The Orville has literally some of the worst acting I’ve ever seen put onto film, and Seth’s girlfriends were rarely bringing up the average. Seriously, it’s like the half the cast was there specifically to make Travis Mayweather seem like an Emmy-winning tour-de-force.

The fact that it was so damn earnest and had a some good slush-pile scripts from Star Trek saved it overall, but nobody was watching The Orville for the acting, though Penney Jerald, Peter Macon, and Adrianne Palicki handled the material well.

Bill Belichick origin story.

I have an ortho I made, and I just couldn’t get used to it. I’ve never had any keyboard-related RSI, and my “spider dance” typing is very much a hand-eye coordination task, so… ehhh. No neuroplasticity for it.

I don’t know of anything marketed as such, though some ortholinear POS terminals can be easily repurposed into big keyboards. The ortho users tend to be very interested in ergonomics, and one of the guiding principles there is minimizing hand movement (sometimes I personally think this goes a bit far; it seems to me that if it’s good to move the rest of your body from time to time, it’s good to move your arms and hands too). Most of them are quite small. The biggest size I’ve seen regularly is 75 keys in a 15x5 grid. Of course, ortho/ergo is also a very DIY-friendly space, so sometimes you see… outliers. LOL.

I’m sure Mister King is problematic in many ways, but for a Southern corporate lawyer from the early 1900s, he’s pretty boring to judge from a quick internet search.

Mine is something called a “Mobile Mug”. It’s a hollow plastic cup (polypropylene appparently) with a rubber friction-fit bottom. I’m just barely old enough that as a young law student, mugs of brewed coffee were still the most common legal stimulant for 1L’s in the library. I lost the lid years ago, but in honor of getting back to my DS9 re-watch mixed with new-watch, I dug it out for some French press rocket fuel.

Then I promptly forgot it was on the table and poured the coffee into a random Starbucks-knockoff plastic to-go cup.

Yeah, that asshole is nobody’s favorite.

I actually kind of like that Apple has become a boring and iterative company for the most part. I just use the same glass and metal rectangle until a few months after my upgrade eligibility on my work plan (because I always forget when it is), then I get whichever glass and metal rectangle is cheap now. I routinely forget which iPhone I use, and my life is no worse because of it.

Okay, I just looked it up. It’s a 13, and I did remember, but I was not at all confident.

Yes. The “Ginger”/“It” hype was off the charts. People were legitimately wondering if it was going to be some sort of jet pack or something.

Confirmed. The Mickey Bot is canon!

If 1960s Charles Schulz had ever heard of tacos, this is pretty much the exact strip he would have done.

At my kid’s elementary school, they just have a charging rack full of cheap Chromebooks and the kids check one out in the morning and put it back in the afternoon. The middle schoolers get to take them home.

Can somebody please explain to me how Jennifer Hetrick was never cast as a one-episode Seinfeld girlfriend?

This discusses the pontoons and the partyboat or “pleasure boat” as it’s referred to in the article. They can be very stable, but they need to be pretty wide and as they saw in the video, you still want the boat to ride pretty low in relation to the size of pontoons you use.

A daggerboard is a type of centerboard that can be pulled up through a slot in the hull. Centerboards are mostly used in sailboats, but the reason they’re needed is that in terms of forces acting a boat, sailing makes it top-heavy as fuck. This benchy is naturally top-heavy, so having a fin sticking down in to water helps, and having a weight on the end of it helps even more.

Ultimately, I imagine they ran across most of these concepts in preparing the video, but it wasn’t as fun for their intended audience as a silly low-stakes 3D Printing YOLO meme, and TBF the 3D printing seems to have come off very well.

Of course the Southerner headin’ out to the lake thinks of pontoons like a partyboat instead of a daggerboard or other weighted keel. LOL. This tracks with my life experience.

So this claim seems well sourced, but I had to look it up because my bullshit detector always perks up when Sparta is discussed.

The surviving written sources are limited and largely from a non-Spartan viewpoint. Anton Powell wrote that to say the written sources are “‘not without problems’… as an understatement would be hard to beat”.

By Roman times, when a more organized and centralized polity was creating a pan-Mediterranean culture that had a lot to do with which works ended up preserved, Sparta was pretty much a theme park shell of its former self, and its former self is probably not so amazing anyway. In particular, their unusually thorough and unbalanced slave economy is overlooked when lionizing them, and their military record is rather underwhelming, possibly due to the incredible inefficiencies, even by ancient Greek standards, of said slave economy.

Psycholinguisitics understands this effect. The “wrong” word is increasing cognitive load and slowing down the listener’s comprehension. The exact same thing happens when pronoun use is unclear and a person has to parse the most likely referent from context.

Language, especially English, is not computer code but leveraging the existing “libraries” of meaning and declaring variables carefully is usually very useful.

Not food safe.