Monarchy.

Huh, when I see BlackSky I think of the BlueSky derivative designed to be friendlier to black people.

Relevant xkcd (Mobile version)

On at least two occasions, a woman gave birth to twins right at the end/start of the year, resulting in twins born in different years.

I use an iodé phone. It’s basically Android with all the Google crap removed, and it comes with Fdroid.

Basically:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiCl7j9mowk

Rye, barley, oats, and rice are also grasses.

Rye used to be a weed that evolved to resemble wheat so early farmers wouldn’t uproot it. But it evolved to resemble wheat so much that it became an edible crop in its own right.

Let them fight

I like QuiteRSS (if you use Linux or BSD, it should be in your package manager). It’s super-easy to sort and manage tonnes of feeds, it’s very clear what is read and what’s unread, and you can set it to never delete unread items. It hasn’t been updated in ages, but it still works (mostly. Once in a while a Qt update breaks it until someone can fix the packaging).

My second favourite isAkregator. It’s almost as easy to use as QuiteRSS, but unread items aren’t as distinctive, and sometimes an unread item looks read.

Wow, no, she was in the wrong.

I spent three years unemployed after I graduated college. It was perfectly acceptable to call a place and ask if they were hiring. Never did me any good, but there is nothing wrong with doing so.

on ho.

Good. Software patents are bollocks.

Tom’s incongruity is entirely deliberate. Tolkien worked out Middle Earth in meticulous detail, but thought that a truly believable mythology needed to have a few mysteries, hence Tom.

Some disaster relief charities used to let people decide how their donations would be spent. Donors overwhelmingly voted for rebuilding houses, because everybody needs a house, and replacing someone’s house is nice and feels good.

The charities ended up with way too much money earmarked for housing, which they were legally required to spend on new houses. That excess money could have been spent on boring things like sewage, but they were legally barred from doing so. The result was a lot of people with unnecessarily big, fancy homes with no working toilets or running water.

The charities quickly dropped this practice, because donors directed the money to what felt right instead of to where it was actually needed or would do the most good. And that’s why we don’t run the country that way.

I feel like it was supposed to be a surprise, hence the almost total lack of StarFox stuff in the trailers, but then people who looked really carefully at the trailer noticed a leg that looks like Fox’s and posted it all over social media, so Illumination (and Nintendo maybe) decided to embrace the publicity.

On an personal sidenote, when Nintendo and Illumination announced their partnership, I threw together an outline of how I would do it. I would have adapted Galaxy as the grand finale, and would have also brought in Team StarFox (and also the Triforce bearers). Heh.

Anyway, I kind of suspect they’re doing Galaxy precisely because it lets them introduce the StarFox characters relatively seamlessly. The heroes chase Bowser across the galaxy, somebody says they’re going to need help, and Rosalina says she knows just the team… Then if reception is positive, they can spin off Team StarFox into their own movies.

Hmm. Perhaps the second Zelda movie will see Samus land in Hyrule.

That was my dad’s experience. He was born in 1952 in Ireland, and one day my grandad sat down with him for a very vague and confusing talk which involved both birds and bees, but Dad couldn’t really remember what Grandad actually said.

Society had gotten more liberal by the time or was Dad’s turn to have the talk with me (1996 or so), so Dad was pretty forthright and straightforward about everything, though in retrospect it was probably still awkward for him. Still, I think that even in the late 90s my parents were unusually open; we were a bit unusual for only going to Mass occasionally rather than every Sunday. I remember the other kids at school constantly asking me how babies were made, but I’m pretty sure they just thought it was outrageous that I said “penis” and “vagina” instead of “willy” and “fanny”.

In Ireland Constitutional Amendments require a referendum to pass. It’s bizarre to me that other countries leave something so important in the hands of politicians.

My cousin, who has given birth twice, says a more accurate phrase is “I slept like a dad” (Her husband is super attentive and at least as involved in raising the children as she is). She told me this when we took the younger child, about eight months old, for a walk. Lots of heavy, loud traffic; cousin and I had to raise our voices to speak, yet the baby calmly slept the entire time.

Anecdotally, I’ve heard that trans people use it to buy hormones because HRT is usually not covered by national healthcare or insurance, so the people selling them aren’t doing so fully entirely technically legally.

Hand of there’s no way to do a national referendum how do they amend the Constitution?