He’s also in the Fallout TV series and the Obi Wan Kenobi series

It’s worse than that - he wasn’t being lazy, he was convinced that if he came out of the tunnel, the rain would ruin his paint. Even after it stopped raining, he still wouldn’t come out just in case it started raining again.

Basically he had a mental illness, and his punishment was to be bricked up and forced to watch the other trains going past. One is friendly, one says it serves him right. Because he has no steam, he’s unable to communicate. And all the time his paint is slowly getting ruined anyway because he’s stuck in the tunnel.

As someone who’s had a breakdown, it really resonates in a different way than it did when I was a kid.

Two starches can be magnificent - it’s hard to beat a good chip butty.

Is this really true? (Answer provided below)

ʇ,usᴉ ʇI ˙ɹǝʍsu∀

So, there’s some truth to this, but not in the way that you’ve summed it up.

Crucially, you need to understand that there isn’t a “the English accent”. It’s also important to remember that as wildly different as accents in England are now, they were even more different from each other several hundred years ago.

So which accents are we talking about for this story? Well, the early American colonies had settlers mostly from London and Southern England.

This is the accent that then diverged.

At the time, and in the South of England particularly, speech was becoming less rhotic. In the American colonies, however, it retained its rhoticity, as it still does in many parts of Britain even today.

This is further complicated by the fact that later massive influxes of people came from parts of Britain that did retain rhoticity in their accents, in particular the West Country, Scotland and Ireland (incidentally, all which still have it today).

So, like I said, there’s some truth to it, but it’s not quite as you’ve phrased it. Elizabethan Brits didn’t sound like modern-day Boston folk. Americans very much have accents all of their own, influenced by not just by native English, but speakers of other languages too.

So, it’s definitely a neat little tidbit, but it’s usually wildly mistated!

I think it mostly depends on the community. There are people from all over the world on here, and different groups have different demographics.

Unless you’re using a server that’s super-picky in its federation, I can’t see that the server makes much of a difference.

Honestly, with the state of many questions posted here, I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a fair number of bots posting here.

One user in particular, has a posting history that is highly sus.

You include car safety features in your list of reasons that you think the EU is going to collapse?

I hate to tell you, but you might be onto a losing battle. It’s been a mandatory safety feature on all new cars in the EU for a few years now.

Black Books (s1e4). It’s a daft Father Ted / IT Crowd style comedy.

The main character’s posh friends are angry at him for being extremely drunk at a dinner party and traumatising their son, who has been walking around with a shocked open-mouthed expression ever since walking in on him going to the toilet in their kitchen. He tries to downplay it by saying that’s how children normally look.

“What? What? He looks surprised. All children look surprised. Everything’s new to them.”

FWIW, the UK currently has a bill in place that will lower the voting age to 16 before the next General Election (so, before Aug 2029).

I think it’ll be a good thing. Young people are a good deal more aware of what’s happening in the country than old people are. I mean, the current arrangement has stripped away the housing and career prospects of young people and brought us to the verge of fascism again.

For information based things, absolutely.

Something that people don’t seem to understand is that there’s a difference between AI and GenAI.

And that within GenAI, there’s low cost stuff like text and graphics, and high cost like video and audio.

And that with tools developed with GenAI often do not use GenAI when it is run.

AI is super useful and you use it in a bunch of applications already without even realising it. The camera that interprets speed signs and displays them on your dashboard = AI. Spam filters = AI. Google translate = AI.

I don’t know what you think my greater point was, maybe you’ve accidentally conflated me with another poster.

My point actually is that these are not unprecedented rates. These are entirely precedented rates. This is gross capitalism destroying the world as gross capitalism always does. What you’ve lost sight of, though, is the respective scale of things.

As I said, the US alone needlessly wastes vastly more energy and water than the entire world’s usage of AI consumes. For energy, it’s several times more, for water it’s orders of magnitude more.

You make out that solving these massive problems is impossible, so instead you’re railing against AI. Which of course is your prerogative, but just remember that there are much bigger wins out there.

There is a point there, though.

American cars are much less efficient than European ones.

The amount of water required for AI data centres worldwide is more than an order of magnitude lower than the water required for just corn in the US alone. Only a small fraction of which actually gets used for food.

The average energy usage per person in the US is nearly three times higher than someone in the UK.

The environmental cost of data centres is absolutely a concern, but we shouldn’t forget the US alone wastes more energy and resources than are used by data centres worldwide.

Perfect choice of title

This was my immediate thought too.

OP - it’s not that uncommon, and is totally treatable.

It’s just some muscles involuntary tensing up as a result of something going inside (or sometimes even the idea). Unfortunately, because it’s an involuntary reflex, you can’t “just relax” it away. It’s just something your body needs to unlearn.

Talk to your doctor, follow their advice.

For what it’s worth, both of the people I knew who had it when they were younger, once it was sorted, it stayed sorted.

Survivor bias is definitely a major factor here - I can vaguely remember at least a dozen sitcoms from my childhood and early adulthood that didn’t survive (or got soft-rebooted into something better).

We do capitalise community names though - like deaf vs Deaf.

This is the same, it’s not being used as a description of how someone looks, but to what community they belong.

Mitchell and Webb did a terrific sketch on this concept.

Mitchell and Webb - Advertising