I’ve had frog, it’s practically the original “tastes like chicken” food. They have maybe the slightest bit of fishiness to them, but nothing a little bit of seasoning won’t almost totally cover up.

Similarly gator is also almost a dead-ringer for chicken, just chewier (not surprising, I’m pretty sure just need to look at a gator to be able to tell it was gonna be tough and chewy)

So I’m thinking odds are that dino tastes like chicken.

I’m not sure which version of my comment you replied to because I kind of waffled a bit on my last paragraph and edited it about 3 or 4 times in rapid succession probably about the same time you were replying because I didn’t like how it sounded, it felt a little rambly trying to cram it all into the comment, so sorry about that.

But yeah, I’m basically on the same page there, one of my versions did touch on that, lots of animals have instincts tied to the moon, more available light gives them different opportunities and risks, and we are, at our core, still animals with some weird instincts driving our decisions, and of course there are things like the tides as well, and who knows what other little effects the moon is having on us and our environment that might make us act a certain way, all with a reasonable, if not immediately apparent scientific explanation.

Sure feels supernatural though.

I work in 911 dispatch, and it absolutely feels like on and around a full moon our calls get weirder

We’re not necessarily getting more or more serious calls than average, so it’s kind of hard to point to any measurable statistic that would back up that assertion, and it’s not just people with psych issues calling and ranting at us, so you can’t even just go by mentions of callers “rambling” or “not making sense” in the notes of our calls, a lot of them are just bizarre situations that seem really unlikely or convoluted.

I’m kind of loath to label it as supernatural though. I feel like if there is actually a correlation and not just confirmation bias on my part, it probably has some reasonable scientific explanation.

Have luddite grandparents who would refuse to pay their taxes with anything but a handwritten check on general principle, and who wouldn’t have been able to work a Bitcoin ATM even if you were right there with them literally pointing at things and telling them what to do.

It also helps that they’re dead.

My parents are getting up in their years though. My mom’s still sharp as a tack and decently good with tech. She doesn’t exactly fully understand AI, but she’s aware of it and has a general ideas of what it can do, so I’m pretty confident her bullshit detectors can fill in the gaps from there.

And my dad… well he has my mom around. Probably about 20 years ago he was just about ready to give information to some scammer claiming to be from Apple tech support

Despite the fact that we owned no apple products.

Freeze drying is actually pretty neat

The first step is indeed freezing, basically the same as you would in a regular freezer

But then you take that frozen food, keeping it frozen, and put it in a vacuum chamber.

You might remember from sciences classes in school that different atmospheric temperatures result in water (and other things) freezing or boiling at different temperatures. It’s why water boils faster at a higher altitude (and why some packaged foods and recipes have different instructions if you’re more than X feet/meters above sea level, the air pressure is lower and so water boils at a lower temperature.

You may also have heard the term sublimation, where a solid turns into a gas without melting into a liquid in-between, like dry ice does, which is solid carbon dioxide, and why it’s “dry”

Under a vacuum, ice does the same thing, it turns right into water vapor without melting into water in between.

It actually does this under normal pressure too, but much more slowly. That’s actually a lot of what freezer burn is-the water in your food sublimating away into water vapor. And if you’ve ever left some ice cubes in a freezer for a really long time you might notice they sometimes kind of shrink and get misshapen even though the temperature never got above freezing.

Side note- water actually does kind of a lot of weird stuff when it comes to freezing and melting, in like how given the right conditions, even at normal atmospheric pressure, it can melt or stay liquid well below its freezing temperature, and of course the fact that it expands when frozen.

So the end result is a totally dry, usually pretty shelf-stable product. Because it was frozen, it can retain a lot of it’s flavor that might have been cooked off or evaporated with other drying processes.

Some things also take on an interesting texture from the process because all of space in the food that used to be full of water is now full of air. Freeze dried fruits, for example, tend to be really crisp and crumbly sort of like a chip or a cracker, where dehydrated fruit often can be sort of leathery.

