TheBananaKing

Spoken like a person who isn't forced to use JIRA

Eggplant. I tried cooking it until just tender, like zucchini - and it was nasty as hell; I never got it and never wanted to.

Then I encountered some actually properly cooked stuff in a pasta dish when eating out and ohmygod.

Mush? Slime? How long was she cooking them for, for god's sake?

Saucepan. Lots of boiling salty water. Cut an X in the bottom so they cook more evenly, then drop them in for just 2-3 minutes until barely tender. They're amazing, and they actually taste like themselves.

By all means complain about overcooked vegetables, but you don't need to fry everything in bacon fat to make it taste good.

The conditions required for fascism to flourish have been building up since the freaking 1950s.

Labour laws getting systematically stripped, unions getting crippled, corporations exploiting workers like fucking battery hens. Wages stagnating for decades, social programs stripped bare, people starting their careers with a lifetime of crippling student debt, Corporations and investors pricing housing completely out of reach, education systematically defunded, ongoing militarization of the police into armed gangs accountable to nobody, weird creepy fetishization of the military pushing unconditional support for increasingly brutal and cynical invasions and regime-changes, apologia for and allegiance to fascists like Netanyahu...

it's literally everything that Cyberpunk 2077 was parodying, for god's sake.

People are poor, they're exploited to the bone, they have no secure income, they're drowning in debt and can't afford housing. They feel un-represented by the government, they have fuckall education, the corpo media piped into their home keeps telling them that immigrants and deviants are the cause of all their problems, they're constantly shown how their government bombs hell out of Evil Brown People overseas and that this is a good and righteous thing, so they want more of it at home. They hark back to a mythical Good Old Days they're constantly told about when things weren't as bad and brown and/or LGBTQ people weren't a thing (or could be freely lynched) and women weren't so uppity, and they want that back; let's try that last part and the first part will surely come with it.

You get these people, you show them a political outsider who says screw all the rules and bureaucracy, I'm going to take charge, sweep all the red tape out of the way and do all the things you know you want...

Of course they'll get sucked in.

And of course it doesn't matter that their figurehead is worthless and incompetent and clearly evil.

It's not about results, it's about emotion. People are fed up, worn out and sick of the way things are.

Trump and his degenerate shitgibbons promise to trash everything, and hurt the people their followers believe are the problem. And that's deeply emotionally satisying.

Claire Saffitz is great.

That they're held on a work-day, to disenfranchise those that can't take the day off.

"Americans".

Fucking devastating.

Not counting music, I assume - I have a gazilion artists I love if anyone's interested.

As for actual Content with a capital C:

• PhilosophyTube Extremely interesting, well-researched and entertaining presentation of a wide range of philosophical and sociopolitical topics. From the UK.

• Shaun Ditto, though with a different angle and a Northern accent.

• Contrapoints Ditto, but American and quite a bit more... theatrical. Quite a strong focus on gender and transgender issues; check out her video on J. K. Rowling for one of the best treatments of the topic.

• Dr. Geoff Lindsey - Linguistics and phonology stuff, deep dives into pronunciation, fascinating as fuck.

• Middle Eats Really damn good middle-eastern cooking channel, no-nonsense presentation.

• Brian Lagerstrom - Baking / cooking - good recipes, sensible treatment.

• J. Kenji López-Alt of Serious Eats fame - damn good cook, nice guy.

• Tom Bates Creator of Nigel and Marmalade. Dumb, stoopid, awesome.

• Adam Millard - The Architect of Games - video essays on gaming

• Noodle - very funny animated video essays on gaming

• Ice Cream Sandwich - stoopid funny little cartoons about dumb shit.

• Jaiden Animations Animated little essays about stuff, she must be protected at all costs. See for instance Things about Relationships I wish someone told me about.

• Tom Scott has finished up his Things You Might Not Know series, but there's like a decade of them and they're amazing. Little investigative videos on everything from programming to wasp farming. You need to watch all of them.

• Taylor Tries Videos on juggling. I have the hugest talent-crush.

As someone who's been on forums of every stripe since the goddamn 80s, I can say with a great deal of experience that all good internet communities have just one single rule: "Don't make us ban you."

Anything else just invites edgy trolls and rules-lawyering.

Now don't get me wrong, guidelines are good and necessary. Give people an idea of the kinds of thing you do and don't want to see, and the way you will generally act in turn, because managing expectations is important.

But the moment you make hard-and-fast rules that you're obliged to follow, people will make a point of bending you over them with edge cases and not cuddling afterwards, just because they can. They think denial-of-service attacks are just as hilarious against human systems as they are against software ones, if not moreso - or they do it to assert control as part of one personality disorder or another.

If you play their game, you will lose.

You need to have an admin-discretion clause, and not feel bad about invoking it whenever it's the right thing to do.

Of course, this can lead to tyrannical asshole mods - if you have a mod team, you need to keep a close eye on it to prevent shitty personalities taking over in that domain. As the person that the buck stops with, if you can't trust yourself with it, then the place is going to hell anyway.

:laughs in Australian:

Long posts rely on what is basically the essay format you learned in high school, following the old rule-of-three.

Three main sections:

• Introduction
• Thesis
• Conclusion.

Each section is further split into three:

• The basic idea, background, why it matters.
• Three supporting arguments, from different angles
• Thesis restated, arguments summarised, you should agree.

And each supported argument is further divided into P1, P2, C - either modus ponens or modus tollens.

Modus ponens is 'X is true, X implies Y, therefore Y is true'.

Modus tollens is 'X implies Y, but Y is false, therefore X is also false'

Of course, not every long post is necessarily an attempt to convince someone, so you modify the technique to suit the content. Sometimes you're just setting out to explain or inform - but this changes less than you'd think: instead of frogmarching someone towards your conclusion, you're leading them towards understanding. In either case, you still break up the concepts into about three pieces, and present them in an order that makes the conclusion feel inevitable.

If you want to expand beyond that, you can break it down inwards, splitting supporting concepts in three, or you can build it outwards, making three supporting arguments for each basic angle.

One important thing to remember is that nobody wants to read a huge unbroken wall of text, so use paragraphs to break up separate ideas into small manageable chunks with whitespace in between. And remember that the last sentence of a paragraph hits like a mic drop, so use this strategically.

Another trick is to sound out the post in your head and think about cadence; you don't want a string of five-word sentences that all fall off at the end. If you have a whole page of "Dada da da da DUM. Dada dada da DUM. Da dada da daDUM.", your readers will get annoyed and dismiss you without necessarily knowing why. You need to change up the rhythm, throw in some parenthetical clauses, vary the length and keep the flow of tex sounding interesting. It makes the difference between school assembly anouncements and a professional youtuber.

Honestly it's all a bit of a hack - once you get the hang of it, you can hammer it out all day with surprisingly little effort.

Heh, fair enough :)

The point is you treat it as input, not output; something that's happening rather than you doing it.