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02:00 - 16:0016:00 - 00:00

4:01 PM
@marcellothearcane I remember utter boredom from my youth before the Internet.
 
@marcellothearcane Haha, yes, I agree this is a problem.
 
Just another day in Russia
 
@CowperKettle What about it?
 
@Cerberus And if you get shut down whenever you try to talk about it, where are we heading?
 
4:03 PM
@Cerberus Absurd combination of dilapidation, a powerful airplane, and a church.
I like such images ))
 
@CowperKettle And an old woman casually carrying two trees
 
Hmm it doesn't look so absurd to me, but OK.
 
Yes, and that ))
 
@marcellothearcane There is unfortunately some hysteria attached to the issue now.
 
There is a Russian community called эстетика ебеней dedicated to atmospheric images of Russia. With old factories and stuff. Dilapidated housing.
A kind of nostalgic.
The kinds of images that every Russian will feel as something known from childhood.
 
4:06 PM
@CowperKettle Is that all Russia?
 
@marcellothearcane What do you mean by "all"?
 
You said every Russian would remember it
 
I mean it's kind of typical and nostalgic and a little weird.
 
Oh okay
Because not every British person would remember this
 
4:08 PM
@CowperKettle what part of Russia are you from?
 
@marcellothearcane Yekaterinburg
This is Omsk
 
Russia is staggeringly large
 
Yes
Are you from the UK?
(Murmansk Region)
 
@CowperKettle That's right
 
4:13 PM
What's with the planes everywhere?
 
In the Soviet times, it was customary to put military planes, tanks as a sign of progress
To make people feel proud of our achievements
And communist propaganda signs everywhere, to remind that we are moving towards communism.
St. Petersburg
 
@CowperKettle How long ago was that?
Up till the end of the Cold War?
 
Yes, up until 1991
But starting from about 2011 new military equipment has been put here and there as monuments. I mean not the latest, but the tradition has been revived a bit.
 
Was/is it successful?
Does it make people feel like they are progressing?
 
I don't know ))
 
4:19 PM
I expect someone has done some maths
 
Maybe it does make someone think so
 
What is the general view of communism in Russia?
Here it's generally 'A Bad Idea'
Not so much recently I guess
 
People know that it was impossible to build communism. But "We had a large, powerful country!"
This one is a masterpiece
LOL
 
@Cerberus right. the french model was to -not- ask any ethnicity questions at all (because during WWII used to find Jews to deport). But now they don't know (at the state statistics level) how much discrimination there is because the data isn't recorded.
 
@CowperKettle there's probably a load of natural resources
 
4:27 PM
@Cerberus @MattE.Эллен Did we solve the racism problem? By lexical semantics? I hope so because I wanted to move on to solving the Israel-Palestine problem.
I think we would be able to resolve that for them pretty quickly.
If they would just follow what we say.
 
@Mitch you should probably tell someone if so
It would stop a lot of arguments
@Mitch what's your plan?
 
We should just genetically recode all people to have the same skin color and general features, and voila, no racism.
In several decades, it might be possible.
Maybe change the color coding once a decade, so that we could see a person's age by their color.
Say, people born 2070-2080 are born jet-black.
People born 2080-2090 are milk-white.
And so on.
"Grandpa, how did people know the ages of other people before the introduction of color coding?"
 
@CowperKettle yeah but that's boring
@CowperKettle then "ageism" would be even more pronounced
And given that whole industries revolve around making people look younger, it might not work so well
But if you're going into genetic engineering, maybe you could make people thermochromic
 
4:44 PM
@Mitch not just racism, but all bigotry. solved.
 
@MattE.Эллен at what point does saying something is bad become bigotry?
 
@marcellothearcane read above for details ;)
 
@marcellothearcane I'm kinda surprised that no one has come to me directly to ask.
@CowperKettle That's ageist!
@MattE.Эллен Nice. I can sleep much easier tonight.
I mean it doesn't really solve the problem with cats, but hey small victories.
@marcellothearcane Oh, glad you asked.
 
