You make it sound like folks had a choice.

Of course they had a choice. They could choose to become violent enforcers of the empire’s will, or suffer state violence a thousand times milder than what they were being asked to commit. It’s not like they were being black bagged and dragged to the front to be thrown into a meatgrinder without training or equipment, like Ukraine has been doing. They were told “go and murder for our vanity, for our dominion over all things, or sit in this box for a few years” and they chose to go do violence and bring horror and death to innocent people on the other side of the world instead of sitting in a cage for a few years.

Rich failsons tended to be given safe and cushy posts, and even beyond that most American soldiers in Vietnam survived. Literally no one should join the US military ever. It is always a worse thing to do than not doing it is.

Hypocrisy literally does not matter, GOP hogs do not have shame or moral beliefs, they do not have principles, they are literally just ravening demons wearing human skin who subsist on suffering and death and who do not perceive material reality or remember what they had for breakfast this morning. You’re not owning them by accusing them of at one point doing the less bad thing when moral consistency would suggest they should have done the more evil thing which they advocate for, because they don’t care, literally no one cares.

It’s really fun watching what the executive branch can do when it’s committed to grafting. Like there are literally no guardrails in place. It’s hilarious.

It’s wild watching the status quo go from “well, uh, you see [insert form of corruption] is actually fully legitimate and ok because you see these crime papers were rubber stamped in triplicate and everyone pinky promised to be a good boy, which you can see was notarized here, so it’s all good and normal,” to “well sure, president crimes is just stuffing money in a big cartoon money sack and bragging about how much crime he’s doing, but you know there’s no law that says the president can’t do crimes so it’s all good and normal.”

Deeply unserious country innovates new ways to go even deeper and become even less serious.

it isn’t productive.

it better not be.

Cranking your hog for somewhat longer than is typically considered socially acceptable, as a hobby.

undersocialized young men that don’t know how to interact with people.

You don’t even need the “undersocialized” or “young” qualifiers there. However the volcel police meme started back on the old sub it was quickly weaponized to target the sort of omnipresent low-level sexual harassment that creeps do all over reddit and it’s managed to persist past the death of the sub and multiple ground shifts in site culture here because it works at suppressing that.

This picture must be really old

I’m pretty sure I saw it back in like 2009 or earlier.

That manga would actually be good if a) the author understood/textually acknowledged that Mahiro is the most trans character to ever exist, and b) it completely dropped the thing where like half the chapters (especially the later ones) are just a setup for some character pissing themself.

this image is doing me psychic damage.

I’ve been looking at this closer, and it’s a boat launch squeezed into the margins between the river and some vacant paved lot that’s fenced off. What got paved was the existing parking lot and access road, while some effort was made to block off and restore another section where people had clearly also been driving onto and presumably parking on.

There’s a much larger, nicer looking park across the water with a tiny parking lot and pedestrian and bike access from both sides of the river.

It looks like it’s a boat launch. Google maps still shows the pre-renovation version, and it looks like the parking lot actually got smaller overall (that bit in the northwest that shows a paved trail in the renovated version was dirt/gravel and had road access and tire tracks, so it looks like that was another parking area) and the pier for the boat launch was rebuilt. That’s why it has those weird, very long parking spots on one side: they’re for cars with boat trailers.

what doesn’t go on beans’n’rice?

Hakarl, probably.

For a non-joke answer, I’d say cheese. I know cheese on rice is a thing in some places, but every time I’ve had it it’s been very unpleasant, like the texture and flavor just clash so horribly. A jam would be weird too, and probably worse than just mixing in whatever fruit it was made from. Mashed potatoes would probably be a weird blend, and worse than mixing in chunks/sticks of fried potato.

I guess most of those are more like “if you prepare this blend of ingredients wrong it won’t be good” than ingredients clashing, though, apart from the cheese one. So that’s what I’m going with: cheese is not a good pairing with rice and beans.

I think they mostly start as like semi-free web fiction being published chapter by chapter, and the most popular ones get turned into actual light novels with some backing which can then later be picked up by a mangaka and/or turned into an anime series if they’re popular enough. That’s why the titles are basically a story pitch and why there’s so much “genre fiction, with a twist” that come out of it: they’re trying to at once appeal to a popular genre audience while at the same time standing out from the crowd.

