I agree with you. Even if you never touch it, it's nice to know what the libraries you're calling are doing under the hood.
Imagine being a high-ranking NYT exec, watching a computer hellbrain churn for a few minutes and spit out a five letter word.
"See? We can help!"
"I UNDERSTAND that one time you saw YOUR MOTHER wearing CLOTHING. The HORROR of it. THE DRAPING FABRIC. THE DELICATE EMBROIDERY. The WAY it BUNCHED UP AROUND HER. I cannot begin to FATHOM how DISGUSTING it must have been for you. TO SEE YOUR MOTHER THERE in CLOTHING. This is not the kind of thing I like to imagine. The FOLDS and GUSSETS and BUTTON HOLES. Imagine your mother PUTTING HER CLOTHING ON, thrusting her STUBBY FINGERS through her BUTTON HOLES as she DRAPES HERSELF IN FABRIC. And when she was done she LOOKED IN A MIRROR....."
I had this whole theory built up about how the aliens were manifestations of the little girl's trauma and grief and everything was just happening within the town. All the stuff on the radio and TV was her using spooky kid mind powers unconsciously. That's why they were allergic to water: she has a weird thing about contaminated water glasses.
And then at the end he just hits the fucking alien with a baseball bat and the credits roll. What the actual hell.
Getting stopped randomly in the street by people trying to find weed or the Greek Orthodox temple, that's what.
As a survivor of homeschooling, this is the one thing I wish more people understood: school is not about cramming enough data into a kid until they magically evolve into an adult. School is supposed to teach you how to think.
Not in an Orwellian sense, but in a "here's how to approach a problem, here's how to get the data you need, here's how to keep track of it all, here's how to articulate your thoughts, here's how to ask useful questions...." sense. More broadly, it should also teach you how to handle failure and remind you that you'll never know everything.
Abstracting that away, either by giving kids AI crutches or -- in my case -- the teacher's textbook and telling them to figure it out, causes a lot of damage once they're out of the school bubble and have to solve big, knotty problems.
Have you played the second one? I begged my parents for weeks to rent it. Then I got it and... I can't even describe it. At one point there's a platformer puzzle room based on the Three Bears. I played it for a whole weekend because I couldn't believe how awful it was.
maybe this will work
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linting and unit tests
I'm mostly talking about dry ingredients, which I can mash down, level off, leave heaping....
Most of the issues I had with cooking are a result of how recipes are. Recipe says dice a thing? How small? A teaspoon of something? The hell does that mean? I can fit a ton of stuff in there if I mash it down. Salt to taste? Forget about it. Pretty soon I'm operating in panic mode and maybe the recipe turns out but I'm too stressed out to enjoy it.
Enter Sohla's cookbook, which explains everything. It's part cookbook, part autobiography, and part reference manual. Her youtube videos are tremendous fun, too.
Yeah, the goddamn wooden spoon. I remember being noisy in a crib and my mom storming into the room screaming and busting the spoon in half on the side of the crib. She'd already hit me with it so I knew exactly what it meant. I got spoons, open hand, and hairbrushes for most of my childhood. Hair pulling, pinching, and ear-twisting too if we were in a situation where she couldn't just haul off and hit me.
The funny thing is, she called me up about a decade ago and asked if I could remember anything about my childhood that was bad. And rather than list everything off, I told her about the time she broke the spoon on the crib. That's when I found out that it hadn't happened at all, and in fact if it had happened it was because the spoon was old and brittle and if she'd done anything at all it would have been a light tap on the side of the crib to get my attention, and now that she remembers it yeah that's exactly what happened. It just fell apart in her hands. We didn't talk for a few years because of that and other things.
After my daughter was born, she sent us a package that included two beautiful olivewood spoons from Israel. I use the fuckers when I'm making pasta. She calls or texts every once in a while warning me about protecting my daughter dark, evil things in the world. This usually happens when she sees a picture of my kid playing with a toy spider or a halloween skull. And I just chuckle and agree that there are dark, evil things in the world and I'm doing my damndest to protect her from them.
Lawyers all dragging screenshots of excitebike into court and counting the wheels.
This dovetails nicely with my theory that Jesus hasn't come back yet because we invented the nailgun.
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It's been a busy few weeks. Other than grilling the occasional bratwurst, I haven't been able to do much.
