My most recent play-through of Half-Life 2: Episode 2 ended in failure because I literally could not get myself together enough to fight

… despite multiple attempts. I now can’t bear to play it again because those warning alarms trigger my anxiety.

For a while I was convinced that having moved the game between PCs might have triggered some kind of anti-piracy protection and the battle was rigged to be impossible… but it’s more likely that I just lost the reflexes and timing to be able to pull it off. Especially since I own a legitimate copy and was playing through Steam.

A similar story is true of the final battle in Quake 4, which I barely remember now. Pretty sure I was still on Windows at the time and I’ve been on Linux for the better part of a decade. It was also from a backup and wasn’t through Steam, but I own a legit copy of the game and there are no in-game alarms that I remember so that might be on the reinstall and replay list at some point. Maybe.

I took the extreme liberty of assuming they were from 1000 years ago and Saxon rather than 2000 years ago and Aramaic, if only so that I might have any chance of producing something even close to what they might have said.

Shepherd is surprisingly fluent. I would have expected something more like “ᚺᚹᚫᛏ? ᛁᚳ ᚾᛖ ᚩᚾᚷᛁᛖᛏᚪᚾ”

“UK seeks bribe to not look into Microsoft’s business practices.”

The follow-up question is basically “Are you a non-American English speaker?”, however you choose to parse that.

So, it’s “neesh” for me.

I’m self taught at this stuff, and am still very amateur, so I might be entirely off base. I rely on sources like Wiktionary and those YouTubers who do etymology for the love of it and don’t seem to have any kind of agenda.

I too had a decent upbringing, but, after a bit of introspection about why I’m so wary of my own name, it came down to this:

I have two names. One is my given name and the other is “son”.

My parents have always tended to use my given name in negative and neutral contexts and “son” in more positive ones. It’s not intentional on their part, and I expect my father got the same, but I think it’s at the root of it all.

Good upbringing or not, how many of us are still terrified of being addressed by our full name in an irate tone? I’m convinced it’s related.

The only wrinkle that bothers me is when a sonless aunt once called me “son” and it made me very uncomfortable. But, I figure there are other reasons for that.

Identifying this as egg behaviour might be egg behaviour.

A lot of British Pakistanis like to holiday in Pakistan, and I mean, a lot, and like any sufficiently large group of humans, there’s bound to be a handful who bear a grudge.

Which is to say that If I hear that something terrible has happened to him, I won’t be in the least bit surprised.

(Which is NOT to endorse someone doing anything like that. This is merely an observation.)

That one’s from a common Proto-Indo-European ancestor rather than from a specific known language outside of PIE culture.

I mean, it’s plausible that “water” also comes from one specific language to have ended up in PIE, but it’s further back than we can trace, so we can’t be as certain as we can be for “channel”. There’s also that water is a lot more fundamental to a language than channels, or reeds, are, which makes it less likely to be a borrowing.

On the other hand, PIE did have at least two words for each of water (ancestors of “water” and “aqua”) and fire (“fire” and “igni(s)-”), if not other words. This is somewhat reminiscent of how English ended up with a lot of doubled words after the Normans took over a thousand year ago, so maybe something like that happened back then too.

You should seek out the etymology, which has been doing the rounds in the last year or so, of “POG”.

But if you’re not familiar with or interested in online video game streamers and the whole lingo that goes around that world, you might be more interested in something a bit more generic like “channel” which traces all the way back to an ancient Sumerian word for “reed”.

Well, there is a ring involved and you could probably get aliens to come and do something with it, but it’s not the same thing at all.

So it has a name! If I knew that, I had long forgotten. Thank you!

But if you do decide to do this, and I should stress that this does not constitute a suggestion to do so, make sure to go out in clearly identifiable footwear and clothing and with no head or face coverings so that the camera can get a good look at you before it dies, you filthy, filthy vandal.

Is Cooper (I presume that’s the youngest) old enough to be past the “potato with arms and legs” stage?

For those that don’t know, basically there’s a stage where kids don’t draw bodies at all, because they don’t fully register the interactions with that part of their parent (or something like that), and so a portrait of a parent tends to end up a head with stick limbs.

I don’t specifically remember doing this myself, but I saw younger kids doing that when I was a child and have since learned that it’s a developmental phenomenon.

Anyway, Cooper might be advanced for his age. That is, assuming any of this is even relevant for anthropomorphic cartoon cats.

There was this one story that lives rent free in my head, which is terrifying when you realise. And this comment might pass it on, so read on at your peril.

It might be a Steven Baxter story. I know I read it in an anthology, but it could have been a different author.

The story is about a person who lives in a world where it’s illegal to not use augmented reality devices every moment of every day, to ensure that you’re seeing enough ads and behaving like a law-abiding citizen.

The protagonist is in charge of an investigation into people who deliberately live outside this system and seek to disrupt it. One of these people may or may not be the protagonist’s son.

The story meanders for a bit but the investigation is hampered by the very technology it seeks to enforce, so the protagonist insists that their augmented reality device temporarily disable everything.

It claims to have done so, but it soon becomes clear that augmentation is still going on.

So the protagonist invokes an override to turn it all off.

The answer is racism and doctrines of cultural supremacy. Also a lot of guilt about what happened to the Jews in WWII as a result of racism and doctrines of cultural supremacy.

(This is overly simplistic, of course, but it covers quite a lot of it.)

The speech bubble has “Every time I read a shitty dreadful news”.

There may be some confusion because I took out the adjectives, which don’t change the surrounding grammar at all. They change the semantics somewhat, but this is about grammar, not the meaning. This then reduces to “Every time I read a news”, and then further to the particle “a news”, which, again, does not change the original syntax of that fragment.

My point was that such usage is invalid in the standard varieties of English I’m aware of.

I are of understanding what the author intended, just like you understood the start of this sentence, but it doesn’t mean that it’s standard form. Which, ultimately, is why I asked if there’s a form of English where it is correct.

(Tangentially, I do need to work on softening the way I word my comments. That’s an ongoing struggle.)

Which dialect of English uses “news” as a discrete noun like this? “A news” is ungrammatical to me, so this is either wrong or an innovation I’m not aware of.

What is weird here, either way, is how “new” is generally an adjective, but “news” is a specific plural noun form of it, suggesting that “a new” ought to be grammatical, and indeed perhaps a conjugation for this comic, but that doesn’t sound right to me either.

“A news item” would be the most correct here, I think.

See also: goods.

Something somewhere was definitely doing the conversion for you, but it could have been your editor, the compiler or something in between like a C preprocessor directive getting loaded in by your configuration.