But if you don’t take their human skin, what does the transformation back look like? I’m imagining the somewhat absurd scene of a werewolf anxiously arranging its tattered human skin around itself with its rough paws for the magic to do its stuff.

Do they need to find it and put it back on to transform back, or does that involve them shedding their wolf pelt and emerging in human form from within it?

My impression is that the werewolf transformation is entirely magical and not governed by real-world effects: one moment, the moon is out and you suddenly grow fur, a snout and uncontrollable predatory instincts, and when it’s over, the fur recedes/disappears, your facial geometry is restored and you just feel inexplicably tired. It’s conceivable that you’d shed some hair, which presumably wouldn’t magically vanish once it’s not attached to you, though.

As for vampires, I thought they just used their incisors to puncture their victims and then just sucked their blood out. Their teeth being plumbed into a vacuum pump seems somewhat too complicated.

Now watch all the tankies praise him as a honorary socialist

That’s what happens when you don’t vet whom you give the time machine to

or, “hHhHhHhH”, as in “I’m laughing so hard I’m hitting caps lock instead of A”

Some Slavic languages apparently also have distinct masculine and feminine versions of verbs, which match the speaker if in the first person. Apparently so does Icelandic (to the point where an Icelandic modernist novel was titled “When I Got Pregnant”, though in the masculine form)

Vibe coding. Not even once.

There is the quality known in German as fingerspitzgefühl (literally “fingertip feeling”): the ability of an experienced worker to gauge the situation they’re dealing with from perception and past experience, in ways that one can’t codify into a ring binder of rules. It comes with experience and is a skill. And this applies to even the most menial labour: anything requiring effort has more and less efficient ways of doing it, as well as hazards.

The fact that fingerspitzgefühl cannot be codified into intellectual property and rented out to interchangeable low-paid day labourers must be burning up the owners, once again robbed of the dream of independence from those who actually do their work. Some argue that that’s what’s driving the vast amount of investment in AI: a push to deskill labour once and for all, eliminating human fingerspitzgefühl and replacing it with reverse centaurs following orders from their VR glasses.

No, as apex predators, they accumulate toxins. It’s better to compost them.

The mask is off, and once you acknowledge that your ideology is about dominance and nothing else, “crimes against humanity” are just what the untermenschen call winning.

What breed of cat is that?

At least they don’t turn their charges into fertiliser, in the way that private equity-owned veterinary chains do.

Having had breakfast at an American diner and not needing to eat for the rest of the day, I can almost believe that. Food portions there are huge.

RFK Jr. approved

It sucks that Netflix only allowed the first two seasons (when it was just a cute, edgy cartoon about the unreality of Hollywood/LA, rather than a statement on the human condition) to be released on DVD/BluRay. I’d love to have a copy of “The View From Halfway Down” in my library.

Could you not also control the height of the pattern by having more stitches under the raised parts?

Could an embroidery machine be programmed to set the stitches’ directions as in the picture?

I have a bottle of Gin Mare bought in Spain with such a stamp on the cap.