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Re "why we don’t have anything better": is LoC classification actively worse? I'm not trying to debate their relative merits, just trying to get a sense of what you think of them comparatively. Both have kind of had to adapt a bit over time.

But there's one I keep stumbling upon which I _think_ is New English Library, but it's definitely trying very hard not to be fun. Murder is a big deal, y'all, and the NEL wants you to know these are Serious Books for Serious People.

Harper's design seems very American, and very mid-90s. I feel like if I had a brain injury where I couldn't decipher text and I saw these, I'd reckon the author was Carl Hiaasen or Elmore Leonard or something: still crime stories and funny, but a bit more gonzo and a bit less British.

Hachette also keeps things lighthearted, except that they include a little spray of blood to remind you these are murder stories. They have a very consistent style. Notice how they _also_ have a monocle, albeit a stylized one.

Open Road Media definitely leans towards "silly and fun", but their trade dress is weirdly inconsistent, with a complete changeover in style from _Have His Carcase_ to _Murder Must Advertise. Both are basically lighthearted though; the "empty suit" design particularly seems to fit the style.

Apropos of nothing, looking at trade dress for various editions of the Lord Peter Wimsy stories. It's interesting because they're both murder mysteries — and thus gritty — but also moderately comic, with the central character being a faintly Wodehousian upper-class twit, and art can go either way.

I unfairly identify Ashland with the horrifyingly industrial site on the Big Sandy River welcoming me back into Kentucky's smothering embrace when traveling on I-64 from West Virginia. It's unfair because even though the highway exit is "Ashland", Ashland is 8 miles north and presumably less ugly.

datacenter "projects" progress to the stage of becoming real, working datacenters. www.wheresyoured.at/where-are-al...

FWIW, they (for whatever value of "they" you have in mind) actually can't. Ed Zitron, among others, has noted how few

As a notable example, a large enough jackpot makes a Powerball ticket have positive net EV, but it's _still_ not a winning idea to buy one, and an even worse idea to buy several thousand, because all that value is jammed into a single, extremely-low-probability outcome.

The third book was conspicuously the high-water mark of the series. After that she got too big for editors, too big for pagecount limits, and indulged her worst lore-development impulses, resulting in bloated, poorly written works far too into their own shoddy worldbuilding.

Between this and the discovery that solar panel shade can actually _increase_ certain crop yields, people are discovering that there are truly extraordinary opportunities to make better use of the earth's surface area with solar panels. There's so much power waiting to be harnessed!

For historical buildings, decorative swastikas are unsettlingly common. The Ny Carlsberg Glypotek in Copenhagen is a gorgeous sculpture museum and, like, there's a swastika on every ceiling. It was built in the 19th century and trade dress for Carlsberg beer had a lot of swastikas, so...

Or a windmill. Windmills are good.

I don't even know what it is, and now _I_ want a mangerine for snack.

"Also seemed pretty sure that there aren't many swayable Republicans" Not with that attitude, no.

It's fascinating that Anthony's work is hardcore sketchy, but every fan interaction he had was apparently wholesome and kind. Apparently within the industry he had a reputation as a pain in the ass to peers, but his deportment towards fans was entirely not what his writing would lead you to expect.

Even if you had an oddball version I don't know, I'd venture you're misremembering the bottom-of-screen travel picture, because Apple // graphics tended not to work that way (split-screen modes were usually text-on-bottom for technical reasons, especially with text that scrolled).

Almost surely the MECC 1985 release, and absolutely so if it had actual graphics for travel and hunting. There were lots of Apple //e variants, mostly off of the MECC '75 version (which was in BASIC and spawned homebrew customizations), but they were all text with occasional lo-res graphics.

"Original" is a difficult target because there were a lot of variants (official and unofficial) floating around from the dawn of computing. The 1985 MECC Apple // version is iconic, but it's not the first. The 1975 MECC release is on the Internet Archive but the oldest known version is from 1971.