The bit is from a decade ago. I’m not sure the volatility had arrived/was obvious yet.

In the history of “girls can’t play chess”, there was a time when Anna Rudolf was accused of cheating with lip balm somehow.

So this was meant as an example of someone trolling the chess-loser subreddit. The fictional, suspiciously age-gappy husband can’t comprehend that he isn’t winning for himself, and the super-obvious lipstick is to bait him into ridiculous accusations of cheating. Would such behaviour be assholish? The subreddit decides.

And since I’m explaining the joke anyway, there’s also an underlying criticism of the way women have to manage the egos of men—particularly the kind inhabiting OP’s fictional subreddit—by letting them win, etc. So, no, absolutely not a non sequitur.

I (36F) always wear bright red lipstick whenever I decide I’m not going to let my husband (52M) win. AITA?

One lib rails against the divisiveness of hypermodern play, pleads for a return to the moderate centre ground. Another suggests turning the board sideways so everyone gets to attack the left.

And is renamed “M’lady”.

They insist that the point of the game is to capture the now-defenceless queen, at which point the winner screams “Cuck! And mate!”

Some people are atheists because they don’t believe in gods. Others are atheists because they can’t conceive of anything superior to themselves. Of course those atheists are going to be awful people.

‘Scraping whatever you want, permission or no, is good and necessary.’

‘No, not like that.’

I don’t think that’ll be a problem in a gwlad beirdd a chantorion.

The Left (and the rest of the world) destroyed by facts and logic yet again.

Ugh. The tides are literally zero sum. The moon does not create extra water.

And growing up by the sea, one of the first things I learned about rising tides is that they drown people (who don’t have boats).

Do you have the same problem with your first language?

Thanks again, Prof! These are all great answers.

If short vowels aren’t always marked, and they modify a preceding letter, does that mean there are no Arabic words that start with them? Or is there a silent consonant like the chosongul/hangul ㅇ used in Korean? Or does everyone just have to learn how to read those words anyway, like with English’s bough cough dough ought rough through?

I notice that if we combine حَبيبي (Habiibii) with yesterday’s قطر ('aTr), then today’s table header عَرَبي —which I guess means Arabic—looks like its transliteration is [something]arabii, which makes me wonder about what that something is. Looking forward to more lessons.

In the “Hayawaan” transliteration for حَيوان, is the “a” between the “y” and “w” part of “ya”, part of “aw”, or an implicit third thing?

How often were they allowed to leave?

Not just “subjectively extremely correct”, the reader understanding your intention is the literal definition of communication.

The problem as a writer, though, is that you don’t know if the “as long as” is going to hold. Punctuation as a set of rules that must be followed is certainly unhelpful nonsense, but punctuation as a tool to help point those who might be misdirected without it is worth some consideration.

As long as they create self-contained sentences, periods/full stops are always a safe option, so you shouldn’t need to worry about using them in either of these instances.

Arguably the first comma example should be replaced. As it is, it’s splicing two unconnected ideas. A semicolon may seem ‘speedier’ but I would (personally) avoid even that here since the two parts don’t seem (to me, absent context) to be sufficiently tied together to validate that choice. In any case, if this is text for children, the punctuation should be simple, i.e., use a period. If the text is for adults, they shouldn’t be assumed to be two-mississippi-ing after periods and, consequently, periods should not be seen as slowing them down. So… just use a period.

In the second example, if not a safe period, a colon is perfectly fine: the dialogue is directly related to the preceding text. A copy edit along the lines of:—

Lacing it with sarcasm, Maddie laughed, “Mark, looks like you’ve got a friend.”

would justify the comma according to the style I’ve acquired, but that’s a much bigger change for the sake of a comma.

It all comes down to taste though, so take my comments with a pinch of salt.

Yeah, that’s what I was suspecting.

I ended up leaning towards “download” being used in the boomer way of meaning any data transfer, whatever the direction, which in this case would more specifically be called an “upload”. And that “online” was being used to mean “using a website”, even though the local processing is offline.

The alternative fit to the description I had considered was a website you could give an URL, so it retrieves the zip file and allows you to inspect it remotely, and maybe just download some of the contained files, so it deals with the risk and bandwidth issues for you. That would be a different kind of useful, though it’d only be a few days before someone uses it for malign purposes and gets the site operator a no-knock visit from the fuzz, so that seemed much less likely.

I can see a use for an app that can be used where they can’t be installed, though.

I’m confused. How are you defining “download” and “online” here?

The website suggests that the server holds the files and does the extraction:

Extract and Explore compressed files online [emphasis mine]

which fits with the github claim of:

to view and extract zip files online without downloading them

but the website also states that:

nothing leave your browser

which suggests that the server has nothing to do with it, and you do actually download the zip files first.

What am I missing?