I completely understand the weather thing. In the Netherlands it doesn’t get that cold, but the rain is really annoying (it rained basically non-stop from october till late february). In the city where I live however, there is also a pretty good bus service, so you can avoid cycling longer distances in the rain. For me I find cycling in good weather so good for my mental and physical health that I wouldn’t want to go without it.

You say an e-bike doesn’t quite do it for you, and I’m curious what you mean. Is it that it doesn’t have the range, that the engine isn’t strong enough for hills, or something else? I would love to learn about more disadvantages of micromobility, so I can create more nuanced opinions.

It is getting a lot better, but traditionally chess was a game for men only. Until the 2000s women were seen as inferior by most top players, like Bobby Fischer and Garry Kasparov (AKA Gary Chess, inventor of chess). Right now 95 percent of members of the Dutch chess federation is men. In my local chess club the average ratio men/women is provably like 90/10, with the difference between children being a lot less than adults.

If you haven’t seen it, the series “The Queens Gambit” does a pretty good job portraying the difference between men and women at the top of chess: maybe one woman, hundreds of men.

The gender gap is coming down, but it is still there.

Also, pro chess players only sacrifice their queens, but not their kings. I do both

I don’t mind seeing the country name uncensored, but it is a tradition in chess to not only be sexist, but also racist (at least against one country)

It is an album by the famous Frnch singer Jean-Jacques Goldman. Even though he is not known for anything chess related, he is Frnch. The Fr*nch are looked down upon in chess for some reason, so anything in chess related to this nation has been called “en passant.” This includes capturing a pawn that moved two squares, throwing a croissant on the board and starting a revolution turning all pieces into pawns.

This could very well be the truth. In LOTR and the Hobbit these despicable creatures seem pretty nice, but keep in mind that it was Hobbits who wrote all of that and they are in this case biased towards Hobbits. Furthermore, it’s interesting that the Hobbits, who could barely read or write, had so much knowledge about their genealogical ancestry: this could merely be an oddity, but it could also mean that they made it up to erase any questions about their rights to the territory.

On top of that, when I was searching through my memory for proof of another theory I have, that Lobelia got screwed over by Bilbo, it seemed suspicious to me that despite their love for genealogy and the fact that they (at least before “the Hobbit”) kept their homes to their family, or heirs, there is no mention of any inheritance procedure in any of the books, despite this being more relevant for the Hobbits who wrote the books than for example some random elven language. When Bilbo comes back in the Shire, he was declared dead, but there seemed to be an “auction” instead of an “inheritance”. On the other hand, Bilbo bequeaths everyting to Frodo later on.

This use of words raises some suspicion. One possibility is that the “auction” was actually an “inheritance” and that Bilbo tried to invalidate Lobelia’s claims to his inheritance in his writings. Tolkien may have omitted the part of the book where inheritance in the Shire is explained to make Bilbo more likable: this part of the book is necessary to make my Lobelia theory, which I will not explain here because it’s too long, not just a theory, but a fact.

The other possible reason as to why there is no explanation of the inheritance procedure is because there was no such thing, because the Hobbits didn’t live here for that long yet, increasing the probability of the theory mentioned in the above comment.

Furthermore, Sauron wasn’t actually an eye, but he was seen by the Hobbits as such. The sun baby may have been angry at the Hobbits (see comment above this one); by showing himself as something resembling the sun baby, he (what even are the sun baby’s pronouns?) made them recall the crimes they commited against the Teletubbies.

I may just be wrong though.

Maybe, but alcohol works fine. Intellectual research at my local chess club shows that three beers is the optimal amount, massively increasing intuition, without significantly decreasing intelligence. So for beginners I would recommend starting there.

Your world vision is too narrow. It is time for you to expand your horizons, move across borders, explore new worlds, new planets, new lives! Start with checkers. Maybe some day your board will be big enough to see the squares you can only dream of.

Chess generators would never invent a name as glorious as “grob opening, double grob variation, Coca-Cola gambit”.

The study used social media and photo-sharing websites

I am curious what kind of pictures they used; I could imagine that if you see a hermit crab with plastic you would take a picture of it, which could lead to misleading results. On the other hand, if the crabs were just in the background, this would not be the case.

But It’s sad news.

On top of that it avoids Bg5, pinning the horsey, which could otherwise maybe be annoying. Also, I thing you meant Qa4+ instead of Qh4+, which is the anarchychess idea in this position for white.