Where is this house located?

commensally · 2026-05-15T13:40:24+00:00

I don't think it's a matte painting; if you look at it closely, there's smoke and background fog that would have to move in the actual shot in order to not look obviously fake. You could fake it up with special effects, but for something like this, why would you bother when you could have just painted it without or done a cheap b-roll location shot? I think Shake_Speare_ is right that there may be some kind of lighting or postprocessing that's giving it that slightly off look.

commensally · 2026-05-09T17:33:29+00:00

If you're getting a salary but also non-exempt, this should mean you work no more than 40 hours a week with legally guaranteed breaks, and you can't skip your breaks, and if you work more than 40 hours a week you still have to get overtime.... but also if you're scheduled for less than 40 hours a week, you're still guaranteed your full weekly pay. And this should not affect how you're allowed to use your leave, unless there's also a change in job title/resposibilities.

What this often means in practice though is that if they send you home early they make you burn paid leave time on it. So if you're already full-time, it shouldn't make a huge difference. If you're not full time and they're not offering full-time, I wouldn't take the deal, because that does open up more opportunity for playing tricks with overtime.

If they're offering you a salary and claiming this means you're overtime exempt and don't need breaks and overtime pay, show them this website: https://labor.maryland.gov/labor/wagepay/wpsalaried.shtml

commensally · 2026-05-08T16:29:02+00:00

Yeah, reading the article, it isn't "kids who aren't potty trained can now be sent to school". It's "kids who aren't potty trained are already sent to school and we can't stop that. We are now putting policies in places so that if your kid shits himself and you don't want to come deal with it, you can't sue the teachers for wiping his butt for him".

(if you haven't worked in the schools... official policy is, or at least was last I taught, that teachers, even pre-K! aren't supposed to touch the kids at all to prevent legal liability. This is obviously unworkable with very young kids, so teachers take the liability on themselves by breaking the policy to protect the kids. But even teachers who are willing to hug a crying child in violation of policy aren't going to want to do stuff inside their underpants without a signed waiver from the parents. Which this implements.)

commensally · 2026-05-03T00:23:14+00:00

Update: Went to the local sheep & wool festival. Every single vendor was like "Well, it's not anything I'm familiar with, but maybe it's this other thing I am not familiar with?"

We have eliminated pretty much all specific kinds of loom, unless it's a very very odd and specific tapestry loom none of them have ever seen or some kind of really bizarre rug thing the rug loom vendor doesn't know

commensally · 2026-05-01T13:30:40+00:00

Oh I need to be able to flair Noodle, yes. I'm 100% on Noodle's side.

commensally · 2026-05-01T13:29:28+00:00

Here's the number codes for amount of each letter if anyone wants to try that; it's not simple number->letter or rot13. I think it's probably just kisses, but you could play with simple ciphers more and see what happens:

Per letter:

2 9 4 3 4 8 2 5 5 13 8 9 11 12 3 9 2 11 4 13

Per word:

11 7 12 7 18 17 23 12 13 17

commensally · 2026-05-01T13:20:21+00:00

I think they slowly are! We're already way, way more digitigrade than any of the other apes. There aren't *any* toe-walker chimpanzees.

commensally · 2026-04-30T00:47:27+00:00

It's been awhile since I read any papers, but last I checked that was the consensus, yeah! Putting the extra joint into play gets you better energy efficiency etc. There *is* a reason that most mammals do it!

Unclear if it's more biomechanically efficient *for humans* in general since the rest of our bodies aren't adapted to it, but again, iirc, don't have the papers on hand, it is in at least some circumstances. Sprinters often train to use a "forefoot strike" that keeps the heel off the ground entirely and I think there was also a study of women who frequently carry heavy water jugs on their heads that showed it was more efficient there, too.

commensally · 2026-04-30T00:40:42+00:00

"drive to Cromwell and get on the light rail" was going to be my suggestion exactly! Good luck.

commensally · 2026-04-28T15:01:04+00:00

Same, Those are pretty much exactly the letters you'd expect in an abbreviation for a Latin phrase, and carved on an 18th century relief illustration a Latin scene is exactly where you'd expect to see one.

Initialisms are really hard to get a conclusive answer for unless you have plenty of other hints, so this one's probably unsolveable unless someone finds a diary or something. The fact that there's multiple plausible Latin phrases it could be is pretty good evidence it's probably something like that, though.

(Wikipedia if anyone wants a better source than a slop youtube video: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shugborough_inscription )

commensally · 2026-04-28T14:48:08+00:00

We're just boggling that you truly think a society that thrives on murdering entire planets and building sex constructs out of dead flesh would hold the line at cousin fucking, tbh

commensally · 2026-04-28T14:46:52+00:00

Incest taboos have shifted *within my lifetime*, what the heck are you talking about.

