It looks pretty damn good to me, but I have a small rant about tomahawk steaks in general.

I get that they’re a premium cut of meat, they’re a big fat slap of ribeye, but they’re also a novelty cut, the big ol’ handle of bone hanging off of it doesn’t really serve any purpose except being big and showy. The tomahawk steak is kind of all about ridiculous excess.

And I’m not knocking that, I love goofy, showy, ostentatious, kitschy shit. I’d even say that it’s kind of my thing.

And I think when you serve one like this, take it off the bone, slice it up, and serve it on a plate, that kind of removes some of the fun factor.

I have a friend of a friend who is kind of ridiculously wealthy and likes to throw very elaborate parties. One such occasion was a “viking feast” (the historical accuracy of this is dubious at best) where the only foods served are meats and bread, no plates, the only utensils allowed are knives and your hands.

There was a lot of meat. A whole lamb roasted over the fire, a whole massive salmon, many chickens, probably more than I’m forgetting, but most relevant to this, enough tomahawk steaks for everyone who wanted one to have their own.

And that I think is the environment where the tomahawk steak really shines. It’s the perfect “walking around” steak, it’s got a big fucking handle of bone built into it. It’s like the turkey leg you’re almost required to get at the Renaissance faire on steroids.

It’s staying true to it being a high-end steak, this was a special event, not something that happens every year and we’re celebrating, but it’s also leaning into the sheer novelty of the steak. It’s goofy and it’s supposed to be, and it’s not trying to pretend otherwise.

As an aside, another friend and I managed to wrangle a standing invitation to return to this when he throws one (it occurs when the local team plays the Vikings in the playoffs) because we’re both burly bearded dudes with no interest in football, so we pretty much stood outside by the fire all night drinking from horns we brought ourselves, and host was stoked to have “actual vikings” there.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

I kind of think of myself as “prepper light” I keep a small stockpile of food and supplies around, have at least general plans for most emergencies that might arise, like I live close to a nuclear plant so I know the evacuation route I’m supposed to take from my home if something ever happens there, what radio station is going to have information, etc. I know what I’m doing if we lose power for an extended period of time, etc.

But I’m not devoting a significant amount of my time to it. A few minutes or hours here or there, a little casual research, the occasional “roughing it” camping trip for fun and practice

But most importantly, I have friends. I’m a pretty all-around capable guy, but there’s a lot of gaps in my knowledge. When it comes to fixing cars, spinning yarn and weaving cloth, more advanced construction, plumbing, gardening, etc. I’m kind of clueless. But I have friends who are really good at those things. If shit ever really hits the fan in whatever sort of “end of the world as we know it” sort of scenario you might be imagining, none of us are going to cut it long-term by ourselves, but with all of our various skills put together we might just stand a chance.

And also I like those people, I want to make sure they make it through it with me.

It’s called a Melodica

US

My situation is a little fucked up because I work 12 hour shifts, but PTO is based around 8 hour days because that’s what most employees here work and they haven’t made any special exemptions for us. These numbers are going to be based around 8 hour days because I don’t feel like doing the math

Vacation time- 10 days for new hires, and you get 5 additional days at 5, 13, and 19 years, so assuming I stick around for 19+ years I’ll have 25 days. You can carry over up to 15 unused days to the next year

5 personal days, no carryover

Sick days accrue at 1 day per month, so essentially 12, with unlimited carryover,

1 personal holiday

Certain things like perfect attendance, coming in for overtime, etc. can earn you “flex time” which actually is usually awarded in 12 hour increments.

I’m kind of bad at using my PTO. My schedule is kind of wonky and I work less days overall than most people and tend to just slot most of my vacation plans into that. If I plan things right I also only need to take 2 days off to get a whole week, and every other weekend I have a 3 day weekend. I don’t tend to take a lot of elaborate vacations, 3 day or less trips are kind of my norm. Every couple years I’ll do something a bit more elaborate and take a week or more, but more often my PTO tends to get used for other things besides going on vacation. I have a week coming up that I took off to paint some rooms in my house for example.

