Oppan Gamgam style.

Every time I want to quote the Smiths’ That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore, I remember Morrissey is a fascist supporter now.

Fun fact:

In standard Dutch:

• poep = poop = shit.
• Poepen = to poop.

In Flemish/Belgian Dutch:

• poep = backside (as in the poop deck, the French la poupe = backside).
• poepen = to fuck. Etymological root comes from pop(children’s doll), root is probably the latin pupa=doll/girl. I assume the English puppet also comes from the latin pupa. Poppen used to mean playing with dolls. Poppen became poepen, perhaps through the influence of poep/la poupe.

This is entirely irrelevant knowledge, but I find it kinda adorable and interesting.

You’re being flippant and know better, but I think it’s important to state the obvious and add some nuance. Not to defend the Belgians, but to emphasize the central role capitalism played in the death of up to 15 million people, and how corporate-colonialism never really ended.

Arguably, the worst atrocities in Congo occured when it was the private property of king Leopold, who granted vast concessions to private companies with international investors. For example: the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company. They declared bankrupcy in Belgium, and refounded themselves as Abir Company in the Congo Free State, so they could avoid paying tax and avoid Belgian regulation. A corporation moving production/extraction/exploitation abroad, relocating their headquarters to a third country, so they can avoid tax and regulation…

The DRC officially became independent of Belgium in 1960, but colonial corporate rule and influence never truly ended. King Leopold founded Compagnie du Katanga, Compagnie du Katanga became Union Minière du Haut-Katanga, Union Minière du Haut-Katanga became Umicore. Umicore is very active in Congo to this day. A few years ago Elon Musk signed a deal with them to help supply Congolese cobalt for Tesla cars.

The soon to be trillionaire fascist son of a man who owned an emerald mine in a former British colony, runs a company that produces cars that include cobalt mined by a company that helped kill 15 million people in the Congo Free State.

People prefer to look the other way, then act surprised when the chickens come home to roost.

French cuisine may be somewhat overrated, but by no stretch of the imagination is it shitty.

And it’s not as if the Italians are any better when it comes to being snobby about mediocre food.

Oat milk isn’t rare outside the US. It’s a bit harder to get in French coffee shops, but not that much.

This is just France being French. Especially because Toulouse is a small regional airport.

As used in Witcher 3 for one of the crones of crookback bog:

Is Owl House mainly a kids show? It seems like it.

Same question for Knights of Guinevere? Kids, YA, a bit of both but also interesting for adults?

Or buy a second hand pc for not much more than 50 euros/dollars. Install linux and it’ll be more than fast enough for torrenting, playing media and a bit of surfing. Companies are off loading anything that can’t run windows 11 right now.

Also means you’re not torrenting stuff on your main system while gaming.

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TBH in the past, I’ve argued both for the -um ending, and for the -ium ending. It really annoys some people. It’s even more annoying, when they realise that you’ve managed to annoy them with such a pedantic point.

Another one is skeptical/sceptical. “I think you’ll find it comes from the Greek, so it should be with a k.”

Or the plural octopus. “I think you’ll find it comes from the Greek, so it’s octopodes. Octopi is certainly wrong, because it doesn’t come from latin.”

I think I may be an energy vampire.

You’ll probably hate me for saying this, but when I worked in an office, I often pretended to be stupid when it came to IT stuff.

Sometimes it’s nice to have a little break on the company’s dime. I get that it’s annoying, but on the plus side, it helps prevent management from making unnecessary and existentially threatening cuts to the IT department.

Boomer boss gets the importance of the IT guy replacing the deskjet printer so they can print off a 100 page colour manual on how the company’s ‘going green’. They don’t understand the IT department fixing something like sievelike data security. That’s a problem for after the shareholder meeting, if anyone ever finds out.

It’s a bit like how I’m not great at scanning stuff at the self-scan tills and make mistakes. Don’t want it to be too profitable to replace a cashier with a machine. Everyone’s got bills to pay.

I used to do IT support, so now I sometimes pretend to be an idiot outside of work too. “Mom’s friend Sarah has an issue with windows and wants me to help fix it for free? Sorry, I only know how to use the apples.”

A kilometer is 1000 M16A4s.

Also: the latin for lead(Pb) is plumbum, not plumbium. Same thing for gold(Au). It’s Aurum, not Aurium. Same for Iron(Fe). Ferrum not Ferrium.

I’m honestly a fan of having the option to use standardised/latinised chemical element names.

Cu = Cuprum = Copper.

Hg = Hydrargyrum = Mercury. Hydrargyrum is still sometimes (very very rarely) used in English.

Pb = Plumbum = Lead. The French for lead is plomb, for example. Would clear up a lot of confusion with homographs. We already use plumb in English, as in plumb line. (The fact that it’s plumbum, not plumbium, does undermine the whole aluminium>aluminum argument obviously).

Argentum instead of silver. Plenty of languages use a variation of that already. English already uses argent in some contexts, like heraldry.

Same thing for natrium instead of sodium, also common to have a variation of that in plenty of languages.

IRC Silicium was the originally proposed name for silicon. Plenty of languages also use a variation of that.

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I could see it being written about a lot of straight men. The world is full of deeply insecure emotionally stunted man-children, bullied at school for being supposedly ‘feminine’ or ‘gay’, who now overcompensate by riding around in huge trucks, being right-wing douche canoes, and pretending to be ‘alpha’. It’s no coincidence that plenty of those types end up killing themselves too, despite supposedly being in a position of privilege.

Society is patriarchal and heteronormative. This hurts almost everyone to a certain degree.

Not that I’m discounting the very real predjudice the LGBTQ+ community faces. It has cost me a job or two. Fortunately I’m bi and look stereotypically masculine, so I’m able to fly under the radar most of the time. And coming to terms with my sexuality has really opened my world and broadened my horizons, which has helped me immensely.

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.

Look at all the straight men, who are performatively masculine. Look at how angry and insecure they are, because they’re unable to be honest about their supposedly ‘feminine’ characteristics and interests.

Look at tradwives and performatively feminine women. Often unhappy because they can never conform fully to an artificial and socially constructed female ideal. Look at how they often project that frustration on other marginalised groups.

Potassium (K) is called Kalium in New Latin and a variation thereof in plenty of languages. It makes far more sense. The symbol’s K in the periodic table an the eymological link with alkali is in the word. The Brits don’t have a leg to stand on.

Then again, Americans are stupid about the metric system. Think they can’t visualize what 1 meter is, but almost every American can visualize the length of an M16A4 just fine.

America would sooner arrest someone for bypassing the firewall on an article about a prolific child rapist, than arrest an actual child rapist.