Exact number is between 3100-3200 EUR/mo after tax. My current salary is fixed by the government and is under a preferential tax treatment (no income tax first 3 years, only social security)

Number might seem low… but in comparison, the country’s median salary is like 2500-2600/mo, 2800+/mo where I live. I also don’t spend a lot (I literally don’t know how to spend more than half of my monthly salary at the moment) so I feel like a king here lmao

The literal same job title I had in Chicago was $61,008/yr exact before tax in Chicago and I definitely felt poor. Enough to survive, but poor

Yes, but sometimes I wonder if it is just the nature of what happens when a social media network grows large. I did observe how some subreddits instantly get more toxic as they grow bigger too

… On the other hand though, coincidentally I did see some very recent comments that are decidedly more right-wing than the general Lemmy userbase. I personally try not to judge ppl’s political orientation but I do wonder if there’s something weird going on

Anyone remotely interested in Japanese music, J-pop, or rhythm games might have seen some music being labelled with something like “BOFU2017” or “BOF:NT” in song names, and a lot of these music have surprisingly high production value. This actually has some rather interesting history

So Beatmania was a DJ simulator rhythm game released by Konami in 1998 that was an inspiration for a lot of music games in the future. The Be-Music Source file format was developed for a community simulator of Beatmania. Later, BMS evolved into essentially its own rhythm game (which anyone can play btw, beatoraja is even available on AUR), and the community forbade players from playing official Konami charts (referred to as “illegal charts”)

In order to increase the amounts of content available for BMS, the community decided to host BMS creation competitions to encourage players to make more BMS… the flagship event is called “BMS of Fighters” (BOF), hosted annually starting from 2004. All music from the events are completely free and libre: as in, free as in both freedom and free beer. And the competition is fierce; a quick search on YouTube will show some top-ranking songs and their production values tend to be very high (… and there are some shitposts too, we don’t talk about Mopemope or that stupid Kirby song)

Obviously because of the libre nature of these competitions, a lot of these songs end up getting picked up by various rhythm games that are not BMS at all. The most popular rhythm games (like DDR, maimai) tend to have a generous collection of the top ranking BOF charts. The low-budget games even more so: when I was in China for two months and saw a lot of local arcade games (basically Chinese clones of maimai, DDR/PIU and Dancerush), guess what songs they have the most! Muse Dash which also started as a Chinese indie game also has a ton of BOF songs; in fact, Blackest Luxury Car, a song which I strongly associate with Muse Dash’s entire identity (they even have a stage modeled after the song), was in fact… a song from BOFU2017

It’s hard to tell but I wouldn’t be surprised if BMS have a wider societal impact on rhythm game music and even the entire Japanese music genre as a whole. A lot of the artists behind top-ranking charts probably got contracts with various rhythm games… or maybe even beyond those. One funny example I know is that one artist became the lead composer of a gacha game that grossed $18M last month; the game in question is almost universally praised for their good soundtracks

As for the BMS themselves… distribution is not centralized whatsoever, especially for less popular songs. Some are on Google Drive, some on OneDrive, some on certain hosting websites, some only in packaged archives that some people are thanklessly maintaining… but anyways it is rather fascinating

Also the 2025 BOF started on October 3rd and is ongoing now. The portal for all BOF events are here: https://bmsoffighters.net/

My zeroth thing would be to yell at the top of my lungs What the actual fuck

1. Increase security personnel for myself and the White House. Sadly this will have to be necessary given the hostile nature of the US at the moment… hopefully this is temporary
2. Reverse every policy Trump and the MAGA team have been doing (if that even counts as one thing)
3. Convert the US voting system to ranked choice voting
4. Add a wage indexing scheme: governmental salaries, minimum wage, and private market wage guidelines will be pegged to inflation
5. Increase governmental budget especially in areas like health, science

I’d probably be voted out by the time my term ends, but I hope at least some of the changes are permanent

Don’t mind me I’m also looking through the replies, I’m not qualified to answer this question… I basically followed the trend and drifted from China to the US for education & thought I would have stayed permanently, but wow things went down the drain quickly (left before the ICE did their thing in Chicago…). I am still trying to figure out the new country (Belgium) I found a job and relocated to at the moment

The country I live in now is quite well-served by railway lines so it would be hard to imagine going on a road trip… If I have the opportunity however, maybe to the Ardennes mountains since it’d be nice to explore the whole area

The ironic answer would be the local pothole(s)

Hiragana is the standard Japanese alphabet basically… But in everyday language, Hiragana is used to construct Kanji, so you would rarely encounter actual written Hiragana unless 1) in some commonly used terms and/or grammatical constructs, 2) someone is pointing out the pronunciation of a Kanji, or 3) in materials for younger audiences

Katagana is used for “borrowed words” from non-Asian languages like say ice cream. These words never have associated Kanjis to begin with, so that’s why you see them more often

Edit: I correct myself, I was a bit too exaggerating… Hiragana isn’t that rare, just less prominent than Katagana. But it is a bit strange if someone lives in Japan in a long time and never know they exist… They are the basic alphabet after all

I can only answer for CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) languages. Others have answered the first point, but on “showing emphasis”:

I can confirm that in modern, information-age CJK languages, people also use things like italic, boldface, and other equivalents not too different from English. Notably though the punctuation marks are distinct Unicode letters (they are all full-length instead of half-length) different from their Germanic/Romance counterparts; the Japanese quotation marks are probably the most fun example. As for font type… Chinese has a long evolution history so there are in fact a variety of fonts baked into its history, some of which are very cursed

If you are referring to pre-information-age… there is the concept of Isochrony on Wikipedia but I think it’s more for individual words. Emphasis can be shown by how you speak a language and stress certain words… but then CJK are all high-context languages so there are lots of nuances

Yes, because I was primarily a lurker while I was on Reddit… Lurked on Lemmy for a year too but not anymore, so I spend more time on here

A few somewhat recent ones of different magnitudes:

• Cancer, despite still being the leading cause of deaths worldwide, is seeing a downward trend in mortality rates across most subtypes
• The 2025 Nobel Prizes are currently being awarded
• The Greek Parthenon recently became scaffold free for the first time in 15 years, apparently restoration is using all original pieces as well
• EU has fairly recently revised the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive which will require new buildings to have zero-emission

… Thanks, is there an in joke that I didn’t quite get somewhere??

