Camden I think is the original location, but they have a couple other places now, Mt Holly and Medford I think?
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I generally don't let many people from Jersey know this, but you guys may have the best cheesesteaks with Donkeys Place. They're a little heretical with the seeded Kaiser roll, but they're damn good.
Ah fuck, can't believe I forgot birch beer.
Any time I manage to get someone with any influence at a local brewery's attention I try to put the idea for a hard birch beer into their mind. I don't think it's taken root anywhere yet, but hopefully someday.
Applejack to an extent, I don't think it has quite as much cultural significance to Philly, but maybe to NJ with Lairds.
While I'm on NJ, the Taylor ham/pork roll debate is weird to me, it says pork roll on the package.
And while we're talking drinks, I suppose honorable mention goes to Yuengling. Pottsville is a bit outside of the Philly area, but it's ubiquitous in and around the city, if you order a "lager" you get a Yuengling. Its a solid alternative to the Bud/Miller/Coors big brand beers, but really nothing too special. I avoid buying it myself anymore because Dick Yuengling is kind of a dick, and there's plenty of other great beers being made in and around the city, but I've probably drank more lagers in my life than any other single beer.
EDIT: On birch beer, if you ever find yourself up to Ulysses PA in, I think, Potter County, they have the Pennsylvania lumber museum, they have a birch still there, and at least the one time I was there they had a guy talking about it with a little vial of birch oil from the still you could smell. He had a lot of cool information about birch trees/oil, turns out birch trees contain a compound that's similar to aspirin. And the birch oil does smell very much like birch beer.
Philly area
Yes cheesesteak, hoagie, soft pretzels.
But I believe strongly that a roast pork Italiano sandwich loaded up with sharp provolone, roasted long hots, and broccoli rabe is the best Philly sandwich.
Go a little out into the suburbs around Norristown, and you'll also find the "Zep" a sort of pared-down hoagie, one kind of meat, cheese, oil and spices, tomatoes, and plenty of onions.
I'm not going to wade into the minefield of which sandwich shops are best except to say Pat's and Geno's are garbage, but maybe worth it for the experience if you're a tourist. Avoid anywhere that advertises as a "Philly Cheesesteak" look for cheesesteak, steak sandwiches, or even just steaks. For a Zep I don't think it's controversial to say Lou's ro Eve's are the places to go.
Tomato pie- close relative of pizza, thick sort of focaccia-like crust, square, thick tomato sauce, dusting of Parmesan cheese, served cold. Staple of many parties here.
Also in the suburbs - Franzones pizza, Bridgeport is the original location, but the original owner sold it to a relative and opened the one in Plymouth/Conshy location and another in Manayunk. You're going to either love or hate the pizza, thin crust, very sweet sauce in a spiral on top of the cheese. There's a few imitators out there but Franzones is the original.
This is the right time of year for them so "Irish Potato" candies. Sweet cream cheese and shredded coconut, rolled in cinnamon. Nothing Irish about them but they kind of look like potatoes.
Zitners Easter eggs- chocolate candies with various fillings.
Goldenbergs Peanut Chews- chewy molasses candy with peanuts covered in chocolate
Mallow Cups- like a Reese's cup but full of marshmallow and coconut instead of peanut butter
Scrapple - don't ask what's in it, just eat it.
Pork roll (kind of a jersey thing, but ubiquitous in Philly too) it's basically round spam
Pepperpot soup- this is old Philly food, like revolutionary war Philly, it's damn hard to find these days but every few years some local restaurant gets the idea to recreate it. It's a hearty, slightly spicy beef and trip soup. There's some Caribbean pepper pot soups that are kind of similar.
Careful, when the couple bottles I already have kicking around run out I might try to take you up on that offer.
Assuming you're Canadian, I've had the pleasure of visiting a few different parts of your country a handful of times, and each one was of the most memorable trips of my life, so I'm always happy for an excuse to return.
Depending on where you are, it may not even be the longest drive I've taken to get some whiskey (current record is about 12 hours)
I'm not much of a JD fan in general, it's an OK whiskey but it doesn't do anything that plenty of other whiskeys don't do better.
I had a personal boycott of JD going for a few years, my wife and I are both whiskey drinkers and we visited TN for the 2017 eclipse. We decided while we were there we might as well make a detour to the distillery. I'm sure with the eclipse it was probably one of the busiest tourism weeks they've had there, so we weren't surprised to find a long line waiting for us. We made the most of it, it took us about 45 minutes to get to the front of the line, it snaked through a little mini museum, and it gave us some time to decide which tour we wanted to do.
But when we got to the front of the line we were informed that all of the tours we were interested in were sold out, and the only one available was the one that didn't allow you to try any whiskey at the end.
