Hey you can recreate the experience by simply going to your local library, except most libraries have eliminated late fees and there's of course no checkout fees either
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an end to the looming threat of nuclear annihilation and before the start of the “war on terror”
There's an underappreciated film that came out during this period called Canadian Bacon, one of John Candy's last films. Basically the president of the United States is trying to improve his approval rating as the military industrial complex is imploding and sending the nation into a recession, so he drums up a cold war with Canada instead. Its honestly a brilliant time capsule of geopolitical sentiments at the time, as well as funny as hell
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So I've started really enjoying theatres post-pandemic. It comes down to going to the right theatre and not going to a super packed premier night showing. I'll usually attend a weekend matinee or a weeknight showing of something that's about to drop from the theatre cycle when it's not very busy and you don't have to fight for seats. Going rate is like $18 per ticket for a nicer theatre which if you only go 2-4 times a year like I do is perfectly agreeable
Now I could see someone who goes weekly or biweekly really not liking the theatre experience these days but that's not me
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Lol I never went to a movie theater in my entire life. Am I missing out on anything?
Honestly going to the movie theatre is an experience best had with friends/family/dates. I regularly check the schedules at a few local and not so local theatres and make plans with friends if there's something we want to see. Usually it ends up being one of the times they replay some older films (for example many of the Studio Ghibli films get theatre time at least once a year and it's a wonderful way to see those beautiful films) because there just aren't many new movies I want to see coming out.
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The US is fucking huge...The US is larger than all of Europe, by quite a margin
It is hilarious to imagine if this were real. Like what would European explorers and Settlers have done if they started mapping it out and went "wait a minute..."
For an rail network that runs 24/7 they're going to have crews specifically to wake up should there be a problem on the busiest sections of mainline as this hoax indicated there were. That's a significant amount of dollars burned if they close the line due to a citizen reporting heavy damage to the bridge, and just waiting until 8am on the next business day to actually look at anything.
I strongly suspect what happened was they woke up their on-call inspectors (or scrambled an inspector who worked nights, which a rail network may very well have) informed them of photos circulating showing significant structural damage to this 150 year old viaduct, so they roll up and see the exact same viaduct in the exact same shape it's been in for their entire life and call up their boss and say "oy you wakin me up for this shiv? The bridge is bloody fine! Check your sauces mate!" (And after reporting that it was a hoax probably went and did a more thorough inspection to make sure their bases were covered)
Flying out of Madison recently I saw so many people bringing cases of Spotted Cow as their stowed carry-on. There's a store right by the gate with a pile of cases for exactly this purpose of course
I love the one time they didn't like the hard drive expansion bay with vents in my laptop but decided it's okay because it can't be opened by hand but didn't care about the screwdrivers in my carry-on bag that I forgot about which would allow me to access the expansion bay in flight if desired
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China was notably one of the last places on earth to retire steam locomotives from revenue service, only ending mainline steam in 2005 and reportedly ending the last branchline's use of steam in 2023, but may still have some revenue steam service surviving elsewhere
Bosnia still has some revenue steam service at a coal mine (notably running locomotives built by Germany using prisoner labor during WWII that were designed to use minimal resources and with a design life of only 10 years)
Hilariously my 1200 sq foot 125 year old home is much less energy efficient than my in-laws 3000 sq foot 3 year old home due to the greatly improved insulation and sealing practices in modern structures. On the other hand my house is so drafty I don't have to worry about things like mold growth due to improper vapor barriers nor the air becoming too stale due to insufficient circulation
There were recently a couple of bad gas leaks locally and it was an interesting reminder that there's these natural gas lines laid crisscrossing the northern US that are just explosions waiting to happen. There's been some nasty ones too
The unavoidable conclusion in today's world is that we need to be phasing out natural gas. It can't be cleanly turned off and back on, it's wildly dangerous if it leaks out due to poor install/maintaince or natural disasters, it can explode if someone happens to drill into a gas line (I know a guy who did internet installs and at the time he joked about how "yeah you just drill holes into folks homes to poke the cables through and hope you don't hear hissing after drilling") during a house fire it just feeds more extremely potent fuel into the fire until turned off. About the only benefit is when it's extremely cold out, such as when the destabilizing polar vortex whips through, natural gas is probably the most energy efficient option to keep homes and businesses inhabitable
Jesus it's not even like it just ran
rmdirfrom the current directory and got lost, it just flat out explicitly deleted everything from the root of the driveYeah as an admin I love that I can run familiar Linuxy commands in powershell but I also hate that they can't just use/fork the real userland utilities so everything works just similarly enough to completely throw you off when you stumble across a difference
I love reading this as the backups have never succeeded
Its all creepy until you realize it was all just a chat with an LLM and not actually an agentic machine learning model or chain of models hooked into some custom APIs
LLMs famously collapse into rediculousness once a conversation goes on too long. They're now at the point where that takes more than a couple of paragraphs of text at least
On the upside, they specified D: drive which is typically a lesser used bulk storage drive, so less activity to potentially overwrite the files marked as deleted
Bulking up on carbs before robbing the Louve maybe? Need a lot of calories for that much running
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But more seriously, watch the water in your sight glass, keep it about 3/4 full at all times and check it like you check your rear view mirror in your car, and don't forget to open the cylinder cocks every time you stop (or at least when you first start moving) and you should be pretty good to avoid unexpected damage to your locomotive!
As someone who just lost one grandparent to dementia and has another entering treatment (and in the process of being moved into a care facility) he definitely has dementia or a similar cognitive decline. If you watch him now when he's publicly speaking and compare it to his 2016 campaign he's just not the same person anymore. He's now seeming to not remember what he was to be speaking about, going on random unexpected tangents, needs to be led around by someone else when anywhere other than the White House (and may also need to be led around within the White House, but that's not as visible) occasionally walks completely a different direction from where he should be going, and he's lost his talent for remembering names, mixing people's names with associations when he speaks ("Tim Apple" of Apple CEO Tim Cook, or "Tim Minnesota" of Tim Walz) or occasionally naming someone who hasn't held the position in a very long time, looking directly at the solar eclipse while the eclipse glasses were in his hand (or pocket? I can't remember now) its all really clear dementia behavior. Also the tests he's described taking, he describes them exactly as coherently and in an extremely similar manner to my grandmother's descriptions of probably the same tests. She also knew she had an MRI (and named the wrong thing it was for) and kept saying it was tomorrow for a week, which is pretty comparable to how Trump has been talking about his MRIs.
Like, for a normal person in an assisted living facility, I'd say with his mix of ailments he might not even make it until the end of the year, but he has quite frankly the best access to healthcare of anyone in the entire world. We're going to watch this poor man regress until there's no sign of him left because his team refuses to publicly admit that their guy is dying. Honestly it feels like elder abuse, letting him act like a toddler on the world stage (which is what dementia does, its like the person regresses in age) instead of publicly announcing his decline and how his team will be reviewing his work and slowly taking over his duties as he becomes less capable, letting him decline not in the spotlight but in privacy. It'll be an interesting next few years for sure, because I'll be shocked if he survives to the end of his presidency
I mean, the Climax was a pretty sweet geared locomotive for usecases where you just need to haul a ton of stuff over rough track with one very light engine. Now they just use trucks and call it a day