I grew up with parents that did a lot of the support stuff around the house without making me learn any of it. The result was me going away to college not knowing how to cook, clean, do laundry, fix things, or really any of the practical day-to-day life skills one needs to live independently.

Luckily, I lived with the maybe unsupported belief that I could do anything if I tried, and failing seemed really low stakes, so I managed to figure things out.

I am completely dogshit at cooking. Whenever I try a new recipe, I either burn or undercook the food, resulting in about an hour wasted of poor planning.

There are a few tricks you can do to guard yourself here.

First, if you’re using the stovetop, turn the heat down. A lot. Especially if you have an electric coil stove. Most recipes are seemingly written to gas stovetops, and at high settings, electric stoves end up transferring way more heat into the cookware than a gas flame on high (flames lick up around the edge, and like half of the heat is lost to the environment). If you’re using electric stoves, you basically never want to turn them up above 60% unless you’re boiling water. So, treat 6/10 as “high” and adjust your scale accordingly.

Second, use a timer. Don’t let yourself walk away from the stove for more than a few minutes at a time, and if food is looking close to done, don’t walk away at all. Things go from “mostly cooked” to “done” in a matter of seconds.

Third, pre-heat your cookware. Don’t add food to a cold pan. Add a small amount of fat while it is cold, and use its appearance to judge whether it’s hot enough to add food or not. If you’re using butter, wait for it to bubble; oil, wait for it to take on a shimmery appearance. Adding food to cold or unlubricated cookware can cause it to stick, and stick bad. More importantly, it’s easy to walk away from a cold pan, and it doesn’t remain cold for nearly as long as you think.

Let’s take eggs as an example. Frying an egg is trickier than it seems, particularly if you like a loose yolk, because yolks cook at lower temperatures than whites. Adding a knob of butter – about a teaspoon, or roughly 1" X 1" x 0.25" – to a non-stick pan, turning the heat to medium-high, and then watching for the bubbles tells you when to add the egg. The egg should sizzle a little, and the thinnest parts of the albumen should turn white immediately. Add a small pinch of salt, pepper, or other spices you may like at this time, then watch the egg carefully.

Gradually, the white should turn more and more opaque. It should take a minute or two.

If you want a fully runny yolk, flip it when it’s opaque about half-way up; if you want it less runny or more gelled, wait until it’s almost fully opaque, but still glossy. Once you’ve turned it over, it only needs to cook for about 60 seconds. The timing here will involve some trial and error to hit the exact yolk consistency that you want. Remember that it’s OK if it’s not perfect.

Fourth, and finally, for baking, get an in-oven probe thermometer and an oven thermometer. Always pre-heat the oven, and don’t trust the temperature setting until you’ve verified it with the stand-along oven thermometer. Baking and roasting is all about temperature control. It’s ok to cook at a lower temperature than the recipe calls for, it will just take longer for it to finish cooking. It’s also ok to cook roasted foods to lower temperatures than guidelines, so long as you cook them for longer. This will usually prevent things like meats from drying out as much. For instance, safety guidelines say to cook poultry to 165 deg. F, but this is the temperature that instantly kills microbes. It will also dry out the meat somewhat significantly. If you can get and keep the temperature at or above 150 F for four to five minutes, it will be just as safe. And it takes time for heat to penetrate the meat, so the internals usually continue to increase by 5 to 10 F after you remove it from the oven, so you’ll almost always be able to keep it hot enough for long enough if you remove it at 150.

But, of course, monitor it yourself to be sure. Or turn the oven off and crack open the door for a couple of minutes before actually removing it if you’re worried it’s not going to hold.

This may involve walking back and forth around the kitchen getting ingredients as needed, forgetting to do a step, or forgetting an ingredient that is sitting on the counter away from me.

Honestly, prepare everything you can in advance. Make a checklist, and break things down into steps. Chop of everything you need to fry. Put dense items like carrots and potatoes in the same bowl. Put lighter items like onions and celery together. Keep delicates like garlic separate. Pre-mix dry ingredients. Keep reactives like baking powder or baking soda to the side until you know you need them. This all takes a little extra time, but while you’re learning it’s really helpful to front-load a lot of the work and to keep track of it as you go.

