The MST3K bots were originally built for the show using various random toys and household items. There has been a “bot building” scene of fans dedicated to collecting those bot parts and replicating the show’s bots for ages, and that community has always traded parts and part replicas matching the show’s bots among themselves. (I get the sense home 3D-printing has taken over for most of the demand for bot parts nowadays, but that wasn’t yet a thing when I did this in the early 2000s.)

There used to be quite a few websites and forums about the bots and their components. The only ones from those old days I still see online are this one and this one.

For Servo I tracked down and modified the same candy dispensers they used for his head. His torso, arms, and hands are resin-cast copies of matching originals sourced from a fellow bot builder, his shoulders and the black trains along his bowl are vacuformed plastic sheets a fellow bot builder fabricated using matching original parts as molds, and the bowl and other mechanics were things I had found or made myself.

20something years later I stripped out the internal puppetry mechanics, transforming the puppet to a static statue. I changed the bowl, and installed lamp wiring from a home lamp-rewiring kit. The bulb is an Alexa-compatible smart bulb, situated at the bottom of his clear globe, and I filled the globe with clear glass marbles. I have him set up to switch on in the afternoon with the rest of the lights around the house, and he changes color every hour until it’s time to switch off in the evening.

I then tested the whole thing safely to ensure the wiring was intact and safe, and checked that the whole thing doesn’t get hot under normal use. All is well!

Seriously. They may as well be interviewing a flipping coin, and then proclaiming that it “admitted” heads.

I’m lying in this statement.

So you’re actually the guy from Grim Fandango?

The Man Who Folded Himself.

I live in NYC, and I missed the GTAIV version of my city when the game was over.

A chatbot is not capable of doing something so interesting as “going rogue.” That expression implies it’s a mind with agency making a choice to go against something, and this program doesn’t have the ability to do such a thing. It’s just continuing to be the unreliable bullshit machine the tech will always be, no matter how much money and hype continues to be pumped into it.

Not only did Nick Reiner write that screenplay, the movie got made and his father directed it.

Was there a rule in the book that said Air Bud couldn’t shit in your yard?

You’re doing better than I am along those lines, my most famous precise birthday twin appears to be Rachel Dolezal.

That may be so if you’re just getting it for the remote, but if you have one around for other reasons this is another thing it can do.

Flipper Zero has a universal remote mode, and for codes not in the database they can even learn commands from your other remotes.

Spoon Theory is a metaphor for describing certain limiting effects of a disability to those unfamiliar. It comes from this original post by writer Christine Miserandino which explains the basic idea. Here’s its Wikipedia article.

It was similar for me! I got on an app thinking I’d finally try that casual-dating stuff I’d heard so much about, and my first date on the app is the person to whom I’m very happily married.

I’ve been happily married for seven and a half years, and we met on a dating app which I ended up using for only a month or so.

It was my first time using such a thing, I was in my late 30s and mildly curious about those apps the Kids These Days seem to like. I installed one (OKCupid) and was basically daring the silly thing to work. I figured if I was going to try that sort of thing, I was going to do it in a very practical way. I made sure everything about me I thought might be a red flag for someone out there was featured prominently in my profile:

• Here’s exactly where I am politically, religiously, etc.
• Here’s my real age.
• Here’s my firm disinterest in parenthood.
• Here’s my bisexuality but also my monogamousness, yes those two things can go together.
• Here’s the neighborhood I really live in, not the nearest fashionable one.
• Here are a bunch of weird hobbies and pursuits of mine.
• Here are social and political things about which I’m a vocal activist.
• Here’s some of the art, comedy, and other creative stuff I do, and a bit of the weirder end of my sense of humor.
• Here’s the fact that my username there was also the one I’ve used everywhere online for decades (here included) and I’ve had a pretty active online presence ever since there’s been such a thing, so I’m fairly searchable before you even say hello.
• Here are photos of me I quite like but also some I think I look particularly fat/old/unflattered in, and ones that clearly show off certain things I like to do with my personal style (for example, I’m a cis masculine-presenting guy who wears nail polish.)

