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Fondots

@ Fondots @lemmy.world

Posts
2
Comments
657
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Any dead franchises that can survive being rebooted?

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  • Here's one out of left field- Bucky O'Hare

    The franchise has been dormant for about 30 years, and even back then there wasn't that much established lore for a modern reboot to tiptoe around- a comic book that frankly not too many people read, a couple pretty good video games, and a Saturday morning cartoon made to sell toys, and there was little to no continuity between those different properties, you pretty much have free reign to go in and do whatever the hell you want with it.

    And there's was some pretty good stuff in there to work with that's maybe even more relevant today than it was when it came out- plotlines about inept bureaucracy, imperialist/capitalist toads controlled by an AI, pollution, climate disruption, slavery, etc.

    And the property was kind of hamstrung by its budget and stuff. I definitely enjoyed it as a kid, and when i went back to rewatch it a few years ago as an adult I thought it held up well enough but the animation and voice acting was definitely pretty janky at times, but even still it managed to have some bigger overarching story arcs. It also had a couple strong female characters without getting preachy about it, though there's certainly some room for improvement in how they were written.

    And if nothing else, today we can probably count on the furry community to watch a show about a green rabbit space ship captain, a cat space witch, a 4 armed pirate duck, a muscly baboon, and their nerdy human audience surrogate.

  • What is your experience with an online cult?

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  • No first-hand experience, and arguably not really a cult, but I have a friend who's a recovering alcoholic, and according to him a few of the local AA groups around us have a few members who are in the weird fringes of the rationalist community, maybe sort of tangentially connected to the "zizians"

    For those not familiar with the zizians, behind the bastards had a pretty decent series on them

    There's also a decent amount of weird overlap between self help type groups like AA (not that AA isn't without plenty of valid criticism) and abusive cult-like organizations. I think the elan.school (Joe vs Elan School) webcomic touched on that, and I also recommend that as an interesting look into the troubled teen industry (trigger warnings for child abuse and such on that)

  • Is there a good substitute for cheeze whiz when making grilled cheese sandwiches at home?

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  • Hoo boy are you confidently incorrect.

    This isn't exactly a secret, the other commenter linked part of the regulations about this, and you can just look up actual products that are out there, their ingredients and how they're labeled, as well as plenty of people out there who have made their own American cheese-like products from cheese and emulsifiers.

    And it sounds like you need a new cheese monger, if you got that info from them they're lying out their ass to sell you some American cheese they couldn't get rid of otherwise.

  • Is there a good substitute for cheeze whiz when making grilled cheese sandwiches at home?

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  • Assuming you're not trolling

    American Cheese is basically cheese (usually cheddar, though there's a couple other cheeses it can be made from) that's had an emulsifier (usually sodium citrate) added to it, which is an emulsifier that keeps it from separating when melted (if you've ever melted regular cheese you may have noticed that it gets kind of oily/greasy because the fat in the cheese separates out) which makes for a really nice creamy/gooey texture.

    It's solid (though usually fairly soft) and comes in a block or pre-sliced.

    There's sort of a few different "levels" of American cheese, with different labeling requirements depending on how much other stuff has been added to it.

    At the top end you have stuff that can be labeled as "pasteurized process American cheese" which is basically what I described above. Cheese + emulsifier, and sometimes a little added fat, salt, acid, and color. It's basically cheddar that melts nicer. There's of course a range of quality here, some start with a better quality cheese than others, and/or add more or less emulsifiers/salt/fat/acid/color, but overall these are actually pretty good. If the label actually says "American cheese" on it, this is almost certainly what you're getting.

    A step down you have "pasteurized process American cheese food" which again have emulsifiers and such, and are at least 51% cheese, the rest is made up of other dairy products.

