not cruvus memes

It tastes like a pumpkin gingerbread cake! Great treat for fall and winter!

Tim Cain's Chocolate Chip Pumpkin Muffins -- They're the shadow king's favorite!

1 and 2/3 cup flour

2 tsp cinnamon

1/4 tsp cloves

1/4 tsp baking powder

2 eggs

1 cup chocolate chips

1 cup sugar

1 tsp nutmeg

1 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

1 cup pumpkin (half of a 16 oz can)

1/2 cup (one stick) butter, melted

Tim Cain is one of the creators of Fallout

and he is an overall delight

like it is actually very important that you learn about who initially came up with the centrifuge design system for the Hail Mary and that she was one of the scientists that disagreed with Grace and he still doesn't like her for it and the feeling is mutual but he still acknowledges how fantastic her idea is because of course it is. She is the whole reason the ship works in a way that is vital to the mission.

It's important that you understand that Strat finds the world's leading climatologist to tell her exactly what mandmade catastrophe would increase greenhouse gases exponentially because it doesn't matter that it fucks with the world's ecosystem as long as it buys the earth more time while the sun actively cools down due to the astrophage infection.

It matters that you know she took a man out of prison for involuntary manslaughter because of his idea to pave vast amounts of land with solar panels to breed astrophage faster. It matters that you remember with Grace that paving a vast chunk of the Sahara Desert with these solar panels fucked up weather all the way up to Europe.

It matters that you understand the gravity, the desperation, and how all of it was necessary because there just wasn't enough time to work with without sacrificing something. Someone. Anyone.

It matters that you know how quickly Strat hired these people, blew off court appearances, hired convicts, and ordered bombings of the Antarctic to release gases into the atmosphere to make global warming worse. You need to understand the level of urgency, how Strat moved through these hurdles and approached solutions. How she was a history major in college and it's why she knows damn well how bad it's about to get for Earth.

Because once you know how little time the earth has, how limited the resources are, how risky the science is, how so few people are well equipped for this particular mission that is well and truly the world's only shot at surviving, you understand a lot better why forcing Grace to go was their only option after their other scientists died due to a simple, fatal flaw. Even with one scientist left in the world who was willing to go.

HELLO you are asking questions that literature and poetry THROUGHOUT the middle ages has asked, and it is from this questioning that we derive things like the Codes of Chivalry (which is not "how to treat a noble lady really nice" but is actually "how to be an ethical person when you're rich and you own a horse" and includes such things as "don't run people over with your horse")

In fact I daresay you already know instinctively just from cultural osmosis what a good boss -- a good liege lord -- is and does based on the tropes that have survived to the current day and the kinds of things that get Hugely Praised in things like legends of King Arthur.

A good boss (liege lord) is:

Merciful. He is not having his peasants killed for things like poaching rabbits during a famine. In fact, he is working to mitigate famine. During times of individual hardship, he might negotiate with a peasant for a payment plan on their annual rent.

Patient. He is not impulsive, he does not lose his temper.

Prudent. He makes choices that are thoughtful, considered, conservative (in the sense of not needlessly risky--he's not investing his entire fortune in having everyone plant an unproven crop). He is making sure local infrastructure like roads and public buildings are maintained and kept in good nick.

Gentle. He doesn't haul off and slap a servant or a tenant for breaking a dish or making a mistake. He doesn't abuse animals, his wife or children, or his employees. He doesn't rape the servants.

Generous (both in money and in spirit). He is not extorting the peasants for an amount of rent that is beyond their means, he is not raising taxes every year to cover his own lavish lifestyle. He is paying his servants a living wage (or, if wages are low, he's giving them room/board/clothing to make up the difference). If someone in a tenant's family dies, the lord is sending a gift of condolence, or helping to pay for the funeral, or possibly even ATTENDING the funeral and speaking a few kind words about the deceased, ESPECIALLY if they were a really upstanding and important member of the community. If one of his tenants is gravely sick, the lord is sending a basket of food or paying for a doctor. He is giving charitably (generally this will be, like, a bequest to the church so that they can run a hospital or an orphanage or a school for the local village children).

