Get a longer USB cable, run it out the base of wherever the zipper is, and up the outside of the case?

Hmm. That could be.

goes looking for numbers

According to this:

https://piefed.fediverse.observer/stats&months=48

It looks like there was a pretty significant increase in 2026.

I’ve sometimes seen credit card debt used as a proxy for financial difficulties. For the US:

https://wallethub.com/edu/cc/credit-card-debt-study/24400

So…there are some things that aren’t ideal about that graph. For one, it’s not inflation-adjusted; a dollar in 2000 is just under $2 in 2026. So it’s got an upwards-trending line, but a very substantial portion of that is actually just the result of inflation. And I’d kinda prefer to have a median value, though since I’m just comparing relative numbers rather than getting an absolute value, it’s probably not a huge deal.

But based on that, credit card debt has increased. And for most age groups, it’s higher in inflation-adjusted terms than it was 25 years ago. The 18-29 group is about the same, in inflation-adjusted terms — they had an average of about $500 25 years back, and about $1000 today. That’s an increase of about 2x in nominal terms, so no movement in real terms.

But people in their 40s have about 3x the amount of credit card debt in nominal terms as did the same age group in 2000. So that’s a real increase; it’s about 1.5x in real terms. Ditto for people in their 50s.

People in their 70s have something like 6x as much in nominal terms, or about 3x in real terms, as the people who were in their 70s in 2000, which is a pretty meaningful increase. For them, it’s not a COVID-19 surge, but just a long, sustained drift.

Note that if you’re asking about, say, just the last few months, OP, this only runs to late 2025.

If someone is concerned about climate policy and wants people to curtail their ICE vehicle use, high fuel prices are probably going to be the only realistic way that this is gonna be exposed to the consumer (like, we probably aren’t going to have an administration impose fuel rationing or something) so this is pretty good. Not only are they high, but it’s also good odds that your favorite politician isn’t the one taking the political hit for it. As the article points out:

In the U.S., gas prices were less than $3 per gallon before the start of the Iran war in February, and since then, the national average is now $4.14. That increase has cost Americans more than $50 billion, according to a Brown University analysis. As of this writing, the most expensive gas in America is in California, where car owners are spending as much as $5.78 per gallon. That has hurt the economy, with Americans spending a lot less money on vacations over the summer. Flights and road trips have also declined, as jet fuel costs have also been affected by the Iran war.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/03/26/1134677/gas-prices-electric-vehicles/

Historically, this is exactly the sort of moment that’s pushed people to reevaluate how they get around. During the oil crisis of the 1970s, Americans switched to smaller, more efficient cars in droves. It was a major opportunity for Japanese automakers, whose vehicles tended to fit this mold better than those produced by their US counterparts.

Nice, round numbers do tend to get people’s attention. Some point to $4 per gallon (which the national average is quite close to right now). At that price, the total cost of ownership for an EV is comfortably lower than the cost for a gas-powered car, even with higher electricity prices, according to data from the energy consultancy BloombergNEF.

Then again, maybe that won’t quite do the trick: One survey from Cox Automotive found that most US consumers would consider switching to an EV or hybrid if gas prices hit $6 per gallon.

Mind, I don’t think that Trump is gonna get a Greenpeace or Sierra Club endorsement any time soon…

Well…I’m sure that GNU R can do timelines in that it can visualize pretty much any collection of data on a computer anyhow you want, but that’s going to involve a pretty substantial learning curve; it probably won’t meet your bar for being “intuitive”. It’s a programming language for statistical analysis and visualization. It’d be most useful if you already have a lot of data in some kind of computer-readable format that you want to visualize at scale.

searches

Here’s an R package, timevis, which does some of this stuff:

https://github.com/daattali/timevis/

There’s another, vistime:

https://github.com/shosaco/vistime/

If you have an example image of the sort that you want to create, that might help people give recommendations.

