Skua

It also wasn’t uncommon to have a (partial) set of encyclopedias

“The big book of answers” as it was (jokingly) referred to in my childhood home. It was kept near the dinner table to settle arguments. It never settled them

I usually keep a bottle of virgin olive oil and a bottle of sunflower oil in the kitchen. Different oils for different jobs. Sunflower oil doesn’t taste of much and can handle higher heat - not as high as avocado oil, but pretty close - whereas olive has that lovely flavour. I sometimes get sesame oil if I’m doing a lot of east Asian cooking, but only ever a small bottle. That stuff tastes too strong to be a general-usage oil outside of the cuisines that work with it.

I’m not personally too concerned about the health benefits of each one. It’s oil. I shouldn’t be having an excess of it no matter which sort it is.

It’s quite expensive here. I occasionally get a small bottle if I see an unusually good price, but the vast majority of the time sunflower oil does the same job for far less cost

Nailed it

Only one-way? Alright, well I’m gonna go walk Lairig Ghru, a hiking route that I like the look of that is too long for me to do there and back. I’ll walk out however far I want to go and then magically teleport back to the start

Ahhh, Tenerife and Mount Takamagahara were the two I didn’t have some awareness of the story of

Astana, Bishkek, Kuwait City, Nairobi, Tarawa

I can’t vouch for its actual journalism because I haven’t read much of it, but it’s actually based in the Netherlands and as of this summer banned in Russia

I feel like I could suggest most of Salvatore Ganacci’s catalogue here, but I think Take Me To America is probably the winner. Join a determined Bosnian man on his quest to for a better TV signal

Oil is also about a fifth of Russia’s entire economy, so the less it is needed the worse it is for Russia

Real life Little Odessa is in New York (there is a large community of Soviet / post-Soviet migrants there). The Half Life location is New Little Odessa though, so it sounds like it’s not where real life Little Odessa is

The Ottawa Treaty attempted to get rid of them, but it’s essentially just a voluntary thing. Ukraine did sign up to it, but many of the world’s major military powers did not. Unfortunately Russia is among those that didn’t. Since Russia is mining the front anyway, there’s little benefit to Ukraine not doing so

There is a small silver lining here - or a less dark patch of the cloud, maybe - in that modern mines are designed to make themselves inert or self destruct after a few weeks or months

Probably not that different any more. China’s consumption-based per-capita emissions are damn near as high as the EU’s now, and China has three times the capitas

There’s a reason it is nicknamed the Grauniad

Also, he was one of the guys in Rubberbandits

The Elder Scrolls is probably the one I’ve had the most fun theory-crafting about, but I will admit that you have to pick and choose what to care about.

Also the old Wipeout racing games had a remarkable amount of background plot going on that was really pretty fun. The self-awareness to poke fun at Fusion’s poorly-received changes as being the in-universe result of megacorp meddling for mass market appeal gave me a good laugh, but you can piece together a surprising amount of the world from random references in team flavour text

I’ve never heard of First Law, but it being mentioned alongside the Expanse is reason enough for me to check it out

I have to use Teams for a remote course I’m doing and holy shit no program I have ever used is worse for notifications than Teams. Even turning off everything doesn’t prevent it from flashing on the taskbar, so you then have to go disable that for everything as well. I know someone sent a message in chat, Teams, I am in the fucking call where they sent it