That sounds like a just so story.

Spanish raiders could and did very easily talk to the locals they were subjugating to find out more about the plant. It was often described at that point as “a kind of truffle”. It was considered for a long time to be suitable for peasants and slaves, but not anyone with the option to eat ‘better’ food. The real reasons it took so long for potatoes to catch on are deeply rooted cultural norms around farming, class stigma around this ‘peasant food’, and worries around it being poisonous.

At every stage of it’s introduction into european diets, they knew how to cook it.

I actually prefer the smaller squad sizes and more barebones strategic level. Having a more RPG-like structure and more focus on a small number of characters is my jam. I looked at xenonauts, I think it’s absolutely amazing for a specific kind of player, and I know that I’m not that specific kind of player.

Menace’s solution to this is to basically remove the option for most weapons to miss entirely. A squad in that game is treated like a single unit, the equivalent to an XCOM/Xenonauts soldier. When you attack, it’s the same percentage roll applied to every bullet in the burst for each soldier. This means a single attack might have 40 individual dice rolls. The question is not if you hit, it’s for how much. Seems like a nice way of solving that issue without adding a whole bunch of units.

Cyber Knights does something similar: an attack with most weapons is a burst with each bullet’s chance to hit being individually rolled. This normalizes the chance to hit so it’s not all or nothing.

I love that game, played the crap out of it, waiting for another major patch to come back.

I was considering buying this as a massive fan of XCOM 2.

Was.

I’ll just keep playing Cyber Knights: Flashpoint thank you very much.

The crazy thing is he doesn’t even need to do anything to Russian civil aviation to paralyze it: the mere statement combined with daily strikes inside Russia is enough to send insurance to the moon and ground tons of flights.

It’s a powerful choking hazard. It’ll cause you to choke if it gets in your airwaves at room temperature, and will kill you if inhaled in higher concentrations.

And yet despite this, we pump it into almost every home on the planet.

I’ve heard of it. No way it lasts more than 5 minutes before being turned off. Every piece of software has bugs, and you bet your ass every single person would immediately start brainstorming.

They threaten the UK, France, Germany, etc for their internal audience, not the external one. To a middle class Russian (the target audience), those are “the west”, great empires, powerful players in the great game of geopolitics. It’s an empty affirmation to Russian citizens that they’re still at the big boy table. It would look bad internally threatening “weak Poland” without following through.

That doesn’t change or connect at all with the actual danger of an invasion. Before the full-scale war with Ukraine, Russia was “trying to negotiate between Ukraine and separatists”, they weren’t saber rattling. They quietly put their troops on the border for a “training exercise”, denied they were preparing for an invasion despite the British screaming from the rooftops, and then went in.

Specifically about Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia: yes, they’re in more danger than Poland, but an attack on them would pull Poland in. Poland sees an attack on them to be fundamentally the same as an attack on Poland.

they think they can ride it out in bunkers

It’s so nice of them to prepare all this shelter, food, generators, fuel, etc for their heads of security. So generous of them doing this with the absolute certainty that they’re going to get shot in the head and their shelter taken over as soon as the doors close.

Sorry, I obviously read too much into the final sentence of that comment.

People are obviously free to use, remake and mold language as they see fit. If that’s the way you’re using Muslim, then go for it. As a piece of friendly advice, because of common usage, don’t be surprised that people understand that word differently.

The stereotyping of brown skin = follower of islam (to use your terminology) I can 100% understand being very frustrating and annoying. For people that have given this more than 10 femtoseconds of thought, it’s obviously ridiculous to “present” as any particular religion outside of wearing traditional religious garb or wearing religious symbols.

Fair enough. I’ve seen countless examples of citizens in the same country not having access to the same services, resources and in some cases even legal recourse as other citizens. Reminds me of some pictures of “White residents only” signs I saw from Jim Crow era US.

If that’s the way you’re using the distinction, then yeah, it’s functionally the same as being discriminated against and a second-class citizen.

I’ve never heard of that distinction. When I’m talking about Israelis, I mean Israeli citizens (and I’m relatively confident most others do as well). What does an Israeli national have in terms of rights and responsibilities that a citizen doesnt?

Europe’s a big place. I don’t have anything resembling that here in Romania. You mean like in the Netherlands?

I’m sorry that you’ve experienced racist stereotypes.

On the topic of the Israeli/Jewish distinction, it might surprise you to know there are Muslim Israelis. They’re a minority and normally treated like second class citizens, but they exist and they have citizenship. As I hope you know, there are also Jewish non-Israelis. Some of them, myself included, are even actively anti-zionist. The common association is that Israeli = Jew, but as I hope I’ve explained citizenship doesn’t necessarily determine religion, and conversely religion doesn’t determine citizenship.

GNU Terry Pratchett

The magic stomach-filling qualities of lembas bread combined with the knowledge it was based on hard tack was then combined by Terry Pratchett:

The dwarf bread was brought out for inspection. But it was miraculous, the dwarf bread. No one ever went hungry when they had some dwarf bread to avoid. You only had to look at it for a moment, and instantly you could think of dozens of things you’d rather eat. Your boots, for example. Mountains. Raw sheep. Your own foot.

I think we might be having a bit of miscommunication. By ‘pretext’ I don’t mean the root cause of the action, I mean the excuse given to justify the action.

That’s not the worst case. The worst case is Christians using the baptism as a pretext to forcibly take the children away from their parents.

Historically speaking, this was sometimes used as pretext for the permanent separation of children from their parents. This is a form of genocide according to article 2.5 of the UN definition:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

[…]

5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Do not redeem. DO NOT REDEEM!!