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Yes, that is the subversion of expectations that makes this a joke.

The Hunger Games owes everything to Stephen King. They basically just took The Long Walk novel and glittered/mashed it up with The Running Man movie. Neither of those took place during or after any apocalypse. They were each just set in either the now, or the very near future, in an America that has gone fully corrupt as a result of being morally, politically, and economically bankrupt. King was (and always has) written very local and topical stories set in what is literally his here and now. When he lived in Maine, he wrote Maine stories. When he moved to Florida, he wrote Duma Key. So, it’s no surprise that a YA story as derivative as The Hunger Games would have the same blind spot for Global events as the inspirational works.

But, also if we were really going to descend into an apocalypse (or a dictatorship), news of the broader globe would be one of the first casualties. People inside most apocalypse (and fascist dystopian) stories don’t usually have a lot of knowledge about the “outside” world. If they do, it’s usually an unreliable narrative.

The cardinal directions are north, east, south, and west, as on a map. They are not left, right, up, and down because the cardinal directions are not relative to the observer. The problem of differentiating D-Pad, Stick, shoulder, trigger, etc. can be frustrating too (especially when they are shown on screen as icons with confusingly minor differences instead of text), but that is another matter entirely.

Those things fucking suck when you can get them to work and they are downright dangerous otherwise.

I felt like Rachel Brosnahan’s performance as Lois Lane was either inspired by or an homage to Margot Kidder. They both seem to effortlessly balance smart, funny, feminine, and powerful in an apparently effortless way. Both have maad rizz, no cap.

My social anxiety combined with an ability to sing that is overshadowed by my ability to hear when people sing off key is exactly why I sing karaoke. I belt out the songs I know I can sing (at least a little) and songs that I love because it beats the thrill of any roller coaster around. My eyes may be closed. My hands might be shaking so bad I can barely hold the mic. But… I don’t know. Karaoke isn’t about being good. It’s not about talent. It’s not about looking good for the gram. It’s about being in the moment and not letting all of that bullshit silence the song in your heart. Fucking let it all out. It’s like jumping out of a plane BECAUSE you have a fear of heights instead of doing it in spite of that fear.

This whole post is a lie to manipulate people into engaging with an astroturfing bot.

King has almost always written his stories in the immediate present. There are a few exceptions, but they are intentional and critical to the plot. In all the others, it is fully in keeping with his style to update cultural references to set the story in the recent past, the now, or the very near future. He is a contemporary writer of contemporary stories, that is fundamentally the reason. King also seems to feel no loyalty to preserving his past works. He is alive. His stories are more about the lives of the characters than fashion or pop culture. I’m not always a fan of his revisions either (The Gunslinger being a good example), but it’s part of the total package of his writing philosophy.

At that scale meters and miles are pretty close with respect to orders of magnitude, which is why practically everyone talks about these scales in AUs regardless of what units they actually used to do the science.

It’s more than simply unfair. It’s theft, wage theft, plain and simple.

A CSV is just a long string of text with a few control characters tossed in for end lines. There are practically no rules enforced by the file type itself. You can dump that unsanitized and poorly awk’d data into whatever awful mess you want. Nobody’s stopping you. Sure, excel will force it’s CSV formatting rules on you when you export like a child’s training wheels. But that’s not relevant here.

You want mpd to server and play the music, connected with a web front end (there are a few to choose from) accessible on the private store wifi. You should probably serve this frontend only to a certain machine on the network (like the managers computer in the back) and lock everything else out. The last time I ripped CDs on Linux I used whipper, which I believe was the successor to morituri. This is all only legal if the CDs they have already included the licensing fees to play them publicly or are themselves freely licensed. There are sources of freely licensed music out there that you can play publicly without paying.

Paging Cathode Ray Dude

Isn’t this basically in line with the plot of the prequels anyway?

Pie is just a sweet quiche with fewer eggs.

First, 400 pounds is a pretty beefy fridge, most basic units are a lot lighter. 400 pounds is coincidentally the top end of the average weight search AI gave me too, the lower end being 200 pounds. I’ve moved a few fridges over the decades, they’d have been hard pressed to get a 400 pounder wedged in there like that.

Second, a fridge is mostly empty space. The weight is certainly not distributed throughout. If they put the heavy end (usually where the compressor is) hanging out the back, they probably wouldn’t have made it very far anyway before the thing ejected itself. They are primarily difficult to move because they are bulky and lack safe handholds for lifting.

Third, police modifications adding weight would necessarily require modifications improving the suspension. It would be pretty bad design if putting three 200+ adults in the rear of a police wagon were enough to make the vehicle unsafe.

This is all a pretty dumb thing to argue about. After all, I agree that the cop in this case was an idiot. That’s mostly because storing a fridge on its side is a dumb move, but also because I do actually believe that storing it as we see in the photo would be bad for the car too. Fridges have lots of sharp edges, plenty of opportunity to destroy the interior, shatter a window, or cause an accident. I just don’t think weight or its distribution is the problem.

More like big squirrels with civilization.

It is amazing foundational science fiction story. Once you’ve read it, you’ll see many of its ideas and themes in many other great works of science fiction literature. Perhaps the most recognizable is as the inspiration for the Ewoks from Star Wars. (In my personal opinion inspiration is a bit of a stretch, Ewoks are pretty much a direct copy.)

I use the word pardon because there are lots of local Spanish speakers, tourist/seasonal French Canadian speakers, and occasionally tourists from farther abroad around and I’d rather be understood than pretend everyone speaks English. When speaking to strangers, like when I’m asking forgiveness for being an inconvience to them or trying to politely get someone’s attention, preferring loan words that really don’t need translation in order to be understood just seems like good citizenship and also more kind.