Also, read the full recipe and instructions in advance. A lot of cookbooks and cooking videos are poorly written and produced, and will throw “quiet” steps in like they expect you to know they’re coming, like “mystery” shows that don’t give you enough information to solve the mystery before the protagonist.

My motor skills are sometimes clumsy with cutting, so oftentimes the vegetables and fruit are cut too thick, or not to the point where the recipe expects them.

This comes with practice, and a home cook does not need the level of consistency or exactness that a chef in a Michelin star restaurant does, and if it’s something that’s really finicky that does, maybe skip it until you’re more practiced.

Or buy a mandolin.

That’s not usually necessary, though. Most cooking does not require strict tolerances on the size of things. The consequence of slicing things thicker than you meant to is that it will take slightly longer to cook.

Like, every recipe under the sun will tell you to chop or slice vegetables into equally thick units, but that functionally never happens in a home kitchen. It’s not that important.

When I made aloo gobi, my cauliflower was too large, the potatoes were undercooked, and the other veggies were just a pile of slop.

This is ok. Treat this as a learning experience. Slice your florets in half one more time, and add your vegetables to the dish at different times, starting with the potatoes, and ending with the stuff that turned out as mush. It’s easier to cook things for different amounts of time than it is to figure out the exact sizes you need to make things so they take equally long to cook. Especially since some ingredients will stand up to being cooked for longer while others won’t.

Also, you can use a microwave to finish a dish that has some components that didn’t get quite enough time on the stove or in the oven.

Oftentimes I might hate the taste of what I’ve made, so ultimately I will act to not eat anything because I don’t want to waste money cooking then going out

This is really hard, and I know is an incredibly frustrating experience. It takes time and experience with flavours and flavouring ingredients to get a sense for what works, and what fixes things when they don’t work.

Try to keep in mind when cooking that you can always add more of a flavour, but it’s really, really hard to remove it if you add too much. Start conservative with seasoning, and build it up as you cook the dish.

Make sure you use enough salt. If things are bland, even if you’ve added spices and other seasonings, it’s probably because there’s not enough salt. But add it lightly, testing the flavour over time. It’s really hard to unsalt a dish if you go overboard.

I know it can feel really daunting to try and cook. Failure, as you say, can mean feeling like you don’t get to eat. But failure is also a teacher, and you’ve expressed specifics here that point you toward the kinds of things you can do next time to make things better.

Something that can help with all of this is a cooking journal. It’s a place where you can write down your prep notes, as well as the outcome of the dish, what was wrong, what could be done better. Try and keep things small to start, and work with forgiving ingredients (dark poultry meat, for instance, if you eat meat, or waxy potatoes). You build up your skills, and your intuition, slowly over time.

You can do it. You just have to make it OK to fail. There’s no shame in not being good at something you’ve never learned to do.

And politics is pagentry. Liberals believe strongly in the rituals of the state, and the respect of “the office”. It almost never matters who the shitbag was who held the office, for them a part of the system is playing your role and not deviating from the script.

This conveys nothing but the fact that she’s following the script of political society.

There are other reasons to dislike Harris. Better reasons. Reasons founded on something other than the want for people to ignore the established customs of the space they’re inhabiting.

There’s a lot of things that LLMs are really good at, or incredibly useful for, such as ingesting large bodies of text, and then analyzing them based on your ability to create well thought out prompts.

That’s the story people tell at least. The weasel phrase at the end is fun, I guess. Leaves a massive backdoor excuse when it doesn’t actually work.

But in practice, LLMs are falling down even at this job. They seem to have some yse in academic qualitaruve coding, but for summarizing novel or extended bodies of text, they struggle to actually tell people what they want to know.

Most people do not give a shit if text contains a reference to X. And if they do, they can generally just CTRL+F “X”.

See that it’s never going to make money, go public, hand the keys over to someone else, and then try again with a wallet full of cash and a reputation for making billion dollar businesses.

Just to be clear, publishers don’t like reviewers, either. They’re seen as gatekeepers of audiences and people to be managed and bribed, and that means keeping the reviewer market small. They want reviewers to be PR people with a fascade of being impartial, and few enough to count on one hand.

