Disturbed’s cover of Sound of Silence is not only awful, it is an antithesis of the meaning of the song. Anyone who likes that version better than S&G’s arguably doesn’t understand the point of the song, and the fact that everyone holds it up as the gold standard of “covers better than the original” is even worse.

A close second is Postmodern Jukebox and their horrendous tendencies to take tempos to an opposite extreme instead of finding more meaningful ways of changing the genre of a song. I like some of their stuff, but the number of people who love their cover of Welcome to the Jungle is mind-boggling to me.

There are plenty of songs that I prefer the cover of to the original (Whitney Houston’s ‘I Will Always Love You’), or ones that just give the original a modern coat of paint without changing much else (Smash Mouth’s ‘I’m a Believer’), but these songs in particular are just awful imo.

Can we not use a super abelist rendition of mental struggles as our meme, thanks?

This is correct, and it isn’t just associated with acids. It’s because of an effect called ‘freezing point depression’, which is the same reason salt lowers the freezing point of water while raising its boiling point.

There are a few explanations as to why this happens, with the easiest being this: if you add something that can’t freeze to something that can, then the whole thing will need to lose more energy to allow the whole mass to solidify because the un-freezing stuff physically interferes with the attempts of the freezing stuff to bind together.

However, there is also the additional aspect of vapor pressure, which comes into play when adding things that can freeze to another thing that also freezes, but at a different temperature. I don’t really understand that at all, so I will pull from the Wikipedia article on it:

The freezing point is the temperature at which the liquid solvent and solid solvent are at equilibrium, so that their vapor pressures are equal. When a non-volatile solute is added to a volatile liquid solvent, the solution vapour pressure will be lower than that of the pure solvent. As a result, the solid will reach equilibrium with the solution at a lower temperature than with the pure solvent. This explanation in terms of vapor pressure is equivalent to the argument based on chemical potential, since the chemical potential of a vapor is logarithmically related to pressure. All of the colligative properties result from a lowering of the chemical potential of the solvent in the presence of a solute. This lowering is an entropy effect. The greater randomness of the solution (as compared to the pure solvent) acts in opposition to freezing, so that a lower temperature must be reached, over a broader range, before equilibrium between the liquid solution and solid solution phases is achieved. Melting point determinations are commonly exploited in organic chemistry to aid in identifying substances and to ascertain their purity.

So, TL;DR is that chemistry is weird, things react weird at the molecular level because of energy states, and that is what allows us to make ice cream!

Avocados and peppers to make guacamole 😋

Update just dropped. For users with SMAPI installed, don’t forget to run the game once after installing the update so that SMAPI 4.0.0 can install properly. Currently waiting for that to drop, as they confirmed that it would be released alongside the 1.6 game update.

Edit: SMAPI 4.0.0 now available for download on Curseforge and Nexus. Direct download from GitHub no longer available due to file size limits.

Either pumpkin pie or apple pie are my favorites!

Thanksgiving is for pies in my family, any other desserts wait until Christmas.

When recipes call for you to cook an item in a pan without first adding oil, they say to toast it to indicate that you are applying dry heat to it. For example, most Indian recipes call for toasting whole spices in a dry pan before grinding. That is also why you can toast marshmallows over an open flame.

It just irritates my mouth. May be oral allergy or just a reaction to the enzymes in the pineapple. It isn’t as bad as my reaction to wine and vinegar though, so I have to see more specialists to figure that out lol.

Not really? I actually get confused if people use mixed up idioms or other weird turns of phrase. It is really only this food item in particular.

I also like my ice cream to be soup lol! Pineapple on pizza is okay, but I can only have small amounts of pineapple. The rest are odd, but at least you know what you like!

No, we grew up in the same region of the same state and haven’t moved from there. Most of our friends are native to the region as well. I have no idea why I call it something different, it is the term I have used all my life. Even my sister calls it a ‘grilled cheese’!

According to my husband and all my friends, the weirdest thing about me is my name for a sandwich.

Apparently, everyone else calls it a ‘grilled cheese’. I have always called it by it’s proper name, a ‘toasted cheese’.

If you make it in a panini press, then it is a grilled cheese. But if you make a sandwich by buttering each side and toasting it in a pan on the stove until the cheese melts, then it is a toasted cheese. But every time I say ‘toasted cheese’, people look at me as though I have grown another head.

Yes, I even passed my driver’s test in a manual while needing to do a 3 point turn on a hill. I am almost 30, born and raised in the suburbs of New York.

I haven’t driven manual in years, ever since that car fell victim to black ice and a guard rail, but I have done recent test drives of manuals without stalling, so I guess it is something you never forget once you know how.

Cooking in general, and baking in particular. It is actual fun for me, and is actually stress relief as well, because it allows me creative freedom in a medium that I apparently have natural talent in. I make my own bread every week for sandwiches, bake snacks for my weekly board game meetup, volunteer to make birthday cakes for friends and family, and give out giant boxes of cookies every Christmas. I am always inventing and researching new recipes, converting recipes to accommodate various dietary needs, and trying to find ways to use ingredients I have lying around in a way that will ensure I don’t have food going to waste. There is nothing better to me than when I figure out what each recipe needs at each step and why, and watching it all come together.

