Hey, I’m Santa! Other than that, people lie and conceal a lot on the internet. This person was asking stuff you were not comfortable with. Well done trusting your gut! I would have done the same.

These are so festive! Thanks for sharing

That’s the beauty of it!

Yeah, sometimes you overlook some elements and once pointed out you can’t unsee it. (My opinion of the book the name of the wind honestly dropped after convincing my partner to read it)

The first graph is a ratio, but both the title and the other two graphs are absolute numbers

In the Alps, there are already quite some ghost towns. Small towns either turned into touristic villages or disappeared over the last 50 years. Others were border towns that slowly went out of business. So many are hanging in by a thread, with increasingly old population.

I heard the problem was with yeast interacting poorly with their digestion. Please, power of the internet, tell me if I’m wrong!

I do this sooo often. Often times I just write intro stuff to cool ideas that might or might not be connected to what I should write about. I find honing a page much easier than writing it, so I try to write something and recursively make it into what I need.

I find it so upsetting that most of university’s focus is building marketable skills. That should be the side result! The main result should be in-depth education in a field of your choosing, while building critical thinking skills. Not “let’s give you 5 more years of fact based learning while cherry picking the facts to tailor it your future job”

Last winter, our city had red flooding warnings, part of the city center under water and blocked to traffic. The city hall warning to not cross bridges unless absolutely necessary. And life went on as usual?! I was flabbergasted that the school closed, but not the university nor anything else.

And sometimes the importance of your work is overstated…

I understand… unfortunately, from the other side, I have received so many emails/links/leaflets with woefully out of date information, that I often still try to get direct contact with someone on the inside to confirm stuff.

Lately, I’ve spend an afternoon queuing and getting documents for a government mcGuffin, just to be told at the third meeting with the same staff member that I was an exception and all that stuff did not apply to me at all, I had to go to another office and bring a different set of documents.

I had to directly contact my health insurance three times in one month because the information on their website was out of date.

I had to directly request some “public” documents from HR because the website was last updated early 2024, but there was a law change January 2025.

So many instances like these make me skim emails and often reach out directly. I’m sorry it bites you in the ass.

Considering the creator, is this historically accurate (as far as we know)?

Ohhh daaaaam!!

Absolutely! I just moved to a city that significantly sponsors third places, there are so many clubs and activities for free or almost (archery club fee at 45€/year, dojos go between 45€/semester to 100€, swimming pool at 2€/hour, film festivals for under 10€, knitting club and language club are free, additional discounts come with social security benefits). It makes such a difference! Meeting people becomes seamless when costs are not a constraint. It has been so much easier to build a social net.

Previously I was in a big business city. Everything costs so much, it was hard to justify. Free activities were few and far between. After years there, all my social contacts were through my work.

Stairs are always the architectural element I look at the most. I find them neat! And this one… wow! Who designed it?

Wouldn’t there be other possible plants that would provide the same alkaloid compounds?

Wow, your wife and her brother rock! Congratulations!

A dude approached me letting me know he was the Blue Elf, he was dressed in a childish vibrant flat colors, but nothing too out of the ordinary. He told me he was an artist traveling for an exchange and that he was known for giving away blue puzzle pieces, of which he gave me one. Said goodbye a couple of stops later. He left me utterly confounded. Once home, I looked it up on the Internet and confirmed all his story…

We haven’t crossed the point of no return. We are accelerating because we keep press on the acceleration. If we stopped (as we did temporarily during Covid), stuff would get back on track. We have to act now