Schadrach

Was going to be my second pick after the considerably more niche VR.5. Which involved the MC entering the minds of people via modem because it was 90s scifi about virtual reality. It also tended to be trippy as hell in a way that is just amazing. Also basically impossible to find without sailing the seven seas, and not easy even then.

Was going to throw Kindred: The Embraced in as a third choice. Also considerably more obscure than Heroes, it was basically a White Wolf Vampire: The Masquerade TV series.

To quote Marilyn Manson:

"If you die when there’s no one watching,

then your ratings drop and you’re forgotten.

But if they kill you on their TV,

You’re a martyr and a Lamb Of God. "

Now lie detectors don’t work at all…

Meh, they do work. They just measure stress response, not truthfulness. The idea being that you’ll have a heightened stress response to a question you are lying about the answer to, which may or may not be accurate depending on individual and situation.

Breath analyzers aren’t exactly accurate. There’s a bunch of things that can give them false positives, they often aren’t properly calibrated, and the science behind them is kinda shaky. They got challenged often enough in certain states that in at least one state if an officer has you breathe in a machine and that machine produces a number higher than the legal BAC limit, that’s proof of DUI regardless of what the machine may or may not do to result in that number.

That and their cops are paranoid as fuck and would rather overspend than risk getting a scratch.

Police can get decommissioned military equipment on the cheap, so long as they can basically write a grant proposal justifying why they want it.

I was thinking more or less the same thing - if you are here illegally it’s probably both cheaper and easier to pay you $1k per person and a free flight back whence you came than to track you down, go through the legal process, and remove you against your will.

3 is best. And also ISO. Most notably because if you have dates in that format, alphabetical.sort and sort by date are the same thing. You can also continue from there to increasing degrees of precision, like 2025-09-01 23:02:35 and that remains true.

…and yet the elevator pitch “Seth McFarlane wants to be Picard” sounds like it would be awful. But it works.

They don’t give a fuck if murderers and armed robbers get away with their shit.

They care if murderers and robbers get away with their shit, they don’t care if murderers and robbers get away with your shit. Important distinction.

It’s not.

When something is marked up and marketed specifically to men, it’s proof how insecure men are.

When something is marked up and marketed specifically to women, then women are victims and we call it the pink tax.

This is in no way new. 20 years ago I used to refer to some job postings as H1Bait because they’d have requirements that were physically impossible (like having 5 years experience with a piece of software <2 years old) specifically so they could claim they couldn’t find anyone qualified (because anyone claiming to be qualified was definitely lying) to justify an H1B for which they would be suddenly way less thorough about checking qualifications.

Guarantee you she was hot relative to local environmental temperatures, especially compared to women with a current latitude below 60.

Cat: Pounces onto pillow at 5am “Wake up, bitch. It’s time for my breakfast. Now I’m going to meow repeatedly into your face until you comply with my demands.”

The solution to that is to make it very clear, from the beginning that you do not negotiate with terrorists but you do acknowledge her/him and return kindness with kindness. There’s a reason my wife’s relationship with our cat involves a lot more being bitten and meowed at until demands are met than mine does.

they very likely didn’t know you were a woman,

I didn’t. I don’t usually check the user profile and comment history of whoever I am responding to to verify their demographics before responding.

It was info I already had (which a reader could glean from my comment),

Could they?

do cocaine (although I’m pretty sure it was speed back then, but I’d still take it).

…in response to a reference to cocaine cola. That doesn’t sound like you were aware cocaine cola was actually a thing, but rather sounds like you were saying people weren’t using cocaine much but were doing speed instead, implicitly suggesting cocaine cola wasn’t a thing, at least not commonly.

You did so in comparison to cocaine, in response to something that only mentioned cocaine in the context of cocaine cola. If you say it wasn’t cocaine but speed back then, how am I supposed to get that you are referencing diet pills and not at all contradicting the whole cocaine cola bit?

But yeah, diet pills were basically just speed back then too. I can’t argue that. Not sure why that’s related to cocaine in cola though. Turns out people do all kinds of drugs, especially when readily available.

Getting high as shit has had an important cultural role in most of the world at one point in time or another. Westerners got away from it post-Christendom but even then it’s been a thing basically everywhere at one point or another, unless nothing psychedelic grows there, and even then there are ways to achieve ecstatic states to roughly similar effect through extreme asceticism - if there’s not something to eat or smoke to get there then your shaman might have to starve and dehydrate himself then be suspended in the air through rods run through his chest, but you can get there either way.

Coca-Cola literally used to contain cocaine. It started life as a patent medicine made from coca leaf and kola nut, and expanded from there. By the 1950s they at least on paper were already cocaine free - they switched to “spent” leaves in 1904 (leaves that already had cocaine extracted and so only had what was left due to inefficiencies in the process) and later switched to extract made by a third party that was invested in being thorough in removing the cocaine since they were selling that for medical use as well so any cocaine in the extract sold to Coca-Cola was a loss in their higher-dollar product.

my SO worked in clinic that wasn’t open on holidays, but offered no holiday pay, so employees had to use the 10 or 14 vaca days they got to cover their 7 holidays, which they couldn’t have worked if they wanted to.

That sucks. I get 9ish holiday days/year (ish because sometimes we work New Years and get the holiday day for it the previous year) and we start at 2 weeks vacation in addition, with it going up with seniority, eventually capping out at 5 weeks. It is use it, sell it or lose it though - new vacation is granted at start of year and expires at end of year.

I say #2, specifically because it can be done mathematically, as opposed to trying to agree on some definition of “fairness” that isn’t completely different for every office and doesn’t have to be wholly redistricted every election as a consequence.

Say, something like least split line. Basically, if you have an even number of seats for a region, draw the shortest length line that splits the region into two regions of equal population. If you have an odd number of seats > 1, then draw the shortest line that splits the region based on number per seat given one side gets the “extra” seat (for example, for 5 seats you’d split so that one side is 2/3 of the other side and give 3 seats to one side and 2 to the other). Repeat the process for each region created by these lines until each region represents one seat. If there are multiple shortest lines, you the one closest to a NS axis. The extra seat always goes to the west side of the line.