And a bag of cocaine! Or maybe that’s the gloves, lol.

The superscripts are almost certainly references to translators’ footnotes.

The random italicization I’m less sure about, but it seems to primarily be on words that may not have a direct Hebrew counterpart?

“that is the question we need to answer”

provides no answer to the question.

Honest question. What alternative perspective do you think they could bring that would heighten discourse?

I personally don’t think there is such a thing. Not with modern online conservatives.

I have a million other avenues for listening to conservatives if I want to. I don’t need them here.

Hell yeah! Message away!

I highly commend the idea! As someone who has taught English in Japan (kinda sorta, DM me if you want the whole story), TA’d Japanese in the US, and has tried to tie video games with teaching foreign language, I’d like to offer a few bits of advice.

Netcode is Important

Smash is great but the netcode is AWFUL. Instead of more advanced algorithms, it just slows or outright freezes the game if anything is out of sync even a little. I could barely tolerate it playing with folks outside of my general region in the US (and often even within it). I can only imagine it to be unplayable between Japan and anywhere else.

If you wanna stick to platform fighters, I would highly recommend Rivals of Aether 2 (PC). It plays a LOT like Smash but uses rollback netcode, which makes for a MUCH better online experience.

I don’t think I could ever win a tournament for either game, but I might be able to teach you a thing or two :)

The Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)

I don’t know your planned teaching strategy, so forgive me if you’ve already taken this into account.

Smash Bros is a pretty intense game that requires a lot of focus, even when playing casually. I can barely speak English when battling, let alone a language for which I’m not a native speaker.

It’s a lot of pressure that I suspect would actively hinder language learning. You want to keep your learners in the ZPD, where they’re not bored and not overwhelmed, to maximize their acquisition and retention.

I would recommend finding games where there’s a lot of relaxed time between bouts of action or a game that’s generally relaxed throughout that encourages conversation and banter.

Party games might be good options here. Mario Party (if it has a remote play option, I honestly don’t recall) has all the board sections where there’s plenty of time to converse (and commiserate lol). Something like Jackbox games might also work, especially ones that are more focused on creative input and not overly reliant on preprogrammed English text (there might be Japanese versions of this sort of thing, maybe?). Heck, you could even do Tabletop Simulator and play all sorts of games that make for a great learning atmosphere.

Turn-based co-op games are also interesting options. Sunderfolk might be a good option there, or even a co-op campaign of Baldur’s Gate 3. The gameplay mechanics might make for difficult on-ramping for the language learning piece, but you’d certainly have plenty of content to discuss!

Willingness to play and learn

I think this is a really neat idea and would like to see you succeed. My ability to join is pretty limited though. Between a full time job and family obligations, I’m reliably available only between 9:30pm and 12:00am US Eastern Time (UTC-5:00 for now, UTC-4:00 during Daylight Savings Time), Tuesday-Sunday.

Best of luck!

If it helps, I don’t think I’ve run across any obviously right wing comments on Lemmy in a long time, at least not any that haven’t been ratioed to hell and back.

Another fun story is c/conservative. It was started by a conservative, iirc, and for reasons I can’t fully recall, is now modded by leftists, and the whole community’s purpose is calling out conservative nonsense.

The social fabric of Lemmy seems to be very anti-conservative, which is really refreshing for me, at least.

Best advice I can think of is to hit up your local hobby shop, or a Renaissance fair, if you have one nearby. Those places are chock full of ttrpg nerds.

If you wore a sign or badge that says something like, “looking for D&D group,” I bet you’d get asked by at least a few folks. Especially if you’re already being nice and friendly and joining in the other activities there!

That said, playing online is not as bad as you’d think. I’ve played with a group fully online for over a decade now (shout-out to Foundry VTT).

I wish you luck in your ventures!

If I’m not mistaken (and I might be) the immutability can actually be toggled off for power users.

Socialism has several different lineages. All of which used different strategies for accomplishing socialism (workers own the means of production) and maybe eventually communism (stateless, moneyless, classless society). (I often use “socialism” interchangeably as both the movement for and the desired end state, which I think Marx used to do, too, iirc).

The Marxist-Leninist/Maoist version is what most folks are familiar with - create a “vanguard party”, leverage that political power to take over the government in a workers’ revolution, and then use the power of the state to accomplish socialism and eventually transition to communism. That strategy was how we got the USSR and Communist China, loosely speaking. How much that strategy actually fulfilled the promises of socialism/communism is up for debate.

But there were other socialist movements in other areas of the world. The European version tends to be either democratic socialism (use standard political power to ease a transition to socialism, sans revolution) or social democracy (use government to implement the desired economic egalitarianism without the precise goal of the workers owning the means of production). (I hope I got those right, I often get them mixed up.)

I would agree with you that no European state has reached the end state of socialism or communism, as they’re still pretty dang capitalist, but a good number of EU states are a lot closer to the promises of socialism than the rest of the world, as far as I understand things.

Probably?

An important thing to note is that “Breadtube” is an exonym. That is, no supposed “member” of Breadtube joined or formed a group with that label - it’s just a label that some leftists put on a few video essayists who are/were either socialists or were perceived to be close enough.

Contrapoints, Lindsay Ellis, and HBomberguy were some bigger examples of this “group”. All of them can be critiqued for different reasons, but I will usually give them a watch when they put out something. I usually learn something of value, IMHO.

#notallburgers?

Why burgers?

That is nice. Even a small support system is something to cherish. I wish you the best of everything!

Yeah. That’s scary. I hope your wife is supportive, at least?

I’ve been using a black and white toner Brother printer I got in 2013 and it’s still chugging along. My 3rd party toner cartridges also work well. Sucks your color ones aren’t though.

Yes. Study.

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1586566/full

This is splitting hairs a bit, but Ground News is more of an aggregator with useful framing than a source in and of itself.

To be fair, CNN “leans left” in the same way US Democrat liberals “lean left”. Which is to say, socially progressive (usually) and economically capitalist.

Assuming I’m using those terms right, which I think I am, at least in the context of the US.

This isn’t a particularly well thought out stance, but I do wonder if books are kind of self-selecting for appropriate audiences? As in, just being able to read and understand something in a book might be enough to warrant your permission to read it.

Movies and shows can be consumed more passively, with almost no maturity required to experience the media, so I can see why providing that guidance would be warranted.

But I don’t know, that stance might crumble under scrutiny.