What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

I was playing Mario Kart 8 Deluxe with my kid the other day and it was a blast. Nintendo have really nailed this game, especially in the balance of accessible enough for beginners to have fun but hard enough for people to have a challenge too.

My other favourite game (although I haven't played it for a while) is Sega Rally Championship on Sega Saturn. This game has 4 tracks (one of which needs to be unlocked) and 3 cars (and again, one of these needs to be unlocked). The tiny number of cars and tracks means that you get to do the same corners over and over. This might sound tedious, but when you hit the corner just right you know it. You can get a sense of mastery over it. I've spent many hours playing games in the Gran Turismo series, and I really enjoy them, but fair play some of the tracks and cars are just shovelled into the game and you don't spend much time with them

In the first Gran Turismo the licensing tests were properly hard. They weren't messing around. Getting bronze requires people to read the manual and understand what the point of the test is. Getting all gold is an actual challenge for experienced players. I feel like the tests (at least, the bronze levels) got easier in later games. The UK soundtrack was small but pretty good.

My final mention is the Burnout series. I loved the crash junctions. I'm not sure the open world of Paradise was fun - it meant spending a lot of time driving across a map to get to the start line of various events. I feel the same way about many games - I'd rather just have a menu of levels and what I need to do to complete them (GoldenEye, SNES PilotWings, BlastCorps are all good examples) than have this stuff obscured by the open world. Burnout on the Nintendo DS was a genuinely awful game. I think Burnout Dominator was my favourite in the series.

So, what do driving games get right? What do they miss? What interesting game mechanics do you enjoy?

There were a few years when RTS was a popular genre with games like Total Annihilation, Age of Empires, Command and Conquer, and Starcraft being very popular examples.

But these games have mostly died out, and I was wondering if maybe I'm just not aware of modern RTS variants, or if there are good reasons why these games died off.

Like, are Tower Defence games a form of RTS?

Are there any RTS games where teams play against each other, so 2v2 rather than 1v1?

Golden Globe nominations come out mid-December. I don’t really see anything changing from here to the end of the year. The only movies left to premiere are Avatar and Babylon. Both of which are almost guaranteed to be good, at the very least. And Avatar is guaranteed to be a huge hit.

Here are my previous predictions for the Globes, and it’s crazy how much things have changed.

The Globes usually have a couple of weird choices and I don’t think many of these will end up with Oscar nominations.

But here’s where I think the winds are blowing.

Motion Picture - Drama:

1. The Fabelmans
2. Women Talking
3. Avatar: The Way of Water
4. Top Gun: Maverick
5. TÁR

Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy:

1. Babylon
2. The Banshees of Inisherin
3. Everything Everywhere All At Once
4. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
5. Spirited

Director:

1. Steven Spielberg - The Fabelmans
2. Damien Chazelle - Babylon
3. James Cameron - Avatar: The Way of Water
4. Martin McDonagh - The Banshees of Inisherin
5. Sarah Polley - Women Talking

Screenplay:

1. The Banshees of Inisherin
2. Babylon
3. The Fabelmans
4. Women Talking
5. Everything Everywhere All At Once

Lead Actor - Drama:

1. Brendan Fraser - The Whale
2. Austin Butler - Elvis
3. Bill Nighy - Living
4. Gabriel LaBelle - The Fabelmans
5. Tom Cruise - Top Gun: Maverick

Lead Actress - Drama:

1. Danielle Deadwyler - Till
2. Naomi Ackie - I Wanna Dance With Somebody
3. Cate Blanchett - TÁR
4. Michelle Williams - The Fabelmans
5. Jennifer Lawrence - Causeway

Lead Actor - Musical or Comedy:

1. Colin Farrell - The Banshees of Inisherin
2. Diego Calva - Babylon
3. Daniel Craig - Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
4. Will Ferrell - Spirited
5. George Clooney - Ticket to Paradise

Lead Actress - Musical or Comedy:

1. Margot Robbie - Babylon
2. Michelle Yeoh - Everything Everywhere All At Once
3. Julia Roberts - Ticket to Paradise
4. Sandra Bullock - The Lost City
5. Lesley Manville - Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris

Supporting Actor:

1. Ke Huy Quan - Everything Everywhere All At Once
2. Brendan Gleeson - The Banshees of Inisherin
3. Brad Pitt - Babylon
4. Paul Dano - The Fabelmans
5. Eddie Redmayne - The Good Nurse

Supporting Actress:

1. Jean Smart - Babylon
2. Claire Foy - Women Talking
3. Kerry Condon - The Banshees of Inisherin
4. Janelle Monae - Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
5. Hong Chau - The Whale

Original Score:

1. The Fabelmans
2. Babylon
3. Avatar: The Way of Water
4. Women Talking
5. Pinocchio

Original Song:

1. “Hold My Hand” from Top Gun: Maverick
2. “Carolina” from Where the Crawdads Sing
3. “Lift Me Up” from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
4. “Ciao Papa” from Pinocchio
5. “Do A Little Good" from Spirited

Animated Feature

1. Pinocchio
2. Turning Red
3. Strange World
4. My Father’s Dragon
5. Puss in Boots: The Last Wish

General Programming Q&A thread! Ask any questions about programming, answer the questions of other users, or post suggestions for future threads.

