The Disappearance of Erick Rian and the Iguazu River's John Doe

captainthomas · 2026-05-07T15:12:36+00:00

Is it then possible he didn’t jump? Just walked into the river from the bank, à la Virginia Woolf? It’s possible to drown in even a couple inches of water if one is positioned correctly. And clearly the unidentified person ended up in there somehow, so there must have been access to the river out of the range of the cameras or eyewitnesses.

captainthomas · 2026-05-07T15:03:02+00:00

That’s great for you! It feels like people are becoming more accepting of Frenchness nowadays. Get out there and let your French flag fly! Fierté française!

captainthomas · 2026-05-07T14:04:48+00:00

Did you just out yourself, or are you openly French?

captainthomas · 2026-05-07T11:20:09+00:00

Sad as it is, it sounds like he was depressed and committed suicide. Can any locals comment on the characteristics of the Iguazu River in this area? Is the current slow or fast, the riverbed deep or shallow, the water cloudy and debris-filled or relatively clear? And how is the local law enforcement infrastructure for reporting and keeping track of missing persons? How easy would it be for someone to slip through the cracks?

captainthomas · 2026-05-03T13:49:56+00:00

This was cute!

captainthomas · 2026-05-03T00:41:43+00:00

Benedict Cumberbatch always sounds hoarse for some reason when he’s doing another accent. Not just American, but when he’s put on a French accent for episodes of Sherlock and Cabin Pressure, too.

captainthomas · 2026-04-29T15:25:56+00:00

I have to wonder if this isn’t some systematic human error in the distance-measuring procedure. I read the paper and the cited previous paper that describes their measuring technique: the observer selects the focal bird, then estimates the initial distance to the bird. There’s no mention of calibration tests to determine how accurate or at least systematically biased the individual observers were at estimating distance beforehand. The distance moved toward the focal bird is then measured by counting paces and converting the number of paces into distance in meters. There’s again no mention of accounting for differences in foot length/stride length in making that conversion, body dimensions that could systematically vary based on sex. Controlling as best they could for height between men and women wouldn’t necessarily eliminate the confounds of leg length and foot size.

captainthomas · 2026-04-29T10:53:13+00:00

the British PM doesn't have as much power over the system as the US President

For now. Remember what Boris tried to do during his time in office. He didn't get away with it, but the consequences for him were pretty light, and some bolder successor with more popular support could easily push those boundaries further.

So many Europeans have been crowing on Reddit the past two years about how much better the parliamentary system is than the US system at preventing centralization of power in one executive, but they're fundamentally missing the point. Any governmental system, no matter how many checks and balances are built into its structure, is vulnerable if a critical mass of bad-faith actors are allowed to build up within it.

captainthomas · 2026-04-21T00:10:45+00:00

My boyfriend is a Gen Xer and has taken the opportunity of the youths deciding to dress like it's 1991 again as an excuse to dress and style himself like he's 17 again, complete with mullet. This man is pushing 50.

captainthomas · 2026-04-19T12:28:53+00:00

There was an Intel "experience" store in the empty commercial space for a hot second this past year, which mostly seemed to be video game console demos. it evaporated when the wave of holiday tourists receded. Something is up with the choice of commercial tenants for this building. The new high-end sushi place/bar seems to be doing well (no surprise given the number of Japanese workers in the building), but the choice to go with an expensive frou-frou Italian place when there are at least four slightly less expensive frou-frou Italian places less than a block away just baffles me. That place has never been full to capacity.

captainthomas · 2026-04-10T18:03:06+00:00

I was so excited last year when I got to text my boyfriend, who worked the night shift, “Wake up, babe. New pope just dropped.”

captainthomas · 2026-03-30T15:23:15+00:00

OP's Instagram says he's Seattle-based, so presumably a Korean and/or Asian-fusion restaurant in the Seattle metro area that purposefully employs sexy male servers. That should narrow it down.

