Bonifratz

The German city I used to live in has an oversized pedestrian overpass with three large openings or holes. It never had an official name (as it was never intended as a monument or sight), but right from the start it was locally known as the Elefantenklo (“elephant loo”), or E-Klo.

These days it’s often considered Gießen’s most well-known landmark, which… tells you something about the place.

German wiki with photoa: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elefantenklo_(Gießen)

Music and chess, mostly

I’m sure I have a bunch, but for the fediverse I think the most controversial is that I think neopronouns are a bad idea. DISCLAIMER I support queer folks, and I also use neopronouns when requested (because there’s zero reason to be a dick about it), but I think everybody would be better off without them.

The entire purpose of pronouns is to offer a quick, generic (i. e. non-individual) way of referring to people or objects without using their names. Using neopronouns which have to be communicated and learned first is the opposite of that. So in my view they’re not really pronouns, just additional names one has to learn for a person.

I think the most sensible way of accommodating all genders is using whatever pronouns are present in the language (usually male and female, or a generic pronoun), plus a non-binary pronoun if needed, like singular they in English.

Writing this from Linux which I installed last fall in lieu of the Windows 11 update.
I’m still using both OS via dual boot, and I still have some unresolved issues on Linux, but I will fully transition during the course of this year.
One thing that is really mind-blowing is the difference in performance on my ~7 y/o laptop. My Linux Mint is just lightning fast compared to Windows 10. You can quite literally feel how Windows runs a thousand random things in the background (most of which I never asked for) whereas Linux feels very clean and… empty, but in a good way.

Absolutely worth it though. Maybe watch it together with somebody so you can do some adhoc mutual therapy lol.

I love Ghibli movies so much because they tell stories very well, they are never black and white, and they always make me feel and ponder things. (And all that with beautiful art and music).

I’ve had similar thoughts these past two or three years but at least with my current life (family, work/studies, volunteering…) going offline isn’t even close to feasible. But at least I have started to move more and more of my online life to FOSS services or smaller or European companies. Finally installed Linux last year, also thinking of dabbling in self-hosting some time in the near future.

But I’m pretty sure the next years will give us a kind of Neo-Luddite movement, because you’re clearly not the only one fed up with modern digitlal tech.

Hats off to you, then. I see you truly know your lines.

I don’t give two shits about your LiNe ExPeRtIsE unless you built at least ten >3 minute tracks in the original Line Rider.