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[reversecrystal]

A news site called WindowsCentral just posted a headline: "57% of all content on the web is AI-generated."

They're misquoting a Forbes article that said, "57% of all text-based content on the web is AI-generated."

Which itself was also a misquote of a study saying "57% of all text translations on the web are machine generated."

Figured I should give everyone a heads up

for all the "OMG dead Internet theory is real!" posting coming up.

[reversecrystal]

Hey, are you a broke motherfucker trying to save money on groceries and attempting to plan for having food in the house at the end of the month? Do you have a good system for storing frozen meat? If you don't, here's how I do it:

Large Bastard called me when I was at the plasma center (we're broke motherfuckers!) to tell me that Aldi had nearly expired pork chops (use or freeze by tomorrow) for 50% off, so I told him to get 4 packs.

I keep my freezer pretty full with homemade stock, frozen meat, frozen veggies, frozen fruit, and g-free bread, so I can't just stick the big packages of pork chops directly in the freezer, and besides if I do, the pork chops will freeze to each other and then I'll have to thaw the whole mass of them if i want to cook them, which will increase thawing time.

So what I do instead is make an accordion of waxed paper and fill it with pork chops.

This ends up saving a ton of space, and means I can choose to thaw 8 pieces or 1 piece or however much I need at a time.

3 packs stored this way are smaller than 1 pack from the store.

The final accordion of meat gets wrapped in a layer of waxed paper, then put into a freezer bag with the air pressed out, and now if I don't have cash for groceries I've still got something to eat.

This is also the way that I save meat that is close to its spoilage date that I won't be able to cook before it goes bad. If you stick a family pack of chicken breasts in the freezer, you have a family pack of chicken breasts to thaw. If you put them into little waxed paper envelopes, you've got single serving packets that you can easily toss into a soup or bake from frozen.

This is ALSO pretty much the technique I use to freeze banana slices when my bananas are going brown and I'm not in the mood to bake, only I freeze them on a cutting board before breaking them off and sticking them in a bag when they're frozen.

Freeze wet stuff in individual pieces, not big chunks, so you don't have to break up big chunks to use your frozen food.

I know this probably seems pretty obvious to a lot of people, but it wasn't obvious to me until a couple years ago because nobody ever showed me how to do it and I didn't grow up in a family that cooked a lot.

[reversecrystal]

had a minor crisis when 12ft.io went down yesterday and thankfully it's back now but this seems like a good opportunity to compile a list of similar paywall-evading tools in case 12ft ever gets canned for real:

12ft.io: the legend himself. definitely my favorite of the bunch by virtue of being the easiest to use (and the easiest url to remember), but it's configured to disable paywall evasion for a handful of popular sites like the new york times, so you'll have to go elsewhere for those.

printfriendly: works great; never had any issues with removing paywalls, even on domains that don't work with 12ft.io. since this site is literally designed to make sites print-friendly, it might simplify the overall formatting of the page you're trying to access, which can be a good or bad thing. my only real issue is that the "element zapper" (which lets you remove content blocks from the print-friendly preview) is a little sensitive if you're browsing on a touchscreen device, which means you might accidentally delete a paragraph when you're just trying to scroll. but if that happens you can reload the page and it'll revert everything back to its original state.

fifteen feet: basically a 12ft clone, minus 12ft's restrictions. haven't used it much since I only discovered it yesterday in the wake of 12ft's 451 error but it seems to do the trick.

archive.today: an archival tool very similar to the wayback machine, but it also works as a de facto paywall removal tool. (the wayback machine seems to remove paywalls as well, but archive.today has better UX imo and is way faster to use.)

and an honorable mention for sci-hub: only works for scientific/academic journals, not random news articles, but the other sites listed above only work for random news articles and not academic publications so you gotta have this one in your toolbelt for full coverage. pubmed is your oyster.

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[reversecrystal]

i am not joking we need to force teach cooking in schools. like. it is an essential thing for survival. do you know how easy it is to make things if you know even the bare bones shit about how cooking works. we need to teach teenagers how far you can take an onion and some other veggies it''s sad that people grow up not knowing how to prepare literally anything. and i'm not talking about oh this home ed class taught me how to make chicken nuggets at home i'm talking about learning the balancing of sweetness and acidity and saltiness and bitterness and shit like that and techniques and oil temperatures and how meats cook. it needs to be taught because it's literally not even that difficult and it matters so much

[reversecrystal]

I wish Japanese video games didn't have such an awfully simplistic, childish view of world politics. Even the mature and serious ones are laughably off the mark most of the time, and they just assume that the common narrative about a given organisation or government is correct. I wonder if this has anything to do with the way Japanese government demonises leftist discourse and tries to nurture unquestionable trust in institutions.

[reversecrystal]

[reversecrystal]

5 simple exercises to awaken dormant muscles

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[reversecrystal]

As lunar new year approaches, I'd like to share my mom's Chinese new year cake recipe. It's probably more like a pudding, as definition, but we call it a cake. This makes the perfect "not too sweet" nian gao. And it also doesn't stick to your teeth like a lot of nian gao.

2024 blaze edit: my mom had a massive stroke last March and it left her barely able to walk. She was an incredible cook and has some of the best recipes. I just felt this year, it was more important than ever to share some of those recipes so that even though she isn't able to cook for others herself, she can be cheered by the knowledge her recipes are still making ppl happy.

