City, but a small one. And yeah, food was good, but the floor and average were both lower there.

I moved to New Zealand six months ago, and I have had exactly one truly bad meal since I’ve been here. I haven’t eaten any Maori food, so I guess all the food I’ve eaten has been from another country.

The one that surprised me the most was KFC. We moved from one state away from Kentucky, and we had to come here to have truly good KFC.

I was expecting the Chinese food to be good here, but it’s really good. So is the Korean, Indian, and Malaysian food. The fish and chips are good. The burgers are great, even from McDonald’s. The absolute best was Filipino food from a tiny little restaurant in a random strip mall near Sylvia Park. That food changed my life.

In fairness, I have had a couple of “fine” meals—as in, “well, nothing special, but it was fine.”

The one bad meal was Pad Thai made by Thai people at a Thai restaurant down by the beach. It was just way too sweet, which makes me wonder if they saw me and made it “for a white guy” or something.

I agree that sipping is probably the best option. My problem is that most to-go cups at restaurants use lids for structural reinforcement; they make the cup less sturdy (because it’s cheaper) and count on the lid to keep it stable.

For clumsy and forgetful people (it’s me, hi, I’m the problem) the option right now seems to be buying a reusable straw that ends up sitting in my silverware drawer permanently, living with the fact that I’m just always going to have some sort of stain on my shirt, or drinking subpar, flat sodas. Or, I guess, switching to a non-carbonated drink. None of them are my favorite options. Come on, scientists!

I used to listen to an actual play podcast wherein one of the cast was really good at specifically identifying phrases and sentences that could be sung to the opening lines of “Camptown Races” and singing out “DOO-DAH! DOO-DAH!!” My favorite one was “Polynesian shark-tooth sword.” (This might be a Kingdom of Loathing thing?)

And then, of course, there’s the xkcd and resulting generators that, beautifully, find Wikipedia articles (or really any random line of text) that can be sung to the tune of “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.” I especially like the ones where they fit surprisingly well and you’re also like, “wait, why is that a Wikipedia article?!” like “Private Purchase Naval Weapons,” or the ones that are only singable because of a parenthetical clarifier like “Silver Comet (roller coaster).”

Paper straws are scientifically terrible for carbonated drinks. All of those fibers make a ton of nucleation sites for the CO2 and just make darn sure that your carbonated drink isn’t carbonated by the time it gets to your mouth. Seriously, if you wanted to design something to intentionally make a carbonated soda flat by the time it gets to your lips, I don’t know how you’d do it better than with a paper straw. Maybe a long hose that shakes the liquid as it goes through?

And sure, ok, plastic straws aren’t great environmentally. But surely there was a third option before we went back to literally the worst choice? Something decently cheap, biodegradable, and non-porous? Can we not invent something like that? There’s tons of industrially-compostable polymers, right? Wouldn’t those break down in the ocean over time?

A large number of culinary fruits aren’t even botanical fruits, yes. Most of them are botanical berries (and some things that aren’t botanical berries are still culinary berries). Conflating the two linguistic domains causes lots of problems!

They probably don’t even produce the bottles. They probably just put the water in the bottles.

Tomatoes are both a fruit (botanically) and a vegetable (culinarily). “Vegetable” doesn’t have a botanical definition, so the old aphorism about tomatoes “not being a vegetable” is trying to conflate terms from two different domains and hoping you don’t notice.

I’m not as old as you, but I remember window trays at Dog n Suds (and our local, the Mug-n-Bun) in the 90s. They did actually clip on the window, and if you had your window fully open they had you roll it up an inch or two so it could attach. I assume that wasn’t new technology at the time. They didn’t look quite like this, though; they were cantilevered on rubber pads so that the top of the tray lined up with the top of the window. By then they had moved away from glass serving dishes to Styrofoam with lids, so it wasn’t really a problem to get things into the car, height-wise.

I mean, this is almost certainly a staged display for a car show, but I’m just verifying that these trays (well, ones kind of like these) do exist and were (are?) used.

As with all standards, cheap manufacturing and poor labeling has ruined its perception.

Honestly, were it not for Hanlon’s Razor, I’d think tech companies are trying to sandbag open standards compliance so that standards fail and they can fall back to proprietary.

Not entirely sure I don’t think that anyway.

Could be where your VPN is hosted. If your traffic appears to be coming from (for instance) an AWS data center, it might appear to be coming from a known spam source (since there are some spammers which have used AWS). The instance you’re on might just be using an overzealous spam block IP list.

I mean, he is already baked.

For people who have been there for a while, remember that there’s almost certainly an internal propaganda campaign trying to refute any negative stories that come out about Meta. I’ve heard enough from people who have interacted with Meta employees to know that it’s almost a cult; and when you’re getting paid twice a month, it probably doesn’t feel as toxic and more transactional. That probably makes it more of a frog-boiling than it would seem from the outside; even smart people can get taken in by a cult.

People who have started more recently, though, have less of an excuse.

Yeah, I can’t wait for the tell-all book that someone inevitably releases in 20 years about how Xwitter was a complete ghost town propped up by sports and racism. The company is clearly hemorrhaging money like a firehose.

It might not completely go away, but it will slide further and ever quicker into irrelevance. Just like Xwitter has done.

Sailfish is closed-source, isn’t it? I want to be excited about it, but I am hesitant about another closed-source OS.

Also, a step up in length and maybe stress but still solidly cozy sci-fi, but “Of Monsters and Mainframes” by Barbara Truelove.

I think the “Monk and Robot” series by Becky Chambers would be right up your alley. Cozy sci-fi with a very Hobbit-y feel.

If there’s enough pushback, they’ll eventually either do it or they’ll die.

I don’t own a shoe horn, but I use my finger to the same effect on tied shoes. I have one pair that I only tie every few weeks.