• 0 Posts
  • 154 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 19th, 2023

help-circle

  • Ehhh, I don’t think there is a unifying “white” culture.

    Plenty of regional cultures that are predominantly white, and definitely city level ones, but that’s different from a “white culture”.

    Hell, it’s hard to even say there’s am American culture because it’s just so damn big. Even regional cultures, like the general southern culture I came up in, I can’t say is a single one. There’s to much different between adjoining counties sometimes, and states can be even further apart.

    If I point to the Appalachian culture I’m also a part of, you can’t really rely on that as much as you’d think, because five hundred miles in the mountains is a huge barrier to culture connections, even though much of the population shares common ancestry that informs the local cultures.

    So, nah, I can’t buy the idea of “white” culture any more than I can any singular racial culture. They just don’t work when in reality, though they’re temping on paper.

    Shit, even “ethnic” cultures vary too much between specific cities to rely on them translating fully, so why would arbitrary skin color groupings? The Irish folk here in the hills have kept and/or adapted the culture of their ancestors different than those in Boston, or New Orleans, or New York. Just looking at my maternal and paternal families, there’s enough differences that I wouldn’t give credence to an Irish, Scots-Irish or German culture being fully passed down in the same way.

    The UK is way smaller than the US, and every city has its own distinct culture. Some are big enough cities that there’s multiple versions in each one.

    If I had to lay claim to a national culture of the US, it would have to be adaptability. The overall culture of the US is to take what comes here and mix it around until it sticks. And that’s not a very distinct thing at all.



  • Well, everyone on lemmy is just me talking to myself ;)

    Any time this comes up, it’s always cool how many people have shared a similar experience. It also always makes me wish there was research into how this kind of dream happens, that so many people have experienced it. The fact that so many people do seems to me that there’s something about humans, as a species, that makes it possible, beyond just the ability/need to dream in general.





  • I remember a bunch over the years that I can still close my eyes and replay, so this is a harder question than it may seem on the surface.

    The actual most unforgettable is a recurring nightmare that I’m not willing to talk about because fuck that.

    But number two was a doozie. Heh.

    Back in high school, I had one of those bonkers dreams that fucked me up bad for a while.

    In the dream, I met a girl, fell in love, had kids and grandkids, grew old together. And I’m not talking about just those events and nothing else. There were entire days taking place, from waking up to going to bed in the dream. Entire birthday parties, vacations together, sitting on swings and swinging while holding hands and watching the kids play.

    I lived an entire fucking life in a dream.

    And I woke up from that still a fucking kid. And I immediately started crying because my family were gone, my dream family. I lost them just as sure as if they’d died. It was both beautiful and horrifying.

    It fucked me up. Not that I wasn’t already pretty damn fucked up, what with PTSD already kicking my ass at that age. But that dream was brutal. Well, waking up from it was, the dream itself was amazing.

    I’ve told the story of this many times online because retelling it tends to take the sting out of it a little more each time.

    Not that I haven’t had a great deal of joy in real life, I have. And I’m happier with my wife and kid now than I ever was in the dream, plus it’s real. But that dream has sometimes made it difficult to be fully present in a relationship in the past. It was one of those things where knowing that the person I was with wasn’t the right one made it easier to end things before they went bad. But the fact that I would have to constantly compare reality to the dream meant that I could never be certain how much was a genuine incompatibility and how much was holding reality up to the lens of a dream.

    But the older I got, the less that factored into things. Now, it’s more of a pleasant memory than a bad one. The dream has lost its sting from being only a dream, and reality is better in terms of having a fulfilling and real partner.


  • I’ve been cooking at home, and occasionally in restaurants, since I was about ten or so. So, 40ish years.

    No single standard is better than the others. It does suck that there isn’t a single one that is used as a base, and then gets converted by the cook into their preferred units and structure, but even that has issues.

    The good news is that most cooking, and even most baking, is very forgiving of the kind of discrepancies between sizes of lemons, onions, etc. You don’t really run into trouble until you’re dealing with things that react chemically based on the ratio of ingredients, which is still most common in baking, and not even all baking.

    Even in those types of recipes, it’s usually flour that’s the problem, not leaveners, since flour compacts readily and to a high degree. But, then again, most modern recipes like that are going to be in weight measures, or in baker’s ratios. You’d be using a scale for the fiddly recipes.

    So, generally, just guesstimate your produce size the first time you make something. It’s not going to be so far off that the results will suck if the dish itself doesn’t. Then you tweak things until it fits what you prefer, which is what happens anyway as you build your recipe book/collection.

    My old recipe book had scribbled notes in the margins from years of refinements. When I copied that into a digital recipe manager, I added them in directly. Now, I’m able to just enter the original recipe, then add my notes as parentheticals or whatever as I refine.

    Even with those detailed notes, a given recipe won’t always be reproducible as exactly the same. That’s because you just can’t standardize everything. You use good produce, there’s going to be varying water content, slight differences in flavor compounds, more or less sugars, so to get the same results over time, the cook has to know how to adjust for those things on the fly.

    Of equal import is that no matter how scientific your process of recipe development is, the table is never the same as the cook. My taste buds and brain aren’t the same as my wife’s, my kid’s, my cousin’s, etc. So there’s limits to the benefits of standardized recipes on the plate.

