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Cake day: April 17th, 2024

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  • Culture and identity and language and all that is a continuum in the Arab world as it is anywhere else. There are people who would claim that our native language where I’m from shouldn’t be considered “Arabic” but that’s a whole can of worms.

    I am not a linguist, just a layperson.

    I don’t like dividing us into little categories in most contexts because that’s often used in the context of saying “look we’re much better than <other group>” but very broadly four cultural spheres is correct:

    • Levant has stronger Syriac and Turkish influence (which also applies to modern Turkish). Unfortunately that’s used sometimes as evidence that we a different (that’s not bad necessarily) or inherently better (this one is bad) people than the peoples to our south. Lebanon particularly also has a strong reliance on French and to a lesser extent English loanwords. Stereotypically seen as a bit gentle (when being generous) or effeminate (when making fun of it) as far as the spectrum of the language goes.

    • The Gulf is where a lot of modern Arab stereotypes come from. It’s more heterogeneous than most people give it credit for but there’s obviously a distinct culture after crossing into the desert. The line is a bit more blurry on the East side than the West but this might just be my own bias coming from Lebanon. Some surprising English loanwords scattered throughout. More aggressive in tone on average.

    • Egypt is kind of it’s own thing and it’s simultaneously a cultural juggernaut, especially in the past century when it was exporting a ton of music and movies and literature (we were doing that too to a lesser extent). Egypt has a massive population, most of which is very densely concentrated, and a huge media machine. I feel like Egyptian is the most widely understood dialect because all Arabs are exposed to it. Libya is grouped with Egypt sometimes and sometimes it’s not, depending on what you’re comparing.

    • West of Libya is basically alien to me. There’s been more culture coming from there that we are exposed to now, especially music in the past decade. We all like seeing Morocco and Algeria pull off upsets at the World Cup but we see them as kind of their own bubble all the way over there. Their dialects are difficult for us to grasp and even the vocabulary they use is very different. Personally, I’ve defaulted to French or English with the few Moroccans I’ve met while abroad. Yay colonialism. Although we do bond over comparing language differences (“You say what for pants? That’s funny.” Etc )

    • Then there’s Standard Arabic (we call it Fus7a), which nobody speaks natively but we all learn in school. Most books and articles are written in Modern Standard Arabic. Divided opinion among the more nationalistic types on whether or not it’s important or should be taught. It’s the formalized form of the language and while I’m terrible at writing or speaking it, I do find it useful when I need to fall back to a word I can’t think of. I think of it as a kind of linguistic gear change. You can also drop the odd unexpected MSA word or form here and there to catch people off guard and punctuate your speech but maybe that’s just me.






  • Which is partially felt more because and is exacerbated by the fact that companies and their shareholders feel entitled to capture every drop of money you have, to the point that buying a pizza comes with the option to spread the cost over four months just in case there’s 10$ from a person that they could only capture by offering the option.

    I live half a planet away from America and even I’ve seen it. Disgusting.

    Remember when we looked at phone apps that cost more than .99 and thought the developers were greedy?


  • If you still think the hardware is pretty good, you haven’t been using their newer hardware.

    I think I wrote a comment about this recently, but their newest mouse with a layout I like (G604) was made with terrible soft rubber that is practically designed to disintegrate with use. All their mouse switches are also short life crappy switches that stop working relatively quickly.

    Soldering new switches into the G604 is an absolute PITA because it was designed by people who didn’t care for repair. Still doable, just annoying. I just wish the rubber was replaced with the grippy hard textured plastic they used a few years earlier.

    At least you only need to use the software at first when you’re setting things up.


  • Yeah we don’t really mix blood types at all here in Lebanon, and I really doubt they do anywhere else. Universal donor and universal recipient is just theory, in practice it’s easier to receive O- than AB+ because AB is really uncommon (as is the case everywhere).

    AFAIK the A/B and Rhesus antigens are not the only markers and there are more blood compatibility components that are taken into account if possible.


  • Shame it’s not on iOS. I’ve corrected a few things on local maps directly on Google’s platform (hilariously, it keeps rejecting some of them which are clearly visible from the satellite image), but I’ve always wanted to fix up the local OSM map. It’s just really intimidating as someone with only a very surface level understanding of how GIS works.



  • It’s kind of nice how everyone is in on the joke now? Like I think if you told the average person 15 years ago that a lot of history “documentaries” are racially motivated drivel you’d get a funny reaction.

    I think I could show this to my (quite conservative) parents and get a good chuckle out of them now.

    Granted I’m from the Middle East and the racist theories we have here have some of the roles swapped around. We don’t have 24 hour electricity but the average person genuinely believes we are the god-chosen enlightened people who are only held back by some combination of hubris, western empire, and “western empire” (this one should have a bunch of parentheses around it, several sets, I don’t want to get caught in some spam filter).





  • ggtdbz@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoPeople Twitter@sh.itjust.worksLife is pain
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    2 months ago

    Well, there used to be a Spotify feature where you could tell it to generate a “radio” (algorithmic playlist) based on an existing playlist you have.

    You have all your favorite songs of x mood in one playlist? Let the algorithm help you find more of this stuff!

    Thankfully the execs at Spotify rightfully noticed that this was a good feature and immediately fucking axed it in the past year or so.

    That was my favorite feature. That was why I used their damn service.



  • I’ve seen those, and while the appeal of something I can set and not have to turn off at an exact time is there, I always felt like cleaning it looks like a bigger hassle than cleaning a small pot.

    The one I remember seeing had you puncture the base of the eggs, and then they sit on a plastic tray over a heated metal pad. The metal pad is attached to the heating element so you can’t just scrub that with soapy water if any egginess sticks to it. The plastic tray also looked like it had a lot of nooks and crannies where all sorts of eggy proteins can get stuck.

    That and single-purpose appliances don’t really appeal to me as I don’t have much space. Not to discount how helpful they are for people with different physical needs than me, but I don’t know.

    I eat enough hard boiled eggs that I consider getting one every so often, which is why this comment is as unnecessarily long as it is.


  • I did get shown the ad, I thought “huh, it’s not like Apple to do ragebait marketing”. I thought that was just what that is, and that everyone can see that. The “Newphoria” marketing tagline I think was verging on it as well, but I didn’t see anyone moaning about it online. Much harder to avoid for me because it was on giant billboards and shop signs.

    I guess it’s just working as intended if people are recycling it every day into news fodder, not like there’s anything else going on in the world (ongoing genocide? No we have four tweets about Apple’s new ad and boy are these tweets strongly worded!)



  • I think having it in the post body would be helpful.

    I found these to be a bit offbeat until I read a comment a week or so ago describing these comics as “boomer absurdism” and amazingly those two words gave me something to grab onto to find the humor in the weirder ones. That’s the what made it click for me. A date would help too.