If you're cooking with peppers remember to wash your hands BEFORE you touch your junk.

Or, I am both proud and ashamed to say, you can douse that fire with heavy cream.

Fallen Order is a decent game. Not a super immersive story in my opinion but overall it's good, if a little railroaded. It kind of feels more like a disney production than a fleshed out game. I don't remember being intimidated by anything for very long and mostly found certain enemies kind of annoying to fight. Although the Vader sequence at the end is simply great. Survivor in my personal opinion is much superior. The story is more engaging, the enemies vary more, the bosses are more dynamic, and they expanded just the right mechanics. They really figured out how to get you to choose your battles and it scales well with upgrades (although I did choose to fight until I beat a rancor at the very beginning that was clearly meant for mid to late game). It plays a lot like Stellar Blade if you tone down the anime stuff and tighten the combat to a looser Sekiro.

If you don't mind skipping some story, you can go into Survivor and then treat Fallen Order like a prequel. And if story is a big factor for you, it's worth just powering though.

My VA doc recently told me they're planning to reform mental health ratings to "account for those that can hold a job" and that they want to revisit including medication and symptom management in decision determination.

Absolute regressive madness

It's almost a concept of a plan

Do my 600 applications mean nothing?!

(Yes, they in fact mean nothing)

I carry this screencap specifically for that reason:

I had a boss that did this quarterly meeting where he'd schedule two full days to review everything he heard piecemeal once a week and it always ended up taking 3 and a half days. It was hell and we all hated it. The whole office had to sit in it, no one got any work done, and most of us fell asleep. No decisions were ever made and it was just to give himself the feel goods about telling his boss he knew what was going on.

Horrible boss. The running theory in the office was that he hated his family and didn't want to go home

The downdetector comments have descended immediately into utter madness

Pulse Water Modulation

When they announced new star wars like 10 years ago I really hoped for a Kyle Katarn story. Seeing what they've done though I'm glad they left him alone

Commenting for some context.

I have some experience with this since I was a recruiter for a couple years (Disclaimer: before trump). I did officer recruiting and had no quota, so I had the freedom to be more honest with people. My first question was always, "Do you want to join the military?" And if the answer was "no" I'd tell them to go do anything else. If the answer was "yes," I'd try to figure out what they really wanted. Often what they wanted was something they could find elsewhere and I would tell them so and how to get there. Occasionally someone would just be pro-military and I put a lot of energy into explaining that there are no promises, no guarantees, and the government will do what it wants with you whether you like it or not. My goal was to dismiss misconceptions (often generated by media/movies or recruiting ads themselves). This was before this insane trump era and I had fewer reservations if someone truly wanted it AND had the wherewithal to be a decent human about it.

Enlisted recruiters don't necessarily have the same leeway. They are directly graded on the number of enlistments they get in whatever reporting period. Their promotions often depend on it. They are also given materials and information to use. The message above looks like a mixture of someone trying to meet their enlistment quota through outreach and a certain well-intentioned blindness that comes from years of indoctrination to trust the system. I'd be hesitant to say this recruiter is personally trying to round up immigrants, although there is always a chance. It seems more likely that this either came from higher in the organization, like Pentagon level directive (arguably more concerning), or comes from short-sighted intention to help without considering or being aware of the broader dangers so they're trying to disseminate info about programs that could have been helpful in the past without understanding how they can also be weaponized.

That being said! Intention doesn't matter. This is a program that can be weaponized and it should be ridiculed as such.

PSA: Everyone should always be highly skeptical when dealing with recruiters, now more than ever, especially since they are graded on number of enlistments. If anyone you know is considering an enlistment tell them that recruiters are not there to help you get what you want, they're there to make numbers. The incentive structure for them is not in anyone else's best interest. I've found this argument to be effective where more ideological arguments may not land or may further entrench.

If it doesn't feature 4NonBlondes and What's Going On, then I'm not interested

Kaos. Jeff Goldlum plays a paranoid Zeus. That's pretty much all to need to know, but the cast and writing are both incredible

Seveneves kind of touches on rebuilding although it skips decades and centuries. Lucifer's Hammer deals with the aftermath of a global disaster and includes some rebuilding... kind of. Alas, Babylon explores a post-nuclear world. None of them are particularly optimistic except Seveneves (in a way), but it also doesn't explore rebuilding in a lot of detail. Since you're already reading Octavia Butler, you can try Lilith's Brood, but it won't be anything like rebuilding the modern world. Asimov's Foundation series is about rebuilding at a galactic scale but I'm not sure they aged particularly well.

If you're interested in building specifically you can try Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars.

In addition: Children of Time might scratch the itch in a way since it's about the development of a sentient species. I think the sequel explores more building, but i haven't read it yet and the reviews are kind of mixed

I order a lot of takeout and recently stopped using online ordering because a bunch of them in the area stopped allowing orders as a guest. They force to log in or sign up. I've found that calling the store is easier and faster

And then Jack Welch entered the scene and destroyed the company and also hundreds of thousands of lives

Oh man, I wonder what the author of The Book of Eels thinks. I remember thoroughly enjoying the book even though it ended without any conclusive idea where eels come from

I'm convinced they'll do it to themselves, especially as more books are made with AI, more articles, more reddit bots, etc. Their tool will poison its own well.

Catching strays