[Caveat lector: I don’t even speak English, to be honest.]

Give this page and this page a check. They’re a mess to follow, but to keep it short:

There isn’t a “single” Kiwi pronunciation, but a wide range between “cultivated” (resembling Received Pronunciation) to “broad” (rather unique). So if you can pull out a RP you could use it, but note you’d probably sound old-fashioned.

With one notable exception (Otago), local accents are typically non-rhotic. So for example, no *[ɹ] in “art”.

“Broad” pronunciations tend to raise vowels; so for example “trap, dress, price” sound like “trepp, driss, proice” in comparison with British accents. In the meantime “kit” is pronounced with the schwa, [ə], so it should sound the same as the first vowel in “about”.

Possible, but “better diet” on its own should apply to all five.

Another interesting bit in that pic is India. It was in a rather steep curve up from before '85 to ~'92[?]. Then it dropped, stagnated, started climbing back.

Mao died in '76. This wasn’t some great achievement, but the end of one of the most catastrophic policies any country has submitted its own population to.

Nah. Even if we eyeball the start of the curve, like I did, it clearly starts way before 1976+19 = 1995:

And upon further inspection even my eyeballed 1991 is a bit too late; 1969+19 = 1988 would make a better fit. It’s something that happened before the 70s.

Improved health conditions. The start of the curve is around '91, and given this graph is for 19yos it’s probably some change around '72. I don’t know which change.

That’s why you should only invoke foocubi — dealing with sour demons is a pain.

…my ⟨L d α⟩ look exactly like this, but unlike whoever wrote this table my ⟨o a⟩ are indistinguishable too. And my medial ⟨s⟩ is almost indistinguishable from ⟨f⟩, both look like ⟨ʃ⟩, except ⟨f⟩ gets a horizontal stroke . My calligraphy goes from amazing to nasty depending on how much effort I take.

Venetian:

• (ƚe) ciacoƚe ['tʃa.kɔ.e] (gossips, chitchatting); singular (ƚa) ciacoƚa ['tʃa.kɔ.e̯a]
• ciacoƚar [tʃa.kɔ.'e̯äɾ] (to gossip, to chitchat)

Not some fancy word, I know. But it’s nice to get this sort of everyday stuff.

This isn’t even a “lie”. It’s worse than that: it’s an empty statement misleading readers to see meaning where there’s none.

Commitment is intentions. Even between human beings, you don’t know someone else’s intentions, at most what they claim about them; so there’s no way to check if the “I’m committed to $thing” claim is true or false. But to make it even worse, a company is not a human being, it is simply an abstraction, unable to have “intentions”.

So, let’s call bread “bread” and wine “wine”: people working for Microslop noticed it’s being called “Microslop”, they know why, and they’re trying to minimise brand damage — trying to convince you that Microslop does not output slop, and that the Moon is made of green cheese. That’s it.

Moral of the story: be actively hostile towards corporations. Do not allow corporations to set any sort of foothold in public spaces. Because eventually they will try to claim those public spaces as their own private walled gardens, and everyone but them will get shit.

That one was made to be creepy. Sting (who wrote it) once said to the BBC that “the song is very, very sinister and ugly. And people have actually misinterpreted it as being a gentle little love song, when it’s quite the opposite.” and that “I didn’t realise at the time how sinister it is. I think I was thinking of Big Brother, of surveillance and control.”

Oh, I was beaten with both in my childhood. But never at the same time. Please remove this. It’s giving me PTSD. :-P

Yandere: “por que no los dos?”

Found some info about the coin in Wikipedia. The text there (𐤊𐤐𐤓𐤀 kpr’) is Kapara, the name of the city where this was minted, modern Soluntum. And accordingly to the fashion of a civilisation that calls its own capital “new city”, Kapara means simply “village”.

There are two schools of thought. There’s the glass-half-full outlook where YouTube is asking us if its videos feel like AI slop because it wants to make the platform slop-free. Then there’s the more pessimistic takeaway that YouTube is asking humans what does and doesn’t feel like AI slop so that it can move closer to AI-generated videos being indiscernible from the real thing.

Likely the later, given the Rick Beato scandal. (TL;DR: YT sloppified his videos without asking him permission, and everyone raged.)

