Or when you’re new to an area, know that those deceptive lanes are there, but forget which exits use them… so then you stay in the center lane because ‘that’s a fake merge lane!’ but then 15 seconds later “motherfucker I just missed my exit!”
The face eating leopards will never not eat your face, duder. Next time kill em.
Does that make it more acceptable?
The thing I take issue with is the obligation we’ve been trained to feel when certain days come to buy something for everyone close to you.
If you’re buying someone a gift because you see something you know they’ll enjoy, then hoard it until some gathering like Christmas because that’s an opportune time to give it, nothing about that rubs me wrong. If you buy someone a gift because it’s Christmas then it’s just a material ritual that lacks that personal connection that makes gifting meaningful.
And like, even I will send some bullshit to my nieces and nephews for birthdays and such, cuz they’re like 6 and fucking love that shit - there’s no deep personal connection or anything, but lil Timmy doesn’t give a fuck: he had nothing from me a minute ago, and now he’s losing his shit over some $5 squirt gun. It’s fun for fun sake.
But like, when my mom calls me (and I’m pushing 40) asking what I want for Christmas… Mom, love ya, but stop worrying about that kind of shit. Let’s go out for some dinner or something so we can reminisce about how much of an asshole I was when I was lil Timmy’s age.
My answer is basically to stop letting a calendar date guilt trip you into wasting money on me because you’ve been marketed into some obligation so send me shit I don’t need. If you happen to find something you think I’d actually appreciate, go for it, but even then it doesn’t have to be for some stupid holiday.
I’ve kinda just stopped giving a shit about things like christmas or birthdays, both for me and for the people I’d consider giving a gift to, but I give them the same treatment: if I find something they’d like, I’ll just buy and gift it as soon as it’s convenient. And honestly the reactions are much better anyway, since it shows you’re actually thinking of that person and not just fulfilling some annual ritual to send them shit cuz the commercials say it’s time.
For the longest time, I avoided vegetarian dishes and ingredients like tofu. Was introduced to Indian food - the meat options were delicious, but then I tried the paneer version, and holy fuck. The revelation that meat is infact entirely unnecessary to make a dish taste absolutely amazing was a game changer. Like owning a manual car and just assuming 1st and reverse were the only two gears - then suddenly discovering 2nd+, despite them having literally just been right infront of me in plain sight the whole time.
Morale of the story is that I (finally) learned to appreciate vegetarian cooking on its own culinary merit… there are a lot of idealogical and ecological reasons to go vegetarian or vegan or w/e, but those usually take the spotlight (I mean… because they’re actually important), but another less-touted angle is that it’s just fucking delicious.
So, vegetarian cooking tips are nothing to scoff at!
Anyway, chickpea pasta… I didn’t know that was a thing - I’ll keep an out for it. I’m wondering if I might have actually had it though and not actually known what it was. A coworker brought some pasta in for a potluck, and it had an unusually gummy texture, and just a little bit of grit they same way hummus has. I never did ask what it was, but it was good stuff. It was more dense and chewy than regular pasta, which I’ve always found to be a satisfying combo in food.
Decade or so ago, logging into a work computer and suddenly the screen is just tiled with the word “virus”, but a bit janky looking like it was a screenshot of the word that was enlarged and tiled with no thought to whether the right side of the image lined up with the left and such - it was a very 90s cheesy movie like depiction of what happens to your comp when you get a virus, like you’d expect the next scene to be some shady hacker on the other end exclaiming “I’m in!”
Then again, I don’t know jack fuck about viruses, and the machine is behaving super weird, so I unplugged the internet cable from the back, and called my manager over. He had a similar “…is this for fuckin real?” reaction that I did. Mind you, this is a hospital, so if one of our computers is fucked, this is a big deal for potentially leaking patient info, so even though it had that kind of slapstick appearance, no one was fucking around with it: so, manager pushed it up the chain, and after a few mins a fucking SWAT team of IT guys comes in and starts doing their own assessment.
After some deliberation, they start troubleshooting - keystrokes and whatnot don’t seem to be responsive. One of them eventually reaches back behind the monitor and ‘poof’ the screen pops back to the normal login screen.
So, that facility had a fancy custom login screen, which was some generic desktop background type scenery and a wall of text that none of us ever put any thought into. One of the snipits on that wall of text was instructions on what to do if you suspect your machine has virus (which was basically what I did - leave it running, unplug it from the internet, and call IT… hooray, I’m not completely stupid!). What ended up being the cause of the “virus” tiling was the fucking VGA cable slowing worming its way out of the back of the monitor - when I got to it, that thing was hanging on by a thread, and touching the desk it was on was just enough of a bump to make it cross that line between having enough of a connection to do its job vs not. That micrometer of pull of on that cable wasn’t enough to completely cut its signal, but it wasn’t enough to produce a normal display either: it just picked a random spot on the screen, and filled the monitor with that repeating image. The spot it just happened to do this to was the word “virus” in the custom login text explaining what to do if you think you have a virus, lol.