And the vacuum process also has effects on some foods besides just drying them out. Skittles, for example, are sort of sealed by their candy shell, so they expand and pop, sort of like popcorn, due to the water inside of them sublimating and expanding until the shell cracks.

If memory serves me, the marshmallows in lucky charms are freeze-dried, which is why their texture is dry and crunchy instead of gooey and fluffy.

It’s not what you want to hear, but I am pretty sure that as far as added flavorings go, for your bog-standard marshmallow, you’re pretty much just looking at vanilla.

Not that it’s the only thing you’re tasting, there’s sugar of course, and that’s sugar has been cooked to a certain temperature which changes some of its properties, there’s gelatine which has a bit of flavor on its own, there’s air mixed into it which affects the both feel which can change how you perceived the flavor, etc. so they’re kind of a gestalt flavor experience where the whole thing comes together as more than just the taste of whatever flavor you added to it.

Some people will say that it tastes like marsh mallow (the plant)

Traditionally they would have been made with marshmallow root, almost no one has done it that way in a long time and the marshmallows you’re buying at a grocery store almost certainly contain no marshmallow root. I’ve had some things made with the root, there’s not much flavor there, maybe a bit of earthiness, the main point of it was as sort of a thickener, which is the role filled by gelatin in modern marshmallows.

My PC is hooked up to my main TV as a gaming/home theater thing.

I think my setup is pretty cool, it’s synced up to my Philips hue lights, surround sound, the whole shebang.

For whatever reason, I assume some sort of DRM nonsense, the light sync doesn’t work through the hue sync box and I have to use the PC app

The Hue app doesn’t support Linux, and from what I can find the app doesn’t work right through proton/WINE/etc. there’s a handful of people trying to cobble together their own Linux hue sync apps but none of them seem like they’re quite there yet.

I’m pretty sure that with the advancements made in the last few years I can probably run just about any game or program I want (most of what I use aside from games is FOSS anyway) but I do still have a bit of a bad taste lingering in my mouth from trying to get games and stuff running on Linux over a decade ago.

For some it kind of is, the leather subculture is a thing, and needless to say leather is a pretty important part of it.

I am not at all qualified to really go into it too much beyond just pointing out that it exists.

I do have a little anecdote about it though. I know someone who is an all-around very kinky person, into all kinds of fairly extreme bondage stuff. She entered and won some sort of “Ms Leather [city we live in]” competition/pageant thing a few years back but there was a bit of controversy about it because she wasn’t part of the leather subculture, even though there was a pretty decent amount of overlap between her own kinky interests and the leather community, and so she decided to resign her title and apologize over it.

I started typing a few of them out, it became a very long long post, and then I set my phone down for a minute and it got deleted somehow and I’m not gonna retype it all right now, because I probably should have gone to sleep about 2 or 3 hours ago after getting off work.

But if you remind me later today, I’ll try to type some of them up again.

Also gonna get my disclaimer out of the way for it now

The problem with talking about the craziest calls is because they are crazy and often pretty unique incidents that sometimes make the news, someone could probably Google the details and figure out exactly where I work and I don’t particularly want to put that out there. And if I strip out the more identifiable details, that often kind of gets rid of the parts that made them so crazy so they just don’t make for as good of a story.

That said, before it got deleted I feel like I had a pretty entertaining and still properly anonymized post going, but it did only scratch the tip of the iceberg for some of the crazy shit I’ve handled.

I’ll leave you with one more story that fit the OP’s request for dumb calls though

I had to send police out to basically tell two grown-ass adults to say please and thank you to each other.

I got a call from a lady who was absolutely furious.

The problem was she wanted to park in a particular parking space, but there was some guy already parked there and sitting in his vehicle.

Now this was just public street parking in a busy downtown area. Not some private lot, or permit only area, or even the space right in front of her house I don’t think it was even metered or time-restricted. Just a first-came, first-serve space on the side of the street that anyone can park in.

