weev

I want to take a moment to denounce Anglishizers — those in the Anglish movement who assert that the Norman conquest and its linguistic consequences have been a disaster for the English language. These people are fucking stupid, and couldn’t be more wrong. This is an extremely popular Tweet, and was widely screenshotted and shared on a number of forums I post on. In regards to this tweet, to faithfully delatinize you would have to say "hoose" and not "haus" -- if you're going to insist on Anglicization, why choose the post-Norman Middle English pronunciation of words over the traditional Anglo-Frisian one? Probably because it is obvious that "hoos" sounds fucking ridiculous. Anglishizers constantly do this kind of sleight of hand, because they know that Old English is full of ridiculous Dr. Seuss sounding words and they want to delatinize without sounding like a fucking Swede. That really proves that these people are motivated by anti-Latin sentiment more than any love of the ancient language. The fact that they are telling people to say sneedinghouse and not sneedinghoos makes it self-evident that Norman transformation of English changed it for the better. Regardless, the poetry of John Keats, Lord Byron, and Wordsworth is the greatest in history. Even famous poets writing in other languages have said so. If you’ve never seen William F. Buckley interview the Jorge Luis Borges, the titan of Spanish language poetry and literature, it’s worth a watch just for him to explain why he thinks English is vastly superior to his own language: You can make English soft and sexy like a Romance language in seductive sonnets, flowing and dreamlike as a Celtic language, but also give it the sharpness of Germanic ones when needing fury and resentment. English is capable of having dozens of thematic flavors conveying the same idea. Middle English made English a great language of thought, giving it the scientific precision of Latin and letting it further take loans from Greek, enabling English's future transition into the global language of science, engineering, and computing. I’m sorry, but mispronouncing the words of various North Germanic languages to make a millennia-late attempt at delatinizing is fucking cringe. This is like speaking Klingon for people that really hate Catholics. Like any decent American of Protestant stock I too oppose the papacy, but not to such a degree that I’m willing to make myself sound like a fucking retard over it.

Okay I really didn’t notice for a long time that my client doesn’t seem to support NIP-17 DMs at all. I just started using @Mailstr which I think is the most awesome service on Nostr. I found it by accident, searching for a domain name while building the exact same product. But the DMs didn’t come through. So I pop open a second client that supports NIP-17 DMs and notice that I not only have the messages from Mailstr but some other people who have DM’d me in the past. This is why I have a Session ID in my profile — because DMs on Nostr are a *complete fucking disaster*. There is only one reasonably good UI/UX experience for normal users on MacOS Desktop — @Nostur — and it doesn’t support NIP-17. Imagine talking to a normal person and them being told that they didn’t get the DMs from their girlfriend because there are multiple fucking ways to send a DM on Nostr. This is horrific and I can’t believe there isn’t a concerted push to demand everyone pick whatever a standard is and stick with it. To make this even worse, NIP-17 is also a stupidly broken standard. The spec mentions “optional forward secrecy” but the author doesn’t seem to understand how forward secrecy is achieved or the idea that the phrase actually means something in the context of cryptography (this is maximally cringe). Only 0xchat’s “Secret Chats” or White Noise provide reasonable mechanisms for Forward Secrecy, and they aren’t even NIPs at all. Don’t send me messages via either of these, because they only provide phone apps and I do not use phones. The only way to fix things is to make the situation temporarily worse — create a *brand fucking new* protocol NIP for DMs from someone that understands what “forward secrecy” means and scream at client maintainers until they all implement it. AHHHHHHHHHHHHH