DonAntonioMagino

@DonAntonioMagino@feddit.nl

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You should know there's a font designed to make reading easier, especially for people with low vision. It's called Atkinson Hyperlegible Next. It's free for personal and commercial use.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  To be honest, studies around whether this font is actually easier to read for people with dyslexia haven’t shown that to be the case. At least, that’s what I remember from reading about it in a Dutch skeptic magazine (Skepter). So if you have dyslexia and find this font harder to read, that doesn’t have to say anything about you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Your all-time favorite game? Let's discuss the best options!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  When it comes to nostalgia, my favourite game is a 90’s German demo of the DOS version of the original Command & Conquer.

  „Jawohl, Sir!”; „Bestätigt!”.

  The soldiers were still robots there, too, because of German law forbidding a realistic depiction of war.

  The best game I’ve ever played is without a doubt Red Dead Redemption 2. I’ve never cried over a game, and with RDR2 a cried when I finished it myself, then I cried again when I watched it being played in a let’s play series on YouTube. RDR2 is a masterpiece, plain and simple.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New fediverse chick just dropped⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Got my first Nicole this time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sooo, where did the blatant Nazism suddenly come from?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This is it, and we (in the west) have gone so far to the right that the richest man of the world, with a powerful position (formally) near government can do the Hitler salute and the established media just shrugs.

  Doing the Hitler salute used to make you a pariah. Now, it’s just a thing the extreme right does to ‘provoke’ (that word I saw used to describe Bannon’s salute in a German newspaper title). In a couple of years, it is normal that the right does this, and the established media doesn’t bat an eye anymore.

  It’s clear that you still can’t trust established media to be a force against nazism. They’ll start analysing the nazi takeover as nazi only when it’s much too late, out of fear of not being ‘neutral’.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why was there a pro-Hitler, Holocaust-denying ad on X?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  This can’t be the whole truth, though. What ivanafterall is describing is true for essentially the whole western world. Media (or at least high-brow media) feel they need to be respectable, and to be respectable you have to be perfectly neutral. Not just in America did established media feel the need trivialise Musk’s obvious Hitler, this happened all over. I follow Dutch and German media, and haven’t seen a mainline newspaper call it what it was.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In light of recent events, here's OpenStreetMap editors discussing naming of the Gulf of Mexico⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Judging from this very polemic article by linguistic anthropologist Kahryn E. Graber, the argument is that a linguistic distinction that exists in Russian (and Ukrainian) is mirrorred in other languages using the definite article. ‘Na Ukraine’ on the one hand litterally means ‘on Ukraine’, ‘v Ukraine’ on the other ‘in Ukraine’. There’s actually a similar distinction already in English, where you can live ‘on Antarctica’ and ‘in the United States’. Graber goes on to say that ‘In Russian, a person is “na” an unbounded territory, such as a hill, but “v” a bounded territory that is defined politically or institutionally, such as a nation-state.’ She would then probably also argue that the same, in English, goes for names like ‘the Congo’, being named after a river. The claim that this is a Soviet-era practice (if what she means by that is that it arose during the Soviet Union), is simply not true, though. In Google Books you can find plenty of titles with ‘the Ukraine’ from before 1900. The earliest mention I could find in English was from 1670.

  It anyway strikes me as very performative. You can well argue that language influences the way we view the world (though, I think the way we view the world influences the language we use much more). Even so, there are obviously much bigger (concrete) threats to Ukrainian sovereignty than (to Ukrainians) foreigners using a definite article or not. Thus, it becomes less a matter of protecting sovereignty, and more a matter of simple respect to Ukrainian sensibilities. Ukrainians may take offence at you using the definite article, and you may want to prevent that by not saying ‘the Ukraine’.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google officially changes the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America on Maps⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve not read the article, but checking this, it’s actually in the Dutch version as well… Bunch of fuckers.

  Image

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Those YouTube ads everyone hates made $10.4 billion in just three months⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not sure what you mean here. As far as spelling goes, Dutch is far more consistent than English.

  You’re mentioning some none-standard Dutch which is often perceived as incorrect (and it is indeed according to the rules of the standard language norm). Yet, if you were correct in your claim that ‘groter als jij’ was ‘never proper Dutch and sound[s] wrong to every native Dutch speaker’, no native Dutch speaker would ever use ‘groter als jij’. This simply isn’t the case: native Dutch speakers often do this, and have been doing it at least since the seventeenth century (eg. this quote from 1670: ‘Zy [de vrucht ”Peci”] is niet veel groter als een kastanie …, vol sap en aengenaem van smaek: herder dan een gemeine appel, en een weinig zuurachtig,’ - ‘It [the fruit “Peci”] is not much bigger than a chestnut …, full of juice and pleasantly tasting: harder than a common apple, and a bit sourish,’).

  Sorry to have gone so off-topic here, though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Those YouTube ads everyone hates made $10.4 billion in just three months⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The plural -s in Dutch only gets an apostrophe if the stem word ends on an open vowel. So it’s ‘Maria’s huis’ but ‘Piets boek’. So even in Dutch this’d be incorrect ;)