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

I believe that it burns, but it doesn’t explode.

As observed by that legendary grammarian Dave Barry.

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

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.

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.

For about 1 year my two sons and I played Rock Band, mostly The Beatles, everyday when they came home from school. At least an hour each day. We played other versions of Rock Band, but the Beatles was easily our favorite.

It directly led one of them to learn the piano and eventually get a master’s degree in composing, and the other to enjoy playing in bands and performing in musical theatre.

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.

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.

The thing is that Trump doesn’t understand subtlety, and public displays of fealty are what really get him off.

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.

1 hour border Collie had surgery, I saw that where her fur was white, the skin was pink, and where the fur was black, the skin was also black.