TLDR, got my management chain from my dept to the top dogs running the hospital, and the entire fucking IT department to swarm to my unit over a potential data breach that ended up being a wiggly VGA cable.
Whoops.
saag paneer or tikka masala
Can’t go wrong with those! Indian food is some of the best on the planet. I think paneer tikka masala was the first time I had paneer - didn’t have a clue what it was, just know I really liked the chicken version and there was an unfamiliar word next to one of my favorite dishes. Ordered it just out of curiosity. First thought was “oh, it’s tofu” and was a bit disappointed cuz I didn’t care for that squishy texture (it’s grown on me since though… noms…). Took a bite – second thought was “this is the best fucking tofu I’ve ever had!”. Did some digging online and quickly discovered I was wrong on both counts: it’s cheese! …that doesn’t melt… hmmm…
I’ve since experimented a good bit with it and different rubs and marinades on the smoker. Garlic herb and pepper rub is probably my favorite so far. Today’s batch was “Kewpie Deep Roasted Sesame” mixed with some balsamic, and I’d say ranks #2. Terryaki + soy sauce came out decent. BBQ was meh. Pesto was (surprisingly) meh. …and by ‘meh’ I mean “still delicious, but nowhere near its potential, so not gonna bother with that one again”.
I fuckin love paneer! I literally have some on the smoker as we speak (bite sized blocks of paneer + pretty much any sauce you’re in the mood for + lowish temp smoke for 90 minutes or so = insanely delicious).
Today’s sauce is a sesame based marinade I found in our local Asian market - was a really good dipper for meats and veggies, so I have high hopes for this batch of paneer!
Edit - snacking on it now. Errmagerd this batch turned out good!
as are nuts (can’t have those myself unfortunately)
Unsolicited story time!
I made a few batches of baklava for my coworkers a while back, with various fillings. Most recipes call for dates or some kind of nut, so I was just like ‘fuck it, we’re trying them all’.
One of those coworkers had a nut allergy, so I make a batch that used sunflower seeds instead (no recipe for that, just sub the nuts 1-1) and honestly is was one of the best of the 10 or so different types I made. Baklava is something a lot of people with nut allergies have never tried cuz it’s always got some kind of nut in it. - if you’re one of those, definitely give it a whirl some times (and do NOT use one of the recipes that go through making your own filo dough… that stuff is… involved. You can get premade rolls in most grocery stores - look near things like those refrigerated tubes of cookie dough, or in the frozen section).
I’m sure sunflower seeds as a nut substitute is nothing new, but baklava specifically might be something that wasn’t previously on your radar. (if that’s the case, and you do go for, shoot me a message to let me know how it went ^_^)
That coworker was fucking stoked - when people bring in food for the group they don’t usually put much thought into things like allergies or religious accommodations, but hooking those folks up with some noms when they’re expecting to be left out is a great way to make their day.
Is there some kind of food that’s basically tofu but made from beans other than soy? I’ve had em whole and mashed up into a paste, but iirc soy beans are the only one’s I’ve had as their own cohesive block,
The texture of tofu is a turn off for a lot of people, but what if you make tofu from like kidney beans or something? A product that’s firmer and chewier (and probably not called ___ tofu, cuz people are idiots) could potentially be a hit.
Edit - loving the replies this is getting! Looks like I’ve got some homework to do!
…yeah looking at some of the new nurses and doctors who are using AI to limp their way through school, AI has already begun to “free us from the tyranny of facts” by giving us a new generation of idiots who have outsourced the act of thinking to the spellchecker-on-meth running on their phone.
…
The future of healthcare isn’t looking great.
It means it’s time to learn photoshop or https://paint.net/ or something, and edit the numbers on your three most recent pay stubs to give yourself an imaginary 30% raise, then submit those to the company considering hiring you and ask for a match. Then work there long enough to get three real paystubs at that amount to submit to another company that won’t ever consider auditing the pay stubs given to your previous employer.
…probably don’t do this if your job requires a specialty license that you could lose; or if you work for the govt or something that you’d be risking jail time for. Or if your field is in some niche specialty where word will quickly spread to the remaining very small pool of potential employers. But if the only potential consequence is a rejection, fuck it. Even if you get a rejection where you’re just another replaceable drone in their eyes anyway, just keep trying until one bites.
Oh, 100% this is unhealthy as fuck. I gained a ton of weight when I was piss broke cuz all I could afford was rice - exceptions were a treat. When you’re that tight on cash though, you start to prioritize it over pretty much everything else, including your own body.
