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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: September 14th, 2024

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  • I love Chinese food so much. I’ve visited twice, and always make room for food.

    My favorite street food is probably sheng jian bao, the pan fried buns with soupy pork filling sealed in.

    In terms of a single standalone dish, it’s hard to say. I like noodle dishes, like Taipei style beef noodle soup. Or Wuhan style re gan mian.

    And for the type of meal where there’s a lot of dishes on the table to be shared, my favorite dish in that setting is probably Mapo tofu. I did a food tour of Chengdu once and just everything Sichuan is so good, but Mapo tofu is just all my favorite Sichuan things in a single dish.


  • I’ve lived all over the U.S., so here are some of my favorites:

    Texas:

    • Beef barbecue. The classic is beef brisket, but a lot of places have great beef rib, too.
    • Tex Mex: fajitas hit the spot every time.
    • Breakfast tacos, especially with leftover smoked brisket from the day before, or some other smoked meat like smoked sausage. Undeniably Texas, undeniably delicious.

    Louisiana:

    • Boiled crawfish, with red potatoes and corn and andouille sausage. Some people overcook their potatoes and corn, but even then there’s still a charm to it. But the whole experience of a crawfish boil is everything great about food culture: socializing around a big table, making a big mess, teaching kids and newbies how do engage in that task of peeling crawfish. The Vietnamese riffs on these traditions are also great, and Viet-Cajun is a great genre of food in general, too.

    The American South in general:

    • American Southern style fried chicken. It’s just great.
    • Pecan pie. Easily my favorite American dessert.

    Southern California:

    • Burritos. Something about the fresh made flour tortillas in Southern California are just better than everywhere else in the U.S. So a good burrito provides flavor from the fillings, and also flavor from the wrap itself, in a way that all the parts just complement each other.
    • Ensenada style fish tacos (yes, I know this originates south of the border but it is “local” to the general region). There’s just something refreshing about fish tacos with a crunchy cabbage slaw, fresh lime juice, a crema-based sauce, eaten outdoors. Can’t beat it.

    New York:

    • Bodega style breakfast sandwich. The basic concept is universal across the U.S. (egg, a breakfast meat like sausage or bacon, and cheese on some kind of roll, bun, or even bagel, griddled with generous amounts of butter), but something about the New York bodegas just make these taste better when you’re on the go.

    Chicago:

    • Deep dish pizza. Looks kinda dumb, but it’s delicious.
    • Chicago style, “dragged through the garden” hot dogs. Every component makes this ensemble great.
    • Italian beef sandwiches. I don’t know why these aren’t more popular outside of Chicago. Get it dipped, get a little messy with it.


  • All else being equal, in terms of structure and property itself, I’d rather live in a detached house.

    But all else isn’t equal. I’ll sacrifice my ideal building type in order to live in the specific neighborhood I want to live in, within easy walking distance of amenities like parks, groceries, world class restaurants, bars, and things like that, all while being able to get around by bike, mass transit, or even easy/cheap hailed vehicles like taxis or Ubers. And that means I’m living in a dense urban area, where detached houses are rare and prohibitively expensive.

    So I look for neighborhoods where I’d actually like to live, then look for places there with the right number of bedrooms and floor space, and then look to see what is within a feasible budget for myself. The first time I bought a home, I would’ve preferred to rent, but the building we liked in the neighborhood we liked happened to be condos rather than rentals.

    But housing is a package deal. And house versus townhouse/rowhouse/brownstone versus low rise condo versus high rise condo versus apartment versus someone’s accessory dwelling unit is only part of that package. And the other parts are more important to me.





  • You might be overcooking it. Once the cell walls rupture too much, the sulfur compounds spread out and start to overpower the rest of the vegetable. It should still be somewhat firm/crisp when you bite into it.

    You might also be using broccoli that’s had too many of the cell walls ruptured from processing before cooking. If you’re cutting with a dull knife, especially into small pieces, or smashing it somehow before cooking, those smells will leak out a bit faster.

    Or, if you’re cooking from frozen, the ice crystals might have mushed up the vegetable.