Like, you talk about different timescales. Are you wanting something that can simultaneously display stuff at geologic timescales and daily stuff? Do you want to generate static images? Just be able to zoom in and out yourself?

The alternative, Vance said, was accepting that “the Iranians were going to shoot at ships like crazy people.”

Vance, the Trump administration was shooting at Cuban boats to score political points less than a year ago.

So…it’s not really italic, but some typefaces don’t have a true italic. For these, to fill in where one wants an italic style, there may be simply a slant added to the regular typeface. The result of this is called an oblique. I guess you could call that “semi-italic” in a sense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_type

Oblique type is a form of type that slants slightly to the right, used for the same purposes as italic type. Unlike italic type, however, it does not use different glyph shapes; it uses the same glyphs as roman type, except slanted. Oblique and italic type are technical terms to distinguish between the two ways of creating slanted font styles; oblique designs may be labelled italic by companies selling fonts or by computer programs. Oblique designs may also be called slanted or sloped roman styles.[1] Oblique fonts, as supplied by a font designer, may be simply slanted, but this is often not the case: many have slight corrections made to them to give curves more consistent widths, so they retain the proportions of counters and the thick-and-thin quality of strokes from the regular design.[2][3]

There are also some procedural font formats that can take inputs to set various values, and I imagine that one input could hypothetically morph to a variable degree between an italic and regular face.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_font

A variable font (VF) is a font file that is able to store a continuous range of design variants. An entire typeface (font family) can be stored in such a file, with an infinite number of fonts available to be sampled.[2]

The variable font technology originated in Apple’s TrueType GX font variations. The technology was adapted to OpenType as OpenType variable fonts (OTVF) in version 1.8 of the OpenType specification.[3][4][5] The technology was announced by Adobe, Apple, Google, and Microsoft in September 2016. Making such a feature standardized in OpenType paved the way for support in many software platforms.[3][6][7][8]

Variable fonts should not be confused with variable-width fonts. A variable font may be either variable-width or fixed-width.[9]

I don’t personally know off-the-cuff of a font that specifically does a procedural regular/italic morph, though.

deleted by creator

Yeah, I definitely like Vangelis stuff myself.

1492: Conquest of Paradise

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=UfHx0_z3bD8&list=OLAK5uy_kOfOjm87WdODYRYnphcPF3A3XI64jK5J4

Chariots of Fire

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=8a-HfNE3EIo&list=OLAK5uy_lkHoq84JxhDV9-7EHWX48-f0zUxdyFizY

Bounty

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=kKI3ZoWiYBk&list=PLy5kryT0xrJMuOJ-hun3UHGDls50vvei0

Blade Runner

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=smpTDkLCYb0&list=OLAK5uy_neLURwHRNsWnZouMq5K_vGitaXhlKEr4g

Perhaps the only movie that stood on its own against a soundtrack by Vangelis was Blade Runner.

Yeah. Though…man, I really like Blade Runner’s music, too.

Mortal Kombat

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=GJ885wc055g&list=PLsiaLSJMPwj-7GTqB_kpil7d6tDayWR4c

Romeo + Juliet

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=MNqaWx4OHbs&list=PLC4MpT8HK1NVdcDzyzrb_nr8R4dTGTd7t

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=FqlpJUvC15E&list=OLAK5uy_ksMcoC36wmr-fyFQfcpM_TjVqo3pBA1H4

searches

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_pinching_conspiracy_theory

The finger pinching conspiracy theory[b] is an antifeminist conspiracy theory that originated in South Korea. It claims that there is a deliberate plot to spread and promote misandry through symbolic hand gestures, and that radical feminist groups have propagated these hidden messages to humiliate men with small penises.

The conspiracy theory first gained prominence in May 2021 when convenience store chain GS25 published an advertisement with a hand gesture, which faced accusations of allegedly disparaging penises and aggrandizing the defunct fringe group Megalia. The company retracted it and issued an apology. Since then, numerous organizations were met with similar protests from theorists and announced apologies.

