Took me until well into adulthood to realise: the fruitcake bit is fine. The problem is putting fucking marzipan and royal icing on it.

It's disgusting in itself; it doesn't go with fruitcake; AND it makes the fruitcake seem like a letdown by creating an expectation of cake-cake

"And yet, Manta rays, by participating in a competitive food chain, occasionally get themselves eaten by sharks. As my increasingly oxygen-starved gaze drifts from that marine seraph to an inanimate block of basalt, I find myself pondering which is the more *intelligent* assemblage of matter."

*diligently taking notes* nuclear bombs = radioactive. Hmm, makes sense

You're Dead To Me's whole shtick is getting someone who half-remembers the subject to make jokes about it while an expert fills in the blanks, get @gregjenner.bsky.social on the line

He's a rock star/physicist

I'm also convinced this makes it easier to spill hot water. It just seems to splash about more. (I almost said "easier to scald yourself with hot water" but I suppose that goes without saying...)

We had a geography teacher who could be extremely easily derailed into talking about any interesting thing you saw on TV that week, we thought we were geniuses distracting him from his lesson plan into conversations about space or whatever but he was stealth-educating us, the BASTARD

I keep seeing that face and haircut next to the kind of headlines he tends to generate and literally forgetting that there is nominally a Labour government

OK but now I want a movie about the fixer who helps rural domestic goddesses fake their deaths so they can pursue high-flying careers as unattached single women in the big city

This person specifically is a muppet because they think the things they got joy from as children were literally 'magic' and not the result of a person just out of shot putting in a lot of work to entertain them

I'm sure that point about "*how* they insist" is a hugely underestimated confounding variable. "No, please, I'll get this, I've had a great time" must have a very different effect on the romantic mood than "I'm a MAN and the man ALWAYS pays, put your card away, you're EMASCULATING me!"

And it wouldn't just be a conversation from which a quest never emerges. Based on both training input and user prompting, the NPCs would happily give you a full quest to go complete for them, and you'd go off to find the isolated wilderness location they described only to never find it.

The Women's Institute has branches in Canada, New Zealand and South Africa.

Are they going to ban trans women too? And if not, are they going to break away from the UK branch as a protest and solidarity?

Just after they took the front door out to drive the inhabitants insane

A lot of the actual fear of monarchy that led to the creation of a separate Parliament was less to do with "what if the king is crazy" -hey, he's still the King- and more to do with "what if the king's inner circle get too much sway over him". THEY'RE not divinely enthroned, they're just some guys!

Impossible for me not to read this post as a response to the one that appeared directly above it.

Kier Starmer proudly announcing this into a microphone in an attempt to score Normal Points

Szechuan pepper!

Ah, the rare "My client would never do this specific act, because that would absolutely be a crime and what's more he would 100% have known it was a crime at the time he allegedly did it" defence.

It's a bold strategy, Cotton, let's see how it plays out