A list of things that pair well with McDonald's Szechuan Sauce

httpsiimgflipcom46x3awjpg

Whilst having a conversation with a friend he wanted to give me a list of foods that would probably taste good with Szechuan sauce. Considering the list itself, I have a feeling that it's not as tasty as he might recall. These are compiled from our talk on the matter over one of the popular (but not too popular) messaging apps.

Read more

How to kill an over-powered super villain

Thanks to Darrel Miller for the heavy lifting here. Check out his expansion pack for the CC&VF tabletop RPG.

Got a super villain problem? Need to “eliminate” the threat when faced with complicated geo-political circumstances? Not sure how to get it done without escalating the situation?

I’ve got a few ideas you’re welcome to…

  • The leader of a threatened nation that is meeting to negotiate with the villain in their sinister lair could have an explosive device surgically implanted that would explode during a scheduled meeting. It would be best if the device replaced an existing, known medical implant, i.e., an artificial hip, so as to avoid tipping off the scoundrel. When calculating yield, go overboard. Nothing angers an arch-enemy more than almost being killed. Of course, ’tis a noble sacrifice on the part of the official who chooses this most ultimate of tasks. We should honor that.
  • When the villain is showing off their tank full of sharks with lasers on their frickin’ heads, kick them in. Despicables such as these are frequently so over-confident that they thoughtlessly place themselves in easily exploited positions, believing that their target would never suspect that they are the lunch. If said villain has managed to protect themselves from the sharks, sacrifice yourself. It’s highly unlikely that, in the mad scrum of blood and gore, the sharks could limit their fervor for feeding.
  • If Mein Führer appears to have thought of all potential soft vectors their adversaries might employ in an effort to stop their advances without engaging in outright battle, bomb them. The problem might be that they’d have access to an advanced weapon that, even if they were eliminated, could still wreck untold destruction. To bypass that potential, carry a number of bunker busters into the upper atmosphere on giant balloons, deploy them on giant, remotely controllable ram-air parachutes, and drop them when over the target or targets. Location intelligence here is key, so work your double-agents and spy agencies hard.
  • Travel forward in time to get an older, mostly broken version of your foe and take him to his young self to use as leverage to convince the junior villain to travel forward in time to kill his older self, thereby preventing the wreck that he would become. If the villain’s future turns out annoyingly positive, you can shift to another dimension where things didn’t work out and engineer your desired outcome, but then… you’d be the villain. If any of this makes sense, you get a cookie. It will be delivered via Einstein-Rosen Bridge portal services LLC. Please make sure someone was/is/will be there to sign for the package.
  • For those of you with a bent for the subtle, long game with an unknowable outcome, try using public education as a trojan. With a bespoke curriculum designed to gently guide each subsequent generation towards very specific ideological precepts, you can steer the populace towards the opinion you want the public court to espouse. When the time comes for that inevitable super villain’s appearance, you’ll have already set the groundwork, at which point the populace will have determined how best to eliminate the future threat… Maybe.
  • Finally, lots of people have power suits to make them strong, but how many have built a power suit designed to keep a baddie under control? Simply design a highly complex, mobile, armored suit powered by a super-computer-grade A.I. that will stop said villain from being able to do anything but eat & drink, keep clean, and watch hundreds of hours of Night Court, Cheers, and 3rd Rock from the Sun. Racquetball on Tuesdays is mandatory. Don’t be late (not that they have any choice, of course.)

Nobody likes a villain, but that doesn’t really matter because, despite our likes and dislikes, the world doesn’t work like that and we get baddies. Period. Full stop. In fact, they appear to be about as common as your standard, every-day, shit-eating housefly. While our “fortune” regarding the percentage of villains who have achieved “success” has leaned in favor of less mass-murdery types for several decades, there are still plenty petty, self-important tyrants about to spoil most anyone’s day/year/millennia.

And they do, with alarming frequency.

