As far as swords go, the gladius is still the goat.

Ugly people are still have always been making it, pop acts have just make a pretty person pretend to sing it it sells better.

41 miles as the crow flies, 81 miles by car for me.

Pretty much everyone post-Stalin fumbled the bag. The fact that the USSR lasted as long as it did once the leadership was essentially asleep at the wheel is a testament to how robust its foundations were.

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Frankly, George Orwell is part of the problem. Aside from a brief stint during the Spanish Civil War where he supported the CNT-FAI, he spent the overwhelming majority of his life supporting the British Empire and relentlessly hating Communists (and other socialists and members of minority groups) of all stripes, to the point where even the British government told him to chill the fuck out because they were allied with the Soviets. His books aren’t immensely popular in extremely right wing countries because they have a left wing critique of government overreach, they’re popular because they are anti-government in exactly the same vague and malleable way that all populist right wingers are.

The whole Western world is at this point, it’s so depressing. Even when the left seems to win democratically people like Macron nakedly abuse their authority and choose to caucus with the fascists over the social democrats.

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One of my favorite places to eat is Alberto’s, that doesn’t make it good.

I remember subscribing to YouTube Red when it first came out (and had a reasonable price), literally the first video I watched after subbing included an ad for YouTube Red in it. I was so fucking pissed lmao, thank goodness for SponsorBlock.

George fumbled the ball hard with the prequels and its never quite been picked back up since. In the 90s, the original cast was all the perfect age to reprise their roles with something like an adaptation of the Thrawn trilogy. It would have been such a fucking slam dunk but instead we got the Prequels and Star Wars hasn’t had a good movie since 1983.

Killing Snoke was the right move. Nobody needed a lame Palpatine ripoff, focusing the story on the characters that actually matter (Rey/Kylo) was the right decision. The problem was that the third movie needed to build on this idea, and on the other major idea that TLJ introduced (that the war was started by weapons manufacturers for profit), not completely throw them out the window and start over from scratch.

Tons of the problems of modern day matchmaking could be solved by this, but if players are running their own servers then they can just have their server give them the items they want, which means no more premium currency purchases for R$.

I don’t have a washing machine so I end up using an overpriced laundromat (or visiting my parents lmao), but ever since I saw a tiktok of a tiny Japanese machine that was both a washer and a dryer one of those been at the top of my wish list. I don’t even care if it can only wash one or two sets of clothes at a time, that’s all I need.

UPDATE: A man in black arrived at my house after I posted an ad in the paper about finding the lost ring. He wasn’t much for conversation, but he seemed quite pleased to get the ring back.

I think you could be right, but it depends on the details Nintendo comes out with. I remember people were saying that they thought certain Palworld monsters had been ripped from the Pokemon games and recolored - if Nintendo can demonstrate that, then that’s a slam dunk for them.

But if it’s just creature designs and collecting them, then I just don’t think that “a cute monkey with green fur” is a novel enough concept to be defensible against someone else doing something similar.

Luckily, we’ll always have Psy.

Your characters walk into a magic shop, but instead of buying magic items the shopkeeper offers to sell them scrolls of ownership. “There are infinite number of these scrolls,” he explains, “but they all use a decentralized mechanism to determine ownership!”

“Okay, I’ll buy one. Now where’s my +1 sword?” The fighter asks.

“The scrolls say that you own it” the shopkeeper unhelpfully reiterates. “And every other scroll will be updated to agree that you own it.”

I like this because then you can say that a non-worthy person can wield the hammer, if they’re stronger than Odin and can beat the enchantment. Magneto is probably on that level.

The trope probably goes back further than that, but yes.