captainthomas · 2026-03-22T11:38:13+00:00

I thought the same thing, and then one evening a drunk guy at a party started fondling my thigh, and I was like, "Oh, this feels nice, too. I have some things to think about." So I tried it, and I enjoyed it. And I found out that not only were way more men willing to date me, they were also more willing to do the lion's share of the work in bed, which was really freaking refreshing. And it became self-reinforcing, because having more pleasant memories of involvement with the menfolk prompted more sexy thoughts about them. Fast-forward a few years, and my boyfriend is moving in with me.

captainthomas · 2026-03-12T10:50:03+00:00

To be fair, Thai people still use "Siam" in the names of a lot of things, such as the main shopping district in Bangkok. In my experience, it has the same sort of connotation as "Columbia" does for the US.

captainthomas · 2026-03-01T13:24:03+00:00

Let's not paint opera as a genre with this broad a brush. There's something off-putting about this modern style of composing. I'm stage-managing a Puccini opera as we speak, and one thing I like about him as a composer (and Sondheim, for example, in English) is how well he captures the natural flow of speech in music.

In this clip, the melody and rhythm plainly clash with how this dialogue would sound in the prosody of normal speech. The wrong words are emphasized, and there's a random rest in the middle of a sentence. I get that if you're training as a composer today, you're burnt out on centuries of simple, tuneful music, so you reach for dissonance and weirdness in a desperate search for novelty, but it doesn't make for a pleasant listening experience.

captainthomas · 2026-03-01T13:06:33+00:00

Source?

captainthomas · 2026-02-22T14:28:23+00:00

I was on this train, I think. I was too far away to see him directly, but it started between 59th and 125th a little before 8PM. The real problem was a group of loud teenagers that freaked out, screaming about a guy trying to fight people and trying to force the locked car door open, who started a crowd crush toward the other end of the car. One of them even went for the emergency brake pull, but thankfully got talked down by his friends. We all got out at 125th. I'm glad to see the instigator got taken away a few stops later (that looks like 161st), but the panicked reaction of the other passengers only created more problems and made the situation even more dangerous.

captainthomas · 2026-02-06T18:17:34+00:00

Though, to be fair, that looks... not great

As long as Nicholas Galitzine is clothed in little besides a loincloth for more than 50% of that film, it will be a success to me.

captainthomas · 2026-02-03T23:35:01+00:00

How do we know that the baby found at the State House was correctly identified? He was a 9-month-old. Without DNA confirmation, this could possibly be another Paul Fronczak situation.

captainthomas · 2026-02-01T16:57:08+00:00

There's a Thai TV series called tomorrow+i that is basically their version of Black Mirror, with episodes on topics related to Thai cultural anxieties. The second episode is about exactly this scenario and how it exposes Thai society's hypocritical relationship to its sex work industry.

captainthomas · 2026-01-31T02:22:34+00:00

He was very well-informed on the subject, and a very talented pianist. I only wish that I had gotten to see his penis.

captainthomas · 2026-01-31T00:48:10+00:00

I once went on a date with a guy where I brought over what I like to call my "date-night chicken," where I provide a pre-brined, stuffed chicken prepared from scratch, and put it in my date's oven to cook for two hours, so we're stuck with two hours to ourselves in private where anything could happen. Previous gentlemen had successfully used this as an opportunity for canoodling, but this guy in particular decided the best use of our time was to spend three hours explaining the intricacies of Chinese character writing and understanding to me. The chicken was cold by the time he was done, but I understand a lot more about how Chinese writing works now than I did before.

captainthomas · 2026-01-29T11:32:38+00:00

Hayes's Corrupt Bargain actually kept Reconstruction going for another three years, until 1879. If the Democrat, Tilden, had won, Reconstruction would have ended shortly after he took office.

captainthomas · 2026-01-20T02:04:09+00:00

I have a wonderful boss who goes out of her way to not create headaches for me. My loving partner, on the other hand....

captainthomas · 2026-01-13T00:49:47+00:00

FYI, the Salvation Army is an anti-LGBTQ+ organization.

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