I have most of what I need/want outside of the Internet (books, newspapers, people to discuss with, places to go,… even my music and movies are physical media/offline). I would get back a tad more free time, I guess which would probably be great ;)

I regularly read books in English and then in their French translation, out of curiosity. It happens less often the other way around (because there is, sadly for the US, a lot less French authors being translated into English) but I’ll do it on occasions. I don’t focus much on the cover, to be honest.

Why can the title be so different once translated (not all the time)? For the same reasons it a movie title can be so different too, I suppose: market studies and cultural context. The same with the cover design: what sells in the USA probably would not sell that well in a few European countries.

I don’t visualize it. It’s just there, just escaped from my head right onto the paper, and it’s written just how one is supposed to be writing it.

To me, it’s a question of practice. The more (regularly) you write the more it become a reflex, the more you enrich your vocabulary (read widely, read as often as possible) the more you will ‘know’ words and how to write them (also true for grammar and full sentences). I never think about crossing the t or put on accent on ‘à, é, è, ë, and so on’ when I need one… it comes naturally because I internalized the various (French, or whatever other languages I can write) grammatical rules.

BTW, it’s ok to forget them on occasions, provided the word/sentence remains legible. My handwriting is pretty shitty but I’m used to reading it so I need not write every single accentuation or diacritic sign in order to be by able to re-read myself. I also devised my own shorthand along the years and most of my notes will be written using that shorthand (meaning a lot of symbols instead of traditional words)… I would never use shorthand, and would take a lot more care with accents and punctuation (and grammar) knowing someone else will be reading what I write.

As for the signature, I just decided on mine when I was maybe 15 or 16 and have kept using it since then, now nearing my 60. So, yeah it just flows out of the pen without me thinking much about it.

As keen as I am to spend my day groveling to some mod, who’s probably as charmingly direct as your good self, to determine which petty rule my entirely vanilla post transgressed, I think I’d rather just get on with my life.

Then, why even bother mentioning it? Not trolling, it’s a real question: if it’s not worth you asking the concerned person their motivation/reasoning, what interest is there for you in sharing it online with random people like myself?

Can anywhere here please suggest me where I can find free help to start my own Marketing Agency?

You don’t.

You don’t create an agency from scratch, you create an Agency out of talents. SO you need some talents to begin with. Yours or some hired ones.

You need to show people what you can sell them before they will be willing to put a cent on your name… Even more so in the age of AI where every single person able to click a big fat mouse button and to type a few words in web form now consider themselves the best creative ever/ So, what can you give your customers no AI will give them in a couple clicks?

If you have zero money, you should still be able to find some time to develop your skills and your business… by yourself. Without help and without… much income either, if any. If you can’t, well that is probably what you should work on first as you will need a way to sustain yourself for a certain time.

To find customers, I would start by soliciting every single local businesses around my place, in person I mean. Local businesses? Yep the kind that most will probably not even consider potential customers because they’re so small and so not hyped. The thing is that you (nor would I, btw) probably won’t get an exclusive deal with Nike or Apple or Louis Vuitton tomorrow. By working with them you will 1) build expertise (here the real value is) 2) build a portfolio (look at what I can do) 3) build an address book (aka meet people who may want to hire you or that may want to work with you)

Also, keep in mind failing (over and over again) is at the heart of learning anything difficult. And becoming a pro in any endeavor certainly qualify as ‘difficult’.

Would you read it daily?

I read no book daily. I read a book until it is finished or until I’m done with it. I may read some book multiple times, some even on an almost regular schedule (a few I will read reach year or so) but I see no reason to read the same book over and over again while there are so many more books waiting to be read.

funniest book ever written

Good luck beating some of those I’ve already read ;)

It has funny pictures.

I don’t care much in a book.

Would you send it to all your friends urging them to read it?

Surest way for most of them to never read it. Instead, I would hint at that certain book I really enjoyed, sharing a few snippets or key notions.

There’s like this weird, subtle one upmanship about every little thing and a lot of people are very nitpicky and judgmental

Like on any other social network, no?

The issue I see around here is that there are very few of us (we’re not Twitter or Reddit or whatever) so the negativity is always more visible and more noticeable. Then, any user that leave is a real loss because there are already so few of us.

It kind of takes the fun out of being on here, TBH. Or am I the only one experiencing this?

