Ahh, so this is what the genie gave me when I wished for Sony to release more Bloodborne stuff. What a bastard

Never mind getting the Union Jack the right way up, at least some of those dumb fucks managed to paint the Danish flag on a roundabout because they forgot what the English one looks like

The game looks like it’s tricking you but actually isn’t. There are always two witches and they’re both real, you just don’t get to see one of the health bars at first. You can still damage the one with the hidden health bar

It’s essentially a model parliament, but one that gets contact with the actual government. Under-18s fight for election and hold debates in the same manner as the House of Commons

No, I have absolutely no idea how this makes it “woke” beyond that some people just use the word to mean “thing I don’t like”

Imagine if the boss fight one was invisible unless you had enough insight, like Aava in DS2

I mean, someone would definitely still beat it like that. But it’d be cool

Funny you should say that, they actually caused one in Moscow just over a week ago (October 31st)

It seems to me like Ukraine is focussing its efforts on military targets and oil production, though. Russia’s oil industry has been getting absolutely hammered, to the point where it has had to start importing fuel

Huh. We made them shiver in the cold

I can’t necessarily offer an answer here, but I can give you a bound at least. I was able to find this 1703 geography of the Kingdom of Naples that explicitly calls Italy a boot, so “some time before 1703” can be said for sure

Forma una Penisola, à guisa di uno Stivale, fi come l’Italia tutta fù meditata da Strabone, e da altri Geografi di rigo

Machine translated:

It forms a peninsula, like a boot, just as all of Italy was studied by Strabo and other renowned geographers.

I’m fairly sure the Strabo bit means “we’ve known it was this shape since Strabo” rather than “Strabo said it was boot-shaped”

To speculate a little more, I think the style of boot that Italy looks like started off as riding shoes developed in 10th century Iran (heels are good for staying in stirrups, apparently). If that is correct then it can’t be earlier than the 10th century since there weren’t boots that Italy looked like

I went to look at what’s actually under that dot on the map and discovered “Forrest State Forest”. Australia, I love how you name things

Didn’t they start handing blue checks to high-profile people that didn’t ask for them? Some time soon after they immediately became a marker of accounts run by warped knobheads

I’m definitely imagining Andhere fighting all coiled up in the first phase, swinging his weapon like a human, and then erupting into a rampaging snake monster in the second phase like Messmer in ER

Wretch has some truly horrid AoE attacks, I bet. That cloak of mist dissipates across most of the arena and just spawns eyes and teeth at random

The spurs on Romund’s ankles suggest to me that he’s got a mount of some sort. Between his general proportions and all the spikes already stuck in him, I think we’ve just accidentally drawn Starscoure Radahn here

I definitely don’t think that they should be restricted, but I do find that weather significantly affects my tastes and some things are way better when specific ingredients are in season. I love cranachan but tend to go for it only when I can get good fresh raspberries, and I enjoy denser and heavier foods a lot more when I’m hiding from the cold

No. I don’t know if this is where you heard the story from specifically, but certainly here in the UK it was basically a lie spread by pro-Brexit figures. There is an EU regulation on the shape of fruits, but it’s only for classifying them; you can absolutely buy and sell funny-shaped fruit all you want. It’s just an easy way for buyers that do actually care about perfectly-shaped fruit to find that, such as wholesalers

Oh hell yeah, that’s way better than me doing it! Quite glad that I got distracted by my friends and didn’t do them yesterday now

It’s the day of Stonewall, so there are loads of pride marches, but also it was the last day of the first battle of Seoul in 1950 so the soul was slightly too early

The article doesn’t give a lot of hard numbers, but two of the four things it talks about are European (Franco-British storm shadow missiles and Rheinmetall’s Spanish division producing a shitload of 155mm artillery shells). I think rocket artillery specifically remains pretty much an American thing within NATO, though

I think it was just the two of us, I’m afraid! However I have little else to do this evening and I want to see what you drew, so I think I’m gonna go in and finish some of them. I’ll post them in this community and tag you once I do

There aren’t really good alternatives to the rare earth metals in terms of what they are used for, but there can be in terms of supply of them. Despite their name they are not actually that rare, just not very easy to extract economically. In terms of the percentage of Earth’s crust made up of them, most rare earths are pretty similar to such widely-used stuff as copper and tin. The problem is that they don’t usually gather up into high concentrations that are easy to mine, they’re all dispersed

China has a combination of really good reserves of them, a lot of industrial investment into the process of producing them, and a conscious strategy to be involved in other places with good reserves by doing the refining of their ores. There’s plenty of rare earth deposits elsewhere, but China has done it cheaper than everyone else for a while now. Brazil, India, Australia, and Russia have the next-biggest reserves, and I can’t help but note that China has made efforts to align with three of those four

This is exactly my approach too. I love that these games will let you miss stuff; it makes what you do actually find after you go pull on threads all the more rewarding. After that, well I’ve had my exploration fun, if I liked the game enough to play it again then it’s time to go see what I missed

Dvorak during the week to prepare for responsibilities, Beethoven at the weekend to celebrate freedom