Their pupils are vertical slits so they can let more or less light in, depending on the surrounding light. Note how they pupils dilate by a lot when in the dark, but if your cat is lazying under the Sun the slit gets really narrow.

Linux is only a kernel. It isn’t a full operating system; it’s only a small (albeit central) part of one. Everything else is components like the GNU utils, X and/or Wayland, so goes on. That’s why some people call Debian, Fedora, Arch etc. “GNU/Linux distributions”, to highlight that those components are damn important.

Android uses the Linux kernel (or a modification of), but it lacks practically every single other thing you’d see in a common GNU/Linux distribution. And applications are incompatible - you can’t run Android applications in, say, Debian, nor vice versa.

And, more importantly, Android lacks what makes GNU/Linux worth using: commitment to free and open source software (FOSS).

Sure, you can fork Android. Some already did it; it’s called GrapheneOS. But when people say they want a “Linux phone”, they mean they want a phone version of a GNU/Linux distribution, because of that commitment to FOSS. You don’t get it from Android.

“Cocaine, I dislike. Kittens, I snort.” - Yoda.

He probably tried snorting kittens after seeing Mario doing it, and then he got addicted:

I don’t know a name, but if making a Pokémon city out of it, please place it in an island near Cinnabar (#E34234), in Kanto.

“Yellow-red red”.

I’m half-joking. (Yellow-red is the old name for orange.) There isn’t a primary word for that specific colour, but I’ve seen people calling the colours in the #FF4000~FF5000 range “orange red”.

I wonder why languages lost that form, because it seems really useful to have a single verb for those.

I am not sure, but I think it’s due to the changes in the passive. Latin had proper passive forms for plenty verbs, and a lot of those verbs handling states were either deponent (passive-looking with active meaning; like irascor) or relied on the passive for the state (like terreo “I terrify” → terreor “I’m terrified”). Somewhere down the road the Romance languages ditched it for the sake of the analytical passive, sum + participle.

I’m saying this because, while irascor died, the participle survived in e.g. Portuguese (Lat. iratum → Por. irado, “angered”). And it got even re-attached to a new verb (irar “to cause anger”).

It isn’t something you’d expect people to say; like, “hoy estoy miedoso, pero mañana estaré valiente” sounds weird as fuck. But it isn’t agrammatical, the oddity there is semantic.

I know some German but I’m not proficient with it.

It’s easier to analyse the sentence by including the subject, typically omitted: “es ist mir kalt” = “it is me cold”, or “it’s cold to me”. It’s a lot like saying “that’s blue to me”, you know? Like, it isn’t like you are cold or blue, it’s something else, but you’re experiencing it. (It’s a dative of relation, in both languages.)

“Mir” is German for “me” or “to me” roughly, right?

Roughly, yes. But that gets messy, there’s no good equivalent.

Think on it this way: you have a bunch of situations where you’d use the first person, right? English arbitrarily splits those situations between “me” and “I”; German does it between “ich”, “mich”, and “mir”.

That German dative is used in situations like:

• if a verb demands two objects, one gets the dative; e.g. “er gibt mir das Buch” (he gives me the book).
• if the preposition demands it; e.g. “er spricht mit mir” = “he speaks with me”
• if you got a dative of relation (like the above), or benefaction (something done for another person), etc.

I tried to learn some German at some point, but I didn’t manage to learn enough to get comfortable with the various cases.

I got to thank Latin for that - by the time I started studying German, the cases felt intuitive.

But… really, when you’re dealing with Indo-European languages, you’re going to experience at least some grammatical hell: adpositions (English), cases (Latin), a mix of both (German), but never “neither”.

Speaking on Latin, it just clicked me it does something else than the languages you listed - those states/emotions get handled primarily by the verb:

• hungry - esurio (verb, “I’m hungry”)
• angry - irascor (verb, “I’m angry”)
• cold - frigeo (verb, “I’m chilly/cold”)
• scared - timeo (verb, “I fear/have fear”)
• brave - fortis (adjective, “strong”); animosus (adjective, roughly “adamant”, “stubborn”, “angry”)

German also mixes it a fair bit. Following merc’s table in order:

1. hungry - ich habe Hunger / ich bin hungrig
2. angry - ich bin böse / ich bin wütend
3. cold - mir ist kalt
4. scared - ich habe Angst
5. brave - ich bin mutig

#4 uses haben (to have) + noun; #2 and #5 use sein (to be) + adjective.

For #1 you’ll typically see the noun + haben. Adjective + sein is perfectly viable, but a bit less common, and I feel like it leans towards metaphoric usage; e.g. «ich bin hungrig nach Liebe», literally “I’m hungry for love”.

