A true air fryer cooks by blasting hot air from directly above the food. The fan and heating element sit on top, and the food rests in a basket with holes that let air flow underneath. This creates a fast-moving vortex of heat that surrounds the food, cooking it evenly and making it crispy with very little oil.

A small tabletop convection oven works differently. Its fan is usually in the back or on the side, pushing hot air around the chamber instead of straight down. The air moves more gently, and the food often sits on a solid tray or rack that blocks airflow underneath. It still cooks evenly, but it produces more of a roasted texture than a fried one.

Personally, I prefer tabletop convection.

Gyozaius.

I like it!

The fact that you need a /s makes me very sad.

I am actually amazed that it found a connection and explained it to me.

This is one of the biggest problems with our current state of polarization: we’re quick to box people into a binary; either “red” or “blue,” “left” or “right.”

Real people rarely fit neatly into those categories. When you take the time to actually map out someone’s beliefs, experiences, and values, what you find almost never looks like a solid block of one color. Instead, it’s more like a mosaic: someone might lean conservative on economic issues, progressive on social ones, independent when it comes to foreign policy, and undecided on others.

Reducing all of that complexity down to a single partisan label is not only misleading, it also fuels division. It makes it harder to have real conversations, because instead of engaging with the full person (their reasoning, contradictions, and growth), we engage with a caricature. Recognizing that most people carry a mix of beliefs forces us to slow down, listen, and resist the urge to collapse identities into overly simple categories.

The challenge is that this feels counterintuitive, especially for people who haven’t examined why they hold the views they do. It’s easier, and often more comforting, to inherit an identity or adopt a team than it is to wrestle with contradictions and gray areas. But when we refuse that deeper work, we not only misunderstand others, we also misunderstand ourselves.

In other words, the messiness is the point. People are complicated, and when we acknowledge that, we create more space for dialogue, empathy, and genuine understanding; the very things that binary polarization squeezes out.

Edit:

If you’re interested in seeing how this plays out in practice, the New York Times put together a quiz a few years back that illustrates the point really well:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/09/08/opinion/republicans-democrats-parties.html

Most agricultural products go through screening to remove unwanted materials, but these systems can miss items that closely resemble the food in size and appearance. For example, I once bit into a rock that looked exactly like an almond in a bag of almonds. While it’s a rare occurrence, it’s still important to stay cautious. If something like this happens, contact the company and provide the product’s serial or lot number. This helps them trace where and when it was packaged and check if there was a problem with the screening process.

Yup. I totally understand why it rings hollow and why “feels good” that a Nazi died.

Authoritarianism isn’t waiting for permission. Absolutely.

But there’s a difference between “they don’t need justification” and “justification doesn’t matter.” Yes, Trump was always going to crack down on dissent. But Kirk’s assassination transforms that from “Trump’s authoritarian overreach” into “necessary response to political violence.” It shifts the narrative from aggression to self-defense. Did Goebbels need Wessel after his death in 1930? No, but it sure as shit worked to mobilize the base.

My point is that we, the true patriots upholding actual freedom, lose here. We all lose here and its frustrating that so many people are caught up in the cosmic justice that they can’t see that this is EXACTLY what they want.

The “feels good that a Nazi died” impulse is human. But politics isn’t about feelings, it’s about power. And right now, people celebrating are ensuring that the worst people in America are about to get a lot more of it, wrapped in the flag and carrying Kirk’s picture.

Instead of telling me how I feel, name a single “good thing” that has resulted.

Kirk’s organization is stronger, his ideas are martyred, his followers are more radicalized. You tell me I am afraid, but I am observing reality; historical and present.

Show me the improvement, because all I see is fascists getting exactly what they want.

It appears you do not want to know more.

Ohhh! I love Starship Troopers! The book, not so much, but the movie I adore.

Let’s dig into your choice to respond with this scene.

That’s the moment where Verhoeven shows us ‘Federation Victory’! The good guys have won! They’ve captured the Brain Bug! It’s afraid! Humanity wins!

Except what’s actually happening is fascists celebrating the torture of a sentient being. One that extracted human minds just as they’ll now extract from its mind; each side justifying their horrors by pointing to the other’s. All while convincing themselves they’re heroes.

The Federation doesn’t attempt communication or diplomacy. They literally probe its brain for intel while cheering its terror. The troops cheering ‘It’s afraid!’ aren’t the good guys. They’re Verhoeven’s mirror showing us how righteousness becomes the very tyranny it claims to fight.

NPH’s character literally becomes a full SS-uniformed intelligence officer who feeds his best friends into an endless meat grinder. The bugs were defending their home. The Federation manufactured its own eternal enemy. And everyone cheering becomes complicit in forever war.

You’ve sent me a scene about people so drunk on their enemy’s fear that they can’t see they’ve become the monsters.

So either you’re agreeing that celebrating suffering makes us indistinguishable from what we oppose, or you’ve accidentally proven my point by quoting the villains as heroes.

Either way, I couldn’t have picked a better metaphor myself.

