It’s always good to support the original publisher and encourage local libraries by reading a hard copy, so I could never endorse piracy, even for people who can’t get their hands on a physical copy. Even though it’s true that both libgen and annas-archive have ebook copies of this particular book (and can easily be found via google), I could never in good conscience direct anyone to such a site.

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.

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.

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

I remember being very interested in them back in the early 2010s, but progress has been very slow. They’re more or less at the same point now as they were then, as far as I can tell, apart from minor updates. It’s hard to be sure though because their site updates so rarely. I clicked through to it just now and there were some machine pages talking about what they hope to accomplish in 2014, and others being proud of their progress so far in 2018. It’s hard to tell exactly where they’re at when their site is so inconsistently updated.

If there’s a source showing a clearer and more complete picture of their status I’d love to see it, as I do find the idea interesting.

This stuff is generally archived and indexed elsewhere, that’s just where the main request threads are

Google “da archive” and be prepared for a rabbit hole of archived 4chan threads and indexes that probably have whatever games you’re looking for if you’re willing to dig long enough

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?

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.

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