Let me guess: you were trying to pirate Windows games and software. Right?

If yes, look at it this way. You’re pirating games for one system, and trying to run them in another system. Of course it’ll involve one or two additional loops to make it work. It’s like baking bread on your stove, you know? It can be done, but it isn’t as streamlined as using your oven.

That said it isn’t really difficult. I have a bunch of pirated Windows games installed in my Linux. Steam helps by a lot, because of Proton; add the game to Steam as a “non-Steam game”, then force it to use a specific Steam Play compatibility tool. You can do it without Steam but it streamlines everything.

You’re still better off looking for native software, though, made for Linux. A bunch of good games have Linux versions.

The design looks really badass, specially with the other side:

This is Melqart, a major Phoenician god. Patron deity of Tyre, ruler of the underworld, protector of the [over]world, he who symbolises death and rebirth. Interpretatio graeca associated him with Hercules / Herakles.

By the time this coin was minted, the Second Punic War (218~201 BCE) was just starting. Carthaginians troops advanced here and there, but inconclusively, as the Roman pushback war strong. Sicily was split between Roman (ex-Carthaginian) lands and the Greek kingdom of Syracuse. Syracuse allied itself with Carthage in 215 BCE, under the promise that they’d get the rest of the island after the war was over.

This might look an odd promise, since those lands used to be Carthaginian, but it makes sense: odds are they knew they wouldn’t be able to completely wipe Rome out. If Carthage won the war, at least it would have a strong ally at Rome’s backdoor, as a buffer state; might as well expand elsewhere, right? And if it lost… well, they’d lose those lands anyway. (That’s what happened — by 212 BCE the Roman siege of Syracuse was over, and the city sacked. And by 210 BCE the last non-Roman stronghold in the island was taken over. It was Akragas [modern Agrigento], where this coin was minted.)

In the light of all of that, the coin kind of looks like advertisement for war efforts, doesn’t it? I feel like both pictures in the shekel were carefully chosen, to remind Carthaginians of their iconic elephantry, about their origins as just a Tyrian colony, depicting a god associated with heroism and rebirth in their second war against Rome.

I’m retranslating the English subtitles into Portuguese (done) and Venetian (WIP).

I know this is dirty, and there’s no way I’d do it professionally (I’d simply refuse the job), or if this was some actual release. But given my goal is to allow my family to enjoy the series, that’s good enough. And context helps a lot, the series in question is Yoru wa Neko to Issho, you can get 90% of each episode by the animation alone.

Plus, well… weeb vocab helps a lot too. For example, you don’t need to speak Japanese to know what a “yame— ah!” means, as the cat drops a glass of water on the floor.

The tents remind me of Lyn from fire emblem on the GBA

The similarity is not a coincidence: both Dias’ feud and the Sacae region of Fire Emblem were clearly modelled after the steppes in Inner Asia, where nomadic peoples use this sort of tent fairly often.

(It’s known as “yurt”, “ger”, and by other names; it depends on the language.)

The main appeal of those is that they’re large enough to be homes (unlike camping tents), but still relatively easy/fast to disassemble and reassemble. A competent group can do it in a single hour, as in this video; but even a single person can do it, it’s just that it’d take longer.

And people still wonder why I pirate my series and keep my favs all in my hard disk, instead of “y bother lol? just subscribe to crânchi rou lmao”. It’s because of this sort of shit, or rather enshittification; I don’t want to deal with it at all, I trust streaming services as much as I trust cable TV (zero).

And this topic is specially relevant for me because I’m currently translating anime. And I can only do it because the video and subtitles can be separated; I don’t speak Japanese, so gotta work based on another subtitle, plus nobody wants to watch stuff with superimposed layers of subtitles.

Wow. The example picture alone already shows what’s wrong.

DLSS off: the background is rainy, the “cigare[ttes]” thing and the delicatessens sign are weathered, there’s some blue plastic in the background, she’s wearing brown, her eyes and lips lack any shine. This scene is clearly representing a tired, weary, “soulless” reality; one you survive but not live, that makes you whisper to yourself “…I’m so bloody tired”…

DLSS on: throws the mood out of the window by adding OH-SO-SHINY!!! everywhere.

This is not a breakthrough. This is not fidelity. It’s butchering artistic intent.