Hossenfeffer

Hold my flashbang, I’m going in!

Did you just assume their pronouns?

Doofus. I make carbonaaaaaaaara the authentic Italian way. Pretty much.

I don’t use guancale because I can never find it in the store, so I mix it up with Oscar Mayer hotdogs, pepperoni, and some crispy bacon. I don’t use eggs because who’s got time for that shit, so I mostly use mayonnaise. Bucatini and other fancy pastas are for losers so I sub in some tater tots instead of the pasta. And Pecorino Romano is expensive so I generally use Easy Cheese spray and crushed up Cheetos. I don’t add cream, but I do add ketchup which does much the same job. And peas because they give that pop of color and flavor. And obviously some hot sauce because otherwise it’s a bit bland. And some pineapple for that Hawaaaiiain/Italian fusion vibe.

But basically it’s an authentic carbonaaaaaaaara just like you get in Rome. Oh, I like to hit it with a good old splash of A.1. Sauce because why wouldn’t you? I love A.1. Sauce.

You’re supposed to wait until the pets are dead.

Whoever has been left as its leadership is a dumbass.

Not in the slightest. More likely their annual bonus depends on boosting revenue right now. So they’re incentivised to generate short term increases in revenue but not for longer term. Plus, also, if/when Youtube goes tits up they’ll just get a different CEOing job (with “increased revenue by 25% in 2024 on their resume”) rinse and repeat.

Kind of my point. We gained ecommerce, streaming services, platforms such as this one, online gaming, mapping services, and others - at the cost of the freedoms for which people are nostalgic. And now we have ads, personalization, tracking, and inevitable enshitification.

Back in the days of the wild frontier things were chaotic, anarchic, violent, and unconstrained.

Then came the churches, then came the schools
Then came the lawyers, then came the rules
Then came the trains and the trucks with their loads
And the dirty old track was the Telegraph Road

And now we’re all fenced in, regulated, allowed to wander only in approved lanes… oh, wait, sorry, we’re talking about the internet, not real life!

I mean, sure, it’s no looker, but if it makes mail carriers’ lives easier then that’s a win. Will probably be ‘iconic’ in a decade or two.

Me. Sigh.

Hold my bag of many things, I’m going in!

She’s a former prosecutor. He’s a compulsive liar, misogynist and racist former reality TV star with dementia who isn’t used to being told to wait his turn before he can speak.

And together they fight grime?

First thing I turned off in my new car when I got it. I hate the feeling that the car is no longer responding to my inputs.

No, but they were:

Strategic bombing of a civilian population

The most successful besiegers were probably the Romans. It wasn’t so much the act of laying siege that caused cities to surrender, it was the utter, uncompromising determination of the Romans to see the siege through to the end, and the atrocities they would commit on the surrendering population that made them so successful. Surrender immediately and you don’t get enslaved or butchered… hold out and things will go very, very badly.

I don’t recall all the details but there was one siege in western Europe where the mayor of the town declared ‘you won’t take us: we have supplies for four years in our store houses’ to which the Roman commander replied ‘then we’ll take you on the fifth year.’

Or take Masada, a supposedly impregnable fortress built on a mountaintop. First the Romans built walls all the way around it, both to contain the Jewish ‘rebels’ but also to protect the Roman siegeworks from any potential rescue force. Then they just built a ramp. A massive, massive ramp, that reached all the way up to the fortress walls (which weren’t that strong because who builds a strong wall when your fortress is perched on top of a mountain?). Then they wheeled up some siege engines, smashed their way through the walls and discovered most of the inhabitants had commited suicide rather than face capture.

Strategic bombing of a civilian population has only ever hardened that population’s resolve.

Are you including Hiroshima and Nagasaki in that?

I like boats. Plus I’m a billionaire now.

The problem is that it’s so much money that you can clear out the inventory of almost anything you would buy while only chewing a few percent off the bankroll.

I shop at Burgess.

Goldman Sachs is overhyped and unreliable.

I’m anaspeptic, phrasmotic, even compunctuous to have read such pericombobulation.

In today’s money? About 17p, or 21 US cents. Shocking, really. I’ve got a club because at that price, why wouldn’t you?