Don’t sleep on Spanish if it’s being offered, it’s the 4th most spoken language on the planet and is heavily woven throughout the US.

I took it in high school but didn’t solidify it until adulthood, when we had Venezuelans marry into the family. And it’s a fantastic and fun language. Can’t recommend it highly enough.

The simplest wind instruments are things like your basic wood flutes, recorders, ocarinas… simplest stringed instruments are going to be 3 and 4 stringed stuff like cigar box guitars, tenor guitars, and ukuleles. But none of them are just pick up and play.

Realistically even the simplest instruments are going to require at least 50 to 100 hours of practice and instruction to reach an advanced beginner / early intermediate level, where you start to be able to intuitively do things that sound good. The great news is that good YouTube teachers can help you reach that point, if you’re willing to put in the time and practice.

I learned to play guitar and tenor guitar in my 30s, and it’s been extremely rewarding to just be able to unwind and create some music whenever the mood strikes. It was work… but enjoyable work, if that makes sense? I liked the practice and getting the results of my progression. I’d definitely recommend learning to play an instrument to anyone with the time, patience, and inclination.

How will things be? Really rough and really dark, for several decades.

Hopefully we’ll all make it out to the other side, and see a (likely transformed) world trying to rebuild itself for the better.

They made sure the military looked like crap on parade. A lot of units weren’t in dress uniform and the marching was noted as sloppy where it looked on purpose.

I was actually really impressed with how they pulled that off. When you get really, really skilled at something, it becomes more and more difficult to intentionally perform terribly at it.

Looking like trash when they are, in reality, the complete 180° opposite of trash, was in itself an incredible display of skill lol

I don’t think the population is as hopelessly divided as the social media spaces make it out to be, but at the same time, the federal government looks more and more unrecoverable from corporate interests and back to the people every single day. It’s probably past the point of return, excepting major societal shakeup.

It feels like there may come a point where the states that are large enough to be countries on their own start looking into any mechanisms that would allow them separation, just to be able to run themselves without federal interference and incompetence.

I’ll use something real that I like about them, but to be clear, it’s still 99.9% money and 0.1% that other thing lol

Get a back and shoulder loofah and call it a day (not endorsing this one, just using it as an example of what I’m talking about).

We just might be able to stop repeating negative history in 60-100 year phases all the time, due to the overwhelming majority of people having living memory of those events, instead of a handful of people due to the restrictions of the human life span.

Hey, I’m heading into my late 40s and I haven’t been able to say that yet lol

I’ve noped out on entire office days before where I’ve been “digestively energetic” so to speak. I’m not putting myself or coworkers through that at the office.

With jobs, it’s just the job market right now. Companies aren’t interested in keeping good relations with applicants. Expect to just never hear back on a significant number of your applications.

Never in the history of me sending thumb responses in work chats has it ever meant “whatever you say you fucking dumbass.”

It’s primarily used to show acknowledgement. It’s the office worker equivalent of “10-4.”

Seems like you have some pretty serious projection issues to work out OP lol

I had no idea of the intentions, but history of the internet says there was maybe 1% chance of being pure and 99% chance of being something malicious, so I just ignored it, figuring it was a bot to dm everyone it could find on the platform.

I really do think it’s a mass noun.

I’m not sure why you think that. By definition (which you even gave in your original post) that would mean that data are something that can’t be broken down into individual, countable units.

But there is a smallest unit, which is called a bit. Data can be broken down into smaller, countable units. So the word doesn’t fit the common definition of what a mass noun is.

I think you’re confusing this due to the common incorrect use of “that” in relation to data as if it’s something singular, id est, “Could you please provide me that data?”

Technically this is grammatically incorrect (and yes before you ask, I say “those data”), but I’ve come to understand that people actually mean “data set” when they say this, and are just omitting that word from the sentence.

Since that is all that’s needed to have everything correctly agree again, I can just fix it in my head when I hear it so that my brain doesn’t explode.

The IPA is fantastically interesting.

I don’t agree with people who think it should replace our standard alphabets and syllabarries (it is jarring, at least in my opinion, to essentially read other people’s accents from written text when they don’t match your own), but it can be pretty useful in some situations… where you’re actually studying accents, or the most common ways things are said in other languages.

Sounds like something you could write, since you experienced it directly from your subconscious.

So, you have to give a little more than 48 hours notice when you decide to organize a large scale national protest action.

Look to be planning for the event to be somewhat out in the future, to give time for the plan to be spread and heard by the masses. When you just throw something like this out with two days’ notice, you’re not going to make any change larger than 0.00000001%… not enough people possibly hear about it to be able to participate.

A little old school here, but Tom Petty and the HB were always fantastic live, I got to catch them several times.

I also once was socially-dragged to a Sheryl Crow concert at the Ryman, and even though she’s not usually my thing, that show was fantastic. She had a bunch of folks from the Nashville Symphony Orchestra playing with her band that night, and I’ve never seen a group of classical musicians have so much fun. They really made it an unbelievable show. If you’re ever there and can catch ANYTHING at the Ryman, do it… the acoustics are absolutely insane.

My favorite concert story was that we went to a “Best of the 80s” concert in Indiana in the late 90s when I was a teen (bands that performed included Wang Chung, A Flock of Seagulls, and a few one-hit wonders I’m struggling to remember right now). At the end, the promoters took the mic and apologized to everyone that the show was ending a little early, the closing band, Missing Persons, couldn’t make it. My friends and family I was there with laughed our asses off the entire way out of the arena, but it didn’t seem like a single other person there got it.

Pretty sure the game theorists channel on youtube did that one several years back. It’s been a minute since I watched it but a search should pull it for you.