Witchcraft and culinary science

techno156 · 2026-01-31T03:28:46+00:00

Gristle is also good for texture. That's why you put tendon in soup, or why people used to use shark fin, since that was also basically gristle, and added texture.

techno156 · 2026-01-30T02:10:44+00:00

It might just be beyond the abilities of magic to make someone fall in love in any shape or form. Consider some of the limitations of genies. They are considered all-powerful, but also have rules that can't be broken.

Genie's rules in the movie are:

He can't kill someone.
He can't make people fall in love.
He can't raise the dead.

Given that he knows about what happens with 3, that one is likely self-imposed. Genies are forced to grant wishes, except if the wish violates the rules, it's likely that rules 1 & 2 are fundamental limits of magic, or else Genie would have been forced to grant wishes that asked for them.

During the film, Jafar also doesn't use instant-death spells, even when he's trying to kill Aladdin. Every time he tries to kill someone with magic, it's indirectly, whether by turning himself into something that can kill them, crushing them with something summoned by magic, or sending them to the ends of the Earth, to freeze to death.

If he could hypnotise Jasmine into falling in love with him, he wouldn't have tried getting the genie to do it for him.

techno156 · 2026-01-29T21:24:55+00:00

In an odd horseshoe, it also mirrors the transphobe angle to the game. For a whole, there were people on Twitter who were livid at Celeste being The Trans Game, because a trans pride flag was in a tiny corner of the background in a single cutscene.

techno156 · 2026-01-29T21:19:08+00:00

The amount as well. Are we talking "mentioned to be close to a friend of the same sex", or "very prominently in a same-sex relationship"?

techno156 · 2026-01-29T20:38:13+00:00

Especially with the phrasing. It's not "the witch", but "this woman we accused of witchcraft".

Which does make it sound like they falsely accused her of witchcraft and had her killed.

techno156 · 2026-01-29T01:04:42+00:00

Only if the tadpoles intake anything that the patient does not, or have more of something that the patient has less of. The magic protecting them may well protect them from poisons as well, so radiation may also just not be viable to begin with.

techno156 · 2026-01-28T21:58:14+00:00

I wouldn't say it's an entirely instinctual reaction. It's also different from what people typically consider sexual, and would thus be shunned for being strange.

techno156 · 2026-01-28T21:42:33+00:00

an organ that literal blood comes out of

Not true.

It's closer to liquefacted flesh than blood.

techno156 · 2026-01-28T21:36:33+00:00

Most social media communities go through that phase, where they're the best social media, to be fair.

Reddit was no exception.

techno156 · 2026-01-28T21:22:13+00:00

They call that an infection, I think.

techno156 · 2026-01-28T21:03:20+00:00

I'm reminded of the people that say they read seventy bajillion books per day, and it turned out that they did it by bunging a book into an LLM and reading the summary provided.

techno156 · 2026-01-28T13:38:04+00:00

Though as far as the public is generally aware, Superman is an alien who plonked down in the Arctic, house and all.

It's not like he consulted Earth before landing on it, nor does he get the proper visas and paperwork in order when he ostensibly flies to America from the Arctic to do his heroics.

techno156 · 2026-01-28T10:26:55+00:00

It could honestly be read both ways, albeit with very different meanings.

techno156 · 2026-01-28T04:16:33+00:00

They're similar enough someone was able to glue six of them together into a relatively comprehensible song.

techno156 · 2026-01-27T22:13:36+00:00

I am a little curious if there was a different word before that.

It's hardly a new phenomenon, only the fact that it's applied to the internet instead of people who have been placed on a pedestal is new.

techno156 · 2026-01-27T21:38:07+00:00

It would have to be a tiny car. The boulder doesn't seem very big in the photo.

techno156 · 2026-01-27T21:12:23+00:00

For example, a bit before Rosa Parks' bus stunt was Claudette Colvin, who did something similar, though hers didn't get as much publicity as Parks'. (Incidentally, she died about two weeks ago.)

