MudMan

So… have you been told to eat only soft food? Can you still use your mouth to process food a bit? If you’re all stitched up you want to keep it to soups and purees and drinks that you don’t have to process at all. I know someone who misunderstood “soft food” for “stuff that isn’t too tough” and had to seek medical attention when a bunch of stuff got loose in there. Talk to your doctor if in doubt, that wasn’t pleasant.

But hey, from that experience, there are a few things I learned you can do if/when you can process your food in your mouth a bit.

• Starchy snacks will melt easily and not taste like cardboard. Chips, bread sticks, that type of thing are all doable.

• Yogurt and dairy desserts, unsurprisingly. Lots of flavours and textures in that supermarket aisle. Try mixing jams and other spreads into sharper stuff like kefir instead of having just the industrially flavored boring stuff.

• Surprisingly, some cold cuts of meat. If you buy it cut at the shop and ask them to go as thin as possible you will be able to shred it with your hands or a knife as you eat it and essentially still make it through a deconstructed sandwich if you pair it with untoasted soft bread.

• Ditto for fruit salad. Banana, finely chopped strawberries and other stuff that is soft or can be cut small and swallowed whole.

• Soups, creams and stews. Overcook veg and potatoes, and chop any meat quite small (and be ready to cut it smaller when eating) but it’ll be fine. I’m not a fan, but it’s a thing.

• Smoothies, milkshakes and chocolate milk. Get some of the nutrients without having to make it taste the same each time.

• Eggs. Omelettes, scrambled eggs, poached eggs, whathaveyou.

• Pasta. Get over the instinct to keep it al dente and overcook a thicker shape a bit. Just keep the sauce less chunky. Also rice and couscous if you’re bored of pasta.

• Flaky fish. Experiment, but there are plenty of kinds that will flake small and be very soft when cooked. Get some garlic and parsley on there, grill it a bit, it’ll taste great.

The idea is to keep it to things that will melt in your mouth with little coaxing or things cut so fine that all the work has been made and can be swallowed whole. It can be a sustainable diet that isn’t unpleasant with a bit of adjustment.

Man, it’s gonna be so hard not to comment on the nonsense if you guys keep putting Trump crap on World News. I really don’t want to block this as well as the US news channels, but I will if pushed.

Also, no, he didn’t assign everybody female, he made everybody non-binary, which is extra woke. At the point of conception no person produces any reproductive cells at all, so by his definition is neither male nor female. Plus it explicitly differentiates sex from gender identity, which I found rather woke, too.

It’s a paper launch anyway, and it’s been two gens since mass upgrades made old cards dirt cheap. 4090s are still running higher than MSRP two days before the next gen comes out. It’s a good call if you got a good price based on today’s market.

Dude, I don’t know, it’s pretty latest. At least for a few more days.

Go have fun. Mess with frame generation. Don’t listen to the snobs, all pixels are real pixels.

Check out Quake 2 RTX when you have a second. I know everybody is all about benchmarking Cyberpunk, but man, will Q2RTX give you buyers’ squee for zero money.

I said whatever part, and that’s certainly a part.

You will have some coping to do in any case, I’m afraid, and best of luck with that going forward. I mean that sincerely.

Exactly my point.

Yes we do. This election has no more evidence of being stolen at this point than the previous one did when the nazi weirdos were banging that drum. You’re free to do the MAGA rounds, though, but I doubt you’re going to get the same traction. Don’t quite see anybody storming the MAGApitol at the moment.

Not that it changes anything, because you let it happen and now it happened, so the end result is the same, however you want to cope with whatever part of responsibility you personally have on the matter.

See, you think that doesn’t make it sound like desperate deflection after having handed the country to the nazis, but it does. I was here during the campaign, I saw how that went.

Nah, man, there is no amount of interference that justifies Trump having a fart’s chance in hell of not losing every single state in a country unwilling to hand the keys to these guys 1932-style. Beds were made, sleeping in them is to happen.

It just sucks that the rest of us are under the covers getting dutch ovened as well.

