I don’t know if this counts, but when I was about 13I was very excited to find an enormous book in my favorite genre at the time, Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard.

It was the first book I ever put down in disgust without finishing. In the almost half-century since then, there are under a dozen that I haven’t finished. Shows you just how bad it is.

I haven’t done it, bit I believe that with a pressure cooker you don’t need to soak the chickpeas.

*Je does

“doivent” is third-person plural (they, not I)

Oh, and I didn’t notice that autocorrect changed my French to English. Should be"dois" or, as you say, “devrais” for the conditional.

All but one of my grandparents had died before I was born, and the remaining one died when I was about 10. She was a stickler for social rules, so I found her kind of intimidating.

That’s one of the nice things about the law in Quebec. Binding arbitration clauses are illegal.

A quetzal in the rainforest of Panama.

To sleep, perchance to dream. And in that sleep of death, what dreams may come!

Hamlet (hopefully I didn’t get it too wrong)

I have been using walkscape as well. My walks with the dogs have almost doubled in length, just because I have a little incentive to achieve a goal in the game.

A lot of his science fiction writing is available with a Creative Commons license, meaning that you can download and read it for free. I really enjoy his quirky, sardonic style.

https://craphound.com/tag/creative-commons/

Gets you to a page where you can download.

I have the set of Infocom text adventure games. I think the earliest ones came out in about 1981 or 82. I still fire one up now and then for a nostalgia hit. I bought a few when they came out, but couldn’t afford more.

You can play some of them online, in your browser. Of course there are thousands of text adventure games (a.k.a. interactive fiction) available for free. Definitely worth checking out! And look at Inform, a language and IDE for creating these games by using more or less standard English.

To protect against piracy, most of these games required physical objects that were included in the game box. They are known as feelies. There are plenty of places on the web where you can find all the feelings you need.

There are estimated to be between 200,000 and 400,000 significant deviations (i.e. not just spelling mistakes) in the New Testament manuscripts we now have. Scholars make educated guesses about what the correct wording is, but those are still guesses.

You know the story of the adulteress who is going to be stoned? That was added at least 100 years after the rest of the Gospel of John was written.

The oldest surviving manuscripts of the Book of Luke, which was the first gospel written, ends with the women running away from the empty tomb and not telling anyone. It is believed that the resurrection story was added later.

Bart Ehrman does a very good job of explaining these issues on his YouTube channel.

I bought a book that had Yggdrasil in a CD that I used so I didn’t have to go into the university for the Unix labs.

I think that the entirety of the book, around 1,000 pages, was printed out man pages.

I think that singing English songs would be very, very helpful. It forces you to use the phrasing, pronunciation, and emphasis of a native English speaker.

Are you saying “Whatabout…”?

instead of death

Unless you count birds that abandon their nests, and other animals that flee their homes. Or the heavy metals and other chemicals that are added to the environment. Or the significant increases in particulate matter in the air.

https://earth.org/environmental-impact-of-fireworks/

Did you know that you can edit the title of your post? You should think about it!

My wife pointed out to me a couple of years ago that I was simultaneously the oldest person on our Dev team, and the youngest person in our church.

On the other hand, the inflation rate in Japan has averaged close to 0% for the past 30 years. Japan used to be considered an expensive country, but now I think it’s safe to say that it’s cheaper than much of North America and Europe

Corned beef seems to have originated in Ireland and Scotland, but was commonly used throughout the British Empire for the past 400 years. I assume the cooking and salting process makes it last much longer without going bad, which would make sense for long voyages.

There was certainly a plug-in or something that made Reddit look like an Excel spreadsheet, so reading Reddit made you look like you were doing important calculations!