Duckduckgo does plenty with its advanced search operators, which are pretty similar to Google's. * is a wildcard, meaning if you were to search c*y, results word return something including a sequence beginning with 'c' and ending with 'y', but having any sequence of characters in between them.
shikitohno
joined 1 year ago
Eh, if I knew it was permitted going in, that's on me. If it's a new movie and there's no notice that they'll allow that behavior, and they allow some guests to be loud and obnoxious for the whole showing, I wouldn't go back to that theater unless I heard things changed. That was more than enough to avoid teenagers being insufferable at Friday night horror films when I was growing up. Some of them allowed it, and they had ongoing problems with teenagers being little monsters (breaking stuff, causing fights, bothering other patrons outside the theaters, etc), and gained reputations for being dumps not worth going to. Others required teenagers to be accompanied by parents, to control them a bit and shame them into behaving. Others just didn't indulge in it at all, and would just straight up kick out disruptive people.
I'd prefer more places had a system like Alamo Drafthouse's, where they post on the site when it's going to be a screening with audience participation, or a children's screening, or whatever. Everyone is free to choose the sort of screening they want to attend, and those who opt for a quiet theater experience without some muppet feeling the need to scream "Oh no! He's gonna get you bitch, run!" or similarly obvious outbursts, don't have to put up with it.
Honestly, 9/10, I find the people shouting and carrying on really only add something to the experience for the friends that went with them and find them funny. Save that for when you're watching at home with them, or when there's a screening that explicitly allows it.
For stage shows that have some audience participation as an element, sure. For most other cases, it just seems like people who don't know how to behave themselves in public. Like, sure, go for it if you're at a Rocky Horror Picture Show screening, or the theater advertised it as a sing along screening, but otherwise, it's inappropriate and inconsiderate.
If it's anything like my time on the night shift at a grocery store, there's probably one person that's been there for decades and only has to pack out one aisle of pillows, or some other bulky and light stuff, while everyone else has to cover 3 times as many shelves, with smaller and heavier items. But since that person has been there forever, they're one of the holdouts with a decent contract that makes several times more an hour than anyone else, including the shift supervisor, and actually has decent benefits.
I only see the super cheap coffee from Latin America vacuum packed in the states, like Cafe Bustelo. Stuff that's ground up and going to sit in a warehouse or on a grocery store shelf for months and months.
I mean, I know there had to have been some, but 2/3 of those are out of business and weren't competitive with their Japanese rivals, while Zenith's most recent "notable product" on Wikipedia dates from the 1970s and has been a subsidiary of a Korean company for nearly 30 years.
I think it's mostly that they did way better than the US in terms of making many consumer technology products widely available at a higher quality and better cost than the US did. Like, Japanese brands were huge for televisions, audio equipment and similar goods. I can think of several that were the go to brands for TVs when I was growing up, but I can't think of a single US-based manufacturer, even a crappy one.
They also did way better in terms of building out internet access and public transport than the US has done.
It might only be within a few limited sectors, but when those sectors account for the vast majority of peoples' interactions with technology, it's going to have a far greater impact on their perceptions of relative advancement.
Also, in the pre-internet days, it probably helped that non-Japanese people largely didn't see all the ways that Japan can be an extremely conservative country, like their reliance on fax machines long after pretty much every other country with the means to do so had almost entirely left them behind as obsolete.
It's seems like the 3d movies of the tech world. Every so often, they release a new iteration, tell us it'll change everything, and while people get excited at first, they rapidly realize it's not as useful as it was presented and often impractical. Start developing the next gen version, rinse and repeat.
I had a different, fun experience. My lab work was actually what got me diagnosed, but to make sure I'm taking the right dose and my medication is being effective, I need to get labs done about every 3 months. Insurance decided that nobody could possibly need lab work done more than 3 times a year, so I got a nice $2,000 surprise bill in the mail for the last labs of the year.
No, of course not. Can't have him getting distracted from advancing his handlers' agendas by handing him a snack, now can we?
I'm not really concerned about it myself, I'm already well beyond the point it would be terribly relevant to me. I would very much disagree re: education levels, though. I've worked with plenty of people from various countries, and those with less education often cannot switch to a more widely understood way of speaking, in my experience. Partly, it comes down to limited vocabulary, resulting in them being unable to provide alternative ways of saying things that might be more widely understood, and partly down to an ignorance as to what elements of their speech aren't widely used or understood outside of where they grew up.
I would still argue that a neutral Spanish is no more real a variant than BBC English or "General American" accents and mannerisms used by news presenters represent actual variants of English, though. It might serve as a crutch for intelligibility in cases of extremely heavy accents, but most cases where you might employ it are situations where you already wouldn't be expected to employ much in the way of slang. In regular interactions, though, people mostly just speak to each other in their natural accent, and if somebody busts out a local term that isn't understood, the other person asks "¿Qué quiere decir huachicolero?" gets an explanation, and the conversation moves on, same as it does in English.
At the end of the day, I think pursuing a neutral manner of speaking from the beginning is something of a fool's errand for most language learners. Like it or not, you will wind up speaking like the native speakers you interact with most. I don't particularly use Dominican vocabulary, but people still assume I'm from DR when I speak Spanish, because when Spanish became my primary working language for 5 years after getting out of the beginner stages, that's who I was surrounded by at work. Absent very specific goals (I knew a guy who focused exclusively on Rioplatense Spanish, as he was moving to Argentina in a couple of years to study in Buenos Aires), I think most people would be better served focusing on the fundamentals, reading widely, consuming a wide range of media and actually speaking with people, rather than endlessly agonizing over perfecting the process before actually getting to the point they can actually use the language.
After years of regular use, I can speak it fine and modify how I speak appropriately, as the situation calls for. If it's sufficient for the RAE folks working on the DELE and the staff at my local Instituto Cervantes to not remark on anything beyond occasionally flubbing the gender of a word, I'm not too worried about the neutrality of my Spanish.
The last time I played gen 1, this was my strategy up until I caught an Abra. After that, once I got.some.levels on Abra and he got a psychic attack, my starter only came out when Abra ran out of moves. By the time you hit the Elite 4, you can just one shot pretty much everything with a well-leveled psychic Pokémon.