It’s not literally meth, but it is an amphetamine (in fact, literally amphetamine, it’s one of the two enantiomers of amphetamine, and the more potent of the two at that)

So same class of drugs, produces the same kind of effects to different degrees. You can kind of think of it in the same way that opium, morphine, heroin, and fentanyl are all in the same family of drugs, fentanyl is of course way more potent than opium, but at its core is still doing essentially the same thing.

And for what it’s worth, meth is also an ADHD medication, sold under the brand name Desoxyn, not super commonly prescribed but it is used for that purpose.

And since I’ve already touched on this concept- meth also exists in 2 enantiomers, Desoxyn and the street drug are dextro-methamphetamine, and levo-methamphetamine is sold over-the-counter in some places to treat stuffy noses as a “Vicks Vapor Inhaler.” Chiral chemicals like that can be weird, sometimes they can be almost entirely interchangeable, other times they can have completely different effects or mildly different potencies.

I mean, welcome to the world. Sometimes concepts are complicated and require more than a simple dictionary-style definition to fully understand. Otherwise there’d be no use for classes and textbooks and you could learn everything you need to know from a dictionary.

And I did provide some pretty short definitions right at the beginning, the rest is examples and me sort of musing on the terms for further clarification for those who need/want it.

Elsewhere in the comments I think you used the term “misogynist homicide.” If for some reason that term sits better with you, by all means use it, I’d say they’re synonymous, and all of my explanation applies just as much to that term. Language evolves and new words are coined every day, if we can come up with a neat one-word name for something as opposed to clunky 2+ word phrases I’m generally a fan of that.

Also, I think a critical reading of my comment might show you that I also have some misgivings about how we use the term, because like I repeatedly said, it can be damn hard to properly sort out the killers motivations. I think some people are too fast to slap the label on any instance where a woman is killed, especially by a man, and while it’s probably likely that the label is appropriate in the majority of those cases, I don’t think it’s necessarily a useful term to use unless you can clearly explain the misogynistic motivations behind it.

Domestic violence is violence that occurs between people who have a domestic relationship- family members, roommates, romantic/sexual partners, etc. It may or may not rise to the level of murder.

Femicide is killing a woman due to her gender, and there may or may not be a domestic relationship between the killer and the victim.

There’s going to be a lot of overlap and grey areas between the two. Many femicides are domestics, but not all, and not all domestics result in femicide

To provide some examples

1. Sort of your “classic” domestic abuse situation- man beats his wife. Domestic abuse, not a femicide because he’s not killing her.

1.5 He beats her to death. Domestic, and this may ruffle some feathers, but I’m going to say only probably a femicide. I’m sure I’m going to end up saying something like this a lot in this comment and expand on it as I go, but you kind of have to examine the killers thoughts and motivations, and they may not always be totally clear. In probably the vast majority of these kinds of situations you’d probably find there’s sort of an underlying attitude of “I’m the man, she’s the woman, so I can do whatever I want to her” to one degree or another which would make it a pretty cut-and-dry femicide, but I think there’s also cases where he might be just as violent and abusive to other people regardless of gender given the opportunity, which muddies the waters and makes it a little harder to call a femicide, if he was just as likely to kill a man under similar circumstances I don’t know if it necessarily warrants slapping the “femicide” label on it, but it sure as hell looks like one on the surface. I suspect that most places collecting and studying data on this kind of thing would just go ahead and call it a femicide and I’m not going to blame them for that, I don’t think there’s any feasible way to really examine each individual incident with the kind of attention you’d need to properly sort it out, and even if you could, in the end given the sorts of cultural imbalances between men and women that exist, you’d probably end up with the conclusion that the basically all of them do in fact qualify as femicide to some degree and the rest are just kind of a rounding error.

2. Religious extremists kill a woman they see out on the street because (take your pick, she wasn’t dressed “appropriately,” didn’t have a male guardian with her, she dared to have a job or education, etc.) That’s a femicide, but not a domestic because there was no relationship between them.

As an aside, there was a conscious decision on my part in that example to use the gender-neutral “they” in that example. You probably pictured male murderers, I did as well, but on further reflection I think it would be perfectly fair to still call it a femicide even if the perpetrators were women. The victim is still being targeted because she’s a woman who’s not behaving the way they think a woman should.

