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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: August 21st, 2024

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  • Edit: I need to see what dried beans I have and maybe go shopping. I will give this a try with a couple different types of beans and report back if I fart or not.

    Hope you have some alpha-galactosidase at your disposal.

    The simplified explanation: A reason beans give some people gas is due to certain types of sugars and carbohydrates they contain. Those sugars are water soluble. Seems like brewing beans would concentrate those sugars and lead to epic tootage.

    Also, one method for reducing how much gas that beans cause is to soak them in lots of water. Basically, soak them for up to 8 hours, drain, rinse, and repeat a couple more times. It works on the same principal, that the soaking process will remove at least some of the problematic, water soluble sugars. Supposedly adding a small amount of baking soda helps, too. I’m less certain about that.


  • 5 layer burritos got me through some tough times eons ago when I was a young adult. I could get a drink and a couple of those burritos for just over $3 - $5 USD (prices rose over the years and different locations charged different prices). And it would be enough to stave off hunger for the rest of the day.

    Back in 2022, I was traveling and decided to stop at a Taco Bell for the first time in close to a decade for old times’ sake. That same drink and 2 burrito order now costs over $12. Three of those five layers were spread microscopically thin. The tortilla wrap wasn’t even warmed or steamed, so it was dry and crumbly. They couldn’t even roll it properly. Yuck. It’s not an exaggeration to say that I could have gone to a sit down Mexican place and gotten more, better food plus table service for the same price. So, lesson learned.

    Needless to say, I haven’t been back since. With the descent into madness of Taco Bell and Subway, I’m afraid to try my other young adult fast food savior, Wendy’s, in case that’s totally been ruined, too.


  • Earlier this year one of my relatives came for an extended visit. We were discussing what we might have for dinner that week and both of us were on board for the same ingredients, such as asparagus. My relative was also happy with the video services I’m currently subscribed to because I have a couple options they don’t have at home, so they were telling me about how they were rewatching some older Harrison Ford movies. And then there’s the age-old (or old age) conversations about our current health issues.

    In the following days, my relative kept bringing up the fact that their phone and tablet are listening to our conversations. Proof? After we had the food conversation, their news feed was suddenly filled with asparagus recipes. They were also getting ads for more Harrison Ford content on the service that they don’t subscribe to. And to top it off, they were seeing ads for a prescription my dog takes but that they had never even heard of before our conversation the day or two before. Isn’t it obvious? They’re listening to our conversations.

    To me this was easily explainable by Occam’s Razor. All our devices are on the same IP address. After we discussed the asparagus I went online that night and did a search for asparagus recipes. And when we were talking about my dog’s health condition, I used my phone to look up the active ingredient because I couldn’t recall off the top of my head. Plus, when Hulu or whatever random service sees you’re watching a lot of Harrison Ford movies, it makes sense they’d advertise others you might like.

    That makes a lot more sense and is a lot less complicated of an explanation than “our devices are always recording our conversations and uploading them to the internet as a basis to send us advertisements”.

    Sure it’s technically feasible, but if it were happening, surely they would be a lot more incontrovertible proof than a questionable and likely misinterpreted news source that seems to be more of a “sly” advertisement for a tech solution that the big players aren’t actually using.



  • This actually is a good point and is one of the reasons that overuse of emojis can be annoying for some folks. Basically it boils down to the fact that a lot of people using them don’t use them effectively or in a way that provides any “value” to the reader.

    For an otherwise clear and benign statement, a grinning emoji to signify that the writer wants their statement to be “fun” isn’t particularly useful, relevant, nor insightful for the reader. At best, it comes across as unnecessary filler like an ad at the end of a sentence. It makes no difference, it’s just there for the writer’s own pleasure. Nothing wrong with that, but hopefully you can see that it would be annoying for some folks.

    On the other hand, using emojis effectively, like putting one after making a sarcastic statement provides insight and meaning to people reading. In other words, it has value for the audience, provides useful context. A lot less annoying to people when they actually derive some benefit from it.

    One issue is, a whole lot of people don’t recognize this and/or don’t care.



  • Imagine if every language in the world used the exact same alphabet, exact same words with the exact same spelling, and exact same sentences but the meaning of those words/sentences varied from person to person, region to region, in different contexts, and sometimes changed day to day. Then on top of that, the words even rendered differently from device to device.

    Additionally, there was no way to look up what those words meant to the person writing them, who you don’t even know. Even if you ask for clarification, there’s less than 50% chance they’ll respond at all, let alone provide a sincere, meaningful, and accurate answer.

    That’s what emojis are like to me. Sure, some of these same complaints apply to text-based communication as well, but emojis take it to the extreme.

    I don’t typically care that much if people use them – for instance, to reinforce the meaning or intention of their message. But it’s mildly annoying when the emojis are a message all of their own and that person is trying to communicate with me.

    Additionally, there’s an extremely high degree of correlation between people and messages that use a bunch of emojis and actual quality of the message/meaning being sent. In other words, if someone’s using a lot of emojis to communicate, I can pretty much completely disregard anything they have to say because it almost certainly holds no value to me. And that’s okay.

    So maybe in a broader sense, comments/titles/descriptions with lots and lots of emojis is annoying similar to seeing advertisements at the top of my search results and interspersed in the front page posts. It’s useless drivel that mucks up the experience.

    And even to use your description as an example:

    I don’t understand at all how that emoji is necessary or even insightful. It seems completely contradictory to the “But seriously” at the start of the sentence, it doesn’t seem like anybody with any degree of reading comprehension would mistake what you’re saying as being something negative/nasty/mean/hurtful/etc so it’s like if I ended my sentence with “and I’m currently chewing gum”. Okay, nice to know I guess, but why would I need to be told that?