Pious. This classically means "goes to church, submits with humility to God" but to me this quality is subtextually standing in for "maintaining an ongoing sense of Perspective that HE'S not god, that there are higher powers he is Accountable to, that he too can be Judged, etc, so that he doesn't end up going on a weird fucked up power trip"

Humble. One of the most admiring things you hear about a lord doing in literature and epic poetry is, "He ate off of wooden plates while his followers ate off of gold and silver." Humility isn't about being meek, it's just about not thinking so much of yourself that you turn your nose up and sneer at what "lesser" people do. In other words: Don't be a fucking diva. If your carriage gets stuck in the mud, climb out and help everybody else push, you're not gonna die from getting mud on your shoes.

Condescending. This word has changed wildly in meaning/tone over the last couple centuries -- it's now a rude thing to do (because we've done away with legal social hierarchies, so someone acting like they're lowering themselves to your level IS insulting), but in older times, a high-ranking person "condescending" to a servant was worthy of praise and admiration: it means they were setting aside rank and privilege to speak to them with the easygoing, friendly respect and compassion they'd give a peer. This is things like... Treats those beneath him with courtesy and respect (ie: listens soberly and attentively when one of his servants or tenants comes to complain about a problem). Having a sense of humor and kindness about it when the lord and a servant both come around a corner at the same time and run into each other and the servant gets knocked to the ground and starts babbling apologies--the condescending (positive) lord helps them to their feet with his own hands and cracks a joke to show them that it's ok (as opposed to just walking off without a word or insulting/scolding them). This is also things like trusting a farmer, woodcutter, or artisan to speak with expertise about their own livelihood and taking their advice into consideration if they tell the lord that one of his ideas won't work.

Good boundaries. The ethical liege lord knows that it's normal for the staff to probably be softly bitching about him in private (even with a really good boss, we all grumble from time to time). He's not eavesdropping on them, he's not going into the staff areas where they should reasonably expect to have a degree of privacy, etc.

Righteous and protective of "the weak". The "weak" here doesn't necessarily mean physically weak, this is often used in the sense of someone politically or socially weak, aka The Marginalized -- the poor, the disabled, women, children, the elderly, etc. If a lord sees someone like this being mistreated or abused, he's supposed to step in and put a stop to that.

Committed to reciprocity. In a highly hierarchical system like feudalism, every person (from the lowest peasant all the way up to the crown prince) legally OWES their liege lord certain things (taxes, labor, service, loyalty, etc). A good liege remembers and takes very seriously the idea that this should be a balanced and reciprocal relationship -- in other words, he owes something BACK. Feudalism is modeled very strongly on the family system: If children owe their parents obedience and service, then parents owe their children care and protection. This still applies when the "child" is a farmer and the "parent" is a local baron. Or when the "child" is a duke and the "parent" is the king.

Basically, we get so caught up in the aesthetics of nobility that we forget that it literally is a managerial position that comes with responsibilities that were... very similar back in the day to the same ones we have now. Humans have not changed all that much. At the end of the day, a really good boss in the 1400s versus in one from the 2020s displays most of the same qualities of personality, even if the details of execution are different.

The next question is, of course, "well, but this theoretical liege lord is HIGHLY idealized -- how often did that actually HAPPEN? Wasn't it more likely that everyone was exploited all the time?" and to that I say: Well, maybe. But again, I don't think humans have changed all that much. Just like the bosses of today, there's a SPECTRUM: A really really good boss is rare and precious and one that you tell stories about for years after you've left that job, but a truly, genuinely, homicidally nightmarish boss is also pretty rare. Most bosses are sort of meh -- they have their good moments, they have their shitty moments, but they're tolerable and you can get along with them well enough to do your job, and then you roll your eyes at them behind their back. Generally, humans don't take outright exploitation lying down. Being a bad boss in the historical period is how you get peasant uprisings and revolts, and you know that to be true because your parents raised you with that knowledge, so unless you are very stupid or inbred or an egomaniac, there is literal personal incentive to at minimum be a Tolerable liege lord. And that means hitting at least SOME of the above bullet points.