At no point during the 45 minutes we were standing around did they make any sort of announcement or put a sign up or anything to let us know that the other tours were sold out, if they had we probably would have decided to just go on that tour, but that really pissed us off, so we left.
I decided that I wouldn't give Jack any of my money after that, not that I was buying a whole lot of it anyway.
A year or two ago they ran an ad campaign with some drag queens. I decided that my personal boycott had gone on long enough and I could reward that little bit of token wokeness, although I have to admit that I still haven't bought any JD since then.
And like too many other companies it looks like they've now rolled back their DEI initiatives, so fuck 'em, back on the boycott list they go.
Now as a whisky drinker in the US, I'm disappointed that there's going to be tariffs affecting Canadian whisky, I'm a little torn as to whether I should support my favorite Canadian brands or avoid them since the tariffs are going to be funneling money to the trump administration.
I'm certainly going to be cutting back on my American whiskeys and many other American products in protest. I encourage my fellow whiskey drinkers to the north to do the same, you guys make some fine rye, I'll gladly take some Alberta Premium over almost anything made in the States.
I suspect I'm going to find myself drinking a lot of Scotch, Irish, and Japanese whisk(e)ys for the next few years, but I look forward to the day when I can hopefully enjoy some Canadian rye again without Trump's tariffs.
don't use colloquialisms, or soft language.
Honestly, part of the problem with the current crop of right wing assholes, is that a lot of them are so fucking brainwashed that they don't even realize that what they're supporting is just outright fascist/Nazi bullshit, so if you ask them point-blank "Are you a Nazi/fascist" they're going to answer "no" and truly believe that, even as they're supporting rounding up immigrants into concentration camps and "ironically" making Nazi salutes.
They have absolutely mastered 1984-style doublethink and duckspeak. They'll prattle on about being free speech absolutists while wanting to remove books about trans people from libraries or banning people with different opinions from their social media sites. They'll talk about being fiscally conservative while absolutely fucking the economy. They'll rant about draining the swamp and eliminating the deep state while they give some unelected goon unprecedented power to do whatever the hell he wants in the government with no consequences.
And they see absolutely no contradictions there.
So you kind of have to play fucking word games with them if you want to actually sus out what their actual thoughts are.
Tangential to this, but I've always figured that if somehow the US government is in contact with extraterrestrials, this is probably a big reason why the president probably isn't in the loop
Unless FTL travel or communications are on the table, or the aliens are based in or near our solar system, it would just take too long to have a back-and forth conversation between the president and the alien home planet.
The nearest star is proxima centauri, at about 4¼ light years away. That means it would take at least 8½ years to receive a reply to a message sent to their home planet
Imagine if, on the day he took office, Bill Clinton sent a message to the Centaurians to initiate negotiations of some kind, he'd be into his second term by the time they even got his message, and he'd be out of office and we'd be about half a year into Dubya's first term, if they took a couple months to think about their reply we may have even received it on 9/11.
Bush fires off another reply, probably with a very different viewpoint from Clinton, different goals, coming from potentially a wildly different political climate.
Aliens receive it in late 2005, meanwhile we're getting a new Pope, hurricane Katrina happens, all kinds of bullshit is going on in our world.
We receive their reply about a year into Obama's first term, again things are wildly different. They get our reply in 2014.
Donny boy receives their reply in probably mid to late 2018. The aliens receive his orange smudged, sharpie-scrawled reply in late 2022 or early 2023. Biden doesn't even get to take part in this particular conversation.
We won't get a reply to whatever trump told them until 2027. The aliens would probably also be surprised that they got two messages from the same president when he replies again if he hasn't croaked by then, and may begin to wonder if our democracy has collapsed and been replaced with a trump dictatorship (and they may be right)
So if they intend to have any sort of actually productive conversation, it probably needs to stay out of the president's hands and instead fall to maybe some unelected government officials or career military types who might hold their position for decades and have more of an opportunity to choose and groom their successors.
You can see a pretty clear difference looking at fertility rates between red states and blue states. So there is definitely something to the idea.
What's a bit harder to sort out is whether it's because more conservatives are choosing to have kids in general, or if those who do are just more likely to have multiple kids.
I don't think the argument is really that becoming a parent makes you more conservative, it's more the other way around- conservatives are more likely to become parents
On paper it makes some amount of sense, with the lack of belief in abortion and contraception, emphasis on "traditional family values" and such.
In actuality, I don't know if it holds water. I've seen a couple studies done on that idea, and the results have kind of been a bit of a mixed bag, I think my takeaway was more that conservatives who have kids tend to have more of them than liberals who have kids, but overall rates of liberals and conservatives who have kids in general were pretty damn close.
