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Today I realised how two completelly opposite techniques can be used together to manipulate people in a really consistent way. That’s what the Catholic Church (and religions in general) do: they make complex issues look simple, but they digress for ages about really simple stuff – overall turning the reality upside-down.
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One Galleon is 17 Sickles and one Sickle is 29 Knuts... The wizarding currency isn’t too simple or practical, is it? Muggles also have struggled for ages with overcomplicated, inconsistent systems of units. But then we adapted the SI – and since then we got used to using this simple, decimal system.
There is one thing though that we still measure in strange units. 60 seconds go in a minute, 60 minutes go in an hour, 24 hours go in a day. There’s 365 days in a year, except when it’s 366, and they can be divided into 52 weeks of 7 days, with some days left over, or alternatively into 12 months of 28, 29, 30 or 31 days each, depending on... reasons.
Could we simplify all that mess?
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Religious people often threaten atheists with what will happen to them after death, if they don’t convert. Yeah, cause out of all the different made-up stories about what happens after death, it’s specifically yours that’s gonna be the right one. Right...
Let’s revert that question into “what if you’re wasting your life on religious bullshit”. It’s not as scary, because if it’s the case, you won’t notice you were wrong (that’s how being dead works). Still, your current life is the only one that you know for sure you’re gonna get. Are you really willing to waste it?
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I’ve lived in three countries so far, and for me it’s really interesting to see how differently they do some things that I’ve never even thought could be done differently. Today: addresses.
Almost everyone knows that in Japan you use blocks instead of street names and that buildings within a block are numbered chronologically, not geographically. But that’s Asia, right? How much can one European country be different from another?
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15 września ulicami mojego rodzinnego Szczecina przejdzie pierwszy w historii Marsz Równości. Trzymam kciuki za Lambdę, by wreszcie się to udało!
Tymczasem “środowisko patriotyczne i kombatanckie” śle do prezydenta Krzystka list, który jest tak absurdalny, że aż nie wiem, czy się z niego śmiać, czy położyć się i czekać na śmierć z zażenowania.
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I’ve lived in three countries so far, and I got some official documents from all of them (Germans definitely spam way more than the others). I think it’s interesting to compare, how different approaches they have to the design of those documents.
I baked a cake. It wasn’t hard, it wasn’t impressive, I don’t have a picture to share, I’m not planning to use this recipe ever again or even to eat it whole.
But still, it was quite an important cake for me.
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There is a website I’ve created many years ago, Stosłowia (Polish only), which collects stories of up to a hundred words. It never got any users, but I didn’t really care to promote it in any way either.
Last week I’ve decided to rewrite it from scratch, because so many things were wrong about it – from an ancient backend in plain PHP with hardcoded credentials and no separation of concerns, to login with Facebook (and only Facebook) that stopped working... Now it’s a fresh Symfony 4.1 with Encore with some new features (like automatic screenshot generation, seen for instance on Twitter).
But what I’d like to show you, is how a couple of pretty small design changes have made the whole website way nicer visually (IMHO).
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There is a song by Faun (“Tanz mit mir”) in which a girl agrees to dance with a guy and then spend the night with him, but only if he is “faithful” and “doesn’t kiss any other girl”.
It got me thinking... From a perspective of a non-monogramist that sounds like an extremely low bar for cheating. Really, a kiss is too much already? Maybe he can’t even check out a girl? Oh, right, he probably can’t.
If we counted how many kisses or hugs me and my husband have given out to other guys, we’d have to get divorced repeatedly... Does it mean people in open relationships have no bar whatsoever? Hell no! We can feel cheated too!
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Pope Francis wrote a letter to all Catholics, in which he vows no more sexual abuse cover-ups. Cool... So when pope does it, it’s called “a Letter to the People of God”? If I vowed not to cover for criminals, it would be called “basic human decency”.
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It’s honestly diffucult being a webdeveloper in the world of shitty websites. I guess that’s how hairdressers feel when they see my pathetic hair after it’s been a while since my last visit...
But the thing is, even though it’s technically easy to use scissors and clippers, I don’t do that on my own hair, I leave that to the professionals.
Continue reading… (~5 min read)