We needed an easy dinner tonight, so my wife prepped some stuffed peppers and brought a fairly thick ribeye home. While she got the peppers ready, I salted the ribeye and let it hang out in the fridge while I got the grill started. Last time I posted a steak, Hossenfeffer suggested a reverse sear, so that's what I did.
I got the egg up to 350ish F because that's what the peppers needed. I put the heat deflector in and gave the peppers a 15 minute head start. Then I prepped the thermometer and set a target of 120F. It took about 15min, which was fortunate because that's how much longer the peppers needed.
I wasn't prepared for how hideous the steak looked after 15min, but I soldiered through the horror and let it rest in a foil tent while I pulled the (very hot) heat deflector out and opened the vents all the way. Once I hit about 575F I opened the grill and threw the steak back on for 30s a side.
I'm pretty happy with the results. The peppers (with a cooked filling of mushrooms, hazelnut, and goat cheese) turned out great and went really well with the steak. Definitely trying both again. Thanks for the suggestion!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bigos
We found out our oven wasn't working this evening and my wife really wanted bigos for dinner. Given that it's mostly about cooking pork and other fun stuff in a pot at 250F for 4 hours, we decided to fire up the green egg.
We didn't really follow a recipe, just chopped up pork, beets, potatoes, a head of cabbage, and an onion, added salt, and dumped it all in a pot. I got the grill up to temperature with the indirect heat plate installed and then just moved the pot onto the grill. Aside from stirring it a few times, I left it covered.
It was amazing. I have no idea what kind of vile tricks our oven used to fool us into thinking it can cook things properly, but the food stayed moist and developed a nice broth instead of charring onto the bottom of the pot like it usually does. That means that instead of chiseling sludge out of the pot, we had watermelon and relaxed on the patio!
I actually left the pot on the grill for a half hour longer than necessary because my wife hadn't gotten back yet and it still came out perfectly.
I can't wait to try other recipes like it. 10/10, would recommend.
Friday is usually grilling day if it's warm enough. I ran down to the local butcher's shop and bought a couple of NY strip steaks for this evening. I also bought some corn and a bundle of asparagus (more on that later.)
They probably didn't need it, but i did a marinade and let them sit in the fridge for two hours: 1/4 cup lime juice 1/4 cup Worcestershire sauce 1/4 cup tamari 1/4 cup high-heat oil (i used sunflower) ~1 tbsp brown sugar a few cloves of garlic, squashed through a press ~1 tbsp stone-ground mustard a handful of thyme a handful of cilantro
I also soaked the corn for a half hour so the husk wouldn't burn during the cooking session.
Once work was over I went out to the patio and started the BBQ. When I had it stabilized at 450F, I added the corn, took the steaks out of the fridge to bring them up to room temperature, and added the corn.
I tried to prep the asparagus, but it was slimy and smelled like a fish tank. We had frozen peas instead.
After the corn had been on the grill for 20mins (turned it 15mins) I added the steaks. They were about 2" thick, so I did the first side for 6min and the second for 7. They ended up on the done side of medium rare. I think next time I'll try 5 and 7. Dinner went well and I've got enough left over for a sandwich tomorrow. Have a good weekend!
5:00 AM: My alarm goes off, reminding me to do BUTT STUFF. It's not as funny as it was yesterday evening. I snooze the alarm and then get out of bed anyway. Downstairs, out to the back porch, uncover the big green egg, start the charcoal, turn the alarm off again. I loaded it the day before, filling the fire box all the way up and cramming four gnarly pieces of hickory into the charcoal. It's charcoal from the bottom of the bag and there are more small pieces than I expect, but I went with it anyway. Indirect heat plate and drip pan go in, followed by the grate. I watch the needle creep up to 225F and then lock the vents down.
5:30 AM: I pull the pork shoulder out of the refrigerator, unwrap all ten pounds of it, and immediately feel overwhelmed. I've done a few chickens and two racks of ribs on the egg, but nothing this massive. First I flip it over and score a diamond pattern into the fat cap, and then cover the whole thing in yellow mustard and BBQ rub (label: sea salt, brown sugar, paprika, garlic, onion, "other spices".) Back out to the BBQ to check if it's stabilized. It's still running cold, so I open the vents wider and watch the needle creep up to 225. This is the longest I've ever cooked anything. I try not to obsess about all the things that will go wrong.
