At least as far as US law is concerned, a federally hosted and administrated social media platform gets interesting with America’s unusually strong free speech laws, since there’s content which is legal but unethical which they likely would not be allowed to block or moderate, such as bullying, hate speech, misinformation, etc. but also illegal content would be immediately moderated away, which might include content that falls into legal grey areas or ethical but technically illegal content, like someone copy/pasting the contents of a paywalled article, or discussing any kind of DRM or digital security bypass

Honestly I think there’s good reason for governments to host a Mastodon instance for their representatives to use for communications, but inviting the public to use it might get weird for sure

Too big of a map ultimately becomes a deal breaker for me because it will inevitably have too much empty space and get too boring and time consuming to play through.

Smaller more refined maps are better than larger maps where the team can’t sufficiently justify every single corner and make sure every inch truly is fully designed and makes sense.

This is particularly American sensibility about not drinking alcohol casually around children

Shockingly this will vary by family. Some families take their kids bar hopping while they drink to excess, some drink casually and not in excess, and some are sober around their kids, and some remain sober all the time. My wife grew up hanging out in bars with her parents biker friends and their kids. She learned to watch some of them and save the good homemade wine when someone was about to topple. I grew up with parents who would have a single drink with dinner one to two times a week and would avoid getting drunk (at least that I know of).

Personally, as a parent and living in an area with a strong alcohol culture and with alcoholic family members, I drink very rarely (the alcoholic family members really kill my desire to drink), and when I do I make sure we have more than enough adults available to parent and drive if needed. I also am very much a lightweight so there is no drinking without getting noticeably giggly and sloppy. My wife feels and acts similarly but is not a lightweight and can realistically drink one drink and be visibly unaffected.

I honestly think the OP is less about the presence of alcohol around children but more just calling out a wine mom as such

My wife’s family will 100% get drunk around their kids, and drunk drive with the kids in the car. Seeing that first hand makes us really reluctant to drink at all.

I’ve only seen the ocean when visiting family in LA, so I do genuinely wonder if the waves are especially loud and violent there compared to, say the Gulf of Mexico or the US East Coast. But importantly, that is the exact same conditions Hollywood people would be used to too, so they should be very aware of how loud the ocean is (I’d say its comparable to cruising altitude in a standard commercial passenger aircraft)

Hyce, who works at the Colorado Railroad Museum in Golden (which is a heritage railroad with restored steam locomotives) got to drive on of them while visiting family in Bosnia

There are uncommon instances of revenue freight being hauled by steam such as during a recent dispute between different agencies in Germany or the Everett railroad in Pennsylvania apparently does have some revenue service despite primarily being a tourist railroad and has on occasion used steam to switch out it’s revenue customers

Or for a similar but entirely different example, the Iowa Traction Railroad uses almost exclusively century old electric locomotives all built in the 1910s and 1920s. You can see here one of their electric locomotives posing with a much newer locomotive:

Don’t forget the universally established upward direction so all ships are magically oriented exactly the same when they meet

At beaches too. Hollywood is based so close to the beach they should know how hard it is to hold a conversation at a normal tone of voice near the ocean

I read an interesting article about historical armor fights. Basically some researchers got special forces members to wear replica historical armor and simulate battle as described in various surviving epics and identified the armor to be surprisingly effective

Duels did happen from time to time in the 19th century. For example, California Senator David Broderick in 1859 became the only US Senator to die in a duel, and there’s a difficult to validate tale of two French men in 1808 holding a gun duel in hot air balloons!

Actually I have a history book about the history of ballooning called Aeronauts that I found at a thrift store. If I remember I’ll see what that has to say about this tale because it does call out other largely fabricated tales as such

But like most fictions, the fiction of Wild West duels contains some kernels of truth and certainly makes for great drama

Honestly the original effects also had me going:

So I suppose it’s not that much worse with the ring

Edit: meant to reply one comment up. Too late now

There’s a Christmas movie called Holiday in Handcuffs where a woman abducts a dude to play her boyfriend so her family gets off of her back, and naturally they actually fall in love by the end but also HOLY SHIT HOW IS THAT A THING

Luke Skywalker taking a lucky shot at a vulnerability that a team of engineers and military men, all of which were high-level Imperial defectors, with support from many planets of what is the Star Wars alternative of Western Europe and North America, had found by analyzing space station’s stolen blueprints, using computers and what not, is realistic.

I’m guessing you haven’t seen Rogue One. The architect of the death star was sympathetic to the rebellion and deliberately created the vulnerability of the reactor that needs only a single hit with a blaster to blow up the entire megastructure, sent a message to the rebellion explaining said flaw and instructing them to aquire the designs of the death star to identify where the reactor is so that they can exploit the flaw.

Having been involved in large (software) projects this seems quite plausible that someone near the top could intentionally leave a backdoor in there and have it go unnoticed into live testing, especially with the mix of disciplines needed in constructing such a megastructure

Also I’ve heard that the water that first comes out of those sprinklers is RANK from having sat in the pipes for years

Hey now, War Games had pretty dang realistic hacking!

Worst was some show my MIL was watching. A team of super savants is trying to stop an ICBM from nuking Los Angelas, and not only was it completely not understanding orbital dynamics but they didn’t even seem to follow any kind of rudimentary in-universe laws of physics (usually shows and movies just treat spaceships like submarines which at least if it’s consistent it can still make a decent story) as the ICBM was 30 seconds from impact 3 times over a 20 minute period somehow

Over a decade+ that’s not horrendous. I’ve probably spent around $2000 on computers for gaming in that same period. I know people who’ve dropped far more than that in a single day for their hobbies so gaming really is a pretty cheap hobby

Yeah the one saving grace is it’s a very long lifespan compared to all other computing platforms, plus one can actually install an alternative operating system or even hack Windows 11 to install in an unsupported manner, but it still means millions of computers going to the ewaste bin

Probably the easiest way to do an off-site backup for low-double digit terabytes is an external drive in a bank safety deposit box. Remember your home could burn down fall over and sink into a swamp and no amount of parity drives within the home would keep that data safe.

There’s a group called Improv Everywhere that used to do really creative flash mobs like the No Pants Subway ride where they would all claim to have forgotten to put on pants that day, or going into a cafe and lugging 90s desktops in and dialing in, or during the Great Recession they had a suicide jumper on a 2ft high ledge which they dramatically had to talk down.

They once tried to do a “writers against libraries” stunt but it ended up not being funny enough because people kinda went “oh yeah libraries are kinda weird in that they just give out books for free”