Only superficially. Dune deconstructs the entire heroic archetype. Paul Atreides’ emergence as the hero and leader of the Fremen is completely artificial and engineered for colonialist purposes (so that House Atreides can control the supply of spice with minimal resistance from the population of Arrakis).

The plan backfires, of course, as the Fremen jihad ends up being more successful than they’d anticipated and spreads off-world and out of Paul’s ability to control it.

I do make real meals all the time. I love cooking. The whole point of my comments is to show how crappy and low value these meals are.

Please give the thing rounded sides like the SE (and older phones with that case). I’m getting so sick of the sharp corners of all the current phones and the way they dig into my hands.

You owe it to yourself to try some traditional Roguelikes:

• Caves of Qud (Just released 1.0 a month ago. Amazing game. Unique science fiction world full of weird and wonderful characters, complex tinkering crafting system, crazy mutants and really cool cybernetics. Huge amounts of lore and a rich detailed world. I can’t stop playing it!)
• Shattered Pixel Dungeon (Really awesome game with a friendly developer who posts on Lemmy. Extremely well balanced classes: 5 main classes with a 6th in development. Cool character customization and equipment upgrade system. Super deep alchemy system. Probably the best mobile roguelike but amazing on PC too, with a great UI for every platform)
• NetHack (old school, developed since 1987 and still active, very tough game, might not want to try this one first. Incredibly rewarding once you learn it! Absolutely crazy amount of interactions between items, characters, and features in the dungeon. Takes its “verb-based action system” much farther than any other game, including text adventure games)
• Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup (very complex but not as brutal and spoilery as NetHack. Extreme replay value due to the huge number of species, backgrounds, skills, and gods)
• Tales of Maj’Eyal (not as many races as DCSS but still a huge variety of character builds. Great music as well)

Read the label on the package. The enchiladas are already full of rice and beans.

1200 calories / 4 people is 300 calories per person. 300 calories times 3 meals per day is only 900 calories. According to the American Heart Association, that’s the recommended calorie intake for a 1 year old.

So unless your “family of 4” consists of 4 babies and no older children or adults, this is not a family size meal.

Wow you aren’t kidding! I was expecting some 3D modern graphics thing but it’s literally a new Escape Velocity game without the EV name!

Thanks for this. Wishlisted!

Edit: oh it’s actually free!

I think I will! Thanks for the rec!

I think my dream girl is someone who solves a murder mystery while wearing a flapper headband. Like she’s ready to go to some big party involving super long cigarette holders but she carries a magnifying glass and a notebook in her purse and she doesn’t hesitate to start looking for clues and talking to witnesses when everyone finds the body sprawled on the drawing room floor!

You’ve worn a flapper headband? Have you ever solved a murder mystery?

I get that. But usually the hero is someone who underestimates their own ability and learns to overcome challenges by believing in themselves. Here we have the opposite, which seems more fitting for a villain.

It’s honestly such a weird show. The “hero” is an incompetent jerk who constantly screws up and relentlessly bullies his most loyal friend who is vastly more competent in every way.

At least they gradually tone down the bullying as time goes on and the teasing on Tool Time becomes more of a two way street.

A lot I think. McDonald’s doesn’t just build restaurants anywhere. They conduct rigorous market analyses to determine where they want to buy real estate. They don’t buy unless they expect a place to be growing.

They have the benefit of all the data from their restaurants. They can compare that with publicly available data from local city councils. This is one of the reasons big companies seem to be immortal. They just have so much data, experience, and understanding of exactly how the business works at a local level.

Of course what they can’t anticipate (and few can) are global economic slowdowns and other major trends or even sudden events.

Say you want to open your own McDonald’s branch. You pass their financial vetting, get on their waiting list, go through McDonald’s boot camp, then McDonald’s corporate builds a new McDonald’s restaurant on land they own (or acquires land before doing so), then they lease the land to you, sell you all the equipment for the kitchen, the furniture for the dining area, and all the food and other supplies you need.

The prices are set according to their rules, the food is provided to you by them, the recipes are all very simple (you learn them at boot camp), all you do is hire and train the staff and operate the restaurant. You pay McDonald’s for everything, your profits are entirely based on sales, they own the land your restaurant sits on. If you decide you want out they’ll find someone else to take over.

Just as residential real estate has skyrocketed in price, so has commercial real estate (even more so). If you decide you’re out and McDonald’s corporate decides that location is no longer profitable then they sell the property with a large return on their investment.

But here’s the really annoying thing about McDonald’s: they don’t care if their sales trend towards zero. McDonald’s makes all their money on the real estate values of their restaurants, not on food sales.

Our western culture of individualism is older than capitalism. Much older. It stems from our agricultural and pastoral modes of production. Grains like wheat as well as livestock like sheep, goats, and cattle are highly amenable to work by an individual farmer or shepherd or rancher. Wheat is sown in ploughed fields that have been worked by oxen or horses.

Compare with a different grain like rice which must be transplanted into flooded fields by large groups of people or crops like potatoes or yams which must be planted and dug up individually by mass labour.

The structure of individualism or collectivism is in the roots of our cultures going back thousands of years. So rather than capitalism giving rise to individualism I think the opposite is the case.

Robin Hood might not have even existed as a singular person. Rather, the name could’ve been a common alias shared by many different outlaws.

Robin Hood wasn’t really an altruist. He was an ally of King Richard who was absent (fighting in the crusades) during Robin’s adventures. Prince John, Robin Hood’s nemesis, was constantly scheming to usurp Richard’s throne. Thus Robin Hood and his band of outlaws should better be thought of as partisans fighting a guerrilla war against a usurper.

But not unusual in Japan!