Moron, Idiot, and Imbecile were coined as precise medical terms by Dr Henry H Goddard in the 1900-10s. Retard(ed) was devised as a euphemism to replace them in the 1960s.
Once an unfashionable euphemism falls out of use, people gradually cease to recognise the offensive meaning which made it unfashionable.
Also, just because someone is famous/important/etc doesn't mean they're always right. In fact, one of the dangerous things about being famous is the people stop being willing to disagree with you and that can lead to becoming detached and warped as a person.
Ditto. Discord is fantastic platform to use and I'm a member of so many interesting communities across a range of subjects, but it does seem so very precarious to rely on the company to keep it going as it is.
I once did something in a similar vein, but with much less sophistication. We had 8 players and 2 copies of Catan. The games were played simultaneously and the rule was that the first player to win a game was the overall winner. Everyone was very motivated to play frantically!
For standard Catan, the resources aren't quite perfectly determinable - when one player robs another, any players besides those two don't know which resource changed hands. There is a valid argument from that that resources should be fully concealed. Everybody can track how many of each resource currently exists in total, but they don't always know who holds which ones.
This was my staunch opinion for a long time, but I've actually come around to the idea that many games are improved by having some degree of hidden information which is in-theory trackable by players, since it allows a certain sort of player to take their turn much more rapidly (i.e. it mitigates "analysis paralysis"). I don't think it's true for every game, obviously, (IMO it would be a poor house rule to make in 1830, for instance), but I've become a lot more willing to trust designers' decisions on what information should be public vs. hidden as my taste in board games has developed over time.
(For the record, I have no opinion on the value of hidden vs public information as a design decision in Catan.)
I wonder how much you would enjoy (or hate) Bruno Faidutti's games, they are all about hidden information, scheming and bluffing.
"Maskerade" especially, because there you often don't even know for certain which character you are yourself. Everyone is just pretending, scheming and bluffing the time. Which I suppose really captures the idea of scheaming at Renaissance courts.
I've actually played a lot of Citadels (which I think is great fun these days, although I'll admit I disliked it when I first played it many years ago). I'll have to give Mascarade a shot, it looks like it would be engaging in the same sort of way.
Boilers in the UK are usually mounted on the inside of an exterior wall to provide for venting exhaust gases outside. They may provide hot water on-demand without a tank (combi boiler) or fill a hot water cylinder on a schedule (system boiler) depending on type. Heating is typically provided by the boiler pumping hot water through a circuit of wall-mounted radiators regulated by TRVs (Thermostatic Radiator Valves).
Note that if the employer is found to be engaging in "disguised employment" then, in some jurisdictions such as the UK, they may be found liable for these things anyway plus penalties.
I know, some countries like UK, Germany, Austria, etc have laws to discourage this, but in Eastern Europe(Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, etc) this is totally legal.
Once an unfashionable euphemism falls out of use, people gradually cease to recognise the offensive meaning which made it unfashionable.