Apparently, for being bad at border stuff? The fact that almost half the country (and an inconveniently important half, given the god-damn electoral college) thinks this asshole is the best option to lead the country is truly depressing.

More like battery acid and corn syrup, at least for the regular flavor, and I say that as someone who likes it.

New College has the double whammy of being Florida’s most liberal public college, and also by far its smallest. It didn’t have nearly the cultural insulation to survive DeSantis even as well as The larger schools who have alumni scattered across various levels of business ands government. More’s the pity. New College was something special.

UF for instance slow played everything its imported, uselessly-conservative president Ben Sasse thought he might want to do until he got bored of spending the school’s money on his friends in Washington — as in they literally got jobs with UF but never moved to Gainesville — and finally quit.

It’s okay guys. You can just call it a Tempest 2000 emulator. Don’t feel bad.

Tres comas, indeed.

And plenty MAGA asshole enough to have hired a neo-nazi to set sale pricing.

AKA it’s going to be a big god-damned mess to actually get rid of you, so here’s the lowest-level work we have for your job description. Good luck in your own case and with re-election, asshole.

Honestly, the fact that there were any professional consequences at all is a bit of a relief. Anybody with half a brain and an ounce of empathy could tell he pulled an ego-driven schoolyard-bully move and deserves to be punished, but with nothing “officially official” being done to the girl, it was always going to be hard to turn it into a removal from an elected position.

Also: while I don’t know the selection process for US Navy submarines, my experience with the military is that you can have an opinion about how you want to be posted, but no actual decision-making ability. So I may hope to fly Navy jets, but the Navy can simply say: “fuck you, you’re going to be stationed on a submarine,” and there’s little I could do about it.

You not wrong in general, though with submarines in particular, longstanding policy in the US Navy is that you don’t put people in them who aren’t willing to give it a try, specifically because of those close quarters and limited options in an emergency. I have heard stories of people having a hard time getting other postings once they’re qualified sub-mariners, but having a crew full of resentful balls of anxiety is not worth it to them.

I guess in return, they get a little more money, better food (at least until it runs out), a vague sense of exclusivity, and a more casual culture arising from the close quarters and the actual risk of death being a constant motivator to do your job well.

Something tells me the People’s Liberation Army Navy might take a bit of a firmer approach to postings, but I don’t know for sure.

More Tales to Tremble By is the only one so far I might be eventually talked into thinking is the one, but no epiphany yet. The low angle drawing of the house and the sailor peering over the railing feel familiar (particularly that greenish wash over the sailor one), but they don’t quite match the admittedly 35-40 year-old memory in my head.

The Tales of the Black Freighter vibes in it are pretty cool as well.

I just looked through it and that’s not the one, (art style is too different) but I have to say I love block-print drawings. Hell, seeing all this mid-century spooky artwork has been really fun even if the for-sure right book never pops up.

Thanks!

End stage Fry’s was so weird it could have been a Terry Gilliam movie or something. Vast expanses of mostly empty aisles with the few bits of leftover inventory still there, but interspersed with filled-up cages of AliExpress junk at 10x the AE price or 3x the “get it tomorrow” Amazon price. Then there would be one or two areas where the vendors had gone along with their cockamamie “we’ll sell your shit on consignment!” scam, and a few sad employees trying to avoid making eye contact.

Yet Microcenter endures.

Pocket squares/boutonnieres are pretty much always on the wearer’s left-hand side, so that’s my guess as well.

I see it, and it’s not an absurd guess, but of the suggestions so far, the “Tales to Tremble By” books seem closest. I tried AI first, though not with the entire post as a prompt. Oddly, my initial slimmer prompt got something that’s closer than the full thing, though I’ll leave it to the dear reader whether that says more about AI or me. Thanks for the new approach!

I am glad to see ChatGPT is a little less assertive these days about how confident it is.

Lol, they did a few more, but while fun, nothing comes close to giant magic kaiju polar bear specifically murderizing its rivals before using its F16 to destroy the entire Earth, Scientology style, then body surfing the resulting F16-destroying explosion at warp speed to make it to its asteroid-based hockey arena on time, but making sure to blow up the hockey goal as well.

I will have to take a look, but I tend to think this is not it. I was familiar with Ripley’s as a brand from the newspaper comic, so I think I would have recalled that detail. Still, thanks so much!

I’m not willing to commit, but I can’t dismiss this one out of hand. I will need to track down a copy and see if anything gives me that AHA! moment.

Thanks!

I was really optimistic that the Schwartz books with the original Stephen Gammell illustrations would be it, but it’s just not quiiiite right. It could all be jumbled enough that it’s just me whose wrong, but this feels like one of those times where I think the component parts in my brain are sufficient that the memories will coalesce if and when I see it again.

In a Dark, Dark Room seems to be from something a little later and slimmer. My book was also a good inch and a half thick, maybe pushing 200 pages depending on paper weight.

Ed Gorey specifically got me thinking about this book again, but his style is also not quite right. Thanks for the suggestions, though!

Redacted registrars and contact info at this point just means small-time origins. Most registrars will offer it for free or very cheap.

Poking around reddit, it appears it’s not a scam per se, but the low barrier to entry on both sides means there’s a lot of low-info/low-budget creators on one side, offering gigs that may not be worthwhile and including a lot of people asking for “samples” or tryouts that seem suspiciously like requests for free work. Then on the jobseeker side there are a lot of unskilled newbies just putting their availability out there.

Seems like having a profile is not a bad idea, but each specific opportunity would need to be vetted, and anything that smells fishy probably is.

So, he modded a GBA either to accept control input from modded controllers, or he stuffed a SBC emulator with two USB-C ports into a GBA case.

Pretty cool, and a clever concept to work towards, but hardly revolutionary. I wouldn’t be “drooling” until it was past prototype stage and didn’t look like a it was stuck together with a piece of tape or that a single bump on the train would snap the ports right off those control pads.