Now that summer is officially here, what are the four reggae/Cali reggae albums that may not be your favorite album of all time (or even artist favorite) but it's one's that are the perfect summer album.
This was hard and so many good albums were left off but for me:
Slightly Stoopid - Closer to the Sun
Dirty Heads - Cabin by the Sea
Bob Marley - Legend
The Elovaters - Endless Summer

I recently got my first car, and while I won't be going on a road trip with it anytime soon (I'll need to do some city driving with it and check for problems), I've always thought that planning ahead is always a good idea. I've always found the US to be a fascinating place to explore with a car, it's so vast, and has many things to offer and see. Is it a good idea to do a road trip solo?
I live in Canada, and would enter the US through the border crossing near Champlain, New York. I have a list of places I would like to see, and it ranges from specific locations to broad areas, sorry if it's messy, I made it off the top of my head.
The list is as follows, in more or less the order I would like to visit:
-Plattsburgh, New York -Hildene, The Lincoln Family Home, Vermont -Cathedral Ledge, New Hampshire -Marginal Way, Maine -Melrose, Massachusetts -Cape Ann, Massachusetts -Provincetown, Massachusetts -Newport Car Museum, Rhode Island -Mystic Seaport Museum, Connecticut -Gettysburg National Military Park, Pennsylvania -Independence Hall, Pennsylvania -New York City, New York -Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia -Washington D.C., Virginia -National Museum of the US Air Force, Ohio -Stone Mountain, Georgia -Athens, Tennessee -Tarpon Springs, Florida -Cape Canaveral, Florida -Goldee’s Barbecue, Fort Worth, Texas -Kenton, Oklahoma -White Sands National Park, New Mexico -South Unit, North Dakota -Mount Rushmore, South Dakota -Glacier National Park, Montana -Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming -Grand Canyon, Arizona -Monument Valley, Arizona -Zion National Park, Utah -Yosemite National Park, California -Redwood Forest, California
Routes to drive:
-U.S. Route 50 -U.S Route 395
As you can see, I really like places with scenery and historical significance. You'll realize that there aren't many cities on this list, that's because I'm not particularly a fan of them, but I wouldn't mind visiting more population centers to see more interesting things. Any other recommendations and tips will be greatly appreciated.

I would like a desk ornament-sized print of Mount Rushmore with Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell included as a fifth person. I suspect Powell would fit best in the open space to the side of Washington, but am open to design suggestion. The object should fit comfortably on a desk, so maybe 6-8 inches wide x 3-5 inches tall. Smaller is better, though I want to make sure it's easy to distinguish Powell's features. I suggest using an image of Powell with his glasses on - this is easy to Google but I can provide examples if needed. Any white-ish or neutral color resembling South Dakota granite would be fine. I would like 3 copies of this print in my initial order, and may be interested in additional copies depending on pricing. Please provide a price quote for 3 copies, and let me know if there would be any volume discount for an order of 10. Thank you!

One Piece is Minecraft. Uranus pushes blocks down, Pluton pushes them up. Poseidon moves then around. Pluton put Jaya up in the sky. Uranus put Lulusia and Ennies Lobby at the bottom of the sea. Poseidon pulled everything together to make the red line and Pluton pushes it all up. Joyboy wanted to make one continent where everyone could live together in peace. He wanted to Mount Rushmore the whole thing with wacky adventures in pictogram. The summer, winter, jungle, viking, Spanish, bubble islands are all vacation spots for everyone to enjoy. The whole world is a giant amusement park. The grand line is a cruise ship tour. Reverse mountain is splash mountain to enter the whole ride. The twenty kingdoms didn't want to lose their power, their control over their part of the world. Joyboy forming one unified nation was a threat to their sovereignty, who was he to decide the fate of the whole world? They fought, he lost, but the world was already shaped into his personal Minecraft server. They couldn't allow their citizens to live in the red line and realize they were all equal people with hopes dreams and goals. They took residence and ruled from above. That's the natural order, the haves and the have nots. But the damage was done. The world was changed. Even devil fruits were already released. A technology that allowed one to be anything they wanted while touring the grand line, the technology to safely remove the dream was lost and instead it stays with the user for life. The hopes and dreams had to be vilified, demonized. The devil fruits are the accursed product of another way of life, not of the proper natural order of rulers and and kingdoms. Joyboy dreamed of what could have been if everyone was equal and free to live their dreams. The mermaids, the giants, the long legs,the long arms, the tontatas, all a fantastic evolution made possible by advanced technology, temporarily for fun, but now permanent with no way to remove the 'costume'. The world government won, but they don't have the know-how to return the word to its natural order. They are left with the wacky amusement park Joyboy created, the world of One Piece.

