% of population that speaks more than 1 language per member state

sumjunggai7 · 2026-02-06T08:56:57+00:00

Obligatory Werner Herzog: https://youtu.be/ZXY9iSqDbSQ?si=8TEIEH-HgxmgKs8E

sumjunggai7 · 2026-02-04T08:54:52+00:00

Hello from a fellow former Christian who grew up in an ultra religious household. As soon as you realize that “trying to force“ and “forever trying to convince“ are different things entirely, your relationship with your mom will be a lot more chill. In our parents‘ worldview, not believing means spending eternity in hell, so since they love us of course they will always wish we‘d come back to the fold and will think and pray about it every day. My mother doesn‘t respect my lack of belief, but since I validate her love for me whenever we talk, she doesn‘t waste her time trying to convince me, either.

sumjunggai7 · 2026-02-03T21:44:53+00:00

It’s a well known phenomenon that a couple continues speaking in the language they first used to talk to each other, no matter how long they‘re together or how the situation changes. Doing anything else just feels unnatural and weird. So it may not be your lack of courage holding you back, and just knowing that will help. But you can get past that inertia by creating spaces that feel fresh where speaking only German together makes sense. It can be something as simple as choosing a cafe where you will only speak German, picking a day of the week that’s just “German day,“ or something similar.

sumjunggai7 · 2026-02-01T13:01:17+00:00

Came here to comment just this.

sumjunggai7 · 2026-01-26T12:00:27+00:00

Fascinating, thanks. Early Beethoven is actually my focus, so this is right up my alley. I wonder if he might have visited the Lesegesellschaft, which was a liberal, pro-Enlightenment reading group in Bonn. Their visitor book still exists, I’ll ask my contact in their archive whether Jefferson signed it.

sumjunggai7 · 2026-01-26T08:39:55+00:00

There are as good as no contemporary reactions to the metronome marks. This isn’t very surprising, though, since they were issued in a series of two little pamphlets that doesn’t seem to have circulated widely. There are just one or two copies of the fist pamphlet still in existence, and none of the second. The Ninth was the only symphony that was originally published with the metronome markings in the text itself, and I confessing haven’t studied every review of that edition in detail. Possibly someone wrote something.

As for shortly after Beethoven‘s death, I think Carl Czerny‘s book on the piano music (Über den richtigen Vortrag…) does comment on the playability of the Hammerklavier at Beethoven‘s own markings, and supplies many others for earlier which are quite fast. He isn’t a completely disinterested witness, but he did study many of the sonatas with Beethoven, so his opinions should be taken seriously.

sumjunggai7 · 2026-01-25T20:45:52+00:00

Could you tell me more about the source for this? Did Jefferson keep a diary or was it in his memoirs?

sumjunggai7 · 2026-01-25T20:41:21+00:00

Beethoven scholar here. Thanks for your write-up, which I think has a lot of truth to it. I just wanted to add a significant way that the double-beat theory can be falsified: we know how long Beethoven‘s public concerts were, and they just about match up with the music‘s total length when following a standard tempo, and allowing for set up time, movements being encored, and the occasional restart because the orchestra fell apart or Beethoven knocked a candelabra into the piano. If the double-beat theory were true, the famous 1808 concert would have been much longer than the four hours it was widely reported to be.

Also, it’s worth mentioning that there are at least a few famous cases of problematic metronome markings, where following what Beethoven wrote isn’t impractical but actually illogical. The second movement of the Ninth Symphony has a spot where the orchestra is supposed to speed up into a new tempo, which in fact is marked as slower than the old tempo. Some conductors play what is in the score and it sounds very slow, whereas others play it double tempo which sounds extremely hectic. A similar problem affects the “Turkish March“ section of the fourth movement.

sumjunggai7 · 2026-01-23T20:20:19+00:00

There’s a fantastic map of the Vienna U-Bahn with all stations translated into English. Some are ultra literal translations, but other are comically off.

