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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I was an agnostic for a very long time.

    My main view of things - I couldn’t know if there was a god or if there wasn’t. But all that ultimate judgement shit never made any sense for me. If you’re just behaving decently because of fear of ultimate judgment, then you’re not a decent person. Ok if god would want me not to be an asshole, I’d need to be that out of my free will. And if a god demanded adherence to some random rules out of the blue - that god wouldn’t have a moral compass and I wouldn’t want to have to do anything with them in my life, being smitten down at the end would have been a consequence for me anyways.

    I just want to be no asshole. So the question of there’s a god or not. I don’t care. God is irrelevant.

    Thus: agnostic

    I started staying I’m an atheist somw time ago, as that’s just quicker and I can go by without explaining.

    Still - if there’s a god around, which is possible but improbable - I’m making sure I make fucking good use of the free will they gave me.












  • Yeah, but when you DO know the system is totally fucked.

    Calling customer service that have no cmie what they’re taking about either, pushing you through a script. One fun time my internet connection was broken and I called the provider. They walked me through all the windows settings to check if I had set up things correctly. I did run Linux, but hat set up Windows for other people so frequently that I knew how each dialog looked and how it’d respond to the failure, so I just lied. FINALLY in the end of the call that guy scheduled a reboot of my port on the provider’s DSLAM which made things work again…

    (And no, not all customer service is like this. I also got amazing support of people who know what they are talking about, but they cost more for the companies than just outsourcing to the cheapest generic call center.)




  • That’s hard to find out. When I was in school I was captivated by American movies and music, mostly all blockbuster movies came out of the us. I’m Gen X and as a teenager I had my TV tuned in to MTV a lot (when it wasn’t in use with the Commodore 64)

    Before that - I’m from the southern part of Germany, so we had a lot of US influence after WW2, whereas other parts of Germany had French, British and Russian military here.

    I suppose WW2 had a big impact in Europe, as English speaking troops came in and saved people from Nazi Germany. Interestingly that’s how it feels in some parts of Germany even (they saved us from the Nazis) - as absurd as it is, when you’re aware how much support the Nazis had in the population.

    Nevertheless English was a big positive thing - and the answer probably is “both the UK and the US”. My dad was a huge Beatles fan as a teenager and fans want to understand the lyrics. All you need is love.

    Also don’t forget Europe has so many languages - so when we talk to each other we use what the most of us know - English. I do believe that the “EU” with its more open borders also brings people to use more English.

    Unfortunately I (unsuccessfully) was taught Latin in school as a third language , not French - so English is my only tool in Europe to communicate beyond my native language. It worked everywhere I visited. From Latin everything I remember is “Marcus hodie in colloseo est. Ubi est Cornelia?” (really. that was chapter 1 in my first latin book, and it’s all I remember)

    In some countries there’s a age gap, with people below 40 or so are much more fluent in English, but AFAIK it’s mandatory as a second language across schools in a big part of Europe. Even in my Generation - I have a lot of friends whom I just share English as a common language with.