Probably not, but it’s admittedly odd to verify that a home furnishing is obviously also a lump of seasoning.

WTF was Cressida Cowper doing while she was in Wales?!

Twist: poster is AB+

Well, yeah. We do!

Ted Lasso has it right: pigeon sweat.

Only exception for me is southern-style sweet tea where the tannins make the 'beetus juice taste a little caramel-esque.

Sure, but kinda ALL beer is an acquired taste, and frankly I don’t think I’ve ever thought, “I sure do want a tasty beverage and don’t care about the alcohol content” and ended up drinking beer. Even if you’re not getting drunk, the alcohol is the point, and everything else is mitigation.

That said, when I am feeling like a little bit of alcohol, I like a nice malty dark beer, stouts of course, but even a simple schwarzbier dark lager can do the trick. A very dry cider is even better though, edging close to the point where I might actually pick it purely for taste.

“Retro” consoles with thermal paste and system batteries…

Yes, but literally three quarters of the US presence is on Okinawa. Just saying I think Tokyo is okay with that, as they get a the full military force multiplier with, from their perspective, a 75% discount on awful American behavior because the Ryukus are physically isolated and culturally distinct.

Lanterns is super solid, and I honestly really liked the ending once I gave it a beat. I’ll say no more in case you haven’t seen it yet.

We are at just about the right spot to get (most of) the original cast back and pick things up.

Hopefully Captive’s War will be decent as well. I’m enjoying the books.

The August report, titled “Fracture From Within,” was compiled by experts in the CIA’s Red Cell, according to two U.S. sources who described the contents of the report to Drop Site News. The Red Cell, which is the unit responsible for providing “alternative analysis” within the agency, produced the assessment through a combination of open source information and U.S. intelligence… The CIA’s “red teams” are tasked with developing analysis and ideas that challenge prevailing assumptions and expose groupthink or blind spots that can take hold within the intelligence apparatus.

Basically, this is “what’s the weirdest shit that is kinda plausible if things don’t go how our consensus expects.” Useful I assume, but by definition unlikely.

Bit of a square, though.

Although building on that, I think the “Mainland” Japanese have been pretty content to have the Americans corralled on one little island (Post WW2, it was bases on the home islands that were shut down), with their easily othered country-cousins the Okinawans being the ones who have to deal with the American troops day-to-day, many of whom are dumb kids on their first tour. I can guarantee you that neither my dad in the 60s nor my brother in the 90s was interested in good-faith cultural exchange while stationed there with the Marines.

That ain’t no wagon.

signed,

Subaru crew.

How interesting and cool. I mean, I can have certainly have experiences that flood over me without being articulated, and I can sort of stop talking to myself for a while and I don’t lose the ability to function or anything, but it really cannot last more than a few minutes. Processing the world is deeply tied to language for me.

Interesting as well that litre/liter isn’t even a “proper” SI unit; it’s just a nickname for a cubic decimetre/decimeter held over from France’s original metric system.

I also like to imagine that the path to working for the BIPM is not always a glorious one: “Jacques, you have spent the last three years of your post-doctoral fellowship trying to settle on the units you wish to use in your abstract. We think we have found the perfect place for your skillset…”

Obviously, so many more self-aware mammals don’t have language than do, but I’m with you in the sense that I have no idea how you would turn it off or any real conception of what it would be like to go even an hour without it.

I like to think I actually have a pretty decent ability to visualize things, but one other thing that may be related is I also don’t read as quickly as I would like. Upon asking my wife, who digests anything she’s interested in at lightning speed, she informed me that she doesn’t mentally articulate every word. She scans the information visually, still in order but without a detour through her speech center, and retention is excellent. Our daughter seems to do the same thing. Meanwhile, I’m here feeling like I’ve got shit on lockdown because at least I don’t have to whisper the words to myself like some early medieval monk (to the extent that trope is even true… thanks for nothin’, Augustine). If I quickly recite some meaningless mantra in my mind over and over again, I can speed things up for a little while, but it feels deeply unnatural.

Ooh, we all know how well genre fans take it when their expectations are subverted in a way that makes them re-evaluate previous entries in a series.

How do they know Christa McAuliffe had dandruff?

They found her head and shoulders on the beach.

Dark shit for an elementary school, but we were brutal.

Yup. In any lotsa-kids area, they’re everywhere, and everybody drives really slow because of it, but with 20 times the kids out and about, it’s not unusual at all that there’d be two or three times more fatalities.