Honestly, maybe not the easiest concept for Disney to pull off when more than a hundred of their films (a little over half) have a main character with one or both parents dead or missing. Even with just the ones on the box, Ariel’s mom is dead, Max’s mom is dead, Tiana’s dad dies off-camera during the movie, and we all know what happens to Mufasa.

I actually wondered the same thing while I was writing lol. Further research is clearly warranted 🧑‍🔬🔬

In his 1953 autobiography, Danish explorer Peter Freuchen claimed that in 1926, he became trapped in a blizzard while running a dog team and was forced to take shelter under his sled for 30 hours while snow built up and froze around him. When he tried to emerge, he found he was entombed in ice and unable to break free with his hands alone. Thinking quickly, he took a shit right there, shaped the turd into a chisel, and allowed it to freeze solid. He then claims he was able to use his newly made tool to chip his way free and make it back to camp. Peter was the only witness to his supposed escape. The study mentions it’s based on an Inuit ethnographic account, however. Maybe Peter, having spent much time in the Arctic with Inuit peoples simply took the story for himself. With the runners of the study finding that they were unable to replicate such a technique, it lends credibility to the claim that story may have been fabricated.

Good thing we also have more thylacines than ever before, right?

Nah, son. Thylacines have, in a way, become cryptids since their extinction, complete with cheesy travel shows where some bogan tells you all about how they totally saw one time and they’re 100% sure it was a thylacine they barely saw from a distance running away through the tall grass after sunset. I’ve seen similar shows about Bigfoot, Nessie, Mothman, and others. They don’t exist anymore, making your chances of seeing one alive no more likely than seeing Bigfoot, which is the point I was making. Animals thought to be extinct being officially rediscovered is a pretty rare occurrence; I assure you it doesn’t happen “regularly”. It’s a big deal when it happens because it’s quite rare. Yes, I’m familiar with the stories of all the other extinct species you mentioned as well. The ivory-billed woodpecker is still considered by most ornithologists to be extinct, and the last widely accepted sighting of any individual was in 1987, despite some supposed (but not universally accepted or entirely conclusive) sightings every once in a while. In 2020, a guy working for Fish and Wildlife claimed to have ID’d one in video footage, but it must not have been very compelling because the very next year Fish and Wildlife proposed declaring it officially extinct. People claim to have sighted the ivory-billed woodpecker not infrequently, much like the thylacine. What is infrequent is any compelling evidence whatsoever, however.

There have been many sightings and footprints found of Bigfoot, too. I live in the Bigfoot sighting capital of the world and new sightings are routinely reported. If the “Portland” in your name is in reference to the one in Oregon, you do too.

The last widely accepted sighting of a wild thylacine was in 1933, nearly a hundred years ago. Even if any tiny, isolated pockets had managed to escape extermination (which is unlikely on an island without much mountainous terrain or dense forest, especially when everyone and their grandma was out hunting them for the bounty the government put on their tails), they’d be in big trouble owing to genetic drift by now. You always hear people say “I know what I saw,” but do they really? It makes me circle back to the Bigfoot thing. At least some of the people who claim to have seen Bigfoot genuinely believe they really saw him.

Or jeans, or beef stroganoff, or every other time lemmy immediately runs a new joke into the ground and continues to do so far beyond when the joke is completely dead

“By precisely reflecting sunlight that is endlessly available in space to specific targets on the ground, we can create a world where sunlight powers solar farms for longer than just daytime, and in doing this, commoditize sunlight.”

Not to mention too expensive. The base ticket prices have skyrocketed over 1600% since 1996. In just the seven years between 2015 and 2022, attendees with household incomes of less than $100k dropped from around 56% to 40% and attendees with household incomes of $100k-$300k+ have risen from 43% to 59%. Over the years, it’s seemed like the crowd has been increasingly yuppie and increasingly white collar; these numbers appear to back that notion up. I remember seeing a video from a few years ago where Andrew Callaghan was talking about how he paid $10k for an RV spot and 2 tickets. He also complained that a lot of the people there seemed like “weekend-warrior-types”. I can only hope that price is with an insane scalper markup or a super deluxe VIP package or something. $10k is an unthinkable price for a weeklong camping trip in the desert, even a really cool one.

That, the heat as you mentioned (I found a chart that demonstrates rising averages and most in the comments are saying the reported highs are far too low), and the floods last year I think have combined to scare a lot of the core demographic away. I dreamed of going to Burning Man for years, but I haven’t even thought of it in quite some time since I learned how prohibitively expensive it would be to go.

Don’t the lyrics in “In the Flesh” indicate that the nazis are actually a different band that had to be called in as substitutes because the lead singer of the band that was supposed to play is currently going through a mental breakdown in his hotel room (i.e. stuck behind the wall)? The main figure of the album might’ve just imagined the whole thing, though.

The government predicts a 70 to 80 percent probability of a magnitude 8 to 9 quake occurring along the Nankai Trough within the next 30 years.

Damn, and I thought we had it bad in the PNW with a 37% chance of a 7.1+ (possibly up to and beyond 9.0) in the next 50 years.

Yeah, definitely not. “Tankie” isn’t some mostly meaningless word like “woke”, it’s a very specific belief in authoritarian self-declared, so-called “communist” states (USSR, China, North Korea, et al).

They claim to be for revolution and then turn around and give 100% blind obedience to the newly installed leaders. Pointing out their immense power or bad actions gets you called brainwashed, a reactionary, or counter-revolutionary. They win gold in mental gymnastics in regards to how the new ruling class totally doesn’t count as a ruling class, how the state doesn’t count as a state, how the money doesn’t count as money, and how it’s still communism even though not a single one of those prerequisites has ever been met.

They don’t take down systems of oppression, they replace them and refuse to believe it isn’t the greatest idea anyone’s ever had. Here’s a hint: if your “revolutionary” party demands absolute loyalty, they probably aren’t as great as they say.