Ah, oil, the Black Gold. Also consider the other resource, the gold gold.

I frequently add ‘cat’ to the name, so Zola becomes Zolacat, Dora is DoraCat and Bella is BellaCat or the BellaMonster

Yes, there’s room for discussion, so there’s no blind support for Israel. I’m not saying there is no support for Israel. Western Europe is walking the line between appeasement politics and reality. They all know that condemning Israel would create tensions with the US.

But if you look at citizens, pro-Palestine (so not necessarily pro-Hamas) protests are centered around ending human suffering, without actually taking a side in who has a claim to the land there.

The Netherlands is not participating in the Eurovision Song Festival, which might seem like inconsequential, but it’s a pretty big statement. Winners of the contest are returning the awards now that Israel is not banned from participating.

Plus the ICJ is located in the Hague, which isn’t recognized by the USA, but also show some moderate doubts towards what Israel is doing.

The entire situation in Israel is complicated with its roots going far beyond the temporal conscience of people. There’s no clear answer other than that nothing warrants bombing hospitals and blocking humanitarian aid.

The USA never really had allies after WWII. They did a lot to stop Germany from taking over the continent, but after that the USA was basically a playground bully, an enforcer, that believes it’s the boss and as long as everyone does what they want, they can be friends.

Now that they start doing things that don’t align with what the ideals of the European Union or Europe in general, suddenly we start seeing that ‘allies’ is a very relative term.

The USA just wants to be number 1. Now that they have started destroying their own economy, suddenly the EU, Canada, China, all of them seem like threats.

Basically the USA is just a market to Europe, and they provide the media we watch in the shape of TV shows and the like. They provide the arms we need to ‘keep peace’ where necessary. If shit is going to hit the fan (more than it did in Ukraine, maybe also tensions in Gaza since Europe doesn’t blindly support Israel), it’s not a given that the USA and Europe will be on the same side, but my point is it was never really a given.

Any site that generates content can choose to create an RSS feed. Essentially it’s a link to which the site can push new stories.

You need an RSS client. Good news! There are a lot of free ones (and open source, too!).

The pro’s of RSS:

• all your different go-to news outlets in one place
• no ad-ridden webpages
• no dealing with interfaces of said news outlets
• your pick ff categories, for instance if you’re not interested in celebrity gossip, you just turn that off

The cons:

• you’ll need to go collect RSS links from your favorite sites
• one of your sites might no longer use RSS because they don’t get ad revenue for it
• RSS readers are often not pretty
• you might get weirdly formatted text pages sometimes

Superfast Jellyfish by Gorillaz

I read the part on the website and I like the setup. I am correct in thinking this is a US based community?

The joke is probably the awkward translation, but I’m shocked at that price for a flight and hotel

My mixtape

Really don’t quite get why these sports games need a ‘new’ version each year anyway. All they really used to change were driver line-ups and some minute details about how cars handled on controllers. If you were to play with a wheel you’d not have noticed much difference since F1 2018 but they’ll expect you to buy it again and again.

Just sell the game at 70, yearly content updates at 20 and stop pretending you’re actually doing anything about issues in the game.

I go to the dermatologist every six months and they have to look at my entire body every time, I take extra care to be clean and smell neutral or faintly nice. Unless that one time I had to go by bike bugy that was outside my control. I feel pretty self conscious at those times.

Same goes for the dentist, I take extra care weeks in advance when I know an appointment is coming up. If you have stuff in between your teeth a brush won’t reach, one quick brush before the appointment has as much effect as taking a breath mint.

Barebones OS with ads and a premium subscription for anything that makes it remotely useful

It’s probably due to some cultural differences but the meat on a spin unit is called döner kebab here. Shoarma is little strips of pork with a certain herb on it. It’s more like gyros in a way.

Shoarma is popular in my country on pizzas. I was never a fan but it grew on me.

To me, shared experience is always an easy ice breaker. Stuff like mainstream media is a quick win. And yeah, sometimes if people are a bit more underground or indie as far as their media is concerned grants them an image of having a distinct personality, but that usually only works if they’re socially strong and have other stuff they can connect with other people over.

I’m not saying you should consume anything that gets promoted massively, but keeping an eye on what’s popular and seeing if anything floats your boat might give you an easier time striking up a conversation with someone.

I used to be really dismissive of anything with a huge advertising budget. If something gets promoted everywhere all the time, it’s unlikely I’d give it a chance. Somehow I felt more interesting than others because of this. Turns out you’re not, people lose interest really quickly when they can’t talk to you about anything.

I can’t wait to serve you to my family

Or the slightly more graphical: my dad said you taste great

I use the generator function in Databricks for Python to save me a lot of typing but autocomplete functions drive me crazy

Could it be that web services are divided into regions

The French and acronyms. You got NATO, but the French translate it so they call it OTAN. Directly translated, they also just say the ‘States United’.

Anyone’s guess who did word order first to find out why French is a silly language.

I suggest having a look at John Oliver’s piece on it.

Have you ever heard of Blanco White though? The poet?