Wow, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised given what I already knew about the history and present-day reality of humanity’s interactions with animals, but I’m still surprised.

It’s notable that on the island your links describe, the entire penguin “industry” and several shipwrecks’ worth of dead sailors were the product of one moderately-successful entrepreneur’s ambitions, that he received widespread condemnation at the time, and that this condemnation was not enough to stop him.

Is that true? It’s in the middle of an unrelated section of the article and has no citation.

Medieval

Potatoes

My suspension of disbelief is ruined completely.

It’s fairly straightforward to give a child no opportunity to lie about the things important to the parents, if the parents put in the effort. They can watch the kid come home right after school and sit in the living room doing homework all evening, and the school will tell them his grades and whether or not he’s behaving well.

Reminds me of “Ninja parade slips through town unnoticed” from the Onion.

Depends on what you mean by “strict”. I think the meme is about the parents who get angry over little things but don’t actually pay attention to their kids much - the ones who just assume that their kids would not dare to misbehave. However when I was in high school, I also saw plenty of kids (often immigrants) who had successfully been taught to work pretty much non-stop. I think their parents watched them (or at least their grades) closely enough that they couldn’t have gotten away with anything. It seemed to work well - they got straight A’s, never got in trouble, and went to prestigious universities. I can’t think of a single one I knew who burned out or rebelled (while in high school - I don’t know what happened to them afterwards). However, the ones I got to meet were already filtered, with the low- and medium-achievers not admitted to that school.

I’m not expecting prominent muscles. I just don’t want my stomach protruding like an inflated balloon even when the rest of me is bony.

I think posture does have something to do with it, because when I stand up straight and tense my stomach muscles, I look a lot better. I suspect that the problem isn’t so much that I have excess fat on my stomach (although I do have some) but rather that my stomach muscles aren’t preventing my stomach from bulging out unless I’m deliberately focusing on keeping them tense. I think better posture can be made subconscious (or else why have adults always told children to stand up straight) but I don’t think there’s a way to keep the muscles tense subconsciously. Or is there?

Speaking of posture, my new office chair has a significant forward curve at my lower back which I find uncomfortable. (I used to sit in an old-timey banker’s chair with a back that sloped smoothly backwards.) Is that because my posture is bad? Am I supposed to be sitting in a way that conforms to that curve? I know some people who strap cushions to their car seats in order to add that curve. I find those cushions really uncomfortable too, but are those people actually on to something or are their backs just different from mine?

I’m skinny everywhere except on my stomach. My body thinks that when I diet to lose weight it’s because I want to look like Skeletor, so the first place I lose fat from is my face and it becomes gaunt and looks unhealthy.

The EU only demanded consent.

As in the meme…

Me: I consent (to load the website using the cookie settings already in my browser).

Website: I consent.

Privacy busybodies and EU regulators: I don’t.

Blame the EU. There, cookies used to bother a tiny number of “privacy advocates” who were already perfectly capable of blocking the cookies in their own browsers but they weren’t happy because no one else cared about cookies so they got the GDPR passed to bother everyone in the world.

But AI is actually way ahead of where I thought it would be in 2025.

I wouldn’t be able to do that - I had to stop drinking caffeine a few years ago but still get cranky if I don’t have the experience of drinking a big mug of tea in the morning, despite the fact that the decaf tea has no direct pharmacological effect on me. Then whenever I’m bored or anxious or tired I make another big mug of decaf tea and feel better. It has to be tea; other beverages don’t help. Purely psychosomatic but still definitely a real effect.

Y’all get lemongrass?

You think I’m just persnickety? I’m downright cantankerous!

Hollow Night

All credibility lost.

I wish I knew. The other thing that stuck out to me was that no one wore shorts. I did at first just because it was hot but I stopped after I noticed that I was the only man not wearing long pants

But cultural differences do exist too. When I visited Mumbai, I fairly frequently saw pairs of adult men walking around holding hands. It looked really gay to my American eyes, gayer than anything that my gay friends do in public. However, apparently in India it is normal for heterosexual men to hold each other’s hands.

It’s like gorilla glue: made by gorillas for gorillas from gorillas.

I wanted to conquer the world like Alexander the Great. I’m not sure why that appealed to me, in retrospect.

(A friend gave me some advice a few years ago. He said “You’re much more normal than you like to think. You have normal needs and you will be happy if you live a normal life.” I don’t know if he’s right.)