Skua

A bit of a niche one: I am a big fan of the TTRPG Lancer, and a popular meme format is describing things in the game by cutting and pasting bits of the rulebook like a classic ransom letter

I don’t know, I’m afraid. As I understand it, the base ten positional numbering system we use in most of the world (as in, the value of each individual digit is multiplied by ten a number of times based on its position in the number) originated in northern India, but the writing of the people that developed it did not use a lot of punctuation. The modern comma comes from Europe and I’m fairly sure that the idea of a thousands separator comes from Europeans trying to write big numbers in Roman numerals. Based on that I would assume that the British colonial period introduced the idea of using a comma as a thousands separator to India. However, while Europeans were used to thinking in thousands and millions, Indians were habitually thinking in lakhs and crores, so I assume they adjusted the commas to suit that. Since the separators are literally only there to make it easier to read and do not affect any of the maths you can do with it, I don’t imagine Indians would have much reason to change their system

It’s groups of two except for that the three numbers left of the decimal point are in a group of three. So 1,00,00,000 rather than 10,000,000, for example. 1,00,00,000 is a crore, 1,00,000 is a lakh

Mirepoix! You can also swap the carrot for bell pepper to get the Cajun equivalent

Spirit in the Sky specifically is a fuzz running on a near-dead battery, so it’s a bit of an odd one. I think the broad approach to the sound is fairly popular though. Stone Foxes come to mind as an example

Sometimes stuff is just popular for a good reason. I love loads of different styles of guitar, but I think my favourite heavy riff is probably the chorus one starting at 2:02 in Saor’s Children of the Mist

Or maybe Flying Whales because, I mean, it’s Flying Whales

This is probably a lot heavier on the technical grammar than you need, but here is the relevant wikipedia page if you want it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dummy_pronoun

Basically English (along with other Germanic languages and a whole bunch of others) doesn’t like having a verb by itself without something to do the verb, so we just put “it” in as a sort of placeholder. The “it” isn’t anything, but the grammar wants there to be something there

To me it seems like the difference between having a written description of something vs an image of it. I can describe to you a square, 10 centimetres on each side, drawn with black ink in the centre of a sheet of white A4 printer paper. I could also show you a photo of that square. In both cases the information is conveyed, but only one of them involved an image

When I’m navigating I basically always do it by landmarks and turns, which is probably not unusual. I can use relationships of “this street goes west until it meets that street” without having to picture a map. The shape and length of that street don’t really matter for the sake of getting somewhere, only what it connects to

Not sure that I can really compare it to how I would be without aphantasia since, of course, it is all I have ever known, but I do stll enjoy reading. Like other people are saying, I don’t tend to concern myself with visual descriptions

This carries over to my TTRPG gameplay. I rarely ever actually describe what anyone looks like beyond the absolutely vaguest of descriptions (i.e. a heavily-built man, getting on years), which I didn’t notice until a player pointed it out to me. I mostly go by mannerisms, which I suppose is an aspect of appearance

I am still quite good at building mental maps of locations and can do all the classic “rotate a shape” kind of stuff. I can’t visualise it, but I can figure it out. I guess I’m mentally storing it in another format. Possibly related to that, one of the few types of illustration I do particularly enjoy getting in a book is a map

On the one hand, the quantity probably isn’t significantly dangerous. On the other, OPs mindset seems to be. If they cannot control their drinking then that’s a problem, regardless of how much they actually end up drinking

The entire breakdown of my electricity bill in the UK is a rate for energy use, a standing charge that is independent of usage, and VAT. Strictly speaking I’ve got two different usage rates because my heating is on a separate meter, but that’s an unusual situation

That’s fine, that just means the ethical question is now “is accessing it in one of those ways worth the consequences of doing so?” You might well say yes or, as others in these comments have, argue that the consequences are negligible. You might say no. It’s still a relevant debate in the topic OP is asking about even if we completely accept your position about which ways of getting access are ethical

I think the question includes a discussion of whether or not that access is worth sending money to the author, right? Like, even if OP completely agrees with your position about the author deserving money for access and also wants access, they may want to both avoid sending money to the author and to avoid stealing it more. Of course you mentioned the possibility of finding it in a library and someone else in the thread suggested finding it second hand, which are probably both preferable solutions here if they are practical

I don’t think people expect that you have to agree with everyone you give money to, but it doesn’t seem unreasonable to try to avoid sending money to a Holocaust denier specifically for his Holocaust denial

While I was joking, of course, France’s economy actually was quite a lot more bigger and more powerful than the UK’s up until the industrial revolution and the about a century of everything going very badly for France. France was the most populous country in Europe by a wide margin, and back then that basically was the whole economy. It has quite a lot more land than the UK, and that land is a lot more productive too; the north of Wales and most of Scotland do not make for good farmland. Unlike Germany and Italy it united and centralised quite early, and it just outweighed Spain and the Low Countries the same way it did the UK, so for a long time France had the edge over all of its neighbours.

During the Napoleonic wars, France managed to raise forces that matched the UK, Prussia, Austria, and Spain combined in number. Some of that was due to other factors like how he organised it, but you’ve still got to have the people available somewhere if you want to match four major powers at once

I mean if you take it seriously we do have plenty of good and interesting food, both in traditional and modern cuisine. Hot spice isn’t often a part of it, but there’s lots of usage of herbs and milder spices. Laverbread, black pudding, haggis (yes, seriously), Worcestershire sauce, and Cornish herby pasty are all solid examples of very traditional foods that are pretty seasoning-forward without even touching the enormous amount of stuff we picked up from other cultures (like the curries)

That’s not to say that we don’t frequently earn our terrible culinary reputation. We do. Next to our neighbours like France, Spain, and Italy we just do not have the same level of widespread passion for food, and our habits reflect this. A general lack of adventurousness plagues our palates on a national level

Pfft, you think we invaded everyone for spices to eat them? Absolutely not. We did it so that we could sell them to the French, thereby making the French poorer by exploiting their degenerate addiction to food that tastes nice

This is Alaric, in this image firmly telling me that “my” hoodie is in fact his

If we take the ancient Greek example of calling anyone whose language you can’t understand a barbarian, the US and UK are probably tied for peak civilisation

It is unscientific, but let’s not pretend we here in Europe don’t sometimes do it anyway. Racism is still a thing in Europe, unfortunately. But also, it has been a thing in Europe for basically as long as humans have lived on a large enough scale to notice it. In the 19th century you had the “three great races” of “Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid”. Even way back in the time of the Roman Empire they were being weird about race, ascribing strength and aggression to the pale people to their north and intelligence and peacefulness to the darker people to their south and east.

We’re collectively getting a lot better about not doing it these days, but we’ve got to recognise that there’s still progress needing made