Pie is just a sweet quiche with fewer eggs.

More like big squirrels with civilization.

It is amazing foundational science fiction story. Once you’ve read it, you’ll see many of its ideas and themes in many other great works of science fiction literature. Perhaps the most recognizable is as the inspiration for the Ewoks from Star Wars. (In my personal opinion inspiration is a bit of a stretch, Ewoks are pretty much a direct copy.)

Just another way to dehumanize.

I use the word pardon because there are lots of local Spanish speakers, tourist/seasonal French Canadian speakers, and occasionally tourists from farther abroad around and I’d rather be understood than pretend everyone speaks English. When speaking to strangers, like when I’m asking forgiveness for being an inconvience to them or trying to politely get someone’s attention, preferring loan words that really don’t need translation in order to be understood just seems like good citizenship and also more kind.

There are lots of ways to fill a 2D space with a single non-crossing path. I’m sure counting the ways could be interesting to some. I guess you’d prefer a zig-zag oriented orthogonal to the sides, rather than the corners. This orientation fills the frame of a photo a little better though given the perspective. You could also make a spiral. I think the Hilbert space filling curve is way more interesting, but probably would make for a confusing photo.

Because there isn’t much of a risk of food borne illness from bacteria inside the flesh of the fish. The big concern there, especially salmon, is the parasites. That’s why salmon is flash frozen on the boat as soon after it’s caught as possible, to kill those parasites. That flash freezing is also the only reason salmon is used in modern sushi. Properly handled, salmon is about as (if not less) dangerous than a steak with regards to bacteria. Pretty much any bacteria present will be on the surface, not inside the flesh, so those get killed w once you’ve cooked the outside. As with anything, the risk of bacteria isn’t zero, but it’s small enough that most people need not worry about cooked it until it is a dry chewy abomination.

That sounds like a lot of work. And I’m not fan of steamed fish. Salmon is like the easiest fish to pan fry.

• Heat a tablespoon (this can be a literal spoon from your table, no need for precision here) or two of olive oil to its smoke point on a pan. If it’s smoking a lot turn the heat down.
• Lightly (using course) salt salmon.
• Add to hot pan. Don’t worry if it sticks a little.
• When the salmon has changed color to right around halfway from the pan to the top of the salmon, flip it over. At this point if the pan is hot enough, even a steel pan should have released the fish. After the flip, watch the color continue to change.
• When it looks like a fish you want to eat (and the fish stops sticking) remove from the pan and plate. The edges should be a delicious crispy golden color. This is where all the best flavors get together. You don’t even need to worry about it being cooked through. I like it a little closer to raw on the inside.

The whole process takes about 5 minutes plus the time it takes to preheat the pan. I have an induction range, so the pan preheats in the time it takes me to salt the salmon.

You could probably just use some unbleached linen or cheese cloth, aka a non-decorative towel, since that is the reusable material that paper towels replaced in our modern disposable society.

That’s not how TV in the 80s and 90s worked. Most of the TV we watched as kids in the 80s would have been reruns of things in syndication. Millenials born in 82 would have grown up watching reruns of Cheers for their entire childhood and likely have memories of watching even some of the later episodes live.

Yeah, King’s endings tend to be a little messy and narratively unsatisfying sometimes. Gunslinger is easily my favorite of the series and just about every other thing he’s written. On my last read through the story, I started with my original copy of The Gunslinger, then read through the rest of the series (reading the disconnected but related stories just before the final book), and finished with the revised edition of The Gunslinger.

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

• The Gunslinger

Right? Most of those are all the kinds of regular maintenance things you button up BEFORE a long trip. Windshield cracks are usually either quick fixes or fixes that can be delayed or patched until you finish the trip.

Frequent enough stops to limits butt pain and blood clots isn’t such a bad idea though.

They were also inconveniently experiencing significant negative feedback to their business decision to sell warmed up day old food as a standard operating procedure just before new of the logo drama erupted. If you thought cracker barrel was extremely mid before, it’s apparently gone full Applebee’s microwave kitchen bad lately.

It used to remember passwords, it briefly got a gig memorizing drink orders, now it mostly focuses remembering project numbers and does a little 2FA code work on the side.

So, far right parents in a conservative religion in a Republican town in a Republican state produced a child so tortured by a culture of hate and violence that as soon as they even start to lean either way their instinct is murder. Breaking the cycle of hate is relatively easy compared to breaking the cycle of violence. The statements they made to their roommate (even if that heresay is true) just confirm that they were a troubled child from a troubled culture trying to change. It should surprise no one that those childish attempts would be a VERY twisted reflection of the ideal. So no, he was not part of the left. Just a child in pain reacting the only way their conservative upbringing taught them.

