The catarrhine who invented a perpetual motion machine, by dreaming at night and devouring its own dreams through the day.

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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: January 12th, 2024

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  • Here in Curitiba it’s this church:

    It’s constantly maintained and renovated, but the building is 287 years old, built in 1737. (For reference the city itself is 331yo.)

    It’s kind of funny that people here don’t typically remember the name of that church, Igreja da Ordem (Church of the Order; the “order” in question are the Franciscans). Instead they remember the name of the square that the church faces, named after the church - o Largo da Ordem (lit. “Order Plaza”, but more like “the plaza of the church of the Order”).




  • Perhaps she associated bathtub = attention and feeling good afterwards? Cats do show some sort of weak “past cause, present effect” connection.

    In Kika’s case I don’t have an idea, as the place changes from time to time. It used to be on the stairs, then on the sisal mat, now the box. It’s kind of annoying when I’m taking my morning yerba though, as I’m in the kitchen and she’s meowing constantly.


  • Kika (16?yo): she likes to be petted, but she’s wants to be petted in a very specific corner of the house - currently her cardboard box, but it changes over time. So she begs me “pet me, pet me!”, then as I move my hand to pet her she runs to the box, and keeps meowing. Until I go pet her in the cardboard box.

    Siegfrieda (7?yo): I don’t know what’s weirder: looking at the rain and meowing at me as if saying “can’t you stop it?”, watching anime with me, or the “overly attached girlfriend” face that she does when someone is eating yoghurt.



  • But there’s enough of a problem you can see even if you just start at Julius, which is what I was concentrating on in my previous comment. The parallels to Trump are terrifyingly on the nose.

    True that.

    Weirdly enough (or perhaps not surprisingly) I see the same here with Bolsonaro supporters; there’s a disproportionally high amount of them among classicists, even if humanities as a whole leans heavily to the left.


  • The alt right obsesses over the Roman empire, but ignores the republic, as if Julius Caesar and Octavius were the origin of everything. As such I’m not surprised that they don’t learn about what caused the fall of the republic. (A century or so of oppressed masses and greedy elites did it.)

    And, even when it comes to the empire, they’re busier cherry-picking examples that show that the grass was greener, the men were manlier, the women were chaster, and dogs barked quieter.


  • At least when it comes to languages, the eurocentrism and subjectivity are being addressed for at least a century. Sapir for example proposed that the “classical languages” weren’t just two but five - Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Latin, Sanskrit. And the definition became roughly “varieties with a heavy and outlasting impact outside their native communities”. (Personally I’d also add Sumerian, Quechua and Nahuatl to that list. But that’s just me.)

    Additionally plenty linguists see the idea of “classic” not as specific languages, but as a potential stage of a language, assigned retroactively to the period when its prestige and cultural production were specially strong. For example, Classical Ge’ez is defined as the one from centuries XIII~XIV.


  • This is the sort of thing that I love reading on the internet.

    From a conlanger perspective I feel like the time reference could be split into four, to account time travel. For example: let’s say that both of us travelled to 3100, I remained there and you came back to 2024. Then you write me a letter, that I’m going to read as soon as we arrive in 3100, telling me about your experiences. You could use:

    • your current date as reference - 3100 comes after 2024, so it’s future
    • your personal experiences - you already experienced it, so it’s past
    • my current date as reference - as I’m in 3100, it’s present
    • my personal experiences - as I’m watching you experience it, it’s present

    Any given language could pick any of those references to model their tense around, or many of them, or even none (plenty languages IRL lack grammatical tense). If only doing things from the PoV of the speaker (you), that means 6~9 tenses for what most languages have 2 (past and non-past) or 3 (past, present, future).



  • There was a time that people prefixed my nickname with “Wiki-”, because apparently I stand out for knowing a bit about everything. I don’t quite agree with it but hey, at least it’s something nice.

    My accent (when speaking Portuguese) also stands out, apparently. Outside my city people are quick to identify where I’m from; and yet in my own city people often ask me where I’m from.



  • It’s tempting to look for potential vocab exchange between Rapa Nui and (Quechua and Aymara). That could help dating the exchange with the Andes, as the lexicon stops following the lender’s sound changes to follow the borrower’s instead.

    (Polynesian syllabic structure and small phonemic stock make this extra tricky though. For example, Classical Quechua /s ʂ h/ would probably end all merged into /h/, and you’d see multiple epenthetic vowels popping up.)

    Even then I wouldn’t be surprised if they contacted the folks up south, like the Mapuche. Specially as I don’t expect the landing spot from a Rapa Nui → South America to be the best spot to start the opposite travel, due to sea currents.


  • The text says “several”, but it mentions only four components (gdebi, apturl, aptdaemon and mintcommon-aptdaemon) merged into two (captain, aptkit). It doesn’t look like much, and typically the Mint project is responsible to not claim to maintain more than it can maintain¹.

    In special, I remember gdebi being broken for quite a while², so this hints that Mint’s goal is to get properly maintained replacements.

    1. As shown by Cinnamon. I personally don’t like it, but it is well maintained, even being a huge project.
    2. If I recall correctly, the issue was with the associated gdebi-gtk frontend; you’d open a package with it, then click “install”, then the program exits because it’s looking for sudo instead of pkexec. I’m almost certain that it was fixed by now, but it does show general lack of maintainance.




  • This is not exactly what you’re asking for (media inside media), but it’s really close in spirit (nested narratives), and I really like it: a book written in Portuguese in the XIX century, called Noite na Taverna (Night in the Tavern).

    The book has an overarching story of friends telling each other stories in a tavern, over booze; with all those nested stories being about love, despair, and death (it has a strong gothic vibe).

    And, as each character tells the others a story, there’s always that fishy smell that the story might be actually bullshit; and other characters do raise some doubts about its in-universe veracity (like Bertram does to Solfieri). And you, as the reader, do the same - but in no moment you question the veracity of the overarching story, and you feel like you’re inside the tavern alongside the drunkards.

    So it’s a lot like the author is toying with your suspension of disbelief - redirecting it from the overarching story to the nested stories, and as you doubt the later you get even more immersed into the former.


    If I must use an example of media within media, then my choice would be “The Book” within Orwell’s 1984. I think that it’s a great piece because it shows Orwell’s views on politics and society, while still serving narrative and worldbuilding purpose - for Winston it’s a material proof of the Inner Party’s bullshit, for O’Brien it’s a tool of the Inner Party to sniff out dissidence. (Note: 1984 is extremely misrepresented nowadays, I’m aware, but I still like it.)