Parts of it remain indecipherable without the social context, however, as the writer explicitly assumes a mutual knowledge of some set of unspecified rules.

that phrase is to biology as “donde esta la biblioteca” is to spanish

Probably Wayne Gretzky? I don’t even know anything about ice hockey and I know he’s supposed to be the most dominant player of any sport. Like he and his brother have the record for highest combined goals of any pair of brothers: 2,857 by Wayne, 4 by Brent. If you take away all his goals, he’d be the highest scoring player of all time on assists alone. There have been 13 times when a player has scored over 100 goals in a season in NHL history: Lemieux (once), Orr (once), and Gretzy (eleven times in a row). He retired last century and still holds 57 records. I’m not gonna keep picking out examples but there’s a bunch more facts like this that sound like the old “chuck norris facts” meme but are actually true.

“If you don’t know anything about ice hockey why do you have all these facts on hand?” - I remembered seeing this kind of list before so I did a quick Google.

Edit: I’m seeing some different exact figures for some of these, but the general principle stands and I’m not invested enough in hockey facts to nail down which numbers are exactly right.

they probably fell into an empty enclosure one day and the zookeepers just rolled with it and put up a sign

Are capybaras as chill as their reputation suggests, or is that more a feature of cases that are used to captivity? If the memes/images/videos are to be believed, I’d expect to be able to just wander up to one in the wild and have it respond like a well-socialized pet dog.

“Inconvenience” would be the verb for causing an inconvenience. So in the sentence you’re going for, “inconvene” would have to be replaced with the passive “be inconvenienced” (“we’ve gotta be inconvenienced and grovel to google a bit”). I don’t believe we have a separate word for “endure an inconvenience”, although it seems like the kind of thing some languages might have a single word for. Stylistically I’d probably restructure the sentence to “we’ve gotta put up with the inconvenience” rather than just using the passive verb, but yeah.

I think you’d most often see this verb in the stock phrase “Sorry to inconvenience you”.

GEB is pop science, it’s not math heavy at all

Pro wrestling is fake (or, is all just fiction, like a TV show or a theater performance). Wrestling and boxing are not fake.

I’m not a lawyer, but I think this would be on archivetopia. I think the question would be whether healthcorp had taken reasonable care to preserve these records, or had been negligent by leaving them entirely in the hands of archivetopia. It seems to me that the former would be the case, and that archivetopia has failed to appropriately safeguard those files, if a random employee can delete them without any procedures in place to prevent that or to keep additional backups.

Obviously there are multiple points of failure here - any one out of healthcorp, archivetopia, or the employee could have acted differently to prevent this. But if healthcorp had a reasonable expectation that handing these documents over to archivetopia would meet their obligations to preserve them, they should be in the clear - just as they would be if their document warehouse met all health and safety regulations but somehow burned down anyway. In both cases, they did what they could but events beyond their control resulted in data loss. In both cases, there is still a question about reasonable care: Did their warehouse meet all safety requirements? Did they have good reason to believe that these documents would be safe with archivetopia? If the answer to those questions is no, they are still at fault. If yes, they are in the clear.

On top of this, archivetopia is certainly at fault (multiple parties may be in the wrong here). And of course, the employee is at fault, although I don’t know if they’d be legally culpable or if it would be an internal matter.

Not a conclusive answer, but I hope this helps to clarify some of the considerations involved.

Do you have any additional info about the changes they’re making to the mission? I didn’t see that in the article

Well you can start here, then spend a few decades reading and thinking about it, and get back to us when you’ve figured it out

He’s talking about the belgariad/malloreon, by David Eddings. It seems like he may not have read the second paragraph mentioning the death gate cycle, hence the confusion.

The Belgariad is a series of 5 books, and the Malloreon is a sequel series which is also 5 books.

Talking to people and examining writing will usually drop references to a couple of other places to explore, or to unanswered questions that are worth looking into. Even if they seem minor, these almost inevitably lead to putting together pieces of the larger story, regardless of which pieces you start with. I don’t specifically remember what whistling guy talks about, but it sounds like that’s the only potential lead you’ve found so far. It’s certainly possible to make progress without ever talking to him, via all kinds of things that can be independently stumbled on, but if you haven’t found anything else I bet revisiting his dialogue will give you an idea on where to search next.

(Okay, I checked the wiki and can confirm that, while Esker is not the richest source of new options in the game, his dialogue does include instructions that lead to new threads for you to pull on)

Where have you visited so far? Usually I’d think you’ve encountered something other than the ship within a few hours, and most of the things you can encounter should give you ideas as to what else to explore. Have you literally only floated around in the ship, or is that a way of saying that the things you’ve found aren’t interesting to you?

you had one job

It’s a fictional diary entry, from The Prestige. The next entry is 2 months later, when he’s fallen in love with a different woman.

Bulimia - twice the taste, and no calories!

But Larry, you don’t have any hair. Why do you need a hairbrus–auuugh bears why are there bears

I think xeelee’s joke might have been that you have no idea what the inside of a car’s engine looks like, and are therefore a cartoonist