In a discussion I was having with a friend about old music, we came onto the subject of the [honestly, I think, not super well-known] big band-era entertainer, Ted Lewis. (Apparently aka "Mr. Entertainment".)
As a flippant comment, one of us joked that Ted Lewis was deserving of recognition as one of the great artists in the pantheon of popular music, and that there should be a Mount Rushmore that features him and, after a brief bit of deliberation, the 3 other legends spanning generations of music: Glen Campbell, Michael Jackson, and Taylor Swift. (None of this should be taken seriously.)
Anyway this seemed like a trivial throwaway task that any image AI should be able to accomplish: make an image of Mount Rushmore but with the presidents' faces replaced with those of Ted Lewis, Glen Campbell, Michael Jackson (any era), and Taylor Swift.
The first hitch was that most AI prompts seem to disallow you from creating art from real people. Or at least specific real people. We've tried a few ways to get around this, mostly: (a) Identify which, if any, of the people are not disallowed and (b) for any personas that are not allowed, verbally describe them in detail.
The results have been shockingly poor, however. It mostly ignores several details from the prompts. For instance, the result might give us a Mount Rushmore with 4 reasonably-passable Taylor Swift analogues and nobody else. Other times, it will misinfer details based on some other part -- e.g. if I describe Ted Lewis as "a clean-shaven man with a long face and large nose wearing a top hat tilted to the side", I might get essentially a bearded Abraham Lincoln type because he's wearing a top hat.
We've tried breaking the prompt into several parts, where over the course of 4 questions we develop a character ("The next character will be a broad-faced, clean-shaven country-western singer from the 70s with large lapels and a big swoop of brown hair. We'll call him 'Glen'.") and then LLM will respond appropriately, ("Got it! 'Glen' is a cowboy western singer who might be found riding the range with only his guitar." or something.)
Then we'd ask it to take all four characters and put each one onto Mount Rushmore. And lo and behold, all the detail is typically lost. Sometimes we'll see snippets of the characters as-described, but never anything close to what we're looking for.
We initially started joking about this almost a year ago and it's become a "thing" now where every few months we'll try again, usually with a different model (or version of a model). Nothing has ever come anywhere close to what we request. Frequently the results are... chilling.
I'm curious if there's something fundamentally difficult about this request, or if the difficulty is in our own lack of aptitude in generating a suitable prompt.
If the former, I strongly (and tongue-in-cheekily) propose that the "Ted Lewis, Glen Campbell, Michael Jackson, Taylor Swift on Mount Rusnmore" request become a standard Turing Test-style benchmark for assessing the quality of image generation AI.

I’m kinda curious what everyone’s Mount Rushmore of shmups would be. They aren’t necessarily the best, but the ones you think represent the foundations of the shmup genre. You can use series if it makes more sense. I separate mine into horizontal and vertical:
Horizontal: R-Type series, Gradius series, Darius series, Cotton series
Vertical: Xevious, DoDonpachi Series, Aleste Series, Galaga
How about yours?