    Then you have things that don't even meet that definition and contain other additives, there's not really an officially regulated term for these things, and just about anything goes for them, they might be labeled as a cheese "product," "snack," "dip," "sauce," "spread" or any number of other things. These are your cheez wiz, Kraft singles, Velveeta, etc. And this is where a lot of people get the idea that American cheese is crap, some of them don't even taste much like cheese, their texture can be weirdly waxy/plastic-y, they have all kinds of weird additives and non-dairy ingredients, I once bought some bottom of the barrel cheese product singles that didn't even want to melt on my burger.

    For those second two categories, you're probably not going to find the words "American cheese" anywhere on the package. You might find "American" in big friendly letters, but you'll have to look elsewhere on the package to find that it's a "cheese food/product/etc"

    For the first two, you'll often find them being sliced off of a giant block at the deli counter, though some of them may be pre-packaged in the dairy aisle, for the last category you're almost never going to find them at the deli and it's all gonna be in the dairy aisle or even on an unrefrigerated shelf somewhere.

    And if you're adventurous in the kitchen, you can do some pretty cool things with American cheese, those emulsifiers in them can make some magic happen with cheese sauces and such that you really couldn't do otherwise. As an example, I don't really like most seafood, but my wife loves sushi, so I sometimes make some weird non-fish sushi so we can both be satisfied. One time I made a "Philly cheese steak" roll with beef and caramelized onions, and I whipped up a sort of "Japanese cheez wiz" to go with it by making some dashi and melting American cheese into it (I think I also added some miso) and it was fucking delicious, and you wouldn't be able to do that with regular cheese without adding extra emulsifiers, the cheese and the broth just wouldn't mix right.

  • Pizza Hut's AI system caused 'cascading' problems and $100M in damages, franchisee alleges in new suit

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  • I was a delivery guy for a local pizzeria once upon a time (and that place still has their own drivers, and even their own delivery vehicles, which is practically unheard of)

    And I'm not gonna lie, door dash and such was great for a while because it let me get food delivered from restaurants that otherwise didn't do delivery.

    But I've stopped using them, for a few reasons including their shitty business practices

    But the straw that broke the camels back in each case that made me delete was them fucking up my order.

    And that happens, I'm not particularly mad at the store or the driver, I've been there

    But the way that these delivery apps handle it is, to me, unacceptable.

    When I contacted them, their response was to just issue me a refund.

    And to me, what should have happened, is I should have immediately had a replacement sent, expedited as much as possible, at no extra cost.

    That's what we always did when I was a delivery guy, and often with a gift certificate as an apology.

    And sure, a refund on top of that would be nice, but really the root issue is that I don't have the food I ordered. If I order it again, I'm going to the back of the delivery queue, and if I happened to order it when I was low on money I may not even be able to reorder it that day because that refund often takes a couple days to clear.

  • TIL that eating dirt was common in the U.S. South until the 80s. People ate a handful a day, often seasoned with vinegar and salt.

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  • I once heard Spam described as "everything but the oink"

    And so when I describe scrapple, I usually start with that, and then describe scrapple as being "mostly oink"

  • TIL that eating dirt was common in the U.S. South until the 80s. People ate a handful a day, often seasoned with vinegar and salt.

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  • I'm not too sure about what the version of scrapple you received was, it sounds like some kind of bastardized hash, but scrapple is a common breakfast thing in the Mid-Atlantic/Delaware valley area.

    The version I'm familiar with as a Philadelphian, admittedly doesn't sound a whole lot better on paper, but the actual eating experience sounds a lot more pleasant. It's basically pork scraps and organ meats simmered down until they're falling apart and mixed with cornmeal and buckwheat then formed into a mushy loaf, which is then sliced and fried.

    You're not going to identify any particular piece of pork or anything else in it, it's a pretty uniform grey mush, and the only real texture comes from frying it to give the outside a nice crispiness. Nothing tough or chewy about it, you barely need to chew it, the texture is probably more like polenta (which it kind of is) than anything else you might be familiar with. It also usually doesn't contain any apple or potatoes.

    It's not everyone's cup of tea, but if you find yourself near Philly don't let whatever you were served in the south turn you off from trying actual scrapple.

