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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • Milk, PB sandwich, cream-of-wheat (esp. with maple), low-caffeine and -astringency teas, Kraft Mac for all of 15 min before the gutache sets in (homemade mac is better if I have the time, but cooking is decidedly not soothing), egg on bagel with cheese (yolk must not be runny), chicken and rice or noodle soup without too much sage or rosemary where the veggies have become properly soft, properly seasoned black beans (see, my food does have color sometimes), and instant mashed potatoes.

    This does not include foods that I often enjoy but are not (to me) soothing such as funky cheeses, most Indian curries (to the wonder of my parents), burritos, and mom’s spaghetti, all of which are exciting, tasty, and attention-grabbing but are not soothing per se.

    Texture for the longest time has been the issue; anything without a texture surprise and that does not have an overpowering flavor (super sour, bitter, or, when I was younger, spicy) tends to be at least tolerable. I get most of my fruits and veggies by either stewing them to death in soups or blending into smoothies… or as raw bell peppers, for some reason.

    Unasked-for list of unpleasant food textures

    Wet crunch of veggies in soft pastas or soups (undercooked onions, green peppers, celery), lettuce of all kinds (plus it’s bitter, but no one seems to agree), the russian roulette that is a box of fresh berries, oranges with too much pith (and seeds!), the weird semisoft texture of white midwestern stir-fried vegetables, chewy chunks of fat or gristle in meats, sea bugs


  • Ah, voluntoldment. We just had a big round at my workplace, but at least no one only a couple people up the chain are engaging with the autofellatory fiction that AI will pick up the slack. Even still, they canned the hypercompetent plant engineer that everyone liked, so half his team left and a couple of our projects are dead in the water because of it. /vent

    edit: chemical manufacturing, not software


  • Huh, didn’t know that gardeners were essentially doing silica sol-gel syntheses. A note of caution: contact with TEOS and other organosilicates can and will cause permanent eye and lung damage (converts to silica, and, broadly, rocks in lungs bad). Make sure your work area is well ventilated and ideally use some kind of eye protection against splashing, don’t touch your face, and wash up when done. TEOS is less reactive once in contact with water (it hydrolyzes to silicic acids and eventually silica, with rates depending strongly on pH).

    Also note that adding TEOS to water does slightly lower pH due to this hydrolysis reaction, but it is much less severe of an adjustment than potassium silicate.







  • I was on arch as a vestige from my school days, having never quite found the time to switch to something more stable. When I saw the news over the weekend, I checked and found 1 would-be-infected package on my machine that was thankfully months out of date. I’m well past the point of wanting to examine PKGBUILDs every time (hence the out of date package). But, instead of just removing AUR packages and sticking to arch repos, I decided to sweep up the technical debt by wiping and installing Fedora. I’m liking it so far, minus the absolute pain in the ass that is Nvidia on Linux. Fuck academics and their insistence on writing everything targeting CUDA; otherwise, I’d have saved a good bit of money a few years ago with a much more compatible AMD card.






  • Alkylation is any reaction that attaches a saturated hydrocarbon group through one of its carbons to something else (more loosely, the hydrocarbon group may contain atoms besides H and C and only be saturated at the point of attachment). It’s pretty common in organic chemistry. The meme is portraying a humorous obsession with alkylation by listing alkylation agents and things the author wants to alkylate, including some unconventional or inadvisable targets.

    Incidentally, a lot of alkylation agents are carcinogenic because they alkylate DNA.







  • No dunking, and make sure what you’re buying is mostly alcohol (> 95%) and not water/alcohol mixtures often used for disinfection. Using in combination with e.g., a toothbrush is probably your best bet. IPA (and acetone) can strip some adhesives and cause certain kinds of electrical insulation to swell or dissolve, so a targeted approach is better. IPA is flammable (though less so than acetone), so be careful/well ventilated when allowing parts to dry, and ensure parts are fully dried before reconnecting to power.

    IPA itself is only about twice as toxic as ethanol and certainly less problematic by inhalation than tar in the long run. I wouldn’t bother with a mask mostly because it won’t do shit unless it’s a cartridge respirator. However, IPA can sometimes facilitate skin absorption. IDK specifically about tar buildup but recommend wearing gloves (disposable nitrile is fine).