Or worse: it’s in telephone mode now, so obviously you only want the sound from the “call” because there’s no other reasons the microphone could be on.

A solid chunk of Philip K Dick’s output worked better as movies/TV than as books.

There’s definitely something there, but the books feel somewhat unfinished/unpolished. Which makes sense, his books weren’t popular in English until after the release of Blade Runner, which coincided with his death. Maybe the popularity of the movie would’ve given him more time and resources to revise future works.

A Scanner Darkly is the only one where both the book and the movie felt about the same quality.

Chittenden county is moderately dense. It has about 25% of the state’s population. There’s public transit in the form of buses and it seems moderately used. It’s a rural state, but not nearly as rural as you seem to think.

In contrast I grew up in a significantly more densely populated suburbs in the greater Boston area. People might use the commuter rail, but I’m not even sure what other public transit even existed. If it’s there I’ve never heard of anyone interacting with it.

True but I’d just like to sit and admire the word frugivorous for a moment

It’s also worth noting that this is famous enough that Amazon has offered a service called Mechanical Turk since 2005.

The implementation and service are both fine in theory, but you do need to be clear that what’s being paid for is humans pretending to be computers.

Slice it before you go. Are items with bread not found in picnics?

Sandwiches are perfect for a picnic, and it’s an occasion you’d want to gussy them up a bit for. Fancier bread might be the cheapest and most obvious way to do that.

It’s still not loading for me unless I open it externally

I think that’s part of the point. It’s someone’s job to make the original comic.

Removing the titular protagonist should ruin a work. Removing them here does absolutely nothing. It makes no more or less sense, despite losing a core component. One would hope a comic in widespread syndication would fare better.

At least with memes when they’re inevitably bad, it’s probably someone fucking around, not a paid professional.

It really depends what sort of recipes you’re making, but for cooking very loose approximations are often fine.

I often have to convert to weight/mass in order to find out how much of an ingredient to buy. I have no idea how many cups an eggplant is. But once I get it home the recipe might as well say “however much eggplant you have.”

If I’m truly off, I will typically scale up the recipe adjusting for the extra meat or vegetable content. I’ll more or less assume that 1lb of meat is interchangeable with 1lb of veggies. That’s not quite true, in particular with salt.

Your mileage may vary though. Some recipes and ingredients are much more sensitive to deviations.

There may be an earlier version, but I know this as an old Emo Phillips joke

I’ve run into it when interacting with folks who grew up in the south. It seems moderately common there. With folks who grew up in the northeast, I haven’t seen this be a thing.

Yes! The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum were both great. If you’ve read more of his work and have a recommendation for where to go next I’d love to hear it.

On the topic of Italian authors, I loved Italo Calvino’s “If on a winter’s night a traveler” as well. I didn’t really expect it to pay off as a cohesive work. I was mostly along for the ride and was pleasantly surprised.

Cheerios and Bugles (each separately). Nothing in either item should make them smell like death. But every flavor of either I’ve encountered always has. They’re not even the same kind of grain.

I’ll eat most ingredients in a wide variety of contexts. It’s pretty rare that I’ll find something that I don’t like, and can’t eventually find a way to like.

I’m not expecting them to be amazing, but them being substantially worse than bland and boring is still a surprise.

That does sound great! Ham isn’t necessarily a bad ingredient, it’s just unusually difficult to tell if it’ll be good or it’ll suit your tastes, especially with more inexpensive kinds.

It’s hard to see where I’d choose it over another topping, but I imagine with most pizzas I don’t really care about ham’s failings.

Pineapple and anchovies might be the two stanard toppings that are really build-arounds. Most other standard pizza toppings seem closer to “do whatever, it’ll be fine”

The ham used on pizzas around here (northeast US), usually isn’t salty enough to work on a Hawaiian pizza. It’s often deli ham, which runs the risk of being sweet, but otherwise flavorless.

Bacon or pepperoni work better. Jalapeno also helps.

Slightly hotter, but still quite tame take:

Ham is the problem with Hawaiian pizza. Pineapple is innocent.

You’ve moved away from the part which specifies long-haul trucking. To my understanding this is an area where trains are a reasonable solution.

Last mile coverage we also have room for improvement with much smaller vehicles, like bikes.

I’m not sure I’d say it’s exact, but some of the political norms you’re describing appear to have been extremely short-lived. That’s not to say we shouldn’t try to get them back or rue their loss.

Machine politics with power structures like in Tammany hall seem to have been popular for quite a while.

Boulders are the best kind of decorative bollard