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.

“Conservative” is just a subgroup of liberal at this point, since there’s not a monarchist status quo for them to cleave to like “conservatives” in the 19th and early 20th centuries could in some places (note: this gets weird in liberal monarchies like the UK where the monarchist dictatorship is just an accepted part of liberalism). “Conservative” is just the sub-category of liberal that’s defined by being even more racist, chauvinist, and extremist than is typical of mainstream liberalism.

It’s not a binary, it’s not even a spectrum, it’s two competing blocs of one hard-right ideology.

It’s such a wild perspective too because like, everything the US is doing is public because it’s all just corporations fishing for more investor money or trying to look as advanced as they can possibly fake so their current shareholders get more wealth from people believing the shares are worth more and might be worth even more in the future. There are no particularly shadowy programs, apart from proprietary AI labs that are being cagey about how they’re training their dumbshit chatbots while issuing press releases like “our super special robot boy is so smart, you wouldn’t believe it, we’re totally too scared to even show him to you because he might have attained godhood, he’s even autocompleting a quarter of every line of code that gets written! Which definitely isn’t only a modest improvement over existing IDE autocompletes or boilerplate macros at all!” to try to get more funding and pump their shareholder value.

I don’t think 30 year olds should act or eat like this.

Look, Americans have very specific dietary needs, like hummingbirds. Without a regular meal of bread that’s 50% corn syrup by mass and covered in thickened fruit juice with extra corn syrup and a little bit of fat and protein to further amplify the effects, they cannot sustain the exertion of pushing their lifted SUVs along Fred Flintstone style on their way to and from work. The average American burns over 20,000 calories on their typical 4 hour daily commute and the entire food economy is oriented around supporting this activity.

All candidates are accelerationist candidates. There are no brakes on the grift train and the figurative pedal is already welded to the figurative metal, all that was up in the air was who gets rich stuffing their pockets while pretending to drive it.

Lmao, I didn’t even stop to think about the problems with that before rejecting it out of hand. I could imagine some sort of convection camp stove thing running off a propane tank, like a glorified grill with a fan in it, but gas ranges are demanding and risky enough and require ventilation that some shitty little countertop appliance wouldn’t have. Even if the build quality was high enough that it wasn’t a constant fire/explosion hazard, it would be dumping carbon monoxide everywhere.

Literally just legalized bribes of a government official whose job is collecting bribes and being a dumbass.

I’d sooner go for a propane wok stand/burner if I was going to mess with gas tbh. I like tools I can actively and directly use instead of just a box I tell to do something and then trust to work.

I just happen to have been given an air fryer despite me repeatedly saying “aren’t those just shitty tiny ovens? the hype seems like a meme from people who can’t cook,” and deciding to give it a fair try. So far my cynicism seems to be validated: it’s not granularly controllable like an oven and I can’t operate it directly like with a cast iron pan on a stove, it’s literally just set a temperature and cook time and trust that the inscrutable box is doing it right.

My conclusion was that the air fryer, at least the one I have, just doesn’t get hot enough to get the effect I want. Doing this same process with the final step in a pan with a little oil works extremely well, though: boil with salt and vinegar, drain, toss in spices and oil, and fry on medium-high heat (hot enough that vegetable oil starts putting out little wisps of smoke, but not hot enough that it actually starts smoking) turning regularly until they look done, which gets the texture both inside and out perfect in a way that is frustratingly hard to get with sweet potatoes. I guess my next experiment would be trying to bake them for a short time at 450 or so in a real oven to see if that’ll do it, because 400 just wasn’t enough to get the outside good without messing up the internal consistency.

I will say boiling the wedges/sticks like this and then using the air fryer is still better than just baking them directly from raw, even though I wasn’t fully satisfied with the results. It’s just using a pan instead of the air fryer worked better.

Experiment 2 - 10 minutes at 400 degrees: meh, it’s better but still inferior to frying them in a pan. That’s the last of the fries I had prepared, so no more experiments right now.

