I’m a Finnish speaker. Nouns aren’t gendered in Finnish either, so that’s not weird.

Things that do trip me up:

• Pronouns (lack of T/V distinction (i.e. just one “you”) and gendered third person)
• Articles (Finnish doesn’t have articles as such, so adding them sometimes takes some brainpower)
• so freaking many irregular verbs etc
• seriously what is this orthography even (Finnish grammar may be complex, but the same can’t be said of the pronunciation)

Actually, I’m learning French right now and gendered nouns aren’t even that much of a problem. I was dreading the numerals more.

Most of my local public transport is electrically-powered now

Which is kind of my point. Over the years our public transport has been proudly advertising their use of biodiesels and bio gas, CNG and LNG. And apparently battery-electric buses are coming too. (Sorry, Adam Something. Apparently our city cannot into trams, as fucking awesome as it would be! But apparently the Green Party is proposing TRAINS)

cash certainly lives here

Yeah, and that was kind of a pointed example on my part. I don’t think cash is going away entirely. That said, vast majority of our public transport is already apparently either going on prepaid cards or debit so, eh.

Over here we already have plenty of memes based on “What if Breaking Bad happened in Europe? It’d been very underwhelming because we have public healthcare.” But I’m glad Albuquerque can at least say “well we could maybe have mitigated some of the car shenanigans in the series now.”

When Twitter (and Reddit) pulled this off, I was just mildly pissed. Can’t do interesting things with my data, oh no.

…Image that, except it’s an expensive luxury car you’re no longer allowed to do interesting things with.

Authors have to submit manuscripts to publishers individually (or, in some markets, agents who work with multiple publishers in the same niche).

Publishers get showered with manuscripts. Very small percentage of them are what publishers deem will meet market goals.

In standard publishing contracts, the author gets paid an advance. This is basically the royalty percentage for the entire first print run. It’s not refundable. It represents the trust the publisher puts on the author, and if the publisher can’t sell all copies, well, tough for them. (They’d probably just not work with that author again.)

Getting to that point is a pretty massive hurdle to clear for first time authors.

So no, authors don’t really get to pick their publishers. The only scenario where people get to pick their publishers is some celebrity deal bullshit.

Also some sites ask for email addresses.

I give them my .fi address.

The sites then go “did you mean .fr?”

And I’m like “No actually I’m in Finland. It’s a whole different country. Don’t get me wrong, I love the French, great country. I love our EU brothers and sisters and enbypals. Just don’t buy a nuclear reactor from them.”

The way publishing industry has been for a very long time, authors (especially first time ones) don’t get to pick whoever pays the best deal. Just whoever pays the first.

Edit: Also, theoretically, publishers should accommodate author wishes once a publication contract has been made. Actually not unheard of that a publisher would do something cool for their up and coming star. But this? Sloppiness on the publisher’s part, plain and simple.

I’m in Finland and it’s always mildly weird when these country lists have “Aland Islands” right in the top. I’m not entirely sure in which circumstances the folks from Åland even pick that option. But, I mean, it’s an autonomous region, they do have the right to mildly confuse the people who collect user statistics.

(There was also that one incident when some Google product wasn’t available in EU as a whole due to regulations that had to be sorted out, but it was somehow available in Åland because Google did an oopsie.)

Why hello! 🙋🏻‍♀️

I think I saw some quip by Linus Torvalds about how Finland has such long winters with nothing to do, so it’s no wonder we have so many great information technology nerds.

I have the DVD. It’s somewhere in the pile.

I need to one day develop a DVD/BR/book catalogue app to get even vague idea about what exactly is on my shelves and boxes. It has long since gone unmanageable. At least I know what’s my next major project after NaNoWriMo.

Debian user here. Checks out.

Though I use Windows (and Debian WSL) as desktop daily. The fact that I mostly drink instant coffee is possibly related.

For me OneDrive “memories” are from my wallpaper folder or Xbox screenshots.

Google “memories” are food diary photos (on days when my food budget is spent, Google loves to show me photos of the massive pizzas I ate years ago, because it knows) or random sunsets. (Except for that photo collage with cheery music from my grandma’s funeral. Why did it have to do that specifically. Just asking.)

I don’t think I’ve had a single USB-C cable/connector/socket fail yet. Which can’t be said of Micro-USB.

But other than that, meh.

A solid game in its current state. Probably one of the best games of the decade for me, just not in top 5. Has that “once you start playing, suddenly it’s 3 hours later” factor. Extremely atmospheric world design. Lots of great writing too.

Now, it does have the annoying thing that it sometimes keeps reminding me of games that did some aspect better. For example: Vehicle physics feel completely hokey. (“Man, I wish I was playing Saints Row 3/4”) Can’t really go exploring everywhere, would have loved to explore more rooftops and such. (“Man, I’ve got to get back to Mirror’s Edge”) Not exactly a prime stealth game in accordance with the laws of the art form. (“Man, Deus Ex was the shit, got to play it”)

Blender tutorials are like:

OK you start Blender up, you delete the default cube…

Lemmy installation tutorials are like:

OK you install Lemmy on your server, you defederate from Hexbear…

When things go wrong in Windows at an app or third party software, stuff is often fixable. At worst you might need to reinstall the damn thing. But if the OS itself starts doing weird stuff, things often go to the headache territory really fast. Get a weird error, log says some OS component is going boom, no idea how to fix it, official instructions are along the lines of “Well if DISM and SFC are not going to fix it, looks like you need to reinstall the entire damn OS.” Which usually wouldn’t be a cause for anxiety, but blergh, muh preschus licence key, hope I won’t screw that up.

Meanwhile, I ran one Debian install for over 20 years once. Stuff is usually very fixable indeed. There are good logs. It’s rarely a complete mystery why some program is doing what it doing. At absolute worst you might need to look at the source code, which is actually rare.

I have a sports watch and the corresponding fitness app. I can confirm. “Sitting on one’s ass at the restaurant” is not a fitness activity. HOWEVER. Some of my activities (e.g. walks) do terminate near fast food jonts. …I dread what that kind of data analysis would yield on a major political figure.

Well, systemd developers made one of the classic blunders a software developer can do: make a program that has to deal with time and dates. Every time I have to deal with timestamps I’m like “oh shit, here we go again”.

Anyway, as I understood it the reason this is in systemd is because they wanted to replace cron, and it’s fine by me because cron has it’s own brain-hurt. (The cron syntax is something that always makes me squint real hard for a while.)

Some of the things that helped me:

• Regularity. I also have ADHD so actually getting me to catalog daily/weekly things that I need to do was hard enough. But now that I have like 5 todo lists things are looking up.
• Cataloging things. I love photography and writing down interesting ideas. Someone looking through my photo collection might wonder why I take photos of random shit. Simple reason: Something managed to brighten my day and I just had to put it in on the record. I feel happier when I know that those moments won’t ever disappear if I can at all manage it. Similarly, if I have cool ideas that made me happy for some reason, I write them down.
• Crap social media is the worst. Be on the social media to fearlessly shout your cool ideas to the void if you have to. Don’t be there to passively and silently afraid to speak up and stick around with people you barely know and watch them slowly turn nazi yes-men. (Yes. It has happened. Before Elon bought Twitter. Can’t even imagine how shit things are nowdays over there.)

Kinect 2.0 is the one for Xbox One, right? That one has a proprietary plug and needs an adapter of some kind for PC. Finding one now needs some effort. Would have been neat if it supported the Xbox 360 Kinect because it has a standard USB connector.