• 1 Post
  • 1.48K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 19th, 2023

help-circle

  • I can’t wait to develop my natural immunity to polio! Or smallpox!

    The flu, why, without the vaccine you can develop a natural immunity every year, twice a year if you really want to!

    Legit dude, what the fuck do you think “natural” immunity is? It’s catching whatever it is, being sick, and surviving it. You specifically chose colds and the flu as examples, and they’re the worst possible examples because they mutate so fast you never actually achieve immunity to anything; the version you have resistance to might come around again, or it might not, but you damn sure will eventually run across a strain that your body isn’t equipped for.

    Like, I get that vaccines are confusing to someone with little education, but this is the internet age, you can look up the terms you’re using and make sure you aren’t fucking up your entire point. Like, the time it took you to type the post up, you could have looked up what vaccines actually do, and why they are/were the single greatest achievement of the human species.

    You can go and get a shot of something stable enough and never get sick from it, ever in some cases. In others, you might get sick but it’ll be a few bad days instead of a week or more of misery (as is sometimes how the flu vaccines end up because of the aforementioned mutations, but other viruses are just a bit harder to stop entirely).

    So, nah, fuck your natural “immunity”, that’s just a recipe for lost health and time better spent on something like reading up on why vaccines are fucking awesome, even in the rare cases of allergies or bad reactions.


  • You can try looking into a sleep position trainer. It isn’t what you’re asking about, but it has had good results in reducing or eliminating the paralysis episodes, so it’s a similar outcome.

    The problem with what you’re specifically asking about is that nobody has gone into production afaik. There’s patents for things like they, but they’re either junk (and obviously so), or would be way too complicated to set up and use reliably. Sleep paralysis isn’t usually responsive to just shaking by itself.

    But you could try something similar to the alarms made for deaf people, if you have a consistent timing with your episodes. Or do something like strap a massager to your hand where you can cut it on and hope that the vibration breaks through. People have made that work, though it isn’t consistent afaik.


  • It’s not so much the foods, though both were amazing cooks in their own ways, with some amazing standards meals they’d turn out. It’s them making it that really hits as a loss.

    Both of them contributed to me learning how to cook, and in some ways I ended up improving on what I learned from them by virtue of having both.

    But, if I had to nail down one specific meal/dish from each that I miss the hell out of, I think my paternal grandmother’s breakfasts are the most missed of hers. The woman could put on a spread! Eggs, grits, sausage, liver mush, biscuits, red-eye gravy, with her home made jams and jellies. Gods, you want to talk about feeding an army, when all of us grandkids would stay over at once, there would be her, my grandfather, one uncle, and eleven kids ranging from toddlers to teenagers at one point.

    And she never missed a step, while doing it all with us young’ns under foot. She was damm fine baker, and a master of country cooking/soul food, but her breakfasts were next level.

    My maternal grandmother could do that kind of cooking too, though not as well. Where she was a standout was with more of the suburban American cuisine. The roasts and casseroles and traditional holiday meals. I think those holiday meals are what I miss most, though her meatloaf and spaghetti were both amazeballs. My grandfather was a hunter, so some kind of bird would be featured often, be it goose, duck, or turkey. Sometimes as the only meat source, sometimes alongside a store bought turkey if a lot of the more distant family was showing up.

    Even after she decided she was done babysitting a bird and my uncle took over that part with a deep fryer, her sides still wreck those I’ve had with other people. Sweet potatoes, three-bean salad, seven layer salad, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, deviled eggs, asparagus, peas, all kinds of options, sometimes with all of those, plus others, plus desserts. Most of the veggies were from their garden, though they would be home canned fur Christmas, and some would be for Thanksgiving.

    It wasn’t that any given item was so good (though they were), it’s that all of everything either made was so consistently amazing. Never a flop, never a dud.





  • Eh, short term it’s no big deal. Teeth are durable as hell and won’t get fucked up by anything that minor if it’s a rare thing. But, the more you do it, the more damage accumulates over time. A few times a year over decades? Never gonna notice it.

    A few times a month, and it’ll be a decade or two before it would be a problem.

    A few times a week, and you’d better have dental coverage and/or good income, because you’re looking at a few years before it starts showing up as carries. Less if circumstances are bad, or you didn’t start out with very good teeth.

    There’s also the fact that keeping in the habit of brushing after eating stays a habit better if you don’t deviate from it without an important reason. In my mind, if you’re awake enough to eat, you’re awake enough to brush afterward. If you aren’t awake enough to brush, then you probably shouldn’t be eating either. Fucks with digestion and metabolism. It’s better to just stay on track and skip the snack, if you dig me.

    But nah, if it’s a rare thing, you’ll take more damage from a soda than a single night skipping brushing after a midnight nosh. It’s all about the acids.