So she asked him to move, and based on how she was talking to me, I suspect that she didn’t ask nicely.

To which he responded “say please”

Which pissed her the fuck off enough to call 911 about it.

I also get the impression that she did not, in fact, try saying “please”

I work in a pretty diverse county. We have some of the richest communities in the country here, and we have areas that are pretty economically depressed with high crime rates, we have semi-rural areas with hundreds of acres of woods and farms and we have areas that seem more urban than some parts of the major city that we border. We got a bit of everything here.

This particular story took place in a little microcosm of urban blight. It’s a rough, pretty urban little town, full of drugs, crime, homeless encampments, graffiti, decaying homes with boarded up windows, etc.

And the police in this town really are… something.

Overall, as far as cops go (which is a big qualifier,) the cops in my county are pretty good. I’ll go into that a bit more in my other stories if/when I get around to them.

The ones in this town are cut from a different sort of cloth though. Not that they’re necessarily bad, when shit is hitting the fan and there’s been a shooting or some other major incident, they’re exactly the cops you want running the show, they are organized and they get shit done

And they are actually very familiar with their community, it sometimes almost feels like they all personally know each and every person who lives in their town

However, for anything short of a major incident, it feels like they want nothing to do with it and calls end up sitting in pending for ridiculously long times even when they don’t seem to have anything else going on.

So how or why the police actually went out to this petty squabble in a timely manner is a mystery for the ages.

But go they did, and, per the notes they entered into the call, they “explained the concept of street parking to the complainant”

Now, my first instinct here is to say that my caller was an entitled asshole. And she absolutely was. But the other party wasn’t actually that much better. He chose to engage with and antagonize her, and while he did have every right to be there, he could have deescalated the situation at any time by just leaving. Was a parking space really worth wasting the police and my time over? What if she had escalated further and gotten violent?

Yeah I’ve been at it for about 7 years now, as a very rough ballpark I’ve probably answered well over 100k calls at this point, so plenty of opportunities to pick up some funny calls. This is just kind of a best-of list of funny calls that aren’t too traumatic or personally identifiable. I’ve handled some pretty crazy shit in my time here and I’d generally consider the area I work in to be a pretty boring and safe place, I can’t even imagine some of the stuff some other places deal with.

Ok, actual 911 dispatcher here, I have a few.

First one has actually happened twice, I’ve also heard a couple 911 recordings of this happening elsewhere

Caller is upstairs in their bedroom, and they hear some noises from downstairs. They start freaking out thinking someone is in their house.

I enter the call, stay on the line with them, and after a couple minutes a lightbulb goes off in their head, they crack open the door to hear a little better and say “nevermind, it was my Roomba”

The first time I think the caller’s boyfriend changed the schedule on her, and the second time the robot got caught on something and was making a lot of racket.

–

Next one, I have a child caller, he’s freaking out because he got Kool aid powder in his eye and it stung. Now, that would be understandable if he was by himself, kids don’t know better, but I can hear his dad talking to him in the background. Now I’m sure this kid was freaking out and this was the only way he could get him to calm down but c’mon man, rinse the kids eyes out and tell him to suck it up, don’t make me go through all the motions of asking this kid if he wants an ambulance and getting him connected to poison control and shit, be a parent.

–

Another call with poison control, it’s late at night, and this dude had just went to get himself a midnight snack. His wife had made 2 trays of cabbage rolls (ground beef wrapped in cabbage) she’d cooked one and left the other one raw intending to cook them the next day or freeze them or something. My caller chose poorly, and apparently ate more than one raw cabbage roll before realizing it.

He’s not having any symptoms, except for sort of a general disgust of having eaten raw meat. He’s not sure if he wants an ambulance, I eventually get him over to poison control because I was basically out of other options, and they basically tell him “look dude, you’re either gonna get food poisoning and spend a couple days throwing up and feeling like shit or you’re noto not really anything you can do about it”

Then he starts asking them about if he can go to the doctor to get prophylactic antibiotics or something. Just way blowing this whole thing out of proportion

–

Another one was actually a legitimate call, but took a turn for the stupid somewhere in there. We had a domestic going on, one party was inside the house, the other party was outside, they’re standing at the front door yelling at each other.

