As opposed to French, which famously exists as a natural truth of the universe. Even if we had never discovered French it would still be there… waiting.

Not just the sets but the camera, too. Whedon wanted the audience to feel like they were in the space, so they wouldn’t do the usual tricks of removing walls to set the camera up for stuff like hallway shots. If you watch on the longer shots where they move through the ship you can see the actors turn their shoulders slightly when they pass the camera cause they’re squeezing around the corner of the hallway.

I haven’t seen a Darths & Droids reference in the wild in a while.

I remember just cackling the first time I read their Episode I comics.

There are islands out there. If you truly think you would prefer that life you can just… go do it.

You don’t even need an island. You could wander off into the jungle of Vietnam and never hear from society again.

Extremely disappointed to discover that this isn’t by the other Edward Teach. Please give me Blackbeard’s extensively sourced treatise on porn.

There are actually 4 states that were independent countries at one point or another.

Hawai’i

Texas

California

Vermont

You’re correct that Jupiter is the brightest object in the night sky besides (obviously) the sun and the moon.

The brightest star is Sirius, near the constellation Orion.

Polaris is absolutely NOT the brightest star in the sky. Not even close.

How to actually find it: Find the big dipper (I know you know what it looks like). Take the two stars at the front end of the “cup” part. Draw a line through them “up” and out of the cup until you hit a star. That’s it.

“Sorry, I’m under a pretty strict NDA and I’m not allowed to discuss it.”

No idea. He used the money he saved to help for a down payment in a condo.

A friend of mine lived in downtown Boston during the pandemic. Like, across the street from the Garden. His building lost a TON of tenents when people fled the city since they could now work remotely. He was going to move as well, but then the building offered to reduce his rent by $700/month if he stayed. So he did.

If you like Mysterium, I highly recommend the successor game Obscurio. Its pretty much the same gimmick of art interpretation, but works way better for groups.

Instead of the “ghost” having to keep track of and pick art for each person, the “investigators” are making a group decision so you only need to pick one set of clue art. This means the ghost’s turn is way faster (doesn’t explode with higher player count) and there’s actually group interaction instead of each person in their own world, staring at art no one else cares about.

The way it’s set up also means the ghost can start working on choosing the art for the next round while the group is debating, not having to wait to see if they are correct or not, so it’s way more streamlined. All together just a snappier, more engaging version of Mysterium.

I love driving stick. Or I did up until the day my left knee fell apart. Now it’s just not an option for me.

What, you mean you missed the canonical Fortnite event of Palpatine’s voice ringing out across the galaxy? And then felt like you had somehow missed key plot events despite having watched all the movies because you didn’t participate in some fad videogame marketed to tweens? So it showing up in the opening crawl felt forced, unimaginative, and honestly just stupid?

Yeah, that sounds like my experience too.

Bullshit. You were singing Amish Paradise and we all know it.

Yup, I had someone print off Excel sheets, manually highlight and write in corrections, and them bring the pages over to my desk to have me fix them in the file.

I also once had the city reject a report I submitted because the width of the columns in the Excel file were different from the previous year and they wanted to print it all off on one page.

I used to work for municipal government in a major American city. The database for the entire city downloaded query results to your desktop formatted as Excel 95. Still does.

At one point I had to install special R packages because someone retired and I was tasked with taking over the worksheet they had been maintaining forever and the usual R packages to read data from Excel can’t parse Excel 5.0.

There was also someone in the office who still used a typewriter on the regular.