3. Woman kills her husband. Domestic, murder, not a femicide because the victim was a man.

4. (Here’s where shit really starts getting murky.) Man kills his wife because she was having an affair with another man. Again it’s a domestic, it’s a murder, and its maybe/probably a femicide. It’s a bit harder to nail down the motivation here. There could be a lot of underlying psychological, cultural, interpersonal, etc. baggage here. Did the man kill her just because she was cheating, or does he have, for example, some sort of underlying expectations that because she’s the female partner she’s supposed to be loyal and subservient to him. I don’t know that there’s an easy way to untangle that, and many men may not even really be consciously aware of those sorts of biases they have in the back of their minds. If hypothetically the man way gay/bit/pan/etc. would he have murdered a male partner in the same sort of situation?

5. Wife kills her husband’s mistress. Murder. Kind of a domestic, maybe stretching it a bit because unless he was cheating on her with her sister or something there’s not really a direct domestic relationship between the two women, but there is still an indirect link between them through the husband. Femicide? Again, maybe, for pretty much the same reasons as #4, lots of potential baggage there that would need to be unpacked.

5½. Man kills his cheating wife AND/OR wife’s mistress ~(wife was cheating on him with another woman.)~ Murder✓ Domestic? See above. Femicide? Maybe, again see above, but there’s also potentially an added aspect of “she cheated on me with another woman?” That, in his mind, adds extra insult to just the fact that she was cheating on him, would he have been so quick to jump to Murder if she had cheated on him with a man?

5¾? Woman kills her wife AND/OR her wife’s mistress. Murder- yes. Domestic - see above. Femicide - again see above, probably not a femicide, I think in this one since we’re dealing with a lesbian relationship we’ve kind of reached a point where we’d kind of expect a lot of “traditional” ideas about gender roles and such to be thrown out the window which would sort of take the concept of femicide off the table, but in practice that shit is really deeply ingrained in a lot of people and hard for them to shake entirely. There can still be some lingering notions that “a woman should be faithful to their partner” that they wouldn’t apply equally to men, and so you could make a solid argument for it qualifying as femicide.

6. Man rapes and kills woman jogging alone in the park. Murder? Yes. Domestic? No, no relationship between them. Femicide? Almost certainly yes. I’m sure there could be some edge cases of a rapist lurking in the bushes who would be happy to target the next person who came jogging down the trail regardless of their gender, but far more often they probably specifically were preying on women.

7. Man kills woman in a carjacking. Murder? Yes. Domestic? No. Femicide? Maybe. This could be a situation where they literally just carjacked the first person in a vehicle they come across, so not a femicide, it could have just as easily been a man. Or it could be a case where they specifically targeted a woman because they perceived her as being weaker, easier to victimize, less able to defend herself, etc. which I think would make a compelling argument to call it a femicide.

That’s not meant to be an all-inclusive list by any means of course.

And there’s a lot of complicating factors we could go into that I’ll be honest, I don’t feel like digging into too deep right now and I may hit the character limit if I tried to. Like how trans and nonbinary people fit into the equation, to give a short example a transphobic person kills a trans man who they “see” as a woman, you might say that they had “femicidal intent” or something to that effect, even though the victim was a man, and if they killed a trans woman, their motivations might not have been femicidal, and in their own minds they wouldn’t think they committed femicide, but to the rest of us they committed femicide anyway.

FWIW, if you haven’t already, it may be worth giving the packaging of your “regular” bacon and such a good looking-over

I haven’t done an exhaustive survey, it’s just something I tend to notice because like I said, I dabble in cured meats as a hobby, but at least around me a lot of bacon, hot dogs, etc. across the whole spectrum from bottom of the barrel store brands up to the fancy high-end name brands are touting that they’re “uncured,” and even if they don’t outright say that as a selling point they’re only listing celery powder and natural flavors in the ingredients and no sodium nitrite/nitrate

It’s not all brands by a longshot, but it’s a lot of them.

Not trying to push any kind of cured meat agenda, just kind of giving you something else to look out for, maybe it will give you a few more options or help you discover some other things you should avoid.

