Based on the number of anoles, skinks, geckos, and Texas spinys in our yard, I’m guessing that little display was for someone else.

My brother used to catch them and let them bite down on his earlobes.

Weird dude.

I think a big thing is that good prebuilts are now readily available: hot swap, foam layers, PCB stabilizers, CNC aluminum cases, a mounting system more sophisticated than tray mount, decent firmware (often properly released QMK/VIA, but at least VIA), and fun features like lighting or encoders. A late as 2022, this would have been a wish list on an interest check for a $400+ kit; now it’s a baseline to charge three digits for a prebuilt MX board.

There are still many group buys going on at the high end (geek hack basically exists as an IC/GB publishing platform at this point), and a lot of boards are available bare bones, but when a newbie comes along for a recommendation, no one has to feel bad recommending some pre-built that would make a Pok3r look like a joke as a value proposition.

And this, folks, is why they were never not going to spoil the main spoilery part. Sounds like it was well done, so I guess maybe I’ll actually see it in the theater.

However, after a weeks in the role, several FEMA officials said they came around to Phillips after seeing his initiative during the January storm response.

“Gregg Phillips is FEMA’s best hope at this moment. I can’t believe I’m saying that,” one high-ranking FEMA official told CNN at the time.

Same, unnamed FEMA official, same.

It’s at about 43:00 in the embedded video, and yeah, that’s probable, but the question was posed to the panel about what their characters would explore in a hypothetical Legacy show, so unless she’s been right on top of it, it feels like a fair assumption for her to have made that they’d be among the leads.

As an aside, I think I would absolutely love hanging out with Marina Sirtis for exactly one day, and I would be utterly exhausted at the idea of spending any longer than that. In her interviews, she is always a delight, but also a lot.

I haven’t had any in a while, and I’m not sure if they even carry them anymore, AND the tub was like a million dollars last time I saw one, but Costco had these Caramel Macademia Clusters that just perfectly nailed the ratios and didn’t source their chocolate from Hershey (which is a whole other discussion, but even if I’m very American and don’t dislike it, it’s not always the right fit), and they were basically a diabetes succubus.

Chief Justice has been considered a separate slot for nomination purposes as of the late 19th century, so when he retires or croaks, the job will come open. Sometimes the then-president nominates one of the existing justices and backfills, but it’s completely possible, as @radix@lemmy.world says, to directly nominate the new person for chief justice; it’s actually pretty common to do so.

Once again, I will mention that “originalism” and “textualism” were a fucking death knell for jurisprudence, which barely withstood Bush et al, to say nothing of a brazen bad actor like Trump. They are the dark side of legal reasoning: quicker, easier, more seductive, but once you go down that dark path (with a ritually worshipped constitution that was a nice bit of kit for its time and place but is maddeningly vague and almost impossible to amend), forever will they dominate your destiny.

It’s impractical and deeply, inherently regressive to think that a few clever slaveholding provincials had everything figured out forever and ever (see also the almost impossible to amend part), and pretending that it’s workable without applying thought and context should be grounds to get someone disbarred.

I disliked him because I was an anti elitist

Frankly, given the way he was eventually embraced as the god of all writing (one of my professors was fond of saying about other Elizabethan playwrights: Their best stuff was better than Shakespeare’s worst stuff") and how thoroughly but poorly he’s taught, I don’t blame you. The language is simply not very accessible and pretending otherwise turns reading Shakespeare into a chore and liking him into a flex, and yes, I’m keenly aware that I’m not immune here. I think there’s a place, but I really do tend to think we go too hard and too early with teaching entire plays using the original scripts in middle school or 9th grade.

how anti elitist he was

This is such a tough one for me. On the one hand, he was in some ways making outsider art. Most of the “history” in his plays comes from various middle-brow English books that are full of mistranslations and Tudor propaganda, but then he dives into the psychology of these people in a way that can seem crude to modern ears but was absolutely game-changing for English literature. He finds motivation and humanity even in people who are ultimately irredeemable. He played fast and loose with iambic pentameter, and over the course of his career more and more prose crept in. He wasn’t afraid to take down the actual slang on the streets, and even insert it into the mouths of the powerful. While overstated, he absolutely did coin many words and even more famous turns of phrase that never existed before. The work absolutely had low-brow appeal, and it did piss off certain more formally trained writers. Then there’s the fact that it’s barely controversial to suggest he might have been queer (at least as we understand it), and completely banal to suggest his work often had homoerotic subtexts. It also isn’t insane to suggest that he either was a crypto catholic or or at least had sympathies in that direction.

Yet on the other hand, here’s a guy who was seeking the approval and even acceptance of powerful people for his entire lifetime. He glommed onto middling nobles and wrote sonnet after sonnet for them, about them, to them. He dedicated his “serious” work to his various patrons. Then, as the acting company took off, they absolutely dived straight into proto-capitalist adventures and sought out higher and higher patrons, until by the end they were literally “The King’s Men.” Don’t even get me started on the potentially cringy – and definitely historically dubious – efforts to get his family a proper coat of arms. He knew how the game was played, and he actually played it pretty well, basically retiring early to live in the biggest house in his hometown, getting his favorite daughter married off to a doctor, and having multiple beds to bequeath in his will.

Experts report the alloy was unmoved by the masterful prologue to Pixar’s 2009 classic Up.