He’s out on Eminem because he dyes his hair and beard as a 50-year-old and that’s dumb apparently … meanwhile, EB dresses like a 14-year-old, hides his hair with hats every day and uses slang he made up decades ago … but yeah, it’s Eminem clinging to his youth, huh. Dude has zero self-awareness lol

IASIP takes a spot, so what other three tv comedies would you put on your personal Mount Rushmore?
Also, which president would Sunny be? I'm thinking Roosevelt since he established numerous bird reservations around the country, thus paving the way for bird rights and bird law.

4 years in and I wanna who know who do you thing are the 4 best wrestlers of this decade
My picks
Men: Roman, Seth, Cody, and Sami (Kevin and Bobby are honorable mentions)
Women: Bianca, Rhea, Bayley, and Becky (Iyo and Liv are honorable mentions)

I’d put:
• Face/Off
• Leaving Las Vegas (Oscar)
• The Rock
What else?

In P4, as the FBI team was on its way to Yankton Federal Prison, driving a black 2003 Lincoln Town Car, Tammy was showing signs of unwell.

Albert: "Agent Preston gets carsick."

An episode earlier, Mr C was driving that same Lincoln, curiously, and also he got sick in the car. This time, there was no Albert explaining why that was. Or perhaps it was this scene that he really explained to us.
After losing the control of the vehicle and flipping it around, Mr C put both of his hands on his mouth, trying not to vomit, but there was nothing he could do to stop keep things in. Then, he passed out.
In P5, carsick-prone Tammy was working late in her cubicle. Attached on the wall, there was a picture of the Washington Monument - not the obelisk in Washington but the equestrian statue in Philadelphia bearing the same name. An interesting detail to pay attention to was that when Mr C appeared from behind the hill in P3, just before falling ill, his Lincoln was framed together with a warning sign for horseback riders.
She was in the company of Lincoln and Washington.
The more famous Washington Monument, the obelisk, is usually photographed together with the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool which is in front of it. Throughout Return, there were all kinds of references to Lincoln from the president's head on Mount Rushmore to coins and bills decorated with his features, to a Lincoln look-alike Woodsman, to Lincoln branded cars and even to Lincoln logs on Hawk's table.
In addition to these obvious ones, there probably were more hidden Lincoln references. We'd probably have one in Tammy's cubicle.
Next to the picture of the Washington Monument, Tammy didn't have a pool, though. Instead, she had another kind of rectangular item, the screen of her Apple iMac. She had multiple files open but there was a glimpse of the screen's black & blue world map background that had the likeness of the nighttime surface of water.
On the screen, there was Cooper's fingerprint record file open. Tammy had the fingerprints also on paper. As she lifted a printed one to have a look at it, there was an impression of reflection, as if the paper in her hand was mirrored on the screen.
If the iMac's screen was used as an abstraction of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, duly next to the cubicle's Washington Monument, then Apple's logo - the apple with a bite out of it - was possibly in reference to President Lincoln's well-documented love of apples. Blatant product placement was nicely repurposed to work for the story.
These observations would come on top of another extreme twist that Tammy had Cooper's now idle doppelganger right there, appearing as the photograph of the disheveled Mr C. The photograph was attached to a form but when she lifted it from the table, she briefly touched the picture.
As it seems, all doppelgangers were mindless beings that needed someone to ride them before they were of any use. Season 2 may have ended with Windom Earle's soul possessing Cooper's doppelganger, these two joined by BOB who also hitched a ride with them. At some later point, Earle would have vacated the doppelganger, willingly or unwillingly, after which someone else could have taken him over.
A such moment to get Cooper's doppelganger a new rider seems to have been Red and Richard's meeting in P6. Just before the scene started, it seems that Red had given Richard the doppelganger, the possession taking a little time to move Richard to another world where he would have appeared as Mr C.
At this point of the story then, Tammy's character would somehow have got the doppelganger, abstracted to a photograph of him. Her evening in the cubicle ended with her lifting her right hand to her mouth. Yet, just as the scene cut, it turned to her left hand. When Mr C got sick in his Lincoln, he lifted both of his hands on his mouth, trying not to vomit.
