We have a pet chicken, and whoever has her on their lap is exempt from being asked favors that require moving
We may need at least one more chicken, since they do better with others. If any new ones are as cuddly and sweet as our current bird, we are fucked. No one will ever get anything done.
And yes, I know, “pet chicken”. Kind of bonkers. If you’d asked me in October if I would be walking around my house with a chicken on my shoulder, I would have laughed at you. What’s really hilarious is that we got her because of our other chicken. But the other chicken was actually a rooster, not a hen, and is anti social with other chickens, it turns out.
But I’ll tell you this much. If you can see a little pullet bouncing across the floor, trilling and flapping its wings to hop on your lap for cuddles, and don’t melt just a little, you’re not human lol.
This little fucking bird (that’s not so little now) gets up on my chest, nestles into my beard, and just trills when she’s ready to sleep. How the fuck am I going to wake her up just because someone in the house is bleeding to death? Nope, the bird will wake up eventually, and mops are there to clean up blood. They can just put pressure on the wound and wait.
Does this really bother folks that much? I’ve never cared much about this kind of leeching as long as it isn’t dominating my personal bandwidth. And it never has so far, though I have to admit my 4ish tb of movies isn’t exactly high demand stuff, so I don’t usually have more than one or two at a time being leeched.
Hell, I don’t really care much about leeches anyway, as long as the overall ability to find things is still there. I look at it as the price of the freedom of torrents. There’s always going to be higher demand for data than there are people with the resources/time/willingness to seed heavily. I’m okay with that because I don’t really want to have to keep and seed every fucking thing out there, it would take much more storage than I can afford to be able to keep a ratio on most private trackers since I tend not to keep shit I don’t intend to watch at least once a year unless it’s something pretty damn obscure.
Yeah, teleportation solves way more real life problems than invisibility does.
Invisibility in the real world, for a civilian, is really only good for pranks and crime. Which isn’t exactly a bad thing, but teleportation can do all of that and more.
Now, there are some examples where I won’t/can’t actively seek out their work, and would never contribute to them by buying anything at all, ever.
Cosby falls into that category, just as an example.
But, I have a complete separation as far as the work itself being valid/good despite the origins. Using Cosby as the example again, if I’m somewhere and one of his performances is on, I’m not going to care enough to change a channel or leave, or even say anything.
That’s pretty much anyone and everyone. I just don’t have that thing where a given item, piece of work, whatever, is “tainted” just because the person that made it is a piece of shit. I don’t form an association like that. It’s that I choose to not seek out some things as a matter of principle.
But, as a general rule, if they’re dead, I don’t care at all. And, if the person in question is only one person involved in a group effort, that group effort is fine by me. Like, if the guitarist of a band is a piece of shit, but everyone else is not, why would their work be a bad thing?
Now, this isn’t to say that I ignore any bad acts when interacting with a given work. Take van Gogh as an example. His excesses and disturbing behaviors are part of his work to an extent. It’s a thing where knowing the person’s flaws informs the interaction with the work. Kinda like “gee, I wonder how much of this work stems from the same root as the bad acts did?”
But, I can enjoy the work of people I personally despise with no issues. I just don’t have whatever it is that other people have that makes a thing tainted based on the creator.
Part of that is knowing how shitty humans in general are, and how hard it is to find any artist that didn’t/doesn’t have massive flaws. In music and painting in particular, you run into a shit ton of artists that were abysmal people. If I did have that whatever it is that causes a connection between the art and the artist’s flaws, I wouldn’t be able to listen to much music at all.
That being said, spaghetti sauce. Yeah, home made is better, but “doctoring” a jarred sauce gets 95% as good without hours of work. You can’t fix the canned shit, but I’ve not found a jarred sauce that I can’t tweak with fresh herbs and some quickly sweated aromatics and end up with something that people love. It also satisfies my picky ass. Now, I will say that fucking ragu is pretty shit overall, and doctoring it only goes so far. But it is still good enough that making sauce from scratch ain’t happening.
Edit:
There seems to be a lot of range in spaghetti sauce recipes. It’s also important to note that I’m not talking about marinara.
So, the real time involved is split between prep and simmering.
Here’s how we do it. Remember this is an american talking here, so don’t redirect expect something traditionally Italian. And I’m a southerner that’s mostly german and Scots-Irish, so don’t expect any new York style stuff lol.
You take your tomatoes, skin them however you prefer. I use a quick dip in boiling water, aka blanching.
You give those peeled tomatoes a rough chop into nice size chunks. Now, the kind of tomato matters for that because something like a roma e isn’t gong to need as many chops as a beefsteak. You’d usually be using something like a roma anyway, but if your neighbor drops off a giant bucket of tomatoes, you can only use what you got, you know?
