I think there’s a parallel with other social clubs, too.

My medication kicked in while writing this and it shows. TLDR: in Germany, there are various social clubs including international cultural exchange groups (generally composed of immigrants/children of immigrants and Germans in a roughly 2:1 ratio) and clubs based around specific countries open only or mostly to immigrants from those or neighboring countries (whether openly or simply through convention, selection bias, and social pressure). The former are fun and the latter tend to be toxic unless there’s currently a large wave of immigration/refugees from the country they represent in Germany, in which case they can help coordinate resources and support, as well as help people deal with culture shock and the trauma of needing to flee their home country.

I’m an American immigrant in Germany. I love international groups and being able to bond with people about dealing with German bureaucracy as a non-native. I have zero interest in American emigrant groups.

In international groups, we do make fun of Germany, but it’s not mean spirited. We also commiserate about the actively negative aspects of living in Germany as an immigrant. In American groups, I suspect it would turn into U-S-A chants or something similar.

International groups here welcome Germans as a rule, whereas for groups for specific nationalities, it tends to be limited to people who can speak the language.

There’s a real need served by national groups for brand new immigrants who are overwhelmed by everything being different (often significantly more different than Germany is for an American), and they’re great for creating a sense of community that can be helpful for short term immigrants (though they can hamper long term integration).

I suspect I’ll warm up to American groups as a way to give new immigrants a crash course on German culture if we get a wave of American refugees in the next couple of years, because those are the demographics (large groups of people temporarily displaced from the same country who all come at once) that tend to benefit from these type of groups.

I’ve been told that national groups for Arab countries tend to be full of either bitter, unpleasant people and/or gay people and blatant alcohol drinkers, because everyone else just meets at the mosque. Although given that I have no first hand experience and the person telling me about it only has experience with a handful of cities, it may not be accurate for the rest of the country.

Is that the sort of thing that would survive screenshotting and messing with the color balance?

Your point stands, but 2019 was more than five years ago

For some reason, subtitles are terrible, but if you plug a couple of pages into deepl, it’s pretty understandable. You need to clean it up a little, but that’s pretty easy. I am a language teacher, and actively have to design assignments so that my students can’t just plug them into deepl, because it renders them pointless (for about a third of the class, two thirds don’t clean anything up and it’s obvious).

I used to work in long-tailed litigated liability insurance claims. Think asbestos, lead paint, toxic exposures, etc. Insurance comes into play for defending companies against lawsuits made by people suffering from those exposures. I rationalized it to myself for a year and a half (if we don’t pay for the company’s defense attorneys, we couldn’t pay the claimants their settlements; we’re just following the contract; at this point, the big players are bankrupt, so the claimants are just going after easy targets; etc.), but it makes the world worse and I eventually quit.

I looked at other aspects of the industry, but there really wasn’t a role that I could feel totally comfortable with. At best, I felt like I I worked for the organization which gave earth “adequate notice” for the hyperspace bypass in hitchhikers guide.

I went back to school and now I teach new immigrants the local language. It took a lot of work and I make less money, but holy shit was it worth it.

This is a screenshot dated 2013, but it could also be a copy of an older screenshot. I would normally crop it, but I also feel weirdly nostalgic about the old UI.

If you want another story, when I was a four year old girl, I asked my mother how my dad proposed to her, looking for a fairytale. She told me they’d been together for eight years, so “at that point it was really shit or get off the pot.” This was probably the first time she swore in front of me, and she only did it a dozen times or so ever (though I was twelve when she died, so she was still editing herself).

My dad also separately started hitting a silver quarter with a spoon on the night after their first date, and hit it so many thousands of times over the next several years that he was able to shape it into a ring for her, which is one of the most romantic things I’ve ever heard, but that wasn’t a proposal, so she didn’t tell me that story for several years.

Obviously it’s not a romantic thing, but also related to the individual’s level of comfort with seeming insults, this is a recent situation that did not make sense to a coworker of mine.

My dad just cut his finger off (non dominant pointer, so either #4 or #5 most important, depending on how highly you rate pinkies) the other day after many, many decades of woodworking and general tinkering. He’s otherwise okay, but it hurt like a bitch and it couldn’t be reattached. He’s mostly regretful, with a touch of existential jolting.

My sisters and I got him a giant foam finger two days after it happened and he laughed his fucking head off. I got a pretty good chuckle on that very day from “hey, 9/10 ain’t bad,” but I’m pretty sure that was mostly the painkillers, because it’s not a good joke.

My coworker told us under no circumstances to get the foam finger and we should just be nice. I get the sentiment, but that would scare the shit out of my dad. For context, after shaving his wife’s head during the course of her chemo treatments, my dad looked at her in the mirror when she was feeling nearly her lowest and said that he’d always had a crush on uncle Fenster, but he’d never expected to get so lucky. She laughed uproariously.

I was raised by these people, so that’s the kind of thing that I say. A relationship with someone who was always earnest would not work for either of us.

It’s going to look like a shag rug as soon as they touch it

Sorry, totally unrelated but fun memory: Iconoclast was the first word whose unexpected etymology I (mostly) worked out on my own. I was watching a vh1 documentary on iconoclasts, and I’d just had a biology class where I’d learned about acetoclastic bacteria. I had a eureka moment wherein I leapt to the conclusion that “breaking the mold” was an older saying than I expected. I wasn’t totally right on that, but I was still psyched to have broken it down correctly.

Yeah, that’s at least step three, after talking to him directly and talking to your boss one on one

Why not just make a poll if you don’t want discussion?

Tbh, a full moon means a lot of increased predatory activity, I wouldn’t be surprised if we subconsciously become more anxious and rash, and I wouldn’t consider that any more supernatural than the tides (provided there’s actually at some point a link discovered).

I’m too rash to live in such difficult times. I just want to gather a mob of terrifying trans men and hit up women’s bathrooms, but I don’t think that’s how we maximize rights.

I think they meant international espionage, not spying on the population. That’s at least what I would expect for this.

Yeah, between the strong sense of fairness, textural sensitivities, and the tendency towards consistent foods (1), I would expect autistic people to be more commonly vegan than the general population.

1. I don’t know how to describe this, but I tend to seek out a couple easily prepared/stored foods I enjoy that combine to make a well balanced diet and only eat those for months/years at a time. Though my husband would spontaneously combust if I did that now (not a complaint, he cooks lovely food for us every night and enjoys doing it), before we met, I went for years eating oatmeal with raisins and almonds for every breakfast and beans and rice (mixing up the ingredients with each batch to cover vitamin deficiencies) for every lunch and dinner. I was very poor, but I’d be lying if I said it was a difficult sacrifice to make.

I also didn’t go vegan for health reasons and my doctor and I were just happily surprised that my gallbladder issues resolved themselves without surgery, lol. I wonder how common that is.

You might be the opposite, but that’s not universal.

Autistic vegan who used to shit herself whenever she ingested animal fat over here. My digestive system is happier than ever since I stopped eating animal products many years ago.

They should make cases with the adapter built in, the way they used to (still do?) for external battery packs.

Text is never 100% black, but rastered.

Does “rastered” mean the image is mapped onto a very fine grid and each square is given a 0-100 value for intensity of ink? I looked it up, and it seemed like the squares are given a binary value, but this is nowhere near my wheelhouse and I’m honestly not sure I understood the Wikipedia page, let alone the references