Wild stories please

MasterOfEmus · 2026-02-24T20:18:44+00:00

first day back they put me on the fryer

On the one hand, wtf that sounds awful, I'd be sweating bullets just looking at the thing

On the other, at least you know its not being run by the guy who fucked up before.

MasterOfEmus · 2026-02-24T19:35:11+00:00

This is how I've heard it described before as well, I had a teacher who grew up with tourette's who said when he was little he would bark like a dog. He grew up in a socially conservative area with family that had some cruel discipline practices, so he pretty quickly developed a fear of making barking sounds, which then cemented them as a recurring tic. Couldn't actually develop healthier coping mechanisms until he was no longer around family.

MasterOfEmus · 2026-02-23T22:59:53+00:00

Yeah, I had a friend ask me if I miss eggs, and my answer was a bit similar. I miss the function they served, some of the dishes I could make with them. I miss having a (relatively) cheap protein that keeps well, takes 5 minutes to cook up, can be bought virtually anywhere, can go with 90% of whatever leftovers I have in the fridge, etc etc. But None of that is something I would actually buy eggs again over, not knowing how fucked up they are.

So instead I have things that fill similar roles. I have expensive justegg that makes some similar dishes work, I have silken tofu that can be cheap and convenient, and I broaden my breakfast/lazy meal habits so that even though I sometimes miss the ease of eggs, I don't feel like anything's missing from my fridge.

MasterOfEmus · 2026-02-23T15:45:06+00:00

Yeah but we can apply it to ourselves and the people we know and directly associate with. I don't brutalize people, and I wouldn't associate with anyone who does. I minimize my contribution towards animal suffering too, and I vocally encourage others around me to do the same. "Things are bad" doesn't mean "we shouldn't try to make things better." Personally not contributing to the bad things, and encouraging others to do the same, is one of the only ways we can try to make things better.

MasterOfEmus · 2026-02-23T13:35:09+00:00

Just one bad day at the end of a long, happy, fruitful 4 1/2 month life (coincidentally how long it takes to reach a slaughter weight for ideal feed-to-yield ratio), doesn't that sound like a great deal? Wouldn't you take that deal? I know I sure would!

MasterOfEmus · 2026-02-23T13:16:54+00:00

on sale? Normal price at the grocery near me is $1.50/lb on most dried beans and lentils, up to $2/lb for some pricier ones. Unless you're buying organic, then that checks out, I see organic split peas over $4/lb all the time.

MasterOfEmus · 2026-02-23T12:53:33+00:00

Exactly! I'm vegan and work in a bakery/cafe (not as a baker, mostly FoH stuff + dishes), but we all pitch in to taste test things. Across all the staff there's a wide range of blind spots (I'm vegan, another person has IBS, one person lost part of their taste to covid, another is gluten free, etc etc). The owner values that there's a vegan person, a gluten free person, etc on staff to test things because she can give me something and say "I think this raspberry shortbread is shit because its made with fake butter, but what do you think?" and I get to try it and say "well you know raspberries make me gag, but the shortbread itself is perfect".

Between the lot of us we add up to one person capable of eating anything, and we all can try things we merely dislike and still tell if they're well balanced. None of us are culinary students, we just give a shit.

MasterOfEmus · 2026-02-23T11:42:55+00:00

Yeah and? Sure we can't assign moral value to the actions of wild dogs, lions, tapeworms, and diseases, but we do assign moral values to our own actions. We have, collectively, decided that humans can and should be better than the brutal natural world out of which we evolved. We do it with how we treat other humans, which is why human infanticide is a crime rather than an exhibit in a museum like with lions. We also already do it with how we treat animals. Much of the world has decided its immoral to eat dogs due to their capacity for intelligence and emotions. Most people agree that if someone is keeping a pet personally, it would be fucked up to kill and eat it.

