I also have RockSmith and a bass guitar. However, for 3 years I have been playing in local groups (the last year has been a community open mic where up to a dozen musicians sit around and strum together) and having a lot of fun. The thing is that these are almost all elderly people, self-taught, so they are not trying to become rock stars, just to enjoy playing music together. Playing music I have never heard before has been very good for developing my ear.

I go through periods of playing RockSmith a lot, and then not playing it at all for several months. Discovering user-created tracks that can be added as DLC has been fantastic.

Given that she, and her entire band, have been proven to use recorded tracks instead of performing live at their concerts, I don’t see that this is a big departure.

The other thing I would mention is that even if you learn standard Japanese anime is going to have a huge amount of slang and idioms.

The good thing is that, as in most modern Japanese, it will also have a huge amount of English loan words. The pronunciation may be slightly different, but you can recognize things like “hambaagaa” or “paypaa”.

Of course, sometimes it can go too far, like when I lived in Japan in the 90s and on days when they encouraged people not to drive themselves, it was a “No mycaa dayi” (“No my car day”).

people they’ve given no other choice or recourse

I don’t know, I find I also have the option to not consume media that I can’t pay for or justify ethically. For instance, the only streaming service we have a subscription for is The Criterion Channel.

I’m currently reading in 3 languages, but a bit more narrowly than you.

When I was a young teen, and reading SF&F books voraciously (sometimes a book a day, or more if I had them), I ran across the Perry Rhodan series.

Finally something I wouldn’t run out of! It started in Germany in 1961, and published a novella weekly since. (They haven’t missed a week, and are currently past issue 3,000.)

The first 150 or so were translated into English and I scoured used book stores until I had all of them.

Now, 50 years later, I spent a week in Germany and bought issue 3323 in a railway station bookstore. My German was never great, and is now worse, so Google Lens has helped me get through it.

When I came home I did some searching and found all the English translations as e-books. I’ve read a couple dozen of the early ones and they are pretty dreadful. My 14-year-old self was not very discerning.

I also found e-versions of the German originals up to about #2000, which I could read laboriously, and French translations of the first 1,000.

The latter is a game changer because my French is good enough to read with only occasional dictionary lookups. Reading with Google books allows me to tap as word and see the English instantly, so it’s quite convenient.

I probably played Max Payne 2 from start to finish three or four times. It’s superb.

Where we are, these things are stupidly expensive. Almost twice the cost of normal oreos. Is there something there you see something no there’s nothing

That would explain why a pencil, which contains a “lead” (actually a polymer or graphite now) is Bleistift

Well, not terribly subtle, but if you are fighting with your spouse and they complain that you never say anything nice about their family, you can respond with:

“Well, I have to say that your in-laws are better than my in-laws”

Yes. That was a quick close of the web browser for me.

I don’t know if you have a website, but my $5/month shared web host allows me to set up a git server, and I think many of them are similar.

I get three to five spam emails every day from Republican agents asking “Patriots” to send money to help defend against the woke liberals. They keep changing the subjects and domains sent from, so it is difficult to block them effectively.

The kicker is that I live in Canada, and have never lived in the US or been eligible to vote in a US election.

Or the dozens (hundreds?) of hours that Robin Williams spent as libbing as the genie in Aladdin. I think it was in his contract that they couldn’t even use it anywhere else

Just have a look at what’s going on in ukraine. Once they started using drones, the drone were attacked through their wireless connections. Now they trail fiber optic cables for control. What does that say about the relative reliability and security?

Removed by mod

I hadn’t thought about it, but those may have been the first books I absolutely adored.

After that, I got into Perry Rhodan, a German science fiction serial that has been published weekly since 1961 (yes, they are past issue #3,300 now).

They translated about 140 into English, and I had every one, hunting through used book shope to complete my collection.

I have gone back to read some, and at least the early ones really were abysmal in writing, plotting and early 1960s prejudices. At the time, the scope of the space opera – and the fact that there were so many of them – thrilled me.

And the out-of-place apostrophe perfects it!

I’m still using my Amazfit Bip. When new, it could go 6 weeks on a single charge. After about 7 years, I still get about 2 weeks – enough for me not to bother looking for a replacement.

They also took into account that a certain number of the workers would die from accidents and disease (see: the Panama Canal) and they were okay with that.

Other people are way ahead of you:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romana_Didulo