Most linguists formally classify English as Germanic (West Germanic, alongside Frisian, Dutch and German, though one Norwegian linguist made a case for it being North Germanic), though some people refer to it as a Romance-Germanic creole. It is quantifiably true that, if you want to read Old English, knowing Icelandic will be more helpful than knowing modern English.

The village on Lunt near Liverpool considered changing its name to “Launt”, because vandals kept adding a top stroke to the L in signs.

Coulsdon is the new Scunthorpe, it seems

We’re probably more likely to see Europe paying reparations to Russia to normalise relations and get cheap gas again.

True, though BlueSky is a temporary redoubt at best, though one which, through switching costs, will trap people just as Xitter did. They accepted venture capital funds, and so when the time comes, will have to somehow recoup that from their users. At the moment, they’re in the glue-trap phase, attracting their users with promises to be open and not screw them over (see also: the early days of Facebook). Once enough are there, and have brought their friends and built personally meaningful networks dependent on BlueSky, the trap will close: third-party APIs will be restricted to the point of not providing an escape (as happened with Reddit and Xitter), the user-configurable algorithms will get unremovable additions that gradually increase the amount of ads, influencer content, AI pink-slime and whatever else they want in your feed, and then you’ll lose the ability to see all the content you selected, all the better to keep you refreshing and scrambling for anything you may have missed. And then, since all your friends and the cool people you follow are there, your choices will be to stay and suck it up, or effectively become a hermit.

and apparently Nazis are following suit.

Someone should perhaps spin up a Mastodon/Misskey/something instance named swifties.social and bring them into the fediverse.

How easy is it to strip DRM from Kobo ebooks?

Have they thought of putting in a crypto wallet? Or just forcibly enshittifying every aspect of it with AI?

Why would a PM who saved his party from a popular leftist movement have sympathy for Pinochet? It makes no sense.

Heavy-handed metaphor is heavy-handed

That sound you hear is red-meat-eating gamer dudes with stoic beards going off to cancel out the Swifties

It’s always the ones you most suspect

That also happened to the avant-pop musician Momus (in Greece, some time in the 90s). It was featured in a BBC documentary, IIRC.

Someone could make Union Jack-patterned poppies, for those who want to show in no uncertain terms how gammony they are. They could sell them through ads in the Daily Mail, arguing that the traditional red poppy has been taken over by “wokeness”, and make a lot of money.

The Harambe of our times

Evelyn as a man’s name, if you want to be really old school.

If they were doing so in bulk, probably. As a one-off for one’s own use, doing so with the fit and finish of the commercial product would cost a lot more.

I wonder if they’ll all be blacklisted from entering the Schengen zone (Germany has a policy of banning BDS advocates).

They’re exactly as scientific as the Victorian spiritualists who talked about “vibrational energies” and such, which is to say, not at all.

It’s always the deeply closeted projecting their repression outwards