies. Remarkable.

Mentioning Tiananmen Square, an example of internal repression with a couple of hundreds to a couple of thousands estimated fatalities, in the same sentence as two cases of near complete genocides of other ethnicities is wild. Do you not see how distorted that is as a comparison? In that comparison, you’re either trying to minimize the genocides of the Nazis, the Americans and the Turks, or raise the level of a case of internal repression with limited casualties to be comparable to massive historical crimes against humanity. Neither makes you look great.

Go through a list of the biggest festivals worldwide and check out all artists in their line up each year. The best festivals tend to have a solid and varied list of artists with current releases worth checking out. If you’re into a particular genre, there are reputable festivals for specific genres to check out.

But don’t forget that a lot of music is not new but new to you. I listen to a lot of stuff that’s new to me, but very little of it has been released more recently than the early eighties :⁠-⁠)

I DNA tested my adopted dog, and it turned out that one of his grandparents was a chihuahua-husky mix. That’s one larger than life chihuahua.

That is my all time favorite too. It just fits my hand perfectly, and I can’t live without the programmable buttons anymore. So I bought two brand new ones on the used market when I found out they’d been discontinued. Still haven’t found anything comparable on the market. The Razer Naga Pro comes close though.

Then your mind will literally explode if you listen to “Computer Love” by Zapp & Roger, released in… 1985!

“An nuclear engineer”? That’s suspicious grammar for a nuclear engineer.

I think Americans have a somewhat distorted view of what trains do.

I live in Sweden’s second biggest city, and visit Stockholm the capital regularly as I have family there. I can tell you that the price for flying often is cheaper than the train, and the train takes about 4 times as long to arrive to Stockholm. But I can’t think of a single person I know that doesn’t take the train to Stockholm from here.

There’s more to travel than the number of minutes on the mode of transport. There’s getting yourself to the airport here, and from the airport in Stockholm. There are security checks in airports that take time and are often frustrating. There’s the crammed space where you sit very uncomfortably. There’s the bad air in the plane itself. Planes are just a frustrating exoerience. The train takes me from the train station at the center of my city to the center of the destination, it’s spacious, it’s comfortable, you can move around in a train, you can even do a lot of work during the trip if you want to. Trains are a pleasure to ride, planes are a pain. So just looking at the ticket cost and travel time on the transport mode itself ignores the many advantages trains have over planes. Hell, even my dog is always with me on the train, while he’d be staying at home if I was flying.