Eh, for a given value of “works”, it works fine.

The non alcoholic wines suck though. I don’t even like most reds, and I’d still rather suck down boxed cabernet than drink the non alcoholic stuff. It just tastes meh at best.

There’s a general rule that you don’t cook with wine you wouldn’t drink. While it isn’t some kind of rigorous standard where only the finest possible wines are worthy of cooking with, it does mean that if something is decent out of the container, it isn’t going to get better once it’s concentrated.

So, if you want to try it, try a sip of the stuff straight. If it’s palatable, you’re good to go. There’s very few things that require the alcohol to give the desired results, it’s only mandatory when you’re extracting compounds out of food that can’t be brought out because they aren’t soluble in fat or water. Otherwise, by the time you dilute the alcohol even in something like bourbon across an entire dish, and cook some of the ethanol out, the amount left isn’t going to be detectable in the flavor it’s the other things in wines, liquors, and beers that we use them for.

For deglazing, the alcohol itself does nothing they you’ll be able to taste at the end. Even the kind of “super tasters” that test things for corporations have trouble detecting the residual ethanol, when they can at all. And there aren’t any substances in a fond that aren’t water or fat soluble, so it isn’t useful that way.

IMO, you’d be better off skipping the idea of adding grape juice at all. It just isn’t going to do anything worth mentioning. Any stock is going to be better than that. You’re adding more sugar, and that’s going to shift the taste more than deglazing with plain water would. Not necessarily in a bad way, particularly if you then reduce the liquid and let the sugars develop a little, but it’s still further away from the taste of red wine as a deglazing liquid than water is.

Obviously, taste is subjective, so YMMV, but I’ve dicked around with substitutions over the years for recovering alcoholics, and religious folks. Nobody misses the actual wine unless the entire dish is wine centric in the first place (like beef bourguignon). Most people, if they do notice difference from a version that uses wine will think it’s just the variety of wine changing. If they’re never had the wine version in the first place, it won’t matter at all.

It’s easy when you use the same password for encoding everything.

That is the only acceptable choice

That’s kinda like our chicken.

She’ll be doing her thing, then hop up on you long enough to squawk and wipe her beak on you until you stop what you’re doing and talk to her, then jump down and go back to her chickening.

Well, until she’s ready for a nap, in which case she assumes you have turned into a nest and will treat you as such

That nose needs gentle pets all the time

It really does!

Just the shift in cerebrospinal fluid in response to progesterone explains not just the obvious symptoms that come with that part of the cycle, it points to things like increased migraines, memory issues, and that’s huge.

Having a correlation shown like this could possibly revolutionize how women get care. Just the correlation. If there’s a definitive causation, just the ability to better customize hormone regimens in birth control could improve millions of lives.

Considering the extremes I’ve seen women in my life go through with no real ability to get predictable results from medical assistance relating to their cycles, this is fantastic news.

Sounds like me after taco bell

Well, it’s one of those things where you either learn to compartmentalize, or you quit fast.

I moderated forums back in the early days of the internet. It was rough some days, to the point I had someone show up at my house because I wouldn’t let them abuse other users.

I moderated on reddit, and it was both easier and worse. People like to complain, but automod being able to filter out so much of the worst without having to see it at all made the job bearable. If I’d had to wade through the bigotry, the worst slurs, and similar stuff that a well crafted automod rule could magic away, I wouldn’t have done it at all.

But the fact that you have to constantly adjust the automod to catch up with the most persistent assholes is draining.

And that’s not getting into the stuff that isn’t hate speech, misogyny, bigotry, and that kind of infection. People think they can say anything they want, any way they want, and you stopping them means you’re the asshole, even after that went on a rant about fucking someone’s wife and kids (seriously, that’s a ban I had to make) because someone didn’t agree with their opinion of a flashlight. Seriously, that fucking happened.

Point being that while there are mods that go too far, the internet, and places like reddit or lemmy, would be unbearable without it. There has to be someone making those calls, keeping things from turning into the non stop scroll of venom and porn that used to be way too common back in the day.

Eh, we have a budget program in the house for learning skills, that are then used to help decision making when the kid has funds.

There isn’t an allowance. We buy the stuff based on circumstances. Cash isn’t as ideal as it used to be. Cards, be they gift, prepaid debit, or bank related, come with drawbacks that make them unattractive for the purpose of the kid being able to have their own funds.

They have a real budget and the educational one. The educational one is set up based on their efforts. Originally it was scaled, where it was a set amount every month, they’d have set prices for the basic items of life like rent and utilities but win those amounts representing a percentage rather than actual prices.

