Renato Ramonda

Bearded geek, loudmouth, lover of hats, good food, strange music, games, language, plastic model kits and lots of other stuff.

Beginner but enthusiastic Ukulele player, complete beginner at acoustic guitar. Yes, I like to suck at many things at the same time.

Blog:: https://renatoram.ch
OpenPGP: https://keyoxide.org/hkp/B9762B3ED6D832409153BB29F13A06E003F05D49
Pronouns: He/Him

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Last Notes

2026-08-31 10:01:43 GMT

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for most things, you don't.
Company policy also makes it impossible to just keep emails, they get auto-deleted after like... one year, or two. The only way is to save/archive emails, and... I suppose screenshot the cat, if really needed.
Information that is useful and needs to be kept shouldn't really stay in emails anyway.

2026-08-31 07:46:03 GMT

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since the advent of officially sanctioned work chat apps, my work email has become "where I receive meeting invitations... And spam"
Occasionally I do get a real email (often a group thing with multiple forwards). I think work email is officially dead.

2026-08-26 06:20:31 GMT

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I have that exact reaction to gossip about Italian "celebs" (I AM Italian) because they're only "famous" if you watch trash TV or (sometimes) soccer (or both), and I don't do either.
TV is a closed ecosystem with basically no external interactions, those people have no other footprint on the world.

2026-08-16 12:21:04 GMT

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some have been groomed since childhood, many actually hate or resent that position but have been put in a position that practically (and financially, and socially, and psychologically) makes it almost impossible for them to leave.

2026-06-25 18:24:48 GMT

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The Attack of the 50ft Wotan

2026-06-22 08:34:35 GMT

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also Italian "Canìcola", though in Italy it's a bit old-fashioned... But (probably due to the French influence) not in Swiss Italian! It's still used regularly in official weather alerts by the Swiss institutions and news.

2026-06-18 19:30:14 GMT

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the "AI" companies LOVE to blur the line.
When Mozilla started pushing ai down the users throats, they deliberately lumped translation with chatbots and summarizers to be able to say "see? You don't REALLY hate AI, you use it!"
And yes, they are similar technologies (and machine translation sucks A LOT, just like chatbots and other generators), but they are clearly not the same thing.
The "translate this page" function will not groom me for psychosis and suicide.

2026-06-07 09:44:26 GMT

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then again... The Nazis found a way to be racist towards Slavic and Rus people, who arguably looked way more "Aryan" than most Germans (surely more than Adolf and most of his top gang).

2026-06-07 09:42:11 GMT

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the open and nasty and virulent racism towards people that looked basically the same as them was (still is) puzzling... Maybe it's my western eye but Koreans often don't look that much different.
A legendary wrestler in 70s Japan hid his mixed Japanese/Korean origins until his death (only came out in a posthumous autobiography).
I mean, they were (some still are) racist towards Japanese minorities like the Hokkaido Ainu.
Men find the darnedest things to be bastards about.

2026-05-20 19:10:42 GMT

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yeah that needs some more setup
these days I use neovim with a setup that means I very rarely use my (licensed!) PyCharm.

2026-05-20 17:48:43 GMT

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an editor that warns about stuff and lints and formats your code helps a lot

2026-05-12 11:38:00 GMT

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I'm not sure "appealing to women" *actually* interests incels. To buy into that cult you have to absolutely hate women, they seem to actually revel in their misery and hate "chads/alphas" with envyous passion

2026-03-23 16:08:01 GMT

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hi! Having done some semi-pro translation work in the past... Is there an easy way to see the English original in context?
Sometimes the assumptions about sentence structure and such can cause misunderstandings (or hilarious errors) in different languages.
I can offer Italian, btw, if it's not too big of a file.
Native speaker, fluent in English, have worked on Eng->Ita translations in the past.

2026-03-05 06:30:43 GMT

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who did that? I'm curious

2026-03-03 18:54:27 GMT

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same... Ignorance truly is bliss sometimes

2026-01-23 23:49:34 GMT

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YouTube stopped working for me if I was logged in and using uBlock... So now I use a container tab where I'm never logged in, joke's on them.
Recommendations suck anyway, just in a different way. YouBlock to ban channels helps.

2026-01-08 18:48:14 GMT

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which book, BTW? I think I read all the novels (some quite recently)

2026-01-08 18:47:35 GMT

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I find his writing rewards careful reading... But of course it's not exactly the most "relaxing" read.

2026-01-08 18:46:18 GMT

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one of the things I appreciate greatly about Gibson is how he does that, boosting the sense that these people are "real" (the characters have no reason to explain or elaborate on things that are obvious to them), but he also drops *juust enough* hints that time and again I go "ooh, that's what he meant!" And lo, 2 pages later he actually explains/confirms it.

2025-12-28 09:30:50 GMT

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...it's astounding
(Time is... Fleeting)

2025-11-20 20:41:25 GMT

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look at you boasting about pics of your coq online...

2025-10-29 19:57:27 GMT

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(nobody ever accused Italian fascists of being smart)

2025-10-29 18:55:08 GMT

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Italian fascists have been organizing "camp hobbit" gatherings for the last 50+ years

2025-10-16 07:28:21 GMT

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entirely guesswork on my part but... I'd wager less than 20% saw much actual play.
(and I'm being generous)

2025-10-11 12:49:30 GMT

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foreign books translated in the 50s are often pretty terrible (and the reason translations are redone periodically)
And then, yeah, there's "fascist era speech" for us, which has specific recognizable idiosyncrasies and *will* convey a specific "tone and color" (used all the time in historic dramas and even comedy).

