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.

In the Hyundai ionx 6, you can set the driving mode you prefer. Regular mode with accelerator and brake, and four different levels of regenerative braking, or a special mode that only uses one pedal.

You can also select the driving mode, so the extreme acceleration is only available if you choose “sports mode”.

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.

There was a pedophile priest who had the parents of a boy he molested complain to the bishop. The bishop, in his wisdom, moved him to be a teacher in my school. An all-boys boarding school. A few years after I was there, he was convicted of molesting a boy at the school, as well as the original case. His sentence was 2 years of probation. He died in his 90s just a couple of years ago, and his obituary was full of praise and warm memories.

Meanwhile, one of the boys in my class who I now can see was being groomed by this priest, took his own life before he was 50, after what was described as a very difficult life. I think it’s pretty obvious why.

In the 40+ years since I left that high school, no one from the school or the diocese has ever contacted me or my family to see if we saw or experienced any abuse.

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.

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.

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”

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?