I would not have stayed on Lemmy/piefed had I not learned to filter out what I call its constant ‘noise’ (by blocking users, blocking keywords and by only showing content I’m subscribed to in my feed), removing all the hatred, all the high moral ground political/moral/judgmental non-sense, and also removing the constant flow of low effort posts, and mere trolls. It’s still not perfect but it’s so much better like that!

I’m a patient dude, I’ll see how Lemmy/Piefed (d)evolves in the long run. I wish it won’t crumble under its own political non-sense, it’s constant hatred of anything they disagree with, but if it does, so be it. I will know I’ll have given it a fair chance, and did my part, to show it was not just that.

Old dude speaking, here:

• if you’re inexperienced like you said you were, you probably should not let some random person pay for everything at least when you first start dating them… They may (I insist, conditional form) quickly come to expect something out of all the money they’re spending with you. Maybe not but I would not take any chance, if I were in your shoes.
• As an old dude (bis) I think I should mention I’m always willing to purchase books for younger people (boys as well as girls), even kids, provided there is no possibility for my gift being misinterpreted as something I certainly do not wish it to be.

I remember composing letters in college, just barely pre-internet. It was a lovely art. Next time I find a book of letter, I’m picking it up.

+1 because I can’t do more :)

I’m a regular contact type of person. This whole thing of “we don’t talk for years but then we have a phone call and catch up” is not for me.

• It needs not be years, it’s just a way of speaking.
• Like anything new, we learn to be good at it. Remember your first bike ride? Mine hurt. How you learned to write? Was it by writing an amazing poem in an not less amazing cursive or was it by clumsily tracing batons letters (and getting them wrong)? Me too ;) Remember how you learned to walk? Was it by running and winning a marathon or by falling, over and over again on your diapered bottom? That’s learning and that’s worth it. Bot saying you should do this or that, just that maybe it’s worth trying even if it’s not that great to start with ;)

being a romantic partner seems to be the only way to be a priority in anyone’s life.

I would say this may not be the ‘right’ way to consider the question. But it’s hard to explain, even more so in English. The aim should not be to be a priority. It should be to be valuable to one another.

I know a few people but I’ve one friend. One, that’s it. We’ve been friend since we were kids (now nearing our 60s). We don’t live in the same country anymore and, naturally since we also both try to reduce our impact on the environment by traveling (a lot) less, we don’t see that often. Also, we both have our life(s), friends, and family. And that’s fine: we seldom meet, we even seldom chat like we used (spending countless night discussing philosophy and politics (we both are complete opposites on that matter) and spending countless hours writing to one another the moment we could not meet IRL anymore) but we are friends. We both know from experience the moment we need it the other will be at our door, virtually our in person depending the situation. To me that’s friendship: we don’t spend a lot more time with many other persons, but that doesn’t change a thing. I mean, we can and have put such or such discussion on hold, sometimes for a year or more and get back to it the moment the opportunity arise like if we had left it the night before…

It is something we learned back in the 80s and 90s, before we had readily available ‘Internet’ and before everybody and their mother switched to email and later on to social networks, back when we had to use snail mail to discuss despite distance and wait for our letter to reach them, and wait even more to receive their response. Not just the two of us, many other people used to do that back then. Being patient and being fine with only getting a few minutes here and there and make the most out of those.

like, I don’t (expect to) spend all my time with my spouse… 34 years and counting together. A liberty we both consider a key part in respecting one another’s. She has friends and activities I can’t be bothered with, like I have mine she can’t be bothered with. And we both are fine with that. We’re a couple but we remain two individuals that will do stuff on their own, including spending time with other people and having fun without their partner.

All of that to say we should be fine not being the constant ‘priority’ of someone we truly care, and appreciate whatever time we can spend together, no matter how little.

What you’re describing i snot friendship. Friendship is a rare thing, like love is rare. What you’re describing is just people you know and enjoy spending time with. Which is fine, btw, it is just not friendship ;)

how long do you think we have until the heat death of the universe?

The universe is not threatened by our heat wave(s) and global warming. If anything, the universe (which is quite larger than our little planet) will die out of cold. Edit: in many, many, (many,) billions years… don’t worry about getting a cold.

I feel we’ll be all dead in a few weeks.

Like all of us, you started dying the day you were born. That is not what should worry you: dying is OK if not great as we’re devised to be replaced by younger people… like we replaced our elderly people.