Mom’s Chinese New Year Cake (Nian Gao)

Ingredients:

1 cup (250 ml/211 g) brown sugar

1 cup (250 ml) milk (cow milk can also be substituted for a plant-based milk if you prefer)

1 cup (250 ml) coconut milk

½ cup (125 ml) oil

3 eggs

1 bag (400g) glutinous rice flour

1 tsp (5 ml/4.5 g) baking powder

Full recipe text under cut. Download recipe pdf here. Recipe pdf includes photos of what coconut milk and rice flour I use.

Mom’s Chinese New Year Cake (Nian Gao)

Yield: 3 cakes in 7” aluminum pans

Ingredients:

1 cup (250 ml/211 g) brown sugar

1 cup (250 ml) milk (cow milk can also be substituted for a plant-based milk if you prefer)

1 cup (250 ml) coconut milk

½ cup (125 ml) oil

3 eggs

1 bag (400g) glutinous rice flour

1 tsp (5 ml/4.5 g) baking powder

Directions:

Grease three 7” pans and set aside. Preheat oven to 375°F (190°C).

Mix together sugar, milk, coconut milk, oil, and eggs. Then stir in dry ingredients and blend until smooth. You don’t have to worry about overworking the batter as it is made with glutinous rice flour, not wheat flour.

Divide it evenly amongst three greased pans.

Bake @ 375°F (190°C) for 40-50 minutes. All three can be baked at the same time in the oven. Just rotate where they are in the oven halfway for even browning.

Notes:

Cake should have nice brown crust on top and glutinous squishy sticky core.

Tastes better the next day and once fully cool.

If you don’t want a bunch of leftover coconut milk from the can, use the entire can of coconut milk and then add enough milk to get up to a full 2 cups (500 ml) of liquid.

Don’t skimp on the coconut milk. The recipe is simple enough that you will taste the difference.

This recipe is gluten free. Glutinous rice flour isn’t related to gluten. And be sure to get glutinous rice flour, not sweet rice flour or another type. Or your cake will end up hard.

This is not a traditional nian gao. Most of them are steamed, this one is baked. I don't know where my mom got the idea to bake it. She thinks it might have been an old coworker. But we started doing it this way a decade ago and have been since this is hands down the best nian gao I have ever had and have had since.

If anyone uses an egg substitute that works well, please let me know and I will make a note in the recipe.

If you try it, let me know how it goes! My mom and I would like to see.

[reversecrystal]

so judging by how astonished people are by it every time we explain it to anybody, it seems like my wife and I might really be onto something here

during the pandemic, we invented something we call "astronaut time."

when it's astronaut time, it's like we are two astronauts wearing the big helmets, moving around the station on totally separate tasks. one of us is outside the space station and one of us is inside the space station. our radios do not work and we have no way of communicating with each other. we might see each other through the lil porthole windows, but we ignore each other because we both have different things to do.

"astronaut time" is how we get total privacy when we live in the same apartment. I will pretend you don't exist. You will pretend I don't exist. we have a nonverbal, zero-contact signal for when astronaut time is over (usually "I'll draw a smiley-face on the whiteboard in the kitchen when I'm done"). No talking, stay out of each other's line of sight, we are actively avoiding each other, unless you are currently experiencing a medical emergency goodbye.

it has been. a godsend. imagine living with your partner and being able to close every single tab in your brain related to social interaction. no fear of being interrupted by a "hey, quick question--" or "sorry to bother you, but do you know where the scissors are?" or "did you want something to eat, too?" Once or twice a month, we look at each other lovingly, hold hands, and say "baby I think I need some astronaut time tonight," and the other person goes "okay cool. bye! have a nice night!" and nobody's feelings are hurt and we both go and have a lovely evening completely by ourselves.

like idk it's a small thing but it's made our lives so much nicer, so if you and your partner/roommate are both people who sometimes need total privacy in order to recharge, maybe try it

[reversecrystal]

繕い　　(；ﾟДﾟ) ﾅﾝﾄｫ Mending a sweater

（Reddit:r/oddlysatisfying u/thegupeeman）

[reversecrystal]

I miss the days when, no matter how slow your internet was, if you paused any video and let it buffer long enough, you could watch it uninterrupted

[reversecrystal]

A skeleton crew doesn't mean a site is going away (though it likely won't get updates and bugs/outages will take longer to fix), but just in case anyone is concerned, here's a link to instructions to download your entire blog

[reversecrystal]

So you made a neocities... now what?

Okay, here it is! So you’ve seen how web2 is becoming more and more corporatized and toxic, you know web3 will be a capitalist nightmare if it becomes reality, and people are rediscovering the nostalgic charm of the web1 era so you want in. You want to stake out your little corner of the internet, you made your neocities account, maybe a proboards to go with it…

Now what do you do with it?

This is a short(-ish) guide intended to give you some direction when populating your own site. This is not a technical guide for building a website, I am by no means qualified to teach you html or css, and besides those resources exist already. Think of this more as content inspiration, organized loosely based on what you already use social media for and what you’d be bringing with you to a new space.

If anyone has ideas I didn’t think of, feel free to add on!

Keep reading

[reversecrystal]

hey, don’t cry. one half flour one half yogurt knead into dough and fry for easy flatbread and dip in balsamic vinegar, okay?