    Parts of Ohio have goetta, which I think is supposed to be pretty similar to scrapple but with oatmeal instead of corn meal.

    I've also heard of "livermush" and "liver pudding" being served in some parts of the south, which honestly sound like dead-ringers for scrapple to me, though I have some friends from the south who insist that they're different from and better than scrapple.

    I feel like whatever you were served was some southerner trying to recreate something they heard described one time but never actually tried themselves, or just slapping the name on something without knowing that there's another dish out there with the same name.

  • Have you ever camped out or queued up for the launch of a game, console, or other media?

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  • Got up bright and early and had my mom drive me to target for the game cube launch

    I've done a lot of midnight movie releases, and a couple Harry Potter books releases

    It was a bit of a spur of the moment thing, but I worked late at the time anyway, so when Skyrim came out I just swung by game stop after I got off work to get that at midnight

  • Removed

    Republicans vote to dilute gas as prices rise above $4.50

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  • I think you're confusing e85 with 85 octane gas

    E85 is 85% ethanol, 15% gas (and e15 is the other way around)

    Octane rating is a measure of how much you can compress a fuel before it ignites by itself. Higher octane gas is more resistant to that. (And e85 actually has a pretty high octane rating, usually somewhere north of 100. Regular gas often contains up to 10% ethanol, in part because it boosts the octane rating)

    To expand on that a bit, if you compress gas enough, at a certain point it just catches fire on its own. This is actually a big part of how diesel engines work. Diesel is actually pretty hard to ignite, in some cases you can even put out small fires by pouring diesel on it (don't try this at home) so they rely on getting high enough compression in order to work.

    Gasoline is a lot more flammable though, you don't really need to compress it at all for it to burn. Sure, ideally you probably want a certain compression ratio because something something stoichiometry but gas is more forgiving in that regard. As long as your air-fuel mixture is about right, it's gonna burn when your spark plug goes off.

    In fact, gas is maybe a little too forgiving, if your octane rating is too low and your engine compression is too high (mostly a problem with higher-performance engines) that gas can just kind of go off too early before the spark plug goes off, which causes "engine knock" which will cause damage.

    But the other way around, high octane in a lower compression engine, basically does nothing spectacular. It still goes boom when the spark plug goes off and not until then.

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    What can you say about Cormac McCarthy's book - The Road?

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  • I started reading it just before COVID hit. My reading habits are very sporadic, sometimes I'll devour a book in a day, other times I'll read a chapter or two once a week and it takes me months to finish a book. This happened to be one of the later cases

    It was really good, but holy shit that was not the book to be reading when people were getting into fights over toilet paper.

    So I did not finish it, I intend to eventually, but it had to go on the back burner.

    Everything about it just kind of oozed bleak hopelessness. I've caught myself starting to say I enjoyed it, but "enjoyed" is really the wrong word, there is no joy to be found in that book, perhaps you appreciate it, maybe you feel it, maybe you just read it and acknowledge that it's a good book.

  • Be honest: Do you still use mainstream social media?

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  • I keep a fake Facebook profile around because some businesses and such don't have any online preference besides their Facebook page so if I want to know about deals and events they're running that's the only place I can find them

    I do admit that I occasionally get sucked into scrolling through the feed, but especially over the last few months it's becoming increasingly full of nothing but AI slop

    I never really had much of a social media presence besides that. Was on Reddit for a long time, deleted my account over the API bullshit, once upon a time I had a twitter, never used it much, deleted it when musk took over. Never had an Instagram or tiktok.

  • What's an interesting etymology for a common term?

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  • Mi komencis per duolingo, sed nun mi plejparte nur legas vikipedio en Esperanto.

    Mi instruas min mem jam ĉirkaŭ 3 jarojn, mi ankoraŭ ne estas tute flua, sed mi progresas.

  • What's an interesting etymology for a common term?

