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Joined 1 month ago
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Cake day: October 20th, 2025

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  • I do need razors, I do need tools, I do need camping gear, I do need bath products, I do want jewelry.

    But what you buy me, will never be what I actually want. We have a family tradition, where we go online as a family, and order stuff we actually want. No need for surprises and pretending to be happy with something you didn’t want.

    On a similar note, the family christmas dinner is pizza with pre-made tapas/snacks, consumed in PJs while watching netflix. No one’s stressed, tired or spending too much time in the kitchen.

    Cancer and too many funerals, really does shed a family of fucks to give.






  • Fun fact:

    In standard Dutch:

    • poep = poop = shit.
    • Poepen = to poop.

    In Flemish/Belgian Dutch:

    • poep = backside (as in the poop deck, the French la poupe = backside).
    • poepen = to fuck. Etymological root comes from pop(children’s doll), root is probably the latin pupa=doll/girl. I assume the English puppet also comes from the latin pupa. Poppen used to mean playing with dolls. Poppen became poepen, perhaps through the influence of poep/la poupe.

    This is entirely irrelevant knowledge, but I find it kinda adorable and interesting.


  • You’re being flippant and know better, but I think it’s important to state the obvious and add some nuance. Not to defend the Belgians, but to emphasize the central role capitalism played in the death of up to 15 million people, and how corporate-colonialism never really ended.

    Arguably, the worst atrocities in Congo occured when it was the private property of king Leopold, who granted vast concessions to private companies with international investors. For example: the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company. They declared bankrupcy in Belgium, and refounded themselves as Abir Company in the Congo Free State, so they could avoid paying tax and avoid Belgian regulation. A corporation moving production/extraction/exploitation abroad, relocating their headquarters to a third country, so they can avoid tax and regulation…

    The DRC officially became independent of Belgium in 1960, but colonial corporate rule and influence never truly ended. King Leopold founded Compagnie du Katanga, Compagnie du Katanga became Union Minière du Haut-Katanga, Union Minière du Haut-Katanga became Umicore. Umicore is very active in Congo to this day. A few years ago Elon Musk signed a deal with them to help supply Congolese cobalt for Tesla cars.

    The soon to be trillionaire fascist son of a man who owned an emerald mine in a former British colony, runs a company that produces cars that include cobalt mined by a company that helped kill 15 million people in the Congo Free State.

    People prefer to look the other way, then act surprised when the chickens come home to roost.







  • English isn’t my native language, but I watch a lot of English language youtube videos. When I watch youtube without an adblocker, I now get to enjoy all the local language adverts, automatically translated into a robotic English voice.

    It’s often quite literally unintelligible. The algorithm and American companies are too stupid to realise people can speak more than one language. Their LLMs are incredibly bad in languages other than English. And I can’t disable it, because they clearly want to push this unfinished crap down our throats.

    AI is nowhere near ready enough, nowhere near as widely applicable, and nowhere as useful as the tech giants pretend it is, and they’ll never be able to make a return on all the money they’ve invested in it for years to come.

    It’s the dotcom bubble all over again. It’s pump and dump on a massive scale. Anyone with even a bit of sense knows it. It’d be funny if this wasn’t about to cause a massive recession, that will cost countless people their livelihoods and even their lives.

    On the plus side, if the recession’s bad enough, it might help offset some of the environmental damage that’s been caused. And just like with the dotcom bubble, after 10-20 years, the technology will have matured enough to warrant at least some of the hype.