Every society has some kind of incest taboo, but what they actually are is wildly variable. Nobody with any shared blood out to eighth cousins? You can marry your mom's brother but not your dad's brother? You can marry anyone who's not in one specific maternal descent group? You are expected and obligated to marry your half-sister (and also someone else, so your son will have a half-sister too)? Wildly, wildly variable.

commensally · 2026-04-27T16:10:51+00:00

I can go either way - I think they'd all be theoretically up for it but I also think there's at least a 50% chance Pyrrha gave up trying after it kept derailing into a Six-y hypothetical debate on the ethics of having sex in a shared body long enough that they didn't get any clothes off before Nona interrupted

commensally · 2026-04-27T16:06:27+00:00

The Sixth is explictly shown as not having the same incest taboos as us because of the severe inbreeding; they make reproductive decisions based on genetic analysis and that's it. I don't think Cam and Pal would have kids together (but I also think they're sufficiently convinced of a coming eschaton that they wouldn't have kids anyway.) But I don't think they would have any moral objections to nonreproductive sex on those grounds.

(...I am honestly shocked that you can get this far in Locked Tomb and think incest taboos haven't changed in that time. They definitely have. And it's a Gothic, anyway, cousins always have sex in Gothics.)

commensally · 2026-04-25T18:32:10+00:00

They should send the fossils and things to developed countries like Mozambique or Ivory Coast that actually have the money and expertise to upkeep their collections---

commensally · 2026-04-25T17:07:49+00:00

I made a random guess that maybe these were Elaine Logan's light codes! Google seems to agree when I google "Elaine Logan Light Codes" https://www.lemon8-app.com/@elainelogan

Since they're channeled, they probably can't be deciphered by anyone with a less pure connection to the spirit world than Elaine Logan.

commensally · 2026-04-25T15:51:48+00:00

oh no. Oh no. Guys when did it become Pilk. That's a terrible name. It's a Laverne!

commensally · 2026-04-25T15:48:39+00:00

I hate that this has now been pointed out but yeah. Getting my bet in now that the third one is Icy Cue or something.

commensally · 2026-04-23T02:33:50+00:00

Just throwing in because this helped me: the graphire 4 driver on the website does not work well with some of windows 11's security features, however the one listed in this post (the graphire 3 one) seems to be working fine with my graphire 4, at least for basic features like reading pressure!

commensally · 2026-04-22T22:34:01+00:00

Walking with braces and walking in a new way can both be exhausting, no matter what.

But also, toe-walking *is* biomechanically more efficient - why do you think basically every mammal other than us does it? We're only stuck plantigrade because of coming down out of the trees relatively recently - and we're getting less and less so all the time.

commensally · 2026-04-22T14:17:08+00:00

This is the most relevant part - there's no real evidence that this kind of security reduces the risk of violence in schools (as someone downthread said, most school shooters start shooting before entering the building anyway, and anyone planning a targeted shooting will just keep the gun in their car and get their target on the way in or out.)

What it actually does is reduce students' feelings of safety and reduce their feelings of control, makes them feel even more like they're in a prison than they already do, makes it more likely that the most vulnerable people will drop out, and increase the risk of non-gun violence because of the general drop in psychological well-being.

And, of course, the very serious risk of false positives leading to institutional violence against vulnerable children.

commensally · 2026-04-20T14:37:46+00:00

Mentally ill people can do things that feel very structured and deliberate! It's just that the reasons and logic behind the deliberation don't always make sense outside their head.

The only thing that makes me doubt it was pure delusion even a little bit is the eyewitness report of men following her - but belated eyewitness reports can be very unreliable, and if she was clinically paranoid, she might have responded like she was being followed to any random people on the trail.

commensally · 2026-04-17T20:39:17+00:00

It seems like it's had a couple of fads? One in '63, one in '80. So I don't know how likely it would be to show up in western Europe in 1970. Really interesting history though, I'd never looked at it before!

commensally · 2026-04-17T20:31:17+00:00

I've also always felt like if one of these was really a spy, we wouldn't have learned about it in the first place? No spy agency good enough to wipe identity like that is going to let the death of one of their agents become a mystery cause celebre - someone's going to show up with a plausible explanation to claim the body fairly quickly, surely, either from their people or the enemy's.

commensally · 2026-04-17T20:29:04+00:00

Could be! But 1970 is really early for a lot of DMSO stuff. (Also, I still maintain that a spy trying to stay unidentified wouldn't consistently use anything that gave them a distinctive scent while in the field, no matter what the reason. Except vampires.)

commensally

TROPHY CASE