Welcome again to everybody. Thank you for joining us for the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
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A moroccan-belgian dude defended a Muslim woman on a subway against a racist guy and he got hit in the face by a heavy object. He died after being in a coma. He was murdered by a racist.
The headline: ‘Man passed away after defending woman from attacker’
Passed away. Passed. Away. Like he peacefully lived his life until old age took him away.
Passive voice is just another cruelty of the western system. Civility and etiquette its smothering hands.
It reminds me of the shit they do in the US when a cop murders somebody (usually a black person) and it’s like “officer involved shooting.” I guess it’s same shit, different country; “journalists” (if they can be called that when they’re part of the bougie status quo) tending to be on the side of white supremacy.
Even though they lack a proper unity, Belgium is one of the most racist countries I’ve seen. I’m not surprised the media is defending the asshole.
Have a wonderful week, everyone! Quantitative efforts build up towards qualitative developments. Remember this whenever you feel like your goals are unbreakable walls. You will burst through, eventually.
As always, communism will win.
There’s this Dutch artist Sophie Straat who has been in the news recently for asking all white men to go stand in the back at her show for one song and white men online are absolutely seething lmao
Why did she ask for that though?
Provocative activism basically. It’s to make room in the front for queer people, women and other marginalized groups attending. It’s for the opportunity for a mosh pit for said people.
Nice
Love her and her music, I have seen her at protests as well
I have a crush on a guy, and I haven’t seen him in a while. But I saw him recently in the line for the night club I was going to go into. But instead of going up to him I panicked and went back home. Why am I like this?
Fear of rejection is rough. But like all fears if you just face you realize its not so bad even at its worst. After you get shut down a few times you realize is isn’t that debilitating, nothing really changes. You thought they were cute and you didn’t get to spend time with them before and afterwards its the same. I found a short and direct line was the best way to go.
No one is always at the top of their game. Such things can happen for a variety of reasons, but it doesn’t cancel out the progress you have done up until now. The best thing to do is to not to dwell in it, and instead to try to learn from it, having hope and trying again in the future. (From my point of view.)
40 year old me, looks back to my 20ish self with complete lack of self confidence, and what I can say is, don’t worry, you’ll eventually get over it. We all fear rejection, don’t matter how old we are, but at least after some nos we get more resilient to it.
Think about it dialectically, we all start being afraid of even starting a conversation. Then we negate that part and get into the next step, which is actually talking to people and being rejected. It hurts a lot, but eventually you get over it. Then after being rejected many times and feeling miserable after every time we start receiving yes. But then we get afraid of commiting (at least I got into this phase), thinking that once people knew me they would find me boring and ridicule. Then I finally took the courage to say yes back, I endured and got over all the jealously and insecurity phase afterwards, and finally got into a long term relationship, which I’m still in today. Going through each step sucks, and every person handle each phase differently. What you can do is talk to a (good and trustworthy) friend or maybe a professional. I benefited a lot from therapy to overcome my social anxiety.
Two attacks by supposed Islamist in Europe in one week. Welcome back early-to-mid-2010s. Probably an indicator of the economy being in the gutter.
I hope you all have a nice week :D
7atta ntina ya sa7bi 🫡
Aww that’s very cute and adorable, thanks 😌🤝
It can and will kill you though.
You too, Oppo!
Have a nice week! ᶘ ᵒᴥᵒᶅ
You too Oppo
Thank you Comrade! 🫂
So my uncle asked my help for spellchecking some of his documents (he’s an attorney). However, the docs required a specific program that supports Window$, macO$, and Debian-based distros, and I have Fedora. It took me a long time to create a compatibility layer. Since all else failed, I had to create a Win10 virtual machine.
In the end, my uncle ruled that I’m tech-illiterate. Lol, lmao even.
Le Mao
what kind of program is he using that he can’t export to pdf lol
He uses a program issued by Ministry of Justice, which can export to .pdf, .odt, and .txt. He’s the know-it-all kind of person, so I have to adapt instead to not cause another fight.
As an autistic person, I feel like a lot of autistic symptoms are actually trauma symptoms
Given how our society is structured can really separate the two? Most autistic people will have extensive trauma due to capitalism and ableism.
I hope you can get the space and time required to disentangle the two.
I hate the fact that, in scifi book reading circles 1984 novel has become a standard of “dystopia”. I can’t escape it.
It’s literally everywhere and I hate it.
It’s not even a good book, never mind the author being… bleugh.
…a sex pest?
…an anarchist?
…abusive?
…voyeuristic and paranoic?
…rapist? snitch? fed?
What?!
WHAT?!?!?!?
TELL ME!!!
i feel like it’s kinda unfair to lump anarchist in with the rest of that stuff lol
Yeah, fair, I kinda regretted posting that shortly after, well, posting it (I got distracted immediately afterwards of course lol)

ahem thisisliterally1984
I saw a camera at Otakon today and it really felt like 1984.

Where is this comrade?
Ksar of Aït-Ben-Haddou, Ouarzazate Province, Drâa-tafilalet Region, Morocco.
Thank you. I’m planning to do a North Africa tour in the future, I’ll make sure to visit there as well!
Morocco is awesome
Nice, I was there myself
Permanently back in The Netherlands, watching TV at my parents place. Dutch TV is full of talk shows every night and it so insanely lib and pro capitalism. I never really watched TV in my Belgium years and it kinda feels like a shock to watch this slop.
