Counterpoint: there’s an episode where a genie kills a man by giving him a giant penis but not enough blood to fill it and keep his brain alive, then turns another person invisible. It’s a monster-of-the-week episode, but still. Definitely magic.

Plane or sand it smooth and refinish it. Probably you would need to strip and refinish the whole thing to blend it in but that is an advantage to wooden furniture.

Pass on sticking within the bounds of treason and tyranny. I’m gonna keep idealizing beyond that.

Hasn’t posted in a few months, must be busy with that Ocean’s Eleven project.

Oh, uh, pass.

Learn high-density home gardening and safe food preservation. That said, white rice does store a long time so it’s a good thing to hoard if you’re worried about food availability.

The worst part of anti-war music is that it never stops being relevant. Blast off! It’s party time!

Yep, only things my truck has been specifically good for have been dump runs to one particular facility (big pit with low wall) and hauling loads of gravel/soil. A van or a trailer could accomplish much the same, but the truck was cheap and I don’t have anywhere to keep a trailer so it’s a good second vehicle.

Most influential… it might be Castle Adventure on MSDOS or something like Alleyway on the Gameboy simply because they were the first games I remember playing. Or an old Mac program like Factory or Maelstrom or Power Pete with which I wiled away many hours. Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament was the first time I messed around with modding and that computer literacy and problem solving certainly had an impact.

I didn’t go into any computer-related fields, I just really like video games and they’ve been both a solo hobby and social catalyst for my entire conscious life. Maybe Super Smash Bros Melee or Star Wars Battlefront 2 or Halo because the early 2000s cemented some of my longest friendships and those were at the forefront.

Disagree, I think being in the pilot seat is important. The immersion of control amplifies the experience.

It’d be a lot nicer if Alabama wasn’t dragging it down.

Neither, but I suspect you know your argument is in bad faith.

It’s better to protect some people than none, and if that means balkanizing the US then that sucks for the blue islands in the Bible Belt but we are in crisis and that means triage.

Eggs and omelettes.

I wish mutton and goat were more available near me. Lamb can be had but I want bigger cuts for stew or curry.

What comic and no it doesn’t. And reading through your exchange with the other guy it’s clear we have very different ideas about the nature of self-identity. I don’t think of my body as necessary for “me” to exist, I am my thoughts and memory rather than my neurons and chemistry. If that information can be copied and transmitted then there will be a “me” that continues from a new location.

You’re not a continuous consciousness anyway. Sleep is a thing.

I kinda wish SOMA hit for me but I was already well-aware of the “teleportation problem” and have an established position, so instead I was frustrated at the slow pace of much of the game and annoyed that the protagonist didn’t understand. It felt like “Bioshock at home”.

It’s not a real fish tale if people are measuring in standard units instead of “c-hairs” or “gnat bollocks” anyway.

Oceans: We know the basic mechanics of currents, tides, chemistry, where all that water came from in the first place, and while there are a few known-unknowns it doesn’t seem like a paradigm-shifting discovery is likely. They mystery is mostly because it’s huge and we just can’t look through it very well, and that there’s too many physical inputs to track them all so models are abstractions by necessity.

The same goes for most of your list (I will not speak to prime numbers, I am an Earth Sciences guy and bad at higher math) in that we may not have a perfect map but we know the shape of it and where the probable gaps in understanding are. So the “why” is questions like “why do waves happen” or “why does the sun look yellow” or “why do we have embryonic ‘gills’” and we have pretty good answers you can drill pretty deep into.

Pushing at the edges of physics is, I think, where the situation is flipped. We have very good models for the behavior of light but questions like “why is there a limit to the speed of information and why does light go that fast” and “why does it behave as a wave and also a mass-less particle” don’t seem to have satisfying answers or even a means to be answered. Admittedly physics beyond its applications to organic chemistry is outside my education (again, math) but I try to keep up.

They should be marched into the sea.