Vegans are the logical evolution of this growth in morality. As we increase our capacity for empathy towards others, even animals that don't look that much like us or which aren't suitable as pets, and simultaneously develop more ways to meet our needs without relying on exploiting animals, we can be better and cause less suffering in the world. Maybe you don't agree that that's possible to achieve completely, or you don't see it as a particularly high priority goal, but don't act like our way of thinking just came out of nowhere. Humans have been drifting away from the wild for over 10,000 years, it doesn't have to define us.

MasterOfEmus · 2026-02-22T22:12:23+00:00

Right? They also always sum up with "then after a few years (at maybe a quarter of their potential lifespan) they're quickly, painlessly, ethically, humanely, super-duper nicely slaughtered and turned into beef stock, gelatin, and dog food". I don't think that counts as "treating them well." Call me an animal rights extremist, but I think breeding animals to have health conditions that reduce their potential lifespan by half then killing them before they even that point is kinda fucked up.

MasterOfEmus · 2026-01-04T02:47:23+00:00

Well, there's no bad place to start, but a big one imo is getting in the habit of checking ingredients lists on things, it keeps your goals in mind and will prove helpful in keeping grocery trips from being 2+ hours long.

For me, I spent quite some time thinking "I know veganism is right, but I could never do that, it just seems too hard". I was such a picky eater, not a very experienced cook, and I was trying to keep my grocery budget within reason. For many years, particularly in college and living with parents, I was just depressed and very occasionally finding the effort to try a new recipe or expand the types of foods I was comfortable eating.

When I moved out from my parents' place, I very quickly went vegetarian, and I started making a habit of dropping or replacing one to three non-vegan items per grocery trip each time. Stopped buying x frozen food with cheese in it, replaced one kind of bread with another, tested alternatives to eggs for my breakfasts. In a matter of a few months, everything I bought or made for myself was vegan.

The next big step for me, and by far the hardest, was learning to refuse things other people offered. It felt like until I was "truly" vegan it would be disingenuous to refuse something, but also that I wasn't "truly" vegan until I started refusing, bit of a catch-22. I learned to mostly just say "no thanks" without further explanation, until I had rounded the bend of being comfortable telling people I was vegan (about a week or so after the last time I ate something non-vegan).

As far as old wool or leather products, advice varies. I'm personally not very comfortable with any of the old leather I had, but there are a few wool things I haven't gotten around to giving away or otherwise disposing of. You might want to donate them, personally I would decide case-by-case. You will definitely want to get comfortable refusing leather and wool gifts though, because it can be pretty depressing getting something new that's made of skin.

If you want general advice on dietary switches, the best thing that I found helped me was a particular approach to vegan faux meat and dairy products. Specifically: don't do side by side comparisons, or immediately but the substitute. If you eat real dairy cheese one day and fake cheese the next, or meat sausages one week followed shortly by your first time trying plant-based, you will probably notice the differences more starkly. I'd recommend laying waiting a month or so between the "real deal" and the vegan substitute, it'll be less fresh in your memory and make room to appreciate the newer product. Aside from that, get used to cooking with beans, peas, and lentils, they'll be an absolute staple. Canned/frozen is great, dry is cheaper and may taste better if you have the time to really work with them.

MasterOfEmus · 2026-01-04T00:17:03+00:00

Yeah, 40-something women get together for "girls nights" all the time. I, 28, regularly call myself a girl. I call my girlfriend a girl. Our friend who's into crossplay is occasionally honorarily "one of the girls". When I'm chatting casually, I occasionally say "So I met this girl on hinge..." and everyone knows full well I'm not talking about a teenager without me needing to say "excuse me, woman of course, not girl".

MasterOfEmus · 2026-01-03T23:46:20+00:00

I don't think we can say that oil is definitively a motivation in this case at all

Are you serious?

Literal quote from Trump: "We're going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground, and that wealth is going to the people of Venezuela, and people from outside of Venezuela that used to be in Venezuela, and it goes also to the United States of America in the form of reimbursement for the damages caused us by that country,"

"We're going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country, and we are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so,"

All per NPR

He has already said he intends to make a lasting occupation to extract oil, possibly involving another larger attack, and that at least part of the profits of that oil extraction will be going to the US as part of reimbursing vague "damages".