The mechanism was the election.

I mean, sure, impeachment and whatnot, but it’s not like people didn’t know who this guy was. I can give other institutions a whole bunch of crap for not getting rid of the guy the first time, but when you’ve given him a Supreme Court supermajority, both chambers of Congress and the presidency AFTER he attempted a coup I’m gonna say that’s on you, guys.

Sure. It’ll just be messy and painful for me a few weeks after the people who caused all this, so I intend to enjoy them.

I don’t. Don’t much give a damn what Americans think, either, assuming there’s a distinction to be made there.

At this point I’m camp decoupling. If they want their nationalism so bad they can have it. Quietly, if at all possible.

I know nothing of the sort, and I honestly think it’s far less snobbish than the alternative.

I absolutely had nothing better to do than education, that much I give you. It’s a high bar, I was doing some really cool shit.

Thankfully, my government agreed with me on that one, and I’m more than happy to pay taxes for the rest of my life to make it keep being the case. And thankfully, my parents agreed as well. My dad was adamant I didn’t take a job on the side despite us not being particularly well off. Probably because he’s a left-leaning teacher himself and HE worked his ass off and paid all the taxes so we could all do that, not to have us drive living wages down by squatting at McDonalds, or whatever.

And sure, it was an investment in the way reading a book in my own time is an investment. It made me better at a thing and taught me things and gave me time to figure stuff out. It was certainly not an investment in my career. I haven’t submitted my degree with a job application once in decades of working for a living. Did alright anyway, wouldn’t have done as well without the things I lived and learned or the people I met and learned from.

Which is what education is for, in my book. If you’re looking at dollar input versus lifetime dollar output… well, you do need an education, so maybe you can get that while you’re making a fool of yourself getting that MBA or whatever.

I mean, if you want to get really trippy, the mushroom may still be able to sprout when you eat it, depending on what it is and how it’s prepared, so it isn’t even necessarily dead.

I’m saying the mushroom is probably winning this until you fully digest it/poop it out.

Despite all the edgy cosplay anarchism below, laws are very important things that are crucial to regulate the powerful into some semblance of equality.

They do require state powers to enforce them, though. They are a fiction that only works if enough people agree it works. Let enough pieces of that edifice collapse and laws do become rules the powerful impose on the populace.

Which is why maybe the US shouldn’t have elected the convicted felon as president (or kept a deficient Constitution that grants him unlimited power), but what do I know.

I’m not Chinese, so I can’t answer that.

I can tell you that’s absolutely not how or why I got my own degree. For which I paid barely anything, so hard to picture it as an investment. And it didn’t seem to be much of an “investment” for my classmates, many of whom paid nothing or were paid to do it.

We did think it was cool, though. Got to meet very smart people, both as professors and as classmates, some of which I keep in touch to this day. Got to learn stuff I hadn’t even considered and access technical means I couldn’t have afforded. Zero regrets, even if my degree is only very tangentially related to my current job.

So… does that answer the question?

Was coming to say this.

It’s a very… anglo conservative view to see education as a financial investment to get a job (and a working class person with an education as a waste of resources).

There’s an argument to be made about the labor market in China and how its working class is remunerated in an economy designed for cheap exports, but this framing is probably not it.

It is definitely standard MO, and both press and online chatter are letting them get away with it, with no indication that will ever change so far.

I mean, US conservatives are still mocking the French as cowardly, collaborationist and militarily ineffective on account of WW2, so if any of them need a ladder to get down from any high horses they may be stuck on I think I have one in the back.

The conversation is still about this clip and not the actual policy, though.

Which I’m sure pisses Trump off, so there is that, but it maybe shows the press hasn’t learned anything. And it’s too late for the US, but there is still a far right surge to contain back in civilization, so it’s about time they figure it out.

Note that I’m not including the UK there, Labour government or not. That BBC headline is at least as shocking as the event itself.

I’m pretty sure that statement just made several history books in your vicinity spontaneously combust, but you should still try to see if you can find any of the remaining ones and take a peek inside.