The bone claws were a retcon, so since the retcon he’s always had them.

Wolverine’s healing abilities have been all over the map, but I’d wager with modern writing he’d likely be able to regrow his bones just fine. There’s an article on some of his feats here. I’ll mention that his chopped off hand in Age Of Apocalypse has been justified as a special case in a few ways by comic nerds (he didn’t have time to wait for it to regrow, and the laser blast melted his metal skeleton to cap off the underlying bone are two common suggestions) along with the fact that Wolverine’s powers have been increased by writers over time and that means he’s gotten more over the top since the 90s.

It all depends on the writer whims really, but I doubt any writer would leave Logan clawless for too long. The bone claws themselves are a retcon after Magneto sucked all the metal out of Logan’s skeleton in the 90s anyway, which shows how important they are for the character.

Of course, the easiest simplest killshot on flat earth is the sun setting below the horizon. Flat earth and space deniers tend to say the sun is well, something that’s not a star, but more importantly that it stays in the sky and circles further away from a given location on earth until we can’t see it from a given location anymore while it stays overhead. To think that is to deny easily observed reality of it setting below the horizon. They just wordsalad about perspective until the conversation ends.

One aspect of flat earth/space denial that keeps me engaged is learning from the responses that educated people give to their questions. Details of space programs and astronomy that wouldn’t come up often except to answer flat earth/space denial.

My first tattoo was done in a shack with a DIY tattoo kit ordered online.

Afterwards we had DIY beer made with a Mr. Beer kit ordered online.

Knocking with your feet to pretend there is a ghost is still an alive and well practice. I don’t have exact instances on hand but John Wolfe on YouTube has covered a lot of ghost hunting content and some people in there do it.

Today there are more technological ways to create ghostly knocking using various devices, but if the “ghost hunter”/“medium” is taken to a location they can’t prep beforehand, some of them still do basic knocking tricks.

Space deniers.

They are a sub-set of flat earthers. Not all flat earthers are space deniers, but every space denier I’ve seen is a flat earther.

Some of the more prominent ones like Level Earth Observer spend innumerable hours picking apart International Space Station live footage as “fake”. Things like space rocket launches need to be picked apart to absurd degrees as well. Every camera glitch, every stutter, every little movement is hyper-analyzed and declared to be a fraud.

I find it all fascinating. Some of these deniers put forth their own lay theories, which are usually very Biblical in bent, but many of them like LEO will twist themselves into incoherent knots refusing to admit they have a viewpoint and that they are “just asking questions” despite pushing back in a very particular way to all the answers they get.

Some of them like “CC from New York, Westchester County” are just totally off the deep end, not even playing word games, just conspiratorially ranting without even internal consistency.

I’ve only ever interacted with a space denier directly once and it was as equally interesting as it was frustrating.

There’s a big flat earth/space denier overlap with other fringe ideas like young earth creationism which gets you into Kent Hovind territory. That’s interesting in its own way but also full of slime.

I had a blender bottle from which I had drank all the liquid, which still had ice in it. Because the ice was above the 100ml line (the limit for LIQUIDS), they took it and threw it away. They wouldn’t even just dump the ice, but tossed the whole bottle. Being that I was running short on time for my flight and I got my work to pay for a new one, I didn’t fight it (also just because I’m correct doesn’t mean the argument is going to go my way in a situation like this) but I’m still flabbergasted that ice was a liquid according to the pair of TSA seat fillers checking my bag.

I almost had a multimeter confiscated on a different occasion when they couldn’t figure out what it was. That one I put my foot down until a supervisor thankful instantly waved me through when he showed up.

“Best seller” depends on the metric being used, this article has some simple explanations, including how Amazon niche categories can be gamed to get a book to technically be a best seller.

Because Amazon refreshes ranks at least once a day (often hourly), a well-timed promotional spike can crown you a #1 “best seller” in dozens of micro-categories. Amazon itself acknowledges that ranks are relative and heavily weighted toward recent activity. Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing One TikTok push or email blast can deliver the screenshot—hence the glut of “international best-selling authors” whose lifetime sales barely break four figures.

For a more prestigious listing, like being a New York Times Best-Seller, that’s just lies if the NY Times likes you.

The Times, which had always claimed that the list was compiled from computer sales, countered in court that its list “was not mathematically objective but was editorial content and thus protected under the Constitution as free speech.”

In something like “Rao’s Homemade” sauces, the word “Homemade” is part of the registered name of the sauce (if you look close you can see the little “R” symbol for a Registered Trademark on the label), not a defined descriptor that needs to meet some kind of legal standard. Yes, it is trying to trick you into thinking of it as being less industrially made than it really is. Marketing.

At least you didn’t ask about boneless chicken wings…

I don’t think that proves much besides marketing people slapping anything on a cover long after the movie was made.

In the DVD commentary, the writer/director talked about how he’d had the basic idea, including gun kata, since high school. He could have been lying but I think he was honest and this was sort of a case of independent parallel ideas, since somebody turbo nerdy enough to come up with gun kata probably had influence from Hong Kong action movies that similarly influenced The Matrix.