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  • I've been learning Esperanto, which is basically just all loanwords from different European languages, one thing I'm a little embarrassed to have learned that way is that "Peking" as in Peking Duck, is just a different/older spelling/transliteration of "Beijing" since it's "Pekino" in Esperanto

    Been eating Peking Duck for years, never really stopped to consider where or what Peking was until then.

  • What are your worst tech purchases?

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  • We have one of the Samsung frame TVs, it's a nice TV, it fits a specific need for us in a bit of a weird spot in a bedroom where a regular TV would look out of place.

    But man is the software trash. It's laggy, a lot of the apps seem really poorly-optimized, and half the settings are just randomly unavailable for no apparent reason.

    And since I had to install a box in the wall to hide the one connect box behind it, I kind of don't want to use it with another streaming device, something about putting too much stuff in that box kind of rubs me the wrong way.

  • Motherboard sales are now collapsing amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI

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  • Sorry, but I think the point about local AI not necessarily being evil is the tangent here.

    The OP is about motherboard shortages, which is being driven by the big AI companies and is making hardware unaffordable for normal users

    The top level reply to that is about how that's bad because it removes the ability for people to be in control of their own computing

    Then someone comes in, saying "yeah, but you can host your own AI so that it's not evil so not all AI is bad"

    Then someone points out that you can only host your AI if you can afford the hardware to do so which, as the OP and the comment you replied to pointed out, is getting really hard to do.

  • Republican midterms 'coup' exposed as party quietly pushes to flip key Democrat

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  • There was a guy I knew back in high school, he was an idiot, and he knew it, he was one of the rare idiots who would actually listen to someone smarter than him if you tried to explain things to him. He leaned fairly conservative to begin with, but when he said some stupid bullshit you could get him to change his mind if you explained why it was stupid.

    At some point I heard that he died, turns out that was exaggerated a bit, but he did get a pretty bad head injury, spent some time in a coma, etc. but he is mostly ok

    But the next time I ran into him I noticed that he's just not as willing to hear things out and change his mind anymore, and I can't help but think that's the brain damage.

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  • It's very possible that I'm misremembering, we are talking about a memory from almost 30 years ago from when I was a little kid

    There's also a very real chance that I was simply taught wrong, I wouldn't exactly say that most of my elementary school teachers were particularly techy and probably not actually keeping up to date on search engines.

    From what I could find though (after a quick Google search funnily enough, not really interested in doing any in-depth research) the Google domain was registered September 1997, and the company was officially founded September 1998. I don't know if google.com actually went live on either of those dates, somewhere in-between or maybe shortly after (it does seem that they were up and running by August 1998 because that's when the first Google doodle appeared) but in either case my school district usually started school in late August or early September so that timing seems like it would work out to me.

    And even if it did launch at the end of the previous school year or over the summer break, summer break is only around 10-12 weeks so we would have been coming back just as Google was taking that top spot (if indeed it did do so that quickly, another search shows a lot of results saying that it didn't get that big until around 2000, again, not going to fact-check that too closely because I just don't care that much)

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  • I remember back in like 4th grade when my school was just introducing us to the internet, they told us about the big (I think 6) search engines, which, if I recall, were

    Yahoo, AltaVista, hotbot, lycos, ask Jeeves, and northern light

    And then they also mentioned Google, which was still pretty new and hadn't yet cemented its place in the internet yet. But they did say that Google had more results than the others, and that was all we needed to hear as kids and I think we all immediately started using Google almost exclusively.

  • Who recognizes who around here?

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  • þat is indeed þe guy

    I also love how bent-out-of-shape people get over the thorns.

    I haven't stalked his profile, but I feel like every time I've seen him come up he's also seemed like a pretty cool and reasonable dude (I suppose it's possible he's off being a dick in the parts of Lemmy I don't frequent, but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt)

  • Bill banning whites-only housing passes PA House by 1 vote

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  • It passed the house, but it's very likely going to die in the Senate which has a Republican majority