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If you’ve already got a summer trip on the calendar, it’s not too late to start learning the language.

With a Babbel Lifetime Language Learning Subscription, you can start having real-world conversations in as little as three weeks. We’re talking about confidently asking for directions, ordering dinner without pointing at the menu, navigating transportation, shopping, and even making small talk with locals.

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You can get lifetime access to all 14 languages for just $159 (reg. $646.20) when you use StackSocial’s code LEARN. And yes — lifetime means you can brush up before every trip from now until forever.

Babbel offers over 10,000 hours of lessons across Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, Turkish, Dutch, Polish, Indonesian, Norwegian, Danish, Russian, and English. You can focus on one language — or bounce between them. You’ve got time.

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Download lessons for offline access, skip tedious drills, and start at your level — beginner through advanced.

If you’re traveling this summer, this might be the easiest way to upgrade your trip.

Get lifetime access to all of Babbel’s languages for just $159 (reg. $646.20) with the StackSocial code LEARN at checkout.

StackSocial prices subject to change.

Back for Season 2, Dreaming Whilst Black is a sharp, must-watch satire about the entertainment industry, and the barriers blocking Black artists in TV and film.

Co-created by, co-written by and starring Jamaican-British filmmaker Adjani Salmon, the show's timeliness cannot be understated. As Robert Daniels writes in his Season 1 review for Mashable, "While Black directors like Jordan Peele, Ava DuVernay, Ryan Coogler, Barry Jenkins, and Steve McQueen are respected, award-winning auteurs, the film industry hasn’t become that much easier for young Black directors. Black creatives are largely still shut out of filmmaking because of institutional racism, economic hardship, or by simply not knowing the right people."

SEE ALSO: The cast of 'American Fiction' on the importance of telling diverse stories in Hollywood

Dreaming Whilst Black Season 1 focused on Salmon's protagonist, aspiring filmmaker Kwabena Robinson, as he tried to get a foot in the industry door and make Jamaica Road (a film inspired by his grandparents of the Windrush generation) without "selling out." Season 2 looks at the immense pressure he's under once he's in the door.

"I feel like Season 2 for us, especially seeing the landscape and especially being a show that's about the industry, it just felt right to reflect the times and reflect our peers," Salmon tells Mashable.

"It felt like a fun challenge to tackle the present in terms of when you get these big opportunities, or when Black or brown creatives get these opportunities, is it as good as it's made out to be? Or when something's given with a good intention, does that mean that it always turns out, which you've seen play out more recently — intention versus impact. So we just thought it would be best to tackle that in a comedy. How else?"

"...being a show that's about the industry, it just felt right to reflect the times and reflect our peers."

This season, Kwabena takes on his first TV job, Sin and Subterfuge, which is a "genre-busting Regency drama" with colorblind casting, which may or may not be related to a show that actually exists. And through Kwabena's highly stressful experience with casting, rewrites, shoots, and micromanagement from the top, the show raises interesting questions around historical context, limited resources, on-set politics, and the realities of colorblind casting itself.

"It felt like the easiest thing to call out, to visualise what we're talking about," Salmon says. "Because I know which show you referring to, but actually, there are quite a few shows that have done this, where they've done colorblind casting. I think especially with conversations with our casting director, is that idea that maybe we should move towards color-conscious casting, which is something that we do, where not everybody who we write do we write them the same race that we cast. For example, Alexandros in Season 2, initially he was written British, but a Greek actor came in and he was great, but then we had to rewrite. So, I guess the consciousness in the casting was rewriting the script to acknowledge the actor that we have."

In Season 2's first episode, we get a glimpse into the industry's weak attempts at inclusive storytelling with a string of fictional TV shows that Kwabena turns down, including Mandem in Outer Space and Grime and Punishment. And according to Salmon, the list of potential fictional TV shows the writers came up with was long (and not so fictional).

"Oh, man, we had loads. I will say, because we like to joke that Dreaming Whilst Black's a documentary, and we don't make up race-related jokes, I will say a lot of the shows that we came up with are shows that we either know about, or that had existed, or had been pitched," says Salmon. "We may have reworded stuff — you know, copyright infringement — but it just represented, again, this idea of intention versus impact, when it's like, 'Oh, we need more diverse content. Great. What do we do?' and you just start throwing ideas out there. What you see is probably not the craziest of ideas that we came up with, but the ones that were safest to play out."

You can watch Salmon's interview with Mashable above.

Dreaming Whilst Black is now streaming on Paramount+ in the U.S. and BBC iPlayer in the UK.

March marks an interesting month at the movies. Hollywood is still waiting for the Academy to award Best Picture at the 2026 Oscars. In terms of major releases, the biggest movie hitting theaters is Project Hail Mary, the Ryan Gosling space adventure based on Andy Weir's popular novel. Other than that, March is a fairly quiet month for new movies.

Two of the most feared Titans in the universe—Godzilla and Kong—have returned to Apple TV. After a two-year break, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is now streaming on Apple TV. The show has aired two episodes since its February 27 premiere. Despite the hiatus, Apple's Monsterverseshowhas immediately become a streaming success.