I understand finding comfort where you can, but consider: Kirk not being here to “see it through” assumes his death diminishes his impact. The opposite is true. Alive, he was one voice that could be countered, fact-checked, and eventually forgotten. Dead, he becomes eternal; forever young, forever wronged, forever useful to those who will absolutely be here to see it through. The solace is hollow when his absence strengthens everything he stood for.

You’ve identified something crucial that others miss: we don’t defeat dehumanization by becoming better at it. The moment we celebrate death, we’ve accepted their fundamental premise that political disagreement justifies violence.

Your terror is appropriate and I feel it with you. Not just at the violence itself, but at watching people you agree with politically abandon the very principles that distinguish us from what we oppose. The hardest battle isn’t against fascism; it’s maintaining our humanity while fighting inhumanity.

Your “cool story bro” response is exactly the kind of thinking that creates space for demagogues to thrive. When someone offers strategic analysis about why celebrating political violence backfires, and you respond with a thought-terminating cliché, you’re demonstrating the same anti-intellectual reflex that makes populations vulnerable to manipulation.

Think about what made Charlie Kirk successful: he offered simple, emotionally satisfying answers to complex problems. “Your problems aren’t from complicated economic systems, it’s those people over there.” His audience loved him because he never asked them to think harder than a bumper sticker.

And here you are, faced with someone explaining why emotional satisfaction isn’t political victory, why martyrdom empowers the very ideas we need to defeat… and your response is a meme. You’re operating at exactly the level of discourse that Kirk counted on: where snark replaces strategy, where being dismissive feels like being strong, where “cool story bro” seems like a clever response to warnings about tactical disaster.

The movements that win understand complexity. The movements that lose mistake attitude for analysis. When you brush off strategic thinking with internet catchphrases, you’re not fighting against the Charlie Kirks of the world. You’re proving that their reduction of politics to tribal reflexes and emotional reactions was right all along.

The system that produces Charlie Kirks depends on people refusing to think beyond the satisfaction of the dunk, the own, the sick burn. Your dismissal isn’t rebellion; it’s compliance with the exact intellectual laziness that powerful interests count on to keep populations manageable and movements ineffective.

You’re right that they manufacture pretexts, but there’s a crucial difference between forced fabrications and genuine ammunition. When they have to invent threats, their propaganda requires constant maintenance and reality-bending. When we hand them actual violence to point to, we transform their lies into prophecies. Yes, probability ensures incidents will occur, but the question is whether we contribute to that probability or work against it. “They’ll do it anyway” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that absolves us of strategic thinking. I say, let us not make the Fascist’s job easier.

I get the impulse, truly. He spread hate and did real harm, and the anger at that is justified. But celebrating his death doesn’t hurt his cause, it builds it. The right has shown us the playbook: when left-wing leaders are killed, they shrug it off, Trump even said it ‘doesn’t matter.’ Yet with Kirk, before there’s even a suspect, they’re already framing it as the start of the left’s downfall. When we celebrate, we feed that narrative. We give the Nazis exactly what they want. The real strength is being better than them, and making sure their ideas lose.

Here’s the frustration and why this should not be celebrated:

Charlie Kirk spent years dehumanizing people, making lives measurably worse, and profiting from hatred. The cosmic irony of him being shot while calling trans people dangerous and minimizing gun violence feels like the universe delivering a punchline he wrote himself. There’s a cathartic release in seeing someone who seemed untouchable suddenly silenced by the very violence he dismissed.

But that catharsis is blinding, vile, and destructive. Every celebration post, every “rest in piss” meme, every “fucked around and found out” joke is already being screenshot and weaponized. The worst people imaginable, those eager to exploit violence, are being handed exactly what they want: supposed proof that “they were right,” justification for crackdowns, and, most dangerously, a martyr whose blood sanctifies every awful thing he stood for.

Celebration may feel like a dunk on fascism, but in reality it accelerates it. It may feel like strength, but it exposes a movement so strategically bankrupt that it mistakes emotional satisfaction for political victory. Kirk alive was one influencer among many; Kirk dead is a rallying cry that will outlive us all.

The rage at what he represented is justified. But celebrating his death guarantees those very ideas will flourish. American democracy is dying, and a gravedigger falling into the hole is no victory when it only deepens the grave.

His ideas needed to be defeated. Instead, they’ve been immortalized.

Yeah, I started on Flubuntu, then hopped to Mantrix, tried out Zorblite for a while, eventually ended up on Quasarch. Thought I’d settle there, but now I’m deep into VortexOS with full Grindle support. Honestly, once you get used to Fluxstack and ZIMFS snapshots, there’s really no going back.

Yuuuuuup! One of the key parts of planning policies is evaluating its strength in court. SCOTUS gave the executive branch a free pass to just try anything with zero consequences. Why bother asking if something is legal when it literally doesn’t matter if it isn’t.

Yes, really. The HAC/UnitedHealthcare obesity paper shows that diet is one of the root drivers of the epidemic, and even recommends employer interventions like making healthy, non-processed food more available and addressing social drivers of health. Skipping meals doesn’t mean obesity isn’t real, it often means people are forced into poor nutrition or cheap calories because of cost and access, which are major confounding factors.

Free Gravel?

This one is clearly the best choice. That shit is expensive!

Start a gravel business, destroy the competition, and create a gravel empire.