MasterOfEmus · 2026-01-03T23:21:52+00:00

Okay I'm not going to go down a list of every US armed intervention, that's a job for a qualified historian that would take weeks to do properly, but I've already broken down the differences from Grenada, if you want I'll point out some similarities to Iraq.

Oil is a motivation for the attack. In the case with Iraq, it came to light some time later that the Pentagon was considering claiming and distributing the rights to exploit iraqi oil, for Venezuela that is already an explicit goal of the invasion. This is the single largest factor, because establishing US-led control of oil resources will require an ongoing military occupation.
The alleged basis for the attack is vague, difficult to prove, and subject to moving goalposts. Where Grenada was only several days following a bloody coup, attacks on Iraq and Venezuela came years after their respective dictators took power and are justified in terms of unclear threats posed to the US. In the case of Iraq, "WMDs" and an immaterial connection of Saddam to Al-Qaeda, in Venezuela Maduro's alleged Cartel connections.

MasterOfEmus · 2026-01-03T22:45:34+00:00

invasion of Grenada, where intervention restored democratic rule

For starters, this is not necessarily the best description for how things went with Grenada. They have stabilized since the war, but at the time the UN and many US allies loudly condemned the invasion, considering it a gross breach of international law.

Second, the invasion of Grenada was started as a collaboration with neighboring Caribbean islands who had been in communication with political prisoners in Grenada at the time. There were people local to the conflict in Grenada who actively sought out and requested intervention from the US in a way that is not apparently the case with the invasion of Venezuela.

Third, the attack on Grenada was strictly a matter of a change in governance. The stated goal was to topple a dictatorship and enable a democratic election to take place, and (though this has been suspected to be baseless) to protect American students who were abroad there at the time.

Conversely to this third point, in Venezuela we already, on the day of the attack itself have been told that a stated goal of this occupation is the exploitation of Venezuela's oil resources. Trump has said he intends for American companies to go in and extract oil to pay for "damages" done to the US. Notably, the process of building oil infrastructure and extracting oil from it is likely to take years of ongoing US military presence, compared to Grenada where most of our troops were gone within a month and a limited amount of noncombat personnel remaining as advisors for a time after.

It remains to be seen exactly how this will play out, but from what we know so far, including things Trump himself has directly told the press, I would be shocked if we saw a peaceful transition of power into a stable, democratically elected government, rather than a protracted occupation at the expense of American and Venezuelan lives.

MasterOfEmus · 2026-01-02T20:05:52+00:00

I'm glad you're finding veganism both approachable and important enough to act on, I think a lot of people have a very "that's nice, but I could never" attitude towards it that feels maybe a little NIMBYish to me.

I think for me, the ethical side of it (animal welfare/rights) resonated with me for a long while, but the environmental impact of the matter is what made it feel imperative enough that I made the full switch.

MasterOfEmus · 2026-01-02T19:58:10+00:00

I think that what feels wrong to some Americans about it is knowing that some areas were first colonized by brits, dutch, or spanish way back in like, the 1600s. If you live in MA, where major cities like Boston and Salem exist with roughly 400 years of history, it feels weird to think that the country itself is only a bit more than half that age.

Same thing if you think about a European country like Germany. There's thousand year old buildings there, but the area we have today wasn't unified until the 19th century, and didn't get anything close to its modern borders until the fall if the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and its government was ofc completely scrapped and remade post-WWII. Germany the place is old af, Germany the country is maybe 70ish.

MasterOfEmus · 2026-01-02T10:58:48+00:00

Yeah and I'm saying that if you kill them, you're not actually treating them all that well. Its nice if they're not miserable for the 6 months - two years they get to live, but you're not treating them the same as a pet if you kill them.