2025-10-11 12:44:11 GMT

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sounds like an uncontroversial take to me, at least for the languages I know. Both Italian and English changed so much in the last 100 years that what was formally correct back then (and IS still technical correct) is often so old fashioned to be *practically* incorrect in current speech.
Some Italian books from the early 1900s are positively unreadable. Understandable, yes (mostly), but unpleasant and unusual. If you talk like that you WILL be perceived as "playing a character".

2025-07-09 20:30:50 GMT

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to avoid it getting reused. But I have not used it in years.

2025-07-04 19:31:58 GMT

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nazi Germany had the first (color, too) TV broadcasts, I assume that was the specific reason... But of course it's also for Plot and Message reasons, it's a novel after all.

2025-04-08 11:52:00 GMT

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isn't "the yellow wallpaper" the same as "the wallpaper that is yellow"?
Maybe I have a native language bias

2025-04-05 17:29:00 GMT

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I noticed after tooting that you were referring specifically to the Fall of Gondolin. I haven't read much at all outside the three main books (and the Silmarillion only in translation... For now at least)

2025-04-05 17:25:22 GMT

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several of the names (especially Dwarven, IIRC) are taken directly, not even referenced obliquely, right?

2025-01-02 16:05:48 GMT

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learning what was happening roughly concurrently in other parts of the world is (IME) one of the missing links in how history is taught (or was, for my old ass).
Some assumptions about how ancient some things are, are... Sneaky: I was taken aback learning how basically all we know abt Norse mythology is from like... The 4-500s, hundreds of years after the spread of Christianity.
Reading the myths they sound... Well, super ancient. And their roots are, for sure, but heavily filtered

2024-12-24 10:07:38 GMT

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except most artists are not paid a penny by Spotify at all, yeah I suppose (I personally hate radio as much as Spotify, although for slightly different reasons)

2024-12-24 08:34:32 GMT

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users at the free tier can't really create playlists of only songs they chose and IIRC can only skip a limited number of times (per day?).
I also know most Spotify users I talked to say they like that "the algorithm" inserts stuff they didn't choose in the mix (for "discovering new music").
The article about the fake artists noted they were most likely to be inserted in genres used as "background" while doing something else.

2024-12-13 21:38:15 GMT

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I read only Name of the Rose and Foucault, and I liked them, but never had the drive to seek more

2024-12-13 21:29:55 GMT

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in The Name of the Rose there's a famous scene where young novice monk Adso is in awe because of the Benedictine abbey collection of relics, and his older and wise mentor (who has more experience of the world), William of Baskerville, tells him that he's seen so many shards of the Wood from the True Cross that if you put all of them together you could make a whole boat.

2024-12-13 20:30:24 GMT

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oh yeah!
In Italy (especially in the South) there's Assunta, Addolorata, and even Catena and Incatenata (Chain/Chained), all attributes/variants of Mary.
They're old fashioned, but still in use (Catena is rare though and bad enough that women with that name often go by Cate/Caterina/Rina/Nina)

2024-12-13 20:12:03 GMT

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oh yeah, many, many "special edition" Marys in Italy!
Chained Mary, Sorrowful Mary, the Holy Heart of Mary, the Assumption of Mary, Black Mary, etc
Plus all the female saints (Chiara, Lucia, Barbara, Brigida, SO MANY others).
It's pretty clear to me that an exclusively male-coded religion simply wouldn't have done it for those ancient Mediterranean people (Spain and Latin America are just as Mary centric).

2024-12-13 19:59:35 GMT

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I bet!
The actual practice of folk religion in Italy never really distanced itself from many old rituals (especially in rural areas, and honestly until 1900, even 1950, most of Italy was rural.
Even in my mom's generation, the authority of priests in small villages had to negotiate with associations (brotherhoods and sisterhoods) of locals, especially elders.
For example, in my native village the local patron (Annunciation of Mary) was traditionally on Jul 2.
1/2

2024-12-13 17:41:56 GMT

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happy St. Lucia! (I was just looking at the silver statue of the saint in Siracusa today)
Back when Christians started spreading, they probably *very briefly* tried to tell people they should stop their worship of many goddesses and quickly pivoted to "female saints" and uh... 50 different "variants" of the Holy Mary?
Honestly, in Italian traditional faith (which is what most people practiced anyway, regardless of what the canon said) Mary is probably more important than Jesus.

2024-12-10 15:45:10 GMT

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amusingly enough, due to the mentioned lack of press... it's very likely that unless someone follows a genre actively it's very hard to even know they exist (never heard of Black Rainbows for example).
I mean, the "dwarven themed" epic metal band Wind Rose is like... from Rome (so are Nanowar of Steel).

2024-12-10 14:55:24 GMT

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if you go looking, there is *other* Italian music, it's just that it's stuff that is completely outside of what is considered "mainstream" and passes on the radio and such.
There's a good amount of Italian metal, for example.

2024-12-10 14:16:17 GMT

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you just described 95% of Italian songs of what is generally called "Canzone Italiana" as a genre, which is also pretty much what "Italian pop" is.
Just dreadful slop.

2024-12-01 15:55:28 GMT

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is this... Agrigento?
Doesn't look like Selinunte.
Plenty of amazing Magna Greece and Phoenician archeological sites and objects to see in Sicily (the Museum in Palermo has several of the items removed from the sites for preservation, btw).

2024-08-26 18:48:41 GMT

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better than "DnD sanitation" I spotted in Monza!
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/113/029/815/966/340/872/original/751eb977b10090bf.jpeg