Take my devious ghost pepper challenge! Can YOU tell the difference between r/spicy and r/nosleep?
This is the very first quiz I’ve managed to set up on the new Eleventy blog and you better like it because it took me all freaking day and I’m tired. In fact, I expect you to not only show this to your friends and compare scores, but read it out question-by-question on a Discord call until they ask you to stop.
Warning
This one’s, uh, it gets gross in all of the ways you can imagine.
On that note, this might be one of the last Tab Cleans. I was thinking about moving to a “links of the day” format, which could be an excuse to finally return to cleaning out my hundreds of bookmarks. What do you think?
Howdy! This was a pretty big update with unfortunately very little visible from the front end, as most of my updates seem to be these days.
Long story short and with as little technical jargon as possible, the program I use to build this site had gotten catastrophically slow due to the gigabyte’s worth of images it had to process every time I updated any page on the site. I ended up writing my own script for image processing and now I’ve gotten page build times down to a reasonable 3.5 seconds.
If I can learn how to write smaller blog posts, it’ll mean more frequent updates. But really, I’m just glad it’ll make me dread the blog a little less.
You can now also view tags over on the Categories page. The list was originally gigantic and I got the idea to limit it to only tags that have been used more than once. I’d like to eventually make it a tag cloud, the kind where the more frequently used tags are bigger, but my heart’s just not in it right now.
I regret to inform you that this tab clean is old, and overdue to be posted. How old? One month old. Old enough that I did another tab clean in the meantime, which I will be hopefully posting next week.
Depression, as you may know, is a weighted blanket with evil intentions. It’s the nap on the couch that you swear will only take half an hour, and then when you wake up the sun has already set.
Over this summer it felt like I was up to my neck in depression. I was desperate for anything to do, but burdened with no motivation to try new things. That was when the stars finally aligned: my friend Forest posted on Mastodon suggesting that they would like some friends to parallel play on RetroAchievements with them.
This felt like a moment I was made for. When I’m depressed, there’s nothing that gets me through it better than maxing out a video game, and this time I could actually show people I had done it! Not just that, but I could finally use this opportunity to finish Sonic Adventure, a game I’ve been struggling to 100% ever since I first got it.
Unfortunately, this undertaking meant that I played Big the Cat’s levels.
This just in: my friend found a thing in their freezer that they say is, and I quote, “pretty good.”
Green Giant’s “Restaurant-Style Popcorn Cauliflower” appears to have come into existence with no fanfare at some point in late 2023. My friend bought them on clearance in April 2024, and in the time that they spent not eating them, the product was just as quietly discontinued.
How does it taste? The verdict: “Like fish sticks.” It’s up to you if that’s convincing praise or not, because my friend takes some of the scariest food photography I’ve ever seen, but I used to eat cauliflower bites back when I was vegan and I kind of miss it, so I’m sold on these now.
But the real reason I’m writing this article is because this stupid product does not exist anywhere online except for a single TikTok. I’m not going to sleep at night knowing that culinary history is moving onto a login-gated Library of Alexandria that’s already on fire. I have to do something about this. This one goes out to all the middling discontinued products of the world.