6:15 AM: The butt is on the grill. I'm leaving it alone for 3 hours so the smoke can do its thing. To keep from hovering, I go inside and mix up the BBQ sauce: apple cider vinegar, brown sugar, cayenne, black pepper, and salt. The recipe says to boil the solution and that effectively fills the house with homemade pepper spray.
7:00 AM: My wife and daughter are awake and coughing. I am wildly unpopular.
7:05 AM: Finishing the BBQ sauce on the patio. Most of it goes into a plastic squeeze bottle, but I pour 8 oz through a coffee filter and into an all-purpose spray bottle. I'll be using this, starting at 9:15, every half hour until the butt reaches 165 internal temp. It's a brisk morning and every window not facing the patio is wide open to let the horrible vinegar/capsaicin stench out of the house.
7:10 AM: Yoga and coffee and a lot more coughing.
9:15 AM: Here we go! Spray meat liberally, insert bluetooth thermometer, set timer for 30m. Chase daughter around the yard in the interim. The app says the butt will be done by 6:30. The temperature is climbing steadily, but I know it'll stall out at some point. The stall can last as much as six hours and isn't predictable, so fingers crossed that it'll work out.
1:30 PM: 165! The meat stalled for about an hour at 145, but we're past that now. I've been spraying it every half hour and it's finally time to wrap it in foil. I've already set up a tray and it's the work of about a minute to lift the lid, remove the butt, wrap it up, and replace it. I open the vents wider to get the temp up to 250. They're wider than I'm comfortable with, but at this point I'm largely on autopilot and just want to make number go up.
1:40 PM: Time to lay down. The bluetooth thermometer is registering a lower ambient temp than I expected, but the grill thermometer is sitting solidly at 250. I hand-wave it away as the foil messing with the thermometer in some way. Meat temp is still climbing. A tiny voice in the back of my mind reminds me that I have the vents open a lot wider than expected but I ignore it.
2:40 PM: I sure don't like the ambient temperature reading. I expected it to start climbing, but it's been sitting at a plateau for the last 15 minutes and has just started to tick down. Internal temp is still climbing, albeit slowly. I race out of bed and check the grill thermometer, which shows 240. Uh oh.
2:45 PM: We've trained for this. Actually, no, we haven't. We've never done this before. But we've thought about doing it. We've thought about it a lot. I have a pair of welding gloves, a tray, a fresh open bag of charcoal and my heat gun lighter.
Don gloves, open vents all the way, open grill, remove butt. Remove grate. Remove drip pan. Remove indirect heat plate. Underneath, I see two glowing coals and a sea of ash.
Here we go.
Rake the ashes. Dump in another full load of charcoal, aim heatgun into the center, hold the button down until center glows red. Replace indirect heat plate, drip pan, grill, and butt. Close lid, stare at thermometer and will it up to 250.
2:50 PM: The thermometer app notifies me that it will be another eight hours before the butt will be done. That's less than ideal. I leave it alone.
4:30 PM: Against all odds, internal temp continues to climb. We're at 191 now. My ambient temperature graph looks like a polygraph session. The app says we're ten degrees and an hour and a half out.
My brain is working overtime coming up with worst-case scenarios: it'll be dry, it'll be unevenly cooked, it'll be burned, it'll climb out of the BBQ and steal my wallet.
6:15 PM: Internal temp is 202. Time to take it out and let it rest for an hour. I use the time to run to the store and pick up wine. My wife made pasta salad the night before and is cooking peas. What's in the foil? What did I do?
7:15 PM: The moment of truth. I'm dreading this, but I don't want to wait any longer. I unwrap the thing and cut into it, mostly thinking about Captain Ahab finally stabbing that pesky whale. The knife slides into it like butter. It pulls apart easily. The bark seems ok.
We quickly load up plates. I offer the crowd-strength BBQ sauce to the table but there are no takers.
It turned out! I made pulled pork! My daughter complains loudly until she tries it. We all get up for second helpings. I run a plate over to the neighbor. The rest gets shredded and bagged up for leftover sandwiches and enchiladas.
It all worked out! I'm already planning my second butt.
Links I used: https://thebbqbuddha.com/how-to-smoke-a-boston-butt-on-the-big-green-egg/ https://www.aforkstale.com/carolina-barbecue-sauce-recipe/