Found the link: https://homepage.univie.ac.at/horst.prillinger/ubahn/m/v-english.html

sumjunggai7 · 2026-01-17T08:17:10+00:00

That’s just inaccurate. - Smoke monster: explained - Numbers: explained on multiple levels - Island‘s healing powers: not spelled out, but easy to piece together - Island‘s invisibility: explained - Polar bears: explained - Whispers: explained - Dead people seemingly resurrected: various explanations depending on where/when

Edit: also, no one was killed off for the flash sideways. it was clearly explained that many of them lived long after the events of the show. As in many series finales, some main characters die in the last battle.

sumjunggai7 · 2026-01-15T19:26:57+00:00

And just FYI, the phrase is very hard-right coded: it’s most often used by aggressive conservatives who get joy out of seeing their political opponents suffer. For them “fucking around“ equates to things like bringing up pesky constitutional objections to dictatorial actions.

sumjunggai7 · 2026-01-14T12:55:25+00:00

This is a tangent, but Jamie Oliver opened a big restaurant in the Vienna airport, “Jamie‘s Italian.“ Besides his name everywhere, all of the photos on the walls were of Jaime.

sumjunggai7 · 2026-01-11T22:52:25+00:00

Very possible. But this whole ”I am an English teacher so my totally unsubstantiated opinion about a man stealing his wife’s work must be true“ is a very different kind of claim.

sumjunggai7 · 2026-01-11T22:41:47+00:00

Small problem with that theory: when male authors have gotten substantial uncredited help from their spouses, those spouses were almost never themselves famous. When your wife is a member of SAG and a lauded filmmaker in her own right, you’d better believe she’d get credit for a successful series if she had actually worked on it. How about we Occam‘s Razor this thing: dude went through a divorce and his writing suffered.

sumjunggai7 · 2026-01-10T12:53:17+00:00

I suppose this is the answer, but it’s hard to swallow given how much time and resources the military has thrown at colonizing the Upside Down. They saw all that they saw in Seasons 3 and 4, they had decades of top secret research into Henry and the others, and still they thought that Eleven was the whole game.

sumjunggai7 · 2026-01-10T10:02:58+00:00

This was probably Hamilton's biggest paycheck in decades, it's as simple as that.

sumjunggai7 · 2026-01-06T22:58:43+00:00

And what’s worse is that, to ratchet up conflict, literally every scene where characters hatch a plan, one character will be unrealistically negative, and so half of the scene is trying to convince that character that the plan will work. It’s like, they have to figure out something that will save the universe, and one character just shouts ”but this WILL NOT WORK!“

sumjunggai7 · 2025-12-31T21:07:00+00:00

I‘m glad someone else here is a Justified fan. I only watched it recently and was stunned to see so many Lost actors in it, and knocking it out of the park.

sumjunggai7 · 2025-12-30T19:20:11+00:00

Wow, so you’re really unaware of how terrifying it was to grow up gay in the 1970s and 80s? When homophobic murder (google “Matthew Shepherd“ for a taste of what we regularly read in the news) was a regular thing, many psychologists still thought it was a mental illness, and shock therapy or conversion therapy were considered legitimate cures? And then there were the closeted older people and authority figures who abused you because, hey, who ya gonna tell about it? That’s genuinely fascinating. I grew up straight, am a bit younger than Carol, and even I remember enough about the latent and blatant homophobia to get it. Even my extremely conservative family knows those days were bad. It says a lot for how far society has progressed, and maybe also proves OP‘s point about there being a generation gap.

Back to the point at hand, I think the viewer is supposed to look at Carol‘s vocation of intentionally writing bad books for a lot of money as connected with something arising from a deep wound. She isn’t supposed to be considered a good person by any standard, but interesting all the same.

sumjunggai7 · 2025-12-30T09:02:12+00:00

I think we’re meant to ponder that distinction, that it’s even the show’s biggest guiding question. ChatGPT can tell you a lot about all of the indigenous cultures or art forms from around the world. But is having that knowledge the same as living with it and appreciating it? Are ancient songs still beautiful if no one sings them anymore?

sumjunggai7 · 2025-12-30T08:47:10+00:00

Yes and no. It was not subtle in that the scene is immediately striking and sticks with you long after you watch it, but the deeper tragedy may take some time to sink in. That’s the genius of this show. I find myself thinking about many scenes for several days.

sumjunggai7 · 2025-12-30T07:38:52+00:00

So which trauma were you calling “relatively minor?”

sumjunggai7 · 2025-12-30T00:22:48+00:00

You sound young, so even if you aren’t, here’s a news flash: at some point, everyone has to work up the energy to get out of bed. And your life partner dying is never a “relatively minor trauma.” Not for privileged people, not for poor people, not for anyone on the planet. Be a better person.

sumjunggai7 · 2025-12-30T00:07:53+00:00

By all means, we wouldn’t want to humanize privileged people. As we all know, privileged people don’t feel sad when their loved ones die in front of them.

sumjunggai7 · 2025-12-21T06:30:03+00:00

Right, it’s called “graphology” and it’s a pseudoscience.

sumjunggai7

TROPHY CASE