As much as I hate this guy, could we please stick to the facts and criticise him for things that he actually did?

From what I can see, spez did not moderate jailbait. He was added by one of the other mods because back then you could just add people as mods without their consent. I have yet to see proof that he ever actively participated in that sub.

So please, go ahead, dislike him for being a lying jerk who‘s actively killing reddit but don’t jump on something that someone else did without asking.

Oh yeah, gods forbid anyone plays a game that hasn’t been sold legally for decades…

Alles kein Problem, es ist Karlsruhe. Das Kind wurde längst von der freundlichen Hacker:in von nebenan adoptiert, trägt jetzt Katzenohren und spricht fließend Rust.

Well, it is a bit harder than that. Most of the games are not mate by Microsoft but by other companies so they can’t just decide to give them away for free. And even if they could get everybody to agree to that, they would still need to provide the infrastructure to download them which would be just as much work as keeping the old store running.

I hate to say it but…

Sources on literacy in Medieval Europe seem to be all over the place, reaching from the popular “Almost nobody could even sign their name” to “There was at least one person in most households who could read and write”. Here’s a discussion on Stackexchange that lists some sources.

The sad truth is, we may never know how literate people actually were. We can be relatively sure that especially poor people didn’t have any formal education and couldn’t afford expensive handwritten books. But that doesn’t necessarily mean people couldn’t read and write at all. A basic level of literacy was useful for a lot of people, especially craftsmen and traders. Not so much that they’d read and write whole books but enough for basic bookkeeping or passing notes to someone who lives in a neighboring village. The thing is, those are not the kind of things that would be preserved until today. Paper and parchment were too expensive for such trivialities but we have evidence from Russia that people wrote everyday correspondence on birch bark. With no need to store these writings, most people would have probably just reused whatever they were written on to light fires or just thrown them outside where they would decompose within a few weeks.

(this kind of ties into a fun fact about why so few authentic chainmail shirts have survived until today. Not because they got destroyed by rust but because after they lost their usefulness in early modern times, they were cut up and reused to scrub pots)

When reading a long text, disconnect from the internet as soon as it has loaded so you don’t pay for the time you spend reading.

Anyone upset that xkcd is supporting Harris probably hasn’t been paying attention for the last 19 years. I wonder if this header image is a foreshadowing for XKCD 3000 (!) tomorrow.

The expectation that people in office jobs can be productive for 8 hours per day.

I feel like a lot of answers here are dancing around why people find it offensive without really addressing it.

As an adjective “female” is completely fine to distinguish between genders when applied to humans. As in “a female athlete” or when a form asks you to select “male” or “female” (ideally with additional options “diverse” and “prefer not to answer”).

Where it’s problematic is when it’s used as a noun. In English “a male” and “a female” is almost exclusively reserved for animals. For humans we have “a man” and “a woman”. Calling a person “a female” is often considered offensive because it carries the implication of women being either animals, property or at least so extremely different from the speaker that they don’t consider them equal. This impression is reinforced by the fact that the trend of calling women “females” is popular with self-proclaimed “nice guys” who blame women for not wanting to date them when in reality it’s their own behavior (for example calling women “females”) that drives potential partners away.

So in itself, the word “female” is just as valid as “male” and in some contexts definitely the right word to use but the way it has been used gives it a certain negative connotation.