Skiing can be cheap if you just happen to be local to where you want to go. Used equipment can be cheap and last a long while and season tickets can be a good bargain on a per day basis at that point. I used to do that when I lived basically on a ski mountain.

But then you catch the bug and then you have to plan out $2000+ trips just to be able to do that once after you move away.

Cooking is basically better than free.

Yes, ingredients and equipment cost money, but the end result averages out to be cheaper than if you didn’t know how to cook. And even if you take on more expensive ingredients or tools, you’re probably offsetting even more expensive restaurant meals that you would’ve eaten.

The real advice is to realize that every job has components that are not fun.

There are professional athletes who still love to play their sport, and intend to retire into coaching, but hate dealing with marketing and promos and media availability. Lots hate the travel. Some don’t like some of their teammates or coaches.

I know doctors who hate dealing with the paperwork, and programmers who hate dealing with documentation or testing, and lawyers who hate tracking their timesheets. But each of these are part of the job. The question is whether the entire bundled package deal is a pretty good job or not for yourself.

Every interaction between a man and a woman that I personally experience involves the same man, me. Therefore no matter what my sample size, the sampling bias will only observe what is true of this one specific man.

On the flip side, every man-woman interaction that a woman experiences is with the same woman.

As a result, I’ll have a lot of experience interacting with many women, and women will have a lot of experiences interacting with many men. When women protect themselves from certain traits of other men, even when those traits are not true of myself (the only man I’ve directly observed in these 1-on-1 interactions), they’re inherently building on those worst-case scenarios. I’m not too worried about it, like when my neighbors lock their doors (despite me not being a burglar).

This community is really interesting to me that these types of comics, by women, about being a woman who interacts with men, are both so popular here and so angrily criticized in the comments. It’s a fascinating combination.

due to rationing still being in place for a while, and food was pretty dire still in the 70s and 80s.

That was definitely true of Japan, too, where ramen was a poverty food popularized out of necessity, that then became a foundation for innovation up the value chain.

Same with Korea, where American occupation (and a whole history of foreign conquest and occupation) made for interesting combinations of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and American ingredients. Now Spam is probably bigger in Asia and the Pacific Islands than it ever was in America.

Same with many American food traditions being rooted in the slave trade (see West African food culture being remixed with new world ingredients and exported right back to the Americas in what would become southern U.S. and Caribbean food).

And of course there’s the broader discussion between the interplay between fine dining, casual dining, home cooking, industrial/mass production of prepared/processed foods, etc., that often creates its own foodways.

I’m biased in that I think the cultural mixing in the Americas makes for better food innovation, where so many American classics are some sort of mix of German, Italian, Mexican (which is itself a mix of indigenous and Spanish cuisine, while Spanish cuisine itself has significant North African influence), Caribbean/West African, with even a little bit of French Canadian influence mixing in on Cajun food.

Merely importing ingredients is only part of it. There’s a lot to be said for techniques, tools/equipment, and traditions, too.

But you described it as “suffering.” The subjective experience of a person in that culture is that the food is less pleasant to consume.

In other words, the enjoyment of the food is actively discouraged, in favor of another criterion (the suffering that comes from eating it). So we can point out that the culture does not prioritize the enjoyment of food as much, and can stand by that particular metric as having directionality on that spectrum.

Some dedicated bread lames are curved (see OP’s frontmost lame) which can make certain swooping curved cuts easier. I generally lack the skill to be able to do it consistently, though, so a flat razor blade holder generally works best for me.

Even in puritan cultures that intentionally eat plain food to shun “hedonism”, food becomes a vehicle for virtue signaling. The suffering is a ritual practice. Food, even then, plays a critical cultural role.

Yeah, but one can view that cultural tradition and conclude that their culture does not value the deliciousness of food as much as some other cultures.

British food is unironically great, and the stereotype is based on experiences during WW2 rationing

I think this overstates things. A substantial number of countries have their modern culinary culture defined in the post-war decades, though.

Japanese culinary identity came together after World War II, and many of the dishes and traditions defining their cuisine are recently invented or have evolved considerably during the post-war period: the popularization and evolution of ramen, katsu, Japanese curry, yakitori, etc. Even ancient traditions like sushi and Modern Japanese food draws a lot of influence from classic pre-war cuisine, but the food itself is very different from what was eaten before the war.

