Ultimately, Dooku’s status as an apprentice or not is irrelevant because Palpatine never gave a damn about the Rule of Two. Palps is the logical end result of that system - a greedy sociopath who cares only about himself and his own power with no regard to ideology or what happens when he’s gone. Palpatine had Dooku and Maul as apprentices simultaneously while mostly keeping their existences secret from each other because neither of them were intended to replace him, but to be specialized tools with different purposes. Maul was an assassin meant to kill his enemies without being traced back to him, and Dooku was there to stage false-flag attacks so he could increase his political power. Enforcing the Rule of Two on them and making them fight to be his only apprentice would have been detrimental to his personal plans, the Sith as an organization be damned. He was also totally fine with Dooku blatantly violating the Rule of Two by openly training Ventress right up until he thought Dooku and Ventress might be able to overthrow him, at which point he suddenly started enforcing it by making Dooku kill Ventress.

And part of the reason the setting is almost never China in adaptations is that the original 1001 Nights version of the story is very much set in China in name only, with the setting being modeled after the Middle East anyway. I mean, there are two jinns, a sultan, and the sorcerer is from Morocco. And when characters are actually named, they have decidedly non-Chinese names like Mustapha.

Why? Didn’t improve Musk.

Costing…how much?

$1139

Doesn’t matter much in relation to reputational damage.

Early '60s, actually.

He’s banking on being POTUS for the back half of Trump’s term. Trump could keel over any day, but if he’s still alive by New Year’s we’ll almost certainly see Vance try to remove him with the 25th. Once he’s in power, he just needs to be less batshit than Trump for two years and he’ll be in a good position to win an election.

The previous one, Pope Francis, not the current one, who is Pope Leo XIV.

It’s still on old reddit, for some reason.

There’s also the Coptic Church.

Yep.

Anglicanism is sort of Protestantism. It forked off of the Catholic Church after the start of the Protestant Reformation, but wasn’t really part of the movement. The king of England at the time specifically had a problem with the Pope and essentially took over the churches in England, keeping the Catholic traditions and power structure but changing the head of the faith from the Pope to the king. The English monarch is still officially the head of the Anglican Church.

Americans are very much not Anglican and many of the people who emigrated to the colonies were religious minorities from proper Protestant groups.

Most of those probably aren’t maintained well enough to actually be useful. I mean, a few of them probably get used for target shooting every so often, but they probably have most of them just to have them. Like how some people collect action figures, dolls, or cars, some people collect guns.

No he didn’t. The senate voted not to convict.

The Denuvo workaround only runs on Windows and creates the mother of all security holes.

As much as I like B5 and JMS, DS9 was already in preproduction with the suspicious similarities already in place when he pitched the show. Paramount asking him during the pitch if he’d be interested in making it a Trek show was almost certainly an attempt to poach him for DS9, since they saw how similar the core concepts were. Paramount actually got very hands-off with DS9, and I suspect it was to ensure they didn’t let the pitch influence the show and open them up to a lawsuit.

Also, JMS didn’t go to TNT after Paramount, he went to PTEN. PTEN was terribly run and B5 was literally their only show by the time production started on season 4, with PTEN folding during production. TNT picked up the show for season 5, then ordered a sequel show that they immediately got buyer’s remorse on and fucked with so they could cancel it within the terms of the contract.

How much do you need explained? The Star Wars part, the Babylon 5 part, or both?

It’s his cover for why he doesn’t have a real job. If Bruce isn’t wealthy enough to not have to work, then he has to work during the day, fight crime at night, and never sleep. Even Peter Parker has a job with flexible hours to accommodate his Spider-Man time.

However, Peter only has the one gadget, doesn’t even own a car, and barely makes ends meet. Bruce needs a vehicle to get around town and at least a few gadgets and body armor to deal with the fact that he’s outnumbered, even with just normal criminals and not considering supers like Mr Freeze or Poison Ivy. If you’re keeping supers out of the equation, you could probably strip Bruce down to things that you could make in your garage, like reducing the Batmobile to an ordinary car he’s tinkered with a bit, painted black, taken the license plate off of, and ground off the VIN.

You still need to deal with how the hell he funds everything, though. Even with minimal gear, he’s going to need a full time job to afford it all. And if he doesn’t want to advertise who he is and where he’s operating out of, he’s going to need a second location to store his bat-stuff so that his neighbors don’t notice the Batmobile parked in his driveway. You’re probably looking at a small house that he doesn’t live in and another house or an apartment that he does live in without any roommates or renters at either place. Even with this minimal setup, Bruce would need at least $100k a year in income. This means one of the following: a) a well-paying full-time job, which cuts into Batmanning; b) inherited wealth; c) lottery winnings; or d) an extremely successful Only Fans account. The first doesn’t seem viable, the second is what’s already being used, the third just feels contrived, and the fourth, while something I’d probably read for the novelty, is probably really difficult to market.

Absolutely. Judges do not like people pulling stunts in their courtroom, and unless Trump actually goes full dictator by disolving congress, he can’t touch them and they know it. He can’t intimidate them, so all trying does is piss them off. This might cause the conservative members to stop following his playbook so much, but it’s hard to say for sure.

Abrahamic religions typically have suicide as a sin, for example.