https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broomrape

Try this for a change

I have a huge hog. His name is Captain Snortles and his oinks are food for the soul

Me, an immortal vampire slut with a medically undocumented form of “lucid” Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, dating exclusively nullos, then once the nullo supply has been fully exhausted, switching to pre-T trans men, then post-T trans men and cis men with micropenes, then men with penes within standard deviation, then finally men with penes above the standard deviation, going roughly in order of smallest to biggest but using my powers of volitional macropsia when necessary, all so that I can tell every guy I’m with that his is the “biggest one I’ve ever seen” without ever needing to lie because lying is bad. This project has taken roughly 131 years thus far but I have made a lot of guys very happy. It’s not much but it’s honest work

Yup, I’ve been using ruby characters as much as possible just to spread the word that Lemmy’s markdown supports them!

There is literally only one good point in those pictures, and it is that neanderthals get a bad rap. Not that neanderthals were all muscular and long-lived (they weren’t), just that they get a bad rap. Neanderthals are cool.

※Except when the shaming is consensual

Did you just say penis Discord?

Please go on.

I’ve only heard it about Greece

“These Feds Aren’t Built for Puppy Girl Discourse” sounds like a poorly translated anime title

この連邦当局フェズは、パピーガール・ディスコース出来できない！！

My only Scrabble-related memory as a kid was playing the word “rape” because I’d seen it online but didn’t know what it meant. Things got a bit awkward.

No, you should have a large cock, actually, and a high IQ. It can be done.

It can be done, yes, but I don’t think this “Eurasian Emperor” fellow would like what that looks like in practice…

※IQ is racist pseudoscience and the concept of intelligence in general is deeply misleading

Fuck Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, the only good “The Rock” is Bo— [gets tackled by the Overused Joke Police]

How exactly do they plan on enforcing this…? Like, obviously, public performances like theater, yeah, music that can be heard by others, but what else if anything? Are they gonna ban useraudio.net and its likes? Force Spotify and YouTube Music to use some sort of BPM detector to find music to block?

I thought A Clockwork Orange made it perfectly clear how exactly you force someone to watch something

Well, you aren’t wrong…

It’s called a mianguan (冕冠) if you’re wondering

Can you name any specific examples? I’m curious.

Caucasians literally have heavily choreographed pretend sword fights with actual swords, at some point you just gotta say that they know how badass their traditional culture is and they’re just kinda rubbing it in on everyone else.

Like my mom always points out that in the Caucasus that interest in traditional culture seems to skew a lot younger and seems to be a lot more widespread compared to in Norway. In fact I got an accordion not too long ago, and when I got it, the thought of playing local folk music like its previous owner did was frankly secondary to the thought of learning some Circassian folk music. Because obviously these Norwegian waltzes with their quaint lyrics, to younger folks like me cannot hold a candle to some raw, concentrated Adyghe swag.

This is maybe a bit silly to bring up:

My writings about my conworld mainly focus on a federation whose only land border — a very long land border indeed — is with its former colonial master. This colonial empire has required that the decolonized federation must not enforce border controls, must have the imperial metropole’s monarch as co-head-of-state alongside three indigenous heads-of-state, must tie citizenship and consular services to those of the imperial metropole and the three indigenous confederations, and must allow the empire’s military to do exercises and build bases on the federation’s soil within a “zone of permitted presence” to the west of a tall mountain range. The empire notably has also refused to give up some large stretches of strategically important bits of traditional land of several of the indigenous peoples of the federation — bits of land that could be used for an eventual amphibious invasion of the federation. And obviously the decolonized federation largely inherited its legal system from the empire, and the empire is still very firmly tied to the economy of the decolonized federation, and uses this economic leverage to try to stop the spread of class consciousness and revolutionary spirit.

In the situation of this “unfinished revolution”, the socialist faction of the anti-colonial movement had an interest in ensuring the right to bear arms, because obviously allowing socialists to arm themselves is beneficial for the revolutionary struggle for reasons you should already be well familiar with. But even the non-socialist faction of the anti-colonial movement understood that the young federation’s armed forces would consist of one fleet and one field army of the empire’s, where natives were segregated from settlers and relegated to low-ranking positions, and where a large number of the high-ranking officers were already transferring to other parts of the empire’s military for fear of how they might be treated by a decolonized state. It was paramount for the young federation’s survival to racially integrate its armed forces, to equalize the settlers and natives, to make up for the losses in manpower and strategists, to have natives heavily outnumber settlers, to prevent the development of the armed forces into a distinct group identity with collaborationist interests, to develop heavy industry and combat homelessness and separatism, and to build up the military might to even stand a remote chance of withstanding an invasion.

The way this ended up being solved was by transferring soldiers between formations en masse, reorganizing the armed forces into a highly horizontal and democratic and even informal institution, allowing for non-government militias as well as regional defense forces, cooperating with the armed forces of nearby decolonized states, and instituting incredibly widespread conscription in the form of a militia system, where the federal armed forces do not consist of regular and professional soldiers but rather consist of volunteers and conscripts. Anyone who’s served in the federal armed forces gets to keep sy firearms at home, in fact for conscripts one’s “weapon of passage” is often seen as a trophy of adulthood. Likewise firearms (including parts kits) are easy to purchase and gun clubs are readily available across the federation. The federation’s aim is quite simply to give as many people firearms and training and some form of organization as possible, on top of having a truly ridiculous number of bunkers (many of them disguised as regular buildings) and lots of bits of critical infrastructure rigged with explosives à la Switzerland. Because as Vietnam proves, no amount of imperial superiority can withstand the masses engaging in guerrilla warfare.

However, while this gun policy did succeed in its aims (no pun intended), it also caused many other problems. Because you obviously don’t just have socialists arming themselves, but you also have plenty of reactionary thugs, including settler militias; and you also have increasing gun violence, including ethnic conflict between settlers and natives; and you also have seized or discarded or sold weapons getting into the hands of the police, who were largely disarmed upon independence but who are obviously now using their newer toys to oppress the working class and increasingly become that cohesive collaborationist reactionary segment of society that the young federation ensured the armed forces would not become. Some of the regional defense forces can be at times troublesome as well. So all in all the gun culture of the decolonized federation, the cultural binding of national identity to bearing arms, has resulted in some amount of exploitable societal and political instability, for as much as it has also helped protect independence and develop the revolutionary struggle.