There’s no simple answer to the question of how to deal with a super villain as each is unique and brings their own set of conundrums heroes need to mitigate or manage somehow. If there were easy fixes, we’d not be facing the situation in Ukraine in 2022. But not everyone agrees that other humans have the right to be free or choose their path or just to have the opportunity to take another breath. It’s terrible. We watch the carnage on TV all day long and feel like we have no power to foment change while it appears the villains have all the power to get away with whatever they want…

…then again, I could rant for days. So I won’t.

I’ll leave you with two thoughts:

  1. If you get enough people to believe in the potential of some concept or thing, you can make it real. Just having the idea isn’t enough and no single person is enough to surmount any and all problems on the road to willing it into existence. It takes a village, quoth he with spite roiling on the tip of his tongue at his need to utter her words, after all. The Randian “John Galt” is an unobtainable mythos. We can’t have it, and the efforts being made in the attempt will destroy the world as we know it, unless we stop it as a collective of peoples who may not share the same ideologies, but do share the desire for our cultures to continue, in peace. I’m not suggesting it will be easy, but we could start with a) not killing each other for a while and b) getting people housed, fed, productive, and inoculated, not necessarily in that order and not as severe as I make it sound. That and trying to save our planet from ourselves should keep us busy for a few decades.
  2. Money isn’t real. It’s a disease, but it’s like the common cold or the flu; we know how to fight it even though it keeps coming back for more. We just have to manage it better until people get used to money being as meaningless as it ever was and get on with the business of progressing as a species. Oh, I’d say about 1,200 years of solid work should put a good dent in the problem. That’s going to take a lot of hero-types who will step forward and stand up for logical, meaningful, humanist policies instead of forever bending our knees to our corporate overlords. Your first target is stupidity. And because stupidity is so stupid, you will have to be ruthless. It’s only fair, since ruthless is all they’ve been to the rest of us, especially since most of us oppressed have been making their world turn for decades. And by ruthless I don’t mean violent, just that you need to stop letting their stupid run the show. This also means that you must also stop money from being the loudest asshole in the room. If I figure out how, I’ll write it down, but for now people far smarter than me should already have some ideas.

Of course, and I think this goes without saying, if you ever get the opportunity to kick the villain into a volcano, just do it.

Why the hell not? What’s the worst thing that could happen? World War III?

PS: ^^^


How to sacrifice children for a thriving weapons industry | 2022 Q2 Update

Welcome one and all! Is your weapons industry suffering in the markets when there’s little direct war action to feed the coffers for your “investors”? Our simple program allows you to generate almost unlimited “excitement” for weapon, accessory, and ammunition sales.

2022 has been a year of explosive growth for the gun industry, and we see nothing but profits for the ongoing future. Take a look at some of the successful results from our non-stop “marketing” campaign for “freedom”.

NOTE: The continued performance of gun “enthusiasm” despite the “unintended restructuring” of the National Rifle Association and their extensive messaging platform is a huge cost savings since we no longer funnel funds into their Ackerman McQueen-led AgitProp strike team. We applaud the NRA’s continued efforts to remain relevant, however.

Without further ado here are examples of “successful results” from our industry’s non-stop “marketing campaigns”…

May 24th 2022: Uvalde, TX. — Robb Elementary School — 21 murdered

February 14th, 2018: Parkland, TX. — Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School — 17 murdered

December 14th, 2012: Newtown, CT. — Sandy Hook Elementary School — 27 murdered

This is how. You do everything in your power to get gun laws relaxed, if not stricken entirely, so that more and more guns reach more and more true, red-blooded Americans. That, however, only reaches a certain saturation point. It’s not enough that one person own one gun. They need to need more guns. In order for your profit margins to soar in the short term, you need a catalyst.

You need the “Secret Sauce”; fear, uncertainty, and doubt, also known by its acronym, FUD.

As silly as FUD sounds, it is a devastating weapon that can strike without provocation or warning, and at scale, and all without specific instruction. It’s not enough that they feel unsafe in their homes, they need to feel existential dread. One of the most proven methods of instilling deep, unwavering dread is to see their children slaughtered like fish in a barrel, repeatedly. Preferably with some breathing room in between events so we can hone our messaging. We’d also like to thank Alex Jones who has been an indispensable asset in our efforts. We wish him well in his future endeavors.

