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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)TH
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29
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843
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Pavlova is almost boringly simple, though.

    Beat eggwhites and sugar for ages with a little vinegar along the way, dump onto a parchment lined baking sheet, bake - then turn off the oven, leave the door open a crack and leave a few hours to slowly cool.

    Instead of making a big intricate arrangement with the fruit, go rustic with it - bowl of sugared berries, bowl of whipped cream, dollop of each on each slice.

  • The Malazan Book of the Fallen, by Steven Erikson.

    Ten brick-thick volumes that will alternately fill your heart to bursting then stomp on it until you're wrung out like a rag. It is one HELL of a ride. It does have a steep immersion curve, so be prepared to take a couple of attempts to finish the first one.

    When you find yourself laughing at the tragedy and crying at the jokes, you'll know.

    Also, the Locked Tomb series by Tamsyn Muir. Adorkable romance, badass as hell, will break you. Gets increasingly weird as it goes along. Is good, has massive cult following.

    And by no means least, the Machineries of Empire series by Yoon Ha Lee. Ostensibly weird Korean military space opera, but with a real gut punch; you won't forget this one.

  • NPD and BPD are both driven by an eternal sucking void of insecurity and negative self-esteem that can never be filled.

    Narcissists try to fill it with praise and social status, or failing that, power and subjugation.

    Borderlines try to fill it with limerence and victimhood or failing that, revenge.

    But it can't ever be filled - it's worse than addiction, worse than being underwater in some shitty MLM scheme. It takes and takes and takes because fuck you, pay me.

    So they don't have friends or loved ones, they have hosts. They suck out all the goodness until there's nothing left to give, then they start in on the pain.

    Assholes, in the other hand, are just driven by simple greed, callousness and lack of consideration. They can and do still hurt people of course, but it's not an all-consuming obsessive need.

  • STOP GETTING OUT OF THE WAY

    Stay at your post for fuck's sake. Make them fight you. Drag it out, make it slow and expensive, make them look bad.

    Don't just offer them your chair and the keys to the kingdom and tell them here let your stooge take over, have fun

  • Apart from concerted sociopolitical efforts to make an underclass that can be harmed at will and blamed for everything, there's a couple of less deliberately malicious explanation for a lot of people.

    1: Category violation -> perversion -> predator -> monster.

    2: I don't think it's real -> they are lying -> why would they lie about gender -> to lull people into a false sense of security -> predator -> monster

    Both are of course incredibly false and hateful, and both of course are pushed maliciously and cynically by many, but I think some people are actually taken in by one or other of these.

  • It was the mid-90s, and just a shell account. Gopher, archie, pine and zmodem.

    We didn't get PPP access for a year or two; this was the days before google - yahoo, altavista, some other engines I can't remember, and metasearch engines like dogpile that would query a bunch of different search engines and return the combined set of results.

    This was the days of mailing lists and usenet for the most part - connect up, download messages for like an hour, then log off, read and reply, then log on and send.

    I was there for the original hamsterdance, and it ruled.

  • Individual oxygen atoms are very very grabby; they're stage-5 clingers on PCP. They're straight-up homewreckers, and they cannot and fucking will not be alone. They need a friend or two, and they will go and rip molecules apart to take them because fuck you.

    Now, if there's nothing else available, they'll pair up with another oxygen atom, and form O2, what people normally call oxygen; the stuff you find in the air.

    But it's an uneasy alliance, and the bond angles are all wrong so it's kind of spring-loaded.

    And the same goes for lots of other molecules - carbon-carbon or carbon-hydrogen bonds ferinstance are also kind of tense and uncomfortable; it takes a surprising amount of energy to snap them into place, like building a tower of interlocking mousetraps.

    So smack an O2 at reasonably high speed (or in other words, at a high temperature) at big structure of carbons and hydrogens, and it's fucking chaos.

    The oxygen-oxygen bond splits, and the two halves grab the other atoms, ripping the structure apart and releasing all the energy that went into spring-loading those bonds.

    The main byproducts are CO2 (a carbon with two oxygens) and H2O (an oxygen with two hydrogens), both of which are very low-energy, strong bonds.

    They're both gases, and all that energy leftover is released as heat, which does two things:

    • raise the temperature enough to do the same thing with even more O2s, causing a chain reaction
    • heat up the released gases (and any bits of random gunk that break off with them) so much that they glow red hot, just like hot iron.

    So you get plumes of glowing hot gas-and-particles streaming off the stuff that's burning - and hot air rises, so the plumes point upwards.

    But they also cool down quickly in the air, below the glowing-hot point, and that's why flame has a shape: the boundary is how far as they get while still hot enough to glow.

    Of course, hydrocarbons and carbohydrates aren't the only things that burn, there's lots of other molecules you can do this to, and the same principle applies. It's just that carbony things tend to burn easily and well, and we're surrounded by the stuff because that's what living things are made of, so that's what you tend to see being on fire the most.