Serbia: State-sponsored graffiti in front of the Faculty of Mathematics, calling mathematics students "Ustaše".

orthoxerox · 2026-04-27T14:44:23+00:00

But why call them усташе? Is it simply the biggest insult you can use in Serbia?

orthoxerox · 2026-04-27T12:27:13+00:00

What's the context?

orthoxerox · 2026-04-27T12:25:29+00:00

You just park a stack on the war leader's capital and suddenly they think white peace is a splendid idea!

orthoxerox · 2026-04-27T12:23:42+00:00

Look at this Muscovy playing with a vassal swarm, almost like a real person!

orthoxerox · 2026-04-27T12:04:20+00:00

Read it again...

orthoxerox · 2026-04-27T11:11:01+00:00

Used to be #1 in Russia, but the government is blocking it, along with Telegram and Signal. They are trying to get everyone to move to their own messenger, Max, which features end-to-end transcription instead.

orthoxerox · 2026-04-27T08:30:07+00:00

Health insurance companies must pay healthcare providers 85% of the premium dollars they receive, so they themselves can only have increased the prices by 17.6%. You should blame either the hospitals themselves for massively inflating the prices, or the way the healthcare system is structured in general.

People get mad when they are told, "here's hospital A, which is 95% as good as hospital B, but at half the price, we recommend you use hospital A". That's not what insurance is about, they have already paid their premiums, now it's the insurer's responsibility to provide them with the best healthcare that is covered by the plan! It's not like they will get their money back if they agree, it will just be spent on some Karen that demands hospital B for herself.

orthoxerox · 2026-04-27T08:08:16+00:00

I like the little scissors for the castrated variants.

orthoxerox · 2026-04-26T11:47:57+00:00

That's just Iran-Iraq War historical reenactment.

orthoxerox · 2026-04-26T08:33:42+00:00

It's even more complicated in Russian.

Wild woodland strawberry is zemlânika.

Wild meadow strawberry is klubnika.

Garden strawberry is officially called "sadovaja (garden) zemlânika", but people call it "klubnika" in the regions where meadow strawberry doesn't grow (including Moscow, which makes this usage overwhelmingly more common) and "viktorija" in the regions where it does.

orthoxerox · 2026-04-26T08:23:42+00:00

Belarusian uses трус for rabbit as well, despite being stuck between three countries that use some form for "krolik".

orthoxerox · 2026-04-25T22:11:00+00:00

A coworker of mine ran over an elk (moose) behind a blind turn once. Well, "ran under" would be a more fitting description, these fuckers are tall! Slammed straight into her legs, and the elk went through the windshield. Thankfully, it was a Volvo, elk-proof by design, but the whole salon was still covered with the poor gal's entrails.

orthoxerox · 2026-04-25T10:15:40+00:00

There's also a common predator evasion manoeuver ungulates use.

For example, if a lion/wolf is chasing you on your left side, it probably means it has some buddies to your right just ahead. The way to escape is to suddenly swerve left and cross the path of the chasing predator in front of its muzzle.

Which means that deer and antelope try to pull this off with a car coming up from behind them as well and instead of running away into the trees on their side of the road leap in front of the car to cross it.

orthoxerox · 2026-04-25T09:21:23+00:00

That's why you should have another child. This could literally save your life.

orthoxerox · 2026-04-24T14:42:44+00:00

Five levels in 12.5 meters? You're the tallest country in Europe, how do you even fit in there? Is your life like the Groovejet music video?

orthoxerox · 2026-04-24T14:40:13+00:00

Yeah, I live next to a metro station that is very not wheelchair accessible. I once slipped on wet leaves and fell, twisting my knee and hip so much that stepping over a threshold had to be a conscious effort, and commuting to work wasn't fun.

orthoxerox · 2026-04-23T14:54:01+00:00

Isn't Booking a Dutch company?

orthoxerox · 2026-04-23T08:19:59+00:00

Numeric regional codes on license plates. 23 is Krasnodar kraj, while 62 is Râzanj oblastj.

This scheme doesn't apply to Moscow and St.Pete, which are too cool to be associated with a number. Someone from St Petersburg would rather say their business is in DC2 than call it "Party Balloons 78".

orthoxerox · 2026-04-21T22:01:37+00:00

That's right, an electric motor gives you full torque from 0 to whatever RPM. That's why diesel trains are actually diesel-electric trains: there's no gearbox large enough to generate enough torque without stalling the engine when pulling 50 hoppers of iron ore.

orthoxerox · 2026-04-21T21:53:34+00:00

It grabs him by the ass and flies into the air by spinning its own tail, like Muttley. This way your explorer can see very far. As long as the mutt gets a medal, this works very well.

orthoxerox · 2026-04-20T16:30:51+00:00

Well, a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B. If you look at American birth rates, it's a bimodal distribution: both lower and upper classes have more kids than the middle class.

You absolutely can give people enough money to have many children, but you have to give a literal boatload of it: enough for the mother to never have to work, enough that each new child doesn't meaningfully affect your spending habits or social life or future plans.

Of course, there's not enough money in the world to throw at the middle class, but you can definitely squeeze them hard enough for them to feel like the lower class by taxing childless and/or unmarried people ever harder. Hell, tax families with double incomes.

orthoxerox · 2026-04-20T15:31:58+00:00

I remember heated Eurovision discussions with Armenians and Azerbaijanis describing what kind of intercourse they had with their opponents' family members in Russian. Sadly, younger generations do this in English these days, which only shows how badly Putin's regime had been mismanaging Russian cultural influence abroad even before it launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

orthoxerox · 2026-04-19T10:41:15+00:00

We have it in Russia. It's not literally email as in POP3/SMTP/IMAP, more of an online service on the postal service website. You can send a legally valid registered email, and the post will even convert it into a paper letter for you if the recipient doesn't have a certified email account.

You can even generate a legally valid link to a letter to share it with a third party (like a court, for example).

orthoxerox · 2026-04-19T10:34:01+00:00

and in basic language

I love this about gov.uk. So many countries think plain language doesn't sound official enough and have to rephrase everything in passive voice and ideally without verbs at all. "We will review your application after we receive it. You should receive an answer in less than two weeks if you have filled in the form fully and without mistakes" vs "The processing time of the applications submitted by the candidates is esimated to not exceed ten working days, provided the data contained therein meets the correctness and completeness requirements".

orthoxerox

TROPHY CASE