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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

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  • You’re not really making your own bread unless you grow and harvest the ingredients yourself. What do you mean you don’t mill your own grains? Refine your own sugar?Can’t really even call yourself a baker unless you build your own oven. /s

    Cooking and baking are basically ALL prep work and cleanup. The actual cooking and baking is overall a pretty small fraction of the overall effort that goes into making dinner or a loaf of bread. Go ahead and feel proud of yourself if you take on more of those preparatory tasks, IF it makes for a better end result. But that doesn’t mean you get to act superior to somebody else on a different path of their own personal cooking journey. Drawing an arbitrary line in the sand and saying “this is cooking, but that is not” is kind of like drawing a line between blue and indigo on a rainbow. It’s arbitrary and adds little to good the discussion.

    Go ahead and cheat on those components where it works. Not everybody has the time, space, energy, or skill to make every bread, sauce, or spice blend from scratch. If you can make something better by getting back to the basics and fundamental ingredients, go for it! But let’s be honest when it’s more about pride than the final product, enjoyment of the meal.

    Personally, the biggest reason I prefer to avoid pre-prepared foods that only require heating is so that I can avoid certain common ingredients that are often pumped into those things in insane proportions, particularly salt and sugar. It’s not so that I can feel proud of an arbitrary label.


  • If you’d ever been really swarmed by mosquitoes or lived in a place where they are ever present you’d not be asking this question.

    • When they swarm enough they are nearly impossible to avoid.
    • When their presence is constant some people just stop reacting to the bites. I only ever notice mosquito bites on places that get chaffed (like the wrists and hands, around collars and cuffs). If they bite a place you wouldn’t normally scratch and can avoid scratching the area after a bite, for some people a welt is much less likely to form.
    • They don’t go after only people. Your irritation at a few bites is nothing compared to the diversity in the evolutionary arms race between mosquitoes and their prey.
    • Only the mothers feed on blood. Other mosquito eat mostly plant nectar.



  • This whole idea that they “saved” it is philosophically flawed and deeply problematic from a moral and ecological perspective. Claiming that the mother “abandoned” it demonstrates ignorance of the way these animals live and care for their young.

    Regardless, a proper wildlife rehabilitation program by a zoologist would have actually kept the moose alive and been in a position to judge if the moose was safe to be re-released. Your moose story could have easily ended in the death of people in addition to the moose. This isn’t some kind of vain high horse I’m on. It’s just simple facts learned through decades of direct experience with wild animals in the wild, in rehabilitation, and in zoos. I stand by my earlier statements. I’m sorry this bitter pill is hard for you to swallow I guess. So it goes.


  • Feeding wildlife, even one treated as a “pet”, is a death sentence for them just as surely as if you had fired the gun yourself. Your neighbor killed that moose.

    Other prime examples include: feeding alligators (now you’ve created a danger to others as well, so you’ve not just killed the animal, which will need to be destroyed by officials, you’ve potentially maimed or killed a person); feeding ducks and geese (I once has a neighbor that would feed ducks in the parking island adjacent to the main entry to our apartment complex, no surprise to me that we saw many near misses and a few dead ducks in our driveway); bears (this one should be obvious, same scenario as the gators except bears are faster, climb trees, and are probably smarter than the average person they are going to encounter when they leave the woods looking for human food).

    Undomesticated animals (wildlife/wild animals) are not pets. They’re never going to be pets. They’ve just learned to manipulate some humans for food or shelter. Maybe you’ll get along for a little while with them, but that relationship has poisoned the fear keeping them safe for and from other humans.


  • I tried Govee outdoor lights.

    The app has some ridiculously invasive permissions required to operate that have absolutely nothing to do with turning a light on/off and changing the color. Goodbye privacy.

    The lights were also VERY far from permanent, they lasted through a couple months of mild weather and light use. No snow, no flooding or heavy rain, no direct sun, no extreme heat, no evident physical damage. In my case it wasn’t just one light that went, it was the whole strand and the way it failed left me feeling worried that it was a fire hazard. Their outdoor lights are not well made enough to be left outdoors for long. I would not recommend Govee lights to anyone.




  • Sounds like you eat trash. Most of what I buy from the grocery store is fresh or frozen, pretty much everything else is a slow boring flavorless heavy salted death. I haven’t found a service that can automate my grocery shopping to my satisfaction and frankly I wouldn’t want to. My weekly meal planning happens in the vegetable department based on what in season, available locally, looks appetizing, etc.

    It also sounds like you live alone, not having to contend with other people’s changing schedules and laundry needs.

    You’re automated “easy” life sounds like an empty void. I’m not convinced you’re “living” your life at all, just killing time.







  • Brussel sprouts used to be truly awful, made me literally wretch. Now I eagerly make and order them as a bar snack.

    To be fair there are two reasons beyond my changing tastes for this. First, my mom liked to steam brussel sprouts whole and serve them with margarine, salt, and pepper, now I generally cold sear them or roast them in the oven with much better seasoning. Maybe even some bacon pieces and blue cheese mixed in. Second, brussel sprouts did actually change over time to get less bitter and awful since I was a kid.