The action style and flow is much different than The Matrix, and while both plots are about fighting the system, Equilibrium is much more straight forwardly grabbing elements from classic dystopias.

I think you’re ignoring the core point of the above comment, which is that the long pauses in the show for the laughs are a planned part of the show. If you’ve never been to a recording, the audience noises aren’t spontaneous. There are signs telling the audience when to make noise.

Live audiences sound better than canned laughs, but in terms of pacing for a sitcom, it’s the same thing.

The majority of sitcoms are terrible. When you think of good older ones and compare them to bad ones today you’re doing the thing.

Nope, I was out of date. The private Newseum museum had it for years but closed and the FBI took back the cabin and put it on public display along with other notable items relating to the FBI.

In the article linked to the post, it explains that Kaczynski’s lawyers were the ones who wanted it originally removed from its location and preserved.

In an effort to protect it from snoops and vandals, lawyers requested to have the cabin moved from its original site outside of Lincoln, Montana, to a nearby Air Force base.

As the trial approached, the cabin became the focal point of his lawyers’ planned insanity defense. Only a madman, they argued, could have lived in such primitive conditions.

If you think the reason is stupid, sure, but it wasn’t the FBI that made it so important to a potential trial.

2026 and 1998 are different times. Kaczynski’s pled guilty in 1998. The cabin is currently owned by a privately run museum.

I wonder if it has to do with ease of compositing multiple models. If you have three X-Wing models in the same shot you can have one in focus, with the others a little blurry and if the front one passes in front of the others perhaps it makes the compositing easier since instead of cutting two models separately and trying to make them look correct as they pass in front of the camera, you just cut them out together.

I like ENT. It is far from perfect, but it gets ragged disproportionally.

Season 1 & 2 do have some bombs (‘Dear Doctor’) but even in these less loved seasons, there are good episodes. ‘The Andorian Incident’ is a great episode right in the first season that not only introduces Jeffery Combs as Shran, but becomes a touchpoint for future episodes. There’s a number of other good to ok episodes, I’d say at least in the same amount as TNG’s first seasons.

Season 3 is divisive, but I liked seeing the proto-enlightened humanity backsliding a little bit into the militarized ways. This was an examination of that, done without getting too bogged down. I enjoyed the increasing knowledge of Xindi cultures being a factor in unraveling the situation.

Basically everyone who watched it loves season 4.

Was the show perfect? No. The temporal Cold War running plot was a time wasting slog. Was the finale revealing the whole thing as a TNG holodeck program stupid? Yes. But did the show have a unique take on human-Vulcan relations? Yeah. Did it on the whole keep that optimistic spirit of Trek? Yeah. Was it a long road getting from there to here? Yes, it’s been a long time, but my time is finally near.

Dune has an examination of the chosen one trope. You can pull a lot of meaning out it, but it certainly does more than unabashedly say it’s a good thing.

Regarding the Fremen, idea of a chosen one in-universe only exists because it was seeded as a self-serving belief by a foreign religious group messing with their culture. It isn’t a “real” prophecy, but one seeded so that it can be potentially “fulfilled” by someone in the know in-universe. The fremen follow Paul into war with fanatic zeal. This examines how damaging religious influence is.

The Kwisatz Haderach angle is another “prophecy” except it is being actively worked to be fulfilled in-universe using non-mystical means. Paul realizes how terrible it is to be this type of chosen one and rather than fulfill it he abandons it, and not in the cool “rebel taking down the system” way, but in the “overwhelmed by the weight of it”, way. He becomes broken and all for nothing since his son just completes the path he was on anyway, and it leads to a lot of (nessesary?) evil at his command.

Just send more weapons

All of your examples were of supporting existing local insurgencies in order to help them frustrate foreign conventional occupying forces. The occupiers did not have to choose between victory or death, but could at their leisure withdraw. Having that option creates increasing political pressure to withdraw over time. The is exacerbated by military conscription to an unpopular war and a lack of ideological unity in the occupying nation. This is not the circumstance with Hezbollah.

Watch a Tom Hanks movie

Read ‘Mao Zedong’s Principles of Peoples War’ to understand the dynamics of a mid-20th century insurgency, and have a foundation for how that has adapted with technology.

What?

Those conflicts were conventional forces being extended to achieve friendly political stability in nations with a large enough population that was hostile to be a problem to root out. Vietnam had a conventional force element with the NVA, though the issue for the U.S. was still one of creating political stability in the south for a regime that was locally unpopular.

In your suggestion the U.S. is supposed to play the role of the Viet Cong in Lebanon, and Hezbollah is supposed to play the role of a foreign occupying conventional military.

The U.S. (and the Soviets in Afghanistan) always had the option of withdrawing to their home countries. This was easily doable at any time they wished, so the calculation of these fights for the opposing side was running the occupying side out political patience. That’s not really the same situation with Hezbollah. Defeat was not about racking up a body count enough to collapse the occupying military’s ability to exist, but to frustrate their efforts until occupying nation politics became fed up with the war.

So, how exactly would this be done?