One side benefit, as well, is that with so many excess guns and ammunition, a lot gets stolen, which must be replaced, which means insurance claims, and so on and so forth, providing a solid foundation for “gravy” profit margins in the peripheral markets and for suppliers. That also puts a load of guns into the “grey” and “black” markets, some of which generate more profits for us at gun shows, while illegal arms feed into the suburban, urban, crime, and minority fear secondary markets. And “Ghost Guns” are fine for now, but as they start to make headway, we’ll need to kick-off a “Vuse Maneuver” so we can leverage their work into our profit with minimal capital outlay.

As you can see here, the data is clear. Sales were distressingly low from the mid-90’s to the mid-00’s, but through our continued efforts on multiple fronts, we’ve been able to “eliminate” roadblocks to unlimited growth potential. A strong domestic weapons industry is critical. If we fail to protect this precious resource, hundreds of “Job creators” WILL continue to suffer, and we simply cannot allow that to happen.

You can’t leave it at that, however, you’ve got to dig deeper. You need help from the community, even if you have to manufacture consent. People are sheep. They don’t know what they need. But we, the wealthy and powerful, the ones manipulating things behind the curtains and maintaining a carefully curated veil of legitimacy, we do. Well, we know what we need, and in the end, that’s the only important thing we care to know. Knowing more is exhausting.

At the end of the day, however, we applaud this young man for his crowning achievement as 2nd Place Master Provocateur in our fight to return America to it’s “Roots”; a “colored folk” shooting range dotted with murderous, little fiefdoms teeming with happy, little aryans, bristling with their powerful, little assault rifles. Our Manifest Destiny is at hand, my fellow Americans!

Won’t it be wonderful?

In case it’s not clear, this is satire. I’m upset about Uvalde, TX. How can I not? These little babies were murdered, slaughtered like so many pigs in an abattoir, just like Parkland and Sandy Hook and thousands of others mass shootings year after year after year before, and if things don’t change, many more in the coming years. And we pretend this is a “mental health” issue, claim the time after tragedy is exclusively for grieving and discourse of any kind dishonors the recently deceased, then make deals behind closed doors and in exchange for “contributions” to give the gun industry its fucking money’s worth.

A lot more than our children pay the price, as well. Just look up how many have been killed by gun violence in America in 2022 alone, and the humanists among us are traumatized because we feel emotions; the closer we are, the exponential growth in heartache. We’ve been here before, and we’ll be here again unless the people act, and that means getting out into the streets, which is what I hope we finally do.

I wrote the above piece back in 2017. I wrote another on my blog, the one that was destroyed by The-Host-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named, and no, it’s not Blue Host. I dislike them openly. I may repost it at some point. It takes a lot of work to convert from WordPress Gutenberg post formatting, so probably not.

I hope we get some of this shit figured out before someone does something so stupid we can’t come back from it.

I really do.

PS: Depression is a deeply misunderstood ailment that often doesn’t feel real, either to people who suffer from it and don’t know or to those lucky few who’ve never been depressed, though I’m not sure the latter is possible. I’ve suffered from depression for decades now and I doubt it will ever go away, but I’ve still managed to write… at least until Covid-19 came along…

PPS: My wife, daughter, and I had Covid very early, like in February 2020. Fortunately for us, our primary symptom was body-wide pain and we had none of the other, potential fatal problems. I’ll just gloss over the fact that I happened to get Shingles at the same time, but for those of you who know, you know. What came after, however, has been the most catastrophic symptom of my Covid infection; Long Covid brain fog. If it was already hard enough to write while depressed, Shingles kicked it up a few thousand levels of distressing.

PPPS: I’ve made countless commitments to restart my writing efforts, but I’ve only managed a few spurts of activity over the last few years. I don’t know if I can change that, but I’ll damn well try. I can’t sit idly by, randomly opining on the internet while atrocities are committed on a near daily basis. I need to start being a more active participant in this great experiment gone wrong, a sentiment I hope many more Americans like myself, humanist, open-minded, pragmatic, for forward-thinking, will choose to adopt. I’ll do my best and all I can do is thank you for reading my words.