I don’t know about that, I was on Reddit for a few years before 2015 and /r/conspiracy always came across a little crazy to me. The specific brand of crazy fluctuated a bit over the years, and they definitely got worse at hiding it over time, but even when I first joined it seemed like you didn’t have to scratch the surface very deep to find some really weird and concerning shit.

I’ve always been a conspiracy theory enjoyer, never really bought into any of them (besides a few pretty mainstream ones, but who doesn’t have a favorite Kennedy assassination theory?) So that was probably one of the first subreddits I checked out, I don’t think I ever bothered commenting on anything there, everything there pretty much immediately gave me the sense that “oh no, these people are actually crazy and maybe even kind of dangerous”

I think possibly the best steak I ever had/made was a cheap chuck steak that I gave a nice long sous vide treatment

There is a whole lot of flavor there, but it can be as tough as shoe leather, but with sous vide it came out as tender as any filet, but way beefier

Those are great, definitely gonna be saving those

I basically want that kind of guide for curing meats and other such things

Also there are some blind spots, something I was just looking for recently is canning some of my home-cured meats to save some space in my freezer. I know it’s a theoretically possible undertaking, I can go to the store and buy a can of corned beef after all

But reputable sources like the USDA and NCHFP are kind of silent on it and pretty much leave it at “we can’t recommend doing that, curing can change the density and water content and such and we haven’t gotten the funding to test it.”

I can find people who have canned their own bacon and such, and apparently not died of botulism, but I don’t exactly trust the processes cooked up by some off-grid homestead tradwife mommy-blogger.

FYI, a whole lot of “uncured” meats, at least in the US, are just kind of using loopholes. Often there’s a little asterisk next to the word “uncured”

And if you follow that asterisk to the bottom of the back side of the package or wherever they decided to hide it in small print you’ll see it says something like “contains no added nitrites or nitrates except those naturally occurring in celery powder or other natural ingredients”

And spoiler alert, celery has kind of a lot of nitates and nitrites.

And while there are regulations about how much pure nitrates/nitrites they can add to your food, there’s no regulation on how much celery powder they can add because it’s just considered a “flavoring” ingredient and not a curing agent. “Uncured” bacon or hot dogs or whatever could technically contain far more nitrites than would legally be allowed in their cured counterparts (though in practice I’m sure they’re probably roughly the same amount)

Regardless of if those nitrites are pure or coming from celery powder, it’s the same chemical doing the same thing in your food and body.

Other veggies contain a lot of nitrites/nitrates too, cabbage for example. I’ve occasionally had it happen when I make cabbage rolls in a pressure cooker that despite being totally cooked through the ground beef is still a pretty vibrant red/pink like corned beef because of the nitrites from the cabbage.

I’m not saying this to scare-monger or anything, there are valid health concerns about nitrates and nitrites in general, and of course people like you who have a particular sensitivity to them, and it’s well worth being aware of all of that. That said, I’ve been dabbling in curing my own meats and have a big jar of Prague powder #1 in my pantry which is 6.25% sodium nitrite, so clearly it’s not something that’s particularly high on my own list of concerns. I also intend to try curing my own corned beef at some point with celery juice and other natural sources of nitrites, not because I think it’s any healthier but because it sounds like a fun experiment.

Not any kind of scientist, but an adventurous home cook

I’d really like the USDA/FDA/etc. (maybe not under the current administration) to publish sort of a food safety handbook full of tables and charts for stuff like canning, curing meats, cooking temps, etc. targeted to people like me.

I’ve recently been experimenting with curing meats, I’ve done bacon, Montreal style smoked meat, corned beef, Canadian bacon, and kielbasa.

And holy fuck, is it hard to find good, solid, well-sourced information about how to do that safely.

And I know that information is out there somewhere, because people aren’t dropping dead left and right of listeria, botulism, nitrate poisoning, etc. because they ate some grocery store bacon.