    Now, formatting? That’s a huge help.

    You want your ingredient list to include instructions about when an ingredient is used in multiple places. You want lists broken down in sections when a recipe calls for multiple procedures (like making the main dish, a sauce, and a crust).

    In the instructions, make sure the ingredient quantities are included for redundancy.

    If there’s an instruction about duration that’s variable explain what the variables change. As in: bake for 10 to 15 minutes. Okay, great. What’s the difference? If my stove runs hot and I go for the short time, will I see golden brown, and will 15 be burnt or just really dark? Yeah, you can’t expect identical results from one circumstance to the next, but at least drop an “until golden brown” at the very minimum.

    That applies to any variable, imo, but it can get to be too much detail in complicated recipe.

    Cooking and baking are chemistry, physics. But they’re also an art. The more you try to strip a recipe of flexibility, the less successful it’s going to be for the next cook.



  • That’s my exact distro/de combo. Never had any issues with trackpad use that weren’t also there with the win10 that came on the thinkpad. Which was just that it’s prone to detecting even the lightest accidental taps and over reacting. Maybe it’s device specific?

    Edit: by device specific, I mean that it isn’t every touchpad w/Libreoffice’s issue, rather something that’s wonky with some range of hardware and not others



  • The mods do their job. I don’t know for sure which ones are and are not active, but reports get handled same day in every case where I’ve reported, or been reported. I’d have to check the mod log to see if there’s been recent activity in that regard, but don’t have interest in doing so when anyone can.

    On my pen name account, I moderate two communities, and it would sometimes be months before I’d do anything on the account that would show up because those communities were very slow, and I’m subscribed to them on this account. No need to switch to that account when there’s no mod action needed, unless I want to post/comment on it, which is fairly infrequent.

    Lemmy is way more forgiving of relaxed moderation.



  • southsamurai@sh.itjust.workstoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlLemmy > Mastodon
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    7
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    15 days ago

    As long as you’re getting “favorited”, it’s working as intended. Retooting (sorry, I know that’s not what it’s called I just enjoy the term) is less a determinant of what kind of interest there is on your post, but if you’re getting any at all, you’re doing good.

    Mastodon as a whole isn’t really about this kind of discussion. Just like Twitter was not going to have the same degree of interaction that reddit offered. Mastodon serves a different purpose, so it’s very difficult to make it work for threaded discussion, even though you can even use it to interact with lemmy (or other federated services).

    If you don’t want to use Mastodon as just a place to send your thoughts into the world, you have to follow hashtags that are about discussion and engagement. They can be hard to find, and often aren’t great because most people use instances that limit character use. Hard to have a nuanced talk with under 500 characters.



  • I mean, you quoted the line and missed the last two words as umami. That’s absurd, it’s right there to see.

    Up until the term umami spread outside of Japan, nobody called the flavor that. And it still took longer before people figured out that it was its own taste in the same wau sour, bitter, salty, and sweet are; that it has distinct receptors.

    Before that, there wasn’t really a specific term in use. When people referred to what is now called umami, the vocabulary was different. Savory and meaty are the two I remember being most used, and they have other usages for food. Savory is very often just used as an antonym for sweet, and meaty just means “meat like” without drawing a distinction between the saltiness and slight metallic tang of meat from the part that is umami.

    I don’t know how old you are, so you may or may not have been around during the spread of the term and its eventual discovery of having its own receptors. But it was “viral” in the way it initially crept in, then exploded as every cooking show started talking about it and familiarity with the term spread. There was a collective “ohhhhhh! That’s what I’ve been experiencing”, and the word got adopted. Now it’s a part of the collective lexicon.


  • Nutritional yeast, aka flake yeast.

    Intense flavor, goes with damm near anything parmesan goes with, and things it doesn’t. It’s fairly cheap, lasts ages when stored decently, and it packs a nutritional punch.

    People like to talk about how umami’s spread as a specific flavor into awareness in the west was a massive shift. But a lot of people got locked into the soy and fish sauce focus that was the first thing that western tastes became familiar with as umami. Even when folks are aware of other things, they still tend to think in terms of sauces and complex recipes for pastes and fermented products. But good old yeast is right there, cranking out a deep and rich flavor.

    So it gets slept on pretty hard. It doesn’t help that it isn’t marketed well. A lot of people that have heard of it think it’s more along the lines of a vitamin you take on its own, or lump it in with woowoo nutrition in places where it’s called nutritional yeast.

    One of my favourite things that really focus on it as a major flavor component is roasted cauliflower. You mix it with the spice blend, and toss it in a bowl, and it opens up with that rich, heady scent that yeast has. I don’t measure for it, it’s just dumping a bit of garlic and onion powders, salt & pepper, then some paprika. Then maybe two to three tablespoons of the yeast. It’s mouth watering, just the smell. Fuck, my mouth is watering thinking of it.

    You get that amazing caramelized flavor from the roasting, that delicate floral note that some cauliflower has, the slightly sulfuric tang too. Then the spices lift those, and the yeast ties it all together and becomes greater than the sum of its parts.