Muahahahahaha, my work here is done!

There's a part in one of my favourite stories from 'Merlin Dreams' by Peter Dickinson that addressed that exact conundrum. Mermaids in popular culture don't normally have gills - so how do they breathe, exactly?

That's an excellent point too! I stopped using a signature for a little while and I had some North Americans (I'm based in the UK) commenting that they didn't understand why they got such a quick reply sometimes and not others - it was because occasionally I just happened to check my emails in the evenings after work,…

I also work in academia - publications and journal editing - and I get so many emails a day that if I don't answer them on the bus on my way to/from work I would never get them all answered. I use that time to respond to simple enquiries about publication costs, image resolution, whether an article is relevant to our…

Cylon!

Yeah, I was actually on the swim team in high school for that reason. It never helped my asthma enough, but then I was kinda uncoordinated anyway so I'm not sure whether that was kind of a cyclical problem!

Oh man, I would totally love to be a mermaid! Though I suspect mermaids with asthma probably don't live very long.

Now why didn't I think of that??

Like a third eye that glows in the dark...

I know! I was literally rubbing my monitor because I thought it was a stuck pixel but once I figured out it was part of the image I can't see anything else.

There's one tiny grey pixel in the middle of all that black and it's kind of freaking me out.

Yeah, it's weirdly severe for her. It took me awhile to recognise her.

Okay, hat makes sense - actually my brother uses it pretty much the same way with my 17 year old niece. Though I'm FB friends with my niece too, and I suspect she's just getting cleverer about blocking us boring family members. She's been suspiciously quiet lately!

I honestly don't really understand how that works for you. So your Twitter followers and your Facebook friends are your wife and two daughters? In that case, why would you even be on social media?

Huh. It would be a boner-killer for me if someone corrected my grammar while speaking. I'm a professional editor - as in, that's my full-time day job - but I give a major pass on grammar while speaking. You can't really proofread what comes out of your mouth, and people make mistakes (even when they know the correct…

I would gladly give up my ear for such schnoozly, fuzzy delight!

Oh my gods, my face would be torn to shreds because I would not be able to resist sticking it in that fluffy, fluffy belly!

Oh my god, my cat and your cat could be separated at birth! She hurls herself at the bathroom door and yeowls if i'm in there with the door locked when The Dude sleeps over. When it's just me and I leave the door open, she comes bow-leggedly running down my looooong hallway, meowing all the way before launching…

I love gaming. I love talking about gaming culture. I love reading Kotaku's coverage of gaming topics... But I've always avoided the comments here because to me it has always seemed like a hate-filled community that is blatantly not woman-friendly. It sounds like you guys are serious about eradicating the bigots and…

My dad (also passed away) was a university Professor, charming and urbane and the smartest person most people who knew him had ever met. He grew up poor in Detroit and only wore shoes (secondhand) in the winter; the rest of the time it was newspaper or nothing. I guess his grandparents in rural Pennsylvania were even…