Thanks, I’ll check it out!

I tried it and didn’t like it. Maybe I was expecting it to be more like Elder Scrolls games and it’s not; I haven’t played other games in the genre either. The combat felt clunky to me, though I’ve heard that it’s better to think of it as a rhythm game. I like dark fantasy, but didn’t quite connect with the worldbuilding either, maybe because it felt like a zombie game dressed up as fantasy. It’s also a minor thing, but was also obviously made for console and ported to PC so felt a little weird.

There’s [email protected], which seems active

It would be doable, and libraries have been amenable to this sort of thing, like not handing over records about checking out books. This is even easier than checking out books, since you don’t actually need to record who is attached to the account. Libraries could obfuscate information that could lead to invasion of privacy. And because it’s distributed and local, it’s much harder to abuse. If someone tried creating 100 accounts, the librarians would start remembering them and refusing to give them more. Going around to 100 libraries would also be much harder than spamming a new account page on some website.

becomes easier to dox if you have the person’s location

Yeah, I guess “take over” is too strong vs “provide the option of”. It shouldn’t be the only way, but would be one very good option. They don’t need to actually keep any records of who they gave an account to, and can take steps to obfuscate any privacy-violating processes. Historically, they’ve been very amenable to this, such as not handing over records about who checked out books.

How many libraries

That’d be a great thing IMO. More skills like that should be distributed and federated. Libraries should be community centers of learning, including learning how to run servers. Information isn’t just books anymore, and libraries need to adapt.

It’d be nice to see public libraries take over this sort of thing. They can do community-based physical verification, without cost. They can assert that someone is legit, without revealing any private info. They’d have to be low-drama, boring infrastructure, in that they merely assert “This person is real”, without getting into “This person is good”.

It’s not sexy like a new protocol or blockchain or whatever, but IMO it’s one of the few ways to really handle the problem, and also is a good way to help build local community.

Reminds me of this short from a while back. It didn’t quite predict the focus on smaller, cheaper drones, but still pretty good:

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

This is also some good context about drones being the future of warfare, including in space. Star Wars having fighters duke it out with human pilots will almost certainly not be a thing:

https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/fighter.php

The Godfather basically invented the modern idea of gangsters as sophisticated:

Gangsters reportedly responded enthusiastically to the film. Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano, the former underboss in the Gambino crime family, said: “I left the movie stunned … I mean, I floated out of the theater. Maybe it was fiction, but for me, then, that was our life. It was incredible. I remember talking to a multitude of guys, made guys, who felt the same way.” According to Anthony Fiato, after seeing the film, Patriarca crime family members Paulie Intiso and Nicky Giso altered their speech patterns to imitate that of Vito Corleone. Intiso was known to swear frequently and use poor grammar, but after seeing the movie, he began to improve his speech and philosophize more. In 2025, The Times reported that recruits to the Sicilian Mafia in Italy are now urged by mafia bosses to watch The Godfather so they can learn the trade and because mafia bosses fear that new recruits “lack a code of honour”.

There’s a relevant bit in The Player of Games from The Culture series. It purports that the book you’re reading is actually translated from the original Marain (in-universe language), and has been adapted suitably:

Still with me?

Little textual note for you here (bear with me).

Those of you unfortunate enough not to be reading or hearing this in Marain may well be using a language without the requisite number or type of personal pronouns, so I’d better explain that bit of the translation.

Marain, the Culture’s quintessentially wonderful language (so the Culture will tell you), has, as any schoolkid knows, one personal pronoun to cover females, males, in-betweens, neuters, children, drones, Minds, other sentient machines, and every life-form capable of scraping together anything remotely resembling a nervous system and the rudiments of language (or a good excuse for not having either). Naturally, there are ways of specifying a person’s sex in Marain, but they’re not used in everyday conversation; in the archetypal language-as-moral-weapon-and-proud-of-it, the message is that it’s brains that matter, kids; gonads are hardly worth making a distinction over.

So, in what follows, Gurgeh is quite happily thinking about the Azadians just as he’d think about any other (see list above)… But what of you, O unlucky, possibly brutish, probably ephemeral and undoubtedly disadvantaged citizen of some unCultured society, especially those unfairly (and the Azadians would say under-) endowed with only the mean number of genders?!

How shall we refer to the triumvirate of Azadian sexes without resorting to funny-looking alien terms or gratingly awkward phrases not-words?

…. Rest at ease; I have chosen to use the natural and obvious pronouns for male and female, and to represent the intermediates - or apices - with whatever pronominal term best indicates their place in their society, relative to the existing sexual power-balance of yours. In other words, the precise translation depends on whether your own civilisation (for let us err on the side of terminological generosity) is male or female dominated.

(Those which can fairly claim to be neither will of course have their own suitable term.)

Anyway, enough of that.

