it’s also weirdly accurate to where people might commute to copenhagen today

it should also take into account transport feasability to at least some degree, like no one in their right mind would associate narvik with helsinki…

it’s wild to think that we here in the nordics are apparently less safe from them than people in most of africa are!

a person is born in iceland
population doubles

it’s that plus a population map to some extent, with the large population centres as usual leaning more left.

i mean everyone has a different name for germany though: france says allemagne after the tribe that was closest to them, the romans said germania after the tribe that was closest to them (and that’s where english gets it from), poland says “niemcy” because they considered german to be utter nonsense speech, and german-speaking countries say some variation on “deutschland” meaning land of the people.

exonyms and endonyms are a part of all languages, it just depends on when and how a language started caring about said country/city. Hence why you generally only have exonyms for the largest cities of countries, that’s what anyone outside the country cares about.

the thing about not leaving the town you were born in is false though, people travelled all the time to varying degrees. Hell a big thing was that everyone wanted to go on a pilgrimage to jerusalem once, and there were all kinds of privileges given to pilgrims for that reason. Basically if you were a pilgrim people had to give you free food and bed, and i think free travel too.

it’s definitely just mirroring the side of the head at runtime

If you put everyone in wyoming in the same place they wouldn’t even qualify as the second largest city in sweden lmao

i mean this is how most public transport is in any vaguely populous area in europe, only for rural lines is it standard to actually have to look at the schedule.

if you repeat that enough maybe one day you’ll even believe it yourself

which is ironically austrian, literally called “wiener bread” in sweden and another name i’ve sometimes seen is “spandauer” which refers to a suburb of berlin lmao.

the way i’d summarize our cuisine is that the natively available food is basically “meat and parsnip stew”, and thus we have a profound cultural (bordering on genetic) trauma which causes us to give precisely 0 fucks about what is “correct” or “looks good” and only care about it being tasty and interesting.

i mean maybe that’s what made it well known outside sweden, but meatballs are also a bog standard thing inside sweden.
Meatballs with mashed potatoes, gravy, and lingonberries is the “default food” basically, like fish and chips in the UK.

a tale as old as time, IRC has done this dance for ages now:

“it’s totally decentralized guys! why are you using other platforms??”
- “okay so i can just run my own server and chat with people on freenode?”
“well no, you’d need freenode’s permission to federate with them, obviously”
- “so it’s not decentralized then.”
“it is! it is! Freenode uses multiple servers!”
- “literally every large platform of any kind uses multiple servers, i’m going back to matrix where the only way i notice the large servers dying is because i stop seeing messages from their users…”

This made me realize how dumb it is for sweden specifically to opt for all capitals, since we use so many letters with diacritics and it just ends up looking a bit silly

this confused me since “gård” absolutely does not have the meaning of fence/wall in modern swedish, and looking at wiktionary it seems in ancient norse it only slightly had that meaning, with other meanings being the more sensible to me “city”, “region”, and “yard”.

isn’t aberdeen even simpler? it literally has the river Dee running through it, aber-dee-n

really we just need more railways in general, many parts are literally just unable to squeeze in any more trains and yet barely anything new is being built… In a sensible world we should have started building a high speed network between the capitals 10 years ago.

sure it’s beautiful, the ocean is beautiful too, but that much open space would make me so uncomfortable. Denmark is bad enough.