Older democrats wouldn’t have respected German laws because they only acknowledged American laws and the American civic cult as legitimate. They were true, militant believers in America’s brand of liberal proto-fascism and didn’t tolerate foreign brands of fascism. Until those brands had been safely acquired as subsidiaries of the American empire, that is. Then the foreign fascists became special good boys who deserved lots of money and guns to do violence for American hegemony.

The BC Rich warlock

Everyone’s always ragging on those as being particularly ugly guitars, but I think at worst they just look a little silly. All the really pointy guitars are just sort of a “yeah, I get you’re going for one particular aesthetic and it’s kind of corny, but as long as you get the balance of the shape right and keep some clean lines to it it’s fine,” to me.

That’s making me think of the bespoke johnny silverhand guitars I’ve seen luthiers make as display pieces a few times, except those of course have the body cutout in the wrong place and the tuners placed so the strings have to make a sharp turn at the bridge, making the low strings too long and making the guitar impossible to get good intonation with. You want to see a really cursed looking guitar, look those up.

Most don’t bother me, it’s just that particular shape. I don’t like the headstock, or how the upper part of the body softly curves in to meet the neck at around a right angle like an acoustic, or the sort of boxier acoustic-like body in general. Like the only guitars that I think look worse are weird novelty builds like the machine gun kelly chunky razorblade or an absurd anime waifu cutout that I saw posted as a particularly cursed guitar shape once. I guess there are some variations on the general strat shape that just look off too, like when they’re sort of stretched and warped a little so they get more lopsided and just look blobby.

Damn, you mean I’ve been thinking the wrong name whenever I see a les paul? Looking at it, I don’t really like the telecaster shape either, but it’s not nearly as bad. I really can’t stand electrics that have the acoustic-style headstocks where the tuners are on both sides - I don’t know why but it just looks wrong.

Least reactionary telecaster.

I don’t know why I have that association but telecaster shaped guitars just look fashy to me, even before you deck them out with fascist symbols like that one.

Let’s see… that’s about $9 per person per day, which is still excessive especially if that’s supposed to just be groceries and doesn’t include buying prepared food somewhere which would easily double it if it’s a daily thing, but it’s also less than I was expecting.

I mean I live on $1-2 worth of food a day on average, living mostly on beans, rice, ramen, tofu, potatoes, and the occasional egg, but I had the impression that the typical American diet was, like, full of overpriced junk food that’s high calorie but also comparatively more expensive per calorie than food cooked from raw ingredients.

Dumping mashed potatoes on a can of beans and browning the top with a blowtorch like it’s a flan: “Behold, a pie!”

main

in Starfield there’s not much of it left.

I don’t think there’s any of it left. NPCs at most just sort of path around some patrol route, they’re not even running through a timed schedule or anything like that. I guess NPCs on ships or in outposts randomly pick an object to interact with and go do an animation by it, but that’s also unscheduled and is just a glorified random idle animation.

I truncated that down a bit because it was already getting a bit too wordy, so I skipped the examples. That would be things like some roller coasters using electromagnetic launch systems over conventional chainlift hills, aircraft catapults on carriers to get them up to speed fast enough to take off, some trains use them for propulsion, etc. It’s a really good way of making a big fixed system push things along quickly for definitions of “quickly” that include accelerations humans can comfortably survive, it’s just not very good at making a small and portable system for launching projectiles very fast at a speed that a human on the other end of the equation wouldn’t comfortably survive.

AFAIK what the military has been researching are large (naval) railguns. Coilguns are a novelty with minimal utility (note that the actual principles involved in them are used in real things, but mostly for accelerating things along rail systems, not as guns or cannons), but railguns have some promise in pushing the upper limit of what artillery can do (and AFAIK what they were focused on was specifically a hybrid system that would launch a shell with conventional propellant into a railgun barrel that would then accelerate it even harder) because they can get things moving faster than gas can expand and put more force on a projectile than conventional propellant alone could without having a building sized barrel to accommodate the force.

Ultimately the project made a big fixed emplacement that could launch a projectile faster and harder than any other system, but which was both logistically infeasible due to it rapidly destroying its own barrel (a seemingly intractable problem with railguns is that at high power levels the surface of the rails oxidizes and the rails themselves can warp), and obviated by missiles largely replacing the role of artillery along with “what if we could put a single shell somewhere near a target even faster than a missile, once, and it would take an entire ship dedicated to this task” turning out to not be as useful a niche as sci-fi brained military officials thought it would be fifty years ago.

A coilgun that size isn’t going to be making anything supersonic. I would be genuinely surprised if it even matched the force of something like an airsoft gun.

