Haha, that’s… juicy. Thanks!

For those out of the loop, what happened?

I think that’s part of the point - they’re a statue symbol because they’re difficult to maintain on your own without hired help.

The 501st legion, which is the biggest of these groups, was founded in 1997 so it predates the release of the prequels. If you’re into building things, the stormtrooper armor is a lot more interesting than most of what is a available on the rebel side.

The 501st is all about Star Wars fans who like making costumes working to get others into Star Wars and giving back to the community.

I’m going to directly quote Wikipedia here:

Giving back to the community is one of the 501st Legion’s highest priorities. Because of this, the 501st Legion proudly refers to themselves as the “Bad Guys Doing Good”. Members regularly participate in events to raise awareness for charitable causes, from walk-a-thons to blood drives, and provide opportunities for fundraising through events such as their “Blast-A-Trooper” game, where donations are collected from the public to target armored characters with Nerf blasters.

In September 2016, the 501st Legion announced their commitment to a first-of-its kind international endowment in a unique partnership with Make-A-Wish. The 501st Legion Make-A-Wish Endowment Fund will allow Make-A-Wish America and Make-A-Wish International to grant more Star Wars-related wishes to children diagnosed with life-threatening medical conditions. The endowment fund allows Make-A-Wish to grant wishes, alternating between the United States and international locations every other year – a first for an endowment of this kind. The Endowment relies on contributions from its members, as well as the public. With a goal of $150,000 in the fund by 2021, the Endowment fund will grant wishes from the interest accrued; as the fund continues to grow, so will the number of wishes granted by the endowment.

The 501st Legion never charges a fee for an appearance, but they do welcome donations to a charity in honor of the Legion or the local Legion unit. If an event host does not have a charity of choice, Legion members frequently direct the donations to the Endowment Fund. In cases where the event host is itself a charitable organization, a donation is usually not accepted by the 501st Legion as they volunteer their time for that charitable organization.

In 2016, the members of the 501st donated over 182,000 hours of community service, raising over $889,000 USD in direct donations, and participated in events that helped raise over $46 million for charities worldwide

You already got some replies, but there’s an indicator buffet uses to identify when to (or no) invest: the ratio total stock market value to GDP.

I think many assume there’s more of a plan, or at least more structure, than there actually is. When you pick at it, or pull the single link keeping it all together, it tumbles down.

We have a test environment but it’s a hot mess. All the data is made up and extremely low quality. All the things you would normally interface with are also in test, but getting other teams to coordinate testing in the test space is… a chore. We do the best we can with mock services, but without having real services or representative data some of the data pattern assumptions don’t play out. Leaders value writing code and our lack of architects that span teams mean that when team architects either don’t meet ahead of time, make assumptions, or don’t ever agree on a design then…

We always host UAT. We also track logins. Guess how many users even show up for UAT, let alone actually click on anything.

This is why the vast majority of our testing happens in prod when our users are doing real work.

Sorry for the baby rant :)

This can also be one of the frustrating parts of open source.

Find something you don’t like? Fix it. Will the repo owner approve your pull request? Who knows. Maybe they’re a bit absentee. Maybe they view the original behavior as working as designed. Maybe your design doesn’t fit their architectural model, so they’ll (eventually) heavily refactor your changes and merge them in.

You can always stand up a fork, but keeping those two at feature parity and going in the same general direction can become harder and harder with time.

That’s not to say not to try! But it also means reaching out to the repo owners/maintainers before making your first change.

Oh, sorry - it was the post title.

The song in the meme is Ohio is for lovers by Hawthorne Heights.

And I can’t make it on my own (And I can’t make it on my own) Because my heart is in Ohio So cut my wrists and black my eyes (Cut my wrists and black my eyes) So I can fall asleep tonight, or die

Deep, I know.

Not to say that Dashboard Confessional doesn’t have similar lyrics, lol.

For everyone following along at home: this website is worth a click if you’ve never seen it before!

Rinsing rice does wonders. Without a rice cooker you’ll need to strain it, but it’s still worth it.

1. Measure rice by volume. Let’s say 2 cups worth
2. Put into fine colendar and rinse until the water comes out clear. Mixing with your hand will speed this up. You can also do this in the pot you’re going to cook in and dump water out
3. Put strained rice in your pot
4. Add cold water. The ratio of water to rice matters a lot and varies by species of rice. The ratio will be printed on whatever container your rice came in. For Jasmin rice it’s 2 water to 1 rice, so for our two cups of rice you’ll need 4 cups of water
5. Cover, turn on medium-high heat, being to boil. Don’t go far because it will boil over when it does boil
6. Turn the heat down to low, crack the lid, and set a timer. The amount of time needed will vary based on rice. For Jasmin, 15 minutes is a good check-in time
7. Pop the lid. See water bubbling up? If yes, replace lid and come back in a few minutes. If not, use a wooden spoon to get a peek at the bottom of the pot. See water? If yes, replace lid and come back fairly soon to check again. If not, your rice is done. Turn the heat off, fluff, enjoy.

We made rice for years using this method and it is a very reliable cooking method. Rice doesn’t really leave you a lot of wiggle room though, which is where a rice cooker comes in handy. As an added bonus, some rice cookers come with water lines in them. I measure my dry rice into the cooker, rinse using the cooker, dump most of the water out, and fill to the appropriate level.

Different species of rice have very different textures and somewhat (subtle) different flavorss.

Some rice, like basmati, can be cooked using the pasta method (intentionally use way too much water and strain the excess off after the rice is cooked). I guess all rice could be cooked that way, but you would be giving up some starch.