In no way a comprehensive history of champagne. It focuses on the innovations and contributions of three women (all widows) who helped make champagne what it is today.

Baloo was a pilot at one point, right? I didn't hallucinate that whole thing, did I? It kinda feels like a hallucination.

An interesting piece of computer history.

I'm going to tell you a secret. Don't tell anyone.

I've never actually seen the Monorail episode. I only know it through cultural osmosis.

This was in interesting little read for me. I have friends who are smart people but confuse left and right, and I feel like reading this game me a little insight into their minds.

There's an uproar about this in the community. My current dungeon master has cancelled his D&D Beyond subscription, swears to boycott the franchise (including the upciming film), and plans to do future campaigns with Pathfinder instead.

There's definitely some shitty things in the new license, like WotC claiming copyright on all third-party creations, voiding the old license (This can't actually be legal, can it? The old license was perpetual, and this is not how perpetual works.), and giving third-party publishers an extremely short time window to comply with the new license. And 25% of gross income is a lot! But that's only income above $750,000, so it probably won't affect about 99% of publishers.

Well, I don't really like D&D4+, and I've been trying to convince my friends to try other TTRPGs for years. (With some success, I might add: We had a great Scum & Villainy campaign, had a lot of fun playing Fantasy AGE last year, and we're now doing a Deadlands campaign.) If this pushes more players and content creators to give all the other great TTRPGs out there a try, this might actually be an overall positive.

This is the best deep-dive article I've read about a niche 90's video game in a long time.

Some of these are a real stretch. But that's the thing about a good propehcy; it needs to be vague enough that some later event can be interpreted to fit the prophecy.

In any case, this all seems to fit Trump a lot better than it fits most others who have been claimed to be the antichrist.

Perhaps his biggest play with evangelicals came just before the November midterms, when the Florida governor released an ad portraying himself as an Old Testament warrior. “On the eighth day, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a protector,’” the narrator of the spot, who mentioned “God” 10 times in 96 seconds, told viewers. “So God made a fighter.”

I'm no theology expert, but that sounds an awful lot like blasphemy, no?

I'm not super familiar with DeSantis. Anyone know if he's even an actual Christian, or if he's just pretending, like Trump did?

I'm not necessarily opposed to the death penalty. In my mind it makes more sense to sentence someone to death than to life in prison. The effect is the same (removing an unwanted person from society), and doing so by keeping them locked up behind bars seems (at least in theory) more expensive and less practical.

I am though opposed to life sentences. I don't think the goal of criminal justice should be to remove persons from society, but rather to attempt to reform them so they can rejoin society,

In any case, it seems clear that some methods of execution are worse than others, despite their intentions when introduced were to be more civilised than earlier methods. Maybe it's time to bring the guilliotine out of retirement?

Thanks for another year Thor, and for all the great work you do for us. :-)

I enjoy these draft chats. They always bring up some interesting facts about politicians I know very little about.

I'm not sure I'm qualified to make any guesses myself, but I have a feeling we still have some big surprises to come. Maybe Jeb will make a comeback somehow.

Interesting to hear the arguments from the other side of the debate.

Politicians recently made many ferry rides fare-free here in Norway, but it's not a direct analogue; you don't really have the option of riding your bike instead of taking the ferry.

I tried to watch Mad Men after all the hype it got at the time, but I didn't really get it. Lost interest and couldn't even finish the first season.