I have hypothes.is now!

The "correct" pronunciation of the surname "Wagner" is best approximated in English by something between "VOG-neh" and "VOG-nair". It is a German surname, unquestionable derivation. But if I try to use that pronunciation for a guy I knew with the surname his family pronounced "WAG-nur", that makes me the asshole who is wrong. Names borrowed from other languages are weird, sure! Maybe there's an argument to translate everything into the language of use, like Catholics do (Pope Francis / Francisco / Franciscus etc., Mary / María / Maria / Marie etc. – so in an English sentence, the state of Snowy.). But while it is fair for me to think to myself generally that e.g. Kieran is an incorrect spelling of Ciarán, not listening to the people to whom a name is applied about what the name "correctly" is... well, it's a policy that leads down some pretty dickish roads. It's not about not acknowledging the language of origin, it's about acknowledging other context that also matters.

I'd suggest that listening to the ads on Spanish-language radio is instructive here, because for actually local actual Spanish speakers, even within Spanish sentences, there are pretty sophisticated contextual patterns about whether a place name gets a Spanish or English pronunciation; it's not that one's "right" to people who know what's "correct".

I will also note that despite being generally more open than most of my ilk to something like prescriptivism, I am a partisan here. There is a feeling of linguistic mob thrill I have never felt more than watching John Kerry come to speak at a packed Pioneer Square in Portland in 2003. Within his first couple sentences he said "OR-eh-gahn" to a gushing crowd and received widespread boos. The panicked confusion on his face: good, actually.

re: "Why are you doing this"

Another dynamic, though: I might not have thought to reply with the fun fact to a blog post, because it seems heavier-weight, less chattily conversational. I should likely adjust my tooling to make this easier, but I'll bet there are others for whom the difference in likelihood of response is even more pronounced. Maybe it's good to do one's tentative workshopping in public if you think other people chiming in might be useful!

I don't think this is true! A lot of people care about sunscreen in three ways:

1. People who wear makeup have a real hard time with it not playing nicely with SPF, especially those higher SPFs, especially especially if water resistant. The exact texture ends up being important.
2. There are real safety concerns and then also people getting ridiculous about particular ingredients, so some people get really picky about what's in their sunscreen.
3. Fragrance. I cannot stand the smell of a lot of sunscreen, but I am a Real Pale Person so I can't just ignore it. Hawaiian Tropic has a loud floral scent to cover it up; the Supergoop play stuff smells like it's trying to cover it up with lemon candy; there are Whole Foodsy herbal variants; etc. etc.

Sunscreen is one of the harder things to launch because of the testing involved; innovative formulations available in Asia and Europe are often unavailable in the US for that reason. However, there definitely still is someone trying to make a brand out of it: the Poolsuite.FM people have launched Vacation sunscreen (full screen video so won't play nice with that mobile data limit).

This is fantastic. Internet persona lore. Who is brave enough to make themselves lore? Kicks has legendary-tier lore. (I still get mad thinking about hacker news dweebs failing to have even a single bone in their body capable of recognizing non-literal text, I am not cool, I have no chill, etc.) I like that this isn't quite a statement about bluelander themself, but about the context they inhabit.

I'm somehow reminded of

Now, when getting into book discussions with a certain kind of man, I often say “I can’t read” as soon as possible. This is a pretty transparent defense mechanism, but it works for me, sort of.

from that essay on David Foster Wallace that I treasure in my heart more than I can explain. I love the idea of instrumentalizing one's angle on reality. Sorry, having this conversation with you in the frame you want to use is just not going to work for me. I can't read.

Raccoons traditionally put punctuation in their names because they don't like to be tracked.

Phenomenal.

FWIW I don't know your dev experience but mine has been that... it's easy for things to descend into chaos without a record of them. By creating the record of this unintended behavior, you're already doing some of the work for the maintainer. Every project has an implicit backlog, and making it explicit is tedious, so rather than "asking for a fix", you're "documenting a future item" (especially because like you're saying: they definitely intend for it to not work this way!)