Well, it was about time he got indicted for something. And then today he was arraigned. You are invited to offer your thoughts on this historic development below and no, that picture of Trump’s arraignment isn’t an AI-generated fake or anything.
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Locally, the Trump family were well known grifters. That’s part of why he seemed such an unlikely candidate to us.
@Mrs. Morley: I live on the other coast and knew they were grifters! But then I’ve always lived where the newspapers weren’t snowflakes afraid of running “Doonesbury”.
Regarding Hilda’s being underwater in rain, can confirm that I did that too. If it’s cold drops coming from the sky with wind, it’s much warmer to stay under the warm pool water. Didn’t have an old swimming hole, so I don’t know about that, but probably.
One of my favorite parts of the arraignment (besides all of it), was in the shot pictured, when Cheeto Benito had to open his own damn door, and the cop or whatever in front of him clearly enjoyed it too, because he ain’t about to keep it from smacking that fake orange face. He was probably disappointed that Mango Mussolini got his chubby tiny hand up fast enough to keep it from hitting the face.
Dolt 45 was so shook up he did an even worse job on his makeup than usual. All those shots from the side were really exposing the pasty white skin around the edges.
And the courtroom sketches! The second one here (Rosenberg) is the cover of the next “New Yorker”.
https://www.businessinsider.com/courtroom-sketches-capture-former-president-donald-trumps-arraignment-2023-4#new-york-supreme-court-justice-juan-merchan-recognized-the-unprecedented-nature-of-trumps-indictment-6
Alan wrote:
They don’t want to be just another brick in the wall.
@Snowberry
Adult Fans of Lego (AFOL) is the most common term.
I think Construx would make an excellent basis, just need to find a way for the giant-sized panels to lock in place once scaled up. The bottoms of the joint pieces would also require either a base plate with depressions, or joint pieces that do not have a protrusion on all six sides.
@Allandrel: (TL;DR, Construx nonsense)
If I remember right, my first thought was to redesign everything a little and put grooves near the edges in the… bars(?) girders(?) beams(?) frame pieces(?) And use insert panels or slats. This had the issue of either adding material/mass by making the frame less hollow (ideally all parts should be as lightweight as reasonably possible, to make it easier to transport and build), or weakening the structure. It also had the issue of needing to leave one side open to insert the panels/slats, so you couldn’t just do it frame-first and you’d need to carefully plan how you put it together.
Okay, how about panels which cover the outside of the frame and have lips extending beyond the area they’re meant to cover? That wouldn’t even need sophisticated snap-on parts, just long perpendicular tabs. Which works awesomely if you’re just making a one-room box cabin with no interior walls (columns/supports okay), otherwise you run into the problem where the wall and floor panels physically overlap. There are some solutions to this, but the obvious ones (at least to me) still have some significant limitations on building design, and require some additional and/or variant pieces, which does put a bit of a crimp on the need to keep all the basic, common pieces as simple, few in design, and universal as possible. And some of those solutions are also not at all friendly to the whole frame-first-snap-in-panels after ease and appeal of Construx.
(The simplest version had only two panel variations and the only significant building limitation is that you had to put the floor panels in first if you wanted to make sure the floor was as sturdy as possible, because you and any furniture you have put a lot of weight on the floor and one of the pieces isn’t ideal for that. But it still put a little bit of a crimp design flexibility.)
The third design which still stuck closely with the basic idea of Construx was the simplest yet most out-of-the-box one: instead of just a panel use a frame piece with the adjacent panel permanently attached to it. Because why not? Don’t need to worry about how to attach it if it’s already attached! Not ideal for floor pieces (see the weight issue above) but that’s fixable with a minor redesign.
I did note that the 6-way joint connector doesn’t play nice with floors as-is, unless you’re fine with things sticking out of the floor (and would probably require a few different variations with fewer connections, regardless), and also while the snap-on design works great for thin, small-scale plastic parts, it would have issues for thicker, larger-scale objects, especially if they’re made of materials more rigid than plastic (I was originally imagining wood-paste cabins, after all). So those had to go through a minor redesign too. I don’t think I ever came up with the idea of using a smooth base-plate made of entirely different parts for this; that’s much closer to Lego territory for one thing, and it leaves the walls unconnected to the floor, which has stability issues. Anything which would fix that would likely make things even more complicated or converge on my #2 or #3 solutions.