My wife’s standing at her company’s IT dept skyrocketed during COVID lockdowns.

Why? Because we were both working from home, and aside from helping her with basic troubleshooting, I also helped her formulate her tickets better.

Turns out, tech support folks like it when a ticket has concise info, instead of “screen broke”.

The sound (and image) of a potato rotating in a microwave.

It’s because they find evidence to support their truth, instead of formulating a theory based in the evidence. I’ve heard it described with the circle analogy.

Imagine the absolute truth is a circle, but we don’t know what the shape is. By doing research, we find out certain facts as points on that circle. We can then draw straight lines between those points, and draw a shape that’s as close to the absolute truth as we can get, with the data we have. Further research and discoveries place more dots, sometimes falling outside of the lines we’ve drawn. So we redraw the shape more and more, always increasing towards that circle. That’s how science works.

Conspiracy theorist do the opposite. They draw a random shape (that’s nowhere near a circle, like a star), and then go out to find proof that fits on that shape. Some proof is correct - it just happens to fall on the same lines as the circle. Others are completely out there, aligning with their shape, but not with the circle (because it’s not relevant to the truth). And if they do find proof that fits on the circle, but not on their star, it’s ignored.

On one hand, I don’t want to make fun of her looks, if they’re the results of medical complications. That’s just mean.

But she’d pull off an amazing Lae’zel cosplay.

Actually, the Dutch translation is “Nijlpaard”, not “rivierpaard”.

But, it uses the Dutch name for the Nile river, “Nijl”. So it’s lit. “Nilehorse” - which is technically the same as “river horse”, just more geographically specific.

Yeah

And then you start to go through your dad’s old record collection, and realize “damn, the old man was on to something”

Fun fact! This temple is home to several depictions of the Egyptian creation myth.

However, the way they are drawn, makes it look like giant lightbulbs. This led to the popular conspiracy theory that the temple was built using electrical lighting, despite no evidence having been found.