Of course it was a ritual. It was a form of necromancy, to start you had to invoke the name of an ancient Roman emperor

Outer Wilds. A game that genuinely made me reflect on my place in the universe.

I recently learned that the word clock originally ment bell or bell chime. It's related to the German word Glocke. So 7 o'clock = 7 bongs...

In the original version of the game, she has a full set of six. In the remake, she has two. Story goes, that during the making of the games her Pokémon got swapped with another NPC's, and that was corrected in the remake. But a lot of players wondered were she would "store" six pokeballs on her body...

Never knew THOT is an acronym. I always just read it as a new slang word.

That's why the dwarfs where helping him with his decision.

Many people don't know this, but that was intentional! Laputa was invented by the English author Jonathan Swift. In his book Gulliver's Travels, the floating city of Laputa oppresses the country below it (literally). The oppressed finally manage to ground it by having the towers of their capital collapse inward when Laputa descended on it. The place where it happened is called Lin Lin. Lin Lin = double Lin = Dublin. The oppressed country is Ireland and Swift was calling his own England "the whore".

I just tested myself and burst out laughing. Apparently Surviving Mars is woke because the little models of the colonists are too diverse 🤣

I started reading the Discworld novels in high school in the early 2000s. I definitely felt a change in the writing around Going Postal. The novels were no longer creative chaos the way the were in the 90s. Less plot threats running in parallel, less chaotic stuff happening. But the transition seemed to me so gradual that I wouldn't have made the connection to Pterry's state of mind. It seemed more like he was changing as a writer.

Principal Skinner and Miss Krababel where in the closet together. And he had a thousand hands, like Vishnu. And they were all busy.

The numbers were code for emperor Nero. If you assign every letter in the alphabet a number based on the alphabetical order and add up the values for the name, you get 666. But only if you use the Greek name NERON CAESAR, in Latin, he would be NERO CAESAR, and the missing N gives you only 616. So some scribes in the western part of the empire would calculate in their head and write down 616. So we got two versions of the number going around in manuscripts from the time.

I did, and I am.

It's even more confusing: Emojis were invented in Japan, which adds another layer of cultural differences. Holding your hands flat against each other is a common sign for prayer in Christianity, but in Japan it is a commen gesture for giving thanks. Hence the "official" meaning: Thank you

Maybe they mean lupus? I think wolfes were already extinct in the 1600s on the British isles.

SATANAS

No, it is something different. Cloning creates a another being with the exact same DNA. This would allow people, who can't produce viable sperm/egg cells, to reproduce with their partner. First patients would be infertile men and women.

In my experience, a lot of these politics are purely performative. Politicians get elected on the promise of 'reducing regulations' to 'release the economy', without any connection to reality. In office they than have to do something that looks like the thing they fought for. We've seen the same after Brexit. The 'bad and idiotic' EU regulations were dropped and untreated sewage was let into the sea.

Might mean the US government warming up to the new leadership in Syria. The new president was seen as a terrorist until last year.

I think "train autism" means train spotting (the hobby, not the movie). In the hobby, you observe trains and write down their model and/or serial number in a notebook. The goal is to get a full set of trains of a certain kind, or operated by a company. Nowadays the community also posts photos on the internet, but for a long time, they were known as the guys comparing their notebooks with nothing but numbers.

It's a scleral ring. Lots of animals have that, many including humans don't.