My smartphone isn’t a phone with “extra” features to me. My smartphone is a portable personal computer with extra sensors, a GPS receiver, and wireless internet, which also happens to have a phone app. I don’t want to carry an extra “dumb” phone. I would prefer my smart watch to be the communication and identity hub for me and my devices: holding the SIM card, acting as a wifi hotspot, routing calls and internet to my handheld brick or laptop, etc. Instead of acting like a third party add-on, it would be a mostly distraction free core. Let me use a smartphone, laptop, steam deck, cobbled together cyber deck, or whatever else have you as my local screen, storage cache, and/or proper desktop. Then I can put the screens down or leave them behind without feeling cut off or potentially stranded in a world that practically requires it to navigate with any ease. I want a smart watch that enables me to leave the house without car keys, driver’s license, and credit cards; essentially with nothing but my watchphone. I want to be a cyberpunk Dick Tracy. What I want, with the freedoms and open standards I want, with the privacy I want, without being locked into a single monopoly walled garden, is probably a pipe dream. I want what is probably the next evolution of the “year of the Linux desktop”. But a kid can dream.

So edgy.

If someone wrote this article in the early 90s, it would be called “Why I ditched the radio, and how I created my own CD collection.” I think rephrasing it that way really shines a light on why it’s mostly still comparing apples and oranges.

I have a pretty substantial collection of music hovering around 5,000 albums or 1.6TB (mostly lossless FLAC these days, but still some moldy old mp3s and ogg vorbis files from my youth). I’m not even counting the physical media I still hold on to. I still use Spotify for discovery and playlists. I don’t think the depth and breadth of my library will ever match the depth and breadth of the music that I want to listen to in the very next moment. Lots of times I want to listen to the stuff I’m familiar with, and I do that using my own library. But, when I want to: remember a song I heard in the wild, share a holiday playlist with friends, make an obscurely themed playlist of songs features peaches, preview a musician’s or band’s stuff, discover other things that musician has collaborated on, or simply discover new music; I still use Spotify.

There are (or were) bits and pieces out there (many that pre-date Spotify) that can do some of these things. Last.fm (fka Audioscrobbler) was good for tracking listening habits to compare and share with others, it helped a little with discovery. I used allmusic.com a lot long ago to discover the artists that inspired the artists I was listening. If I wanted to share a playlist, I made a mixtape (really it was burning a mix CD). But, all of these collected information only, not the music itself. If I wanted to actually hear a new song, I had to go somewhere and find it first. That often meant literally traveling somewhere else or ordering from a catalog and waiting for delivery. Every new music discovery was a bet made with real dollars that I would actually enjoy the thing or listen to it more than once. Even after napster paved the way for free listening via piracy, one still had to work to actually find the music.

Spotify (and similar services) finally collected (almost) all of it under one app, so that I could discover and listen seemlessly. It is instant gratification music discovery. I’ll never give up my self hosted collection, but I also don’t have much hope that any self curated collection will be able to complete with the way that I use Spotify. Spotify is just the new radio. It’s never the end of my listening though. Just like with radio, when I find something I like enough, then I can expend the energy (or more often expend the money as directly with the band as I can) to add it to my collection.

Those people aren’t the lowest except in pay. Those people are the engineers, the teachers, and the administrators. They execute actual functions that directly benefit society. These are the people that prevent crime through their support of the community. It’s like calling the foundation of a building the lowest function of a building. That may be true on the surface, but the metaphor quickly breaks down.

There is another lowest of the low in government that does little in the way of support, unless you’re one of the elite. The lowest rung of the government ladder are the people whose job it is to punitively punish people for breaking the laws. They do not prevent any crimes, and the courts have ruled that they are shielded from any responsibility in that regard. They protect inequity between the rich and the poor. They are trained to discriminate and profile. Their very fraternity is rooted in tribal exclusion, us vs. them. They even desecrate the national flag as a symbol of that fraternity. Sometimes that insult even gets worn as part of their official uniform. They restrict and opress rights granted by the law at the whim of politics and oligarchs. They are licensed to murder, with immunity from responsibility. They are encouraged to remain ignorant of the laws that they are tasked with enforcing and they wear that ignorance as a legal shield against consequence and accountability. And yet these gangs of murderous thugs are routinely paid better than any of the others. They are called heroes when they do the bare minimum. They are applauded for showing the bare minimum of humanity.

If this government were a family with the state and federal administration as the parents, then the teachers/engineers/administrators would be the older siblings, aunts, and uncles. The police would rule that house through fear like a toddler on a sugar high with a gun. Occasionally that toddler may shit itself, steal from the cookie jar, or murder a loved one. But all is quickly forgiven because after all they are a only toddler.