I grew up learning to bake from my grandmother, and I inherited her passion and apparently her natural talent for it. I have a lot of recipes memorized, can eyeball teaspoon and tablespoon measures of ingredients with good accuracy, and can somehow get anywhere from 5-10% more out of any given recipe. If a cookie recipe makes 5 dozen I get 6 or 7, even if I am not skimping on size. If I make bread, it rises quicker and larger, even if it is cold. Making cake, I always have extra batter for a couple of cupcakes. It works out though, because I can taste test everything and throw any extra cookies in the freezer so that way I am better prepared for Christmas.

It is always amazing to see someone’s face light up when they get baked goods they love, especially if their diets mean they don’t often get to enjoy them. For example, several of my friends have Celiac, and seeing how happy they are to get things like butter cookies, crinkly-top brownies, or gingerbread is just amazing. It is an easy way to make people feel included and happy, and I get to have fun in the kitchen while doing it.

Fellow trans guy here.

I hear and see you. I have been exactly where you are so many times since I came out almost a decade ago. Heck, I still feel like that from time to time, usually when my coworkers talk about ordering from the homophobic chicken place and then make half-assed excuses when they remember I am there. More than eight years into transition and I still get misgendered by my fellow queer people because they can’t be bothered. I had to cancel my membership to a local gay charity group because they keep hosting events at a gay bar where the owner allowed a TERF group to harass a trans woman until she left the building in tears.

But I can promise that it isn’t all bad, and that there is a place for you. I am married to my wonderful gay husband, who has gone above and beyond educating his friends and family about trans issues and chews out anyone who suggests that being married to me makes him bi. I love with him and our two best friends, a lesbian couple, one of whom is a trans woman. We both have an extensive friend group that we meet with weekly for games, as well as a kink group that they help run that is the most inclusive environment I have ever been in. I have a job where I can be open about who I am, and no one has ever given me an issue.

I am so, so sorry that you are not valued or respected by the people around you right now. I am not saying all of this to tell you you don’t have to move. I am saying this as a way of encouraging you to remind yourself, every day, that you are worth it. You, exactly as you are, are deserving of understanding, of care, and of celebration. And if you are not getting that where you are now, you owe it to yourself to do whatever you need to to get to somewhere where that becomes reality.

I hope you find that space soon, and know that there are always people out there who have shared your experience. We will be here if you need to talk to someone about it, and I wish you all the best in your journey.

Regardless of how much good vegan diets do for the climate (which is already quite a lot), it is important to note that most vegans, myself included, are vegan for ethical reasons.

The vast majority of humans can thrive on a diet the does not include animal-based ingredients. Even B12 is easier to get, as the only reason meat is currently a good source of B12 is due to the animals being fed supplements. You are still getting supplemented B12, just one step removed.

There are some people who cannot live without meat, which is why we also advocate for lab-grown meat. But in my own experience, the majority of people who say they need to eat meat for health reasons do so more for convenience or taste reasons. They often only mention these health issues after they are confronted with the reality of animal agriculture, and will continue to claim illness even when they have never tried alternatives.

At the end of the day, ending the life of a sentient being simply because you want 15 minutes of pleasure in the form of a particular kind of food is morally abhorrent. If it is considered abuse to hit an animal for not doing what you want (which is the case for every animal except those in factory farms), then killing them for an even less consequential reason should also be seen as abuse.

All of the above is not even to mention the absolute horrors that workers endure in slaughterhouses, the number of zoonotic diseases people die from as a result of squalid conditions and overuse of antibiotics in factory farms, and the fact that we grow more food to feed livestock than we do to feed humans, despite meat and dairy making up less than half our food supply.

Animal agriculture is unnecessary at best, and downright psychopathic at worst. Animals are not commodities; they are living, breathing, feeling beings that have been proven time and again to experience suffering and pain. Going vegan will not hurt you, the climate, your health, your children, or anyone else, and it will ensure that another creature is not forced to live a short, torturous, and painful existence simply because you want a particular kind of sandwich.

They are protesting because it is sponsored by an oil company (Shell), and because the cyclists don’t cycle to the event. Many of them flew or drove in, and events like this also generate an immense amount of pollution and plastic waste. Read any article where there are quotes from the protestors and they specifically say the reasons they are protesting.

'Systems change on a societal level’s would mean either ending subsidies for animal agriculture in general, and investing that money into more sustainable food sources, or banning animal agriculture altogether. But every time this is mentioned, people throw a fit and threaten violent action because meat prices will go up and they feel entitled to their cheap burgers, no matter what the cost to the planet.

These pieces are not meant to shame you, they are meant to try to make people demand that these effective changes be made. But for as long as people insist that they shouldn’t have to change a single thing about their lifestyle, no change will ever get made.