You got a typo for mastodon (mastadon)
I don't really have any input on how it is to self-host, but I've been playing around with friendica a bit and I think that has a lot of potential and may be worth mentioning. I think it has a lot of potential as almost a unified fediverse portal in addition to its obvious purpose of being a Facebook alternative, from what I've seen it seems to play pretty nicely with a lot of other fediverse services, and also supports RSS feeds
It needs some polishing, I think the default UI is pretty wonky, but there's a lot of functionality there if you can be bothered to figure it out.
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I work in 911 dispatch, my job is talking to people, and often quite unpleasant people at that.
On my own time, fuck that noise. Live conversation kind of sucks. When it's next based I can walk away from it, think about it, come back write my reply and hit send. Most of the time I can't exactly walk away from a live phone, radio, or in-person conversation and say "hey, good question, I'm gonna go take the dog for a walk while I think about that and get back to you in like 10 minutes" there's an expectation that I'm gonna be there engaged in the conversation and keep everything flowing, and most of the time that sort of urgency just isn't needed. I want to be a part of the conversation, but I don't necessarily have big chunks of my leisure time to set aside to just talking to people, but I can squeeze in a message here or there while I'm doing whatever else I'm doing.
Take this whole exchange for example, I saw your comment, decided I wanted to reply to that, but I had some things I needed to take care of, so I did them, thought about what I was going to say, and wrote it out when I had a few minutes. You're going to see it when it's convenient for you, and maybe write your own reply, which I'll see and reply to when it's convenient for me, and so we'll have a back-and forth conversation that may span a few hours or even days, even though each of us only wrote a couple messages.
I work in 911 dispatch in the US, in addition to my local callers who come from a variety of backgrounds with various accents and speech impediments, I also get calls from alarm companies and a lot of them seem to be outsourcing their call centers or at least hiring a lot of non-native speakers (looking at you, Johnson Controls)
When their accents are so thick that you can't even understand a basic address, like 123 Main St in Springfield, and you're counting on a timely dispatch for a fire alarm, that's a problem.
We also have access to a translation service, but that really slows everything down because everything has to go through the interpreter, so off the bat it's taking twice as long, and often significantly longer because I can't know when to cut my caller off because the interpreter can't really start until the caller finishes talking, so I don't know if the 3 minute rant the caller went on actually is pertinent information I need to know, or are they just rambling and repeating the same useless details over and over again.
I sometimes have to use that translation service when the caller actually speaks pretty decent English but their accent is just totally incomprehensible to my English-speaking ears (especially when you throw in a bad phone connection, I swear some of my callers have found a way to make a phone call from a kazoo.) I've gotten a pretty good ear for the more common accents we get- Spanish, Korean, Hindi, Haitian Creole, Arabic, etc. but every once in a while a curveball gets thrown at me, I legitimately don't think I'd ever heard someone speak Berber or Albanian until I got a call from someone who did, so I've never had a chance to train my ear to those accents.
You even get some situations where due to different dialects and regional accents, even the interpreters sometimes have trouble understanding the caller. For example, different Arabic dialects for example can have a lot of variation, and there's some variation in Spanish dialects. If the interpreter is mostly fluent in Egyptian Arabic or Castilian Spanish, they can sometimes have a hard time understanding a caller who speaks Saudi Arabic or Guatemalan Spanish.
I'm not convinced that the AI tech is ready to be inserted into a 911 call, but if it ever does get to that point it could be a very useful tool for some of my callers. If we can sort of neutralize their accents, we may not need to use translators as often when the caller speaks OK English, and I may not have to ask the alarm to operator to repeat themselves 3 times to understand that they're saying the alarm is at the "Wendy's" (I would have sworn that they were saying "Landis," we have a couple businesses by that name in the area, but none in that shopping center)
Even people who are native English speakers can be kind of hard to understand because of accents. Once in a while I get someone from the UK, or the US south, or hell, even just certain neighborhoods of the city I live just outside of, that can be hard to understand.
And don't get me wrong, I love all the different accents, I'm proud of my own local linguistic quirks, I'm sad that my own ancestors didn't keep their native languages alive with their children (I would be able to speak at least 4 or 5 different languages if they did) and these people who speak English with a heavy accent speak more languages than I can, so I can't really talk shit on them. But it does present a significant barrier to communication and being able to smooth that out would be really useful sometimes
My family is polish, I'll second the bacon. Also dried mushrooms, I want to say my babci used porcini
I don't disagree with the need for local, on-demand production for some oddball parts in some cases, but I do think that 3d printing is the wrong technology for it in this case
This seems like a perfect use for some sort of CNC lathe to me. Pipes are cylinders, and lathes are pretty much the perfect tool to create cylindrical objects. Chuck a piece of metal (or whatever material you need to make the part out of), turn it down to the correct inner and outer diameters, cut the right threads on either end, and you're good to go. Need to be able to pet a wrench on it? Start with hex stock.