That’s just TV in general. I honestly don’t know why people watch that crap. Read some books, people!
I feel you. The TV in our break room at work plays satellite channels and it does feel like Robocop sometimes. Especially when the “news” is playing (if you can really call CP24 news). That’s how I learned that CBCNN exists. 🤢
In Germany they are going full neo-nazi with the russia and now the “enemy within” (literal quote) since that terror attack.
Situational depression can be such a catch-22. Like the change in circumstances that would (probably) resolve it can require sustained motivation and energy that the depression saps right out of you.
Yeah
There is depression and then recovery from depression.
This has been going on for a while now but its absolutely dire seeing companies on the pride parade. Fuck you mean Takeaway needs a boat? Let them not abuse their employees first.
Last week of summer vacation 🙄 gonna enjoy this little piece of freedom. Have a good week everyone!
I also started trying to learn Chinese. Wŏ xihuān xué hanyŭ 😄
Yay
我希望你有很好的时间在学习中文!不是太难
:) I plan to study a little every day, making a habit of it. I’m sure I’ll make steady progress that way. I think the biggest challenge will be learning all the characters and getting the sounds right. Sorry to respond in English but I started learning last week 😁
Do you have any suggestions to music I could listen to?
I’ve never written anything here before, I’m just a lurker tbh lol but I think I can help you a little, I started learning mandarin in 2024 so it’s been 2 years now and since then I’ve made some mistakes and some stuff I got right, I’ll write about the songs first then I’ll write about the language after, btw the music recs I’ll give are not necessarily so you learn with them (many have complex lyrics), I’m supposing you just want to know more about chinese music, another user gave a better answer in case you want music to learn the language.
If you are an r&b fan then you’re lucky bc that’s half of chinese music since the late 90s or so, there’s quite a lot of rock and other genres too though, pretty much every early Jay Chou song is good (mostly r&b), listen to his Fantasy album and see if you like it (especially the first 3 tracks which are my favorite ones), but pls dont learn mandarin by listening to his music, there’s actually a joke that not even chinese people understand much of what he used to sing at the time lmao, there are many rock/dream pop artists like Faye Wong, maybe I’m too biased but there’s almost no bad song in her discography (maybe except for her songs from the 80s, I dont listen to those so I dont know), listen to the entire Fuzao album made by her if you dont mind listening to albums, but if you just want one song then I’d say 感情生活 which it’s an alt rock gothic rock inspired song, if you like dance-pop then listen to Magician by Lexie Liu, if you like the more soul inspired part of r&b then listen to 飛機場的10:30 by David Tao, for more rock albums there’s bands like JaJaTao and Omnipotent Youth Society which both have highly acclaimed rock albums, I didn’t listen to it yet but I heard Soft Lipa (rapper) is considered one of the best hip hop artists which lyrics are in mandarin so it’s probably worth if you like hip hop. I’m just giving broad recs, if you particularly like anything a lot, tell me.
Now for my unsolicited tips regarding the language lol, I’d say use Anki, or any similar flashcards app, it can be either sentence decks or vocabulary decks (many great decks are shared by the community), I like vocabulary decks but some people swear sentence decks are better, but please dont make the same mistakes as I did and dont spend 90% of your study time on flashcards, I’m pretty good at reading mandarin and recognizing Hanzi characters, I can read most sentences that people write in chinese social media, but I’m very bad at actually listening and understanding what people say bc I completely neglected on actually training the ears with podcasts with transcripts and just started doing it this year, also if you’re not gonna live in China I think its almost useless to know handwriting, so don’t stress over that, unless you find it’s the best way for you to memorize hanzi.
Don’t use Duolingo, if you want to use a Duolingo-like app then Hellochinese is even better than that for mandarin and the design is even kinda similar iirc, I didnt use it too much though honestly so its not necessary but many love it, say it’s fun and even prefer it to any other apps so maybe you’re that type of person so it can be a huge plus.
One thing that I thought was useless so it delayed my learning by a lot was that at first I didnt care about tones, I used to read any word without pronouncing the correct tones, and after learning almost 1k hanzi I had to relearn it all again from 0, seriously, memorize the tones for every hanzi you learn, and some months from now I’d advise you to learn some of the basic tone sandhi rules and have them on mind, imo they’re not too important right at the beginning but they’re more important later. Don’t stress over them too much either though bc it doesnt make you difficult to understand if you forget some tone sandhi rules when speaking, all of this might look overwhelming but by the end of the year you’ll realize it was easier than it sounded, as you said learn it a little every day. Sorry for writing too much lol
Thanks :) I’m using HelloChinese as a starting point. I think it works pretty well because with some writing on the side it covers vocabulary, reading, listening, tones, pinyin, and hanzi. Assume I’ll need to move on at some point but it’s a start
music with the intention of learning chinese? i’m not sure about that, but ultimately i wouldn’t recommend since tones aren’t used when singing songs and so it requires a lot more contextual information to understand what’s actually being said. i would recommend starting with simple listening practice of people speaking: peppa pig is a popular starting point. but, making it a daily habit is the most important part! i haven’t been great about studying for quite a while haha
Do you have any suggestions to music I could listen to?
This channel has quite a few songs with lyrics in Pinyin and Characters while it plays:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8k4o6oZ3ce4&list=PLBwqeFGNGi1BTR1l-aciAjo6KpppAbtiY
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
No serious rain for the next ten days. The Rhine river is at its lowest ever. Everything outside looks beige.
















