You are right, I completely forgot about Book Club! Shame on me. 😮

Thanks for reminding me of this! With having reached my limits with US politics, I’ve dropped all my podcasts for the last few months so I haven’t heard Margaret for a while now.

Margaret is great on every topic she covers, but as someone who isn’t trans, I feel she’s really helped me to have a better understanding about the internal and external pressures surrounding the subject matter. I’m sorry I still can’t really verbalize any of my feelings on it, but I’d say to anyone thinking that writing about trans people is written only for trans people, I don’t find this to be the case with any of Margaret’s work. I’ve never had the physical sensation of someone unlocking parts of my mind so frequently to things it couldn’t grasp before.

I’ve been wanting to find something to break up my power run of reading Discworld for the first time, and I think this would be a great book to do that with.

It’s really tough anymore to post positive content here. It feels like spitting on a fire to put it out.

I’m from the US, but I’ve always tried to include everyone in my posts, at the price of looking ignorant every now and then when I get things wrong, but it’s nice when I’ve had people from across the world remark how they’re pleasantly surprised to see something local to them being covered by a non-local. I’ve learned so much in return from just having brief interactions with users from other countries, just by showing some genuine interest in them, their languages, and their home countries. But outside of my own posts, it’s hard to find a place on Lemmy where there doesn’t seem to be things looking to drive a wedge between us.

I used to be able to jump into random posts, even if it was something I wasn’t very familiar with, to try to get conversations going, but so many news/political posts just feel rigged to get people riled up, and I’ll scroll through and not find anything to interact with a lot now.

Plenty of people tell me that I’m doing something important by doing positive stuff here. I really like the small community we’ve got of people that regularly interact. It’s hard to feel like I’m making any kind of difference though. I’m going to show up as long as people are talking to me, but there’s plenty of times I ask myself why I don’t just devote this time back into music or my volunteer work. I’ve dropped all my news and politics podcasts at this point because I’m sick of hearing it all. I censor myself on discussing animal rights issues because I don’t want to add to the pile of negative stuff to worry about. I’ll keep at it the best I can, but a lot of people here are sure making it an exhausting effort some days.

I get bummed that the political stuff has really taken over. I find myself spending more and more time just working on my own content and answering people’s comments than browsing the other communities. It’s draining scrolling past so much stuff to find the fun bits, but I don’t want to just block it and not see how our platform is developing as a whole.

A lot of communities have rules that posts need to be titled the same as the source article, which, while it prevents editorializing, it also brings all those ragebait headlines here. Plus I’d like to see Lemmy users’ opinions moreso than an article I could just read myself. I’d probably prefer more of the political post to be thoughts/feelings and then discussion is backed up by decent articles rather than an article being the post and comments are just all steered back to a single, often inflammatory article.

If half our content is just reposted mainstream media, why would one expect our comment sections to look any different than the comment sections of those mainstream sites?

It is somewhat disturbing as a concept. Industrialized slaughter has heavy implications from how we treat our environment and even each other. The tech’s simplicity makes it more disturbing to me. It’s not something elaborate or really man-made, it’s a harnessed form of nature. Basically a contained version of what happened to those people in that sub to the Titanic.

Lobsters don’t have brains in the same way we do, they have nerve clusters distributed through their segmented bodies. As such, it’s likely we will never understand what they experience.

There’s a ton more data and history here (Wikipedia: pain in crustaceans). I’m glad we as people continue to question the ethics of animal consumption. We have more food options than most other animals, and we can take advantage of that if we wish to.

I do like that it reduces food waste, because I do think if we are killing animals, we should at least make full use of them.

I usually dip the burger in additional ketchup along with the fries.

Burger King Double Bacon Cheeseburger, no pickle. Tastes pretty good and still a good value compared to almost any other menu item.

Close second is Wendy’s Double Stack in the Biggie Bag combo. Again, great taste for the price, and comes with nuggets, fries, and a drink.

Son of Baconator if I feel like being a piggie 😇

Looking at the Buldak Original ingredients list, it looks like many of the same ingredients, but in reverse proportions.

Buldak has a lot of chicken flavoring/bullion to make the chicken flavor (dak=chicken) and a lot of pepper flake to make it hot (bul=fire) and then soy sauce and seasoning.

The fried chicken sauce doesn’t have the chicken flavor since it’s intended to go on actual fried chicken, and I don’t make it super hot. It’s a little more earthy and a little sweet.

I use a decent scoop of gochujang paste (lower heat level), a nice amount of minced garlic, a splash rice vinegar, a tiny blep sesame oil and some sesame seed, and then honey or brown sugar to taste, then soy sauce to get it to a nice dipping sauce consistency.

I don’t measure it, I just make it for making fancy pizza, so I eyeball it in a ramekin and then drizzle as desired on pizza.

Huh, that makes sense the real deal would also be a bit more finicky and dependent on a lot of variables that industrialized product wouldn’t be affected by.

Glad to (possibly) help!

I’d take a lab diamond or bottle of vanillin over the truffle stuff I’ve had any day!

Even the old school beaver anus vanillin! 😅

I also despise broccoli, but broccolini is much milder in smell and taste, and has a tender stem. If you can deal with asparagus, you may like broccolini.

Fig & Pig pizza is so awesome! Sweet, salty, and carby! 🤤

This is my opinion too! Basic Italian-American stuff seems really simple to DIY, so unless a place has some really killer house made sauce it always feels like such a ripoff. If I’m going out, I typically want something that is either too hard, laborious, or messy to make at home.

I think it’s usually for those umami packed glutimates.

If I were to see someone shaving it off the real deal, I’d give it another try, but at this point I’m done with the stuff otherwise and even if the real deal is a better version of that flavor, it hasn’t inspired me enough to cough up the money for a small real truffle for myself.

I used to get the blackened tenders, but I must be the only one because they always took so much longer to get than the regular tenders. They’re pretty alright though otherwise.

That sounds like a pretty good combo pizza!

I was hesitant to have Hawiian pizza the first time, but I instantly liked it. I soon changed it up though to get bacon instead of ham so it adds crunch and smokiness.

Korean fried chicken sauce is also good on pizza.

We come up with some particularly interesting ways to execute lobsters, that’s for sure. I’m not sure we dispatch any other food animal in so many ways.

Lol always a possibility. I’ve tried both a few times to give them a fair shake, and while I taste amazing flavor elements in both those things, the cons just always outweigh the pros. 😅