Those scenes are just there to establish that he’s capable, intelligent and talented in the ways the agency needs, so it’s plausible they would recruit him. Never-mind that they also establish the way he looks at the world and approaches problems which is then forgotten immediately.
That is interesting. I imagined it more like an abstract physics problem than an actual scene. My ball was about 6 inches diameter, made of a nonspecific hard but not very dense material similar to, but not necessarily solid plastic, of no specific color. It was in the center of a table roughly 3 x 6 feet in surface at normal sitting table height, and was also of no specific color or material. The person was just the vague notion of a person applying a push slightly off from across the short axis of the table. The ball bounced slightly on the generic idea of a floor as it rolled away. My mind quickly supplied the additional details when requested, but not until then. (Yellow ball, wood table, etc). If I’d been asked in a way that didn’t feel like a physics problem, but instead asked me to imagine a scene, I would already have had many of those details in my mental view.
My sister works in real estate, and she was asked by a Realtor she works with what the law was on disclosure for a house the seller said was haunted. In most US states, it’s legally required to disclose any material fact about known issues with the property, though how it’s worded and what that includes varies from state to state. She had to look it up, and in North Carolina, haunted is not a required disclosure, though it is in some states. I joked that haunting should count as an “immaterial” fact.
She was laughing about the whole thing until she went by the house herself to make sure everything was ready for the photographer. She heard a noise in the basement and checked. There was an old black man dusting the shelves. She mentioned she wasn’t expecting anyone to be there. He was very polite and explained that he took care of the house, and not to worry, he’d stay out of the way. She went upstairs to let in the photographer. When she went back in the basement there was no sign of the man, even though the only way out was past her. She looked around the whole house for him before she locked up but he was gone. She asked the seller about it, who casually explained that that was just old Terrence, who had taken care of the property for her grandmother, and had died many years ago. Since then, he just sort of appeared around the house occasionally, “tidying up.” (I’m writing this from memory, so some details are probably wrong, especially the name, but it’s the gist of story as she told it.)
They did not mention any of this to the buyer, and don’t know if they ever experienced anything as they never contacted them about it.
I had guessed it was Sri Lanka since it is also shown just off the coast of India. Then I figured it was more likely Indonesia given it’s surrounded by so many other islands and not that close to India. But yeah, now that I know that the name meant Japan I’m wondering if it’s depiction on the map is a conflagration of accounts of Indonesia and Japan.
Classic Italian mistake.
Yeah, the American West has a huge variety of very distinct biomes. For the purpose of telling a story though, one rocky desert or forested mountain vale or whatever is as good as another, leaving us, the audience, largely unaware and misled. We mostly only notice when they do that to areas we’re familiar with.
Reminds me of the movie The Patriot, starring Mel Gibson. There’s a scene where he is at his home in what is clearly the upcountry of South Carolina not too far from the Appalachians and he takes a walk down his garden path to visit his wife’s grave, which is located in the South Carolina lowcountry, by the coast, somehow skipping past over a hundred miles of pine forest that would have been between those areas. If you’re not familiar with those areas, they both just look like areas in the American Southeast, but if you are familiar, it’s very jarring.
They’re only allowed to use one hand, so the competitors always have their off hand tucked in or hooked onto their clothes so that arm can be relaxed and ignored.
8 year old me would have envied this collection. 40 year old me just appreciates that he has a passion for which he still has a child-like sense of wonder.
They’d be seriously shooting themselves in the foot if they did that. Most corporations have 3rd party software that they would not be able or willing to give up, software development for Windows would be unable to test and debug, and I know from personal experience that many consumers find the already existing S Mode to be frustrating and confusing.
It’s not meant to be a stereotype applied to all men, just the a thing that some men do. It happens when a man assumes, perhaps subconsciously, that the woman he is speaking to is his intellectual inferior and would surely benefit from his opinion on whatever topic without any regard to her possible expertise on the topic, or even his own lack thereof. I’ve rarely witnessed it myself, but know women who have had to put up with it. Stereotypeing all men as “manslainers” would be rude, but mocking the men who actually behave that way is cool with me.
Oh yeah, rub my face in those gorgeous technicalities. You want to mock my logical fallacy? Do it. Point out my fallacy and laugh; I can take it.
If the politicians and bureaucrats that Trump and friends pushed out are like murky swamp water, then the ones he brought in are like raw sewage, so I always said that he only wanted to “drain the swamp” so he’d have room to pump in said raw sewage.
I would argue that doesn’t qualify as trivial.
Fine, I’ll paraphrase it for you then. “Towels are really useful when you are traveling the galaxy LOL.”
“A towel, [The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy] says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.” ― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
This is it exactly. “I am at home” describes your location. “I am home” describes your current state.
And reporting “other income” wouldn’t flag you as a likely criminal anyway, unless it was a massive amount. They don’t know if you got it from selling weed, picking pockets, or mowing your neighbor’s lawn (no, Bill is not going to submit a form 1099 for you, he’s just going to hire a professional lawn service instead if you’re going to be weird about it).
So is ‘security camera’ also a misnomer? His job is to make theft less likely because he will report you to the police. That still falls in the realm of security. I will say that ‘security observer’ would be a better job title than ‘security guard’ but they never claimed a job title, just a general field of work.
I can’t help but think of this from the wizard’s point of view as a 4chan green text.
be me, an edgy young wizard. Want to pick a really cool wizard name and come up with “Charles LeSorcier.”
mfw the older wizards all make fun of my name.
get in an argument with a local noble and lose my temper. claim I put a curse on his whole family line that they will each die when they are 30.
remember I haven’t learned how to do it. go home and try to figure out how to cast a blood line curse. it’s too complicated, I can’t figure it out. Can’t ask the other wizards now because they already heard about the curse and they’d just make fun of me more.
make a secret lab in the noble’s basement and spend the next 10 years stuck there trying to figure it out. still fail. time’s up, he turned 30. if the noble doesn’t die they’ll all know I lied. finally give up and just sneak into his house and murder him. make it look like an accident.
mfw the other wizards fall for it. they all think I’m alright now. maybe they will forget about the bloodline thing by the time the noble’s kid is 30.
the bloodline thing is all they want to talk about. 18 years later I have to murder the next one. the other wizards are super hyped I pulled it off, want to be my friend now. none of them know how to cast a bloodline curse either.
mfw I’m stuck for the next few centuries hiding in a noble’s basement and murdering them every couple decades to cover my lie.
The owner shut down his McDonald’s for the afternoon for this. Trump declined to wash his hands, dropped a batch of fries, and “served” a few “customers” through the drive through window. So yeah, basically a photo shoot.