That sounds like a just so story.

Spanish raiders could and did very easily talk to the locals they were subjugating to find out more about the plant. It was often described at that point as “a kind of truffle”. It was considered for a long time to be suitable for peasants and slaves, but not anyone with the option to eat ‘better’ food. The real reasons it took so long for potatoes to catch on are deeply rooted cultural norms around farming, class stigma around this ‘peasant food’, and worries around it being poisonous.

At every stage of it’s introduction into european diets, they knew how to cook it.

I actually prefer the smaller squad sizes and more barebones strategic level. Having a more RPG-like structure and more focus on a small number of characters is my jam. I looked at xenonauts, I think it’s absolutely amazing for a specific kind of player, and I know that I’m not that specific kind of player.

Menace’s solution to this is to basically remove the option for most weapons to miss entirely. A squad in that game is treated like a single unit, the equivalent to an XCOM/Xenonauts soldier. When you attack, it’s the same percentage roll applied to every bullet in the burst for each soldier. This means a single attack might have 40 individual dice rolls. The question is not if you hit, it’s for how much. Seems like a nice way of solving that issue without adding a whole bunch of units.

Cyber Knights does something similar: an attack with most weapons is a burst with each bullet’s chance to hit being individually rolled. This normalizes the chance to hit so it’s not all or nothing.

I love that game, played the crap out of it, waiting for another major patch to come back.

I was considering buying this as a massive fan of XCOM 2.

Was.

I’ll just keep playing Cyber Knights: Flashpoint thank you very much.

The crazy thing is he doesn’t even need to do anything to Russian civil aviation to paralyze it: the mere statement combined with daily strikes inside Russia is enough to send insurance to the moon and ground tons of flights.

They threaten the UK, France, Germany, etc for their internal audience, not the external one. To a middle class Russian (the target audience), those are “the west”, great empires, powerful players in the great game of geopolitics. It’s an empty affirmation to Russian citizens that they’re still at the big boy table. It would look bad internally threatening “weak Poland” without following through.

That doesn’t change or connect at all with the actual danger of an invasion. Before the full-scale war with Ukraine, Russia was “trying to negotiate between Ukraine and separatists”, they weren’t saber rattling. They quietly put their troops on the border for a “training exercise”, denied they were preparing for an invasion despite the British screaming from the rooftops, and then went in.

Specifically about Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia: yes, they’re in more danger than Poland, but an attack on them would pull Poland in. Poland sees an attack on them to be fundamentally the same as an attack on Poland.

Europe’s a big place. I don’t have anything resembling that here in Romania. You mean like in the Netherlands?

GNU Terry Pratchett

The magic stomach-filling qualities of lembas bread combined with the knowledge it was based on hard tack was then combined by Terry Pratchett:

The dwarf bread was brought out for inspection. But it was miraculous, the dwarf bread. No one ever went hungry when they had some dwarf bread to avoid. You only had to look at it for a moment, and instantly you could think of dozens of things you’d rather eat. Your boots, for example. Mountains. Raw sheep. Your own foot.

I think we might be having a bit of miscommunication. By ‘pretext’ I don’t mean the root cause of the action, I mean the excuse given to justify the action.

That’s not the worst case. The worst case is Christians using the baptism as a pretext to forcibly take the children away from their parents.

Historically speaking, this was sometimes used as pretext for the permanent separation of children from their parents. This is a form of genocide according to article 2.5 of the UN definition:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

[…]

5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Do not redeem. DO NOT REDEEM!!

What I struggle with is finding recipes

Heavily recommend looking into Indian cuisine. Huge chunks of India have a long history of vegetarianism and veganism, so there’s tons of delicious vegan recipes.

Actually, no. The earth was created this morning, when I woke up. I was dropped into it in media res, complete with a backstory and the lore. It will be deleted when I go to bed tonight.

That’s giving them far too much credit. They’re against losing all that delicious ad revenue from the debates and wanted to make an example of him. If Dan had cancelled, they’d have done the same to him in a heartbeat.

I like bread as much as the next guy, but do we really need to conquer it? Can’t we make a diplomatic agreement with bread, preferably one where we trade sugars for gluten development?

No! Make a show of it. Stand on stage for an hour and read everything wrong your opponent has every done

That happened here in Romania last presidential election. Our neofascist candidate (Simion) got dunked on by the neoliberal (Dan) in the first debate, so he came up with excuse after excuse as to why he couldn’t come to the rest.

The media companies got pissed off, and instead of cancelling decided to dunk on Simion by asking the questions to Dan and playing the absolute worst clips they could find of Simion answering those questions. Definitely didn’t singlehandedly lose Simion the election, but it definitely didn’t help him.

The EU is legitimately currently trying to be the region police (not world police) as we speak. Part of that involves building up our own military industry. The US government is not happy about that, to put it mildly.

Some of the first people to go in Nazi Germany were the Jewish German WW1 veterans. When a population is purportedly ‘weak’ and ‘incapable’, perhaps even ‘poisoning the nation’, the absolute worst thing you can have are patriotic members of that minority as living counterexamples.

That’s why for the fascist, they must go quickly and quietly so as to not undermine the message.