I am mega noob but I like this game so I’ll meet ya’ll there.

You’re gonna fee real bad when a republican uses this precedent to bend the rules and use naked power to do something bad!

While individuals can find space for weight loss regimes, it really is a society-level problem.

Consider an experiment with two populations of rats. One population gets a normal amount of food, the other gets the same food with a bunch of added sugar. Of course the population with added sugar gets fatter. But, while the average rat may have gained 10% weight or whatever, on an individual level you’ll see a wide range of results - some rats aren’t effected by the increased sugar, some gain a small amount of weight, some gain a lot.

This is basically exactly what we’ve done to ourselves in capitalist society over the past seventy-ish years, taken our previous diet and jacked it up with a ton of sugar (and other additives and a lot of increased volume). But while with the rats it’s easy to see that all you have to do to return the overweight population to normal is to stop adding sugar to their food, with humans we can’t see that because we’ve created a system that blames you for getting sick.

It’s like building a coal power plant in the middle of a neighborhood, and then blaming the residents when they start getting asthma or worse, and holding up the people who won the genetic lottery and don’t get lung disease as the example we should all strive to replicate.

A setting detail for a story I’ve been writing the past few days. “The Nucerian Republic” is kind of like if Ancient Rome was also Scandinavia, “galia” is a catchall third sex for gender non conforming people (the masculine form “galium” is also used for masc enbies), the story is a slice of life following a particular person living in the Republic so it’s mostly about creating and exploring details like this.

According to the Japanese, you can ask God to reincarnate with super powers.

don’t go in a space shuttle

As awesome as it was in concept, that thing was a safety nightmare from the very beginning. With every other manned spacecraft if something goes wrong during launch you can blast off and land the capsule safely in the ocean, but with the shuttle there were large portions of the ascent and descent profiles where, if something went wrong, you were going too fast to turn around but too slow to make it to space so you were just hosed.

It’s truly a great bit and one that should be appropriated by a website that isn’t reactionary.

Bandera is in the game already if Ukraine becomes independent and fascist (although if Nazi Germany conquers them they can put a different German fascist in charge). HOI4 just kinda pretends the Holocaust doesn’t happen, which kinda whitewashes the fascists but also I don’t want to know what the HOI4 community would do if the Holocaust was actually in the game.

abruptly abandoned its draconian “Zero Covid” policies

There were months of protests, followed by a government rollout of the new less strict rules in phases over the course of several more months. The New York Times needs to reread the definition of “abruptly” because I don’t think they know what it means.

The curtains are blue!

The curtains have a swastika on them.

No! They’re just blue! Not everything is political!

I don’t even feel disappointment when people I watch online turn out to not live up to the values they espouse anymore, I just feel numb. Are we all just hypocrites who haven’t been tested yet?

TRUE

Even streamers who I like in short doses like Hasan can’t get through a fifteen minute edited video without saying the same thing five hundred times. It’s suitable as background noise, but if I’m listening to a streamer I’d almost always be better off listening to music.

:flag-trans-pride: :uncle-ho-2:

I remember that argument was when I learned that my parents were NIMBYs. It was honestly a shock, they’re lib but I has assumed they would want a playground in the neighborhood considering that at that time there were six kids in the house with absolutely nothing to do inside walking distance.

100% correct, no notes.

I have a theory that part of the function of the “where is your child now?” stuff that really curtailed kids’ freedom in America in the second half of the twentieth century was a reaction to the Civil Rights and Anti-Vietnam movements. Both were prominently participated in by kids, the anti-war one especially, and when society goes from letting kids have a significant portion of the day to themselves in between school and supper to basically forcing them to go from one controlled location straight to another with no in-between, all of that potential youth-lead political organization falls apart because it doesn’t have anything to support it anymore.

I don’t think it was the primary driver - after all most kids weren’t joining the Students for a Democratic Society - but it is a relevant secondary reason. The primary driver was almost certainly “property values”. I remember one of my only interactions with the HOA where my parents lived concerned plans for a playground being voted down based on the logic that children playing outside would somehow lower everyone nearby’s home value (they also made the equally-bad argument that teens would hang out at the child’s playground to smoke). Multiply this interaction by a million HOAs around the country and eventually even the kids whose parents don’t demand that they come straight home still end up going home anyway because there’s nowhere else for them to go.

I only know this because of Hasan, but Sneako brandished a gun, pointing it at his camera in an extremely cringe-inducing clip. Critical just explained the difference between a clip and a magazine.

Decolonizing Europe back into hundreds of fueding bordergore fiefdoms

People leave their country for a million reasons, but every person who left the Soviet Union got lit up by the propaganda machine so we tend to think that way more people did it than actually did. The Soviets themselves put rules in place to try and prevent certain high-value people from leaving, like nuclear engineers, and this created a lot of friction between a certain class of professional and the state - but taken as a whole Soviet emigration wasn’t much different than, say, American emigration today.

edit: East Germany is a different story, along with German-speaking minorities being expelled from Eastern Europe after World War 2. With the power of hindsight I think it’s safe to say that the East German authorities mishandled the situation and made things worse for a long time before it stabilized, which is why 1/5 of East Germans left the country - but it did stabilize, with emigration dropping precipitously after 1953 with Stalin’s death.

I spent all day reading about early suspensions on carriages and cars - it wasn’t until the 16th century that they figured out you could make the ride smoother by suspending the body of a carriage with leather straps (as opposed to having it be attached directly to the frame), and it wasn’t until the 19th that they figured out that you could make it even smoother with a leaf spring suspension. Leaf springs themselves actually date back to ancient times and can be made of metal or wood depending on what’s available, so it’s just a matter of applying them to a new purpose.

Depending on how far you get sent back, there’s also a lot of very simple improvements you can make to wheels that were technologically possible for a long time before people thought to do it. Make wheels lighter by making them out of thin planks instead of an entire slice of tree trunk, stronger by reinforcing the rim with a metal band, more maneuverable by separating the axle into two sections. Inflatable tires are much harder, but people would use a solid band of rubber or cork around the outside of the wheel to accomplish the same thing before pneumatic tires were figured out.

If you’re doing either of those things, then you’re a stone’s throw away from inventing a bicycle. Just a thought.

I’ve had this idea for ages about someone who goes back to like 1000 AD and tries to introduce germ theory, disinfecting surfaces and medical devices with alcohol, etc. The conflict comes from them having to overcome medieval institutions being resistant to change, starting with them naively writing a treatise on what is currently considered medical common sense but getting rebuked for apparently not knowing what they’re talking about.

Naturally, the main character wears a cute version of a plague doctor outfit.