Don't forget to format your code using the triple backticks or tildes:

Here is my schema:

```sql
CREATE TABLE article_to_warehouse (
  article_id   INTEGER
, warehouse_id INTEGER
)
;
```

How do I add a `UNIQUE` constraint?

I love languages, and one of the great things about learning other languages - or even just learning about them - is how it expands your mental horizons. One of the first things you notice is that many words don't correspond 1:1 with each other in distinct languages. Sometimes, what you think of as one concept gets partitioned out into one, two, three, four distinct word forms in another language. Other times it's the opposite, and distinctions are lost. What are some interesting vocabulary/lexicon differences between English and another language you're familiar with? I'll give some examples:

• Russian motion verbs are a lot more complex than English ones. There are two distinct words for "to walk", idti and xodit'. The former is used for walking in one direction, the latter for walking in multiple or unspecified directions. The former is also used for single actions while the latter is for habitual action. Russian makes this distinction in every common verb for motion. It also makes a distinction between going by foot and going by a means of transportation, like a car, a bicycle, or a train. In English, you could say "I walked to the store" to specify you went by foot, but you could also say "I went to the store" and the mode of transportation is unspecified. In Russian, there is no single verb "go" that doesn't imply either by foot or not by foot. You have to use either idti/xodit' "go by foot" or exat'/ezdit' "go by some means of transportation". (As I understand it, I'm not a native speaker of Russian, just studied it a bit.)
• Terms of kinship are a big topic. Wikipedia lists six distinct basic forms of kinship terminology, and that's just scratching the surface. Some languages distinguish between the maternal and paternal side of the family, others do not. Some do not distinguish cousins and siblings. Some make distinctions between elder and younger family members with distinct words. Unfortunately, I don't speak any languages that are markedly different from English. But even in my native Norwegian, which is closely related to English, there are some differences, such as:
  • First cousin is a distinct stem (søskenbarn, lit. sibling-child, i.e. the child of your parent's sibling) from second cousins (tremenning). There are also distinct words for cousin (no gender specified) and female (kusine) and male (fetter) cousins.
  • Maternal and paternal grandparents are distinguished.
  • I struggled to understand what the hell a "cousin once removed" was until I realized it's a kind of family relation that has no name in Norwegian.
• Or it could just be a single word. For instance, English has one word, "suspicious", meaning both an attitude towards another person's behavior (suspicious of) and that behavior itself (behaving in a suspicious manner). In Norwegian, those are two distinct words: mistenksom (suspicious of) and mistenkelig (behaving suspiciously).

I've only studied a couple of languages seriously. But I also have an interested in constructed languages as a hobby, so I've dabbled in a lot of languages, looking to pilfer ideas for my own projects. I really think it's expanded my view of the world, by showing that categories that seem obvious, really aren't. That's a lesson I've tried to transfer to other areas of life.

I also think it leads into philosophy, because it's really a question of how to divide up semantic space. If we imagine the theoretical space of all things that could ever be spoken about, how do we divide up that space into distinct words? Which categories do we choose to represent as meaningful, and which ones are relegated to being a sub-aspect of another category, only distinguishable by context? I imagine that in a culture with large family units, it makes more sense not to distinguish "brother" from "male cousin", than a culture in which nuclear families are the norm, for instance.

Do you have any cool examples of how vocabulary works differently in other languages, whether it be a single word or a large class of words? Or examples of times when encountering a different way of describing the world by learning another language led to insights in other areas of life?

I’ve been on vacation the past two weeks and now that I’m back and I’ve got internet access I have been reading the news and it has been kind of depressing.

So what’s been good? It can be national, local, personal, or whatever you want to share.

This thread is posted weekly, and is intended as a place for more-casual discussion of the coronavirus and questions/updates that may not warrant their own dedicated topics. Tell us about what the situation is like where you live!

I saw The Banshees of Inisherin in theaters yesterday and greatly enjoyed myself. I recommend it highly! Starring Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson (among others), the film takes place in a remote, pastoral part of Ireland with the Irish Civil War as a backdrop. But it's really about the people living on this island; their relationships, their lifestyle, and their internal conflicts. It's character-driven, personal, intimate, funny, surreal, shocking, troubling, and thought-provoking. The dialogue is fantastic and the narrative dramatic. You could do a lot of interesting thematic analysis about the plot and setting, but I don't want to spoil anything.

If you're the kind of person who likes movie trailers, you can watch the official one on YouTube. However, I think contemporary trailers take away from the natural revelations of a story. It's more interesting to go into this one more or less blind.

This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.

This is an inherently political thread; please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.