I don’t know what kind of vibe I’m giving off, but I always seem to get the “Deepstate, amiright?!” drivers. Okay, that’s a lie… I do know my vibe… I live in a Texas suburb and I’m a cishet white guy who wears cargo shorts and dadcaps and likes sports.

I hate it, but still, this person is taking me somewhere I need to be so I want to be nice, but I can’t quite bring myself to pretend to agree. Unfortunately, a polite “Oh, I’m not sure I’m sold on that” just gets them helpfully trying to probe, “so why would Kamala do a pizzagate if she weren’t a lizard person?”

Fuck me, I need some tattoos.

See Shakespeare just making words up willy nilly.

This is quite a bit of a misconception, based on a few things:

• Shakespeare was writing in the fairly early days of printing. Caxton’s first press in England was set up barely a century before Shakespeare was writing. This is important because academic dictionaries generally cite the earliest written version of a word that they can find, so a writer from the 16th century with books that were well known in the 18th and 19th will be overrepresented.
• Shakespeare was also the odd case of someone writing for popular media (in part… his poems were absolutely targeted at elite audiences and currying favor with them) whose works were comprehensively collected. He was more often going to be the first person writing down stuff that was already seeping into common parlance.
• Many of the words he’s credited with coining are compound words or “verbification” of nouns (and vice versa). This can certainly count as making up words, assuming he’s the one who did so, but it’s not willy nilly and isn’t intended to confuse his audience.

One of the reasons I love Shakespeare so much is that when you dive into it, despite anti-stratfordian nonsense, absolutely everything points to a brilliant but not traditionally-educated outsider storming onto the scene and making shit he thought was good and that people would like, with very little regard for how the established creators thought the form should be done. He came to London from the sticks as an actor, but had the beginnings of a classical education back home, but also lived near and circulated among English-language printers and their (often dubiously accurate) books. Most of the things that ended up making him special first pissed off many of the Oxbridge “wits” who were making bank on their side-hustle of writing plays they ripped off from Greece and Rome. Willy Shakes comes along and is like…

• “This word doesn’t fit the meter… oh fuckin’ well, guess it’s getting a suffix! Or you know what? This next scene will be in… PROSE, motherfuckers!”
• “Some asshole on SIlver Street called me WHAT? That shit’s going in the next play!”
• “WTF was that Athenian guy thinking when he went batshit and killed all those dudes? I know… let’s actually tell people!”
• “You know what’s fuckin’ hilarious? That all the women in these plays are dudes. How funny would it be if we had a dude playing a lady pretending to be a dude and fending off the ladies, all of whom are dudes! Also, half my poems are totally about how bi I am.”

That one’s not actually a problem. The flag is always “hoist side forward” to symbolize a no-retreat mentality. We shall ignore Vietnam and Afghanistan, and how that goes in the reign of President “why they no helping me?!?” remains to be seen.

• Shrinking (and its lesser cousins Rooster and the Scrubs new season)
• Knight of the Seven Kingdoms
• Bridgerton (don’t you judge me!)
• Wonder Man
• Andor s2 was from the first half of 2025, but watch it if you haven’t.
• Slow Horses’ most recent season was released in Sep and Oct. As an aside, I haven’t read them, but based on their number and frequency of publication I’m just about betting the show is one of those that’s absolutely better unless you just intrinsically prefer the way books, even mediocre ones, let you luxuriate in their world building.

Edit: apparently the writer who created this show is the same one who created Derry Girls

And reuses many of the same actors (generally smaller roles from DG), and at least a few of the same gags. I watched the first episode, and it mostly made me want to re-watch Derry Girls, but I’ll get back to it eventually.

I believe the correct adjectives are “spongy” and “bruised.”

“This was a lie and is the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women. We cannot make this mistake again.”

I’m pretty sure Dick Cheney and pals needed no particular urging from Israel for that one. If nothing else, it was on its face a complicated issue for Israel that would have left them without a particular desire to spend political capital with the US, though they would have undoubtedly been on board once it kicked off.

Now that said, it certainly does seem strange that any time there is a report of negotiations making progress with Iran or a proxy, this particular Israeli government seems to get stuck in and something violent happens. I think what we have here is an blind and anti-semitic squirrel finding a nut.

I mean, it helped that I knew the designer, LOL.

IIRC, there is one single bodge wire in there from where I did compromise the matrix, but I cannot stress how simplistic this PCB design was. It is holes for switches, holes for diodes, holes to string it over to the microcontroller dev board, and traces connecting them all. My second one is slightly more ambitious, allowing a couple of layout choices, Alps or MX, and has a designated spot to solder a specific MCU. That one requires two bodge wires because I screwed up the traces a little. If I do a third, I will know to make sure every trace is assigned to a “subnet” before I tell KiCAD to clean things up.

DIY board. I designed a no-stabs matrix-only PCB (the Pi Pico MCU has to serve as the “daughterboard”). It’s FRL 1800 and is one of my personal favorites, though I’ve since replaced the black spacebars with a couple of BOW keys that reflect the hold-tap mapping I set up; I’ve also changed it from KMK to ZMK.

Anyway, PCB orders usually have a minimum order of 5 pieces, so I snapped the numpad off of one and laser-cut a case of sorts, really just plates and spacers, and got “half-height” switches. My laser can sort of half-assedly dye-sub cheap PBT blanks, so I did a Timex Sinclair design. Later, I added feet, a 3D printed replacement one-piece spacer with a sidewall, and a MagSafe ring so it could be the keyboard for a Chrometab I converted to Debian.