The owner shut down his McDonald’s for the afternoon for this. Trump declined to wash his hands, dropped a batch of fries, and “served” a few “customers” through the drive through window. So yeah, basically a photo shoot.

My sister works in real estate, and she was asked by a Realtor she works with what the law was on disclosure for a house the seller said was haunted. In most US states, it’s legally required to disclose any material fact about known issues with the property, though how it’s worded and what that includes varies from state to state. She had to look it up, and in North Carolina, haunted is not a required disclosure, though it is in some states. I joked that haunting should count as an “immaterial” fact.

She was laughing about the whole thing until she went by the house herself to make sure everything was ready for the photographer. She heard a noise in the basement and checked. There was an old black man dusting the shelves. She mentioned she wasn’t expecting anyone to be there. He was very polite and explained that he took care of the house, and not to worry, he’d stay out of the way. She went upstairs to let in the photographer. When she went back in the basement there was no sign of the man, even though the only way out was past her. She looked around the whole house for him before she locked up but he was gone. She asked the seller about it, who casually explained that that was just old Terrence, who had taken care of the property for her grandmother, and had died many years ago. Since then, he just sort of appeared around the house occasionally, “tidying up.” (I’m writing this from memory, so some details are probably wrong, especially the name, but it’s the gist of story as she told it.)

They did not mention any of this to the buyer, and don’t know if they ever experienced anything as they never contacted them about it.

Yes, hallucination is the now standard term for this, but it’s a complete misnomer. A hallucination is when something that does not actually exist is perceived as if it were real. LLMs do not perceive, and therefor can’t hallucinate. I know, the word is stuck now and fighting against it is like trying to bail out the tide, but it really annoys me and I refuse to use it. The phenomenon would better be described as a confabulation.

I had guessed it was Sri Lanka since it is also shown just off the coast of India. Then I figured it was more likely Indonesia given it’s surrounded by so many other islands and not that close to India. But yeah, now that I know that the name meant Japan I’m wondering if it’s depiction on the map is a conflagration of accounts of Indonesia and Japan.

Oh yeah, he’s the guy who argued that his ‘honorary deputy’ badge was not a prop, but a ‘real’ police badge when the moderator at his debate told him he couldn’t use props for debating after he pulled it out and waved it around.

Classic Italian mistake.

Yeah, the American West has a huge variety of very distinct biomes. For the purpose of telling a story though, one rocky desert or forested mountain vale or whatever is as good as another, leaving us, the audience, largely unaware and misled. We mostly only notice when they do that to areas we’re familiar with.

Reminds me of the movie The Patriot, starring Mel Gibson. There’s a scene where he is at his home in what is clearly the upcountry of South Carolina not too far from the Appalachians and he takes a walk down his garden path to visit his wife’s grave, which is located in the South Carolina lowcountry, by the coast, somehow skipping past over a hundred miles of pine forest that would have been between those areas. If you’re not familiar with those areas, they both just look like areas in the American Southeast, but if you are familiar, it’s very jarring.

They’re only allowed to use one hand, so the competitors always have their off hand tucked in or hooked onto their clothes so that arm can be relaxed and ignored.

8 year old me would have envied this collection. 40 year old me just appreciates that he has a passion for which he still has a child-like sense of wonder.

I would say it’s symbiotic to the continued survival and propegation of their genes, but not to their well-being as individuals.

I assume that if they answer with a simple number you can point out they are being reductionist too, because the temperature differs measurably between the floor and ceiling, and that’s not even accounting for any air currents. Most of the time it is reasonable to reduce that down to a single temperature.

The issue with having mandatory useless comments is that any actually useful comments get lost in the noise.

It’s not meant to be a stereotype applied to all men, just the a thing that some men do. It happens when a man assumes, perhaps subconsciously, that the woman he is speaking to is his intellectual inferior and would surely benefit from his opinion on whatever topic without any regard to her possible expertise on the topic, or even his own lack thereof. I’ve rarely witnessed it myself, but know women who have had to put up with it. Stereotypeing all men as “manslainers” would be rude, but mocking the men who actually behave that way is cool with me.

Oh yeah, rub my face in those gorgeous technicalities. You want to mock my logical fallacy? Do it. Point out my fallacy and laugh; I can take it.

If the politicians and bureaucrats that Trump and friends pushed out are like murky swamp water, then the ones he brought in are like raw sewage, so I always said that he only wanted to “drain the swamp” so he’d have room to pump in said raw sewage.

Took me a minute, but it’s comparing the story to observed hermit crab behavior.

I would argue that doesn’t qualify as trivial.

Fine, I’ll paraphrase it for you then. “Towels are really useful when you are traveling the galaxy LOL.”

“A towel, [The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy] says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.” ― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

As a Millennial, I’m now too old to tell the difference.