My parents just ensured the lock on the door knob had a slit on the outside so you could stick anything in there and rotate to unlock it. Half the time, they just used a long fingernail or the edge of a coin. It didn’t require much effort.

They’d still get mad at me for locking my bedroom door and would threaten to remove the door if I kept locking it, but it took them maybe 10 seconds to open it without tools.

They never followed through on the threat; I kept my bedroom door all throughout my childhood.

I just passed 40 recently and I was aware David Letterman had a gap in his teeth, but I didn’t know people joked about it. So it took me a moment to realize this was targeted at him specifically.

I’ve never even sent a solicited dick pic.

I don’t understand how people can trust other people with naked pictures of themselves. Even long-lasting relationships can fall apart, and that person now has vulnerable photos of you at their disposal.

You can show off photos of yourself, but don’t trust other people with control over them!

Ideally, there shouldn’t be a draft. That’s why we have the Reserves; so we don’t need to enact a draft ever again.

Source: I served for 20 years in the US military. When the 2003 Iraq War kicked off, a bunch of people joined the Reserves to say they were doing their part without actually having to do anything. They were shocked when we sent them to war first.

The active duty military were already running operations at dozens of bases around the globe. We couldn’t just drop everything and go join a war. So we sent the Reserves to set up new bases in the Middle East and started trickling in active duty members as the bases became more established. I didn’t get to Iraq until 2007.

Can I get a different scale? I don’t think my respect and appreciation for kids lies anywhere on this line graph.

Meh, not as good as the original series honestly.

FLCL is a quick, fun six part jaunt I love to revisit.

FLCL is now an 18-episode series. They dropped a season 2 and season 3 in 2018. But personally I don’t feel like they were as good as the original series.

They dropped a season 2 and season 3 only a few months apart in 2018. They’re both 6 episodes long, like the original series.

Project A-ko (the first film) is probably one of my favorite anime films of all time. I saw it for the first time when I was a pre-teen back in the '90s and I’ve re-watched it a ton over the last few decades. Something about a super-powerful girl who can run at mach speeds and wreck machines with her bare hands just appealed to me as a kid. It was very inspiring and I always dreamed of growing up to be as strong as her.

I discovered Ghost in the Shell (the first movie) while I was living in Japan in my late teens and it really resonated with me. I got to watch the TV series, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex as it was releasing in Japan. I’m actually re-watching that whole series now, since they’ve announced a new series coming soon. The new Ghost in the Shell show is animated in the unique style of the original manga, so I’m excited to see if it’ll be faithful to the manga.

I discovered a ton of anime while I was living in Japan in the early 2000s, so I have a bunch of classics I regularly re-watch. Excel Saga is another one. I love how chaotic and over-the-top Excel is. The anime is way different from the manga, but it was made when the manga was only partway complete, so it didn’t really have a direction and chose to be chaotic and disjointed instead. Which really works well.

D•N•A² is another classic I love to re-watch periodically. I dunno why I like that one, but it’s a fun comedy/drama romance story.

Golden Boy was such a ridiculous and perverse show, but it encouraged me to continually seek out knowledge and experience, so I enjoy watching that one over and over again. Too bad the original manga creator is a narcissistic, mysoginistic piece of shit. I enjoy both the show and the manga, but learning about that dude really sours his work. It’s no wonder Golden Boy never got more than a 6-episode OVA; most people can’t stand to work with him.

I was living in Japan when Naruto first released and I followed that show religiously. I remember reading articles about this “hidden gem” in Japan that would never be imported to America because of some issue with the rights being tied up in a handful of studios. I guess they got it worked out though, because by the time I moved back to America, Naruto started showing up everywhere. I never actually finished that whole series (I got about 100 episodes into the original series), but I’ve restarted it a handful of times. I plan to finally finish it soon.

I’m currently on my third re-watch of One Piece. At over 1,000 episodes, it’s a slog every time; I’ve spent months slowly picking away at episodes and I’m going to catch up to the latest stuff soon. I also just re-watched the live action series last night, since I’ve recently learned they’ve started filming for season 2.

Finally, the first anime anything I ever watched was a movie called Puss 'n Boots Travels Around the World, the third in a Toei Animation series of Puss 'n Boots films. I grew up watching it on VHS as a little kid and had no idea it was anime until I sought it out as an adult many years later. I have a lot of love and nostalgia for that film, so I re-watch it a lot.

EDIT: The Toei Animation mascot is actually Puss 'n Boots from these old movies. I dunno why I never pieced that together until I was much older.

Oh, that’s a local volunteer militia. Much different than the organizations at play here. They usually don’t have much to do with the state, except that the state govt can choose to activate them to assist with emergencies; in which case they’ll be compensated by the State for their time.

They’re basically like the Reserves for the state’s National Guard. They fill in as requested, but don’t have much to do but train. I’m pretty sure Trump can’t activate them, as they’re strictly a local militia. Federal government has no authority over them.

The National Guard IS the state guard. That’s it’s official title. Perhaps you’re confusing them for the Reserves, which is a federal militia that’s only activated as needed.

But the president can activate the National Guard as a federal entity under his control.

When they say Trump is calling in the National Guard, he’s not deploying troops to the state; they’re already there. He’s just activating them and “deploying” them wherever he needs them in the state.

The big problem here is that activating means putting them on active duty (same status as federal military troops) and giving them active duty pay and benefits. But Trump and Pete Hegseth are not currently paying them (claiming the pay will come later) and trying to limit their deployed status so they don’t need to pay them full deployment benefits.

