I’m atheist, and my partner was Muslim when I first knew her.

People say it doesn’t mater - but honestly it really fucking does.

Imagine being in relationship with someone who never really left North Korea, deep down. There’s so much fear, so much fear-driven obedience, and so much fear-driven defense of the indefensible.

I never really understood the concept of freedom of conscience until I was arguing with one of her friends about Amina Lawal, the Nigerian woman sentenced to death by stoning for adultery - with her sentence delayed until her baby was weaned. Despite being really very progressive at heart, my partner ended up arguing in favour of it - and then later on was seriously pissed off at me for making her defend that.

She ended up deconverting several years later (certainly not at my behest), and things got immeasurably better from then on.

But that’s not a possibility I’d recommend banking on. My honest advice is just don’t go there, it’s far more stressful than you think it is.

Brilliant, thank you, I can’t draw for shit

You don’t actually spoon the whole way, just up to the waist, leaving a bit of a gap between your chest and partner’s shoulders.

Upper arm goes round partner as normal, lower arm rests elbow on mattress, forearm vertical across their back, hand holds their upper shoulder.

Plenty of contact still, but your arm doesn’t die, you don’t get their hair tickling your face all night and you get to use your own pillow.

call the police?

I don’t drive, but as a pedestrian:

USE YOUR GODDAMN TURN SIGNAL

Anything that needs an unconfirmed signup, I’ve always used Don B. Sonozi - godfather@mafia.org

I figure that one day a spammer will learn regret.

you’re doomed, then.

Do a shot of vinegar. Works every time.

Stick it in the oven for an hour, right on the rack, as-is.

Take it out, cut in half, butter/salt/pepper.

The Martian was excellent.

The first Guardians of the Galaxy movie was a hell of a lot of fun.

I’m guessing that’s (cartoons or movies) (made for kids), not (cartoons) or (movies made for kids) - so the Spiderverse moves were also excellent.

How old are your kids?

Stereo vision

Handwriting or drawing ability beyond that of a 6yo

The ability to follow a conversation with more than about 4 people in the room, and for crowd noise not to flip into a gibbering hellscape.

HIRE 👏 MORE 👏 WOMEN 👏 GUARDS 👏

Sysadmin here. I work with linux every day, live and breathe.

And both my actual workstation and my home machine are windows.

Because for tasks that aren’t inherently problem-solvey, I don’t want to have to problem-solve.

For tasks that need tools and technical skills and poking it with a stick, absolutely do them on linux. Logfiles, strace, tcpdump, your programming language of choice, all the tools in the box.

But for file/print/email/office/internet/media/video gaem, lolno fuck that. Save your creative ingenuity and mental bandwidth for the things that actually need it; you don’t want to be reinventing the wheel every morning just to make breakfast.

For the mundane shit where you only care about the content, the UX on windows (or mac, for the people used to it) is just boringly unobtrusive, and thus the better choice.

• sunny loves grumpy
• savage mama bear
• really fucking personal, inexorable vengeance

So when is the rest of the world putting sanctions on El Salvador?

Lie on the beach in winter: the sun is pathetically un-warm.

Adjusting the angle at which you recline won’t make the sun any warmer.

So your intuition is off here.

Imagine someone puts an opaque shell around the earth at cruising altitude, and cuts a metre-square window in it.

Put that window directly over the equator, wait for noon. You will have a metre-square patch of sunlight on the ground.

As the sun heads towards the horizon, the patch of sunlight stretches into a long east-west tail, just like a long shadow.

The same amount of energy is coming through the window, but it’s spread over a much larger area on the surface, so there’s fewer watts-per-square-cm hitting the ground.

Now move that window north 30 degrees. Wait until noon, and the patch is already smeared into a long tail north-south, and that’s before applying any east-west smear. As the sun heads for the horizon, it’s going to be even more spread out into a great big enormous oblong, extended in both directions.

Now, entirely replace that shell with windows, and through the raytracing gets more involved, the same principles are at work.

That’s why mornings and evenings are cold, that’s why winter is cold, that’s why it gets colder towards the poles. You’re getting a smaller and smaller share of the sunlight hitting the area where the earth is.

They’re just setting the tarriff to half the ‘trade deficit’ percentage.

Where the actual trade amount is trivial, this leads to ludicrous results.

You’re always going to a chunk of political support by oppressing minorities, anyone considered ‘other’. A percentage of people are always going to hate, mistrust and blame the out-group for everything wrong with their lives, and this makes them very easy to lead round by the nose.

Stoke enough hatred, and people will gladly give up due process, human rights and social equity in the name of oppressing those they see as the enemy.

And once you can do that, large corporations can exploit the absolute shit out of the population, way harder than they could with all those pesky laws, regulations, oversight, etc. They can use slave labour from the concentration camps, steal the land and wealth from the people they kill or imprison, and they can rewrite laws to suit themselves, secure in the knowledge that anyone opposing them can simply be disappeared off the streets.

A bunch of Americans pronounce it sen-tar for some reason that I’ve never understood.