You chop up an onion, maybe two. You mince some garlic, maybe half a bulb if you really like garlic. I love garlic, so I go heavy.
Now, that’s your usual start. Most people in my family don’t add anything else in the way of veggies. Me? I like to char a couple of red or yellow bell peppers, skin them, and get them in there too. If I’m feeling frisky, I might have zucchini, eggplant, or whatever else cut up and ready to add at the appropriate time too, but that’s optional.
You get the onions sweating. While they’re starting, you feet your herbs together. Idgaf about fresh vs dried, each has benefits for flavor, you do what you prefer. I do oregano, basil, marjoram, a little thyme, and that’s it. I’m simple.
A little black pepper, a little salt (you really don’t need much, maybe a teaspoon for a big batch; salt your damn pasta water instead) to taste.
Once the onions are almost ready, I add the peppers since the quick char and steam to peel them tends to get them halfway cooked anyway.
This is around a half hour of work for most people. For me, it’s closer to an hour. Yay disability!
Then you add your tomatoes, herbs, and any optional veggies. Bring to boil, reduce to simmer.
After that, it’s patience. You’re making sure any veggies added are tender, and after that it’s cooking things down and letting the flavors develop. And, I promise you, anything under a half hour of simmering isn’t going to taste right, and will be super runny. You’ll usually have what amounts to chunky tomato water until close to the hour mark. For a big pot (my biggest is 6 quarts, and it starts damn near full when I do it) an hour and a half is bare minimum for the right thickness.
Now, if you’re going to jar that up, you’re done except for that part, which isn’t involved in what I originally said.
If you’re going to add meat, you’ll want to start browning it off about a half hour ahead of when the thickness will be right. You add the cooked meat in and let it simmer for 15 minutes at minimum. Do yourself a favor and deglaze the pan used with a nice, semisweet red wine, add that to the pot and go at least a half hour after adding it.
Now, exactly how long it needs to simmer is variable because you’re dealing with tomatoes, and the water content varies between varieties, time of year, weather conditions, etc. But I’ve never had a full sized batch take less than an hour and a half counting from the initial bring-to-boil stage.
I dunno, maybe there’s time savers I’ve never thought of. Maybe the folks saying it’s a half hour are doing a different version of “from scratch”, or whatever. But that’s how we do it, and it’s pretty much what the typical recipes I’ve seen online do (I went and checked because I wondered if I was crazy lol), plus or minus some details that don’t really change simmer time.
I’ve had some batches need a full two hours of simmering. And, yeah, you don’t have to stand over the pot the whole time, but chances are you’ll still be in the kitchen cleaning, keeping an eye on things stirring occasionally, adding any herbs or spices to adjust taste as it goes, etc. So it isn’t like you can just pop down to the local pub (or equivalent in your location) and go by time alone. You’ll still be in the general vicinity, with the added heat and humidity from cooking.
But that’s why I rarely go from scratch. I can pick up a jar of whatever, add some herbs, extra garlic and/or onions, brown any meat and then the deglaze and be done in under an hour from start to finish, including prep. The taste isn’t the same, nor is the texture, but it’s still yummy.
Hopes? None. Warner Bros. has no fucking clue how to use DC characters and ideas in theaters. They may get lucky with specific movies being decent, but the best movies are not even as good as the worst of the animated movies and series. They keep throwing money and names at live action, instead of focusing on telling good stories that stay true to the essence of the characters.
I don’t see Gunn doing any better tbh. For one, he’s going to be hamstrung by whatever Warner decides is the goal. For another, he’s going to end up limited by whatever flawed view executives have of the servers characters. And then he still may not have a grasp of what either comics fans or non comic fans need from a movie featuring DC characters.
We don’t get door to door trick or treat any more.
So I do home made treats , and have up a sign that adults can request them for their kids. Unaccompanied kids would be SOL, but the ones we get are people that know I do it, so there’s always an adult making the request.
I actually ran out this year entirely. There’s usually a little left over. I lost count of the cars after about thirty. Small town, word gets around past the folks that know me personally (which is how it started, me doing baggies for kids I know along with store bought packaged candy).
Kinda funny, I was ranting earlier about how Halloween got screwed up because of jerks messing with kids, and it breaking the point of Halloween. But this is the busiest year I’ve had in ages because I went old school lol.
Man, the call problems are a dealbreaker for any phone at all, imo. Maybe not for a toy, but it’s bonkers that they’d release a phone OS that isn’t 100% call stable.