Experiment 1 - 5 minutes at 400 degrees: nope, not even a little bit browned or crisped outside. Tried one, and it was still good because it had been boiled for 10 minutes in a salt and vinegar brine and lightly tossed in garlic, ginger, salt, and pepper, but the texture was 100% that of a lightly boiled potato.

Experiment 1b - 5 more minutes at 400 degrees, same batch: a little browning in spots, still squishy outside, getting too soft inside. Do air fryers just suck? Like my impression has always been that they’re just shitty little ovens for people who want an oven to work like a microwave, and this experiment is just reinforcing this expectation so far.

Experiment 1c - 5 more minutes, same temperature, same batch: no change, they’re just getting drier and floppier. This thing sucks, why does anyone use this over a real oven or stove.

Yeah, it’s an actual masterpiece. Even just on a basic structural level the pacing, art direction, and sound design are all perfect. Even the fanservice elements feel countered by how desexualized Ryuuko is as a character: despite being made to dress like a JoJo character and despite how much literal male gaze is portrayed with how characters react to and leer at her, Ryuuko herself doesn’t play into normal horny tropes of being uncomfortable (and even in the first episode is way more “this sucks and is bad, actually” than the sort of gross blushing and panting discomfort anime does all the time) or excited, she’s just pissed off at everything and almost everyone around her and in full generic-shonen-final-battle mode all the time. She’s like if Goku had to fight in a thong, and thought that that sucked and was gross but quickly became too preoccupied with fighting to care anymore.

Fuck, this is actually one I’m torn on. Because Mako is definitely constantly and incessantly horny for Ryuuko and is definitely both intending it as an actual date and intentionally playing into the narrative trope of the hero getting the girl as a reward for winning because she seems to be the only character that realizes she’s in a story and she seems to think she can control how the story goes by playing into or pointing out tropes, but Ryuuko herself scans as aro/ace: she’s constantly reacting to any sort of sexual situation with anger and revulsion, when she is sexualized it’s always something external imposing that on her and it’s something to be overcome, and her only interaction with romance is an allegorical arranged marriage she grievously injures herself escaping from, literally tearing the physical threads of societal expectations out of her own head.

I’m basically left with two plausible interpretations of this and I don’t know which works better: is Ryuuko a traumatized lesbian who’s just reached the “realizing she can tell social and family pressure to fuck off” stage of understanding and self-actualization, or is she ace and at basically that same point? Her revulsion and anger is usually directed at men, she’s clearly uncomfortable around them in general, and never shows any sort of interest in a male character, but she’s also not thirsting after other women the way Mako is obsessed with her.

Fuck how is Kill la Kill harder to analyze than Yurikuma Arashi? Because it’s definitely operating on the same level of every part of it being this abstract allegory even though it’s also literally happening in the story in a way that doesn’t seem to be the case with Yurikuma Arashi. Do I just need to rewatch it again? Last time I was mostly focused on analyzing the art direction and how it maintains this incredibly tight economy of motion, detail, and color to control the focus of any given shot almost perfectly, to the point that you forget Ryuuko is both dressed as and posing like a JoJo character in like half of them.

I think that historically you’d have been right about one particular type of guy, the chauvinist libertine who was broadly pro-liberation in general but in a very selfish and fickle way where he must be the most liberated and coddled and no one may ever tell him no, but that over the past 10-15 years that type of guy has almost entirely been subsumed into the foaming morass of secular fascists and hypocritical theocrats. Yesterday’s chauvinist libertine misogynists are today’s fascist treatlords who are easily led about by anyone telling them women are threatening their personal treats and so have been converted entirely into rabid reactionaries.

looking for good guys in WW1 is probably not going to end well

The Red Army fighting the invasion by the Entente who wanted the Whites back in power so Russia would return to the war. That’s technically not in WWI but it was both contemporaneous to it, related to it, and involved powers currently fighting in it.