Darth Fluffy

Oh, yeah, that's one of the reasons he gave for not going to the tournament right after he got his spell.

The way I heard it, you take the pot of boiling water out into the cornfield with you. Grab an ear of corn, peel the husk back and take the cornsilk off, then bend the stalk over so you can put the ear in the water.

That was going to be the gist of my response, thank you.
I can see the incident in the grocery store:
"Mommy, that lady just got taller so she could reach the shelf!"
"That's it, young lady, no treat for you if you're going to make up lies about other people."

It’s easier for her to embrace smallness now that it is optional rather than mandatory.

Thing is, he couldn't do it for a much more pressing reason. He had picked himself a staff of genuinely competent and dedicated people, and they would have refused to carry out any such order even if he had been willing to give it. And the devil of it is that no democratic (small d) president could conceivably do it. It would be handing victory to the fascists. We may joke and even laugh at the jokes, but the problem is that in the deepest sense it isn't really funny.
Until that ruling is rightly overturned it will lie like a loaded gun on the steps to the White House for any authoritarian president to use. All they need to do is assemble a staff of unscrupulous grifters and fawning sycophants, and Bob's their uncle.

I never heard that. It makes sense. Zhukov had courage and got lucky.
Stalin was also lucky that he got drunk and failed to order the execution; he needed Zhukov.

 
"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes - and ships - and sealing wax -
Of cabbages - and kings - "
 

They use one of those "Dice less systems" like Amber.  Not saying they use Amber, that would be weird, but there are dice less systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diceless_role-playing_game

A fallout of a generation that grew up with and is (overly?) comfortable with technology is an attendant cavalier attitude toward the hazards associated with said technology. I think us old timey tech aficionados have a healthy skepticism for the cutting edge claims we've heard all to often that also all to often have failed to deliver. Thus 'upgrade' does not equate to 'better' for us.
 

Cabbages have a long history in technology—one of the earliest computers was invented by Charles Cabbage.

She could always just order the six conservative judges lined up against a wall and have them shot. They've okayed that, after all.

There was at least one occasion where Stalin had intended to have Zhukov executed. This was during the initial moments of Barbarossa. Stalin was absolutely panicking and Zhukov lost his temper and told him to either pull himself together or get out of the way. A vast silence filled the room, Stalin stared at Zhukov in shock and then vanished into his office and got falling down drunk. Zhukov shrugged and went to work.
Stalin didn't emerge for something like two days. When he finally did and ran into Zhukov, he stared at him in bafflement. "Why haven't you been shot?" he demanded. Zhukov shrugged and told him, "No-one was ordered to, I suppose." Stalin stared at him for another moment, then shrugged and went on, apparently dismissing the matter from his mind.
He got so drunk that he forgot to order people shot. That must have been a serious binge.

A fallout of a generation that grew up with and is (overly?) comfortable with technology is an attendant cavalier attitude toward the hazards associated with said technology. I think us old timey tech aficionados have a healthy skepticism for the cutting edge claims we've heard all to often that also all to often have failed to deliver. Thus 'upgrade' does not equate to 'better' for us.
 

 

 
To be fair, when cows jump over the Moon, the landings don't tend to be graceful.
 

Working on that.

Made this earlier today out of another meme I had on hand:

Well, duh, cheese season is in the fall, after all the baby cheeses have had a chance to mature.

Working on that.

They chased me out of the store when I brought my cheese gun.

I am not well versed on Stalin's accomplishments, if any. I gather that he was initially an actual functionary, but it seems from far away that the Soviet environment was an opportunistic enclave for the breeding of the worst elements of human nature as it relates to that sort of society. Stalin was one extreme result.
Georgy Zhukov seems to be the antithesis. His leadership appears to me to have been a key component in Soviet success in WW II. I don't know how he survived returning to the Soviet Union, he appears to be the kind of person Stalin viewed as a threat, and there were significant events to accuse him of some bullshit anti-revolutionary activity. He an Eisenhower had a genuine friendship. Ike even sent him a fly rod after the war as a gift, which should have been damning in the Soviet system.
Interestingly, there was a US soldier who was captured and managed to escape several times. In one of his later escapades, he escaped east and ran into and joined the Soviet forces (not official, just fought along side them.) Zhukov heard of this, interviewed the man, and arranged for him to return to his own people. (He had been declared dead, which lead to more fun and games.)
Defector Viktor Belenko talks about the end result at length in his book, MiG Pilot. After working through the shock of how different life in the west is vs what he was used to (had difficulty grasping that grocery stores were real, not just set up to lie to him about conditions; they had goods available, and no lines to buy them) he relates that everything the Soviets ostensibly strove for was available in the West. He had similar issues with a visit to a US naval vessel. The quarters were too nice to be real.
There seems to have been a lot of paranoia steeped into the fabric of the Soviet Union, perhaps not undeservedly, but it seems to have hamstrung them.

The NVMe saga has apparently come to a happy conclusion. The screws arrived today, and they were indeed different from the ones I got from Amazon. My son installed the 4TB NVMe drive using them, and we then took a few moments to do a slight bit of case dusting before reassembling the laptop. A few hushed prayers and crossed fingers later, we booted up the system, ran Disk Management to set up the drive, and voila! The drive worked.
For anyone interested, it is indeed running at PCI-E 3.0 speeds, according to the Crystal Disk Info/Benchmark suite. It reads a tad slower than my Samsung C: drive, but writes just a bit faster. Crystal reports it's built to the NVMe 2.0 standard, whereas the Samsung 970 EVO is merely NVMe 1.3 compliant. Go figure. It's also running cooler than the Samsung, probably due to the graphene heatsink ribbon on top of it.
Regardless of the differences, at the moment, I'm happy.

“Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make”.
They didn’t mind the troops dying, but that was only if they succeeded in killing the enemy as well. Having the soldier fail to get close enough to make the attack was a waste.

This page, and the two following, detail Susan’s strategy, which revolves around being able to play her special card at the right time.

If I was a spearman, and had to take out a tank, I'd try a tank sized pit in the road, or possibly set up a massive log fall on a cliffside road. Either would take a lot of prep time. You might take out individuals who were not buttoned up inside the tank with an arrow from a hidden position; might whittle them down.
It you are spotted out in the open, you'd better surrender. Maybe you can slip your spear into the tank barrel when no one is paying attention. There is some chance it will jam a fired round, and then there is a good chance that if they don't clear the barrel, the next shot will damage the gun.