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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • Once, I was in a sandwich shop in the Netherlands, ordering in English (as I don’t speak Dutch). The fellow behind the counter had excellent English. When he heard my friend and I speak to each other in French, he switched to French, and it was nearly as good as his English.

    That’s a guy working in a sandwich shop, speaking at least three languages rather fluently. Heck, he probably speaks a bit of German too, seeing as we were close to the border with Germany. It blew my mind as a Canadian who’s used to people being stubbornly unilingual.

    Speaking more than one language is so cool. It’s good for your brain, it helps one understand the structure of language better, it opens up doors to new cultures and ideas. I truly don’t understand why so many anglophones (and, if I’m being honest, a good number of francophones in Québec) are so opposed to the idea of bilingualism.

    ///

    Une fois, j’étais dans une shop à sandwich aux Pays-Bas, passant ma commande en anglais (étant donné que je ne parle pas le néerlandais). Le gars derrière le comptoir parlait très bien l’anglais. Quand il a entendu mon amie et moi parler français ensemble, il a changé à un français presque aussi bon que son anglais.

    C’est un gars qui fait des sandwich, qui parle couramment un minimum de trois langues. Crisse, il parle probablement aussi un peu l’allemand vu qu’on était proche de la frontière avec l’Allemagne. Ça m’a ébloui en tant que canadien•ne habitué•e aux gens qui s’entêtent à ne parler qu’une langue.

    Parler plus qu’une langue, c’est tellement cool. C’est bon pour le cerveau, ça t’aide à mieux comprendre les structures de la langue, ça ouvre des portes à de nouvelles idées et cultures. Je ne comprend réellement pas pourquoi tant d’anglophones (et, pour être honnête, un bon nombre de francophones du Québec) sont si opposé•es à l’idée du bilinguisme.



  • If someone asks you if you danced, you could answer “I would have” or “I didn’t” and the same information is brought across

    Hard disagree there. “I would have” implies that dancing was something you desired, but circonstances didn’t allow for whatever reason. There’s an unsaid “but” in there, whereas “I didn’t” simply means you were not involved in the dancing.

    “I would have” carries a lot more meaning than a simple “I did not”.





  • I wouldn’t have called you an asshole until I read this comment! Really makes it seem like the whole post was more about ranting about your freedoms and those sensitive transgenders than a genuine inquiry into the lived experiences of trans guys, you know? Especially considering no one has said anything yet apart from yourself.

    In case anyone reading this is actually having questions about the content of the main post, OPs anecdotes are not representative of trans men as a whole. Those who choose to present that way do so for a myriad of reasons, just as the cis men who present that way do. Would you be asking yourself these same questions about cis men? Trans people get shit if they try “too hard” to conform to gender stereotypes and also get shit if they don’t conform enough.



  • The 87-year-old pontiff reportedly made the homophobic remark in a closed-door meeting last week as he told Italian bishops that gay men shouldn’t be allowed to train for the priesthood.

    The newspaper articles, which were translated from Italian, claimed the Pope had said there is “frociaggine” – which translates in English to “faggotry” – in some of the seminaries.

    Francis’ comments were made in the context of proposals from the Italian bishops to amend guidelines on candidates to seminaries.

    “Faggotry in the Seminary” sounds like a Catholic-themed porno movie from the '80s.

    As gross and homophobic as this is, I doubt it cracks the top 1000 worse things the Church has done.






  • I would describe myself as firmly “in the middle”, and I honestly don’t disagree with your points overall. However, I think Windows isn’t really “easier to use” than most Linux distros, it’s just what most people are used to.

    That doesn’t take away from your argument, as being familiar with an OS will make it easier to use and that’s completely valid, but someone who’s used Linux all their life would similarly face struggles using Windows. User inertia is a huge factor contributing to Windows’ marketshare.



  • This is great news, it’s frankly embarrassing that it took this long. I know here in New Brunswick, our Conservative government has done the absolute bare minimum to help out hungry kids, of which there are many (30 000 kids live in poverty in NB, and many more probably suffer from some degree of food insecurity.)

    It’s such a no-brainer to invest in this, like even if you’re a heartless neoliberal ultra-capitalist who thinks the poor should suffer, do you not want your future-workforce-in-training to actually absorb their training? Hungry kids don’t learn good.



  • There are only two people who ever ask me for tech help. One is my father, who is decently tech-litterate for his age, helping him usually revolves around media piracy. I very occasionally lose patience with him because sometimes I’ll tell him to check something, he’ll say he did it, and I keep trying to figure out his issue only for him to realize half an hour later he didn’t actually check what I told him to.

    The other is an older lady who used to be my neighbour, we became friends and still keep in touch since she moved. I absolutely adore helping her out, since it’s usually something silly that takes literally less than 30 seconds to figure out/fix. She’s always immensely appreciative and acts like I’m the smartest person in the goddamn world. It’s honestly a welcomed ego boost, plus it makes me feel great to see how genuinely thankful she is.

    I think, especially with older generations, you really have to keep in mind how much the world has changed since they got here. My old neighbour didn’t have electricity or running water growing up, and now we expect her to understand GUIs, OSes, settings, accounts, networks…

    I get much more upset when I see people around my age (late twenties to early thirties) who can’t understand the basic functions of a desktop operating system. I understand that not all of my generation were tech-obsessed kids/teens like myself, spending their free time figuring out stuff like upgrading from Vista to XP or partitioning the hard drive on the family PC to dual boot Linux distros, but you’d think they’d at least understand the basics of a filesystem and how to change settings.