I also remember the 1980s. A computer with 64k of memory cost $300, about $1,000 in today’s money. In 1986 my company bought a 10 MB hard drive. I believe it was around $1,500, or roughly $5,000 today.

My first modem in 1987 ran at 300 baud, slow enough that I could read incoming text as it arrived.

When I went to Africa in 1988 as a volunteer, the only way to communicate with my family was by mail, and a letter typically took one month each way. Now that village in Africa has a cell phone tower.

Moving to Japan in the early 1990s, telephone calls home cost $2.50/minute. I was using email, but almost no one I knew had it.

Even cars, for all their faults, are tremendously safer, more efficient, more reliable, and longer lasting than they were when I was growing up in the 1960s and '70s.

I think that the Bip was the battery life champion. I checked sometime in the past year, and I think Amazfit watches typically lasted between 1 and 2 weeks.

I’m perfectly happy with my Amazing Bip watch. It keeps track of my steps and sleep, and links to my phone so that it will buzz if I get a call or text.

It’s about 7 years old now, and still gets almost a month of regular use on a single charge.

That is actually one of my favorite books of all time. Well, at least the first two trilogies. After that, I don’t think he really had much to say.

What worked for me was a protagonist who was in many ways a terrible human being, but actually thought about the morality of his actions, and respected the values of the secondary characters.

It was also the first book I ever read that required me to keep a dictionary nearby. I was only about 16 when I read the first book, but I enjoyed having my vocabulary expanded.

Some people probably dislike the overwhelming amount of similes and heavy use of metaphor, but it made me sit back and think about what I was reading, rather than just burning through it.

I can’t remember when a premonition saved me, but I certainly can remember dozens or hundreds of times when I had an irrational fear that something would go badly but it didn’t.

You may want to check your sources on that. If I remember correctly, his mother knew someone on the board, through her work with the United Way.

That should be Ransom E. Olds, not Olsom Olds

They just got hoodwinked a couple of times.

I think that’s being unreasonably generous to the French. Their military was staffed with elderly officers, and they had very poor communications. They didn’t use radio very much and telephones were often cut, so they had to rely on motorcycle riders.

Also, for some reason they refuse to believe that the Germans would advance through the Ardennes, as they had the previous two times they invaded France.

Their army then essentially gave up, and they agreed to set up Vichy France, a collaborationist state that was very efficient at rounding up and deporting Jews to the gas chambers.

The French also refused to hand their Mediterranean fleet over to the British at Mers-el-Kébir, so the British sunk it rather than risk allowing the ships to be used by the Germans.

Also excellent is The Princess Bride. At the last family party I went to, the parents kept sneaking away from the dinner table to watch snatches of the movie with all the kids.

There is so much money involved. I would almost say that there is too much money involved to leave the results up to the athletes.

How much corruption is there that never gets publicized or even discovered?

Not to mention the literally billions of birds that are killed every year by cats in the US.

I have two words for you: ice cream.

I rest my case.

They are thinking that they have made billions of dollars, so why stop now?

In Sesotho, a language of Southern Africa, there are no swear words, however there are insults that (I was told) may cause someone to want to fight or even kill you.

Those insults:

• I’m not your mother
• You are like a cat that jumps across a ravine and scribbles up the other side

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.