We got calls from both halves, I had the people inside someone else had the person outside. I tell my caller to just close the door and wait for the police. They do. All should have been right with the world, parties are separated, I get all the information I needed and disconnect.

Except like 2 minutes later I see we now have EMS going to that address.

Because my idiot opened the door to continue arguing and got pepper sprayed.

–

Caller sees a light flickering outside at a house several doors down from him. Thinks this is very suspicious. Officers go out there and close out the call with this disposition in the notes “Suspicious flickering light located, no criminal activity afoot”

–

We have a homeless person who calls fairly frequently, probably has some mental health issues. She’s pretty harmless, mostly just wants the police to give her rides to different places she’s trying to get to. Sometimes they even do it for her, but of course taking someone to a bank at 2AM isn’t exactly a top priority for police, so sometimes her calls end up sitting in pending for a while. And no matter how many times we tell her that we still have her call and police will be out there when they can, she keeps calling in to ask for an ETA and to make sure they haven’t forgotten about her.

One night she’s getting really impatient, standing around in a parking lot for a couple hours in the middle of the night. At some point she sees someone in a red jacket standing around in the parking lot way at the other end of the shopping center, probably a good 100 yards+ away from her.

He’s not approaching her, waving at her, doing anything at all to acknowledge her presence, but she thinks he’s suspicious and it’s making her nervous.

Lady, you’re also standing around in a parking lot in the middle of the night. Pot, kettle.

Anyway, after a while one of our officers calls her up to tell her to chill with the 911 calls because they’re busy with other shit, and then drops this on us- she apparently mistook a stop sign for a person in a red jacket.

–

We have a disturbance at a fast food restaurant. The usual, customer freaking out and trashing the place and yelling because they fucked up her order or something. Unfortunately, nothing too unusual there.

Except that in addition to the restaurant calling, the customer also called herself, basically to say “I’m trashing the place and causing a scene because they messed up my order.”

So… you’re basically calling to rat on yourself? Do you expect me to give you permission to carry on wrecking the place or something?

–

Got a call one night, this lady is freaking out because there was an animal on her lawn. She was terrified of it, talked all the way around her house to go in the back door because she didn’t want to walk past it.

What kind of animal? She didn’t know. She was too freaked out to even give me a vague description. Was it big or small? What color was it? Did it have fur, feathers, or scales? She couldn’t tell me.

Officers go out, it was a bunny.

–

Getting more into general stuff people frequently call about than specific stories.

We have a few major highways that run through our area. Once in a while for roadwork to clean debris off the highway, etc. they need to create a traffic break- basically get a couple work trucks or state police vehicles out on the highway in a line across all lanes with flashing lights and such to slow down traffic so someone up ahead can do whatever they need to do in the roadway without getting pancaked.

Again, these vehicles are clearly marked with highway maintenance or police logos, flashing lights, reflectors, the whole shebang.

And without fail, someone calls to complain about this.

–

So many calls about deer, raccoons, snakes, foxes. Opossums, coyotes, and all of the other local wildlife just kind of…existing.

–

Fireworks calls on new Year’s, 4th of July, etc. like not even just some jackass shooting off fireworks in their backyard, but the city or a country club or whatever putting on their own display with all of the permits and Safety regulations and all of that. People call and complain about the official municipal fireworks.

Not to mention the people who think they’re gunshots. Protip- gunshots don’t whistle and sizzle. I get calls about “gunshots” all the time where I can hear them in the background making very un-gunshot like noises.

–

No, I don’t know when your power is gonna be back on after the bad storm we just had. The utility companies have already been notified, it’s on them. Do you think the cops can just arrest or shoot the downed wires to get your power back on?

