Yah, maybe my post came off as “haha nerds, try my foolproof method of having friends” when what I actually meant was “The state of the modern world has caused me to abandon what could be thought of as technological improvements because they are far worse at accomplishing their goal than the old ways.”

Reviews have probably never been unbiased, but there’s so much general misinformation now that even a glut of info is unreliable for figuring anything out.

Users reviews are useless because they’re easily astroturfed for bonkers reasons.

Critic reviews are useless because they are largely just ads bought and paid for.

This has forced me to create a new system I like to call “talking to your friends”. If I wanna know if a movie or show is good, I ask Rebecca or Muhammad because they have similar interests to me. If I wanna know if a game is good, I can talk to Eugene or Jake. Is this music any good? Well, Marcy has similar tastes to me but not always so it’s a toss up.

If I don’t got no friends with that interest, well, time to find a niche online community and start chatting people up.

This is kind of ridiculous.

You can’t win in this country without being a member of one of the two parties. They’ve seen sure to that. In addition, you can’t get the money needed to run a campaign without approval from those parties.

It’s the parties that decide who is on the ballot, not the people. And it’s the parties who control the purse strings.

No candidate on the ballot is trying to help the common people. No matter who you choose, it’s not going to help the situation. We can talk about harm reduction or lesser evils all day, but when you choose lesser evil, you’re still choosing evil and the country trends towards more evil. When you’re reducing harm, you’re still accepting some amount of harm, not cure.

Do you hibernate for winter?

You can read in dreams, but usually the text changes if you look away and look back. That’s the “dream check” most teach when explaining lucid dreaming.

There’s exceptions to this. Text that is strongly associated with images may stay static, e.g. a brand logo, but I find it’s incredibly hard for documents and books to retain their information.

That’ll never happen in America, too damaging to corporate interests.

We’re stuck voting for shit heels who won’t help working class folks for the rest of time.

Buddy, if you’ve eaten at a restaurant, you’ve had worse.

I don’t think recommending people to do 40 + hour fasts is a good idea.

Yeah it BLOWS! I make my own now, way better and cheaper.

If you could recommend a few, I’d be eager to try em. I mostly make my own sauces these days, vinegar or mustard based ones usually with the ghost peppers, and pickled Thai birds eye chilis with garlic, ginger and lemongrass, like a sambal oelek with a decent kick.

There’s a few yuzu based hot sauces out there that aren’t terribly spicy, but have a wonderful fruit flavor, so I’m thinking of trying to make a peach or mango Naga salsa/sauce next, but I gotta wait for good peaches or mangoes at the store.

What app are you using that works well? I’ve been using Sync but it frequently tells me there are comments that it can’t load. And finding new communities isn’t the easiest.

Seriously, it’s already impossible to get a decently spicy hot sauce at the grocery store.

Even the stuff covered in skulls or warnings or labeled “ghost pepper” are so diluted that they hardly count. Look, they’re hot, but ghost pepper in particular has become a buzzword, turning it nigh meaningless in determining how hot a sauce will be. Such a shame, too, as the ghost pepper has a delightful high intensity, low burn heat and sweet finish.

I don’t have a study or nothing, but I know a few other people like myself who like super hot foods and the vibe I get is that foods with capsaicin extract are edible, they’re not pleasant to eat and they lack a… rounded heat experience? It’s kinda hard to put into words. It’s sorta like “pancake syrup” vs maple syrup. Pancake syrup is sweet and sticky, but it isn’t good like maple syrup.

Yeah, but there are hotter peppers and foods available and the jalapeño is an incredibly mild pepper, it’s barely spicy and not a good comparison.

Challenge foods and sauces in general tend to also use pure capsaicin extract to really bring home the heat, but this tends to affect the flavor and make it bitter and unpleasant. Foods shouldn’t be “challenging” you to eat them and then artificially raising the stakes. It’s hard enough to get decently hot foods as it is, having to keep an eye out for companies “cheating” by using the pure extract from the peppers is annoying.

I’m having some fun playing it, but mostly in customizing my ship and setting up automated production via the outpost system.

The RPG elements feel uninspired and the writing pales in comparison to, say, Baldur’s Gate 3, but I feel Larian set a new standard of greatness with their work on the characters and writing there. Starfield feels flat by comparison.

Didn’t down vote ya, but kvetching about votes ain’t a good look.

Why? I said in the post, it doesn’t taste good and it artificially makes things spicier, but in an unpleasant, astringent way that isn’t flavorful like hot hot peppers. The manufacturer states they use the Carolina Reaper and the Naga pepper in the chip, but I’ve had it, and it lacks the flavor of those peppers and tastes bitter like other “challenge” sauces that use some amount of pure capsaicin extract.

It’s easier to get something spicier with pure extract and probably cheaper, but it ruins the taste of the heat.

Edit: it ain’t about extracts in foods or nothing, it’s not “artificial”, it’s just pure capsaicin from the peppers. It just affects the flavor and experience poorly.

Idk how far you are into the game, but “Skyrim in space” is a shockingly apt reduction of the story.

It’s okay, they never have anything interesting or useful to say anyway. They are cardboard cutouts of tropes as deep as the petri dish used to grow their faces.

But it is funny to see three of them walk uncomfortably close to one another in tight, uniform formation before turning simultaneously to look at me and utter forth a generic attempt at local color.

Capsaicin extract should be banned from food in general.

It’s unpleasant and tastes astringent, unlike the capsaicin coming naturally from peppers.

I’ll regularly eat incredibly spicy foods, I grow Naga, scorpion and ghost chilis, and I love the thrill of these treats, but also the flavor. Capsaicin extract is immediately detectable because the flavor and feel of the heat is different and unpleasant. It isn’t that it’s “too spicy”, it feels bad to eat.

If your heat doesn’t come from a pepper included in the recipe, it shouldn’t be consumed.

“Bushel and a peck, and a squeeze around the neck” is a quote from a song from Guys and Dolls.

Your grandmother may have been a fan of musical theater.