Sphinx: You there, knight. I am the guardian of this place and cannot allow you to pass without a battle.

Me: My name is Ender, Sir Ender to you. And I'm a bit weary from my long journey here, would you accept a pun battle?

Sphinx: Aye, Sir Ender.

Me: Thank you, please move aside

Op is one of those people who find it easier to read when words are spelled correctly and don't shoehorn in a throwback letter that hasn't been used in English for centuries.

Notably, there is only one language that still uses the thorn. Icelandic has less than 500,000 speakers worldwide. Also notably, Icelandic is not English and whether or not you're bilingual doesn't excuse poor spelling skills.

The names Norway and Denmark are old and predate 1847 by centuries. "German Ocean" is an old term for the North Sea.

Norway was independent from Denmark at that point in time. So it was off the coast of Norway in the German Ocean (North Sea). And the expedition was sent by the king of Denmark, a nearby seafaring nation.

A mill grinds grain, a windmill is just a mill powered by wind. It's not technically correct to call a wind turbine or wind-powered pump a windmill, but that's how it's commonly used. So this comment chain is a pedantic correction leading into the ground water pun.

It's a solid pun, but does require the background of pedantic Internet discussions

She is a narcissist, talking herself up and putting down the people around her. Constantly bulldozing over clearly established boundaries by deliberately misnaming Worf, harassing Picard and Odo after they've made it very clear they aren't comfortable with her advances, and just completely dismissing almost everything her daughter says. It's clear she just does what she wants and expects everyone to go along with it, making a dramatic scene if anyone objects.

She's a rich bitch that doesn't care about anyone except herself and only really seems to help people when it already aligns with what she wants. It's understandable that Deanna only talks to her mother when pushed into it.

To make the setup work, aye

Looks like she continued to use her maiden name throughout her life. American schools seem to always use her French name, including using Marie instead of Maria. Partially because Americans can't pronounce Polish names. And likely a significant cultural bias towards associating scientific advancement with Western Europe.

The email sounds like a college student participating in a sociology study for class and asking the professor for clarification. This is exactly the kind of thing that I'd expect to ask about gender along with a bunch of other personal information. The goal being to see if any patterns in the responses.

Sociology in general does have the problem that categories are important and helpful to spotting patterns, but people are very difficult to categorize. People just don't fit cleanly into categories

The sentencing is in the article. 20-45 years, largely because they showed no remorse and claimed they would do it again

While I like the comparison between Trump's legal troubles and Julius Caesar's, my inner pedant needs to point out that Caesar was not part of the fall of the Roman Empire. Depending on how you break up the timeline, Caesar was the beginning of the end for the Roman Republic and his heir Augustus was the beginning of the Empire.

Greece's official English name is the Hellenic Republic, named after Helen of Troy.

Big Strong City, on their homeworld Pakled Planet

None of those languages have thorn in their modern alphabets.

And every example you pointed out is valid English. You should probably learn it if you are going to nitpick other people's grammer

I don't understand how anyone thinks any part of this is going to work out.

• The vast majority of machines online are fully automated, how do you validate the age of an automated account? If automated accounts are allowed without verification, how can you possibly tell the difference between them and an actual person?
• How do you handle old and foreign software? Are they going to start prosecuting individual people for running non-compliant software? Can't afford to update your old phone? Well now you're a criminal.
• Validating age requires private information to identify who you are. They have completely put the security of this information on each individual OS. Expect this info to be leaked.

This will never keep someone from viewing something if they really want to. All it will do is open up individuals to prosecution if they want to use any device anonymously.

But when a charismatic idiot says that it's obviously a square, you need a way to prove to third party that your interpretation is correct. Though don't be surprised when some people listen to the charismatic idiot anyway

Lol, I swear I can read

Gale has a problem where he interprets interest in his backstory as romantic interest. Which is kind of realistic, but no one wants to be on the receiving end of that in real life or in a game.

Like bro, put your dick away and tell me some gossip about Mystra.

"not to mention" and "let alone" are both typically used with the more difficult or unpleasant things after the phrase. The main difference is that "not to mention" is usually used to bring something new into the conversation or to imply that the thing you're mentioning needs a whole separate conversation.

"Let alone" is a way to add emphasis when denying something. Usually phrased like "I didn't even X, let alone Y." Y being the thing you want to deny, X being some first step toward Y or just something related that isn't as bad as Y.

Some examples:

"Did you kill Dave?" "I didn't touch him, let alone kill him"

"Can you walk?" "I can't stand, let alone walk."

The first part doesn't even need to be a complete denial as long as it implies the second part is impossible:

"Can you run?" "I can barely stand, let alone run."

They signed up to perform at a non-partisan celebration of their country's 250th anniversary. They backed out once Trump started attaching his name to the event and making it clear he wanted it to be a big rally

But people get mad if I say their tomato pie is just a type of pizza