This Freaking Show. Finally Watched It, Binged In Less Than A Week, Come Out Of The Experience A Little

Obviously the best way to learn a language is whatever gets you to do it but I also think that some people are addicted to grammar drills or something.

Like eventually you’ve gotta listen to it. Eventually you’ve gotta read. You can’t avoid the comprehensible input forever, bud.

My question is, even if you do like grammar drills, why don’t you also listen to the language? That’s gonna be doing most of the work for you.

Random mansion generator

The Procgen Mansion Generator produces large three-dee dwellings to toy with your imagination, offering various architectural styles and other options. Each mansion even comes with floorplans:

https://boingboing.net/2019/07/12/random-mansion-generator.html

😻😻😻😻

the suffering never ends

Daaamn, all of these are on my wish list now

That really is how being in your 30s is like 😭

Hotel California on Guzheng by Moyun.

This is a random message, but recently I've been reading a lot of manga and stories with religious themes. However, I'm gay and have religious trauma so I don't see myself returning to it. But I'm also afraid I'm making a mistake in doing so. Do you think you can point me in tue right direction book wise or christian witch creators? I'm completely new to this and don't want to learn incorrect or conspiracy theory information. Thank you 🩵😊

The best way to avoid internalizing conspiracy theories is to improve your critical thinking and research skills, and to research them from a critical or academic perspective and to learn real history and science. Avoiding "bad" fiction is neither a good nor realistic plan, given that tropes associated with conspiracy theories are found in probably the majority of science fiction and fantasy, and frequently pop up in other forms of fiction as well.

(Avoiding "bad" fiction is the puritan/reactionary's answer to social problems, and it has never fixed a single thing because it's about giving in to a gut reaction telling you to avoid confronting the problem instead of carefully analyzing it to find the actual best solution.)

Here are some resources:

Information Literacy Basics

Critical Thinking Skills: Definitions, Examples, and How to Improve Them

11 Characteristics of Pseudoscience

Six Ways To Debunk Any Conspiracy Theory

Miniminuteman

ESOTERICA

Angela's Symposium

BS-Free Witchcraft

Digital Hammurabi

Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman podcast

It's Probably (not!) Aliens (this is the YouTube page for the podcast, but if you search for it you can find it on other platforms)

Behind The Bastards

Tales of Times Forgotten (you can search the blog for topical words like Atlantis, aliens, antisemitism, conspiracy theory, witch, or whatever)

Jason Colavito's blog (again, you can search for topics)

Conspirituality Podcast

Gutsick Gibbon (debunks young earth creationist claims, do not overlook this one!)

Edit: Adding these. If you're trying to educate yourself on conspiracy theory tropes, consider them required reading:

Check your conspiracy theory. Does it sound anything like this?

Check your conspiracy theory part two: double, double, boil and trouble

Check Your Conspiracy Theory Part Three: Babylonian Mysteries?? In My Religion???

i think the near-extinction of people making fun, deep and/or unique interactive text-based browser games, projects and stories is catastrophic to the internet. i'm talking pre-itch.io era, nothing against it.

there are a lot of fun ones listed here and here but for the most part, they were made years ago and are now a dying breed. i get why. there's no money in it. factoring in the cost of web hosting and servers, it probably costs money. it's just sad that it's a dying art form.

anyway, here's some of my favorite browser-based interactive projects and games, if you're into that kind of thing. 90% of them are on the lists that i linked above.

A Better World - create an alternate history timeline

Alter Ego - abandonware birth-to-death life simulator game

Seedship - text-based game about colonizing a new planet

Sandboxels or ThisIsSand - free-falling sand physics games

Little Alchemy 2 - combine various elements to make new ones

Infinite Craft - kind of the same as Little Alchemy

ZenGM - simulate sports

Tamajoji - browser-based tamagotchi

IFDB - interactive fiction database (text adventure games)

Written Realms - more text adventure games with a user interface

The Cafe & Diner - mystery game

The New Campaign Trail - US presidential campaign game

Money Simulator - simulate financial decisions

Genesis - text-based adventure/fantasy game

Level 13 - text-based science fiction adventure game

Miniconomy - player driven economy game

Checkbox Olympics - games involving clicking checkboxes

BrantSteele.net - game show and Hunger Games simulators

Murder Games - fight to the death simulator by Orteil

Cookie Clicker - different but felt weird not including it. by Orteil.

if you're ever thinking about making a niche project that only a select number of individuals will be nerdy enough to enjoy, keep in mind i've been playing some of these games off and on for 20~ years (Alter Ego, for example). quite literally a lifetime of replayability.

I think one of the Worst Things about wanting to find period clothing from other cultures, is trying to find fucking casual/work clothes. Like no, I do not want to see all these fancy intricate kimonos, I want to see jinbei, and field work outfits so I don't put a damn obi on this poor boy so he has a belt to hang his knife from.