I'm definitely missing something here
 
I think it was a mix of "Quit complaining, other people have it so much worse" and shaking them and saying "Snap out if it"
There was some nuance there of course, but I think that's the biggest part of it.
 
5:00 PM
@Mitch what happens about the one person who has had all the worst happen to them?
We could put them in a museum or something
Some sort of catastrophic lightning rod
 
@marcellothearcane It can always get worse.
rain starts
sigh
Nope. No lightning rods. Learned that lesson.
 
@Mitch Yeah, exactly.
 
@Mitch California looks on with envy
 
 
1 hour later…
6:23 PM
I love it how Google provides etymology
 
7:02 PM
bodice means "a pair of bodies"
 
 
2 hours later…
8:45 PM
@CowperKettle Jay and Silent Bob in Moscow?
@CowperKettle More like a pair of boobies.
So it turns out there actually is a Cat Lassie.
My wife felt it necessary to send me that video, since I always have pooh-poohed the notion of cats as helpful creatures.
 
@Robusto looks shopped. Not too badly shopped, but shopped nonetheless. The light doesn't match up.
 
But obviously it was important to someone to put them there.
It doesn't even have to be Moscow, I guess. Just some shitty tenement in a northern climate.
 
It is important to put Jay and Silent Bob everywhere.
And should be to everyone.
 
Could be Boston. Could be Chicago.
Could be Toronto, for that matter.
 
Yeah.
Point is, all those images could be from Moscow.
Even the one with St. Isaac's Cathedral, if you don't know where it is.
 
8:56 PM
And I don't.
 
See.
Isn't Toronto the city with some fine architecture though? Which is why it always plays other cities in movies?
Ah no. That's Vancouver.
See. I don't even know where Toronto is. Maybe in Vancouver. Maybe in Moscow.
 
When I was 16 the family went to Boston for vacation. It got to be Sunday, and we were supposed to go to mass. Since they didn't have GPS in those days we had to drive around asking people where the nearest Catholic church was. We got no helpful answers. Then I said to ask the next person where we could find St. Mary's. "Three blocks down that way, make a left, and it's two more blocks. Can't miss it."
I was a smart-ass even at that tender age.
 
Well it's easy to direct you to the nearest Catholic church in Moscow, for there is only one.
(Technically three, but one is in disrepair and the third one doesn't count.)
 
Yeah. I didn't even want to go back then, so I don't know why I would need to find one in Moscow at my current state of fallen-away-Catholicness.
 
Die Kathedrale der Unbefleckten Empfängnis der Heiligen Jungfrau Maria (russisch Собор Непорочного Зачатия Пресвятой Девы Марии/Sobor Neporotschnowo Satschatija Preswjatoj Dewy Marii, im Volksmund auch einfach Костёл/Kostjol oder Кирха/Kircha – „die katholische Kirche“) ist eine neugotische Kirche im Zentrum Moskaus und die Kathedrale des Erzbistums Mutter Gottes von Moskau. Sie ist eine von zurzeit nur zwei geöffneten katholischen Kirchen in Moskau und die größte katholische Kathedrale in ganz Russland. Erbaut 1911 nach einem Entwurf von Tomasz Bohdanowicz-Dworzecki als Filialkirche der polnischen…
Yours truly wrote that entire article.
 
9:01 PM
Quatsch.
 
Then someone translated it into English, and they made it a Featured article on there.
 
No such thing as an Unbefleckten Empfängnis.
 
As in, one of the Top 1500 articles on all of English Wikipedia.
 
No royalties for you.
 
@Robusto yeah one reason I'm no Catholic.
 
9:03 PM
"Die Kathedrale der Unbefleckten Empfängnis der Heiligen Jungfrau Maria" ... so there were others?
 