Nice! I was on the unionization effort with my last employer too; I’d make a terrible leader but I have the skills for helping out. I am trying to get to know my coworkers better, so that is definitely not off the table

Thanks. One of my colleague did suggest that, I suppose I’ll start being selfish & start applying now. The problem itself will only get worse unless my entire institution unionizes or something similar… but it’s unlikely that I will get fired (my skills are very in demand) so there’s that; I am also trying to get independent funding which would mitigate the problem a lot

Disclaimer that I’m not an economist

I believe I have heard a discussion about this before… that the “always grow bigger” model is not only not a necessity under capitalism, it wasn’t even the predominant economic model in the US for a while. Post war, FDR’s New Deal followed the Keynesian model, which from my understanding indirectly led to the type of regulated capitalism with a much heavier emphasis on shareholder/employee satisfaction… and also when the extremely high progressive income tax brackets happened. The always need to grow bigger idea may or may not have come from Milton Friedman of the UChicago school in the 1970s: one of the core assumptions of the Neoclassical model is that companies maximize profits.

Also this is definitely not just a US megacorp thing. Other countries have megacorps too. Case in point South Korea…

From what I remember from nutrition science research… our body fat are literally living, breathing cells. As in, fat cells which specialize into fat storage, which can grow/shrink, and are in fact very metabolically active. So not only do they get replaced over time, they are biologically quite relevant and probably more “active” than, say, the nearby muscle cells

Wikipedia does have a page for adipocytes, not sure how up-to-date it is but it explains better than I could. Beware that it is quite technical

Not to mention that the entirety of China, a singular political and military entity (a fairly strong one nonetheless), is somehow all +8 due to a technicality

Now all of China knows you’re here!

… Half of the rhythm games I play I’ve either never run into anyone else or like 1-2 random kids playing them. I’ve legitimately never met another person playing CHRONO CIRCLE, and only 3-5 year olds playing DANCE aROUND. Could just be an issue with Round 1 exclusive games though… also new arcade games are typically not that popular outside of Japan

On unrelated note, a slight flex… Backpack Hero is an inventory management roguelike that has been in early access for a while & was regarded pretty highly. When the game first came out of early access, I remember 100%ing the game in like 2-3 days, and Steam achievements suggest that 0.0% others have had the end-game achievements. I still think about that sometimes… (They do have a community now I think)

Sooo I guess since others mentioned this, I would like to clarify a few things…

TJ is indeed marketed as a “boutique” grocery store, and I think I heard somewhere that their founder made the store in a way where their ideal customer would be a rich kid who graduated from Harvard (not kidding). But they have been bought by Aldi a while back and follow a similar business model. Because of this, their prices are quite reasonable especially for how “high-class” they feel. Drawback is that TJs tend to have incomplete offerings, but are really well-stocked and reasonably priced on essentials and some trendy stuff (for example, vegan food: I’m not kidding they had more tofu than the nearby mainstream grocery chains)

I thought folks here would hate TJ not because the price, but because of their union busting practices (I won’t judge anyone for shopping there, but it’s just a good thing to know)

This is interesting… I was not into coffee before COVID so I didn’t notice it before, wonder if it was indeed because of the pandemic as others mentioned

I don’t think Trader Joe’s is exactly a popular brand on Lemmy due to unrelated reasons, but if there is a Trader Joe’s near you, would you mind checking if they still have coffee grinders? I do vividly remember that my local Trader Joe’s store had one. Also I’m pretty sure most coffee roasters would still grind the beans for you (not that most serious coffee enjoyers ever use that service, but still)

I’m genuinely not sure, but if it is literally just one additional word per day on top of the previous words that don’t change… I’ve memorized a length 35+ randomly generated password (with special characters) out of spite just a year ago. I think I will do fine in this game, at least for 20-30 days. My memory might not handle anything more than that

Especially since… if my calculations are correct, doing this game for 29 days consecutively would net you $435K, an amount so large that it is larger than the median wealth in the country with the highest median wealth currently in the world ($413,193/adult in 2024); another few days would get you over the average ($498,290/adult) as well. So there is a pretty strong incentive to just do this full time and really give you all

Fun fact, when I was in middle school in China (not sure if they do it anymore) we were expected to memorize whole ancient Chinese poems and literary critiques written by the likes of Lu Xun… with like a month each. They actually appear on the exams and we were supposed to just know the entire poems cover to cover. Which is about the difficulty of this challenge with way less rewards

I think funnier ways to do this would include progressively introducing weirder words (old English or borrowed words from other languages like rendezvous or schnitzel), roll a dice on how many words are added (jackpot: now remember 30 more words at once!), make you only have 5 minutes to remember and then keep going on a live show, etc… These would make a fun reality TV show actually