I'd have a lot more confidence that a part isn't going to start leaking if it's carved out of a solid piece of material than if it's made out of many layers of material deposited on top of each other.
The only thing a lathe would struggle with is things like elbows and tees, but with a little know-how you can get around that by just making adapters to more readily available standard elbows and such, using flexible tubing, tube benders, etc.
The idea of 3d printing these parts really feels like a "when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail" situation.
Sort of a tangential example to how this kind of law works
Interstate highways (the ones that start with an I in front of the number) receive federal funding for upkeep.
As part of that, they generally can't be toll roads, and rest stops can't be commercialized- so no stores, restaurants, or gas stations (the idea being that the highways are supposed to be for everyone to use and rest stops shouldn't be competing with local businesses)
There are exceptions for cases like the PA turnpike (I76) which was originally built before the interstate highway act and then later integrated into the interstate system. So they're grandfathered in so they have tolls and commercialized rest stops because they already had them. (The tolls were also supposed to be temporary until the construction was paid off but that's neither here nor there)
You got some misinformation here
The current Post Exposure rabies Prophylaxis (PEP) regimen is definitely not "a shot a day" for 20 days
First day you get a dose of vaccine and a dose of human rabies immune globulin (HRIG)
Then you get an additional vaccine dose on days 3, 7, 14, and if you're immunocompromised you get an additional dose on day 28
And if you've previously received the rabies vaccine (for either pre- or post- exposure) you only need a booster on days 0 and 3.
And the incubation period varies, like you said location and viral load plays into it, in humans it can be as little as a week, but more commonly it's a couple months, and even up to a year. There are a lot of variables at play, and the sooner you can start PEP the better of course, but generally speaking it's usually not a "rush immediately to the hospital in an ambulance or you will die" situation. If it comes to it, you usually have at least a couple days of wiggle room to start PEP.
And no, bats don't always bite the neck. Head and neck are pretty common, they're usually pretty exposed, and bats fly so it would be kind of weird for them to bite you on the leg for example, but it's not like they're magically drawn to act out the plot of a vampire movie. It is true though that a lot of people don't recognize a bat bite for what it is.
Yeah, overall the policies where I am are pretty damn sensible. Technically we're not supposed to, but unless you do something stupid like show up to work high, I'd have a hard time thinking of a way you'd get in trouble for it.
Of course if you ended up getting in trouble somehow on your own time, since it's still illegal here it would probably lead to some sort of disciplinary action, revoked certifications, termination, etc. which I suppose is understandable
It's always interesting to me how different some of these policies are from one agency to another. I see a lot of dispatchers in other places talking about how intense their background checks were, and they had to do a polygraph test and all of that. My background check process was all pretty out-of-sight/out-of-mind. Filled out some paperwork, I don't even think they called any of my references (although to be fair, I was able to list a few firefighters and such as references, and got a friend of a friend who works here to vouch for me, which I'm sure helped) no polygraph, did have to go to the county detectives to get fingerprinted during training, but technically I was already hired at that point, and that was about the extent of it.
I once played a warlock with a kraken for a patron.
My character had been a sailor, shipwrecked in a storm, saved by the kraken in exchange for my service.
I washed up on an island full of kuo toa. Started up a little cargo cult to direct their worship towards the kraken, so that he could ascend to full godhood with the help of the psychic energy bullshit.
Of course things went a bit sideways, the kuo toa kind of fixated on me a little bit since I was the one sitting on a throne in front of them and not the kraken itself.
I also kind of figured that whatever the kraken wanted with godhood was probably bad for the world in general.
So I ran the fuck away from that island before the start of the campaign.
And so I constantly had a bunch of koa toa trying to track me down to drag me back to the island, or maybe to eat me, kind of hard to say. The kraken felt he had invested too much time and energy with me to just let me go so he kept pointing the little fish monsters in my direction to try to get me back on track with his plans.
Sometimes when they showed up I could leverage my position as the object of their worship to bend them to my will. Other times not so much.
I don't really lack for motivation, I'll take on some pretty wild culinary adventures, but occasionally I run into things that I just can't logistically make happen.
For example, nowhere in my house has the right sort of temperature/humidity to cure my own salami and such (I've checked,) and I just don't have the space to squeeze in another fridge with humidity controls and such to make a curing chamber.
I've made my own bacon, various kinds of sausages (including smoking my own kielbasa, andouille, and hot dogs) I've helped butcher chickens, I've made beef Wellington, sushi, I've baked bread and cakes in a Dutch oven in a fire pit, I've made ice cream, homemade pierogies.