It depends. “Donald Trump wants to annex Wisconsin as the 51st state” wouldn’t be funny. Pocketpair launching a Steam store page for the Palworld dating sim (which was last year’s April Fools joke) was.

But yeah, this isn’t the time for political humor.

Besides, “there are only two sexes” is rather obviously inaccurate. While intersex people aren’t terribly common, they do exist and are well-documented – as are the genetic reasons for why they’re intersex. XX men and XY women are also a thing. Genetics are inherently messy.

But acknowledging all that would mean having to admit that sex is a complex matter and can’t be handled with simple statements like “the one you were born with is the one you should have”. It’s easier to just pretend intersex people don’t exist.

Not for me. In my case, the party accidentally one-shotted the big bad the first time they met him because everyone had severely underestimated the amount of firepower that system gave PCs who weren’t deliberately gimped.

It’s okay; I declared that the guy had a cloning device. From then on he died once per session and the tone of the campaign changed into “zany splatter comedy”.

And the name of that hamster? Pikachu.

We absolutely do. The paper is plastic-layered, which is how beverage cartons generally work.

I am aware of waxed cardboard. I dismissed it because I thought that relying solely on it to store a liquid sounded a bit too ambitious. But it might work so yeah, I should have considered it.

Besides, how would an all-paper bottle even work? Liquid soap is, well, liquid. Paper soaks through when it’s in contact with a liquid. The only other way to do such a bottle would be to use coated paper, which is less recyclable than an inner plastic bottle.

Why do you go for a MIRV if your warhead doesn’t even leave the atmosphere?

Keiner sagt, dass gesunde Ernährung Schwurbelei ist. Aber “Nahrungsmittel helfen den Organen, die so ähnlich aussehen” ist völliger Unsinn.

Ich meine, Karotten sehen nicht mal wie Augen aus. Litschis sehen wie Augen aus, oder Nashibirnen. Oder Eier. Karotten sollten statt dessen gut für die Finger sein. Und statt Sellerie sollte Spargel gut für die Knochen sein. Und Feldsalat kann nicht gut für uns sein; der ähnelt nichts im Körper.

Auf dem Poster werden Zufälle als Regel verkauft. Das ist grober Unfug und wird zurecht angeprangert.

You can do that by grafting a tomato plant on top of a potato plant. It’s tricky, though, and IIRC you can end up with inedible tomatoes.

Candy Sweet Icicle is another recommended variety. I never used them in anything because they go straight into my mouth as soon as they are ripe.

Even worse. The business model was “offer a service at a loss, get investors to fund you on promises that your customer base will allow you to turn a profit if it just gets big enough, repeat”. Basically you’re funding growth with the promise of future growth. Enshittification happens when the investors stop believing in the promised future profits and force the business to generate some right now.

It’s easy enough once you’ve tracked one down. Just don’t track someone down to inform them that you’ve turned articles upside down and you should be good.

One problem is that in a world without major problems, stakes have to be low (which is perfectly fine and can make for an engaging story) or an external threat has to be introduced. The latter can easily feel forced or disconnected with the world.

I wonder how it would be to have a nonlinear game set in two time periods. One is a solarpunk-ish idyll under threat (with the protagonist’s actions focused on protecting it) and the other is a preceding industrial dystopia (with the protagonist’s actions focused on effecting change for the better).

Throughout the game the player first learns that the dystopian protagonist’s actions did succeed in changing the world for the better but also that the threats faced by the idyllic period are consequences of those actions. The message is that even ideal decisions can have negative effects down the line, “happily ever after” endings don’t really exist, and happiness requires maintenance. Yet, change for the better is both possible and worth the effort.

Seconded. As far as pens are concerned, Uniball is where it’s at.

Depends on your keyboard layout. On Macintosh-like keyboards it can be as simple as AltGr+dash. On smartphone keyboards you can just long-press the dash.

On Windows you’re expected to hold down Alt and enter some code.

Whichever one has no warnings in ToxFox¹. I am partial to Schwarzkopf’s Nature Box line but I’m the end I’m not picky as long as there’s no nasty shit in there.

¹Explanation for non-Germans: ToxFox is a mobile app released by German eco-NGO BUND. It lets you scan a cosmetic product’s barcode to look it up in an ingredients database. It will show warnings if the product contains stuff like microplastics or ingredients that aren’t entirely harmless.

Their Hysson is pretty tasty, with a slight honey aroma. I can recommend it.

The social implications of veiling are an interesting and complex topic. Unfortunately, public discourse tends to be pretty bad at handling complex topics. But there are occasional moments of lucidity. To wit:

Sometime around 2015 or so we had a big political debate in Germany. Some politicians were floating the idea of a “burqa ban” (= a flat ban on all forms of Islamic face veiling). For a while it was seriously debated but it ultimately failed as most Germans considered it to violate freedom of religion.

The media were actually helpful – at least the publicly funded ones were. One particularly interesting report I saw was when a female reporter put on full veils (and correctly identified what she was wearing as a niqab, not a burqa) and went out in public. First with a hidden camera to see how she was treated, then with a camera team to get vox pops.

Opinions were actually fairly divided even among Muslims. One male Muslim argued that face veils always are inherently oppressive and have no place in society. A young woman (who was wearing nothing indicating her religion) expressed admiration for those who fully veil and hoped that one day she’d be able to as well. An old woman wearing a headscarf who was carrying groceries said that she did wear the niqab “but not right now; I have things to do”.

That diversity of views has stuck with me, especially that last statement. I never expected someone who observes such full veiling to be so pragmatic about it. (Yes, that does go against the reasons for wearing them in the first place but everybody tailors their religion to themself.) If wearing any kind of veils can be something you can just decide not to do, then it becomes an expression of agency, not one of lack thereof. I respect that.

Of course it’s not respectable when someone is forced to wear a headscarf/a niqab/whatever. But a ban isn’t going to fix that; people who oppress their wives aren’t going to stop doing so. If they feel that nobody outside the house is allowed to see their wife’s face then the wife will simply no longer be allowed to leave the house.

Ultimately, in my opinion, people should be allowed to wear any religious garment they want, provided it’s their own desire to do so and there’s no overriding reason to disallow it. (E.g., no matter how religious you are, you do not wear a kaftan or a cross necklace or anything else that dangles while operating industrial machinery.) Anything else is useless at best.

Annoyingly, we already have fast transactions as part of SEPA. But they’re somewhat inconvenient to do and especially not available by just holding your card in front of a sensor.

If we had a harmonized standard for that we could get rid of Visa and MasterCard. And if we had a common web interface to make SEPA transactions more convenient than manually typing an IBAN into a homebanking interface we could get rid of PayPal as well.

Yes, I know services like that exist but I really hate how the current ones expect me to type the login credentials for my homebanking into a third-party website.