I’d also like to mention gnocchetti sardi as my go-to for pesto, for the same seasons.

They did everything you hate back when you said liked anime. They still have bonkers shit today. There’s variety. It’s not like the entire extremely prolific animation industry of an entire country is moving in lockstep to deliver exactly the same product across the board.

Sure, there trends like the onslaught of bland isekai shit we had for a while but even the worst seasons of that had their gems. Heck, even that genre has gems; there a reason KonoSuba is well-regarded (and it’s full of people who would be utterly unacceptable in Japanese society).

You probably have the same problem that gets people to think that all music became shit approximately 20-30 years after they were born: They mainly remember the hits of their youth and forget that 80% of airtime went to shitty music back then as well.

From: jrandom@company.tld
To: everyone@company.tld
Subject: River observations 2026-04-27

Everyone,

I would like to point out that the river appears to be wet. I would also like to observe that I saw at least three (3) separate ducks on the river so far.

We will revisit this topic next Monday as per company guidelines.

J. Random
Widget Testing Dept.

It’s that Linux distro you just can’t get out of your head.

Look, GitHub is an entry-level offering for the general public. If you want true worst-in-class performance you have to go with Azure DevOps.

GitHub simply doesn’t have features like build steps that randomly take ten times as long as usual to complete for no reason, an inability to refer to a PR just by its ID even though it’s unique, or a navigation that makes no sense at all. Sure, you get that four-eights availability but do you get pipelines that reliably fail even though they worked just fine yesterday and nobody changed anything? Those are enterprise features for companies that pay big money to get the worst damn Gitlab clone money can buy.

So your argument is that since you are opposed to the app’s very existence it’s immoral to test it for security flaws.

I’d like to argue against that with the principle of defense in depth. I’m also not a friend of OS-level age verification and would like it to be dropped. But if it is implemented I want it to be implemented in a way that isn’t wildly insecure. I can simultaneously argue against the principle as a whole and insist that any implementation of it be secure. If it does come I at least want the damage from a botched implementation to be mitigated.

To use your cage analogy, I can both complain about the principle of caging people and about the fact that the cage is badly made and poses an injury risk to the people inside it. Neither is acceptable.

The amount they spent on homeopathy wasn’t super large, actually, but it’s still welcome to see it getting kicked out. Until now it had been grandfathered past the requirement for medicine to have proven effectiveness on grounds of cultural inertia.

Mind you, I would’ve preferred it getting dropped due to sufficient public pushback against its special treatment and not as a cost-saving measure. But hey, I’ll take it.

Doesn’t the EU already have a military defense pact built in? Under the Mutual Defense Clause (Article 42(7) of the Treaty on European Union), all EU members are required to defend each other is directly attacked. The Common Security and Defence Policy guides military cooperation. There are transnational brigades and everything.

We need to do better in that regard but we already have a lot of what you’re proposing. Chuck in an alliance with Canada and we’d have most of NATO’s functionality covered.

A few additions:

The solar industry didn’t just lose subsidies, the government actively tried to prevent the installation of new solar panels.

The nuclear exit actually made a bit of sense; our existing NPPs were mostly old and extending their like was getting increasingly uneconomic. At the same time we had very few locations where new ones could be built. They actually had a solid economic case for the nuclear exit.

They even had a good plan for the exit itself, letting existing contacts run out and simply not renewing them. Then they decided to exit the nuclear exit, renewing all of the contracts. Then, after the Fukushima disaster, they decided to exit the exit from the nuclear exit and immediately terminated all contracts, having to pay large penalties for the early termination.

For twenty years they followed the “Black Zero” plan, which amounted to trying to incur no new debt on the federal level whatsoever, no matter what. As a result, they spent basically nothing on infrastructural upkeep and the army and then suddenly found themselves having to take on 100 billion euros in emergency debt because bridges were collapsing, trains had no usable tracks and the Bundeswehr is unable to actually fight.

The CDU/CSU are mind-bogglingly inept at handing the economy.

And some of us might not even be in Italy.

Maybe they’ll try to start a second solar industry so they can kill it off again.

Yeah. Baking is chill because the ingredients are effectively standardized and fungible so if you just follow the steps it’s hard to screw up. You usually only heat the baked good once and that happens in isolation.

Meanwhile, cooking is anarchy. Just because one piece of chicken breast took five minutes on medium heat doesn’t mean that the next one will. You constantly have to monitor and adapt to changing conditions and everything from ingredients to measurements to the very steps of the recipe itself is up for negotiation. And you have to do half the steps while heating the meal and if you ever take too long for something you burn it and it’s ruined.

When I bake I’m relaxed. When I cook I’m in nonstop crisis management mode.

There are also some subtle variations in agnosticism.

There’s the soft variety that says “there is no proof that convinces me either way but I won’t rule out that someone could come up with one”.

There’s the hard variety that says “I don’t think it’s possible to prove either way”.

There’s even a variety that says “it doesn’t matter whether (a) god exists or not, hence there’s no need for a proof”.

But yeah, the core of agnosticism is that you don’t believe the existence of (a) god has been conclusively proven or disproven and are unwilling to commit either way without that proof.

You never got hammerstung by a river elf? You must’ve lived a sheltered life.

Music. Often completely randomly selected – for instance, right now it’s some old dance track called Sweet Like Chocolate by… gotta look this up… Shanks & Bigfoot, apparently. It’ll probably be something else in an hour.

The only time my head does go silent is when I’m really tired. It’s one of the most clear indicators of tiredness for me.