There’s a detailed wiki article about it here.

TLDR: it’s specific to the US and UK, has been in use for over a century, and is largely metaphorical.

This is it exactly: the UK is made up of separate nations, and each nation is allowed to be separately represented.

Another example is the Faroe Islands, which is part of the kingdom of Denmark but has their own World Cup team.

It’s all thanks to the Muzak company and studies in the 50s/60s that suggested bland music made people work better.

There’s an article on it here to get started.

As others have already mentioned:

• Japanese convention is that O means yes (like circling an answer on a test) and X means no (like crossing something out).
• It’s a Japanese console so actually it’s the rest of the world that flipped it.

Another point to consider is that Japanese is typically read from right-to-left, so the ‘first’ button is O. See also: Nintendo controllers, which still use ABXY in a ‘backwards’ arrangement, with A on the right.

As for why western developers decided to flip the controls? No idea who started it or why, but it’s become the global convention. That said, I remember a lot of PS1 games using triangle as the back button.

I would think that whatever browser you use would, presumably, make little difference to how much data a website tries to send you? It would only change what’s displayed. (But happy to be corrected on that by someone more knowledgeable.)

If your connection really is limited to such a slow speed, you might need to find a proxy server that strips out as much as possible before it reaches you.

I realise it’s not really the point here, but calling Jeffrey Epstein a celebrity seems comically reductive.

Like, yeah, technically I guess it’s true? But it’s not the word that springs to mind when most people think of him. Made me chuckle.

I did not! I actually had one back in the day and never had battery issues, but pretty funny to hear it was a common complaint.

(Still, I think the broader point stands.)

Given the pace of technological progress, I doubt a phone bought today will be all that useful (except as a retro novelty) in 20 years time, let alone 100.

How many people do you think are still daily-driving a Motorola KRZR? It’s not because of the battery life.

Yes to all except Outer Wilds.

I love OW but it is not a game to recommend to someone who explicitly says they want a game with no time pressure. Time pressure is literally a core mechanic.

Split in Croatia sounds like it’d fulfill basically all of your criteria.

Wasn’t there a viral Reddit post for a similar issue where someone recommended sucking on the left earbud and it worked?

Ah, I didn’t consider that! It’s not a thing in the UK.

You mean if there was enough traffic ahead of you at the lights that by the time you reached them they’d gone red again? In that scenario you still pulled forwards and then had to stop again, so I’d consider it two stops.

It’s only one stop if you stopped once and then didn’t move at all between one red light and the next (in which case either the entire queue is blocked from entering the junction, or you’re doing something wrong).

I’m a professional writer and this is the way. You’ve just got to force yourself to write. Even if it’s nonsense. Even if you don’t want to. Especially if you don’t want to.

People ask what the difference is between a professional writer and an amateur. Some might say it’s getting paid, but that’s not true - plenty of professional writers don’t get paid. The difference is discipline. When you’re a professional writer you need to be able to turn it on every single day, even when there’s not an ounce of inspiration in your body.

Which servers? (But the answer is almost certainly Linux.)

“In Silicon Valley, wearing a full business suit marked you as unsophisticated and not ‘with it’ in terms of tech and innovation. This caused the dress code requiring a suit to be inverted and it eventually reached the point where you can’t wear a suit and be taken seriously in Silicon Valley.”

https://www.raconteur.net/talent-culture/when-wore-it-best

Have you looked into gardening? Healthy, rewarding, easy to get started, room to grow (if you’ll pardon the pun)…

To add another: ‘pants’ means trousers in the US, but in the UK it means underpants. Can lead to some funny misinterpretations.

Hey now, don’t rope the rest of us in with the USA’s bizarro puritanical approach to TV censorship. You can blaspheme to your heart’s content on TV in the UK.

Because sports teams aren’t just indistinguishable entities; they’re complex organisations with histories, tendencies, and traditions, and that’s before looking at individual players and coaches/managers.