In addition to filling the hell out of my profile with all this, I had a lot of fun with the app’s survey questions and generally gave really involved answers.

My attitude on the app was one of blatant honesty. I’d heard so many horror stories about people meeting on dating apps and the person turning out to be nothing like their profile, look nothing like their photo, etc. to the point of false advertising, and I really failed to understand the logic behind that; why lie to someone from the start, as if they won’t actually realize you lied to them when they meet you?

Another important factor for me was that when I got on the app I was just getting back into dating, having recently taken a long break from such things to work on myself and recover from a toxic and abusive relationship. Among other crappy things, my former abuser had spent the duration of our time together disapproving of and trying to force me to change fundamental things about myself in ways that caused me a lot of long-term harm and I was not interested in going through that sort of thing again. I’d rather someone who doesn’t like thing X about me would see that thing on my profile right up front and so choose not to engage with me, rather than have them get interested but find out that deal-breaker thing about me later and be disappointed. I came at it from the angle of saying “hey, I’m here, this is what I’m like, and here’s a bunch of stuff about me you might not like.” I wasn’t necessarily trying to scare people off, but I wanted to see if anyone out there would see all those things about me and still potentially like me.

Long story long, it worked. I got messaged by someone who saw my profile and liked it, I liked hers, and we really clicked from the start. (Our first date was meant to be a quick cup of tea at a cafe, and ended up being many hours of walking and talking around town.) We totally fell for one another, dated, moved in together, got married, and nearly ten years after that first date we’re still ridiculously happy. She is literally my favorite person in the entire world. Her joys and weirdnesses and my joys and weirdnesses mesh together so perfectly, and our relationship has always been based on complete honesty and open communication and sharing. We’ve seen and supported each other through the highest highs, lowest lows, and everything in between. It’s the healthiest, happiest, and closest romance, friendship, and personal relationship of any kind I’ve ever had, and every day we spend together is better than the last. Among a lot of people who know us we’re that obnoxiously-cute couple. We even have podcasts and other creative projects together nowadays, it’s so goddamn gross. 🥰

When I was maybe 13 years old my younger sister and I got paid to clear out trash from the home of a family friend who was a hoarder. This person had enough self-awareness to know it needed to be cleaned out, but didn’t have the spoons to do anything about it and so just gave us the keys and full reign while they spent a week traveling. We dealt with lots of old food, stacks of ancient newspapers and magazines, useless decades-old kitchen gadgets ordered from the Home Shopping Channel and never removed from the boxes, dead mice and their poop, that kind of thing.

In retrospect that was a huge health hazard to be irresponsibly throwing kids into, the job should have been done by a team of expensive trained adults with protective gear rather than two idiot children with some yellow kitchen gloves and lawn-sized trash bags, but we were happy enough for the pocket money at the time.

The DVD for the hacker documentary film Freedom Downtime has tons of fun Easter eggs, but your example reminds me of my favorite which is a hidden audio track. The track is totally silent for the entire film apart from when a man named Dave Buchwald (who produced the DVD) happens to be on screen for a moment, and you hear him say, “hey, that’s me!” Later, during the credits, when Dave’s name comes up he says, “that’s my name!” And that’s the whole track.

While I don’t hate Christmas, my household isn’t Christian and we don’t celebrate it. Of course we know people who do and we’re happy that they’re enjoying it, but the really tedious bit is all the mainstream Christmas marketing and pushes of it as the “norm.”

The fact that the big stores start with the Christmas stuff around September now really gets up our noses.

Psycho Mantis didn’t corrupt your save file, but he would read your memory card and reference other games you’d played. Given the creepy vibes of the scene to begin with, this freaked out many an unsuspecting player.

Closer to OP’s question, there was a villain in Metal Gear Solid 3 named The End, a sniper who was a very old man. If you saved your game during the fight and then waited over a week (in real-world time) before loading the save again, when you returned to the fight you’d find he’d died of old age while waiting for you to do anything.