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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • Yep. I’m a little too deep into sushi and it’s pretty funny that people will gatekeep ingredients.

    The ingredients that Edomae chefs now use are extremely traditional. Essentially every single one was for food safety, not taste. Vinegar, wasabi, and sake in nikiri are all meant to prevent food-borne illness. The red rice vinegar used at high end restaurants was originally used because it was cheap. Fish is obviously readily available. Edomae chefs now use them because they prefer the taste— which I’ll agree with, I make it the same way— not because it’s sacrilege not to. Every one of the top chefs can tell you the history of sushi as a stall food meant to be accessible.

    Even crotchety Jiro, who might chastise you for using soy sauce, deviates from tradition by using exclusively white vinegar and adding sugar. Yet the same gatekeepers love that guy (until you reach the super gatekeepers who are too cool for him because he got famous).

    Sushi superiority is truly insane to me. I wonder if some assholes back then looked down on the “peasants” for trying to extend the shelf life of their food.

    Sorry this comment is so long, I’m way too deep into this. It’s funny, two chefs I know are top five in Japan (thus, some would say, the world), respected beyond belief, and on my first visits they stayed well after close to talk to the dumb foreigner who wanted to improve his at home sushi. One doesn’t speak English and has one of his apprentices translate between us. I guess when you get far enough into sushi, you feel the need to ramble about it.



  • Real wasabi paste sounds like a poor value, wasabi doesn’t age too gracefully when grated and you’d presumably pay a markup for the packaging and grating

    For those who live in areas with good Japanese grocery stores, I highly recommend looking for some rhizomes and grating it at home. Super easy, less than $10 for several servings, and lasts a couple weeks. If anyone is interested but doesn’t wanna Google it, feel free to reply or DM me and I can send my grater/process.

    There are a lot of foods that aren’t quite as good out of their home country, but American grown wasabi is excellent. I’ve had someone tried to gatekeep me but like, I coincidentally am very into sushi and am reasonably friendly with a couple ***/Tabelog gold sushi chefs that I visit when in town, some of the best in the world with access to the highest quality ingredients. I’m not eating the wasabi directly but I can’t tell a difference between theirs and the American one from half moon bay. It’s definitely worth trying if it’s available in your area, you aren’t missing anything by doing it yourself and it takes minutes.




  • Imo the main difference is that Target has tap to pay/QR code payment while Walmart pushes Walmart+’s payment methods. I tried W+ since it was free with one of my credit cards, and it’s still quite inconvenient.

    But otherwise, I largely agree. Targets feel a little nicer and they look better, but that hardly matters. If there were more Walmarts around me I’d go there instead sometimes. As much as I dislike the Waltons, Walmart sometimes has better selections than Target. Truthfully I’m morally for shoplifting from Walmart but don’t like committing crimes myself since there is risk involved.



  • Tangentially, some Target brand stuff really sucks. Anything with moving parts seems quite prone to breaking quickly. The food items I’ve tried are extremely low quality. One such item is their shredded mozzarella.

    Truly, it is the worst mozzarella I can think of. Tasted off and the texture was lightly rubbery. It also would not melt. Before they started botting the reviews (I assume; it is difficult to imagine real humans enjoying it), it was rated poorly on their own site. And still the reviews mention how it simply does not melt and is quite terrible.

    That fateful bag of horror made me start paying closer attention to the quality of Target brand items, and I have found it lacking. The foods I tried were bad— there was also a memorable bag of cookies, dusty in texture and taste. Also their foaming soap dispensers break consistently within months, though they’re otherwise quite nice.

    So as they pivot into store brand, I’d urge you exercise caution trying them. Buy a brand you like as well so you’re not left without, should it prove low quality. Walmart brand stuff is way better but there are far more Targets where I live.




  • Yeah same. I first remember hearing it when Apple was planning that amazingly invasive local scanning of user images. Now it seems to be everywhere.

    I’m not against it though. CP could’ve described multiple things and this one is a lot less mistakable when you know. CP wasn’t particularly intuitive either— no easier to decipher, merely that with years of use many people knew it— so it’s an upgrade overall I think.

    Another benefit is that it includes “abuse” in the name. That’s important and ensures the people who seek that stuff out won’t borrow the term like they did CP.







  • It’s not even that big of a sacrifice honestly. Wearing a mask is pretty trivial. Restaurants have outdoor tables. The indoor-only ones that don’t but are still worth going to tend to seat less than 15 people so I occasionally deem it worth the risk.

    Long Covid seems way, way worse than a mask. When we have a cure for that I’ll drop it, but until then it’s not even that inconvenient.

    Plus, you don’t even have to get the worst symptoms for it to affect you. A couple people I know lost their taste and smell in 2020/2021 and have yet to regain it. That, I think, ruins restaurants more than sitting outside.


  • Sorry for late response, one of the other commenters got it but if you didn’t look it up after you probably don’t know the scale of the search. There are a ton of Easter eggs and a few UFOs hanging around in the game, leading many to think there is a large scale mystery that can be solved. Also hard to describe the Easter eggs— there was a mural on a mountain, an ingame serial killer, a ghost and her daughter, a cult, ingame rumors of UFOs, an alien frozen in ice, three UFOs hovering and one crashed, and a lot more that I probably can’t remember.

    So for years people scoured through the game and decompiled code hoping to find it. The search is actually vaguely still ongoing apparently, even after the leak since it takes time to parse through.

    While there is still stuff undiscovered, it’s most likely that this was part of the cancelled single player DLCs. Which does suck because it was a genuinely interesting idea and it would’ve been cool if R* had managed to hide a real massive subplot in the game.

    Not the best summary cause it’s been a while and I was never that invested, but it was pretty interesting in the first few years.