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Joined 14 days ago
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Cake day: January 12th, 2026

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  • I am able to follow an American movie by just listening to it, but if I do turn on the subtitles, I get a lot more out of it! I need to spend less of my brain capacity interpreting the foreign language and can use more of it for understanding the social context shown in the film. Or the scenery. I understand more meanings and can read better between the lines when I can see a decent translation into my mother tongue in the subtitles.

    But also: Netflix and one of the Finnish TV stations save extremely much in their translations. That means the translations often contain gross errors or leave things outright untranslated. Even then the subtitles often help, because if my understanding of what was said and what I can read in the translation are about the same, then everything is probably fine.

    In any case: My English is not all that bad, as you can see, but I still turn the subtitles on whenever I can, and I am much less interested in watching a foreign film without them.

    I am largely unable to enjoy song’s lyrics in English if I cannot read them at the same time. In song lyrics the difference is much more noticeable than in movies. I can get about 75 % of the enjoyment of a movie even without subtitles, but lyrics in songs almost become just another musical instrument if I cannot have the lyrics in text format to follow while listening to a song in a foreign language.

    Also, if I try to write something beautiful, it is usually best that I write it in Finnish and then translate it into English, because I can express myself so very much better in Finnish than in English! Takes more than twice the time compared to just outright writing the text in English, but the plot of a story becomes much better if I’ve written it down in my mother tongue. There will be more nuances in the people’s behaviour, and that translates into a more interesting text overall. Even after translation.



  • Many good answers have been given already. One more is that many people understand it would be better for the environment and their own health if they biked instead of driving a car. Yet getting a car was one of the symbols of having the means for a good life. If you are able to let go of your car, it shows that you have held pointless things as important parts of your identity. You don’t want to have been a moron, do you?

    So, you suppress the idea that you could be doing something else than what you are doing. And other people bicycling is kind of in-your-face. They show that you could have an alternative, and that causes a feeling of guilt in you. And that feeling of guilt is uncomfortable, and the people riding their bicycles are what have triggered that feeling. In other words: They have ruined your day by making you feel guilt. A completely self-created guilt, but an annoying feeling all the same. And then you hate everything that is connected to those people that keep ruining your days by the virtue of visibly existing.

    This is not necessarily the reason for all of the people opposing bike infrastructure, but it is one of the important reasons for many.



  • Tuuktuuk@anarchist.nexustoScience Memes@mander.xyzHONK
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    23 hours ago

    That’s pretty much the Finnish language :D

    Just check out the difference between these two phrases written in our goose-y language:

    Tapaan sinut.

    means I will meet you.

    Tapan sinut.

    means I will kill you.

    (You can use your machine translation of choice to check the meanings of those two phrases, if you wish.)



  • Once upon a time there was a crow who was befriended with a talking cow that really, really liked to sit in a swing! (The original name of the book actually implies that the cow has a child, which is kind of freaky, because there is zero mention about the child, and actually reason to believe the child is nowhere around anymore. Why is the book not talking about the cow’s trauma at all?!)

    In any case, once the cow had climbed to a tree for fun, and it was very important that the farmer won’t notice, because cows are not supposed to climb trees. The crow did a good job warning the cow when the farmer was approaching and damn it, I cannot remember what the hell the book tells, wait, maybe in the children’s room there’s another book about the same two animals!

    …nope, couldn’t find it. But, would you like to hear a story of a father who recently found three children’s books that should have been brought back to the library a week ago?

    I hope this story about a crow sated your appetite for crows!







  • Tuuktuuk@anarchist.nexustoScience Memes@mander.xyzSlay Girl
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    3 days ago

    I think I saw her once, actually! A crow was harassing one of the small ones – it looked like it was trying to catch it to eat, probably?

    A seagull saw what’s going on and went full-blown “I’m a parent as well, you absolute damn fucker!”, and chased the crow away. And really not just a few tens of metres away or so, but really chased them away from the whole general area where the mom with really cool hair was swimming with her family!

    When the seagull came back, I gave it something nice to eat, because, damn, flying rat or not, that was a cool move! And I happened to have something seagull compatible, not just some bread that will do more harm than good.





  • Yeah, for what I know I my family used to post a lot there as well. Facebook just mostly stopped showing any content from them some years ago. But when nothing really comes out of it, they don’t bother. They post something, I see some commercial content instead.

    I post something, they see some commercial content instead.

    I’m a bit surprised to hear Facebook works for some people like it worked a decade ago!

    But also, Finnish culture is very different from US culture in how we talk and when, so maybe the algorithm just doesn’t recognize the Finnish kind of engagement and considers us utterly uninterested in each other? Or maybe I’ve just been lucky and FB had been hiccuping? Dunno, there’s no meaningful difference between PieFed and the little of what FB fed me that was not crud.