My mom, every time she needs to re-enter her Gmail password: “I’m pretty sure there’s never been a password on my email thing.”

It really is. Of course, we still live in a wider context of corporate capitalism, and it sucks here as it does in the whole country. They’re gutting public transit, school budgets, and healthcare. Our local representatives are hard-right assholes, because the old farts vote more than us.

Rural France, as far from the 20 biggest cities as geographically possible, a hard-left hotspot for the last few centuries. Tbh we have like 10 local leftist third places (a co-op bar/live shows place, a freecycle place, two boardgame/rpg bars, a pay-what-you-can (good) restaurant with ultra-local food, a community hall for crafts, homework, WFH, and random meetings,two community theaters.)

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Und ich spreche Deutsch! Been to Bavaria (I know) a few times as a kid / teen, my grandmother taught highschool German for decades, and my dad reads Goethe for fun. German was the language I actually loved. Never use it nowadays though, and it’s so rusty I can’t do anything with it anymore. And my traitor kid just picked Italian as her 2nd foreign language. She sucks.

So, in a week or so?

Oh so now I’m committed I need luck all of a sudden?

Thanks !

Not a native speaker, so don’t put too much faith in my answer, but: for me, it means actual left, faaaar left, not the milquetoast leftf-wing parties that sometimes win elections in Western Europe.

There’s a good measure of gift economy, for example. We share many resources, grow food for each other (I do squash, a neighbor does leek, and so on–but we don’t trade, we just take what we need.) When we need musclepower we just pass the word around and strangers or friends come build a wall / clean out an old barn / stack firewood. There’s a buy-nothing warehouse were we drop everything from clothes to building materials, toys, kitchenware, and art supplies.
I volunteer to manage a pay-what-you-want hostel for hikers. There’s a lot of grassroot community politics / activism. It’s nice.

Central France. You coming?

I need one though.

Oh yeah baby

Sometimes I look at my life and I feel jealous of myself. Tbh I deliberately moved here (the boonies, and a leftist / alt-culture hotspot of grassroot community living), and it has its cons, but… Next week a wool felter is taking me foraging wild plants to teach me basket weaving, then I’m teaching her the basics of fermenting food (for booze, taste, or preservation), while my 10yo kid is 500km away for her country-wide robotics competition. I’m happily trapped in a caricature.

Joined, thanks!

What? Where? Nice!

France: never seen a bottle IRL. Used to be blister packs, and if you needed 21 pills but they came in packs of 20, you got 19 too many and they lived forever in your medicine cabinet.

Now pharmacists are allowed to open packs of antibiotic pills and only dispense the exact number you need, and pics like the OP can happen. Most pharmacies don’t do it though.

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Please do. It’s an amazing piece of art.

I for one am all ears. Please?

Literary translator here. An average-sized book takes 4 months to translate, and I bill around 12k€.
90% of books don’t sell enough copies for the publisher to recoup the costs. And that’s books that have been picked amond hundreds because they’re good and/or might sell.

Additionally, you’d need armies of competent translators. It’s a complex skill that takes years to hone. Who would do it?