They don't tell you everything you can do with your iMac.
Perhaps Tammy wanted to take a ride with the doppelganger, or maybe that was going to happen anyway after her finger slipped on the picture. Later in P17, when the doppelganger was lying dead on the floor in Twin Peak's Sheriff's station, Cooper sternly warned not to touch him. Since touching the idle doppelganger had consequences and if the picture of the doppelganger she touched indeed was the doppelganger himself, that likely meant she would be getting on a ride.
Turning to the doppelganger seems to have taken the possessor to new places. The pairing of Tammy's iMac with Washington on a horse linking to the famous pairing of Lincoln and Washington in DC would now reflect the pairing of another kind of Lincoln with another kind of horseback rider. Her iMac would have become the black Lincoln Town Car while Washington would have remained on his horse, now in a warning sign. Her office would have disappeared and turned into the highway, surrounded by barren hills that were dotted with dried bushes like the forms on her screen and desk were dotted with fingerprints.
Then, she would have got sick. She just didn't do too well being in a moving car, and having a doppelganger wasn't going to fix that.
The point in all this would come from another connected scene. In P8, a strange entity credited as the Experiment floated in space. Also she got ill and threw up. Among the vomit, there were a black ball with BOB's head inside as well as something that looked like a potato, its surface dotted with black stains like the fingerprint cards or the bushy hills. Going back to Tammy in the cubicle, just as the scene cut, she was framed together with some document on the wall behind her, the seal of which looked like a black ball.
Someone wanted to free BOB, or at least what was left of him.
When the doppelganger left the Black Lodge in the season 2 finale, it also had BOB on the same ride, in addition to likely being controlled by Earle, returning to the world as Agent Cooper. If Tammy had got the doppelganger under her control, she would need to have gone through BOB as well. As a sign that she indeed had gone just that, her vomiting in the car as Mr C would have made her other existence as the Experiment throw up as well, revealing that this powerful monster had not only cut BOB's head off but also swallowed it.
We had naturally not seen any such fight between the doppelganger and BOB versus the Experiment. It is possible, however, that we got to hear it in P13, fought off screen in what appeared to us as a Las Vegas police station where some woman screamed at certain "twinkies" she would cut their nuts off. This lady would have been the Experiment while the nuts a pair of heads, one that of BOB and the other appearing later as the potato. When the Experiment got sick, these heads would have slipped from her grip and escaped.
This twist would have solved the rather pressing problem that BOB's original actor Frank Silva was not around any more, and they needed to either recast the role or spend a large amount of money to animate his likeness digitally. Apparently the money was enough to animate just his head, and so they decided to have his character decapitated and let his lose head do the remaining terrorising.
Tammy would now be connected to the Experiment, in addition to having already been linked to Judy. Having crashed the car and passed out, she probably lost the control of the doppelganger and found herself somewhere else. Wondering were she would have gone next we need to remember Cole's wisdom that cossacks are in Russia, his mishearing of carsick.
No touching, or you'll be all right!
Cooper told not to touch dead Mr C. When two highway Troopers arrived on the scene of the car wreck, Mr C was still in the car, and he hadn't woken up. The first Trooper went to check on the driver and reached inside. Immediately, he fell under the influence of something bad and collapsed on the ground. The second Trooper was alarmed.

Second Trooper: "What the hell, Billy?"

That name got a lot of strangely undue attention later on so what was going on here should have been of importance. The Second Trooper pushed his struggling partner Billy up and walked him back to their car.

Second Trooper: "Come here. You'll be all right."

That was the last we saw of Billy but that was probably because soon he wasn't Billy any more. Much later in P17, Mr C was sitting in Sheriff Truman's office. Andy was excited to see Cooper again, and we got a hint who their guest really was.

Andy: "Would you like a cup of coffee?" Mr C: "No, thanks. I'm all right."

Apparently the vacated doppelganger got yet another rider in Billy when the Trooper leaned in to touch passed-out Mr C, kicking off the process to take him somewhere else.