No i didn’t

The odds are against you, for sure. It can happen, so it’s not impossible. But the odds are against you.

To increase those odds as much as possible, take one bit of advice over all others - married isn’t something you are, marriage is something you do. You’re not saying “I’m going to be with you for our entire lives” to your fiancee, you’re saying “I am going to spend my entire life working hard to make sure that we don’t grow apart or grow complacent or take each other for granted, and I fully trust that you’re promising the same thing”.

The only way for a long-term relationship to work is if both people dedicate effort to making it work. You’re looking at a life full of compromises. You’re looking at a life of times when one or the other of you is going to get sick, or will fall apart mentally, or will get addicted to drugs, or…any number of other things which can tear people apart. Are you really, fully prepared to deal with those things?

You say you want a family. What if you’re infertile? What if she needs an emergeny hysterectome? What if you find out that you have the genes for Huntington’s and you’re probably going to condemn any children you have to a slow, painful, undignified death? Will you adopt? Have you thought about it? Have you discussed it? Are you 100% sure this is the person who you want to go through those things with? Are you sure you’re the person they would want to go through those things with? Or are you just kind of thinking it’ll probably work out somehow?

Marriage is hard. It’s work. It’s not a thing you do on a day, it’s a thing you do every single day until one of you is dead.

A lot of older people are dismissive of young love. I’m not one of those people. I remember being your age and in love. I remember how deep and all-consuming it is. You will probably never love anybody as deeply again, not with the same burning passion. Not in the same way.

But love and marriage are two very different things. And I think it’s that difference that older people mean when they say things like “you don’t know what love is”. You do. Perhaps in a way they’ve forgotten. But what they mean is the mundane days. The big moments. The effort and work it takes to truly build an “us”. That’s what you don’t yet have enough experience to fully appreciate.

I wish you well. But before you get married to someone, you should try to have an appreciation of what it is that you’ll really be promising.

The advice given above to live together for a year first is good advice. That won’t give you an idea about everything, but it can give you more insight to the little things which can be more important than you think. You might think it’s cute that time she used your toothbrush without asking, or that she leaves her knickers strewn around the house. You might not feel that way in a year when she keeps doing it day after day. And you’d be surprised how significant those little things can become over time. How much are you prepared to work at it? How much is she?

Just try to be sure, going in, that you really have thought this through (because it sounds like you haven’t). And communicate. The only way you’ve got even a slight chance is if both of you communicate openly and honestly and vulnerably with each other - and not just about the big stuff.

I hate that I like his suit

They’re generally treated as different animals, but toads are actually a subset of frogs. All toads are frogs, but not all frogs are toads.

She tries the second one and sets herself on fire again. She complains, and the AI apologises again and says that the correct spell is the first one…

There are genuinely and unironically men out there who don’t wash their own arses because touching a man’s arse is gay.

Webp is a smaller file size than jpeg for the same image quality in almost all circumstances - so it’s more efficient and quicker to load. It also supports lossless compression, transparency, and animation, none of which jpeg do. And the jpeg gets noticable visual artefacts at a much higher quality than webp does.

People didn’t adopt it to annoy you. It’s started to replace jpeg for the same reason jpeg started to replace bmp - it’s a better, more efficient format.

I was once driving to work very early in a bank holiday morning. Dual carriageway, literally nobody but me in either direction. I’m doing 70 in the left lane (which, for those who don’t know, is the correct lane and the speed limit here in the UK).

Suddenly, a guy comes haring up behind me at what must have been at least 100. He doesn’t overtake, but instead sits an inch from my bumper. I do what any reasonable person would do - i take my foot completely off the accelerator and just let my car slowly slow down, to encourage him to overtake.

I shit you not, my car got down to 30 MPH before he pulled out and started overtaking.

And then he gave me WTF gestures as he shot past.

Reminder - this was a dual carriageway, two lanes in the direction we were travelling, and there was literally nobody else on the road.

It’s the weirdest thing.

If i were Freddy Kreuger I’d invade the dreams of tailgaters and give them a different nightmare every night - one night they’re paralysed for the rest of their life from an accident they caused, the next they have to live with having killed a child, etc - until they stop fucking doing it.

I’m burnt out on it at this point. In the whole bullet haven gameplay loop.

I’ve got something like 200 hours in Vampire Survivors, and it cost me less than a fiver

I’ve got perhaps an unusual one - 99% of the time I play games with the music turned off. I just find it much more immersive and I enjoy, for example, not knowing that combat is about to start because the music’s just changed.

