The trick they do with seedless watermelons is really neat.

Basically, they have strain A of watermelons that produces seeds. They take it, and make strain B by doubling up every chromosome. The chromosomal composition of B is the same as A, so the resulting plant behaves the same and still produces seeds. You can then make offspring plants with one A parent and one B parent, taking half the chromosomes from each - so it gets, for instance 15/30 from A and 30/60 from B. The resulting plant is still chromosomally equivalent to A and B, but it has an odd number of chromosomes - 45. So when it goes to create sex cells (which grow into seeds), it can't, because those require that the chromosomes be evenly split. So it grows fruit that are identical to A/B, but that don't produce seeds.

There's some dropoff over time even against the same strain, but there's also better immune response after more exposures. The first COVID shot was two doses because testing showed a better immune response for two doses at a certain concentration several weeks apart, rather than a larger dose one time.

Influenza is a lot more common and contagious, which gives it much more opportunity to mutate. Often these mutations will allow it to bypass a previous vaccine that was formulated for an older version. So a new vaccine needs to be developed to deal with the new strain.

It doesn't make sense to explain an entire plan and then execute it exactly the way it was explained. That's just poor storytelling. There's a lot of redundancy and no real tension.

If the plan is going to fail, it makes sense to spell it out beforehand, as you can then see more clearly where the breakdown of the plan happens and what goes wrong, without having to take you out of the action to elaborate.

If the plan is going to succeed, the tension comes from trying to figure out how they're going to beat the impossible odds. If everything goes according to plan as they laid it out, that tension is lost. So either you'll get the dialogue of explaining the plan playing over it actually happening, to preserve some mystery, or there will be a surprise reveal that goes counter what it seemed like the plan was supposed to be.

These are obviously tropes, but they're tropes for a reason.

It was actually the third Mummy movie he's cited as having damaged him physically the most. He describes being held together by bandages and painkillers for most of that shoot.

That's right.

It does need to be booted up and awake, which hasn't been an issue for me as I have that computer running continuously for other reasons too (like running an Airsonic media server). But there's some things you can do to have it wakeable when you try to connect: https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam_Link/comments/3r9sv7/using_the_link_with_computer_set_to_sleep/

Android has an app called Steam Link that lets you stream remotely from your PC to your phone. Throw in a Razer Kishi or similar and you have a budget Steam Deck anywhere you have a strong enough internet connection.

Presumably you can do something similar with the actual Steam Deck since it's mostly just Remote Desktop with some extra support.

Kleptomaniacs don't get puns.

They take everything, literally.

I'm not sure this works for grapes, but I know the method they use for watermelons is quite clever.

Sex cells, like sperm and eggs, are made by evenly splitting chromosomes. Humans, for instance, have 46 chromosomes in 23 pairs, and each pair splits off so the sex cell has 23 chromosomes. Those 23 mix with the 23 from another person's sex cells and you end up with the 46 chromosomes that will make a new person.

But if you have an uneven number of chromosomes, you can't split them, and will therefore be sterile and incapable of producing sex cells. This is why mules are (generally) infertile - horses and donkeys have different numbers of chromosomes, so while they can reproduce and make a mule, that mule has an odd number of chromosomes and is sterile.

So for watermelons, what they've done is taken a strain and engineered it to have doubled chromosomes. Rather than have 30, for instance (I don't recall the exact number of chromosomes they have but it's not strictly relevant), it has 60, with every chromosome just duplicated. So the genetic makeup is the same and the fruit is exactly the same. They can breed the normal watermelons with other normal watermelons and the doubled watermelons with other doubled watermelons, and either of those results in seeded fruit, which they can use to keep growing the next generation.

But when they cross the two, the resulting melon has an odd number of chromosomes (in the example above it'd have 15 from one parent and 30 from the other for 45 total). It's still got the usual genetic makeup and grows as normal, but as it can't form sex cells, it doesn't develop seeds.

Butcher is a master of the long game.

In Dead Beat (book 7), Dresden is being attacked by a former Denarian, and is in dire straits, and is lamenting "Where's Michael, where's the Knights of the Cross?" Who should show up to save his ass? >!Butters!< We don't think much of this at the time, as that's a character who was already involved in this situation.

But then, in Skin Game (book 15), >!Butters takes up one of the Swords and becomes a Knight of the Cross!<.

It's not as long of a gap as yours, but it's considerable foreshadowing of a major event, and not just a throwaway line into associated gag.

Clearly he listened to Rihanna enough to recognize it, straight to hell.

I like the trend of turning the trope on its head. Like the one about the blonde who takes out a loan with her car as collateral in order to get economical parking.

There's also

"Why are blonde jokes so short? So men can remember them"

Anything can be an unidentified flying object if you're bad enough at identifying flying objects.

Caffeine is a diuretic in moderate amounts (2-3 cups of coffee) though habitual users develop a tolerance against this effect.

In a little over a week, we'll see this reposted with 3 years. 5 days later, it'll be reposted with 2 years. By the end of November, every post on this sub will be:

"What's the difference between a job and a wife?

The job sucks."