TL;DR: In the words of Honore de Balzac, "Everything I have just told you can be summarized by an old word: noblesse oblige!"

You know what else is confusing? Being told my entire life that I would be exclusively attracted to men when in fact I am a raging queer. And you’re not giving kids enough credit, if they can handle topics like ‘you have a set of earthly parents and a set of Heavenly Parents and both are real parents to you’ then they should understand the concept of being trans.

(He got called to be a mission President a year after that - when he got home it was the first time I'd attended church in since he left. I still call him my Bishop. He was, and remains, a great man.)

Anyway, it was the BoM year, so the number of lessons I skipped was non-trivial. I think I repeated the 3rd Nephi, Chapter 17 lesson alone at least six times to avoid some of the dumber ones. Sometimes the kids just wanted to play outside so we’d sneak some of the teaching aids out of the library (mostly fake crowns and other costume gear) and go to the grass. I’d tell them we were reenacting BoM scenes, but it was always just silliness. The boys loved it when I joined their stick battles and they could all gang up on me and chase me around the lawn, and the girls liked when I joined their dramas. Especially murder mysteries. They’d present me with some sort of weird 8 year old parking lot jungle juice in a paper cup, and I’d take a small sip and then spend a minute or two “dying” from poison. Sometimes I barely had to fake it. I'm pretty sure they gave me straight gasoline once.

There was a set of fraternal twins in that group, a brother and a sister, and one day the boy asked why I wasn't on a mission yet. I told him I didn't know how to answer that, and he apologized, and I told him you have nothing to apologize for. His sister looked appalled as soon as he brought it up (mission stuff is a huge Mormon taboo) but when the day was ending, she stayed behind to help me fold chairs. And when that was done she asked if she'd see me in heaven.

And it struck me how much it must have been worrying her, for her to stay late and to overcome the taboo of asking. So I told her I would do my best, and she said that had to be enough, and I gave her a hug and walked her to parents, then got behind the wheel of my ridiculous half-spackle car and bawled like a little kid. I cried so hard my shoulders hurt. Then I went to the gas station and got a hotdog.

The people making these policies aren't afraid that the kids are going to be confused. They're afraid that they won't be. That they'll look up at you, and love you, and tell you that whatever you're doing has to be enough. They're afraid that if you helped their kids be happy and live a good life, those kids would love you, and then they would have to love you too. And so to keep their hatred safe, they throw you and what you could offer their kids away. It is cowardly, and selfish, and so sickening that it is hard to look at.

And in the end, all I could do was stop looking.

Nigel Farage is the leader of Reform UK, a far right party who are currently in the process of a serious bid to become the UK government. they are just straight up evil.

Count Binface is an intergalactic space warrior with a bin on his head. he likes to run as a novelty candidate in general and mayoral elections. a big thing he likes to do is run as a candidate against the incumbent prime minister:

(Also pictured: Boris Johnson, Elmo)

Anyway, in brief:

Nigel Farage is currently in the midst of a big scandal about his finances

He has decided to deal with this by 1) making a show of nobly resigning from parliament and then 2) immediately running in the resulting by-election

He has stated that he is letting 'the people' judge his actions and implied that if he wins that will prove that he has been exonerated in the court of public opinion

His goal was presumably to get a big resounding win over the other parties, proving that The People still love him.

the other parties have thus far decided that this is a 'vanity election' and, well, there is one very easy way to ensure that he will not beat any of them, and that is simply not to play.

and as a result the only person who has so far confirmed they are running against him is Count Binface. no matter the outcome this makes Nigel Farage look like, u know, a fucking clown.