I’ve been enjoying the payment app and personal information verification app in the country I moved to quite a bit. The only previous exposure I had to a centralized app-based payment and/or verification system was China’s WeChat, so I had quite a bit of negative stereotypes with them… but I’m liking these a lot

For additional information: the two are separate apps. Both are private companies (I think?) heavily regulated by and strongly promoted by the EU I believe, and the latter is the de-factor verification system that is used for governmental stuff as well

My personal upvote border:

• This is the best thing I’ve seen today
• Someone made a post/comment made in good faith that adds value to the community
• Someone replied to me in good faith, as far as I can tell

Neutral (no up/down-vote) border:

• Someone made a post/comment that I didn’t think much about
• Someone replied to me, but was not in good faith and/or seem factually dubious

Downvote border (I rarely do that):

• Someone made a post/comment that is factually wrong
• Someone seems to be trolling, making an agenda, or doing something else nefarious

I think maybe because of the lack of a meaningful “karma” system, people on the fediverse seem to be much more upvote-happy… less so than the beans era, but still a lot more upvote-happy than just about any Reddit community I still follow

From personal experience. I am willing to assign a higher value to products made by local and/or small businesses, even if it doesn’t otherwise make any practical sense. But it is a very conscientious moral judgement on my end, so I don’t expect most people to behave this way… and I have a limit too, +100% is probably too much.

Although I guess the benefit of being a “small” business is that you also don’t need as many customers… There are also some types of small businesses that are competitive: I suppose most ethnic food stores or your local market stall won’t struggle with competing on price.

how is it that there are any little shops left at all?

Maybe this depends on the area? I don’t know if it is just me, but it seems to me that these days small businesses do better in larger cities… maybe larger cities have more “ethical shoppers”

Random ham sandwich offered via a seminar at work, no idea of the exact ingredients… served with Coke-zero on the side. This happened yesterday

Nothing, I don’t exactly need anything at the moment. In fact I almost forgot Black Friday existed…

I think I care more than I should. But then most people didn’t have their childhood shaped mostly by rhythm games so…

I have a very specific taste for music, and on top of that I basically don’t listen to anything lower than a subjective 8 out of 10 in my books. Also some meme songs are timeless masterpieces (no I’m not giving examples)

• Not really. I care much more about the melody than the sound effects, and unfortunately my ears aren’t sensitive enough to tell much of the difference
• I have very specific music that I listen to. At the very least it has to be a well-curated playlist, random playlist is a hard no for me
• Actually I mostly listen to music just to enjoy it… I used to listen to music on long roadtrips but I don’t do those anymore
• No, but it’s because there’s no one to talk to. One of the downsides of only liking “alternative music” I suppose
• Sometimes; there aren’t that many artists making things I enjoy in the first place

Music is leaning much more towards art for me

The first part is just an alias and doesn’t really have an interesting story

The second part is the airport code of the city I lived in when this account was created. I was actually quite curious if anyone could have guessed that without me saying it out loud

For search engine: I’m self hosting SearXNG so I’m already indirectly paying via domain registry/VPS? So yes. Technically this can be done for free though (local docker, random RasPi laying around, …)

For email: paid (mailbox.org), worth it. Selfhosting email was too much of a headache at least for me

Moved from a mega metropolis and got shuffled around a lot

Might be an oddity here but… I basically missed nothing. I grew up pretty sheltered, and on top of that my hometown didn’t really have much going for it despite its size. Probably the only redeeming quality is the high-quality public transit… which isn’t remotely as good as it seems if you actually live there

I think now that I’ve grown up & have more defined interests, my hometown is starting to feel a bit more exciting since there are all kinds of hobby groups & such… But still feels mostly soulless to me IMO

Fluent in three languages. Mathematically speaking, there are enough people with my specific migration route (or even language combination) up until the point I left the US that there should be lots of ppl who think the same… But yes I do feel like my PoV can be a bit unique

