Kindles are great devices and they’re subsidised, so they’re cheap. It’s perfectly possible to use them on e.g. permanent airplane mode. You don’t even have to buy books from Amazon, if you use Calibre.

That said I’ll be going Kobo next time because I love buttons.

So are Irish conditions different from conditions over the sea in Wales, or…?

From what I can tell, the secret is rubber boots.

Linehan being attached to something isn’t a plus these days…

Just cook the chicken and eat it. You won’t notice the feathers.

Some of them have a real thing for saying the Tiananmen Square massacre never happened and there’s no evidence, too. I guess I just hallucinated those news reports at the time with screams and gunfire in the background.

As a counterpoint, I’d like to mention that people often scream “reading incomprehension” when actually, what they wrote was ambiguous or unclear.

Not saying you do this, just that I see this far more often than I see people misreading anything.

The word you’re probably thinking of is kichigai. But there are oceans of words that you can’t use on TV in Japan as I understand it, and there have been since the 70s.

m*nko begs to differ.

This reminds me of the not-very-edifying-at-all moment when “joey” became a universal term of abuse in UK playgrounds.

So like am I the only one[tm] who felt like time did pass, actually, while I was under? It was like being deeply asleep.

It’s so weird to me that you’re all put under for wisdom teeth. I’ve had three out with local and nobody even suggested I might need a general.

Isn’t it because they paralyse you and your lungs stop working?

I don’t remember a damn thing. One moment there was a mask over my face and I was being asked to count backwards from ten (I think I got to about 8?), the next I woke up very bleary with a sore throat.

For a long time I thought I woke in a large room with three rows of cots. It wasn’t until some years afterwards that I realised I never saw the room I awoke in.

I didn’t feel high at any point, but then I have ADHD and even being shot full of morphine by a paramedic (the previous week) didn’t get me high. I wuz robbed.

Actually, now you come to mention it…

I’ve been very lucky and haven’t come close to death (yet), but I have had some dream experiences that resembled NDEs.

I tried three times to control what I dreamed about. The dreams weren’t like dreams, is the best way I can put it - they were very short, very vivid, and clearly linked to the “intention” I’d requested. The second dream featured a pair of strangers trying to tell me something.

The last one, I went down a long tunnel (like a storm drain) and ran into people who, indeed, drove me out and told me I shouldn’t be there. After that, I wasn’t able to do it again.

Unsure if just weird dreams or if I actually got too close to something. The thing that makes me think there might be something in NDEs, tbh, is the stories palliative care nurses seem to have.

Not sure that atheism excludes belief in life after death, tbh. We’re all alive right now with no god, after all.

I don’t wear much gold, but my glasses are gold-framed and I’m quite fond of them. They stand out in a way silver or titanium wouldn’t.