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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

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  • As others have pointed out, there’s a lot to hate about ads since the industry is routinely dishonest, insulting, obnoxious, deceptive, intrusive, and all manner of unpleasant. I’ve been adblocking religiously for most of my life for these reasons.

    So I think a more interesting question might be the other way around: “What do you like about commercials?”

    The only commercials I’ve ever liked are the ones for local small businesses. The ones with a nonexistent production budget that aren’t beating the viewer over the head with blatant lies or dishonest sales tactics.

    Adult Swim used to have faux-ad bumpers for the fictional business “Strickland Propane” from King of the Hill, featuring the honest-to-a-fault character Hank Hill as the spokesman, which I felt captured that vibe well.

    Rhett and Link also made a funny homage to these kinds of commercials in this classic skit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnOyMSEWNTs



  • and connect to it with an iPad that has a Jellyfin client installed?

    In my experience, you don’t even need the dedicated Jellyfin client. Just opening it up in a web browser works out of the box, so that’s potentially one less thing to download/install/manage for the clients.

    That said, I’ve never tried to access Jellyfin from an iPad/iPhone/Mac so it might not be as seamless as my experiences on Android/Linux based devices. But I imagine they’d be fine; just test it out before you hit the road.


  • I don’t watch a lot of creepy/spooky stuff, so my recommendations come from a fairly limited breadth. That said, I recommend a few things that many might lump under “kid movies” (I prefer the more accurate label “family entertainment”) since they tend to be perilous and unsettling without being outright violent, gory, or generally miserable.

    Coraline (2009) - A young girl, dissatisfied with her home life after moving to a new town, stumbles upon a dark, parallel world. Therein, she finds solace in a parallel version of her mother who is not what she seems.

    Paranorman (2012) - A young boy who can speak with the dead learns that a witch who was executed by the townspeople hundreds of years ago will soon return to seek vengeance upon them.

    Over the Garden Wall (2014) - A mini-series focusing on two brothers who find themselves inexplicably lost in a forest teeming with fell beasts, witches, undead, and unlikely allies. I watch this one every year around this time. Cozy yet spooky at the same time.


  • Thumbing through my copy of “On Food and Cooking” by Harold McGee, I didn’t find anything specifically comparing fresh vs canned tomatoes for pasta sauces, but it does mention:

    Fresh tomatoes readily cook down to a smooth puree, but many canned tomatoes don’t. Canners frequently add calcium salts to firm the cell walls and keep the pieces intact, and this can interfere with their disintegration during cooking. If you want to make a fine-textured dish from canned tomatoes, check the labels and buy a brand that doesn’t list calcium among its ingredients.



  • Is it “fair”? I’d say no, but the world isn’t a fair place. Enormous, unscrupulous corporations are to blame for the untenable situation we collectively find ourselves in. And those corporations aren’t going to be rectifying their behavior any time soon unless forced to.

    That being said, asking individuals to take steps to reduce climate change isn’t an unreasonable thing in my eyes. Because, until corporations are held accountable, asking individuals is the only thing that can possibly improve the situation. Even though it’s like throwing a cup of water on a forest fire.

    The second that Amazon, Shell, BP, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Coke, Pepsi, et al are forced to do their part, I will start throwing my trash out the window again like a proper American. Until then, I’m gonna recycle and encourage my friends and family to do so as well.