I guess I’ll find out. I have wondered if any of these are just scams.

when it started getting really bad, i started replying stop. it maybe made things a little better but i still get a fair number if these (including this one). it definitely hasn’t made it any worse.

Of course the danger is that this is cancelled out by increased carbon emissions from a making a commensurate amount of toast.

So this new carbon sequestering program is going to be kind of a good news / bad news thing. …

Funny, I just finally gave up on it just a few months ago and moved on Quod Libet.

Oh they thought of that, there’s a whole bunch of cushions glued to that side of it.

It’s definitely pre-cooked. But I think the precursor to modern boxed cereal is not gruel but rather breaking up something like a biscuit, cornbread, etc into a bowl of milk.

It’s pronounced chow-dah, you heathen!

Does any of that explain the 404? An even 400ml is very close to 14 imperial ounces. 14.078. 404 makes it further off and a weird number in any units I’ve tried coverting it to.

This isn’t even a can situation. Except for those rare cases of two partners during together in an accident, one of your will die before the other. This hypothetical situation isn’t hypothetical, it’s the norm.

And immortality doesn’t change anything. One person dies and the survivor grieves. After some years, you get over it. Life goes on. It’s not that you don’t still miss the person, but life goes on, and the pain fades. This happens in mortal timelines, immortality doesn’t make the scenario any more poignant.

Those who actually push for regression are scary. But they don’t truly push for regression, they push for a cherry picked and misremembered version of the past. And the bits they would like to keep vs rollback are different from how I would choose. But a lot of the elements of what we have now are not improvements on the past and I think we need to figure out how to undo some of the damage we’ve done.

And I think part of the reason we have so many scary regressive people is because they feel the ways that the world has gotten worse, even if they misdiagnose it.

I can understand that to someone not used to this, any gap at all might be troubling and one might tend to exaggerate it as “massive”.

However note that these walls are fairly thick which narrows any visibility angles considerably. So to really see someone through the gap you would have to be at exactly the right angle and looking straight at them. Sitting on the toilet in one of these you can see some really narrow strip of the sinks area which also reflects the areas in which someone would have to be and looking straight at you to see you. People at the sink area have their back to you. People walking past them to another stall, are not looking to the side.

I’m not trying to convince you that they are ideal, or that your should like them, just that when the gaps are pretty narrow it is not as big a deal as you might think to get used to.

Again this is assuming these gaps are pretty narrow. I get the impression from what some Americans have said in other discussion that in some places they are quite a bit wider than I am used to, and what I said above may no longer apply.

There a certain ironic cycle there. The cycle you describe of building the suburbs, stores moving in, and people moving in is one part of the cycle. This leads to over-development (in that fucked up car-centric way we have, which leads to traffic congestion etc), and people start moving further out to get away from it. They end up on the edges of it “in the country” with maybe a 40 minute drive for groceries. But then often, the sprawl follows them and their bit of “the country” gets more and more like what they fled.

I’ve seen this conversation many times on Reddit, and from what people say I assume there is a regional thing going on on. I’m from a part of the US where toilet stalls do not have massive gaps. There is a big gap at the bottom but too low for anyone to be seeing under unless they are crawling on the floor. Gaps along the sides are quite narrow. 1 cm at most, and nothing anyone is going to be seeing you through unless they are some kind of freak putting their eye right up to it. These stalls are prefab panels you can easily put into a room. The gaps mean ventilation for the room takes care the stalls too.

I assume stalls started this way and became normalized, and in some parts of the country they’ve gotten sloppier, and sloppier, and normalized these huge gaps I hear people describe but never see.

This might be my bias, but I assume these are the places where everything is a suburban stripmall wasteland, where there are no sidewalks, and where it seems to me the whole environment is increasingly dehumanized.

Some kind of broth or bouillon would be good in it too. Hot sauce. Garlic.

I add those kinds of things to porridge too sometimes. Savory instead of sweet porridge should not be ruled out.

Here’s an another idea for oats: basically make Mac and cheese except with oats instead of pasta. Whole oats if you can get them.

Chilli is s great thing to learn to riff with. You almost can’t go wrong adding things to it. What you list here is a good starting point, but I’d almost certainly add onions and peppers to it.

Farro or cracked wheat can add a little meaty texture to a veg chili. The best veg chilli I ever had had sweet potato, something I’d never have thought of.

I’ll avoid the word normal, but definitely not something most people would ever do. (It’s the sort of thing I might do though.)

Obviously I don’t know the details of your back pain, but I would caution you that doing stuff like that (focusing intently on something in front of you, possibly bending over slightly, for an extended period of time) is probably not good for your back.

I relate to this too, and I think I’ve figured out why. I’ve spent most of my life cultivating a normal impersonation. This has made me sensitive to what is not normal, and even judgemental of it. The problem is you can only keep up a normal-impersonation for so long, and it can be exhausting.

Why can’t people just be the right amount of weird?

It’s pretty important to keep sodium, magnesium, and potassium in balance. If I wasn’t eating and depending on an electrolyte drink for these I’d make damn sure it had all three and in reasonably correct proportions.