Oh, I’d say every generation has their “stars.” How many “teen idols” have come and gone over the decades, only to be chewed up, spit out and entirely forgotten? Thus will be the fate of most of these people too.

It’s a good reminder that U.S. citizens residing abroad can still vote too, usually connected to the district you last resided in, but there are also provisions for U.S. citizens that have never lived in the country, connected to your U.S. citizen parent’s last state of residence.

Oh, I suspect that not only do they know it would hurt aspiring artists, that’s exactly what they want. The large labels (the only ones with lobbying power) miss those pre-internet days when they could sell millions of copies of mass-market Top 40 fluff with ease and didn’t have to worry about people discovering…

It’s all diet, in the end. As someone else mentioned, you can’t spot reduce fat, but also everyone tends to have an area where the fat will only start to go away after everything else is gone first.

There was. It was a Nintendo DS game, though, so it would have been easy to miss.

I suspect it won’t change minds. I’m already hearing the Roman Catholic response to this article in my mind—that she should have gone full-term regardless, given birth and then “let God take care of the rest.” There’s a reason that Catholicism—remembering also how many hospitals they run worldwide—opposes abortion…

Even if you cast aside official Chinese governmental policy (which is very hostile to any dialect/language aside from Mandarin), the Cantonese-speaking regions learn Mandarin to communicate with the rest of China. You basically can’t go wrong with Mandarin if you want to learn Chinese.

No contest between those two—choose Mandarin. Cantonese is being slowly strangled through official Chinese government policy, and at this rate, I would expect Cantonese to be a regional/endangered language in about 100 years. But, yes, both Mandarin and Cantonese are quite difficult to master for native English…

I’m skeptical of Chinese/Mandarin ever hitting the mainstream unless they abandon their overly-complicated writing system. It is an absolute beast to learn even for natives.

You know, it felt like the game lineup hasn’t been great since this generation of consoles came out—and now it feels like there are just so many games that I want to play coming out over the next year. It’s a bit overwhelming!

Well, statistically speaking, all people of European descent are probably related to him—we all have a common ancestor going back just 1,000 years. I’m not trying to be a killjoy; I just find the mathematics behind ancestry to be tremendously fascinating!

I love XII. I’ve played it more than once, and I’ll be first in line to buy it if it ever gets remastered for modern consoles.

That’s sort of what happens being part of any group outside the dominant hegemony—inevitably, you all get defined by the actions of your worst members.

If one is at all familiar with the details of Turkish politics, this video is more depressing than funny, considering we’re basically witnessing the once-promising example of a secular democracy in the Middle East slowly devolve into yet-another religious dictatorship. Enjoy the parliamentary brawls while we can…

My computer is nine years old—yes, I’m long overdue for an upgrade—and I worry that Windows 10 won’t work well with it, even if Microsoft says otherwise.

I was never much of a smooth-talker growing up, but I forced myself over time to get more comfortable with these kinds of conversations. After all, how else do you reach adulthood?

As I’ve come to learn, their position on the death penalty is not that simple and gives ample support to prominent Catholic conservatives (like the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia):

To me, the main difference between the U.S. and Canada is that the U.S. media actively embraces the lunacy of its population, while Canadian media prefers to actively ignore them.

I’ve read that not even banking your own blood for transfusion is acceptable for Jehovah’s Witnesses, but someone can correct me if I’m wrong.