Certain news sites and video hosts get embedded like this. I don’t know if those sites are returning a different sort of embed data when hexbear tries to fetch something about them or if they’re being handled in a special way, but it’s been like this for a while now. I kind of trust that the lemmy/hexbear fork devs have done something to stop the embedding from being a security risk since I’d expect an outcry and the feature to be disabled otherwise, but it does kind of sketch me out every time I see it.

It was pretty much the same for me. Both my parents were big Star Wars nerds so I did see the movies and got a ton of the EU books, but even there if you don’t know what to look for it’s just like “oh they’re the bad guys, they’re doing bad guy stuff that opposes the protagonists, and some of them do cartoon villain stuff sometimes but mostly it’s just this team vs team thing where you’re rooting for the POV characters.” I don’t remember any of that slop ever really conveying how realistically awful those cartoon bad guys were, although at the same time that’s not really something that fluffy pop culture media can necessarily do on its own since it relies on knowing the broader context in which a work was made.

Like how a lot of the Empire’s casual atrocities that do make it into the OT are just like things the US was regularly doing in Vietnam, except Americans in general neither know nor think about that and wouldn’t just casually make the association.

I just realized I’d gotten sidetracked and left out part of what I wanted to say, which was to tie it into how satire isn’t something that changes minds so much as it is entertainment and reinforcement for people who already understand and agree with it, and how in that lens Star Wars communicates its point clearly: the Fascist-coded genocidal maniac Empire are obviously intrinsically bad and alluding to several real-world powers, which is clear to anyone who’s the least bit politically literate. But it’s also fun, accessible slop for everyone who’s not, which is most people, and its general themes and style have been further copied by more incoherent and vapid works (including within the Star Wars franchise itself) to the point that people don’t really think about it beyond a sort of “the Sith/Empire wears the designated villain sign, the Jedi/Republic/Rebels wear the designated good guy sign, and which one you stan is a silly aesthetic sportsball choice of strawberry or blue-raspberry flavored lightsaber shaped gummies” level.

This is one of my major criticisms of Star Wars: Lucas relied way more on aesthetics and narrative tension to simply designate the Empire as cartoon antagonists for his fluffy space opera samurai western about the Vietnam war. The whole tone is outlandish and unreal, and the Empire you see is just a sort of sinister and mustache twirling threat to the protagonists while all their arbitrary violence happens offscreen to characters that generally don’t even have screentime.

And I mean media doesn’t have to be deep and thorough or contain harrowing explorations of just why the villains should in fact be considered ontologically evil, but Star Wars is this cultural juggernaut yet is almost entirely just this shallow, light and fluffy slop where aesthetics are everything and the villains’ evil is just implied or kept somewhere in the background. Then this intersects with a broader sort of “villains are cool and have agency while heroes are just dumb nerds fighting to preserve someone else’s status quo” zeitgeist that finds fertile ground in the brain dirt of American treat lads because of how it’s the natural conclusion to draw when looking at how in slop media antagonists are the primary agents of change while heroes must be reluctant and selfless agents of the status quo, not to mention how the powerful and self-actualized villain is an ideal power fantasy for some amoral libertine treat lad.

I’ve been using white, but it is just about the acid and how it chemically reacts with the potato. Just a splash in the water does it, you don’t need a ton to get the effect. I’ve never bothered to measure how much I’m pouring in but it’s maybe around 1/4 to 1/3 cups worth at the most.

If you chop them into sticks, wedges, or chunks first and then blanch them in simmering water with salt and vinegar for about ten minutes, you can just toss them in some spices and fry them in a pan/wok or bake them until browned. This also works for sweet potatoes.

The vinegar toughens up the outermost layer, making the outside firm and crispy and leaving the inside soft and tender without the need for deep frying.

Some people get a soap taste instead of the peppery citrus taste when eating cilantro.

Is it a categorically different taste, or is it that some people perceive a bitter taste to it that then makes the citrus notes seem like the citrus scent that’s used in a lot of soaps?

I’ve consistently heard that Yamaha is the best option for sub $1000 guitars. They’re not the best looking guitars, but they just have solid build quality and can be relied on to work correctly as an instrument, have no particular issues, and tend to hold up to wear and tear well.

Both of my guitars are cheap Yamahas: the acoustic has held up to 15 years of use with minimal maintenance without any issues (although its action is a bit high and I haven’t wanted to fuck with trying to fix that myself), and the electric is newer but I have no complaints about it and only a few things on my “I will see about adjusting this the next time I’m restringing it” like the neck is set just a little bit wrong and I haven’t bothered setting up the floating bridge yet.