Zero copula is a common but not obligatory part of African American English grammar that can occur just about any time you could contract “is” or “are” to " 's" or " 're" in Standardized/General American English:

• “His name’s Steve” “His name Steve”
• “We’re leaving” “We leaving”
• “I know who that is” “I know who that is” (ungrammatical to contract, ungrammatical to remove copula is)

Regarding “gone”: In casual speech, the kind most people use everyday when talking to one another, vowels become more centralized and consonants are removed or articulated as flaps or taps or otherwise assimilated to better accommodate faster speech. This has been studied in English, Dutch, and German at least. Some examples are “going to” -> “gonna” and “I don’t know” -> “I dunno”, which have transcended phonology into our orthography. I’m not sure what process explains the “gone” variant, which is just “gonna” without the schwa at the end, but yes, many Black Americans say that.

I hadn’t heard that part, I’ll look it up. That’s amazing lmao

Just a reminder that the founder of the Oath Keepers

wears an eye patch after accidentally shooting himself in the face with his own gun. [Reuters]

The country broadly has what’s called a monolingual language ideology. English is prioritized above others. Multilingualism just isn’t viewed as a skill. And thus there’s no large pool of L2 speakers with which to interact regularly enough to learn and maintain an L2. I mean, they certainly exist, but the landscape is quite different from somewhere like Belgium or South Africa or, idk, most countries. Really anywhere where there’s like a home/cultural language, a market language (maybe a pidgin), and an official state language.

I’ve appreciated endeavourOS’s installer and defaults. It’s Arch-based and has an option to install KDE/Plasma as the default desktop environment. I only back up my home directory, but I’m sure there’s systemwide options, like btrfs snapshots (although that’s a whole thing you’d need to test/verify). It’s not an immutable distro. And, being Arch-based, it gets frequent updates. I’ve had a handful of issues from a package being too cutting-edge, but often it gets resolved within a few days at most with an update. Never had something totally break my system that I didn’t cause myself (mostly symlink traversal). Just read up on pacman’s flags (particularly -R flags, like -dd, -s, -n).

It reminds me of Reddit (human solutions/ideas for random problems and interests), except the costs of storing and serving video are probably really high with a large userbase. (I wonder exactly how high, though. I’m sure it’s hard to put a single unit price per GB/hour or whatnot, but still . . .) It’s unfortunate that so many people have put so much work into sharing their knowledge but have basically experienced vendor lock-in.

Just recently I found old reddit and forum threads and a few YouTube videos that helped me and a buddy fix her car. The solution(s) was provided by just enthusiasts and random people helping others in their spare time by documenting stuff. Although there’s also a lot of unhelpful threads and videos out there too, lol.