Doesn’t make him not ace.

Definitely Flemish. It’s a Flemish cartoon and the -ke ending is very Flemish, the Dutch would say “Boertje”.

A bit late, but the “oe” in “boerke” is the same sound as the “oo” in “moon”. The last e is a schwa sound (a short uhh). It means little farmer.

Sure, but I was responding to someone who was defining wasp (the common word) based on clade (using scientific words).

I’m fine with common parlance words for things. What I had issue with was arbitrarily restricting the definition of wasp to a specific clade, which would exclude ants and bees, and also a whole host of at the very least wasp-adjacent animals which would now be stuck with no real way to describe them.

(Also, yes, fish is a rubbish scientific word. We’re far closer cousins of salmon than sharks are. By any reasonable definition of fish, at least biologically, we are fish. You could redefine “fish” in the same way we define “tree”, i.e. based on structure and not on ancestry, but by that definition whales should still be fish. The word “fish” shouldn’t be allowed within 50 metres of cladistics.)

Just to confirm, you don’t think of jewel wasps, spider wasps, sand wasps, and flower wasps as wasps, since they’re not part of the Vespidae, correct?

I’ve mostly seen wasps defined as basically “Apocrita but not the ones we don’t think count as wasps because there’s too many of them, specifically bees and ants.” Which leads to the same weird reasoning that would somehow make legless lizards lizards, but not snakes. I’ve seen velvet ants referred to as wasps, but not ants, even though true ants are far closer cousins to Vespidae. That just isn’t a viable scientific definition. I’m glad we’ve mostly moved on to grouping avian dinosaurs among the dinosaurs, but it feels like a lot of similar groupings are still lagging.

I’m willing to accept Vespidae as a synonym of wasps, but that excludes a ton of wasps. It also erases the very wasp-like nature of ant ancestors, which is what makes cladistics so fascinating. So why not just open it up to include all Apocrita and be done with it?

I’m also fine with a morphological definition of wasps, like how “tree” isn’t based on ancestry but on structure, but you were the one pulling in the scientific names.

Except many non-Vespidae, both living and extinct, would readily be considered wasps. Look at this thing and tell me it’s not a wasp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eusapvertic.jpg If that’s a wasp and a yellow-jacket is a wasp, then so are ants and bees, in the same way that we are apes and birds are dinosaurs. You wouldn’t call a zoo to deal with a loose human and you wouldn’t call dr. Grant to deal with a pigeon, but biologically it makes a lot more sense to deal with ancestry then with how a species interacts with humans.

The aye-aye is also doing much better, mostly because the population size was severely underestimated at the time of writing.

And yeah, the book is amazing. I usually describe it to fans of his other works as somehow being his weirdest book, despite being non-fiction.

I had to use one of those hex wrenches to fix my shower a few months back. It definitely felt like vindication.

Weird comic, why put the punchline in the penultimate panel?

It’s a small part on the German border which we got as compensation for WWI. It has a population of roughly 80.000 people, less than 1% of the Belgian population. The two main languages are Dutch (60ish %) and French (40ish %), but German is technically a national language.

I suspect that people in Flanders encounter way more Germans than German-speaking Belgians.

Can’t speak for the Netherlands, but here in Belgium the first thing anyone thinks of when you speak German is the war. I know I’m not supposed to mention it…

That being said, German usually sounds like angry Dutch to us, so I guess we both agree on where we are on the funny-angry spectrum.

Also, most of your examples are more common in the Netherlands, which are definitely further along the funny axis.

To be fair, based on the (lack of) spelling and grammar in his e-mails, that might actually be how he writes letters.

Haha! That one’s for the champion, where it should hopefully be a bit less of a surprise.

It’s just those 6. Keeping the list small was a deliberate choice to keep things manageable. These are just here to give some Gym Leaders a Pokémon not normally found in the wild in the hopes of making them a bit more interesting.

Ha, weird, thanks for pointing it out!

Also, a small heads up: the most recent version fixed an issue with TM25 Thunder which slipt in at some point. Some of the Pokémon sheets incorrectly showed it as available or unavailable.

And since nobody’s going to check this comment chain anyway, here, have some extra Pokémon:

https://heavenlyspoon.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/new-pokemon.pdf

These are part of a companion book I’m working on with a suggested gym for each of the 50 TMs and a couple of pre-designed regions.

They mean 4000 on a single day once per week, i.e. not just 4000 steps per week spread over multiple days.

It normally is just a copy, but I edit the dex file for small changes instead of doing a full copy since that’s a bit quicker, but yeah, I apparently didn’t actually change it in the main doc. Oops.

And yeah, Articuno is deliberate. I liked it taking up most of that page, and this way seemed like a neat way of not having to shrink it as much.

Happy to hear that! And I’m always happy with more bug reports (as long as they’re fixable). Yeah, Disable should be 1 hit.

I don’t notice the edge clipping on my copy of the Pokédex, but I could’ve accidentally uploaded an older version. It should be good now, I hope.

I’ve updated the document with some other minor changes as well. They’ve been in the doc for a bit now, but this seemed as good a time as any to actually implement them.

Eh, vintage has had control and hatebear-style decks as its most prominent decks for years, with combo often being around 1/3 or less of the metagame. Legacy often has a tempo or control deck as the de facto best deck. Combo being this dominant is really only a modern thing. And while some of these decks aren’t A+B combo decks, I wouldn’t immediately consider them interactive in the way tempo or control would be.

Most of these decks are racing for their win-con, which makes them strategically similar in a way a metagame with strategies like death&taxes, hard control, tempo, and midrange wouldn’t be. I wouldn’t consider a hypothetical metagame with 50 different T3 combo decks more diverse than, say, current vintage.

None of these look very interactive, so I’m not sure “healthy” is the right word. Diverse, sure, but a format where almost every deck is essentially a combo deck is probably not especially interesting to play (and I say this as an absolute combo degenerate).