KobaCumTribute [she/her]

You can’t fool me, you’re just describing the plot of Chained Soldier except cunningly leaving out the part where the protagonist gets his balls stomped on as a reward for being a special good boy who does fights good.

“New” “Food”: literally just an open faced pizza hot pocket. Capitalist “innovation” at its finest.

I swear I’ve been told a recipe for some desert that used blended/mashed chickpeas as a base, but I can’t remember what it was. It seems like a weird choice at first glance, but I mean chickpeas just have a sort of warm and savory flavor and when mashed they do get a consistency in the same general ballpark as a lot of chilled deserts.

Now whether a given recipe is actually good with them, that’s up in the air, but they probably could be used as a base for a desert with a bit of experimentation. I just don’t really cook sweet things, so I haven’t tried personally.

I know the community that would become lemmygrad existed, and might have been called that, but I honestly can’t remember if it was already it’s own site and lemmy instance at that point. I thought it was still on lemmy.ml, but it might not have been, I just remember coming across Zara’s big rant while looking for the old sub’s lifeboat. I also remember that there was next to no activity either there or on lemmy back then, and that even early chapochat when people were still filtering in was orders of magnitude more active than them.

Also Kerry was the 2004 candidate against W, not Clinton’s VP pick.

I actually confused Kerry for Al Gore somehow, probably because they both ran against Bush in the early 2000s.

I’m gonna be honest I somehow conflated Kerry and Al Gore. I’m gonna blame having just woken up lol.

Back in the very first days of the site, when it was chapo chat instead of hexbear, there was some drama in the discord lifeboat that the site founders were originally working from. Someone from the old sub and that discord, Zara IIRC, went around accusing one of the admins and the discord mods of (among other things) “censoring MLs” and tried to stir shit up on the lemmy.ml community that would later become lemmygrad and get spun off into its own site, and her and her followers started spamming pictures of Clinton’s VP and just saying his name over and over for some reason until it became a bannable offense as a signal someone was just around to start shit.

I believe other raiders also picked it up later because they thought it was funny people would get banned for it.

Whoops. In my defense, the sun is coming up and I’m tired enough I had to go back and edit it like three times because I kept realizing I’d left out words, so I just uh didn’t read good there.

I had an answer ready to go for “why did Gorbachev and Deng’s respective reforms turn out different”, but I have a much less clear understanding of the minutia of Khrushchev’s policies apart from like the tractor privatization stuff that didn’t work out too good, the push to increase beef production by trying to grow more cattle feed that didn’t do so well in that climate, and the way the tacit acceptance of the “second economy” set the stage for a lot of stagnation, graft, and corruption that ultimately fed into the liberal bloc that used Gorbachev to seize power and loot everything.

Edit: I’m tired and misread the question to be about Gorbachev vs Deng.

There are several major things that stand out: Deng’s reforms were a tradeoff of accepting the bad of austerity and markets in exchange for real material concessions and access to resources and industrial capital, whereas Gorbachev just kind of shattered the central planning apparatus and began liquidating state assets, and retreated geopolitically as well, in exchange for literally nothing except more agitation and hostility from the US. Deng’s bloc also did not castigate and slander past leaders of the CPC the way Gorbachev’s liberals did to the past leaders of the CPSU, nor did they systematically dismantle the CPC and isolate regional branches from one another the way the CPSU was undermined. The CPC under Deng did not simply roll over and passively accept insurgencies like the CPSU did at the end, and instead both cracked down on violent agitators and sought to continue making some concessions to the broader public sentiment. China’s liberalizing reforms were also careful and piecemeal, getting something out of every step and preventing it from entirely upending the existing logistics system and industrial base, whereas like I mentioned in the beginning Gorbachev just kind of gutted the central planning system, destroyed the Soviet logistics system, and basically just did the liberal prayer of “the market will make it better, praise the holy line which can only ever go up!” and it did not work because of course it doesn’t work.

Some of that is that Deng’s bloc were cynical and decided to retreat from ideological goals for material strategic gains, and some of it is that the US at that point was happy to try to split off China and desperately needed China as a market both to buy skilled labor from and sell new industrial capital in a volume that American factories didn’t want to buy which made those strategic gains possible for China. Some of it is that Gorbachev was a dipshit who was apparently quite competent and well liked in a support role, but who had no good ideas of his own and on inheriting a mandate of reform and modernization found himself leaning on anticommunist extremists and elevating them into positions of power where they could censor communists and run anticommunist propaganda and just generally sabotage everything, and some of it is that the USSR was never going to get the sort of material concessions that China did because Reagan was even more of a fanatic extremist than Nixon and where China had material things to offer the US (and splitting off China into a US-leaning neutral state was a geopolitical goal), the USSR had nothing to offer the US except its own dissolution, collapse, and looting which is what wound up happening.

Anyone can get credit for a free month by recruiting someone with this referral link, so it’s really not that big a deal imo.

I thought the Dark Eldar were a toned down vestige of mainstream Eldar society? Like they can’t just respawn after a quick dip in the warp any more so they had to dial back their excesses a bit and focus more on predatory sadism for safety.