The British Navy fired mortars — whose projectiles can explode midair — from bomb ships to bombard Fort McHenry, along with using Congreve rockets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Baltimore

Lol I looked the post up after seeing the meme a couple days ago. The user has been made aware that they’re now somewhat internet famous.

Could be that 2024 film about a hypothetical Second American Civil War.

Literally the same thing happened to me with a cousin who convinced me to try some online version of the game. Played two games where he steamrolled me without explaining how and why everything was happening and I was like “yeah I’m good thanks”.

Funnily enough, someone else online convinced me to play the Digimon TCG on tabletop simulator with them, and it went well enough that we continued a couple times a week for months. He did a much better job of explaining every step of the game, and I was winning maybe a third of the games towards the end. Commandramons, my beloveds.

I haven’t heard that term before, but I have noticed “hipster” being used less in recent years.

As someone whose work requires using Teams, yeah I was annoyed by the parentheses and pleased when they started using colons.

I’ve had maybe a dozen drinks since my first one 7 years ago, and most of those were bagged fruity frozen drinks that, yeah, helped hide the alcohol flavor. Would have been better as just nonalcoholic frozen fruity drinks. Mocktails can be good but imo most of the ones I’ve had were overpriced for juice and soda water.

Outside of those, I had some sips of an IPA and a pilsner on a food tour, tried a couple cocktails my folks made after they got back from a cruise (which was weird because I never saw them drink before), tried whatever drink has a salt rim at a restaurant (it was terrible). Haven’t had anything this year. Never been buzzed.

But some of them don’t tell you that when you first set it, so you have to call tech support and, after sending you a temporary password to log in and set a new password which then also doesn’t work, they’re like “wait, you can’t have & or ! in the password — try it without,” and it works because it accepted the password but removed all special characters without telling you 🙃

Lol I only found out when the Wii U was at the end of its lifecycle and a host of a podcast I listened to was like “it’s no wonder — so many people think it’s just a tablet for the Wii.” I was like it isn’t?!

I’ve never had someone tell me that they owned one, which is insane considering how popular the Wii was. Talk about marketing failure.

Don’t they serve really low alcohol content drinks on the Enterprise? Been a minute since I watched TNG

fwiw I cook and I’ve never heard of it, but I wasn’t gonna complain about it to the commenter lol

Of note are mirror ambigrams. Particularly vertical axis mirror ambigrams, in this instance. That is, words that could be read by reflecting the design. Basile Morin has a list of ambigrams – mirror and otherwise – that they’ve designed on their website here.

I’ve been listening to The Dawn of Everything, a New History of Humanity the past couple weeks and it’s been quite interesting. Particularly relevant to this topic is how many societies we have evidence for — through actual contact and documentation or through archaeological findings and anthropological research — that either consciously did not develop or later abolished a ruling class, whether as devolved cultural groups or even in cities of tens of thousands. Examples are given for cities in Mesopotamia, Yucatan, iirc north of the Black Sea, and other areas.

Lots of interesting stuff on personal freedom, collective decision-making, community care, agriculture and conscious lack thereof, etc.

All equines originated from North America, at that, though yes they went extinct and were later reintroduced by Europeans.

Similarly, camelids like dromedaries, bactrians, llamas, alpacas, vicuñas, and guanacos also all originate from North America, their genetic ancestors crossing the Bering strait and moving west or moving south into South America. Those still in NA died in the mid-Pleistocene.

I can only see one without opening the meta link, myself. Woman’s got her tongue caught in a vice.

Might be the app I’m using?

Yeah, I’m not in any vegan groups but I’ve seen (what is hopefully) a vocal online minority of those who use the label for killing-is-wrong reasons come off as angrier at folks using it for any other reason than they are at folks who do consume animal products, and insisting that the other camps should use “plant-based (diet)” instead.

Wait, the tiny pocket within the regular pocket that some pants have is for change?

It could be worse, but I’ve never been west of the Mississippi (within the US; I’ve been to BC). I’ve adopted or switched words over the years, so it’s not too surprising that it got it wrong. That old dialect quiz from the NYT or whatever years ago was worse at getting my location.

I had Earthworm Jim, some platformer where you’re a clockwork knight toy, a 3-player smash-em-up called something like Three Dirty Dwarves, and the dinosaur fighting game Primal Rage. It’s probably ass but I have a lot of nostalgia for Primal Rage, ha. I’ve gone back to listen to the soundtrack on occasion.

And ducks. I’ve had a couple generations of ducks and they’re so adorable as ducklings, including the newborns. The adults are pretty, though; got one whose black feathers look plain from a distance but are an iridescent sort of deep purple and green closer up.