So is the rice soaking in water overnight?

I disagree that Star Wars is an example of HASO. It happened a long time ago in a galaxy far away. Those are aliens that just happen to look like humans!

Reminds me of that guy who repeatedly asked Verizon to confirm their price was X cents per byte, but ultimately was charged X dollars per byte.

Found it: http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/2006/12/verizon-doesnt-know-dollars-from-cents.html

What’s wrong with list comprehensions? Do I just have Stockholm Syndrome at this point?

I would skip the square brackets and just use a generator expression: sum(3*n for n in range(5)).