Honestly this thing looks like a hobbyist toy more than a weapon. Like it might pose a risk of eye injury if fired towards someone, but I wouldn’t expect it to even break skin at close range. Unless it’s got some absurdly strong capacitor bank powering it and is very well designed it’s just not going to put out much force at all. At that scale a railgun might honestly be a better bet for “an at least somewhat dangerous handheld electric projectile launcher”, because the problems with those (the surface of the rails oxidizing after a shot or two, so they stop making a good connection with the round and can’t fire) only start cropping up when you get to really high velocities and higher power flow.

If Elden Ring is the last good Fromsoft title

Armored Core 6 came out after it.

I’ve also notice he attributes a lot of China’s problems historically to the way their government is structured.

Make him read Sorghum and Steel, because even though it’s a long-form journal article by anti-CPC ultras they actually go into a bit of detail as to what China was actually doing and how many different sorts of organizational experiments there were in the 50s and 60s, as well as what the actual problems it faced were (spoiler: it’s all material conditions, namely the lack of capital, China’s comparative isolation after the Sino-Soviet split, and the ever-present threat of a nuclear attack by the US).

ZOM 100: Bucket List of the Dead is a pro-social, class conscious zombie story about a depressed and horribly overworked office worker waking up to a zombie apocalypse and celebrating because it means he doesn’t have to go to work anymore, then setting out to do all the things he’d never gotten to do before the world ended because he was too busy working, before it’s too late. It also criticizes that and he quickly comes around to “oh, this is actually really empty and reckless,” eventually settling on a theme that’s something like “even in a hopeless, doomed world, even in the face of calamity, it’s important to keep living and helping people and finding joy in life where you can.”

It’s not explicitly Marxist, but a later arc in the manga does have a character explicitly say something like “Marx said that capitalism’s contradictions would eventually lead to its destruction, but here the world has ended and capitalists are still [making horrible stratified nightmare systems based on rentseeking and feeding people to zombies] and people just keep going along with it for some reason.” There’s also a pretty early panel showing a broken cityscape with no electricity, filled with shambling corpses, overlaid with dialogue about careers that has the gem “100 years ago no one would have predicted modern careers like drone pilot or cryptocurrency specialist.”

The whole thing is stylish as hell, with decent themes and a tone that walks a line between dry and bitter sarcasm and wide-eyed wonder. It’s a little too soft on the more fucked up places it goes too, but ultimately the main characters are almost pathologically-good-natured civilians trying to survive and lend a helping hand where they can, they’re not hardened revolutionaries out to fight for a better world. The manga also has a lot of little filler scenes that are basically just the cast going to [insert famous tourist destination in Japan] and all but soyfacing and pointing at [thing it’s famous for] before zombies show up and they have to run away. Some pages have multiple of that gag crammed into their panels for a quick montage.

There’s this old effortpost explaining it all: https://hexbear.net/post/56333

Because the “middle class” is a fictitious category that everyone from people struggling to stay above the poverty line to literal millionaires think they belong to. It’s what “respectable” people are, the small landholders and people who aspire to own land.

It was cynically created by encouraging suburban land ownership among certain privileged (white) working class demographics, and later reinforced by encouraging tying small amounts of stock ownership into pensions or workers’ benefits. It’s a way of making workers mistakenly see their own material interests as being aligned with the ruling class’s, and insulating them against reforms that would benefit them directly at the cost of meaning less value for the meager property they’ve acquired.

The head of reddit’s censorship team is literally a CIA alumni. An extremely active leftist sub that wasn’t self-defeatingly sectarian or a captured radlib tendency like the v**shites, and that terminally online enough to be shaping discourse in general wasn’t something they could tolerate it.

I have the perfect recipe for exactly that sort of thing: get extra firm tofu, slice short ways across the brick into slices maybe 1cm thick (I actually just halve it, then halve the half, then halve that as well, because that gives a clear visual indicator and gets them all roughly even), lightly press those slices by hand, then stack them and cut them into thin strips. Fry these on medium high in a pan with some oil, topped with mix of salt, sugar (a small amount, maybe half a teaspoon), ginger, and garlic, with or without additional chopped aromatics like onions, fresh garlic, ginger root, etc, stirring regularly once you can see them starting to brown on the sides because it’s a pain to flip these strips compared to larger cubes so just continuously poking at and flipping them is needed to get them done evenly. Once they’ve got a golden brown finish to both sides they’re ready to mix into whatever.

If you can’t get them all touching the metal in the pan, do it in two batches, because they won’t get a good finish on the outside without direct contact with the pan/hot oil.

the setting makes the mechs out to be ancient storied machines that no one knows how to build anymore, passed down through generations of space feudalism and kept barely functional, but they all look like freshly mass produced clean 1980’s angular space robots. they should have like clan banners and family names and engravings and retrofit low-tech parts and stuff if the lore is meant to be at all meaningful.

I think some of the early novels did play into a little of that, although not that creatively, and then the setting moved into a sort of renaissance where they were producing new mechs en masse. It also never quite got to the “mechs are relics” state, because even before that renaissance there were still factories churning them out and standing armies of them.

It’s pretty incoherent, overall.