–

Confused old people who just want to know what time it is.

I think Adam Savage has actually gone into this a bit on his YouTube channel, dude really likes space suits and have a lot of videos about them so I’m not even going to try to find which specific video it was

No because I’m married and my wife wouldn’t like that.

More seriously, It’s not a hard no, but I lean towards probably not, it would probably depend the specifics of their identity and the state of any medical transition.

In general, I’d tend to call myself a straight cis man. If I think long and hard about it, I could make an argument that I’m perhaps something along the lines of a non-binary person with a penis, who just happens to present in a traditionally “masculine” fashion in basically every way, and who is attracted to people with vaginas who present in at least a somewhat feminine way.

That’s a fucking mouthful though, and I’m just not gonna get into the weeds about that in casual conversation.

The fact that I’m a man isn’t really something that’s particularly important to me, I just kind of think of myself as a person. If somehow someone misgendered me it wouldn’t bother me in the slightest (though it may get a chuckle because I’m a bald, hairy dude with a big busty beard and fairly deep voice, not exactly the picture of femininity)

And while I quite enjoy having a penis, I don’t feel as though I’d be particularly bothered by having a vagina instead (although you can miss me with that period nonsense, but I think most vagina-havers would agree on that point) and I’d otherwise live my life the same way.

And how “feminine” a theoretical partner would need to be actually gets a lot of leeway. I can find people pretty far into the tomboy/androgynous/butch/etc end of the spectrum attractive, maybe even preferably to the extreme “girly” end of the spectrum. There’s a line there where they’d be too “masculine” for my tastes, but it’s a fuzzy one.

And for me, a certain amount of physical attraction in a partner is important. It’s a pretty wide spectrum that I’m able to find attractive, but there are limits, and I have preferences and dislikes to varying degrees.

And one of those strongest preferences is that my partner have a vagina. I am just not attracted to people with a penis.

If we want to count it under the trans umbrella, I don’t think that me dating a non-binary person with a vagina would be out of the question.

Maybe even a FTM femboy type who hasn’t had or want bottom surgery.

MTF, which I think is more in the spirit of this question, is a bit murkier though. If they don’t intend to get bottom surgery I think that’s a pretty hard no. And even if they have or intend to I can’t say that I’ve ever seen, let alone touched, a surgically-created vagina, so I don’t know if they’d do it for me the same way as a natural one.

The best comparison I do have is that I generally consider myself to be a boob-guy, and while it’s not an outright disqualifier, fake boobs don’t usually do it for me in quite the same way as real ones, but some are better than others, and while I tend to like big boobs, I have nothing against small ones, and a mastectomy isn’t a deal-breaker for me either.

So I suspect that with bottom surgery, it’s a firm “maybe”

As for a trans partner who has not yet but intends to get that surgery, I guess it kind of depends on the timeline. I don’t really want to have sex with someone with a penis and a sexless relationship for me would have a limited lifespan.

All of that said, regardless of whether I’d date them or not doesn’t change how I’d view their identity. There’s plenty of women out there I wouldn’t date for any number of reasons, but that doesn’t mean I see them as any less of a woman.

Almost 2 decades ago I paid close to that for a 50" plasma TV as one of my first big purchases after I got my first job.

Of course this isn’t a direct 1:1 comparison, they’re different display technologies, TVs these days have a 4k if not 8k resolution when that one I bought was 720p, there’s been almost 20 years of advancement driving costs down, and 20 years of inflation driving them up, etc.

So I don’t even know where to begin trying to fairly compare the relative costs of those 2 TVs

But back then tv manufacturers also weren’t getting paid to include apps, and put a button on their remotes to launch Amazon prime, or show me ads, or anything of the sort. Their only revenue stream was me buying the tv.