Spending any more on food would have required cutting into something critical like rent - I never did have to deal with homelessness, but boy did I toe that line.
In any case, this is desperation diet - hopefully for a very short term leading up to having the means to live a healthier lifestyle.
Happy to say I’m past the piss-broke stage of life, but I’ll never forget how much is sucks. One of the really shitty things about it is all the products marketed toward selling us a ‘cheap’ meal, and we buy it because you don’t question it: it’s poverty food, right? Must be among the cheapest options in the store, right?
Then you start pricing stuff out by things like cost-per-gram and realize you’re getting ripped off. To answer OPs question, I’d call that dish: predatory, bc it’s an up-charged box of ingredients that you can buy separately in probably that same aisle for much cheaper.
For anyone reading this who is stuck in that hell, first off: /hug. Second, the real poverty food MVP is rice. I don’t recall the price off the top of my head, and even if I did I’m sure it’s inflated since I was a frequent buyer, but look for “fortified short grain” which is usually the least expensive and is ‘fortified’ with some extra nutrients to get something other than carbs. Buy it in bulk - you can get it in 50lb bags at places like Costco (if you don’t have a membership, mooch a ride there off someone who does, they can get you through the door/checkout) or Asian/Middle Eastern grocery stores. Price it out to what you’re paying for the amount used in a single meal, and it’s like a literal nickel.
Rice makes for a boring meal by itself, but it’ll fill you up. Your second best friend is the clearance shelf. Pretty much any meat or veggie can go with rice. You’d be surprised how well other shit work with rice too… I recall having a single slice of shitty supreme pizza in the fridge; not enough for a satisfying meal, but, fuck it, whipped up a serving of rice, chopped up the slice of pizza crust and all, and threw it in when the rice was just about soft enough to eat and kinda stir fried it in. The oils from the cheese and sausage all got soaked up by the rice… end result wasn’t amazing by any stretch, but it was away more satisfying than a single slice of pizza or bowl of plain rice, tasted decent, costed pennies.
Pro tip: buy some snack-sized ziplock bags, measure out what you need for a serving, portion it into a ton of individual bags, and keep those in a sealed 5-gallon buckets. There’s a type of beetle that lays its eggs in rice, and it may not hatch until after you’ve bought it. Then they propagate, and there are tiny beetles all over the batch… and losing the better part of a 50lb bag to those fuckers is pretty heart breaking. If you portion it out first, and then it hatches, you lose a single-portion ziplock full. No biggie. Also keep the empty ziplocks and reuse them for the next big bag of rice.
Also get a cheap rice cooker as soon as you can afford it - a pot works fine, but a rice cooker will get you much more consistent results for much less effort.
Actual sex ed is, as usual, the answer to these kinds of situations. I’d guess way more critically so for the Civic boy than Pony’s daughter, since Pony seems open to actually discussing some shit with her daughter, especially if Civic boy actually gives a fuck about virginity.
…oh, and guillotine construction. Definitely don’t forget the guillotine construction.
Public Toilet
Public shooting range.
The urge to stick a piece of rebar or something in there of you see one parked…
Well, rolling with the artificial flavors analogy, we can start by stopping the infuriating trend of adding artificial grape flavor to every fucking food item under the sun. No one asked for or wanted that shit, but now it’s become a chore to find so much as a bag of coffee beans that doesn’t have some blip on the packaging advertising “Now with grape!!” Not only does it taste bad, but it’s caused the cost of food to fucking double.
Second, we can start being honest about what it actually is. Again, it doesn’t taste like grape, so why the fuck are we calling it grape? With AI this is as much on us as it is with the companies marketing that garbage - for ages we’ve been calling so much as an NPC’s pathing algorithm in a videogame “AI” even though there’s objectively no intelligence at play. We’ve since tried to move the goal posts a bit by relabeling actual AI as “AGI” but I guarantee that’ll just become another term to muddy the waters with marketing bullshit. The shit we’re calling “AI” is just categorically not even on the same path as the the kind of AI we see in sci-fi. So if you want Data to see the light of day, we’ll need to stop wasting our time and money on what is effectively a spell checker that’s wrong occasionally.
Unless you think Data is just a chat bot with no consciousness, in which case, hooray, we’ve done it: AI. 🎉 …now can I please have a mug of coffee without Grape™ syrup in it? I know, such a Luddite, drinking coffee without grape! Guilty as charged. But adding that shit to my coffee is never going to get us a product that tastes and feels etc like a grape, so if that’s what you’re after, maybe keep it in R&D and off the fucking grocery shelves.
Free food is good food.
…that sentence has way too many o’s.