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When playing live, songs are usually much faster than the album version, particularly for rock and metal. When you listen back to early demo versions of those same songs, they're usually a fair bit faster than the final recording, too. So at some point along the way, someone decides "ok, we're setting the tempo at X BPM when we record this for real", which is - apparently - not the tempo that came naturally to the musicians originally, or afterwards when touring the album.

How do they decide? Is there a rule of thumb producers are working with when it comes to the speed of a recording?

Cheers!

I have a filter that moves certain incoming emails to the Archives folder. But it just places them in the root folder, and doesn't sort them into their respective YYYY subfolders the way it does when you use the Archive button on a message. Is it possible to have Thunderbird do the 'proper' archiving via a message filter?

Thanks for your help!

I've always been afraid to even click on that thing, it looks like arcane academic patois that isn't meant for mere mortals. But the tooltips make it very accessible.

The tooltips only appear to work on English words, however.

It's kinda sad that a game you love can only be 100%ed once, forever. I propose an option (and it should really be optional) to reattain the cheevos for a game you've already maxed. The original achievement unlock info should remain, but if the in-game pop-ups could be set to begin again, and for the next unlocked cheevo to add a little star or a +1 to your cheevo icon or something (even if it's only visible to yourself), that would be awesome.

Anyone else wish they could 100% a game multiple times or am I just too autistic for my own good? 👀

I've had a few people tell me that although the dog and the person are both imagining the same thing - going for a walk, and all that that entails - the dog is merely associating the sound of the phrase with the activity.

But... isn't that... what language is? What's qualitatively different between the human and the dog here? The human is undoubtedly making connections and associations far more complex and expressive, but at bottom it's all just "sound = thing", no? 🤔

I don't speak Spanish, but I know that when I hear someone say something that sounds like "andallay!", it means "hurry up". I don't know what the word literally means, or how to actually spell it (well, I do now that I looked it up: ándale), or its etymology or whether or not it's a loan word from Chinese, but I know from experience (and cartoons) that it means "go faster". Am I a dog to a Mexican in this scenario? My understanding is as perfunctory as my dog's understanding of "go for a walk" is. But we wouldn't say that I'm not using language when I react appropriately to the "ándale!" instruction.

What am I not getting?

Cheers!

Thank you for your time!

1. Are desktop environments changeable once the OS is installed? Can I switch between Cinnamon and KDE Plasma, for example? Or should I decide on one before I settle for a distro?
2. Coming from Windows, I'm used to my hard drives just being "there", no matter what program I'm using. I need to explicitly set permission levels in order to restrict access, but by default I can access anything anytime. The last time I tried Linux, I couldn't get the program I was using to "see" my hard drives in order to open a file, despite the drives being accessible in the OS file manager. How does this stuff differ between Windows and Linux? What basics should I know about hard drives, e.g. what the hell is "mounting"?
3. What are the crucial differences between the different package managers (e.g. Flathub, Snap, etc.) and why should I choose one over another? And like with the desktop environment question, can I switch app stores at will, or do I need to commit to one before I begin? I've read a lot of very angry and passionate comments in passing related to the various package managers, but none of it was accessible/comprehensible to a n00b like me.
4. Can you recommend a resource - be it a CoolGuide image, video series, a PDF, a website, whatever - that will explain in simple terms the Linux way of doing Windows stuff? (Like with my hard drives question, for example.) "If on Windows you do X, on Linux you'll have to do Y" kinda thing, but for everything, no matter how basic.

Thanks for reading 👍

In computational terms, a low resolution version of an image is almost by definition 'simpler', with fewer colours and details intact, but it seems like it would be much harder to do a convincing 1:1 replication of it in a painting compared to recreating a 'clean' HD version.

Or am I way off the mark? 😆 I'm not a painter, obviously. Seems like getting all of those weird JPEG artefacts right would be something of a novel skill for a traditional painter (or even a digital painter, for that matter).

I hear nothing but bad things when the topic of Unreal Engine 5 is brought up. It's also true that the games I've played which use this engine have suffered from poor performance to one degree or another, so it seems like the complaints are well-founded, but I don't actually know.

Is it a bad engine, or is it just not being used correctly by either the devs when they design their games or the players when they choose their graphical settings? Or a bit of both? What's actually wrong with it, in layman's terms?

Cheers!

I know not all praying religions have their adherents join their hands, but I think it's the case for most. Many cultures even use clasped hands in day-to-day life as a sign of deference or pleading (which I guess makes them "social prayers").

My only 'armchair anthropologist' theory is that hands that are gripped together are unable to present a threat to you, so it is a signal of voluntary vulnerability. But that doesn't make sense in a religious context (although it does in the social context), because how would you ever be a threat to any god in the first place? 🤔 If anything, you're displaying arrogance by saying to god "yeah I COULD fuck you up, but just for this conversation, I'm gonna decommission my arms, arms which I have to register as deadly weapons by the way".

A secondary question on this topic is what is the function of praying hands in the praying process? If you say a prayer without joining your hands, does it not reach god? Or does he hear it but he's like "uhhh, excuse me?? Forgetting something? No childhood leukaemia cure for you, I guess!" like an overly-pedantic lawyer?

Third question: Do any holy books actually describe or prescribe 'praying hands'? If so, what do they have to say about it?

Cheers! 🙏