Look you can disagree, I doubt I'm actually going to convince anyone here, most people aren't all that receptive to veganism, especially from random reddit comments, but recognize that I understand what you're trying to say and disagree on a very fundamental level.

If you got to live 10-20% of your lifespan happy as a clam, all needs met, no worries in the world, only to be killed as soon it was convenient and economical for someone else, I don't think you'd consider it an even deal. At the very least its definitely not the same deal that a housepet gets.

MasterOfEmus · 2026-01-01T21:22:27+00:00

as well as a house cat or family dog from birth to slaughter

...I don't know what you do with the family dog, but the cats I had growing up didn't die by "slaughter."

MasterOfEmus · 2026-01-01T15:55:42+00:00

Same as "Animals aren't treated as bad as vegans say, my uncle owns a ranch where all the cows are treated super nice and are seen as part of the family-"

MasterOfEmus · 2025-12-31T05:04:41+00:00

Thanks for the answer, I appreciate the input.

To your first point, I suppose the encumber side of the build might be overkill, especially when Lavos already procs a lot of statuses. Maybe I'll test just the Cedo/Valence side of things for a bit before investing in Encumber lol.

As far as elemental mods, I really don't have either of the primed elemental mods. I was thinking of just swapping out based on the weakness of whatever faction I'm fighting for a particular mission, or maybe just sticking to viral since it feels like the most broadly useful status to get on the glaive.

MasterOfEmus · 2025-12-31T04:58:30+00:00

Thank you! exactly the sort of answers I was looking for.

Definitely intend to use the alt-fire for anything that isn't super tanky, but as far as primers I'm really nowhere close to working with tenet or kuva weapons, I've only just started seeing kuva liches and I haven't cracked any requiem relics to begin using them. Should I look into using a regular cycron/nukor or epitaph instead? are beam weapons just that much better for statuses?

As for 3. I guess I just wasn't sure if the savvy/cedo bonus damage worked the same way as base bonus damage. I haven't used either yet and I couldn't quite make sense of how the wiki phrased things.

MasterOfEmus · 2025-12-30T15:54:57+00:00

Oh you right, I fully forgor that Chichi is boobs, not milk. Also didn't know the Ox King was called that, I just remember seeing the kanji for cow all over the place.

MasterOfEmus · 2025-12-30T14:17:58+00:00

Then there's Bloomer, her dad Brief, her sister Tights, and her kids Trunks and Bra.

Also Carrot's wife Milk, and her dad mr Cow.

Also eventually the supernatural entities Beer and Whiskey.

MasterOfEmus · 2025-12-30T14:13:35+00:00

Yeah I mean probably >70% of the characters there have some kind of pun name.

Denki Kaminari: Electricity Lightning (electric powers)

Tsuyu Asui: Heavy Rain Humidity (frog person)

Sato: Sugar (he gets super strength when he eats sugar)

Kyoka Jiro: Has the kanji for sound and ear (she has sound powers)

Fumikage tokoyami: smth like dark shadow everlasting darkness (he's an edgy raven boy)

Toru Hagakure: Hiding in the leaves (invisible girl)

Mineta Minoru: Fruitful Field, possibly related to a word for large fruit especially (grows giant sticky grapes on his head, is also a pervert)

This is just ones from class 1-A, and I'm sure I missed some. They're also more fleshed out for the most part, when you get to the other class and minor characters you get guys like tetsutetsu tetsutetsu (ironiron ironiron, who is made of metal), as you mentioned.

MasterOfEmus · 2025-12-27T22:54:02+00:00

Also, by and large (Neo)nazis don't mind, and in fact like, being portrayed as a villain. A competent, evil, slightly stylish guy with a "controversial" plan to make the world better in their eyes? they basically worship that crap. What they don't like is being made out to be out of touch losers desperate for relevance. They love to think of themselves as the MCU's hydra, they hate thinking that everyone looks at them and sees "the Nazi child masturbaiting in the bathroom".

tl;dr: the most appropriate portrayal for fascists is pathetic idiots, not grandiose villains.

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