The various forms of neurodivergence I have certainly don’t help… like for example I don’t have an internal monologue, which changes my PoV a lot. Actually the neurodivergence probably shaped my PoV even more than the languages; I never really fit in even at where I was born

If esports count, I’d like to be like this guy and get a contract to play rhythm games professionally

Otherwise… Probably swimming or race walking, not too many professional sports I could think of that one can do into their 60s without wrecking their body

Not personally, but my parents would pay much, much more for cooking utensils than what “it’s worth”. They live in China, and I don’t think the locals (especially their generation) trust Chinese manufacturing that much… so for anything food- or health-related my parents would just get stuff from say Japan, the US, or the EU. Quite sure mom side still insists on buying kitchen knives from Zwilling whenever she’s traveling

I guess this is becoming more relevant now that Temu is a thing

Brussels. Officially bilingual but most people speak French; English is commonly spoken but not official. I’m also legally allowed to get things in Dutch (the other official language) but I know even less Dutch than French… I promised myself to start learning Dutch once I get to B1-B2 French

Due to historical reasons, language is… a sensitive issue here. And since I work in academia (which were at the center of said language issue), my employer communicates everything in French, despite the fact that academia itself uses English (probably funnier at the Dutch-speaking unis but I digress). For example I think half of the HR and IT teams don’t speak English at all so all my work emails to them have to be in French…

It just feels like any regular Meetup tbh. The Japanese one I’ve been going to obviously has a much higher proportion of ppl who are into, say, anime and manga (since it’s a group of ppl who willingly chose to learn Japanese without external motives), but other than that they feel like standard Meetup events

Japanese is not an easy language: good luck!

Ohh nice! If you happen to be interested in manga: someone at my local Japanese language exchange recommended よつばと! which seemed like a cute & quite useful manga series for learning Japanese

I… don’t think I need motivation when my employer, my landlord, and even my government are legally obligated to establish all legal communications in French (facepalm)

I also suffered from motivation before moving here though, so I’d love to know as well

周杰倫(Jay Chou) - 青花瓷 (Blue and White Porcelain). YouTube link

So Jay Chou (Taiwanese actually…) was an absolute phenomenon in mainland China when I was growing up. Just about all of his songs are good & have mass appeal, but specifically I think this song was something I’ve heard just about everywhere and anywhere (including from a street performer when I visited again a few months ago!) so I’m nominating it as a must-listen

Also don’t worry too much about the lyrics; Jay Chou is known for rapping a lot & I couldn’t understand half of his lyrics when growing up…

Jokes on me there are close to a hundred million people with the same last name as me, I’m not changing

Yes they are… the reason I think that way is that I like to look at relative rankings; as in, it’s not accurate to just look at how many stars a place got, but rather compare it with other places around it

If I recall… at least in Chicago where good restaurants easily get 500+ ratings. I have never had a “miss” at a place 4.7 stars or above on Google, and the local “cult classic” was at like 4.9; 4.5-4.6 can be hit-or-miss; any fine dining below 4.5 is almost always a miss. Obviously since almost none of those establishments got below 4, just looking at the number of stars isn’t useful… but if I have adjust my expectations accordingly (>=4.6 is solid, <=4.4 is bad) it’s actually quite useful

Sadly I have no clue whether it translates to other places. Fairly certain ppl in my current city are a lot more critical (so maybe a 4.7 in Chicago would be… 4.4 here, or something like that)

Now that OP mentioned it, I just realized how few alternatives there are to Google Maps…

For reading reviews, sadly I think Google is still by far the best review aggregator especially for restaurants, in big cities especially the star ratings are scarily accurate (edit: with caveats). I guess expert reviews (such as all of Michelin’s ratings) are good too but they aren’t always available

For writing reviews, I sometimes order food with apps (recently using Too Good To Go) so I’d still leave comprehensive reviews on those. If the place is not on OpenStreetMaps I’d add it. Other times sadly I just don’t, I don’t really have a functional Google account at this point