Slight counterpoint

I have 2 TVs in my house. A 70" Vizio as my main TV and a 40-ish inch Samsung fame in the bedroom

Haven’t used the TVs smart features in years, everything I watch is run through a game console or dedicated streaming device (currently a 4k Chromecast)

Their software is kind of dogshit, but I never interact with it except once in a blue moon after a power outage or something when it defaults back to that. I otherwise find it to be a perfectly fine TV for the price I paid for it.

However, as bad as the software is on the Vizio, the Samsung is 10x worse. And unfortunately as bad as it is, that’s what we use because it was hard enough trying to hide the box the TV came with (the way they get the frame TV’s so light and thin is by moving all of the electronics into a separate box, I installed a cabinet in the wall behind the TV to hide it) let alone trying to hide a separate streaming stick/box along with it. I also feel like using one of those may not play as well with the art mode as the built-in software, which is kind of the whole point.

Totally anecdotal, but I work in 911 dispatch, so I have a bit of insight on people involving themselves in emergencies

It’s really hit or miss.

Fires, gunshots, medical emergencies, fights, things blowing up, car accidents, noise complaints, aircraft crashes, I’ve probably taken a call about it, and those calls have come in from the person involved, a neighbor , a random passerby, their grandmother who lives in another state, or some random follower on tiktok.

And sometimes we get a hundred calls about the same thing. There are times I can just about answer the phone with “911, if you’re calling about the [thing] in [place] we’re already aware, help is on the way.” And be right about 90% of the time while that thing is going on. (To be clear I don’t do that, because almost every time I crack a joke about my job or vent about stupid shit our callers do, some self-righteous dipshit comes at me with a whole “if that’s how you talk to your callers maybe you’re not cut out for this job” spiel as if no one ever vents about the idiots they have to deal with at work.)

And there are other times where we get exactly one call about something serious happening in a very public place and we’re left wondering if it was a prank call until our police/fire/EMS get out there and confirm that yes, everything is exactly as described or even worse, it’s a total shit-show and all hell’s breaking loose.

Sometimes it seems like a whole town is turning out to help people with a minor fender-bender, and sometimes hundreds of people are driving right by an overturned vehicle.

Usually, of course, it’s somewhere in-between. We got a handful of calls about something but our phones aren’t ringing off the hook about it.

Moral of my rant is, a lot of times people will step in to help or at least call 911 in an emergency, but you can’t always count on that. The idea of the bystander effect is exaggerated and misinterpreted, but the core takeaway about it is solid. You can’t always take it for granted that someone else is going to do something to help, so if you find yourself in a position where you can be the one who helps, you should do so.

Except for a few obvious spam posts, I’m pretty hard-pressed to think of any specific posts or comments I’ve seen that struck me as bots (although to be fair, I’m there may be some bias due to which communities I choose to follow)

There are, however, plenty of idiots, people who don’t speak fluent English, trolls and other people whose motivations may not be purely good-faith discussion, people who probably have various types of neurodivergence and/or mental health issues

And I could see some of those categories being very easily mistaken as a bot under a lot of circumstances.

Most bullet casings are brass, which is a fairly soft metal, you could probably scratch some words into it with a pocket knife, sewing needle, pretty much any pointy steel object

Just kind of thinking out loud

All of those people who were brought into ERs from ground zero and the people, vehicles, etc. that brought them there would have been covered in that same dust that’s causing health issues for first responders, that means doctors and nurses probably also received some level of exposure to that dust because I doubt all of those people showered on the way.

I don’t know how their exposure level stacks up against the people who were on-scene, I’m sure it’s an order of magnitude less, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was still significant enough to cause some health problems. IBM pretty sure I’ve seen some evidence of people who live with firefighters developing health issues from secondhand exposure like that.

On top of that, there’s also the psychological burden that always gets overlooked. I’m sure that took a hell of a toll on healthcare workers.

And there’s a recognition aspect, because for all of the people who died, there were also many more who were injured, and more than a few of them owe their lives to the doctors and nurses who treated them just as much as to the first responders who got them to the hospital.

Well at the end of it, you can see he actually starts leaning pretty far to the left