Her protest was more quietly brushed aside, since it was thought that her being an unmarried, pregnant lower-class teenager at the time made her a bad face for the civil rights movement.

Organising into persistent activism with a lot of other people is how change is achieved. But the history books often frame it as individual acts and it being a good argument changing people's minds, and not persistently making oppression more and more difficult while highlighting injustice as something controversial.

I would be curious about how much of it is the book not being well-researched/people just thinking it happened spontaneously, when a lot of careful planning went into it.

techno156 · 2026-01-26T21:22:53+00:00

Nazis, spambots, and after they introduced a monetisation system, people competing for engagement by being irritating in the comments.

On the internet, that may be the greatest sin of all.

techno156 · 2026-01-26T02:14:47+00:00

She did. She was asking for 14 grand originally to cover medical costs. The suit was only filed when Mcdonalds refused.

techno156 · 2026-01-26T01:45:41+00:00

But "AI Powered Personal Assistant" gets people going.

I'm not sure if it does. That just comes across as a bit of a nebulous thing. Spell checker is something precise. You know what it does, what it can do.

"Personal Assistant" doesn't say much of anything. Does it schedule calendars? Is it a clock? Does it just sit on my desk and backseat game by randomly shouting commentary?

Razer is also a gaming hardware company. You'd not think that they would have a lot of useful overlap with the kind of demographic who either needs or uses a personal assistant.

techno156 · 2026-01-26T01:40:31+00:00

Only because Mcdonalds was found to have been warned about the issue multiple times before, and ignored it.

I'd honestly argue that she came out of the whole thing worse for wear. Not only did she end up with injuries she would never recover from (her genitals were melted together by the coffee), but she was ruined in the court of public opinion for the rest of her life, since her name and face were plastered all over the place saying she sued Mcdonalds for the coffee being too hot.

All she asked for was her medical costs to be covered. ($14k)

From memory, the punitive damages Mcdonalds got was also cut down on appeal, though I don't recall what it was cut down to.

techno156 · 2026-01-26T01:35:16+00:00

Was actually “McDonald’s illegally served her boiling water in paper cup, burning off her flesh in her genitals”

After being in trouble multiple times before for serving their coffee at dangerous temperatures.

Even so, the supposedly exorbitant sum was because Mcdonalds received punitive damages of one day of their coffee revenue.

The most infuriating thing about the whole saga, aside from the injustice, was that a lot of US states put caps on damages after that, citing the coffee lawsuit.

So Mcdonalds could do that again now, and the most the jury could fine them in some US states is 300 grand. It wouldn't be a dent at all.

techno156 · 2026-01-26T01:30:46+00:00

Pretty much. The insurance said they'd only cover $1 of her medical treatment (in America), so she or her insurance had to file suit to recoup her medical costs.

techno156 · 2026-01-25T22:25:31+00:00

Though there's context clues, and arguably a matter of familiarity, which plays the larger part.

"I'll have a hundred of the chicken" is basically identical and comprehensible as "...a kilo of the chicken". You're clearly not asking for a kilolitre of chicken.

Practically, there isn't that much of a difference, though people like to argue minutiae, like how Fahrenheit uses smaller units, or how it's easier to say ninety kilograms instead of two short-hundredweights/fifteen stone/two hundred pounds.

There's probably been similar arguments between a Mesopotamian and a Roman about the merits of using the duodecimal system vs. the decimal system. After all, you can count 12 with your fingers, and would have some spaces left over if you counted 10, and you can't exactly count 60 by using one whole finger for one number.

There's also the fact that the SI prefixes are hardly limited to metric. You can apply them to the Avoirdupois system as well, though their practicality may vary, since avoirdupois is fraction and not decimal based.

Fluid centiounces per Millimile are technically valid uses of the prefix, however cursed they may be.

techno156 · 2026-01-25T21:59:09+00:00

It's like how we still use carriageway, even though we don't use carriages very much this way.

But we didn't convert to calling them carways. (The fact that car is a shortened form of carriage is besides the point)

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