They’re rebooting Ernest Saves Christmas now?

I delight in reporting genuine emails from my company that look like sophisticated phishing attempts, bonus points if they send a follow-up assuring us that the previous sketchy email was in fact genuine.

If the fake phishing emails can be caught by my very rudimentary filter they weren’t particularly good anyway. Besides, I still have to look at those emails and report them, otherwise my IT still counts it as a strike against me. Win-win. IT continues to keep me on my toes and I don’t have to take another 30min training course because I ignored an email for a day or two.

They don’t even know cron exists and you’re going to throw them to the wolves by suggesting Systemd? That’s like calling in a drone strike to swat a mosquito.

In thousands of songs, I’ve never noticed Picard doing anything to the length of the files. I tend to manually review every album by running it through Picard and letting it handle the renaming and tagging. That structure used to be Artist/Year Album/Song. I’ve been less strict about naming the songs themselves. It’s always at least track - Title, but sometimes Artist - Album - Disc # - is prepended. Eventually I ran into a situation where I had multiple versions of a release/album with different enough content to warrant keeping both, so now I throw a release ID number (if is exists) after the album name, and inside brackets, for the directory name.

It’s a very flat structure by design, so I’m never quibbling about where I sourced something or what particular genre it is when I’m looking for it. That dramatically reduces the likelihood of duplicates too. Real metadata is better left to tags, since that’s mostly what any player will see anyway.

If I’m having trouble getting Picard to recognize something it always because: musicbrainz.org is missing the release, doesn’t have acoustic ID, or Picard preferred the album track when I’m trying to rename and tag a single or EP. Adding the release info and acoustic ID to musicbrainz is easy and I can usually use the info before the release is even reviewed, but often in trying to add the release I’ll find the correct one and now I can help fill out the data about it.

I treat musicbrainz.org as MY metadata database. If a release is missing or has problems, I do the work to make it better. It’s good digital citizenship and learning about their rules for releases helps me manage my server better.

Also Q*bert.

Dracula was published in 1897 and put the vampire count’s origin in Transylvania, Romania. Bela Lugosi was born and raised in what is now Lugoj, Romania, and would go on to play Dracula on Broadway in 1927, then the the Dracula movie began production in 1930.

Bela certainly made his mark on the character, but the accent was just typecasting not an artistic choice.

The absolute best are rainy days without lightning in a place with some nature and privacy. I feel like dancing naked in the rain and being able to come back in to a dry house, a towel to dry yourself, a good book, and a hot tea, is a very rare experience these days. Thunderstorms are great too when you have safe shelter. But dancing naked in a thunderstorm feels a bit like tempting fate too much, which is thrilling too in a way but also I’ve got creatures inside depending on me staying safe.

There is a whole podcast series about Lugosi and other movies of this era, You Must Remember This. I’m not sure if this specific detail is covered explicitly. But my impression (and very hazy memory) leads me to believe that it may be a situation where Lugosi was cast because he looked like the expectation of a vampire from the other movie, but then Lugosi performed better and caught the public’s attention better. Kind of like Hydrox vs. Oreos. Hydrox was first to market, but ultimately lost to the copycat. To be fair to Lugosi, he still added several other elements of style we now consider essential to the quintessential vampire character. He just happened to naturally have a widows peak and authentic “old world exotic accent” (he barely spoke English when he got his start in Hollywood), which gave him an advantage.

EDIT: I should clarify that Karina Longworth’s podcast, You Must Remember This, is about WAY more than Bela. That was just a short series within that podcast. It’s a great listen is you have any interest in film history or long form non-fiction podcasts in general.

They are black with white stripes. You can look it up, or you can just look closely at a zebra. I wouldn’t recommend the later outside a controlled situation with protected contact though. Zebras are assholes. There’s a reason they haven’t been domesticated.

It’s definitely more than a horror project. But, it’s also definitely still horror.

Common names of animals often describe phenotype not genotype. If it looks like a ducks, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s common name is duck. There are lots of animals with common names grouping them by physical characteristics and ecological niche rather than genetic relationship, especially animals named longed before we had any real scientific study of their genetics.

His family name was actually Drumpf. His immigrant grandfather Americanized it on or shortly after arriving in America.

Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Fun fact, North Dakota (home of the idiot cop and criminally evil prosecutor) has a fewer people than the city of San Francisco in about 150,000 times the acreage. Put another way, there are about 268,000 people per electoral vote in North Dakota compared with about 728,000 people per electoral vote in California and about 670,000 people per electoral vote in Tennessee (home of the grandmother).

Hey now. Hillbillies are a proud Appalachian cultural tradition. The grandmother, being from Tennessee, might have been a hillbilly. And it might not have been an insult for her to self apply that label. The idiot cop and asshole prosecutor were in North Dakota.

Gaffer tape. Gaffer tape everywhere. And for those LEDs that you actually want to see, but not light up the whole room, two pieces of gaffer tape with a hair’s breadth between them. Makes for an indicator light that can only really be seen when your looking straight at it.

It belongs in a museum.

It was sold at private auction.

Woolly Mammoth Tusk Mammuthus primigenius Pleistocene Alaska, USA

Some incredible specimens literally speak for themselves, and this superlative polished Woolly Mammoth Tusk is one such piece. Fondly termed “The Ocean,” for obvious reasons, this example measures a whopping 82 inches (208 cm) on the curve. The outstanding greenish-blue coloration is due to the replacement of the mineral Vivianite during the fossilization process of the ancient ivory. This tusk is beautiful for its intense coloration and boasts a nice curvature as well as an unusually thick form. Not only is this glorious piece a top echelon representation in terms of its exquisite color, the polished fossil is outstanding for condition with only minimal expected restoration to the tip and very minor crack fill. This is a truly striking piece in a custom metal armature that allows it to “float” into the air. The creative and clever mount allows for a dramatic and impactful display which highlights the size, shape and, most importantly, color of this tusk. There really are not enough superlatives to accurately describe the specimen, which absolutely is one of THE most visually stunning, well preserved, and overall superior tusks to grace the market in some time. Overall Measurements: 46.50 x 30.00 x 30.00 inches (118.11 x 76.20 x 76.20 cm)

It was posted on Reddit in 2021. In 2026, the AI image search could only cite the Reddit, Instagram, and Xitter posts because the auction site has a captcha.

The twist better be something better than “She/He’s been dead the whole time.”

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