Category: Random

Personal posts or those that don’t fit in any other category.

Random

I miss my Mazda 323

It was not a great car. I mean, it’s a Mazda, so it’s pretty good overall, but it was a vehicle from 2003. That’s the last year Mazda made the 323 before switching to the Mazda3. So, great car all around, except for this particular one, which had gone around more than 200,000 kilometers before we bought it. We dipped …

Random

Well, would you look at that

It is sad that, while being in a country with more than one café on each corner, it’s hard to find good coffee, to the point where Starbucks is an acceptable substitute. Even more because Starbucks over-roast their coffee, so much so that this “blonde roast” is more like a medium roast everywhere else. On the other hand, I’ve never …

Random

The phonology of European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese

There is some weird stuff going on with these two variants that I think it’s interesting to explore because they diverge in more than just vocabulary, as the phonology for each one moved in different directions — and in the European Portuguese case, removed itself quite a bit from the usual path Romance languages have been following. I should note …

Random

Random nostalgia-inducing things

Whenever I listen to AC/DC, I instantly remember of Neverwinter Nights. It’s kinda weird, but it kinda makes sense: I bought my NwN’s hard box copy (which I still have) and a CD version of Back in Black together, in the same place. (It was in a hypermarket.) When NwN was being installed, Back in Black was playing on my …

Random

The Eurasian steppe

Note: this was originally posted on cohost as a response to a chain of posts about the manga A Bride’s Story. The post was slightly edited here so it wouldn’t depend on context for comprehension. The Eurasian steppe is incredibly fascinating to me, for geographic reasons, and it’s absolutely saddening that it’s still part of Russia – because, you know, colonization and Russification …

Random

The etymology of Slav and slave is weirdly documented

I revisit this obsession every year to check if there’s any change or newer documentation regarding their etymology Fair warning: I’m not a linguist or researcher, just some obsessed dude. I have some interest in Eastern Europe, especially before they became Orthodox Christians, and from time to time I like to look for the etymology research on the word “slav”, …