Elijah

Chicago is by an extremely wide margin the most Central European place outside of Central Europe. I feel like if I went inside half these shops and started addressing people in a sufficiently imperious Viennese accent, some kind of ancestral memory would kick in and they'd start explain to me in Czech/Polish/Ukrainian/Hungarian/Romanian/Serbo-Croat accented German that "I'm sorry Herr Inspector that my nephew has deserted the barracks in Lemberg, but you know how he is - have you checked the local hospitals and brothels?"

McDonald's killed those PlayPlaces on purpose. Drive-thrus now pull 70% of their US sales, and every ball pit was sitting on floor space worth more as a second drive-thru lane. The first PlayPlace ever built, in Chula Vista in 1971, had boosted that store's sales by 63%. Other stores wanted in. By 1991, McDonald's was the biggest playground operator in America with over 3,000 locations. By 2013, the count hit 5,500. Then the way people order changed. Digital orders through the app, self-order screens, and delivery now make up 40% of sales in McDonald's biggest markets. A drive-thru lane and a kiosk keep making money every minute they run, while a ball pit makes nothing and costs a fortune to maintain. The legal bill made it worse. In 1999, McDonald's paid the US Consumer Product Safety Commission $4 million for failing to report more than 400 kids injured on the old Big Mac Climber jungle gym, including 20 with concussions or skull fractures and 80 with broken bones. A 1995 settlement had already cost them $5 million. Insurance costs climbed for stores that still had playgrounds. In 2011, an Arizona researcher tested 50 fast food playgrounds and found dangerous bacteria in 49 of them. COVID gave them cover to finish the job. On March 16, 2020, McDonald's shut every US PlayPlace overnight. By August, CEO Chris Kempczinski told Time magazine: "I don't know if we've got ball pits in our future." That November the company launched "Accelerating the Arches," a multi-billion dollar remodel plan built around drive-thru, delivery, and digital. McDonald's poured $2.4 billion into store upgrades in 2023 alone. Roughly 2,000 more stores are getting major remodels this year. During those same vanishing years, McDonald's total sales grew from $100 billion in 2019 to nearly $130 billion in 2024. That extra $30 billion was built on drive-thru windows and mobile phones while the play areas disappeared.

Facial reconstruction of a 2,500-year-old Scythian from the Dogehe-Baary II site in Tuva The Scythians, also known as the Saka, were an Iranic-speaking people who originated in the regions of Minusinsk, the Altai, Tuva, Mongolia, and Xinjiang. Dogehe-Baary II is located on the right bank of the Biy-Khem (Bolshoy Yenisey), 5 km upstream from its confluence with the Kaa-Khem, and 8 km north of Kyzyl. It belongs to the early stage of the Uyuk-Sagly culture (6th–4th century BC). The site was excavated between 1990 and 2000 by the Central Asian Expedition from the St. Petersburg Institute for Cultural and Natural Legacy, led by K.V. Chugunov (Chugunov, 1994, 1996, 1999a, 2001, 2007; Chugunov, 1998). Dogehe-Baary II represents a group of early nomadic people who lived in Tuva around the 6th to 3rd centuries BC, with the later burials dating to just before the rise of the Huns. Physically, they differed somewhat from earlier nomads in the region. Their skulls were generally longer in shape, and their faces were narrower, though still fairly tall. Their noses tended to project more and had more defined shape, suggesting a shift in facial structure compared to earlier groups. Overall, men and women looked more similar to each other than in some earlier populations, where differences between the sexes were stronger. In the later Dogehe-Baary II burials (mounds 23–25), dated to the transitional phase before the Hunno-Sarmatian period (late 3rd cent. BC), further changes are evident. Cranial size decreases overall, the forehead becomes more sloped, and the face becomes relatively higher but narrower in males. Notably, the relationship between key facial angles becomes inconsistent: smaller nasomalar angles are paired with larger zygomaxillary angles, and in some cases reduced nasal prominence. At the same time, average nasal projection and bone convexity increase. (T.A. Chikisheva, 2008)

See you tomorrow for the third episode 👀

Back in the day, Assassin's Creed 2 was ballsy enough to link Abstergo to the Apollo 11 moon landing by simply looking at the negative of the pic. Really badly need stuff like this back! Major props to AC Wiki for these pics!