The “x just means y” argument has its merits, but there are many words that “just mean” something, but after being used in a bad way now are considered offensive. “Retarded” just means “slowed down”, and “negro” just means “black”. So then the question becomes, who gets to decide if a word is offensive? People with dictionaries, or people who feel offended? Either way, I think society should be consistent.

I did the math for the saffron too, it would be (the equivalence of) $300 in Sweden.

Back in the day, lemon party was my girlfriends first encounter with online nudity.

What started as openSUSE Micro Desktop is now openSUSE Aeon. It’s still RC2, and RC3 will probably be easier to do a clean install since it will add full disk encryption, but if you want to check it out now it’s reliable and works well.

Yes, I think it’s basically the same. With Aeon you get a lot of it automated and already set up, which is good if you want the kind of system that Aeon is. It’s opinionated, so if you want to tinker or want something else I think Tumbleweed is better.

It could be a David Foster Wallace reference. “In the eighth American-educational grade, Bruce Green fell dreadfully in love with a classmate who had the unlikely name of Mildred Bonk. The name was unlikely because if ever an eighth-grader looked like a Daphne Christianson or a Kimberly St.-Simone or something like that, it was Mildred Bonk.”

I’d say (based on his interviews) that he’s an old school social democrat who is disappointed in the direction that social democracy has been heading since the 70s. I don’t think he’s a marxist.

It’s interesting that you call the main character a tyrant, I see him more as a tragic character trying to play by the rules of society, trying to find “something to sell with an extra 0 at the end”. I think his story is about realizing the emptiness of this life, and in the end it all catches up with him, forced to confront his failures. To some extent we are all forced to participate in this society, and I feel a lot of compassion for him. Älskad vare den som sätter sig. Älskad vare den som svettas av skuld eller skam.

One could say that “u” is a lazily written “V”. This was before we had the concept of upper and lower case letters. The roman alphabet used for fancy writing is pretty much exactly as our upper case letters. This was written with a flat brush, but they also had a more cursive everyday alphabet which is quite hard for us to read. Eventually writing with pens made the alphabet evolve into uncial letters that look kind of Tolkienesque. To mark the beginning of a verse they used the old roman fancy letter to have something that stood out in the text, i.e. a versal. “V” is a versal, and “u” was the running text version, but it was considered the same letter. For example they would write “Vniuersum” where we write “Universum” now. Then some complicated things happened in history that necessitated different sounds and the pronounciation split into v, u, and w, over time.

In church latin yes. For example we say “vice versa”, not “wike wersa” (“wike” being two syllables btw). If it helps think of the w as our u. “ui-ke uer-sa”.

If you want to use old latin expressions, and also make people uncomfortable, you can pronounce it the way the romans did. Always pronounce “c” as “k”, and “v” as our “w”, to begin with. “Veni. Vidi. Vici.” becomes “Weni. Widi. Wiki.”, et ketera.