I am incredibly apprehensive on the high amount of discrete greenhouse effects and carbon footprint emissions polluting the air we breathe

Fear doesn’t help much. What can you and what do you do to help prevent that, is the only question you should ask yourself. It’s the only one my spouse and I are asking ourselves. Because we can’t force people to change, because we don’t decide for everyone else but we’re still allowed to decide for ourselves, we try to make the less stupid choices we can in our everyday live.

Why couldn’t they? Provided they learn to speak and to listen to spoken French. It won’t be easy to begin with but like with anything new, the more you do it the better you get.

As far being of different origins, things aren’t that simple:

• English share a lot of vocabulary with French. Even though of German origin, it also has been influenced a lot by Latin, like French obviously.
• France invaded England a few centuries ago (William the Conqueror was the French Guillaume le Conquérant) and it lasted long enough to have a real impact on the English language.
• To make things even more complicated, the French language itself, the one spoken by the French people is historically linked to the ‘Francs’ population (French is ‘Français’, in French) that, to grossly summarize, invaded Gauls following the final collapse of the Roman Empire, migrating from what is now Germany (very roughly speaking). So is it kinda… German too? but it would take a few more centuries before what we now consider as French language would resemble anything like French. At the very least, I would say it would at least need to wait for Charlemagne (approx 300 years after Clovis) and maybe even for le cardinal de Richelieu (XVII century/ under the rein of Louis XIII) when he founded the Académie Française (still active today) as a way to promote a single & common language through the entire kingdom of France… which up until then (and for a few more centuries, up well into the XXth the French government had to work hard to reduce the usage of regional languages) was filled with countless argots and patois, or dialects as you would say in English.

disagreeing with Reddit policy change, a few years ago. Appreciating Lemmy/Piefed being algorithm-free, and allowing me to filter out whatever content I would consider noise.

Sure, and here is my social security number as an added proof. Also, would you happen to need my fingerprints, iris scan and a sample of my DNA?
And thx a lot for preserving my privacy dear (undisclosed) website.

For those who lost weight, what was it like for you? Did people start treating you differently?

Yes, I immediately started noticing a change in people… as well as in myself (feeling more confident for the most stupid reason: the way people would look at me). Because the real trick is that it’s not just ‘them’ being weird, it’s us.

I had to reteach myself to behave like I used to but I kept on losing weight (not thin by any mean but not the obese dude I had been for so many years), because that was what I needed to do in order to preserve what remained of my health.

Provided I already know where I will sleep and take care of my little person:

• Chemist/pharmacy, as I need daily medications without which, after a too short while, there won’t be much of me left.
• Public libraries, and also bookshops (new/used).
• A place where I can sit at a table and be left alone to work, if I fancy so.
• Some cool places I can walk to? (parks, art galleries, museums, chess club, any kind of cool places). Walking is my friend and I will walk as much as I can. So, I like to find cool new places I can walk to. If there are no cool place, I will just walk around.
• Office supply. My job happens between the tip of a pen(cil) and a sheet of paper, and if I always have spares with me I prefer having options.
• If the place I live at provides no meal (handmade cooking, not some microwave junk) I will either:
  look for a restaurant offering actual food (non hyper-processed shit).
  look for a grocery store selling fresh/bio/locally sourced if at all possible, food that I can cook myself. A big plus if I can also find artisanal cheese (yes, I’m French).
• Artisanal bakery selling handmade bread/pastries. Industrial bread should be declared illegal and a crime (see my previous remark about cheese ;)
• A nice café/pub. Nice as in ‘this is some quiet and comfy place (without too loud music/tv, I’m 100% fine with people chatting, like actually chatting not the yelling drunkard kind) that sells great coffee and/or tea’ (even though I’m French, I’ve not touched alcohol in the last 30 years, and have zero desire to change that).

And adults alike.

Had not the USA been short on eggs lately, that would not happen with guns… or did I misunderstood the country you were referring to? ;)

Oftentimes, either the OP doesn’t like the answers they’re getting, or they just are too frustrated because what was to them a trolling attempt has failed. At least, those are what I witness the most often. Why is that so? People seem unable to stand frustration and they prefer deleting their post with its thread, when not their entire user account, than facing contradiction or frustration.

Silly but not surprising, sadly.