You might be interested in browsing through this site:

https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/

It talks about a lot of sci fi tropes from a hard science perspective, and goes over FTL specifically:

https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/fasterlight.php

It’s kind of a downer site in some respects because it does a lot of “here’s why your favorite sci fi series is unrealistic”, but in that discussion there’s a lot of looking at interesting tropes and concepts. There’s also a good explainer for FTL specifically here:

https://www.physicsmatt.com/blog/2016/8/25/why-ftl-implies-time-travel

Here’s a comparison between French and Swedish on a random news story of the day:

https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2026/06/22/le-premier-ministre-britannique-keir-starmer-annonce-sa-demission_6706580_3210.html

Keir Starmer annonce sa démission de son poste de premier ministre du Royaume-Uni

https://www.svt.se/nyheter/utrikes/keir-starmer-avgar-som-storbritanniens-premiarminister

Keir Starmer avgår som Storbritanniens premiärminister

I can tell it’s about Keir Starmer and being a prime minister, but nothing beyond that (annonce = announce, but that doesn’t help). The French one is a bit worse IMO because of false cognates. He decommissions his son from the post of prime minister of the royal university? I translated it and I was way off. Looked at a few others, and I can see cognates after I translate them to English, but it’s not something I would be able to figure out just by reading it.

I tried translating the sentence to French with a machine translator and it came up with this:

L’hiver rigoureux approche, une tempête de neige va s’abattre. Viens te réfugier dans ma maison bien chauffée, mon ami. Bienvenue ! Viens ici, chante et danse, mange et bois. Voilà ce que j’ai prévu. Nous avons de l’eau, de la bière et du lait tout frais de la vache. Oh, et de la soupe bien chaude !

I would understand “bière” and “soupe” out of all that, I think. There’s cognates in there like mansion/maison, but they’re spelled/pronounced differently enough that I don’t think they’d help.

Generally not, but it’d be interesting to explore how long of an intentionally-constructed text could be considered mutually intelligible. Here’s an example for Germanic languages:

https://linguifex.com/wiki/Literature%3AThe_cold_winter_is_near

The cold winter is near is an example text for Germanic languages written by YouTuber King Ming Lam. It aims to use as much partially or completely mutually intelligible vocabulary between North and West Germanic languages to construct a text that can be understood, if vaguely, by any speaker of a mainstream Germanic language, such as English or German.

Here’s the English text:

The cold winter is near, a snowstorm will come. Come in my warm house, my friend. Welcome! Come here, sing and dance, eat and drink. That is my plan. We have water, beer, and milk fresh from the cow. Oh, and warm soup!

To me, Norwegian is the closest to intelligible as a native English speaker:

Den kalde vinteren er nær, en snøstorm vil komme. Kom inn i mitt varme hus, min venn. Velkommen! Kom her, syng og dans, et og drikk. Dette er min plan. Vi har vann, øl og melk fersk fra kua. Åh, og varm suppe!

I’ve also seen that Frisian is supposed to be most understandable to an English speaker, or at least most historically related. Here’s some samples of that:

• English: The boy stroked the girl about the chin and kissed her on the cheeks.
• Saterland Frisian: Die Wänt strookede dät Wucht uum ju Keeuwe un oapede hier ap do Sooken.
• North Frisian (Mooring dialect): Di dreng aide dåt foomen am dåt kan än mäket har aw da siike.
• North Frisian (Söl’ring dialect): Di Dreeng strekt dit faamen om’t Ken en taatjet höör üp di Sjaken
• West Frisian: De jonge streake it famke om it kin en tute har op 'e wangen.
• Gronings: t Jong fleerde t wicht om kinne tou en smokte heur op wange.
• East Frisian Low Saxon: De Fent straktde dat Wicht um’t Kinn to un tuutjede hör up de Wangen.
• German: Der Junge streichelte das Mädchen ums Kinn und küsste sie auf die Wangen.
• Dutch: De jongen streelde het meisje langs haar kin en kuste haar op de wangen.
• Afrikaans: Die seun streel die meisie oor haar ken en soen haar op die wange.
• Danish: Drengen strøg pigen på hagen og kyssede hende på kinderne.
• Icelandic: Drengurinn strauk stúlkunni um hökuna og kyssti hana á kinnarnar.
• Norwegian (Bokmål): Gutten strøk jenta på haken og kysset henne på kinnene.
• Norwegian (Nynorsk): Guten strauk jenta på haka og kyssa henne på kinna.
• Swedish: Pojken strök flickan över hakan och kysste henne på kinderna.

I’ve heard of the phrase “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, in that order”, and in looking that up TIL there’s even a bit more to it:

The winner is whoever stabs the other with their penis and impregnates them

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NisCkxU544c

Just a one-off villian-of-the-week for a superhero called The Shield. Seems like he might’ve-sort’ve been in the DC universe. The Penguin was created in December 1941, and this comic was published in February 1942, so quite possibly inspired by the Penguin.

Sorry, I think this falls under R3. I don’t see the humor arising from removing context, particularly since it’s also not a single panel. The middle panel on its own probably works better.

Sorry, removing due to being edited:

https://www.cbr.com/he-man-masters-universe-fisto-meme/

As an artist? If so, do you have a link?