The Twilight Realms

Ahoy, mateys! In honour of Talk Like a Pirate Day, I've decided to put together this little "pirate dictionary", so now you too can learn how to talk like a true freebooter*. *A real pirate. Ahoy = Used to greet people. Avast! = Technically means "Stop!", but is often used as an interjection to mean "Hey", as in "Stop what you're doing, I want to tell you something". Not to be confused with "ahoy", which is just a general greeting. Matey/mate = A friend. Shiver me timbers! = An expression of shock or disbelief. Batten down the hatches = Prepare the ship for an upcoming storm. Battens are long strips of wood, metal, fibreglass etc., used for various purposes aboard ship, and the hatches are the openings in the deck of a ship or submarine, so "batten down the hatches" means "put strips of wood/metal etc. over the hatches to prevent water from getting in and flooding the ship". Landlubber = Basically ...

Myths You Will Never Be Able to Get Parents to Stop Believing 1. Sugar causes hyperactivity in children. Truth: There is no evidence of a direct link between sugar consumption and hyperactivity in children. Experiments have been done where one group of children was given sugary drinks and another were given sugar-free drinks, for instance, and no difference in their hyperactivity levels was noticed (the children were not told whether their drinks were sugary or sugar-free). Children are just naturally hyperactive, sugar or no sugar. The reason for this myth is mostly likely a combination of confirmation bias on the part of the parents and psychological conditioning on the part of the children - parents who believe this rumour are more likely to notice their children being hyperactive after having sugar, and children aware of this rumour may subconsciously (or even consciously) act more hyper after having sugar because of it, but there is no direct correlation between amount of sugar...

Pointless trivia, Devil May Cry edition. The concept for Devil May Cry grew out of one of several rejected ideas for Resident Evil 4. It was rejected because the ability to juggle zombies in the air wasn't very scary, but Capcom wanted to use the mechanic anyway, so a few things were reworked here and there and Devil May Cry was born. The main character of the failed Resident Evil 4 was a bionically-enhanced human named Tony - in Devil May Cry, Dante commissioned his handguns, Ebony & Ivory, under the pseudonym "Tony Redgrave". The ability to juggle enemies actually originated from a patched-out glitch in Onimusha: Warlords (simply titled Onimusha in Japan) whereby an enemy could be "juggled" by hitting it in midair. While Capcom removed the glitch before the game was released, as mentioned above, they thought the mechanic was too cool to just scrap entirely, and worked it into what would eventually become Devil May Cry. Many of the characters in the D...