So this is hovering around the -2 votes so far. And I imagine that the downvotes are from people who didn’t watch and were taken in by the title.

If the same thing had been in a four-panel cartoon or a screenshot of text or whatever, it would be raking the upvotes in.

I’m a pagan, so it is all about the solstice for my SO and I.

We will typically go somewhere for the sunrise that morning. I have been to Stonehenge and a couple of other stone circles in the past, camping out overnight beforehand - and more recently have watched the live stream from Newgrange. For the last few years we have also celebrated Brumalia - a Roman and Byzantine winter festival that started (in its later period) on Nov 24th. So we progressively decorate the house with lights or holly, ivy, pine cones etc each day from then until the start of Saturnalia on Dec 17th. I have also made an advent-style calendar with chocolates in matchboxes that runs throughout Brumalia - Nov 24th to Dec 25th.

On Dec 5th, which is Krampusnacht and also a Faunalia festival, we will hang a Krampus figure up and have taken to watching the 2015 movie for the last few years.

During Saturnalia itself we will have at least one meal or party with friends - which usually has some element of mis-rule. On the solstice itself, as well as watching the sun rise somewhere or another (probably a local beach this year, as we are on the east coast), there is a local Mummers’ play that we usually go along to in the evening. The solstice is also when we do our gift-giving.

On the 26th, there is a Cutty Wren ceremony locally that we will go along to and then there is some morris dancing at another location on new year’s day.

It is the Federation’s we do not discuss it with outsiders thing. It confuses time travelling Klingons.

I saw this around the time it was first released. One of the most memorable cartoons I have ever seen, I think. Excellent.

So that would only be ‘good’ from the point of view of your totalitarian ruler themselves. It doesn’t say anything about whether it is good or bad for anyone else. And - critically - only good even for them as long as your ruler was actually competent enough to get to where they wanted to get to in the most efficient way. If they were not going to be taking opposing views into account they would have to be universal experts.

Why is that a good thing? It would only be good if the results of the decisions were good. Making bad decisions fast would make things worse.

Decision speed is simply neutral unless there is an associated bias towards good or bad results from those decisions.

This doesn’t seem to be a migraine as such - or at least she is not normally subject to them. She has had something similar in the past, but not for about a decade.

We considered quite a few, but in the end she decided on Stardust - we are currently paused for a tea refresh. I have seen it in the past, probably soon after it came out. Fun and entertaining but not outstanding as a Gaiman tale overall.

Yesterday my SO spend all day with a raging headache and throwing up every half-hour or so.

Today she is better, which we are both very pleased about. My day, consequently, has been largely focused around excursions to get ‘recovery’ foods, doing double duty on household chores, and generally looking after her.

Not what I had planned, but I am very happy that she is better, and I will be settling down with a pizza (she is having baked potato and not sure yet) and we’ll be watching an undemanding film this evening.

A) - it wasn’t private - it was a nature reserve and I was the warden and B) - I kinda intended this in an “…and I EVEN lived on an island…” way.

I do and have for most of my life. I lived on an island where my SO and I were the only permanent residents for 8 years.

I have lived in the suburbs of a couple of large towns/small cities for some years too - and in the centre of an all-but-city and although there is some convenience in those, I’d choose rural any day. The peace, proximity to nature and the ease of getting out for enjoyable walks beats convenience every time for me.

Right now? I’d hardly notice. I get paid tomorrow. This time tomorrow would be a bit better. Even better if it was this time tomorrow and the joint account too, that would be a lot better.

None of it would actually be life changing though. It would just make up for our recent house move and all the associated stuff really.

It will be passed to the wildlife trust so that they know what species they have on the site. This will allow them to manage the habitat in the most appropriate ways to benefit the bats - and other species that are present. It will also feed through to county and national records to monitor population trends and also potentially feed into any neighbouring planning applications - since bats are protected species in the UK.

What kind of explanation are you looking for?

As well as the required technology, it was political will during the cold war that drove the manned landing back then. That political will hasn’t been there since: no-one is really interested in being second on the moon just for the sake of it.

And technological advances have, if anything, made manned missions less necessary if we want to investigate particular subjects: robots and remote scanning can do far more these days without the need for boots on the ground.

The Third Man (1949) if I had to pick just one. It is cinematic poetry from start to end.

Without more context (how well does your GF know the friend? How well do you know the friend? How long have you been living together? Have either of you lived with anyone else in the past? What else was said immediately after this exchange? What else has you GF said to you about living together? Whose idea was living together in the first place? Did one of you live in that home alone beforehand? What is your GF’s sense of humour like otherwise? etc etc) it is going to be impossible to be sure about this, but living together is always going to involve compromises of some kind, so if this is relatively new for her, it is very likely that there is a grain of truth if she sounded like she has some reservations.

One thing that is definitely not going to help, though, whether it was a joke or not, is you getting all defensive about it.

She has told you it was a joke. I’d suggest telling her that even as a joke it has left you feeling hurt, and then ask her if there genuinely is anything that she sees as a problem and what she would like from you in order to make it better - and then commit to make those changes where that is realistic. And take the opportunity to so the same the other way around: what changes you would like from her - so that you are both communicating openly, and trying to grow and make the relationship better.

With this one, we will be assigned a position somewhere likely to be attractive to bats on the site (I think that there will be 14 of us tonight, so 14 points) and then sit there with a bat detector for 90mins or so from around sunset.

You can simply position detectors and recorders alone, without people, but they are expensive and it is best to have someone with them - you also get to see the bats as they pass and can do some of the ID there and then.

These days we record the output from the detector for later analysis of the ultrasound and a lot of that can be done automatically, using AI, but humans still need to confirm the exact species. Once you have your ear in, though, you can recognise a lot of the calls (stepped down to the range that humans can hear) ‘live’ as you hear them, but a lot of the myotis family of bats are very similar and need further ID, through sonograms and actual visual ID, to be certain.

Day off today and soon heading out to a contemporary art exhibition in a nearby town with my SO - and to take a look around the town too, since we haven’t been there for ages.

Then I’m out again this evening for a bat survey at a new nature reserve, recently acquired by the local Wildlife Trust.

• Finnegans Wake - my ‘big read’ which I am doing over the year along with a group over on reddit: one of the only things that still has me dipping into reddit now. Fascinatingly incomprehensible.
• Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time - some good thoughtful worldbuilding and a solid story.
• Robert Brightwell’s Flashman’s Waterloo - one of his series of Flashman prequels featuring the uncle of George MacDonald Fraser’s protagonist. Very well researched and entertaining
• A collection of Neil Munro’s Para Handy tales - gentle humour and a glimpse of a very different world - albeit rather stereotypical and patronising in some ways.

I have experienced the blank looks and total misunderstanding since primary school and have developed a range of measures for dealing with it.

• There are a good many thoughts that I simply do not express in the first place, so have a reputation for being quiet.
• I automatically - these days - judge the level and style of communication to use when I do. Clearly everyone does this, but I have been noted as doing so more than most, which does lead to some issues around authenticity from time to time.
• I am a great believer in the 'tell 'em what you’re gonna tell 'em, then tell 'em twice, then tell 'em what you told ‘em’ approach.
• I do not engage in unnecessary chit-chat with most people, and do not expect to form close connections with the great majority of people either.

Of course, I take great pleasure in meeting people with whom all those are unnecessary. It was a revelation when I joined Mensa and found whole rooms full of them.