Then, as they mastered that, it to realistic numbers, taken straight from our actual bills, with their income factored by their school work and household responsibilities.

The only time the real budget, where they have an amount they can request be spent on their behalf that can roll over and be saved (up to a point, it puts a crimp in other things if it builds up too much) is if they decide to skip obligations, to go into debt, or otherwise do something that would screw their budget if it were real. When that happens, the real budget gets frozen until the educational one gets balanced again.

What they don’t know is that they have an account for when they get older that any of that amount that can’t be held in our accounts gets deposited to. Same when they make bad decisions in budgeting and it gets frozen.

It’s as close as we can get it to simulate adult life without being a horrible grind, or taking agency away, which leads to no learning by making mistakes.

They’ve gotten pretty good at making good decisions. And I mean by the standards of their situation. It isn’t all spent on stuff you might value as an adult. There’s music and crap food, and outings, whatever. But they make the decisions consciously, choosing to spend their budget on self care in those ways, which is a perfectly valid choice even for adults.

Not that that’s the only money that gets spent on such things. We’re fixed income, but they have a say in the tiny household entertainment budget, and have times when they plan the meals, etc. But that’s different from discretionary spending the way allowances were, and the way their personal budget is. Them picking a shitty movie to go to on the rare times we go out to movies, that’s not their allowance equivalent, that’s them taking their turn picking the movie. If they want a different trip out the next week, it would have to come from their discretionary budget instead of the household entertainment/fun budget.

It wouldn’t work for everyone. But it works for us.

She gets all the pats and rubs! Yay!

I painted my cat once.

Turns out, holding down a cat and painting one handed is hard.

Bad joke aside, your sis captured the cuddly sweetness perfectly. That boneless languor that cats have when comfy and sleepy. Beautiful work :)

Okay, this is malarkey. Two frikkin pics of heads that need pets, but no proof of petting.

You, sir, are a scoundrel!

Well, I’ll throw my anecdote into the void here.

I never took ketamine as a depression, anxiety, or PTSD treatment , despite having dealt with the usual medication shuffle over the years.

But I did get my wisdom teeth removed and talked to “angels” as I woke up (it was just hallucinations, but the imagery was like movie angels), and had a six plus month remission of symptoms, followed by another three to five of reduced symptoms. Pretty fucking impressive to me, since I didn’t know when I went under what they were giving me, and wasn’t expecting anything other than waking up and saying dumb shit until the drugs cleared my system.

I’m not sure how that could be a placebo effect since there was no real public information bouncing around about ketamine for psychological conditions. I don’t doubt that it could be placebo effect, but I’d need it explained to me by someone a shit ton more familiar with how placebos work than I am. It was the best I had felt in a decade.

I know this much; if I ever get offered a theraputic dose in a safe place, I’m not turning it down

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Unless I misread, the point isn’t leaving bad reviews, it’s making fake good reviews for a chain restaurant.

The way it’s being done is intended to stymie outsiders from crowding out locals.

Now, I agree that it is going to make competition harder for the non-chain restaurants the fake reviews are supposed to be isolating from tourist and traveller customers. It’s still a shitty move that hurts the local businesses. But it isn’t the same thing as actively trying to tank them. It’s a quibble about wording though, not a disagreement with your actual point.

You know, seeing these responses with other people having experienced it too is cathartic.

I’ve never met anyone irl that had that kind of dream, and the last time I mentioned it online, nobody popped up that had. It’s nice to know that it isn’t some kind of isolated thing, that it’s not just me being weird.

Isekai is a genre where someone is taken out of their regular life and thrown into a new one.

Typically, it’s going to be a more chaotic world, with different structures, like a fantasy novel type of setting, or sci-fi, or “wild west”, or even standard time travel.

There’s tropes involved, but that’s that gist.

I’m way less worried about bluesky as opposed to threads. If anything, it serves as a healthy competitor to mastodon in terms of how it would require a bridge to interact. You have to go out of your way to make it happen.

But threads is pulling a EEE, and it’s obvious that’s the goal.

That it started out enshittified, and things can only get worse with VC being involved deeper.

Well, I dunno if that’s what they meant, but that sure as heck is the reality of it

If it’s not Scottish, it’s crrrap. And, apparently, if it is Scottish, it’s crrrap

Edit: legit though, haggis ain’t bad, just a wee bit funky. But those potatoes+ someone needs to be banned from the kitchen