Well you have the same in English. Articles make no sense there really. Or anywhere really.
The Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception of the Holy Virgin Mary is a neo-Gothic Catholic Church at Moscow's center, that serves as the cathedral of the Catholic Archdiocese of Moscow. Located in the Central Administrative Okrug, it is one of three Catholic churches in Moscow and the largest in Russia.The construction of the cathedral was approved in 1894 by the Ministry of Internal Affairs under Tsarist Russia. Groundbreaking was in 1899; construction work began in 1901 and was completed ten years later. Three-aisled and built from red brick, the cathedral is based on a design by architect Tomasz...
Anyway, here's the translation, for completeness' sake.
 
No, I mean you could have stopped after Empfängnis. We all assume it was the one that occurred to Maria, and not just Maria but the Heiligen Jungfrau Maria.
 
Well, here's the thing. Nobody has read the entire Bible, so for all we know there were like fifty others.
 
I mean, I don't recall one happening to a Sally or a Gisele or an Ellen.
 
In Genesis alone.
Ellen DeGenesis.
 
9:05 PM
Ellen Degenerate.
He'll what?
 
7 hours ago, by BLACK LIVES MATTER
@RegDwigнt flagged as offensive
 
Did you actually get flagged? I thought he was joking.
 
I've no idea, for I was singing in a church at the time. I am as most innocent as can be.
 
room topic changed to English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room: Not for the faint of heart or those easily triggered by English in the raw [phrase-requests] [pronunciation] [single-word-requests] [synonyms]
 
Why does the topic not update in the sidebar. I thought this was all AJAX all the time.
Do people even still remember AJAX?
Or Web 2.0?
Used to be sprayed on every street corner just a couple years ago.
Kinda like "BLM" right now.
 
9:09 PM
It changed for me.
Refresh the room, see what happens. Roll the dice.
 
Still says "Where the brain is a living organ which is listening your commands" here.
Well yes, refreshing is cheating. That's no AJAX. That's just HTTP.
 
Maybe that's because you wrote that one and it's trying to suck up to you.
 
Or maybe it only changed for you for much the same reason.
 
I didn't refresh, btw. It just showed up.
 
See.
I shall now never refresh this room again.
It shall get staler than the stale.
 
9:10 PM
I think the AJAX just likes me better.
 
If anyone, it likes @Cerberus for he's from there.
 
He's from AJAX?
 
Amsterdamsche Football Club Ajax (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈaːjɑks]), also known as AFC Ajax, Ajax Amsterdam, or simply Ajax, is a Dutch professional football club based in Amsterdam, that plays in the Eredivisie, the top tier in Dutch football. Historically, Ajax (named after the legendary Greek hero) has been the most successful club in the Netherlands, with 34 Eredivisie titles and 19 KNVB Cups. It has continuously played in the Eredivisie, since the league's inception in 1956 and, along with Feyenoord and PSV Eindhoven, it is one of the country's "big three" clubs that have dominated that ...
 
Oh. Yeah, I know very few football clubs period, but especially not European ones, and especially especially not Dutch ones.
 
Yeah well I watch football once every eight years. But "Ajax Amsterdam" is just a fixed phrase.
 
9:19 PM
Yeah, but they pronounce it funny.
Ayax. Doesn't have the same ring.
 
Better?
Question: who the fuck is playing the sax in that video.
Like, there's not even just the four of them. There's seven people that showed up for the filming. But none brought a sax.
 
I couldn't tell you because couldn't listen to that.
 
Be like that, Wagner.
Oct 3 '18 at 19:50, by RegDwigнt
They translated "The Ring" into Russian as "A phonecall". Not as ring as in the shape, or even the piece of jewelry.
 
That is the sax seax I'd like to use on an ABBA track.
 
> The Piano Teacher_Dennis Korn has added discussion "LOVEFOOL" to group "Piano"

For all teachers who are asked by her students for the Song ;-)
Gee mate, thanks but you're like 24 years too late.
Like, this was when Leo was even younger than his girlfriends have forever stayed.
 
 
2 hours later…
11:59 PM
@Robusto so someone on MuseScore posted a screenshot of a tremolo, asking what the fuck that was. I explained to them that it is a tremolo, explained to them what a tremolo was, and explained to them where to find it in MuseScore (you go to the menu "tremolo" and click on a tremolo of your liking).
 
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