    Here’s the two main ways I cook broccoli:

    Blanched: cut broccoli into big florets, big enough to constitute two big bites. Boil a lot of water, salted to about 2% salinity. Once it’s a rolling boil, put the broccoli in, and set a timer for 4 minutes. As soon as the timer goes off, dump the broccoli into a strainer and run cold water over it, or dunk it in ice water, to stop the cooking process. Serve and eat.

    Roasted: cut broccoli into big florets. Toss in oil, and season with salt and pepper. Preheat oven with a sheet pan in it, to 450°F. Once preheated, take the broccoli and place it in a single layer on the sheet pan. It should sizzle. Roast for about 15-20 minutes, optionally flipping once (better char if you don’t flip it, but it’s only on one side).

    Optional seasonings: garlic, pepper, red pepper flakes, lemon juice, honey, bread crumbs, pine nuts, any combination of the above. Works with either blanched or roasted.


  • Why the focus on white people? What are non-black, non-white people supposed to take away from this?

    And if we’re just picking up language from others around us, we can acknowledge that pretty much every word, every phrase, every syntactical or grammatical construct we use, we learned by observing others. And we don’t always have the ability to specifically attribute sources for where we learned what, so trying to gatekeep who can and can’t use particular phrases or words is going to be prone to errors. And ultimately futile.

    thinking they are entitled to everything

    This is a FOSS-focused community. The core idea here is that publishing and sharing ideas releases it out to the world, where the creator no longer controls who may use it, or how they may use it.

    That’s why your position on who can or can’t use certain types of language seems so foreign. It’s directly contradicting some of the core values that this community is organized around.






  • If they go and follow 200 users on 20 different instances, then they’ll most likely get followed back by someone on 90% of those instances. It’s not that much effort.

    I don’t know, this sounds like an unnatural way to interact with a service. Following 4000 accounts and trying to spread it out evenly between servers sounds like a terrible way to curate one’s own feed and consume content on a service like this. I rarely follow more than 100 on any given service, and think it’s weird when people follow more than 500.

    Following back seems like a pretty foreign concept to me on this type of service, and seems to me to be inconsistent with how people actually use Twitter or Bluesky. To me, these hiccups in user experience as either a lurker (can’t find anyone in-band who another person on your instance doesn’t already follow) or publisher (can’t be found easily from anyone off of your server unless you actively go try to spam follows in the hopes that some will follow back) would be a dealbreaker for anything less than the biggest server.



  • So if you set up on small server A, and want to be discoverable by users on server B, C, D, and E, you have to do this for many different users and hope that they follow you back just so that those servers’ users can find you.

    And it basically defeats the main use case for where I actually understand microblogging, which is one-way announcements by semi-automated accounts that are widely followed that do not actually follow anyone else back.

    It just sounds like a bad arrangement for discoverability and search.

    hashtags are big on Mastodon

    But I can’t view the posts of any users by hashtag if those users aren’t already being followed by someone from my server, right? That means I’d never want to join a small server if I’m just a lurker who doesn’t really want to actively interact with others, because my own feed would be limited.

    there’s no algorithm

    Sounds like an algorithm that’s just more complicated and has unintuitive human inputs in it.


  • Follow people and hashtags and interact with them and you’ll get followers.

    That sounds like a convoluted method of self promotion, almost like SEO fake engagement, just to be discoverable. And if everyone on the network had to do this to be discoverable, how can I trust the discovery methods to find people worth following?

    And if the cross instance discoverability has these kinds of hurdles, then the promise of federation isn’t going to pan out.

    At least with Lemmy the nature of the platforms, users following a smaller universe of potential communities, makes each community much more easily discoverable for people who don’t necessarily want to be active posters. Mastodon’s user-focused follow is much more limited in seamless federation.


  • Lifestyle changes to where my weekend schedule looks like my weekday schedule, just with different activities.

    I am at home and relaxing by 11pm. I am in bed by 12am. Then I wake up at 7:30am. That’s 7 and a half hours of sleep every night, at the same time every day, 7 days a week.

    And that’s not just lifestyle changes around not going out as late on weekends. It’s also a lifestyle change where I started steering my career and work towards never needing to have any meetings or be at any specific place before 10am.

    I’m not a morning person so I got a job where I don’t have to be a morning person. My whole routine on weekday mornings is designed to make it so that nobody at work can touch my morning until I’ve had a chance to settle into my day.