There are plenty of games where you can’t turn the music off. I’m not a fan of that, but I get it. The devs want you to play their game in a certain way, and turning the music off isn’t part of that. No complaints.

But then there are games which allow you to turn the music off, but all the rest of the sound has been made under the assumption that the music will be playing. The music often covers up a litany of jankiness like background sound effects not looping well. And sometimes the atmosphere sounds (say the drone of an engine in a spaceship) are also controlled by the music slider.

So, if you’re going to give the option to turn the music off, make sure that the game still sounds good without the music.

For me, it’s cutscenes in general. I know there are people who do care in general, but for me a game where I care about the plot is very rare. And the examples I can think of (Outer Wilds, or Ico, for two examples) either have no cutscenes or very few brief ones, and tell the story in a different, more immersive way.

For me, a general rule is - if the game forces moments on me when I can put the controller down and wander into a different room, then that’s not what I’m interested in. I want to actually play the game.

One woman famously sent the BBC a dry cleaning bill because her husband had literally shat himself

Similar to the Strangelove example - although not about history - know what medical professionals consistently say is the TV show which not only had the most accurate medicine, but also best depicts the social paradigm of working in the medical sector? Scrubs.

Oh, I’ve got a carrots one, too. Rabbits don’t have a particular fondness for carrots. We just think they do because of Bugs Bunny. But Bugs eats carrots to imitate a Clark Gable scene in It Happened One Night, with the carrot substituting for a cigar. Over time the connection got lost and it just sort of became “rabbits = carrots”.

They don’t mind them, but they have no particular preference for them.

That’s not the only Bugs Bunny-related thing, either. “Nimrod” has come to mean “idiot” because of its use by Bugs. But that’s not the intended meaning in the cartoons. He specifically says it to Elmer Fudd. Nimrod is a Biblical figure, known for being a great hunter. He’s being sarcastic. But again the reference got lost and people just thought it meant “idiot”.

Okay, so firstly, they start talking about “Western media”, and then only talk about US media.

It’s characterisation of the media as state media is simplistic and misses the headline - the outside influence the media has on the state. Rupert Murdoch explicitly said that he got involved with the media in the US and UK in order to influence politics. There are any number of examples of something being featured on Fox News and Trump talking about it the next day.

Here in the UK the Labour government just announced their new immigration policy. Its biggest aim is to stop people crossing the channel in small boats. The biggest opposition party, Reform’s entire platform is based around stopping small boats. The previous government’s immigration policy for more than a decade was based around stopping small boats.

Illegal immigration is a tiny fraction of immigration. People entering the country in small boats is a tiny fraction of illegal immigration. And illegal immigration itself is overcounted because there are currently no legal routes into the country for asylum seekers, making all asylum seekers illegal immigrants by definition.

So, why have politicians been forming their policy around this one inconsequential issue rather than trying to form more meaningful and effective policy? Because the front pages of the daily newspapers have had small boat stories for years. It’s deliberately been turned into an issue by the press, which has forced politicians to look like they are “doing something”.

The traffic between media and politics isn’t just one way, of course, but it’s a lot more reciprocal and complex than this empty ideological rant would have you believe. And it’s probably fair to say that the press has more influence over the state than the state has over the press, at least in the UK.

Tony Blair, for example, purposefully spent time wooing Murdoch because he knew he couldn’t get elected as Prime Minister without The Sun on side.

It’s ironic that this piece about the lies of the media is itself rather devoid of accurate reporting and is instead knowingly or unknowingly full of falsehoods in order to ideologically persuade its readers.

If you like 8-bit gaming, I recommend getting the free BBC micro emulator BeebEm

Then get the ROM Citadel

It’s a Metroidvania from before either Metroid or Castlevania. It still plays well, it’s still difficult, the puzzles are logical but require thought, and it’s several hours of gameplay to complete.

Not that many years ago Noddy Holder said that with royalties “Merry Xmas Everybody” he can live comfortably for the entire year. I imagine Carey gets a lot more than he does.

“We’ve released this feature which works 80% of the time and which we feel morally obligated to tell you can install malware, or simply send all your files to a malicious actor. Why aren’t you jizzing yourselves?”

There was research which showed that when women make up a third of a group, both men and women tend to think the numbers are even. More than a third = more women than men.

Not just presence either. If women in group settings collectively speak for more than 30% of the time, both men and women feel like women are dominating the conversation.