u/silver_chief2

A Russian expat in US had a short video listing some books Russian students are to read over the summer. Is this still true? I have no opinion obviously.

By comparison some say even Ivy League (top universities) students in US do not read entire books

I removed all links to avoid violating any rules.

Is this typical? I went to US Costco optometrist for new glasses and he said my left eye cataract was bad. It was bad and blurry not sure why I did not notice. He later said it was 3 plus out of 4. The surgery went fine, with day after follow up with surgeon, then 30 day follow up with optometrist. I got new lenses free as within the Costco 90 day period from first lenses.

The optometrist said my right eye was 2 out of 4 and it was too early and to check in with exam next year. I am over 70. The surgeon seemed to recommend another surgery for right eye but I may have remembered wrong.

Is this common?

The movie was an adaptation of Keep the Aspidistra Flying. I liked it.

this is from https://www.reddit.com/r/ussr/comments/18sf3uk/the_red_riviera_kristen_ghodsee/

So, she took her husband and 3 year old daughter to visit Bulgaria. She got travel documents for her two basset hounds and included one in her book. Looks like a passport.

So, she says in US bassets are adored maybe due to the hush puppie shoe ads. In Bulgaria they have never been seen and people view them as the mutant spawn of Satan. Children scream and grandmothers curse when she walked the dogs. Seriously. That was in her book Lost in Transition. A very personal book about her and other  people.

It was suggested she walk them in a soccer stadium outside of town. First 3 times went well. Fourth time she let them loose only to find sheep grazing. The bassets went nuts chasing the sheep. The shepherds went nuts at the devil dogs. One connected with a thrown rock but she was able to stop the shepherd with the axe.

She finally stopped the shepherds by explaining that they were American dogs who had never seen sheep. The shepherds had never met an American much less a mutant American dog. Plus, what kind of dog has not seen a sheep? It took a half hour to explain it all.

I stooped watching TV news in HS many decades ago as it creeped me out. They seemed to tell stories that suited them. I relied on other sources. Garland Nixon said the divide now is between fact based people and narrative based people. I think he nailed it. Look at issues that should be reality based like covid, masks, vaxx, global warming and instead of being fact based they are narrative based with lots of name calling.

I noticed that many of the people I listened to now IDed as left or progressive but they are fact based people. I still think most liberals especially in the MSM are crazy. Rachel Madow came across the screen from time to time and she is nuts.

I like Kim Iversen, Garland Nixon, most of the Grayzone like Max Blumenthal, Aaron Matte, Jimmy Dore. Idk how the retired military, cia, and diplomats on Judge Nap ID, but they make sense to me. IMO Jimmy Dore and on rare occasion Kim Iversen may be wrong and they all have biases.

Max Blumenthal and Kim iversen in particular seem to be very careful and can back up what they say.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CataractSurgery/comments/1smjbdb/i_had_cataract_surgery_yesterday_no_problem/

I had my one month post-op follow up with optometrist at Costco. He said things looked great. I am over 70.

I went into US Costco months ago to get eye exam and new prescription. You need a membership which I paid for. If you pay a little more they store your eye scans and my last was 2021. Previous research told me Costco was cheapest and best for eye glasses. I had tried the internet but those glasses gave me headaches. I recall the exam was maybe $179?

He said I had a large cataract(3 plus on a 1-4 scale) in my left eye and I could not resolve a 10 inch high letter on his office wall with my left eye. So I got new glasses and saw a surgeon and had basic medicare cataract surgery with basic lens a month ago with next day follow up with surgeon.

Yesterday he said my right eye cataract was 2 on a 1-4 scale and too soon to do that one and to come back in a year. Costco has a free eyeglass lenses replacement if within 3 months so my new post-op eyeglass lens are replaced for free but I had to leave the frames for a week or so.

Disclaimer: This is just a technical discussion. A how to and a partial one at that. This might help someone get subtitles in an unsupported language for a movie they really want to watch. Sorry this post is not better. someone recently wanted to get Bulgarian subtitles for a movie but I lost their post.

I wanted to watch a Russian movie with no English subtitles.I did not have a clue. There are ways to use AI to create Russian subtitles but I only did that once and forgot how. this already had russian subtitles.

Территория Territory 2015 Russian film

My computer skills have atrophied but I can use grok. I was fed a trailer with good music for a Russian movie about gold exploring in a cold part of Russia. I used download helper program with firefox to download an mp4 video file on youtube as the whole Russian movie had been uploaded by the owners. Then I found a Eng subtitle file on OpenSubtitles.org as I remember. I made both files have the same name and I could make the subtitles show up in the media player. I am using a command line prompt for ffmpeg as suggested by grok to burn the subtitles onto the video itself. Anyway it worked.

People upload lots of movie subtitle srt files to this site in a huge number of languages. In my case the Eng translation was perfect.

I asked AI maybe grok or deepseek how to do this using ffmpeg which needs to be installed but it is easy. It is a command line language and AI usually gets it right after one or two tries. I move the files into the windows 10 user folder as ffmpeg looks there by default. Sorry I did not save by ffmpeg command line as this was months ago.

Anyway my experiment worked fine.