Today I Learned

Wow, great job, you save him from suicide... by killing him... 🤦‍♂️

Hall was born Chen Zhi Bo (Chinese: 陈志波) on October 31, 2001, in Shanghai, China. Shortly after his first birthday, he was adopted by Gareth J. Hall and Fe Hall, who are of African and Latino and Filipino descent respectively. He had his name officially changed to Christian Joseph Hall. As a child, he was diagnosed with reactive attachment disorder and later depression.

On December 30, 2020, Hall was dropped off at his workplace at a convenience store by his mother. He walked to an overpass of Pennsylvania Route 33 above Interstate 80 near mile marker 302A, and at 1:30 p.m., Hall called emergency services to report a "suicider", resulting in the arrival of police. Footage of the scene showed him pacing around and clutching what appears to be a gun. Initial reports said Hall placed it on the ground after being ordered to do so, and began negotiating with the officers, but soon picked it up again. Around 1:38 p.m., Hall was shot seven times by the troopers.

He was taken to the Lehigh Valley Hospital-Pocono in East Stroudsburg, where he later died from his injuries.

Initial reports from authorities stated that when the officers told Hall to put the gun on the ground, he complied, but at one point during negotiations, he picked up the gun and pointed it in the direction of the police, causing them to shoot him. A video of the incident with evidence contradicting the claims surfaced in February 2021. The video shows Hall raising his hands before he is shot and falls.

According to his family, Hall reported that he had been experiencing a mental health problem. Fe Hall told WNEP-TV, "He needed help. He was looking for help, but instead of getting help, he was killed in cold blood by those who were supposed to help him." Civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump also stated that Hall was in need of help and seemed to be contemplating suicide.

Also, I think my mom would've read this story and be like: "Is this what you want your future to be?"

Like... the fuck? You think I chose depression? Jesus christ...

Also: I wanna comment on the adoption thing...

Dude must've have an identity crisis lol... I mean I as an ethnic Chinese still have my Bio-parents and I already sort of have an identity crisis for being so young when I arrived in the US...

Him having different ethnicity parents must be extremely confusing coupled with the adoption thing, and being in a white majority country and facing perpetual foreigner stereotype and racism while simultaneously having zero connections to your ancestral culture...

I needed a QR Code generator for a document. After long wandering on the web without finding a QR Code generator that doesn't use a proprietary URL shortener, I discovered that you can easily do it inside LibreOffice.

Author Len Deighton has passed away, and his obituary on the BBC mentioned his novel SS-GB (1977) (I read it in the 80s, and saw the miniseries maybe 8~9 years ago) predated fellow alternate history Fatherland (by Robert Harris, 1992) by multiple years.

I thought "surely The Man in the High Castle (1962) and The Iron Dream (1972) preceded both" and started wondering when was the first alternate history with a Nazi victory.

Turns out it was in 1937! The book was Swastika Night by Katharine Burdekin (although she used the pen name Murray Constantine & the author's true identity was only uncovered in the mid-1980s).

It has been described as "the most original of all the many anti-fascist dystopias of the late 1930s" and contains many elements seen a decade later in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four: the past has been destroyed and history is rewritten, language is distorted, few books exist apart from propaganda, and a secret book is the only witness to the past.

• Internet Archive - Swastika Night

Did Canada really become poorer than Alabama?

Also, Daniel Craig, Karl Urban, N sync, and George Lucas have had cameos in various films of the series.

You take the blue pill, you wake up on your bed, and believe whatever you want to believe.

You take the red pill, you take a big step back, and literally FUCK YOUR OWN FACE.