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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: March 18th, 2024

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  • When you start, you follow recipes. Pick a type of cuisine you like. At some point as you explore recipes you will start to understand the “flavor bouquet” of that cuisine. This understanding will help you with what spices go together in a pleasant way, and in what amounts. Like Thai food. Or Italian food.

    That said, bread can be a gateway recipe. It’s simple: yeast, flour, water + a sugar to activate the yeast. Not all bread is sandwich bread. Starting with flatbread (for hummus, gyro, etc) or pizza crust also works. No bread machines, that would defeat the purpose of your original question, but a stand mixer with a dough hook is ok. For sandwich bread, King Arthur Flour has solid recipes (ignore ingredient branding).

    If you like vids, Kenji Lopez-Alt is excellent. He also has a book called The Food Lab which is useful but not necessary, depending on how you learn. Serious Eats also has useful guides.










  • Just about everyone wants to see themselves in the main player character of an RPG. It’s one reason character creators exist. Why we can choose between male and female Shepard and then toggle their appearances. But why is it white men yell the loudest when they don’t see themselves in a fixed main character?

    It’s a valid question. Sure there was an ask for female assassin play, but it wasn’t anything like this crude, angry, and off the rails epidemic we see far too often. Why is this population so loud and rage filled?

    I happily play Witcher, and enjoy Geralt for who he is, including those tired sighs and the long hair that blows in a wind that’s not there. Geralt looks like he’s been torn off the cover of an old bodice ripper novel, which is a bit of an eye roll but adds to the humor. Even so. As a woman I had no problems with it or the game. I’ve played W3 through twice.

    Enter Ciri as the main for the next game. Suddenly there’s a huge problem even though she’s the logical next Witcher. I’d like to know how she plays as a character outside the premade with gimped UI. The preview to 4 was nicely nuanced as well, a lot of detail packed into that clip apart from just simple spooky monster fighting. She clearly has a chip on her shoulder about life choices, and fair enough given her history.

    Again, no raging outcry regarding Geralt or the way he looked for 3 installments. Now there’s outcry.

    I’m not Japanese or Black and yet I’ll happily play this latest AC (but only after its old and goes on sale).


  • This is not hyperbole. There are many elderly living alone, SScheck to SScheck with no one to lean on.

    They’re a common admission when neighbors call in wellness checks and they’re found down or confused.

    The other piece is the people who supply medical care and social services still get paid, one way or another and that payment comes from SS and Medicare. Every time someone doesn’t pay their bill, costs increase. That said, the purpose of a hospital care management team is to transition these elderly cases to a safe living situation. If that is now assisted living or a nursing home it happens by the grace of those institutions now essentially taking the monthly SS check to pay for the new room and board situation with caregivers on site.

    These institutions would certainly miss the SS check. In fact, there’s a hard cap on the level of profit these institutions can make because they rely on the monthly senior benefits to pay their staff, supplies, and electricity. Those monthly benefits don’t really increase. And before you scream that there should be no profit, without profit, these institutions would not exist. People get paid, or doors close. We see this a lot on well meaning but short sighted (regarding money) mental health care institutions. But for elderly care, up until now, SS and Medicare paying costs has been reliable.

    Which raises the question. If the nursing home doesn’t get paid and the dependent old person gets evicted? Where do they get evicted to? Bedbound, confused, where do they go?

    I have an answer for that one. A medical reason will be found to drop them at a local ER, with no return (the needs of a patient can exceed the capability of an institution so this is legal and happens often enough). This makes the displaced SS recipient and senior citizen a not paying hospital customer. Moreover, they are a non-acute person taking up an acute care bed, leaving the ER even more clogged with even longer wait times as the flow out (in the form of discharges, freeing beds for ER admissions, which frees space in the ER for people in the waiting room) slows down even more.

    I give the long explanation so you can follow yet another crack as it forms, leading to the eventual collapse of the already tenuous and strained healthcare system.

    Your statement that they may just die is apt. Strangely, Heritage is serious about banning assisted suicide because it “lacks dignity”.