#3 uses the dative instead, it’s roughly “it’s cold for me”. If you use “ich bin kalt”, you’ll convey that your temperature is low, not that you’re feeling cold.

Being the other main language behind the drunk hodgepodge that is English

That’s inaccurate.

To keep it short, the situation between English, Dutch and German is a lot like the situation between Romance languages: they have a common origin (West Germanic), one isn’t from the other. And while English got bits and bobs of vocab due to Norse and Norman influence, vocab is rather superficial, and most oddities of the language were born in the islands.

This table is a good example. English is basically adjectivising almost everything physiological and emotional, while both German and the Romance languages would use a mix of adjectives and nouns instead. (With the Romance languages typically preferring nouns, but that isn’t a hard rule.)

Fixed - thanks for pointing it out. (Portuguese.)

It’s a bit deeper - in Spanish and other Romance languages, emotions and physiological states are typically conveyed by a noun, not by an adjective*. Like in Catoblepas’ example “tengo miedo”, it’s literally “I have fear”; miedo is a noun. You could use one of the two copulas by forcing an adjective, but it’ll change the meaning:

• soy miedoso - you’re a scaredy-cat, you’re often afraid
• estoy miedoso - I’m not a native speaker** so my intuition might be wrong, but it sounds like you’re going through hard times and you’re currently afraid of random stuff.

*there are exceptions, like “feliz” (happy; adjective).

**my native language does something similar, but the verbs don’t match well.

Relevant bit: the wine in question can be must. As in, the grape juice is prepared in every single way as if you were going to ferment it, but you don’t, so there’s zero alcohol. That’s what they get if, for example, they have a drinking problem.

They often have simple “solutions” to the others’ problems.

Much like Marie Antoniette — if you don’t have bread, eat cake, problem solved. /s

That hints both things are in effect - you kind of expect the contraction and the object.

Now thinking, perhaps it’s also the lack of an object? As in, would “Don’t Split” and “Do Not Split Us” sound weird for you?

(That might explain why I personally don’t see the slogan as weird - my L1 allows object omission, English doesn’t.)

Hong Kong has its own English varieties. Due to their ties to Chinese Pidgin English, they tend to phrase some things in a similar way as you would in Sinitic languages; such as in “make do” and “long time no see”.

I think this might be a lesser case of that - depending on which English varieties you’re exposed to, it might sound a bit weird as a slogan; I think you’re expecting a verbless construction, like “No Splits” or “No Cracks”; or perhaps a contraction, like “Don’t Split Us”.

So, that’s a turdigrade?
…I’ll take my leave.

Fuck, this reminds me I was going to sub this movie into Classical Latin, but never finished the translation - only this scene.

No load of hard cash is large enough to allow a company to systematically screw things up; specially not under an economic system that equates “stable profits” with “failure to grow”.

And Nintendo’s actions aren’t the result of [metaphorical] brain damage; there’s a consistent pattern here of exploiting brand value for short-term profit.

I worded it in a dumb/certain/silly way but, unless drastic changes happen, I do find it likely to happen.

Look at how often Nintendo is surfacing negatively on the news:

• harassing a small dev studio over patents,
• trying to kill emulation while profiting off it,
• bricking hardware already sold to customers,
• demanding unreasonable prices for new games,
• dictating if you shall be allowed to feature one of its games in a speedrunning event…

Nintendo stopped being seen as a company that enables your fun, to become one that gatekeeps it. That’s brand damage - and really bad for Nintendo’s console sales; people are only willing to invest in a console if they’re reasonably certain they can have fun with it.

And at the same time, there are voices within and around Nintendo pushing the company towards the mobile market. Remember Pokémon Go? Or Ishihara saying the Switch 1 would flop, because of smartphones? If Nintendo console sales decline meaningfully, those voices will become louder and louder. Eventually Nintendo will focus primarily on the mobile market.

However people don’t typically buy mobile games; the monetisation strategy is completely different - microtransactions, gacha, lootboxes, all that crap. Most players (the “minnows”) won’t drop a penny on the game, but huge spenders (the “whales”) compensate for that, so it works.

The minnows aren’t just freeloaders, mind you; they’re required to keep the game alive. So mobile game companies need to fine-tune the pressure in their games - it should be just enough to encourage people to spend some money on the game, but not enough to shoo the minnows away.

But we’re talking about Nintendo here. A company willing to damage its own brand for a few additional pennies. Nintendo would not be able to see all those minnows and say “hey, that’s cool”, it would go full “ARE THOSE FREELOADERS STUPID? DON’T THEY KNOW THEY’RE SUPPOSED TO BUY STUFF?”. It would tune the pressure way up, and ruin its mobile market, after it ruined its console market.

…perhaps it should go back to selling playing cards.