Though honestly, without keyboard knowledge, I would have assumed changing Belgium’s name for something else is a white supremacist dogwhistle. This is 4chan afterall.
It’s really not hard to look up keyboard layouts. I can recognize Cyrillic characters and don’t know anything else about the script, but that’s just a search away.
Most of 4chan has nothing to do with politics or propaganda. The ones that are reposted mostly all come from two boards. /b/ and /pol/. Also your reddit comment is weird cause reddit is just full of bots now.
9Gag is pretty bad with them as well. They used to push anti-vax and anti-mask disinformation with obvious bad faith arguments there during the COVID period. Then when the “special military operation” started in Ukraine they immediately switched to posting pro-Russia bullshit.
Until then I was only thinking this sort of nonsense was there as a result of the website being more open to diverse political views, for better or worse. But that sudden switch made me realize that it was actually a team of people trying to sow the seeds of disarray in any way they could for the Western world by pushing disinformation like this on websites mostly frequented by young adult males, who can be vulnerable to radicalization. To think back to it, it was obvious that they were using a bot farm to upvote their content as well. I haven’t set foot on that echo chamber or propaganda and conspiracy nonsense since then. I can only assume this sort of thing is still going on there.
There was a time recently when Internet connection to Russia got severed for a few hours and a lot of people wrote posts about how friendly and polite people on the Internet were during that time.
It’s always been agitprop for one thing or another. Hell, I was an edgy teen over a decade ago and there was always a BBC thread and a WHITES ONLY thread running at all times, and both were interspersed about how jews wanted blacks to cuck all the white guys. Truly unhinged shit.
Eh, as a Dvorak vim user, I haven’t had many issues. I just hotkey swap between Dvorak and QWERTY as needed and things largely work out.
Things could be a lot better, like if games and whatnot would read use key codes instead of letters for key bindings. WASD should silently map to ,AOE (that was painful to type on my phone’s QWERTY keyboard), and that only works in 1/4 or so of games I play.
Yup, my typo rate goes way up when I use anyone else’s computer. After a few minutes, it settles down and I can be almost productive, but those first few minutes suck.
Country standards from the typewriter era. In Bulgaria we have a different layout from the Russian one, using the same Cyrillic letters (stuff like э and ы that we don’t use) but most people use the “phonetic” keyboard which is the one you describe. Also in casual conversations a lot of people don’t even bother to use Cyrillic and go with latin instead even if it’s not official or standardised in any way.
You get used to it. You just write the sound, sh, j, ya(often weitten as q), ch, yu. ь we barely use unless when you write what you would spell as ë in Russian, we don’t use that letter at all! We use a lot of ъ (sounds like uuhh). It’s usually spelled as y or a.
It’s usually more annoying to switch keyboards all the time, but typing in Latin script feels wrong and I feel like it changes my “written voice”.
Same here with Russian (by the way, fuck putler and fuck his dumb fucking war and victory for, and glory to, Ukraine). It was quite common to use Latin in the 90s and early 00s for SMS because Cyrillic would either not be supported at all or severely reduce the number of characters. Nowadays very few people use Latin, it’s more the other way around, the odd foreign word is written in Cyrillic. To me it feels weird to use Latin, because it simply doesn’t work very well. See Polish - they have to use weird workarounds that look like czszkzrcz as a replacement for a single ж, ч, щ.
Interesting to learn about ъ being pronounced like uh in Bulgarian! In Russian it’s a modifier like ь and has no sound of its own. Ъ is called “hardness marker” while ь is “softness marker”. Not sure about the English translation though.
all those layouts are legacy from mechanical typewriters. There pressing keys next to each other sometimes caused the levers to interlock. So letters that often follow each other were put away from each other. And somehow this created the regional flavors of where the q,w,z,a,y are. maybe other letters too, but these are the ones i’ve encountered.
The fractionating columns, however, are bespoke parts that are costly and have long lead times, and also are large and fragile, at least from the point of view of a properly targeted missile. Before the war, Russia relied on Western specialist firms to provide those, which is no longer an option.
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