A few XKCDs had made me cry laughing. This was just a regular cry.

If it’s a US city you’ve heard of, racism probably won’t stop you from living there. You might find pockets, but larger cities should be ok overall. Often they’ll have pockets of people that might hate you for a myriad of reasons. Maybe their ethnicity already hates yours back home. Maybe you’re part of an immigration wave that happened at the same time as there’s, making the two hate each other to step on the other to lift their own (NY Italian and Irish in the early 1900s). Maybe they believe immigrants are consuming all the resources and you’re the reason they’re poor (general hate from whites across the country, but localized majorities do it too).

But, overall, cities will generally have less meaningful racism because, as it turns out, if you spend your life next to other races/ethnicities, you realize we’re all human living the same struggle. Urban/suburban metro areas surrounding them will be similar. Sometimes there’s simple cultural misunderstandings, but once you see the first generation children raised in the local area, you see it has nothing to do with race after all.

But this is not a guarantee it’ll be all dandy and magically happy. I don’t know your ethnicity and I don’t know where you want to go. Even if I did, I don’t know everything.

In my usage, ethnicity refers to somewhat socially-defined regional identities. Basically, what country/group is your ancestral origin. You might call this a nationality, but, to me, that implies I’m assuming you’re not a US national/citizen. This also gives a leeway to include ethnic groups not restricted to a particular country such as certain groups of Jews, nomadic groups like Romani, or sub-groups of countries like Sicilian.

But I really don’t ask often because it’s not really important and can easily be taken as an insult.

I can appreciate the personal part you added regarding losing faith. I left catholicism in my teens. Too many inconsistencies, too much abuse of power. It started by questioning how multiple christianities could have such different rules, followed by learning how most religion is abrahamic and even more diverse in interpretation, to finally saying fuck all this.

I got FC5 in 2020 and it became hard to stomach. It felt like a real potential reality of the US that year. Cults, vehement religious figures, gun fetish, and a classic Americana setting. The prior titles were all far away, imaginary lands offering even a small degree of dissociation. FC5 was just home. I’d relate it to Harry Potter villains in the sense that yeah, of course we know Voldemort is evil, but Umbridge is the most hated character. Not because she’s worse, but because we know a real-life Umbridge personally.

FC6 hit me kinda hard in a similar way. I got into it about a year ago, not long after the israel/Palestine conflict flared up. There’s a ton of genocidal themes there.

Just gotta have reading hormones. Everything smells better that way

unless you want a battle with them

There’s a month left in the semester, probably. I agree, roll over to not risk some petty bullshit. OP may never have this professor again in their lives.

You could just use the blinker the way they worked for the 50 years prior and lock it on and click it off?

Life, uh, finds a way Life… Finds a way Life [checks notes] finds a way
Life, finds a way Life [deep breath] finds a way Life [lean away from the microphone to breathe in] finds a way Life [scratches head] finds a way?
Life [gestures vaguely to day care center] finds a way

They are performative modifiers to add visual context to text. Imagine you’re reading a script for a play. The author adds notes like some of the examples above, in a similar format, in order to better convey what they want the actors to do, by text alone, to better convey the author’s intent to the audience.

OK but the dictionary literally modified the definition to I clude “figuratively” because language is alive and unwell

[looks to audience]

Imagine being this concerned about typed memes

I have a 2nd gen Ford Fusion and was able to reprogram it via computer and software. 3 by default, now 4. Could do 1-7 IIRC

It was one of the last things I rented from blockbuster. I probably bought a Vault (Mountain Dew?) energy soda. I kind of want to watch it again to see if it makes sense, but the reviews are not promising.

Just because a school has an entire ESL department taught by ESL speakers does not mean all ESL speakers are qualified to teach ESL.

Got you, Southland Tales (2006). The Rock, prop 69, post-nuclear war security, and one SUV’s mufflussy getting penetrated by another’s tailpipnis

It’s typically this and not the particular tech in the headlight. And when it’s not “plug n play” (pnp) bulbs, it’s bad aim because every factory aims them with an empty tank and owners are clueless headlights can be aimed. That A8 had pretty good lights for the time. Sure, the lights do tend to be more intense when you’re in the beam on a hill, curve, etc), and the bluer color isn’t great for human night vision, but that’s a tradeoff for the increased speeds we travel at now.

The further development of matrix LED lights by the Germans is a great development, really only feasible with LEDs. They turn off individual segments to give a near-high beam experience but specifically without blinding other drivers.

But blaming it all on LEDs is like blaming gas engines for loud exhaust. There’s supposed to be a system in place that makes it tolerable for everyone around.

Lessons are forgotten fast. Ask an adult to do 3 digit multiplication and watch them fumble. Ask about geometry and they’ll ask Google for a calculator. I don’t remember how to do projectile physics. All the same for English. If all a person does is speak the language while writing very simple messages (in comparison to English essays), the memory of complex synthesis is lost fast. If they’re not continuing to do those tasks in life, it’s gone.

At average apparent text sizes, you only see ~4 letters clearly at a time, so it’s often enough that you can’t read a whole word at once. From there, there’s so many prefixes, suffixes, conjugations, compounds, and portmanteaus that it doesn’t make sense to just try to memorize the dictionary. What happens when you’re reading a flamboyant author that has tons of theasaraus usage and you come across words you’ve never heard in your life? You use context as best you can, but if there’s familiar roots in the word, you have a better chance of understanding it.

Also

spelt

That is a grain spelled “spelt”

I think you’re overestimating the average quality of English as a second/third language education. The internet continuously becomes more accessible across the globe, which has overlap with lower quality and lower frequency of English lessons. There’s more exposure from speakers that don’t use the same native alphabet as well, so use is not so universal. When speaking is the primary use of language, reading is secondary, and writing is tertiary, mistakes get interesting. It’s not too hard to hear the word “extreme” but visualize the spelling from words like dream, team, cream, or beam, all words I could see being more commonly used than extreme. It’s easier to learn “very” as a modifier to a common adjective.

Source: I work in the US with mixed central/south American-born employees and travel to Mexico often. I see casual US-sourced mistakes, of course, as well as those distinctly from Spanish-speaking writers. My Spanish is just as incorrect. If you can say it out loud and still make sense, I’ll vote for non-native English speakers every time as the cause

No no, brights are a fuck-you for having your brights locked on or having swapped bulb types that cannot actually be aimed properly because they fucked with the beam pattern. Or you’re using light bars/pods with non-highway optics, in which case, have my brights and my light bar

I hear this every time I scroll past it in my library. I finished it about 4 hours after my bedtime one night and the ending felt uncomfortable