Better to prepare those boys for all of the ass-whoopings women will serve them in their future professional careers, no?

Good chance the upper class were already familiar with the spices. The LSD and Warheads candy on the other hand…

I’m Belgian. We have three national languages. One is my native language, I’m pretty good at another and I can express myself in the third. I also know English and have notions of a few other European languages. Though some Belgians only know one language or maybe two, most of us can hold our own in three or four. Sometimes more.

So let me just say this: learning a language will really open up a new part of the world for you. That’s not some stupid motivational shit to put on language textbooks. You’ll start to laugh at different jokes, pick up habits, views and culture that would have passed you by completely. It’s really hard to explain this to people who grew up in a mono-culture, but you are really, really missing out.

No. This is not a “creative” way to nudge us towards the store. Definitely not. It’s just the type of monetization every gamer has been secretly yearning for, right?

Very much a coffee person here, but more quality oriented than quantity oriented. I drink two cups every day, sometimes three, but only if it is good. I’d much rather drink no coffee than bad coffee. And I’m véry particular about what I call good coffee.

I (36m) read this recently and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I would have liked this a lot more if I had read it fifteen or twenty years ago. It was very clever at times, language-wise it was buzzing, but it felt very hollow and adolescent at times too.

*Sad Belgian noises

Shake it, baby!

Duke Nukem would like to have a word with Halo.

You can go as cis-conservative as you want with your pronouns in the game. No-one is forcing those conservatives to give in to their innermost desires.

I switched to Qobuz. Mainly for sound quality, but they also pay artists more than ten times as much and they have pretty neat long read articles and deep dives, which is a way more satisfying way to discover new stuff. It’s pretty great.

I don’t know, if I’m honest, if there is one AAA developer out there that makes games that will keep me engaged for at least a couple of hundred hours, it’s probably Bethesda. I think Starfield will be the same. Will there be bugs: yes. Will it be a variation on a well-known theme? Most definitely. Will it be less good than the hype: very likely. Will it be totally worth it nonetheless: probably yes.

Just here to say I love you and I subscribed to !linguistics@lemmy.ml.

As a non-Brazilian, I’d like to add Os Sertões (Rebellion in the baclands) by Euclides da Cunha. That one messed me up for weeks.

For those of you who speak Dutch: check out Roger Van de Velde. He was in prison and institutions for almost all of his adult life and wrote some truely amazing work.

Uitgeverij Vrijdag recently republished some of it. I can recommend ‘Scheiding van goederen’ and ‘De knetterende schedels’.

That was a nice read. Publishing sorely needs more of this.

I really hate the hit-or-miss strategy of many publishers of the last three decades. Publish ten books fast and hope one takes off and makes up for the others. It’s not fair to the talent that gets smothered by all the crap that surrounds it, it fosters a kind of clickbaity-approach to writing, and then there’s the massive amounts of wasted paper…

‘Whatever works’ is always the best rule. I kind of started doing it because I hated going to peoples houses, glancing at every single book in their bookshelves - as every sane person does - asking about a title and hearing ‘oh, I haven’t read that one’.

I try to do it before I even touch it. 😊

The best way to do that is to select your next reads by relying on your own previous reading (that gets easier as you read more), or on the opinions or recommendations of people that know you very well or have very similar tastes.

I haven’t abandoned a single book in years. The few times I was tempted to throw something aside, it was because I was misled by hype (and comparisons that seemed promising but didn’t deliver), or - most commonly - because someone gave it to me as a present.

I have a strict set of rules, and I’ve managed to hold on to them for over 15 years now.

• I never buy books I do not intend to read in the near future.
• I have a “to-read pile” that never exceeds more than 10 to 12 books.
• No book gets to go on the shelf of my library unless I’ve read it.

You should really consider Sailwind then. No combat, just sailing. And the sailing is very realistic. It’s a single dev game, but an absolute gem. He recently added modification options for all of the available boats, so you can play around with different sail plans and rigs!