Now is this a panic room or is this the LDS bunker for the White Horse prophecy apocalypse where they hide for a year before emerging to rule the survivors?
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Okay, so weâd still know there is a secret library in a building owned by a company, because the company still has to file building plans, and we could still FOIA those records - we just wouldnât know on whose behalf the company is acting.
Itâs where heâs going to create a microcosm of the the imaginar,y 1950s America he wanted to createâthe one in which women knew their place, and 49% of the country wasnât looking for a handout.
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In a rental house I once lived in, we discovered a room behind a swinging bookcase in the basement rec-room. It was under the front porch. The owner-landlord next door didnât know about it until we found it. We had gotten permission to remove the built-in bookcase, and discovered the room (with working pull-chain overhead light) empty except for a dusty steamer trunk in the corner. We broke the lock on the steamer trunk and opened it to find ---- it was empty.
More recently I discovered a hidden room in my own house. I was drawing out a floor-plan, and there was this 4sqM extra space bounded by closets and corners of other rooms.
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I think this was covered in the movie Donnie Darko⌠Itâs his âJim Cunninghamâ room⌠probably with a big velvet painting of himself by that McNaughton guy.
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Diana, donât leave us hanging here! What did you find in that secret room?
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If youâre building a custom house, why wouldnât you put in a secret, hidden room? I mean, jeez, a room behind a bookcase == awesome!
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I think a lot of modern homes have a small utility cores for duct work.
I hope they left enough head room in the car elevator for the dog.
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Bookcases are so obvious. Millionaires need to start hiding their secret rooms behind something more modern, like a rack of CDs.
Or a rack of thumb drives.
Or the Cloud.
Yes, thatâs it . . . hide your secret room behind a misty cloud bank that hovers in the corner of rhe room. And donât publish the API. Find THAT Scooby Do!
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I was just thinking, about a half hour ago, about the multitudes of laborers (slaves, I guess) who would have been doing the physical labor of constructing all the enormous monuments and castles and things in our favorite works of epic fiction. I mean, any of those that would have been inspired by the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World like the Colossus of Rhodes and the Great Pyramid of Giza. Such as the Argonath:
Or the Wall of the North:
Or the Mojave Outpost monument in Fallout: New Vegas:
Or any given city, tower keep, castle, or dungeon among the scores of them in Skyrim:
I mean, any number of these would, in the absence of any remotely modern construction technology, have required thousands of manual laborers working around the clock for decades, if not centuries. Sure, some of them may have been subsequently put to the sword in order to keep safe the secret of the Pharaohâs tomb or the sneaky traps guarding the treasure:
But surely not all of them. That would be pretty wasteful of oneâs constituency. Without the smallfolk, what do kings have to lord it over? So I thought it might be fun to tell the story of one of the laborers working on something like the Argonath. He spends his workday hauling big stones over those giant feet and at nightfall when his shift ends he goes back to his tent at the labor camp, kisses the missus, plays with the kids, falls asleep. (Iâm rather stupidly assuming heâs a reasonably well-compensated contractor rather than a slave, obviously.) And when heâs done with one Wonder, he moves on to the next. Every now and then heâll set his hammer down, mop his brow, and watch a small boatload of heroes float past on their way to saving Middle-Earth or whatever. Heâll wish them well (or accidentally-on-purpose drop his hammer on their heads), and resume his labors. Whistling, maybe. No epic adventures for this guy. He just enjoys the feeling of working with his hands, and the satisfaction of a Titan well-built.
Really, just imagining a crew of laborers building the Batcave seems so⌠I dunno, itâs a great question. I always think of that when I hear or read about somebodyâs grandfather who âbuiltâ their ancestral manse, or the frontier pioneer who âbuiltâ a given town, or the king who âbuiltâ such-and-such castle. I assume none of those guys âbuiltâ anything. Well, maybe Grandpa did, depending on how big the house is and how handy he was, but otherwise âcommissionedâ would be more accurate.
No doubt much of the superstructure of the Batcave was just natural formation, but the rest of the stuff in there would have taken Bruce Wayne an awfully long time to design, manufacture, and install, even with the able assistance of an elderly butler and a strapping young ward or two. Since Batman wouldnât employ slave labor, nor would he kill anyone to guard his secrets, weâre forced to assume that he did all the work himself. You know, in between fighting crime and being a billionaire playboy philanthropist.
That may just be the stupidest part of Batmanâs mythology.
Huh. Sorry, guys. Back to Mitt Romneyâs secret file stash.
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Bravo!
Think of the independent contractors!
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Damn. How did I ever forget that one? Possibly the biggest construction project in the galaxy?
Now thereâs a follow-up to Badass Space Dragon: youâre a bunch of contractors building the Death Star II. Manage your resources and try to get it built before the Rebel scum take out the shield generator and infiltrate the superstructure to take out the main reactor! At the very least, collect your fees and GTFO before your hard work goes kablooey!
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Yeah, it really is one of the areas that you have to suspend your disbelief much more than anything else. Yet hardly anyone ever brings it up.
In defense of skyrim though, the fiction does explain where and why and how those barrows/temples are scattered all over the place. The dragon priests had their worshippers build them as a way to keep them alive eternally. Draugers are the followers that built/prayed at those barrows, even in undeath.
The wall in game of thrones bothered me more than anything else on that list. Itâs one of the few situations where I hope itâs explained away by magic. Magic would actually be more plausible than a technologically medieval society building a 500ft wall across a continent.
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Donât forget to put a grate over that exhaust port this time as well.
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I dunno⌠Skyrim really strains my suspension of disbelief. I mean I can swallow the spells and the dragons and the werewolves and the giants and all the magical horsepucky. Even the ancient extinct race of Dwarves with their proto-robotic technology.
But Skyrim is the most ridiculously hollowed-out terrain Iâve ever seen. There seems to be just as much square footage of livable space underground as there is aboveground. Those catacombs go on for miles!
As for the Wall, well, itâs a narrow continent there. Itâs only 300 miles long, but 700 feet high. So itâs something like 25 times as tall as the Great Wall of China, but less than 5% of its length. If the Giants did help, Iâd buy it.
If the giants helped they sure got shafted.
âThanks for the help guys, but, uh, this is kind of awkward⌠stay on the other side or weâll kill you.â
And yeah, youâre right, skyrim does have tons of underground tunnels, but I always felt that the outdoors in elder scrolls games were to scale, while the dungeons not so much.
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Oh, great, so now we all know about it? You mean, Mitt Romney had those contractors put to death for nothing???
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It wasnât for nothing. Theyâll serve him well building his manor in the mormon after life.
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