I don’t think this would’ve happened though if there hadn’t been the societal impetus that aided adoption. The singular they may have been around since Chaucer or Shakespeare - ~30 years ago, people didn’t really use it. There was far more “he or she” going on, that’s now been more commonly replaced with a “they,” also because it’s shorter. English benefits from the fact that the neutral pronoun slots right in to the existing grammar. Other languages struggle with finding such a neutral replacement because it’s more often than not a new word and a slightly altered grammatical function. English is okay on the first problem and arguably okay to mostly okay on the second.

Laaaast Christmas …

The problem with the VPN solution is that the BBC has gotten smart about that. It’s a game of whack a mole. Every time a service has installed a new server with new IPs, iPlayer finds out about it and blocks it. So you don’t even get to the part where you could fraudulently claim to be paying for the license.

Where in France are you? In Calais you might still get terrestrial signal (although I don’t know if the signal standards differ) or it could be available on cable.

A third option is not perfectly legal but more so than torrenting. There are online services that record the terrestrial signal and allow you to download the recordings after the fact. Google BBC online HDR or DVR and see if one of these services might be for you.

I get that. But a rating system by the unwashed masses is going to give you shit data to base your decision on. Because they cannot tell if it was a setting on their device, the hotel network, their ISP, or an act of god that fucked up their internet speed. People are dumb, attribute fault preferably externally. They’ll all blame it on the hotel. You could be reading five reviews from last week about bad internet when there was an unfortunate power outage at the big brand ISP and they were running on the backup satellite internet the hotel had ready for just that case. That doesn’t tell you shit about what it’s like on any other day when everything is working fine. And the reviews end up hurting their business.

Ratings work if you get thousands of them to get enough variety, which I think you probably won’t here. Or if you find a trusted source, a reviewer who knows what they’re doing. Internet speed is in the reviewer category for me.

The problem with speed as a metric is that it isn’t just up to the hotel infrastructure if you as a user actually get it. You’d be rating the hotel on the performance of their ISP and other factors not under their control. Let’s say you traveled from far and try to access websites from home, and the undersea cable got disconnected by mad shark, it’s not the hotel’s fault but you cannot expect that all users will consider that it isn’t the hotel’s fault when they give it a one-star rating on internet speed. If you’re behind the great firewall of China anything but local sites are fast.

You go to this website, choose the theme, then look for the floating bar at the bottom, hit the hamburger menu icon (three lines), choose log in > forgot password

Who decided that it wouldn’t make sense?

I look forward to renaming virtually everything in the Americas.

You are assuming that the name as it is in Italian today has always been the same and it isn’t. Both Milano and Mailand are linguistic descendants of the name whichever people who first set up shop there spoke and decided to call the place. And that wasn’t anywhere close to modern Italian. They are both valid.

English ditches the o and has Florence on the books as well. Geographical names follow no logical rule. Most are just historical accidents, some historical crimes. This is more in the former category if you ask me.

Cologne, Munich, Brussels, Naples, The Hague … It’s everywhere.

But Germans are not much better, it’s absurd that Italian city names that aren’t at all hard to pronounce for Germans have different names in German, e.g. Torino, Milano, Roma (Turin, Mailand, Rom), …

Nobody is better. All languages do this to an extent. The Germanized city names especially in Northern Italy also stem from the fact that they used to be under Austrian control and they claim to speak German too.

People behave very differently digitally compared to what they would do in person. It’s much easier to slam the door digitally and not having to explain why they did that. People are also insecure and do irrational shit, especially while dating. And some people will just troll you if isn’t a setup to defraud you. You just have to stop yourself from assuming best intentions from everybody.

Ghosting is just part of the ephemeral experience online now. In a way, people who ghost you do you a favor. They are not worth the effort.

Ich glaube beinahe, dass die Drogen-Anklage nur vorgeschoben ist!

I think it’s a happy balance of them not wanting to federate and many of us not wanting them to federate with us. Let’s not rock that apple cart.

You can describe yourself any way you like. It’s helpful to provide context, like you did here. Without it you may not be understood. So know who you’re speaking to and provide it, especially when puzzled faces stare back at you.

The Anerican political theater has twice as many viable parties as North Korea. Contrast that with virtually any other democracy where there are at least a handful of parties fighting to be in charge. That doesn’t mean though that you don’t have enough different opinions to fill a party-political spectrum like that in the US. The dominance of the two parties just forces most people under one of the big tent roofs. So you have more conservative Democrats (and there used to be more liberal Republicans) in the party that are bigger in relative numbers compared to what you’ll find in the social democrats in Germany (or among the conservatives in France). The Democrats are nominally the more left leaning party. But if you compared the party programs they would align more with the conservative parties of Scandinavia. Everything is further to the right in the US thanks largely to gun laws and lack of social security. And that explains why you have non-lefty people in the nominally lefty party. And while bigotry and hatred are certainly not a new thing, there is a culture that permeates down from the political leadership. And if name calling and pouring oil into the fire of social issues are the new MO, and admissions and convictions respectively of sexual assault don’t keep candidates out of office, many people feel they are now also allowed to say the quiet part out loud.

For shits and giggles I watched Phantom Menace today. Because I figured I’ll never have as good (?) a reason to watch that … wonderful … movie again. And I had time. As with all things I know I don’t like, the rewatch was more enjoyable because I could brace for the trade dispute Jar Jar pod racing medichloriean bullshit and not get pissed off. But that’s really besides the point. Anakin is six in that movie and too old to be trained as a Jedi. And Padme is closer to 18. I think in terms of the actors’ real ages it’s more than a decade’s difference. And I totally forgot Ani is a Jesus baby too because Shmi doesn’t remember the conception. JFC, what a family, the Skywalkers.

And mesa totally fine with Padme and Ani eventually becoming a couple. Mesa no okay with the children slaying for love though. Big doo-doo dat one.

… and can be replaced later down the line at the central bank.

I think there are countries in the world where that is not the case. India maybe 2 years ago removed one of their large denomination bills with like a week’s notice to get it changed and after that you were SOL. I think (but am not sure) old Sterling notes may also no longer be more than paper.

But he was fucking Padme who was a decade or more his senior! How can this list be complete without addressing this crucial issue?

And I have to admit that I find the classification of killing children in the way that he specifically did as “not evil” a tad unconvincing.

It’s not like the king of pop didn’t have other bad sides to him we learned about already. So if the fucking teenage boys he groomed himself headlines didn’t prevent the making of this movie, why should an Epstein link?

You’re free not to watch the move btw. I’ll be right by your side not watching it.

You have a choice in life. You can accept certain things you cannot change. This one, you won’t change. Even if you spearheaded a popular movement I doubt you’ll get it changed. Everybody hates DLST and we still can’t get rid of it.

So I suggest you adapt your language. You don’t talk about the night of the fifth but the night from the fifth to the sixth. Three additional syllables in this case and the confusion evaporates quickly. You’re focusing on the perceived problem and not on the solution. If you do resolutions for the new year, maybe add that point to your list.