Despite contradictory claims and a general lack of evidence, the theory persists; notably in the video game industry, where Nexon led a public allegation against its collaborators. It is viewed as an online harassment tactic employed by antifeminist backlash movements. The theory has been a source of misinformation circulated by internet-based communities and news media.

I think that it kind of depends on the particular presentation of Batman; they’ve varied quite a bit.

I kind of wish we could have seen what we’d have had in terms of movies if we hadn’t had the drug/alcohol deaths and suicides from famous actors over the years.

I wasn’t against the darker theme

I’m one of the people who didn’t like the “I won’t kill you, but I don’t have to save you” line that Batman says to Ra’s al Ghul in Batman Begins.

It just really does not seem to me to fundamentally fit with the character of Batman as he’s been built up over the decades. I have a hard time with Batman taking a legalistic take, and frankly, a lot of the reason that the series had recurring villains is because Batman had saved them on many occasions in many past stories.

That being said, I suppose that there have been much more dramatic changes to comic book characters.

Thank you!

My understanding is that any sort of a census of the sort described in Luke (requiring males to return to the towns of their birth for registration) probably did not actually occur, as it would have created impractical logistical issues.

searches

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Census_of_Quirinius

Most critical biblical scholars agree that the Gospel of Luke is erroneous.[10] Its author seems to have invoked the census as Joseph and Mary’s motivation for departing “their own city”[11] of Nazareth, Galilee, for Bethlehem.[12][13][14] Additionally, the author may have wished to contrast Joseph and Mary’s obedience to the Roman edict with the rebelliousness of the Zealots, and also to find a prophetic fulfilment of Psalm 87:6: “In the census of the peoples, [princes] will be born there.”[12][b][c] (Luke and Matthew also give different accounts of the family’s departure from Bethlehem.)[17][d] Catholic priest and biblical scholar Joseph Fitzmyer states:[20]

It is clear that the census is a purely literary device used by him to associate Mary and Joseph, residents of Nazareth, with Bethlehem, the town of David, because he knows of a tradition, also attested in Matthew 2, that Jesus was also born in Bethlehem. He is also aware of a tradition about the birth of Jesus in the days of Herod, as is Matthew; Luke’s form of the tradition, unlike Matthew’s, tied the birth in a vague way to a time of political disturbance associated with a census.

Scholars point out that there was no single census of the entire Roman Empire under Augustus and the Romans did not directly tax client kingdoms; further, no Roman census required that people travel from their own homes to those of their ancestors. A census of Judaea would not have affected Joseph and his family, who lived in Galilee under a different ruler; the revolt of Judas of Galilee suggests that Rome’s direct taxation of Judaea was new at the time.[21] Catholic priest and biblical scholar Raymond E. Brown postulates that Judas’s place of origin may have led the author of Luke to think that Galilee was subject to the census.[22][e] Brown also points out that in the Acts of the Apostles, Luke the Evangelist (the traditional author of both books) dates Judas’s census-incited revolt as following the rebellion of Theudas, which took place four decades later.[22][f][g] Protestant theologian and biblical scholar E. P. Sanders concedes that, because revolts followed both Herod’s death and the census, Luke’s author may have “decided to elaborate the event [as] a reason for Joseph to travel … to Bethlehem”, calling this “a relatively slight historical error for an ancient author”.[8]

That’s fine, but as per the community rules, the post should be marked NSFW, OP.

NSFW rule: Mark your post as NSFW if it contains explicit sex or gratuitous nudity. When in doubt, NSFW it for the browsing safety of your fellow users.

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=Dqc50xhPFgw&list=OLAK5uy_kbxKEgp7thccO_mbQRleJaHjIr5PXLtAA

Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain

Did this one on another comment already, so I’ll avoid another link!

Avatar

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=2hYEs1SbVaA&list=OLAK5uy_mUSdsjNGTLVmZtr2F0Re_fvQ4XXLSsY1Q