It’s like a business ensuring you only work 39 hours a week so they don’t have to give you medical benefits or full-time employment status. If they don’t fix it soon, the National Guard may just join the protestors.

Which may be why Trump is sending in the US Marines too; to keep the National Guard in line. Or he’s throwing a bunch of conflicting groups together to start a civil war so he can jump-start his dictatorship. This is how it always starts; declare martial law, deploy troops to every major city to seize control, then start making changes to laws and citizen’s rights across the books, with no one able to stop him through courts or uprisings.

Source: I’m a retired US Air Force veteran. Spent 20 years in active duty service, the last few years under Trump’s first term. It was an absolute nightmare and we hoped he was gone for good. But here we are again, and he doesn’t have a majority Democrat govt to keep him on a leash this time, so we’re in for a rough ride.

Your definition of anarchy is what they try to sell on Fox News. That’s not what it actually is. Anarchism is actually a very structured system that opposes a ruling class controlling people and grants more freedom to the individuals to govern.

Fox News just takes the most extreme way in which anarchism can go wrong and promotes that as the default state.

Are you sure it wasn’t “queuing?” As in, “I’m queuing up some food to be cooked for our queue of orders.”

We’ve already petitioned Canada about adopting us since Trump was elected, and they responded positively! They consider us their favorite neighbor of all the border states. 🥰

Granted, it was a joke in response to Trump’s tariffs, but still… (Source)

I had this problem learning Norwegian.

• “And” is “og”
• “Or” is “eller”

Everytime I see “og” in a Norwegian sentence, I immediately want to translate as “or.” It keeps tripping me up! “Eller” feels like too many letters to be “or,” so I keep translating it as “and” instead.

That may be a southern France thing. My wife had a similar experience there. She was trying to buy tickets and struggling over the French words. A schoolteacher with a bunch of kids in tow pushed past her, got tickets for her school kids, then turned to my wife and said in English, “Your French is terrible. Maybe you just shouldn’t speak at all.”

My wife was so mortified, she didn’t speak to anyone else the rest of that trip.

I spent two years living in Germany, about a 30-minute drive from the French border.

When my coworkers visited France and spoke English, everyone was rude to them and refused to help them. When my wife and I went to France and attempted to speak French, everyone was super nice and helpful… but would immediately switch to English for us.

We learned that as long as you made an attempt to speak their language, the French were very accommodating. But they’d get offended if you just assumed they spoke English.

My wife actually got frustrated because she wanted to practice her French, but no one would speak French with her. Except for the Germans. She tried to speak German to a guy in Berlin once and he switched to French for her. Turns out, my wife speaks German with a French accent. She was able to successfully complete the conversation in French.

Mel Brooks wanted to make a James Bond movie way back in the '60s and petitioned the franchise to let him direct one. They basically told him hell no. They said it was a British action/adventure drama series and they didn’t want an American comedian director to mess up the formula.

So he said he’d make his own James Bond story instead (with blackjack and hookers!), but leaning on his particular comedy talents that they shunned him for.

He created the TV show Get Smart in 1965, about a bumbling secret agent named Maxwell Smart (Agent 86) who somehow saves the day. He’s accompanied by a brilliant and beautiful partner named Agent 99, who usually saves his ass. She’s in love with Smart, but he’s completely oblivious to it. Together they work for CONTROL, a spy organization who is fighting against the evil spy organization KAOS who wants to rule the world.

The whole series is comedy and highly entertaining. It’s also had three films, the latest being a modern reboot of the character in 2008 starring Steve Carell as Maxwell Smart and Anne Hathaway as Agent 99.

It got a sequel series in 1995, also called Get Smart. In this show, Agent Smart is now the director of CONTROL, alongside his wife, the congresswoman Agent 99. Their bumbling kid Zach (Andy Dick) is their primary agent, going by the monicker Agent 66. It didn’t do very well and only had 7 episodes before it was cancelled. It has really cringe '90s humor. And Andy Dick. So not surprising it didn’t last long.

Interesting trivia: Don Adams starred as Maxwell Smart for the entire series (except the 2008 reboot film, where Steve Carell played the character). The original show inspired the creation of the 1983 cartoon Inspector Gadget. They even got Don Adams to play the voice of Inspector Gadget! So Inspector Gadget is a parody of a parody of James Bond.

If Mel Brooks hadn’t wanted to make a James Bond movie in the '60s, we wouldn’t have Inspector Gadget.

Reddit wasn’t immediately known as the “front page of the Internet.” It took time to build up a reputation and tons of content before it started to get noticed and promoted by search engines.

Lemmy is the same. It’s small now, but with enough content, it will eventually become a reference point like Reddit. Every little bit counts.

Thank you. As a former IT guy, I’ve been trying to keep my family away from Apple products. They’re way overpriced for their limited and locked down functionality compared to everything else out there.

My dad had Parkinson’s late in his life and my sister replaced his Android with an iPhone, specifically so she could give him this fitness tracker. He spent the last few years of his life struggling to figure out a new phone, and we could never get the damn app to work anyway. He fell all the time and it never once reported it.

I spent 20 years in the IT field and getting my computer-illiterate family to consult me before buying computer tech is like pulling teeth. I offer them free consultation and support all the time and they just go out and buy spyware-riddled junk on their own. They only come to me when their stuff is no longer useable.

My sister finally stopped buying iPads… only for her to go and buy Amazon Fire tablets for her kids. I had to go in and lock them down because they were constantly shoving ads into every function of the tablet. Her kids kept trying to buy games because they were constantly being advertised to them. And guess who left their credit card credentials on the tablet?

My apologies, /rant.