Basilisk

It’s sometimes used here, I think it depends how English you are. I just use “lol” but my fiancée does use “mdr” with other French speakers.

Depends on how the fight resolved. Sometimes you get snippy for a bit but ultimately either come to an agreement or the fight resolves and that’s it. You rankle for a bit after, get over it, and move on.

Sometimes the fight isn’t about what you’re fighting about. They’ve had a bad day and it manifests as some removed comments about how the dishes were done. You stop fighting about the dishes but you’re still upset because they’re taking their bad day out on you, or they’re still upset because they feel you don’t care about them. These can last much longer because the fight revealed bad blood, but didn’t do anything to address it.

A French one is common enough that it’s used in English- “Répondez, s’il vous plaît” (Respond, if you please) is where we get RSVP. “SVP” is also sometimes used as a shorthand for “please”, at least in Quebecois.

They sell them cut like that as dog treats, with the hole packed with food. Probably either dragged out as a treat for some camper’s dog or scavenged by wildlife and abandoned when the good stuff was gone.

Could be exercise-induced asthma? I get this as well and only found out it wasn’t a common affliction a few weeks ago, when it was pointed out that this might be a cause. For me at least, after a while the pain gets so bad that every time I swallow it feels like my throat doesn’t want to reopen.

Nuclear power, genetics, steam power, modern explosives…

I’ve been playing Star Ocean the Second Story R since my fiancee bought it for me at Christmas.

I can’t help but feel like if we didn’t live in a capitalist hellscape, the increasing democratization of art would be unambiguously a good thing. I’d be more than happy to see “art as decoration” (as opposed to “art as a human means of expression”) opened to being something shunted off to machines, if it weren’t for the fact that this is a method that people currently use to make sure they have enough money to not starve to death in the cold. Advertising art of polar bears drinking Coke is nicer to look at than big block text saying “consume”, but it’s hardly a soulful expression of the human condition. Or maybe it is, which is even more depressing, but the ultimate apotheosis of this is pushing that sort of messaging to robots to make anyway.

Meanwhile, giving people who aren’t necessarily “artistic” a vehicle to create art as a means of expressing themselves is also really neat, and in the hands of people who are artistic, it gives them a low-impact tool for pre-visualization, inspiration, and a new medium to experiment with. It also reduces barriers for people with disabilities to make art. I’d love to see artists training LLM systems on their own work as a way of sharing their “style” with the world — something which is difficult to justify in a world where your style is something that needs to be jealously protected against copyright infringement, which again comes down to needing to monetize your expression as a matter of survival.

The ampersand (&) was so commonly used that for a while it was taught as a letter. British schoolkids in the mid- to late-19th century would include it as the 27th letter on writing work and needlework samplers, usually after “z”.

There’s some discussion that the Alphabet Song ends with “w, x, y & z” specifically to include it.

Q.E.D. is “quod erat demonstrandum”, meaning “thus, it has been demonstrated”.

I hated these Dairy Queen commercials so much I haven’t done DQ willingly in over 20 years. It used to be a regular thing to grab ice cream in a hot afternoon during the summer.