I just want some official reference I can look at to tell me that for a given weight of meat, a dry cure should be between X and Y percent salt, and between A and B percent of Prague powder #1, and that it needs to cure for Z days per inch of thickness, and if it’s a wet brine then it should be C gallons of water and…

When I go looking for that information either I find a bunch of people on BBQ forums who seem to be pulling numbers out of their ass, random recipe sites and cooking blogs that for all I know may be AI slop, or I find some USDA document written in legalese that will say something like 7lbs of sodium nitrite in a 100 gallon pickle solution for 100lbs of meat, which is far bigger than anything I’ll ever work with, and also doesn’t scale directly to the ingredients I have readily available because I’m not starting with pure sodium nitrite but Prague powder which is only 6.25% sodium nitrite.

Luckily most people with those sorts of implants I’ve seen are fairly scientifically-minded, and I’d like to think that’s the sort of thing they’d think of and would wear some sort of appropriate medic alert bracelet.

It’s not like there aren’t other sorts of medical implants, piercings, situations like people with shrapnel embedded in their bodies, etc. out in the world that could potentially cause issues with an MRI machine.

I read about people getting magnets implanted so that they can feel magnetic/electrical fields

Not quite ready to commit to implants, but i did try gluing some tiny magnets to my fingernails once.

I suspect that the implants are a bit more sensitive since they can kind of wiggle around under your skin more, but I could definitely feel some things, the two that stuck out to me were a forklift charger and an electric pencil sharpener.

I also got really used to picking up paperclips and other small metal things like that with them. I only had the magnets for maybe about a week, but I caught myself still trying to pick up paperclips with them for probably about a month afterwards.

All 3 of them, but no one’s home

He’s got a few other stupid tattoos. He’s got some more words tattooed above the stoplight in sort of a fancy script, but I can’t really make them out because he’s always wearing a hat. Some knuckle tattoos I can’t make out because in all his pictures he’s either holding a 40 of old English or flipping off the camera (or both) so his hands are always contorted weirdly, a few words that he probably thought sounded tough, some symbols I don’t recognize, and a crucifix on one arm and a devil holding a cross on the other that might be actually kind of well-done but I don’t have a great eye for tattoos.

He’s a shrimpy white guy with a patchy beard, who grew up in what passes for the ghetto in an otherwise pretty nice suburban area (not to sell it short, it is a pretty shitty town, once in a while it manages to crack some “Top X Most Dangerous Cities in state/country” sort of article, but compared to the “bad neighborhoods” in pretty much any major city it’s nothing)

I could go on for quite a while about him and the rest of that branch of the family, and all the dumb bullshit they’ve done even though I’ve never met most of them, their reputation far precedes them. All through grade school the prevailing advice from my parents was “if anyone asks if you know/are related to any other [our last name]s, just say ‘no’” and that’s always served me well.

None of his profiles seem to have been updated in about 10 years, so with any luck he’s locked up somewhere, or maybe dead. Or maybe he had just enough sense to stop broadcasting his dumbassery out onto the open internet.

It did break a little bit of headcanon for me

It always kind of stuck out to me that Han talked up how the Falcon made the Kessel run, but said nothing about him being the pilot. That felt like something he would have bragged about too, like “I made the Kessel run in under 12 parsecs in this ship”

So I always kind of figured that maybe Lando still owned it when it made the run, or maybe Chewie was the pilot, or any other random circumstance that kept Han from being the pilot, but he just conveniently left that out.

I have a distant relative with a traffic light tattooed in the middle of his forehead, just a black rectangle with red, yellow, and green circles.

And on either side he has some graffiti style writing that I’m pretty sure says “con man”

I became aware of him because we share a fairly uncommon last name, and one day police came to my house grasping at straws looking for this guy because he had been breaking into cars, so the basically went to the first person with the same last name they could find to see if we knew where he was.

It was the first time I’d heard of him, we’re not at all close with the extended family. Eventually I looked him up and found his social media with those stupid tattoos.

The stick also has the advantage of being easier to drop than the finglonger in case whatever you happen to be poking decides it wants to grab hold and pull you down

I don’t know what actual products are out there, but there are other time signals that could potentially be used, for example GPS.

Off the top of my head I don’t think I’ve seen a gps-synced clock, let alone one with a pendulum, but I’ve also never really looked for one either. It certainly feels like a product that probably exists somewhere to me, I’m sure there’s someone out there who would appreciate a clock that can automatically detect the timezone, whether the region your in observes daylight savings time, etc.