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Cake day: February 19th, 2025

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  • “We’d all be speaking <language> and ____ing nothing but _____” means “we would have been forced to follow the culture of this foreign nation and lose our own.”

    The act of forcing people to give up their language and culture for another one has an English word for it: Genocide.

    HumanOnEarth was saying that if we had behaved throughout the 1940’s the way we do now, we would have ended up victims of genocide. Nothing in his comment says that there is anything wrong with cabbages or sausages. They are not a problem to him at all. But losing his own cuisine and his own language would be problems for him.

    I am surprised if you truly do not understand this and wrote your comment in a good faith.

    HumanOnEarth was speaking up against fascism and what you did was to ridicule him. I hope you did so by accident.




  • When starting here, I found it a nice way for finding interesting communities to go to different instances’ pages with my web browser and browsing their Local. A lot of communities I would never have thought of!

    So, go to sopuli.xyz and see what their Local has to offer, then go to piefed.social for the same. And suppo.fi and Solarpunk (is it slrpnk.net or what?) and what is there still? Blåhaj at least. You can see what instances interesting commentators are coming from and check out the rest of that instance’s atmosphere by just writing that instance’s address in your browser’s URL bar.




  • I keep writing this here and there, so I’ll reiterate it here.
    When the Soviet war in Afghanistan ended, some 70 000 absolutely mental soldiers returned straight from the front, and there were another 400 000 or so that had been rotated away from frontline duty and were a bit less of lunatics but doing bad all the same. Those 70 000 + 400 000 were too much for the Soviet Union of 300 million people.

    One of the most important causes for Soviet Union’s collapse were those Afghan veterans who were accustomed to extremely violent way of doing things. The crazy years of 1990’s and the famously violent Russian mafia were a result of those 500-ish thousand madmen having been freed to roam the Soviet Union and later the Russia. All that instability eventually led to the total economical collapse of 1998.

    So… Now there are some 700 000 soldiers more or less on the front, and another 700 000 doing other military duties. Those 700 000 + 700 000 will have quite an effect on the Russia of 140 million people. Once the war ends, ten times as many lunatics will return to the Russia of only 140 million as returned to USSR of 300 million. That will be absolute carnage and the 1990’s will look like a walk in a park compared to what’s coming up.

    This is already unavoidable, but if the Russia is victorious, it can still avoid being ripped completely apart by that carnage. That’s the main reason the Russia cannot end the war. It will wage the war ad infinitum, unless made physically unable to continue. And if they some day cannot get any more soldiers, then that’ll finally the physical barrier they’ve been looking for.


  • I’d like to add: Almost all Russians think the same as Putin regarding what is a number of casualties that will be too much. To the question “what is a number of casualities that makes you think the war is a bad thing instead something that hurts but will bring glory?”, their answer is: “There is no such number. Our leader will [read: should] only stop once we reach victory!”

    But, they do care about a certain other thing: a number of casualties exists that will be too much for people to want to let their children be forced to the front.

    They will not stop supporting the war no matter what the casualties, but they will stop going to the front once the casualities have reached their target number. And that will of course end the war.

    Also, there’s another relevant number: How many percents of your salary is bread allowed to cost before you start opposing the war. This has to do with the death toll, because the more deaths, the more salary must paid to each soldier, and the more the other industries have to increase their salaries in order to remain in competition for the workforce.



  • And, the Latvian language test is hilariously easy. I have learned Latvian and listened to the test material.

    In listening comprehension you hear a phone call to a bus station. The worker answering articulates more clearly than anybody ever would.

    And then the multiple choice question is:
    Where did the caller call?

    • His workplace
    • Bus station
    • A clothes shop

    (I don’t remember the other two variants, but the point stands: the question was super easy to answer)

    And then, you need to write the first verse of Latvia’s anthem, in Latvian. That means having to learn a series if sounds as horribly long as 28 words.

    The only way to fail that test is to have a strong principle not to want to learn Latvian or wanting to NOT know the anthem’s lyrics.

    There are a few more exercises, but all of them are identically ridiculously easy.

    It’s made so that russophiles will be unable to make themselves fill the test and everyone else will pass with flying colours.

    It’s the only exam I’ve ever seen where you need to make an effort in order to fail.



  • Well, yeah. Up to a point, we do.

    But they tend to be based on people knowing that When I say “count the ticket, it’s hundreding” in the meaning “lower the flag, it’s raining” (based on the Finnish word “laskea” meaning both “count” and “to lower”, “lippu” meaning both “ticket” and “flag” and “sataa” being both the partitive form of “hundred” and “it rains”, the joke is about the Finnish language having funny homonyms.

    And similarly here the arse of the joke is English being funny in having to meanings for the word “come”? It’s not usual to make such jokes with words that are actual cognates. They are more usually made with word pairs such as read and read, or read and red. I mean, jokes are goof things to have, but they shouldn’t be based on the laughee being ignorant.

    What would be a fantastic name for a brothel, however, is this:






  • The Ukrainian system of names basically functions this way: If your name is Oleh Melnyk and you want to call your newborn child Nastia, what gets written in the documents is Anastasiia. Then, people will call that Nastia this way:

    • If they have to be very formal, they call her Anastasiia Olehivna (this is the father’s first name with a suffix)
    • If they have to be formal, they call her Anastasiia Melnyk (this is Nastia’s family name)
    • If they have to be somewhat formal, they call her Anastasiia
    • If they have to be informal, they call her Nastia

    Every Anastasiia is always called Nastia by most people around her. And every Nastia has “Anastasiia” as their name in their official documents. Nastia’s parents will never* call her Anastasiia. Not even when telling their friends what their newborn’s name is. They will say “Look, this is our Nastia!”

    The same applies to basically all other names as well. There are lists online for what name corresponds with which nickname and there is no simple pattern that you can reliably use to automatically turn a name’s informal form into a formal form of the name or vice versa. For foreign names, -chka is a very common solution. When I lived in Ukraine, I would have ended up being Tuuchka, which is kind of funny because it means a small cute cloudlet, but people found that weird and just had to resort to always using my name as in documents, which made them feel kind of uncomfortable. If they cannot distinguish between whether the form they use is a formal or an informal one, their brain breaks a little.

    Oh, and when I call my wife’s phone from an unknown number, she answers with “Anastasiia <Familyname>”, but if I give her my phone and she knows she’s talking to a friend of mine without knowing precisely whom, her first words in the phone are “Nastia <Familyname>”. And no, her father’s name is not Oleh. Nor Melnyk. I just took those names randomly. Melnyk is the most common family name over there.

    *) Never, except when they are super angry at her for some seriously bad mischief. Then they shout ANASTASIIA MELNYK, and she knows she in trouble. And if it’s “ANASTASIIA OLEHIVNA, come here NOW!” then it means she immediately knows she’s been caught after all for having killed her sibling three years ago, or something like that. And similarly, if they want to be just generally stern and not angry (although: almost angry), they can go with just “Anastasiia. Come here. Now.”