score updates to -$500

(Whoops, I got him mixed up with Brad Pitt, apparently. I guess you could say he was a figment of my imagination.)

What is Fight Club?

Well, less so now after seeing that!

Eh, you will survive.

The McDonald’s in Rome (specifically, the one near the Spanish Steps) is pretty darn nice, NGL. I got a gelato there once, which is better than anything I ever got at an American McDonalds.

(Ironically for the grandparent commenter’s point, I visited two McDonald’s on that trip specifically to see what might be different about them in other countries. The other one was in the Amsterdam airport during my layover, whereupon I got a McKrocket. It was suitably weird.)

I’m also a software engineer and am still interested in building my own PCs, but I like the GabeCube anyway because you literally cannot build a PC that small, not even with mini-ITX.

I kinda feel like I’d want a Strix Halo (Ryzen AI MAX+ 395) in that form factor even more, though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRJILK3NxSM&t=106

The dream of truly Griswoldian Christmas lights slips ever further from our grasp. Sure, we can blind the neighbors more easily than ever, but what’s the fun of that if you can’t take down the whole power grid along with it? 😞

Once I started going to Dragon Con (Labor Day weekend), September also started feeling like Halloween season to me.

(It probably doesn’t help that more folks in my neighborhood put up decorations for Halloween than they do for Christmas, and start pretty early with them.)

For that reason, my Halloween decorations came down promptly on Nov 1. Maybe I should start decorating for Thanksgiving…

Right, that’s what I said: if Z in the top image were pointing the opposite direction (i.e. if it followed the right hand rule), it would be the same as the bottom image. Rotation is irrelevant; only handedness matters.

Right handed means that when you curl the fingers on your right hand from +X towards +Y, your thumb points towards +Z.

Z pointing in the other direction is the same as the bottom image, just rotated.

Yep, literally crazy.

On the other hand, a lot of screenies do poorly at formal English, like grammar, spelling and word choice, because much of their learning is casual.

Gotta read actual books, not just listen to movie/game dialogue. (Short-form news articles and textual social media probably don’t cut it either, just because news is written to be understood even by people with poor reading skills and social media discussions are too casual.)

I’ve heard that one time – in a show in Albuquerque, no less – when he got to the “anyway, where was I? Kinda lost my train of thought” part, he actually started over again from the beginning!

I bet it did, but you just didn’t know it. It was always a thing you had to ask for, and they’d give it to you from behind the counter.

They’ve still managed to chip away at it a little. It used to be that you could pick a regular hot dog or a polish sausage for the same price, but the latter is gone now. They also used the pandemic as an excuse to get rid of the sauerkraut, and now I think even the onions are gone.

Also during the pandemic, the local Costco Business Center just demolished their cafe entirely.

That’s nothing; I cut mine in the Age of Aquarius!

I’ve been playing Hogwarts Legacy¹, and one nice thing about it is the way it separates out gear items from “appearances.” Each piece of gear comes with its default appearance, but also unlocks access to it permanently, so you can choose any appearances you’ve unlocked without having to wear or even keep the items that granted them.

¹ don’t judge; I didn’t buy it – it came with Amazon Prime²

² okay, that you can judge me for