But only spelling or grammar mistakes.

Games with the highest replay value for me:

• Civilization 4
• Heroes of Might and Magic III
• Sid Meyer’s Alpha Centauri
• TES3: Morrowind
• SimCity 2000

I’m a Product Owner, and my job literally is to participate in meetings, so that my engineers don’t have to. You want to talk to one of them? Sorry, you have to talk to me, and I’ll talk to them on their own time.

In the past, however, there was one time I almost quit. We had an engineering lead with a serious case of Dunning-Kruger syndrome. Good with Javascript, which made him think he was an expert in everything, from c# to aws, and especially in system architecture. He could sell himself and his work really well, though, so the management always took his word for gospel. Got two developers, who had the audacity to tell him how stupid his architecture was, fired. Tried to get me fired, and it turned into a competition of who can outlast whom. Eventually it became too much for me, so I started interviewing elsewhere, when suddenly he was reassigned elsewhere within the company. I decided to stay mainly due to career growth (and to pay my mortgage), and I hear that he’s been doing his usual mess in his new position, while my team is now far happier and more productive.

E-cards. I got at least some cards for my birthday…

To switch to the timeline where Harambe was not killed.

Dodged by no fault of mine. She dumped me because I made fun of her beliefs in astrology. From the little I keep hearing about her, she makes all her decisions according to horoscopes, pendulums, some kind of wooden sticks, etc. Because of that she eventually left a very successful career, her husband, moved across the country to a place she has no ties to, etc. I keep hearing gradually less about her, as she keeps cutting off all our mutual friends.

E. T.

Honorable mention: The Neverending Story. Cried during one scene in the movie, not the end.

I don’t regret it, but some people say I should. A full-width back tattoo of the US Confederacy leadership. The last place I lived in the US was Georgia, very close to Stone Mountain. I spent nearly every weekebd there: running, hiking, fishing, or just enjoying the sun with a book. So, when I decided to leave the US, I wanted to take my best memory with me and got the Stone Mountain carving on my back.

This otherwise insightful chart suffers from the lack of NOFX.

I laughed at the picture, showed it to my wife, she laughed, and then I checked the comments and realised that we’re too old for the Internet…

We often gave high winds and rain. Last month, a wind storm damaged loads of roofs in my neighbouhood, and some people only noticed after the leaks started.

In addition, construction in Ireland is notoriously bad, and one of the first things we did was to fly over a family member who has decades of roofing experience, and he fixed potential leaks. Just as well, as we have neighbours who already had to change some of their timber supports that started rotting. We are still pretty paranoid about the roof quality, though.

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.

• Isaac Asimov, 1980

There were people warning against the glorification of ignorance in the US nearly half a century ago. It’s nothing new; it just reached critical mass (also thanks to social media where ignorant people can self-organise).

I live in Ireland. I’ll probably have my heating on during the colder nights, and I’ll check the roof for leaks once per week or so.

About once every 3-4 weeks. It is costly, but I get them off Anazon at a reasonable price. The box of bags also comes with two sets of filters that need to be replaced regularly.

For people with pets, the Cat & Dog version. Just be aware that the brushes in the hoover head tend to wear out in 4-5 years, depending on the frequency of hoovering and amount of hardfloors. A genuine replacement head can get a bit pricy; for the Cat & Dog head even more so.

There are large companies, many of them in Germany, who are owned by foundations. Perhaps the best known is Bosch, which is almost entirely owned by a charitable foundation. Another very large one is ZF Friedrichshaven, owned by the Zeppelin Foundation. They don’t do any consumer products, but are one of the world’s largest players in the automotive industry.

I drank Earl Grey even before I was aware of TNG. For me, the smell of loose dry Earl Grey is by far the most appealing smell ever. The brewed tea loses some of that aroma, but not that much.

Ireland: Proof of residency for 3 out of the last 4 years before the child gets an Irish passport. It’s enough to present utility bills or paychecks for that period. I did it, and my kids only have Irish passports (even though they’d be entitled to both) until they are old enough to make their own decision in this matter. Or Trump decides to expand his golf course to the entire island.

I’d finance a historical movie about the Soviet invasion of Central Europe in 1944-1945. Similar to The Promise with Oscar Isaac, which introduced loads of people to the Armenian Genocide, my movie would show the reality of the Soviet invasion towards the end of WW2. Too many people, especially in the affected region, still think of the Soviets as liberators, when in fact they were even more ruthless than the Nazis.

Not everyone has smartphones. And speaking of Covid, not having a smartphone bit me in the arse because many businesses only accepted digital vaccination certs. I survived that, though, and I’ll survive not giving business to places that require you to have a smartphone.