It’s a friendship bracelet. Back in the late 80s and early 90s friendship bracelets were super popular in elementary and middle schools. The idea was that you and your friends would make them by hand and give them to each other. I’m sure they’re probably low key still a thing, but their popularity at the time was pretty much on par with how popular fidget spinners were a few years ago, so you could buy mass-produced ones in all the same places you could buy fidget spinners: gas stations, grocery stores, etc. This was the most common style of mass-produced one.

I’ve used both Gotoh and Grover aftermarket tuners and they’re both going strong 10+ years on. No problems to report with either brand.

Different brands of guitars use different hole sizes for the tuning peg, so make sure you measure the diameter of the peg hole in your headstock before you order to make sure you’re getting ones that will fit your guitar.

One of the really great things about the USA is our national parks, so if you’re in the US you should go see as many of them as you can before MAGA starts selling them off to oil/mining companies and real estate developers.

On top of the two movies and the AMC+ show, HBO also put out a reboot series of Interview With the Vampire fairly recently as well.

Even if your entire family came from Norway it actually wouldn’t be that surprising that you’d get some DNA from other cultures popping up in there somewhere. The Viking Age, which spanned several hundred years, was pretty wild. The Vikings developed a type of boat that could sail the open ocean, but still had a shallow enough draft that it could navigate most of the major networks of Europe, and which was light enough that they could be carried overland from one river to another. It was an absolutely devastating technology for the time. They could often sail up a river, sack an entire city, and be gone before the surrounding area was able to raise an army to fight them off. As you can probably imagine the Vikings got all over the damned place. They got all the way to North America to the west, and pushed into Asia and founded Russia to the east. Some sold their mercenary services to the Byzantine Emperor in Constantinople and served in his Varangian Guard. They got around Europe so much and sacked so many European cities so often that at one point Europe straight up completely ran out of silver.

The Viking Age also overlapped with the Muslim expansion throughout the Mediterranean coast of Europe and North Africa. The Muslim conquest of the Iberian region of Spain, and the famous Viking raid on Lindisfarne in England only happened about 70 years apart. So the Vikings were also bumping into them as well. Most people have this idea of the Middle Ages where everyone pretty much stayed put, and nobody traveled more than 20 miles from where they were born. And while that was probably true enough for some people, lots other people moved around a ton, and there was actually quite a bit of cultural cross-pollination and trade. It’s not hard to imagine that somewhere in all of that one of your Scandiwegian ancestors might have gotten a piece of some Spanish hotness.

Also, when the Vikings went raiding, they didn’t just take silver, they also took slaves and brought many of them back to Scandinavia. And sometimes they had sex with those slaves. So there’s also that possibility.

This + some kind of chile powder. I put it on damned near everything.

I remember the cast being at an awards show or something back when the show was at its peak popularity, and to continue the gag this guy wore a mask over the bottom half of his face that was a tiny fence made out of popsicle sticks so that people still wouldn’t know what he looked like.

It’s because it’s a half dozen other languages dressed up in a trenchcoat pretending to be one grownup language. It’s a mishmash of all the languages spoken by every invading army who has at one time or another occupied the island of Britain, plus whatever languages were already there, and a bunch of loan words.

This was further compounded by a bunch of posh dickheads who wanted to use their superior education and knowledge of Latin to, I don’t know, flex on the poors I guess. For example, the word receipt didn’t always have a P in it, but then some aristocrat started insisting that it had to have one. Like, “Well of course it’s supposed to have a P in it, its root word in Latin is ‘recepto,’ how are people supposed to know that I’m a very fancy man who understands Latin if I don’t spell it with a P?”

It’s all just built on vibes.

Yeah, that surprised me too.

Given that the whole point of science is to methodically work your way to results that are reliable and reproducible, and AI is notorious for producing results that range from dubious to fully made up, you’d think AI would actually be on track to create more science jobs