Here’s a trick you can use to fool people into thinking you can cook:

Fry a chicken breast. Ideally, sauté, which just means: get a few tablespoons of canola oil in the pan almost smoking hot, dry the breast with paper towels - like, super dry - then fry the breasts a few minutes on each side. Put a little salt and pepper on the uncooked side as you’re frying it. Flip it only once, fry the other side. It’ll get that crispy brown coating.

When both sides are done, take it out, lower the temp of the pan to about medium, then dump a half-bottle of balsamic vinegar on there. I’m not joking - pour that shit in, a half bottle. Add some more salt & pepper - not too much! - tarragon, it you have it, and just boil it, stirring frequently. Scrape the bottom of the pan while you’re doing it; make sure you scrape up any bits of chicken. Keep boiling that stuff. It’ll boil down to less than half - when you can dip a spoon in curved-side down and lift it up and the sauce coats the spoon (doesn’t just run off), take it off the heat immediately.

It’ll be thick, and you’ll get maybe a quarter cup reduced from the cup you dumped in. It’ll thicken further as it cools. Let it cool, just a little, then drizzle that over the chicken.

Most of the acidity will be gone, and it’ll be a sweet syrup, and it’s fantastic.

But here’s the real magic: you can deglaze a pan and reduce almost anything that has sugars on it. Amaretto Chicken isn’t chicken cooked in amaretto: it’s chicken, with an amaretto reduction made exactly like I described for the balsamic above. Basically; I know the chefs are going to come out of the woodwork, but honestly. Try it with Grand Marnier liquor for an orange twist.

Wine needs more work, and white or red vinegar won’t do - there aren’t enough sugars for a reduction, but any liquor will do. Balsamic is my favorite.

One final trick: the balsamic reduction is best with tuna steaks. With those, you want them to hit the pan, sit for maybe 15 seconds, flip, 15s, and done. Pink in the middle with brown sides.

The most important things about all this are: high heat, and very dry meat. Get that stuff as dry as you can, with paper towels, or hand towels if you like washing clothes. It’s the water on the surface of what you’re cooking that causes oil to splatter, and everything works better when the meat, or tofu, is as dry as you can make it.

Final word: cast iron skillet.

There is a German song about the opposite. The title, loosely translated, is “the sweetest fruit is eaten only buy the biggest animals” because (as the song explains) the sweetest fruit grows in the highest branches.

This version has only German subtitles, but you might find one with English.

Nice try, NSA.

I’ve been to Ontario and BC, which should count as two countries, but it’s only 1. We really liked Niagara on the Lake, in Ontario, and went there a few times. It’s a nice area to bicycle, and you can make it all the way to the falls without getting on the roads much. I liked Vancouver just fine, but I was a kid when we used to go and would probably appreciate it more now as an adult.

I’ve been to Mexico several times; most times, just trips across the border with my parents, again, as a kid. I spent a couple of weeks in the Yucitan more recently, on Isla Mujeres. It was nice than I expected; most of the parting is in Cancun, so it’s more relaxed on the island. Nice place to visit if you have money and can stay in the best resort you can afford.

I’ve spent about a month in Bengaluru, India, and environs. Interesting, and the trip to Mysuru was both intensely depressing and amazingly beautiful. I was traveling for business, so was basically treated like a VIP: 24/7 chauffeur, 5-star hotel, everything. The chauffeur even drove me on the trip to Mysuru, which was a weekend personal trip. I was very careful most of the time, and avoided getting sick, which vastly impacted my enjoyment. Although I did once get on the back of one of my team member’s motorcycle to go to a little local restaurant, which I didn’t think much of, but when I told my boss, he was appalled.

I spent so much time in the UK, I can almost claim citizenship. Same for France. The UK was for two weeks every other month, for three years, on business; and then a couple of vacations; mostly around and about in England. My wife’s sister and her husband did two years as expats in Paris, and we visited then for a couple of weeks two or three times every year during that. I’ve spent a month driving around Provence, and a two week vacation in Normandy and the Loire Valley. I love both countries - London is a great city, and we seriously thought about buying a property near Bath; Paris is a bit too Big City for me, Provence is beautiful, and I’d happily own a cottage in the Loire somewhere.

I lived in Munich for two years, and would buy an apartment there if I could afford it. It’s my favorite place in the world. Bavaria is my soul-home. I tried for several years to find work there, somewhere, in vain - Regensburg is where I’m going to retire, if at all possible.