    Now, if you can’t be bothered to at least swish out with some water, I’d say you’ve got worse things to worry about because you can do that on your way back to bed, swallow it and take zero extra effort beyond the mouthful of water. If your energy is that low, or there’s some other impediment involved, focus on that.




  • Yeah, I’d be looking for someone else too. I don’t believe in being a slave to a clock, but he’s just not matching your needs and expectations even when he’s there, so it just isn’t a good pairing. A trainer and client have to be on the same page for them to be able to really guide you.

    Sorry you’re working so hard and not being supported right. There’s plenty of room for a relaxed trainer, but that’s not what you need to meet your goals. Sucky position to be in. If it wasn’t prepaid, I’d say just walk entirely since it’s a recurring issue.

    Good thing is that trainers tend to have a fairly high turnover rate, so he may end up not being there long.


  • IDGAF about five minutes in most circumstances. There’s just too much shit that matters way more.

    If it was something that was a dealbreaker metrics because it fucked other things up for me, I’d want to know what the deal was, communicate that my needs weren’t being met, and decide to stay a member/customer based on that, but it’s not something that would bother me.

    I refuse to be a fucking slave to the clock on my phone, and wouldn’t insist anyone else be either. Back before network clocks, we all did fine without and nobody died.





  • Ignoring context, it would be unusual, but not inherently worrying. There’s plenty of mothers that help guide their daughters to an age appropriate sex toy, and some that will do the same for their sons. Rarer, there are fathers that will do so, but men have to worry more about external opinions about such. A mothers buys a dildo for their kid, the default assumption is that it’s weird, but not bad. A father does it, and the default assumption is that he’s over the line.

    That being said parents should be the default source is advice about such things, because a bunch of young idiots (as opposed to old idiots) trying to advise each other about things they don’t have much experience with is a recipe for hospital visits.

    In terms of general purpose guidance, and funding/ordering sex toys, there’s nothing wrong with a parent helping their kids in that way, assuming care is taken. There’s even an argument to be made that verbal instructions on safe use are even to be encouraged, and helpful hints aren’t exactly out of line (for real, a lot of young people masturbate in unhealthy ways that just a few sentences could prevent much trouble down the line).

    In context, with the info you provided in comments, the mother in question is not being a good parent in this case, so it fits the word abnormal in the sense that it is unhealthy.


  • I wish I could pretend to get them perfect every time, but I kinda cap out at 7/10. I’ve gotten to the point where the edges are always great, but nailing the centers isn’t as reliable.

    My omelette game is amazing though! Been working on that since I was a kid. Don’t ask about the poached eggs though lol.

    This recipe is pretty close to the one I use; I haven’t gotten around to digitizing some of my older recipes out of laziness.

    One of the biggest factors in getting the centers crispy is the thickness factor though. After I’ve got them cut, I take a cocktail or highball glass, dip the bottom into sugar and gently flatten them a little more. Not enough the edges split, but just before they would.

    If the flour is running a little more moist, I’ll decrease the amount of egg a touch by separating the yolk and decreasing it by half-ish. It’s one of those things that’s by feel though, I’ve yet to figure out a way to turn it into a precise measure because it’s all about his the flour feels before and during mixing. The difference is minor, but it seems to be the limiting factor in making sure the centers are crispy rather than crunchy or chewy.


  • Tbh, if I can’t get them right, I’d rather have chewy than that half-ass crumbly texture too.

    Sugar cookies need to be crisp, crystalline, not crumbly. The problem is that it’s all about getting that sugar/fat ratio perfect with the flour, and that’s hard to pull off since flour hydration varies based on environmental factors.

    They’re one of those super basic kind of baked good that is so hard to really nail that it could be a test. It’s like omelettes; you have to really have your techniques and knowledge nailed down tight to make them great, and they’re easy to screw up.

    But damn, when they do come out perfect, and they almost dissolve on the tongue leaving behind that buttery goodness, it’s a bit of magic. Not my favorite cookies by a mile, but still.


  • Sync on my main tablet, because it has the best 2 column layout for my needs.

    Connect on my phone where 2 column isn’t really a big factor, with summit as an alternative on there because I never have decided which of the two I prefer.

    I don’t use lemmy on laptop/desktop because I dislike the experience via browser. It would be fine for passive scrolling I guess, but even with the various front end options, I run into more hassles than it’s worth when even the meh apps handle lemmy better and I just don’t need anything that could be gained via browser.


  • No worries :)

    As a side note, serious eats did a whole test run of options for cookies. Don’t have the link handy, but they went through various factors like type of sweetener, leavening, etc and showed what changes each makes. It’s possible to tweak any given recipe to adjust for desired results once you get that internalized.