Even French cuisine underwent a revolution with nouvelle cuisine, heavily influenced by Japanese kaiseki traditions. Before the 20th century, French cuisine was about heavy sauces covering rich, slow-cooked foods (see for example the duck press and how that was used), and it took a few waves of new chefs pushing back against the orthodoxy to emphasize lighter, fresher ingredients. The most notable wave happened in the 1960’s, when Paul Bocuse and others brought in small, lighter courses as the pinnacle of fine dining.

Korean, Italian (both northern and southern), and American culinary traditions changed pretty significantly in the second half of the 20th century, as well, through changes in food supply chains, political or economic changes, etc. And that’s true of a lot of places.

Britain’s inability to shake off an 80-year-old culinary reputation comes in large part from simply failing to keep up with other more food-centered cultures that continually reinvent themselves and build on that classic foundation. Some of the criticism is unfair, of course, but it’s not enough to point at how things were 100 years ago as if that has bearing on what is experienced today.

Terrible distribution of options. A good list would have a series of technologies and tools that became obsolete at different times. Almost all of these became obsolete with the rise of broadband internet in the early 2000’s, while a handful were earlier (rotary phones) or later (paper maps, paper checks).

Smithers, I really feel like a free spirit. And I’m really enjoying this so-called “iced cream.”

The choices also tend to center around 2005, with only a handful of technologies that were made definitely obsolete before 1995 or after 2010.

I eat a legume at pretty much every meal. Not all of them are high fiber foods, like peanuts or peanut butter, but most have some. Peas have 7g per serving. Peanuts have 2g per serving. Green beans have 3g. The actual beans start running away with it, though, with something like 15g of fiber per serving.

All those go a long way to hit 25g per day.

Basically legumes are how I get affordable protein, too, so it’s hitting multiple needs with a cheap and easy ingredient.

I moved cities about 5 times between 18 and 30. Each time I had a pretty easy time making new friends in the place where I found myself, and learning a bit about myself and what I’m looking for in friendships, what I have to offer in a friendship, and the types of people I get along best with.

By the time I sorta settled down in my 30’s in one more new city, I had decades of building that actual skills of meeting new people, becoming good friends with the ones who got along with me, and then maintaining those friendships over time.

Now, in my 40’s, even with kids, I still make friendships at work, in the neighborhood, through my kids’ schools and activities, etc. Making the leap of “let’s hang out outside of the context where we met” grows easier when you’ve done it a million times before. And the act of scheduling friend interactions on your personal calendar becomes second nature over time, as well.

All this is to say that it’s a feedback loop, and you want to be in the virtuous cycle, not the vicious cycle. But if you are in the spiral, breaking out of it can pay dividends faster than you’d expect.

This is several of the plotlines running through Superbad.

I buy stuff from all sorts of places. I’m pretty serious about food and cooking, and I run through a pretty wide variety of cultures and regional variation in making my food. So for me, this is how I buy:

Fresh produce in season: street markets

Fresh produce out of season (greenhouse grown or shipped in from another latitude): Whole Foods

Mainstream American prepackaged foods: nearest big box corporate supermarket.

Day to day meat, dairy, and seafood (chicken, beef, pork, shrimp): Whole Foods

Specialty meat (aged stuff, unusual cuts): local specialty butcher, ethnic grocery stores

Specialty seafood (live seafood, less common items): specialty seafood shop

Fancy cheeses: cheese store in my neighborhood, occasionally Whole Foods

Various ethnic specialities (Kim chi, tortillas, paneer, certain types of Chinese/Korean/Vietnamese vegetables, Mexican/Indian spices) that are perishable: ethnic grocery stores

Unusual or imported prepackaged or shelf stable foods/spices: ethnic grocery stores, Amazon, other online stores depending on the item.

Maybe the real toast was the strokes we had along the way.

The current ratio is probably 10 to 1

In terms of compliments you give, what’s the ratio? Be part of the solution.

I compliment my friends all the time. It’s an easy way to support the people you care about.