The smartphone is now the universal computing device, but there have been a few attempts to replace it, from smartwatches to AR glasses. However, they all come up against the same problem: the smartphone as a form factor is just too good, and it probably won’t be replaced anytime soon.

Even though Apple TV kind of marches to the beat of its own drummer when it comes to how much new content it adds and when (*quickly looks at watch), if you put your mind to it, you can still find some upper-crust TV show titles to watch—or rewatch, as the service does have some of the best shows in the world.

You might think that storage is expensive and scarce today, but kids these days have no idea what it is like to scrounge every kilobyte you can. Which is why a floppy disk hack from the early '90s promising twice your data seemed too good to be true. In a lot of cases, it was.

If you store your 3D printer filament on a shelf or out in the open, chances are you’re storing it wrong. If you live in a very dry climate, that might be fine, but for those in more humid environments, the moisture in the air is likely what’s ruining your 3D printing projects—here’s how to fix it.

What I've learned over the last 15+ years of paying internet bills is that it doesn't matter what kind of gear you have, how many devices you run, or which settings you've optimized. Ultimately, if your internet service provider (ISP) is bad, you'll never have a stable connection.

How often do you replace your phone? For over a decade, I've been on a two-year cycle on a phone contract. With my last phone, and iPhone 14 Pro, I lengthened that to three years. Now my three years are up, but I don't feel any need to upgrade to a new phone.

When your smart home goes down, all those clever automations that make your life easier stop working. There are some handy tricks that homelab users often use that help keep Home Assistant running or minimize the impact if it does go down.

Want to do more with the Linux terminal? You might not instinctively put videos and the command line together, but with FFmpeg you can actually do a lot with a video file just by typing a simple command in your terminal.

Your physical Ethernet port has lasted the test of time despite slowly getting phased out. Lots of modern laptops and smaller PCs don't even have this familiar connector anymore, and some people may not know what Ethernet is. This can make people think a wired connection is just old news, something slow and clunky from the dial-up days. We will show you that your computer's often-ignored Ethernet port is actually a hidden Swiss Army knife. It can make dedicated high-speed links for moving files between devices, give power to remote equipment, and let you set up advanced networks way beyond just getting online.

Twin Peaks remains one of the most iconic television shows of all time, marking a major cultural shift and creative transition in TV between the 1980s and 1990s. The show took the familiar formula of the classic murder mystery that was popular at the time and flipped it on its head by purposefully obscuring the murderer and blending unexpected elements of surrealism and horror into it.

Pennsylvania has become the latest state to propose legislation to fight dynamic pricing.

The state's Senate Bill 1205 would prohibit "unfair methods of competition and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in the conduct of any trade or commerce," namely, promoting or engaging in dynamic pricing. In the bill, dynamic pricing refers to changing the prices of essential goods or services within a 24-hour period based on demand or other factors, including the use of artificial intelligence.

SEE ALSO: AI has made us all surveillance targets. This tool helps you fight back.

Dynamic pricing is a practice that's become more common among retailers in recent years. Wendy's walked back the decision to engage in it in 2024 after backlash, but apps like Uber have "surged" prices during busier times for a while now.

A similar practice is surveillance pricing, which uses customers' behaviors and characteristics to set different costs for the same items. And algorithmic pricing uses data — sometimes generalized data, such as when demand is highest, and other times personalized data, such as one's demographic — to determine cost.

In November, New York's Algorithmic Pricing Disclosure Act went into effect. This law requires most businesses that engage in algorithmic pricing to have a clear disclaimer near the price stating, "THIS PRICE WAS SET BY AN ALGORITHM USING YOUR PERSONAL DATA."

Other states considering legislation concerning surveillance pricing are Arizona, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington, according to the Arizona Capitol Times.

In December, food delivery service Instacart ended its controversial price tests following a Consumer Reports investigation that found that it priced the same products differently for different customers, sometimes as much as 23 percent. But that hasn't stopped the likes of Sony from experimenting with dynamic pricing.

Android phones have a lot in common with computers. They have a file system, support for keyboards and mice, advanced multitasking, and even a full-fledged desktop mode. One thing Android doesn’t have, however, is a native clipboard. Thankfully, Gboard can fix that.

Linux is famously customizable, and when you hear its perks discussed, you'll usually see mentions of "flexibility" and "personalization" in the conversation. Despite those strengths, I've gotten tired of customizing my Linux PCs.

Arch Linux has a reputation for being brutally hard to install and maintain. That reputation isn’t wrong—but don’t let it fool you into thinking it’s the final boss of Linux distributions. Here are three distros that are a lot harder than Arch—reserved for truly advanced users who deeply understand how Linux works.

There are plenty of problems with using smart bulbs in your home. One of the most frustrating things is that if the light switch is off, your smart bulb won't work at all. Smart switches solve this problem, but there are some things smart bulbs can give you that smart switches can't.

Sci-fi and fantasy are my favorite genres (big surprise), but for most of my life the movies in these genres always felt like they had less substance than the SF&F books I devoured over the years.