Definitely the Internet’s superior source ofl Star Trek memes.

Not really. I have some old friends that are still pretty active on it, but I only check in every few months to see what they’re up to. I usually have to go directly to their profile because my main timeline hardly has anything I actually follow in it anymore. I fell off using it regularly back when they broke the chronology of the timeline, but now it’s just so much worse. There’s almost nothing in my feed that I actually want to see anymore, it’s all ads and bullshit posts injected by some algorithm.

Great Britain is the big island of the UK which contains England, Scotland, and Wales. The United Kingdom is Great Britain plus the six counties of Northern Ireland, The Isle of Man, and (I think) some of the islands in the English Channel.

A Briton is a person from Britain.

IDK, man. Canada be weird sometimes.

Yes, it’s its own country.

Canada, along with Australia and a bunch of other former colonies, belong to what’s known as the Commonwealth, of which the British monarch is the head. It’s basically an association of countries that used to be ruled by Britain, but Britain no longer has a say in their laws or how they’re governed.

Australia didn’t have a revolution. Australian independence was a long process that lasted from 1901 to 1986. You may want to check the “The steps to full sovereignty” section of the “History of Australia” wikipedia article.

No, Britain is not all the same country. As previously stated, the island of the Britain is England, Scotland, and Wales, which are separate countries, but members of the United Kingdom, and are governed by the UK Parliament. The six Irish counties that make up Northern Ireland is still part of the UK. The rest of the Ireland, known as The Republic of Ireland, is very much not part of the UK. They did have a revolution, and won independence in 1922.

This needs a line going up the Appalachians for the “You-uns” belt.

The frustrating thing is that Trump didn’t even get more votes this election than he did last election. There wasn’t a bunch of new Trump voters that came out of the woodwork and turned the tide. He was absolutely beatable. He only won because 15 million of the people who voted for Biden last election just didn’t bother this time.

My knee pain is associated with arthritis, unfortunately. I wish stretching helped. I’m even a couple years younger than OP, but when I walk up stairs it sounds like I’m crinkling two big balls of cellophane.

I could still do without the knee pain though.

In my state (Colorado) early voting works exactly like regular voting, just, you know, earlier. Registered voters get their ballots automatically sent to them in the mail. You can return your ballot by mail, drop it off at an official drop box, drop it off at a voting location, or you can show up at one of the early voting locations in your county and vote in person the traditional way if you prefer that. Right now in my county there are six locations where you can do in-person early voting. There will be orders of magnitude more in-person voting locations open on the day of the election, but I think most people choose return their ballots by mail or drop box.

Every voting/counting location is staffed with a bipartisan team of election judges, and election observers. I believe the locations are run by paid county officials, but largely staffed by volunteers who have completed a training program. I’ve never heard of there being a shortage of volunteers

The voting drop boxes are big reinforced steel boxes which are securely anchored into concrete. You would need some seriously heavy duty cutting tools to get one open without the key. They are placed in front of city offices like City Hall, the Department of Motor Vehicles, or the city library. They’re usually in open high traffic areas, and are under 24/7 video surveillance. I believe they’re also emptied multiple times per day. I wouldn’t say they’re impossible to tamper with, but it would be extremely difficult to do so and get away with it. To my knowledge, so far nobody has tried. I’m not actually sure what it would really accomplish. I guess you could destroy ballots, but stuffing one with counterfeit ballots would probably be caught almost immediately.

There’s a pretty robust system in place to track who has cast a ballot, how, when, and where. If multiple ballots show up in the name of the same voter, that gets automatically flagged and triggers a fraud investigation. Also there’s signature verification system. Every ballot that’s returned by mail or drop box must be returned in its security envelope, which has the name of the voter and several unique QR and bar codes containing information tying that envelope to that specific voter. This envelope must be signed by the voter for the ballot to be counted. If the signature on the security envelope doesn’t match the signature on file, the ballot gets flagged for investigation, and doesn’t get counted until the voter can be contacted to verify it was them casting the ballot and not someone pretending to be them. Voter fraud is really pretty rare here, but it’s taken very seriously, and gets seriously investigated. When it does happen it’s usually someone trying to cast the ballot of a deceased spouse, or family member, and even that usually gets caught.

There are a lot of safeguards and redundancies in place here that make getting away with voter fraud extremely difficult, but lot of the reason why our system works as well as it does is that people genuinely care about their votes being fairly counted and so are willing to staff and fund the offices who investigate voting irregularities. Our voting system is considered kind of the gold standard for the United States, and I’m lucky to live in a place that has that. Voting systems in other parts of the US are unfortunately not run with the same vigilance or sense of equity.

I don’t know if they officially count as grindhouse, but when I was a kid I loved a ton of the B-grade action movies that the Cannon Film Group put out in the 1980s. American Ninja, Delta Force, Cobra, Bloodsport, the Death Wish movies, Enter the Ninja, Revenge of the Ninja, etc. And, of course, the greatest ninja movie ever made:

Ninja III: The Domination.

Just gonna leave this here.

Maybe you need something like a motorized tie rack.

“Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power.” - Benito Mussolini

Hitchhiker’s guide to the Galaxy. Both the books and the radio shows.

That’s just Melanie Scrofano.

The correct answer is chile verde and cheddar cheese. I don’t care if you need to eat it with a fork, it’s what happiness tastes like.

Creating a need is not the same as creating a job.

You do have the benefit of being right though.

The word octopus is a classical Greek word that comes to English via Latin. The Greek plural is octopodes, the Latin plural is octopi. But we don’t speak Latin or classical Greek. We speak English. Because octopus is the English word for octopus it follows the English rules for pluralization, which is to add “s” or “es” to the end of the word. Cases can be made why octopi and octopodes could be technically correct, but for English speakers octopuses is the most correct.

Usually breading meat starts with dipping the meat into an egg wash before you dip it in the bread crumbs, so the yellow probably comes from egg yolk.

Rom-coms are aspirational fantasies. They’re modern-day fairy tales of getting swept off your feet by a handsome prince and living happily ever after, never wanting for anything ever again. Material comfort is always a factor in these stories. If it’s not overt, as in Pride and Prejudice where the main character betters their station by ending up with the mega-rich guy who seemed like a dick but turned out to have a heart of gold, then it has to be implied by the setting and the lifestyles of the characters. If the material wealth of the love interest isn’t going to be a factor in the story then it has to be demonstrated that those financial needs are met in some other way.

You’re probably never going to see a rom-com where the main character gets their one true love, but being with them condemns them to a life of struggle and poverty. No matter how you try to spin it so it’s ok because at least they have each other, that would never be a truly satisfying ending in this type of movie. Material needs to be taken care of too. Even in movies like Overboard where the whole point of the movie is Goldie Hawn learning to be a human being by struggling through a working class lifestyle, they still have to end up rich at the end for the story to feel fully resolved.

It’s polite to pretend that money doesn’t matter, and a lot of rom-coms try to down-play it, but it does. It does matter. And it always shows up in one way or another.

I don’t know that I’d consider myself an audiophile, but I am a musician. I run a pair of powered studio monitors out of the back of a Focusrite Scarlett usb audio interface for recording, and it’s way better than any computer speakers I’ve ever owned in terms of sound quality and fidelity. Of course, I’m also not trying to have a dance club setup that’s going to rattle the windows on my nextdoor neighbor’s house with super-ultra-mega bass, but it’s an avenue to consider.