I spent a couple of weeks in Prague. Beautiful city, and I hope to go back one day for another visit. I wouldn’t live there, though.

Salzburg, Austria, is my second favorite city, and I’ve been about a dozen times. Again, I’d buy a place around there if I could afford it. Vienna is a wonderful city, with a lot to do. I find out a little strange, with a lot of Eastern European influence.

I’ve spent several weeks in northern Italy, mostly around Chiavenna. My third favorite place, although it’s a small town. German friends of mine owned a cabin in the Alps and we went there often, summer and in the winter for skiing.

I’ve driven through Switzerland a few times, and have been to the Swiss Alps twice on ski vacations. It’s like the whole county is Disneyland - very sanitized, very clean, very precise. It’s absolutely beautiful, but it’s far too tidy for me to want to live there. Bern is an exception; it’s such an amazing city; I’d live there, too.

I’ve been to Singapore a couple of times, for a couple of weeks each time. Beautiful, clean, and very safe. Actually, I really enjoy Singapore, but I think it’s best if you have a lot of money to spend. I wouldn’t enjoy it “on the cheap,” I think.

And I’ve been through the Dubai and Tokyo airports - both of Tokyo’s international airports, actually, which required a bus ride around the city, so I actually saw more than the airport. But I can’t say I saw much of them.

I’d equally live in Salzburg, Austria or Regensburg, Germany, with no hesitation. Munich would be third. Some town in Normandy, or Bath, England, fourth. Chiavenna or Bern, fifth.

Use the search function. It had more options, but you can search for communities in servers with which your instance is federated

The biggest issue you will encounter is parallel evolution. If you search for “linux” communities, you’ll find a dozen of them, all named “linux”, each on a different server. The naïve, easy way to choose is to look for the communities with the highest member count - but this is not always the best way to find the one you want to join. !linux@pentakoala.net will be full of people who bitch constantly about software that uses licenses other than GPLv3 and get downright nasty about people using MIT. Totally hypothetical, but you get my point - you have to peek into the communities and read some posts to differentiate their tone.

Browse “All” occasionally. Sort by “New.” Yeah, you’ll get a lot of furry porn, and a fair amount of OnlyFans fishing posts, but you’ll also find !superbowl@lemmy.world!

Of Bakshi’s movies, I think Wizards is among the least batshit crazy. But, yeah, it’s Ralph through and through. Good watch for current times, too.

LOL

See? Lemmy needs reactions!

None. I think that’s Why I find furries so baffling; it’s, like, bestiality.

Although, and a full grown man, I crushed hard on both Chel from EL Dorado and Ramirez from Atlantis. But those were both humans, and very conventionally attractive.

Oh! Wait! I do have a childhood, non-human example, although she’s hyper-conventionally attractive:

You’re seeing the result of a Reddit migration, bringing the Reddit culture and mindset with it.

When you hear graybeards taking about Eternal September, this is the sort of thing to which they’re referring. Now, you have your own “I remember the good old days, before the assholes took over Lemmy.”

Not a long as Putin has those videos.

Can I adjust dimensions? Like, can I replicated a car, but a tiny one that will fit in a 1x1x1m cube?

If so, I’d replicate 1/8th of the replicator, but double sized. Repeat for all other parts, assemble, and now I have a 2m³ replicator. Repeat until I have one big enough to replicate a house.

Then, the whole point of the exercise: replicate a house-sized Funyun.

Probably more than I know. Browsers cache thumbnails; if you don’t have an ad blocker, you almost certainly have at least one cached NSFW ad thumbnail. Lemmy caches images too, so if you intentionally or accidentally opened an NSFW photo, it’s also on your phone. I suppose there are people who aggressively disable caches and turn on cache purging, but most of us don’t.

People in Lemmy overuse the NSFW tag, which means half the time the actual image is entirely SFW. Which means, I end up opening many NSFW blurred images that might or might not contain actual nudity. So I know there’s “porn” on my phone.

Oh, and there’s also that 4GB folder of Capybara BDSM Vore.

Valv.

Whether or not you use it for porn, it sounds as if you might appreciate it. It’s pretty easy to use, and if you SyncThing it to your desktop, there are a couple of decryption tools. Some also support encryption to the vault format, so you can upload files to your phone already encrypted.

I put everything I don’t want strangers peeking into in there. Bad poetry, lists of my favorite owls, diary entries.