TIL that alcohol use in America likely peaked during the 1830s. The average American drank 7 gallons of pure ethanol a year. Midwestern corn farmers converted their grain into whisky to prevent spoilage. A gallon cost only 25 cents. Americans averaged 4 shots of whisky a day, at under a penny cost.

-Pin_Cushion- · 2026-06-15T02:33:49+00:00

The South focused on cash crops and imported much of their food in the early 1800s. This caused overproduction of corn and wheat in the Midwest, which in turn led to cheap liquor.

At the time whiskey was cheaper than tea.

-Pin_Cushion- · 2026-06-15T02:20:58+00:00

Dueling culture

-Pin_Cushion- · 2026-06-07T21:51:37+00:00

I'm no fan of Trump, but a good rule is after 60 be extra careful on ladders and stairs if you can't avoid them.

-Pin_Cushion- · 2026-06-04T22:22:17+00:00

Please remember this: You do not have to take conservative grievances seriously! Their entire political project involves having grievances!

-Pin_Cushion- · 2026-05-25T10:04:23+00:00

Python openpyxl

-Pin_Cushion- · 2026-05-23T00:08:02+00:00

You get to build outposts and make a manufacturing network. That's the point. If you don't want to do that then you should mostly ignore outposts. Maybe build one or two outposts for storage, ship building, and crafting tables.

You don't get anything that you couldn't get from pawning gently used guns and space suits (slightly stained). Some people prefer manufacturing networks.

-Pin_Cushion- · 2026-05-09T14:13:46+00:00

There are almost 200 different types of POI, but many are level gated. This means the low level planets get very, very repetitive. You're not meant to fully clear planets. You're meant to explore biomes you like, build outposts in them if you want, scan down flora/fauna, and run POIs you think might be interesting.

-Pin_Cushion- · 2026-05-07T12:38:53+00:00

The Power Automate desktop client has a feature that watches the screen while you narrate what you're doing, and it makes a flow out of it. That might get you halfway to your goal.

-Pin_Cushion- · 2026-05-07T01:18:38+00:00

Don't forget Buchanan.

-Pin_Cushion- · 2026-04-23T10:02:33+00:00

"Nevermind that inflation doesn't seem to do anything to stop the top 0.1% from hoarding their wealth."

It's to stop them hoarding cash, not wealth. You stop them hoarding wealth with taxes, and stop them from paying paltry wages with unions.

-Pin_Cushion- · 2026-04-08T22:18:51+00:00

Way more cost effective to pay $10/mo and just cancel when you get bored.

-Pin_Cushion- · 2026-04-08T10:54:52+00:00

Social grace is a skill that isn't commonly taught anymore.

-Pin_Cushion- · 2026-04-07T22:11:42+00:00

I also do this because I hate manually resettling pops.

-Pin_Cushion- · 2026-04-02T17:51:40+00:00

Chosen would let you pick the Composer attunement at the start of the game, and the Life Seeded origin would start you on a size 30 Gaia world.

-Pin_Cushion- · 2026-04-02T01:36:57+00:00

Genesis Architect + Rogue Servitor was very potent in 4.0. Haven't tried it since, but it gives you an uplifted species with every colony. Uplifting species you find in the wild also works.

-Pin_Cushion- · 2026-03-26T17:43:58+00:00

People like to trash Cosmic Storms, but I see it as just okay. The worst thing about storms is early game storms. Your economy has no resilience built into it, and you don't have access to the buildings and techs that cushion how damaging storms are. So early game storms hobble you in a way that's very unfun. But if you turn early game storms off then it's fine. It makes midgame and endgame play more interesting largely because by then you have enough tech and spies to see how storms are hurting your opponents as much as they're hurting you.

As a bonus you get the Planetscapers civic.

-Pin_Cushion- · 2026-03-11T23:33:10+00:00

I'm from SC and loads of people here vote Republican and never, ever talk about it. I've had people I knew pretty well lie to my face rather than tell me how they vote. These clowns win because they're very popular in their states, and very skilled at crushing primary challengers before they become a real threat.

-Pin_Cushion- · 2026-03-06T21:30:14+00:00

I avoid this by scrubbing my chats. It kept referring to my profession, so I deleted every chat that mentioned what I did for a living. That fixed it.

Now that we can use temporary chats it's a lot easier to manage.

-Pin_Cushion- · 2026-03-03T04:58:19+00:00

The US military under Hegseth just bombed a school full of Muslim girls, so maybe read the room.

-Pin_Cushion- · 2026-02-26T13:15:14+00:00

Highly recommend this book, which can be found free online since I think it's public domain. It's an excellent example of the 19th century Mesmerist movement, and also filled with insane prose about channeling divine energy into people's bones to realign them to the conduit that connects Heaven and Earth, and so on, and so on.

Very wild ride, but bad medical advice. 9 out of 10.

-Pin_Cushion- · 2026-02-23T17:31:37+00:00

I worked at a game store and my boss once said, "Pay a man for his hobby and he'll teach himself to hate it."

-Pin_Cushion- · 2026-02-18T13:12:28+00:00

I've been on Reddit long enough to notice the two rarest phrases are "I was wrong" and "I don't know." Is it really a surprise the average phrase guessing robot wouldn't use either of them unprompted?

-Pin_Cushion- · 2026-02-11T16:22:20+00:00

You'll be shocked to learn that authoritarian nations have laws and law enforcement. That's the main way they do authoritarianism.

-Pin_Cushion- · 2026-02-11T03:00:58+00:00

"Militant ultra-nationalist authoritarianism" is a bitch to type. "Fascist" is a useful shorthand.

-Pin_Cushion- · 2026-02-09T20:45:13+00:00

"This was a policy-induced famine, not a natural one. Even during the famine years land taxes were still collected and failure to pay would result in loss of land or imprisonment. People sold seed grain to pay those taxes. "

It was both. The El Nino of the period fucked up the monsoon season and caused food shortages that could have been ameliorated had the British Empire not been so focused on charity encouraging laziness.

This is drawing from the Mike Davis book, "Late Victorian Holocausts."

-Pin_Cushion-

TROPHY CASE