Apparently the lights in the letters L, M and A in the Islamabad Airport sign once went out, treating new arrivals to the news that it IS A BAD AIRPORT.

Also, he had, by all accounts, a crush on a noblewoman named Beatrice, whom he made into the embodiment of beauty and goodness in his books.

Is it legal to not be a Muslim in Saudi Arabia? I thought it was a crime unless one had special dispensation (typically granted to foreign advisors and such).

The real-world equivalent of a typical fediverse account

Sorry mate, I gave up driving years ago.

There’s apparently a resort town in Thailand where all the local staff speak Swedish, because the tourists are almost all Swedish.

The mainstream conservatives (i.e. those within the Overton window of what’s acceptable in mainstream society, or not open Nazis/KKK) have the big corporate networks. Those Nazis who are too Nazi for Elon Musk have their own instances which everybody else fediblocks from orbit just to be sure, where they can run around, sieg-heil and shout racial slurs all day to their hearts’ content. Which leaves those to the left of the centre-right, who are divided between the tankie-triad instances (full of people who think that Stalin did nothing wrong and Putin’s OK too) and the rest (which ranges from liberals to ancoms).

This is the future conservatives want

Are they automating their jobs away to let the rest of humanity live lives of joyous leisure, or will those non-owners who no longer provide utility to the owners just be starved to death?

This is my surprised face

Judging by their mugshots, they were perpetuating a longstanding family tradition

It could be a threat, or it could mean something like “hang in there” or “stay the course” (“dead” as in dead straight, dead reckoning or similar), possibly from some specialised vocabulary. Is there more context?

I suspect Nicole is a similar sort of operation to Aidana the pretty lady dentist from Kazakhstan, only aimed at people who’d be more sceptical. So instead of stealing images from a fitness influencer, they got some from a more average-looking young woman and made up a story. If it’s like Aidana, there’s a guy somewhere (probably in the hinterland of Russia or elsewhere in the former USSR) whose day job is to string the people who reply along, lead them into believing they have a relationship with this lady, make sure they’re absolutely sure this isn’t a scam, and then pig-butchering them for all they’re worth.

I’m 13 and this is edgy

From what I recall, it does, especially for new words (items like “backpack” and “T-shirt” seem to have almost a different word in each country). Maybe Duolingo’s Spanish is from former south (Argentina or Chile perhaps?)

And yet, shafts of light sometimes grace the corners of our rooms

Do they? Duolingo, meanwhile, teaches a Latin American dialect (possibly Mexican), with “ustedes” as the second-person plural. (IIRC, their Portuguese is also Brazilian, which is a greater leap.)

Or Israel. (Turkey apparently replaced the original avionics of their US jets so that they could hypothetically target Israeli fighters.)

Kiki before bouba

Every country in Southeast Asia that gets waves of rowdy Western tourists has markets selling cheaply made T-shirts with these kinds of designs. They’re cheap (at least in western currency) and people end up buying them as souvenirs and as gag gifts for mates/coworkers.

I’ve seen one with the same colours/typeface/drawing style only it was about smoking weed or possibly banging two chicks at once. IIRC, it was purchased in Thailand a decade or two ago.