This is also somwthing that’s happening, then, because Nintendo sees a pathway to victory. Not only are their games licensed only for their own hardware, but they can claim the reviews are misleading and invalid because the games aren’t designed to run on the platforms they’re beinf reviewed on.

Like, none of this is Nintendo coming for your emulation catalogue. It’s them coming for people trying to generate an income from their games. And all of the big publishers are going to line up behind them on this, because they also hate anyone who’s making coin using their creation.

That’s capitalism. That’s what it means for something to be capital, and to own it. It’s what owning the means of production is all about.

Yeah. What’s the point of a vampire if they ain’t scary in some way? And nothing seems to be more scary to a dndfinder player than a monster that breaks their turn pattern.

This is not about the legality of emulation, unfortunately, but about whether people have the rights to publish lets plays without a license.

Many suits in the gaming industry see lets plays as theft. They see people making money using their games and believe lets players should have to pay to license thst content, and that they should have the right to revoke that license if they don’t like what people are saying about or doimg with their games.

I work in the industry, and I know people who work or who have worked at studios owned by every major punlisher in the west. This is a thing they all habe someone of import chomping at the bit for.

It’s just that none of them want to be the one singled out as the first or only one attacking lets plays. Nor to be the one that shoulders the costs of having their position challenged in court.

This can’t be a new thing. This was one of the conditions Nintendo announced when they dropped their stupid “register with us to be allowed to do lets plays” thing.

Oh, and it’s not just Nintendo. All of the big publishers believe they own your videos that use their games. I’ve been involved in discussions with people personally who were trying to figure out how to demand licensing fees from YouTubers.

This is goingnto get worse before it gets better. This has been a traffic jam caused by everyone waiting for somebody to go first. Nintendo is just the one who has volunteered to be the first mover.

But I might be wrong; I feel 70% certain about this one.

You should downgrade your certainty. By a lot.

The expansion is an expansion of space, and therefore explicitly increases the distance between galaxies. It does not, and cannot increase the speed at whoicj those galaxies travel through that space.

Right now, there are galaxies moving away from us at rates higher than the speed of light, a thing which is physically not possible if the expansion is due to an acceleration of the galaxies themselves.

You’ve misunderstood things completely backwards.

Almost exclusively day-ta.

I’m a day-ta scientist who grabs raw day-ta from a tay-ta warehouse (using an interface that makes it look like a day-ta base) and manipulates it inside day-ta frames in order to do day-ta analysis. I also design day-ta analytics schemas.

Sometimes, though rarely, that day-ta warehouse holds rah dah-ta, though, and I can’t tell you how it got there or why.

The case of remote work shows that the CEO class as a whole failed to pick up an innovation yielding massive benefits before it was forced on them by the pandemic, and have continued to resist and resent it ever since.

Hey, look! It’s the whole of what’s going on here. The bosses were forced into letting us have a thing, and, as a result, they will never accept us having it, and will do everything they can – including destroying the business, if they’re privately held – to take it back.

They lost a minuscule slice of power over our lives, and they will never forgive us for that.

I quit my last job because they pulled us back to the office. That’s going to be a lot harder to do next time becauee of BS like this.

Everyone just has to sit on their hands and strike in-office to drive home the point. Something that’ll never happen in unorganized workplaces.

I imported the JSON files from the Foundry VTT module into a Pandas dataframe in Python and randomly select from there, using the party’s casting rank +1 as an upper limit.

The Mozilla trick

What’s that? I’m not spending any more money on ZeniMax games? And I’m getting a Margaret Thatcher Doom mod?

What a marvelous day it is!

He’s Etobicoke Ralph Klein. This is his version of drunkenly throwing pennies at the homeless.

How many muscles in his back did he rip from the bone that time?

On the plus side, the province has demonstrated that the work nurses do is worth that much to it. Should be fun pointing that out in contracr negotiations.

“Private” here is being used to mean “private sector”, not “personal”.

Not who you replied to, but I’ve experienced it on both vanilla Element and on Schildichat over and over, as well as repeated logouts that require signin approval from one of my other active sessions.

That are on devices on different floors of the house, or even in different parts of the city.

Shit’s jankey as hell.