The owner shut down his McDonald’s for the afternoon for this. Trump declined to wash his hands, dropped a batch of fries, and “served” a few “customers” through the drive through window. So yeah, basically a photo shoot.

Yeah, I’m sure it’s some sort of expensive hobby he’s addicted to, and perpetual project motorcycle would be my first guess.

My sister works in real estate, and she was asked by a Realtor she works with what the law was on disclosure for a house the seller said was haunted. In most US states, it’s legally required to disclose any material fact about known issues with the property, though how it’s worded and what that includes varies from state to state. She had to look it up, and in North Carolina, haunted is not a required disclosure, though it is in some states. I joked that haunting should count as an “immaterial” fact.

She was laughing about the whole thing until she went by the house herself to make sure everything was ready for the photographer. She heard a noise in the basement and checked. There was an old black man dusting the shelves. She mentioned she wasn’t expecting anyone to be there. He was very polite and explained that he took care of the house, and not to worry, he’d stay out of the way. She went upstairs to let in the photographer. When she went back in the basement there was no sign of the man, even though the only way out was past her. She looked around the whole house for him before she locked up but he was gone. She asked the seller about it, who casually explained that that was just old Terrence, who had taken care of the property for her grandmother, and had died many years ago. Since then, he just sort of appeared around the house occasionally, “tidying up.” (I’m writing this from memory, so some details are probably wrong, especially the name, but it’s the gist of story as she told it.)

They did not mention any of this to the buyer, and don’t know if they ever experienced anything as they never contacted them about it.

WW2 started several years after America ended the Prohibition, and the ice cream barge was commissioned in its later years as the war in the Pacific dragged on. Still, I don’t think the navy was providing alcohol rations, so I imagine it was quite the party atmosphere when the ice cream barge showed up.

The whole point of making a costly sequel is it can’t be a total disaster. If nothing else, “Joker: Folie à Deux” proved that is not the case.

Well, if studios can accept that sequels and remakes actually aren’t immune from being flops, maybe they will be more open to considering new ideas? I won’t get my hopes up, but it’s a nice thought.

an ice cream barge

For those not familiar, the WW2 US Pacific fleet included, no joke, a barge originally built to deliver and mix massive amounts of concrete that was refitted with food grade surfaces and a huge cooling system to supply ice cream throughout the fleet. I mean, it was navy “ice cream” from powder, but it was still a luxury that boosted morale wherever it went. I can only imagine how much it would have hurt Japanese morale if they had found out the US had so much resources to spare that they could waste them on industrial quantities of frozen treats.

Right, see, those are relevant because they show the value of that inspiration. Inspiration that could have brought many more valuable changes to her life if she still had it, but sadly the park service stole that inspiration from her, along with many potential benefits it could have brought her if they’d just let her remain blissfully ignorant of the true identity of the inspiring bigfoot she thought she saw.

Yes, hallucination is the now standard term for this, but it’s a complete misnomer. A hallucination is when something that does not actually exist is perceived as if it were real. LLMs do not perceive, and therefor can’t hallucinate. I know, the word is stuck now and fighting against it is like trying to bail out the tide, but it really annoys me and I refuse to use it. The phenomenon would better be described as a confabulation.

Classic Italian mistake.

Yeah, the American West has a huge variety of very distinct biomes. For the purpose of telling a story though, one rocky desert or forested mountain vale or whatever is as good as another, leaving us, the audience, largely unaware and misled. We mostly only notice when they do that to areas we’re familiar with.

Reminds me of the movie The Patriot, starring Mel Gibson. There’s a scene where he is at his home in what is clearly the upcountry of South Carolina not too far from the Appalachians and he takes a walk down his garden path to visit his wife’s grave, which is located in the South Carolina lowcountry, by the coast, somehow skipping past over a hundred miles of pine forest that would have been between those areas. If you’re not familiar with those areas, they both just look like areas in the American Southeast, but if you are familiar, it’s very jarring.

They’re only allowed to use one hand, so the competitors always have their off hand tucked in or hooked onto their clothes so that arm can be relaxed and ignored.

8 year old me would have envied this collection. 40 year old me just appreciates that he has a passion for which he still has a child-like sense of wonder.

They’d be seriously shooting themselves in the foot if they did that. Most corporations have 3rd party software that they would not be able or willing to give up, software development for Windows would be unable to test and debug, and I know from personal experience that many consumers find the already existing S Mode to be frustrating and confusing.

I’d bet money it’s scitsophrenia, so no this person has no idea how crazy they look. They’re just doing their part to fight back against whatever the hell they think is happening.

Now I’ve never met this person and neither am I in any way qualified to make a psychological diagnosis, but that dude has scitsophrenia.

It’s not meant to be a stereotype applied to all men, just the a thing that some men do. It happens when a man assumes, perhaps subconsciously, that the woman he is speaking to is his intellectual inferior and would surely benefit from his opinion on whatever topic without any regard to her possible expertise on the topic, or even his own lack thereof. I’ve rarely witnessed it myself, but know women who have had to put up with it. Stereotypeing all men as “manslainers” would be rude, but mocking the men who actually behave that way is cool with me.

Oh yeah, rub my face in those gorgeous technicalities. You want to mock my logical fallacy? Do it. Point out my fallacy and laugh; I can take it.

If the politicians and bureaucrats that Trump and friends pushed out are like murky swamp water, then the ones he brought in are like raw sewage, so I always said that he only wanted to “drain the swamp” so he’d have room to pump in said raw sewage.

Teas are generally not boiled, but steeped in hot water that was boiling a moment ago. I was going to say that cowboy coffee is boiled, but then I looked it up, and even then, the pot is pulled off the heat before adding the grounds.

If you mean what I think you mean, then you’re being down voted because your phrasing isn’t clear. I interpreted your comment to mean that removal any of dark skinned characters would often make the depiction less historically accurate, due to their historical presence as a minority of some sort across much of medieval Europe. If so, I agree that is amusingly ironic.