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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
cromulentenough
fatpinocchio

I’ve been looking at four-dollar-sign Japanese restaurants on Yelp (because I’m considering going to one once just to see what it’s like), and I was disappointed that all the ones I’ve looked at involve the chef deciding what to serve, and see this as a selling point. Why would I pay almost $200 (or more!) for someone to tell me what to eat? If I’m paying that much, if anything it should be the other way around - I tell them what to make and can instruct them on how to make it. I could make those Japanese chefs make mashed potatoes if I felt like it.

jadagul

Because a big part of their skillset is having better taste and more creative ideas than you have.

It’s like Tyler Cowen’s rule that if you’re at a nice restaurant and you see something on the menu that looks so weird you can’t imagine anyone eating it voluntarily, you should get it. It’s on the menu for a reason.

cromulentenough

There’s certain foods that I just don’t like, despite everyone in my family liking it and making me try it a bunch of times.

I don’t care how developed your taste is, either you’re gonna mask it so much I can’t taste that ingredient, or I’m not gonna like it.

jadagul

The big response here is that $200/plate restaurants genuinely aren’t for everyone. Going to a place like that and complaining that you got something you wouldn’t have ordered is like going to a mosh pit and complaining it was loud and crowded. I sympathize—and I would never go to a mosh pit voluntarily myself—but if you don’t want that thing then don’t buy that thing.

“Having the chef choose the food” is literally a big part of what you’re paying for. The difference between a $100/dish restaurant and a $200/person restaurant is way more about the creativity in choices than it is about the literal skill with which the food is assembled.

That said, I would also observe:

  1. There are a lot of foods and ingredients that I “don’t like” but have liked when prepared well enough/properly/by a sufficiently good chef.

  2. Some ingredients taste awful on their own but add interesting notes in combination with other things. The limiting case here is spices; I would never sit down and eat a plate of paprika or cumin. But it’s true with a lot of other ingredients. I “don’t like” tomatoes or celery, but I use both liberally in my cooking.

  3. As an artistic matter, it can be interested and rewarding to experience dishes that aren’t particularly enjoyable. (This relates back to the big response up top; if you can’t imagine feeling that way, you’re probably not the target audience).

cromulentenough

I just object to ‘better taste’. And given things like ‘we know genetics determines if you find coriander tastes soapy/ alcohol tastes bitter/ tannin-y stuff tastes a lot worse’ among others, the combination of flavours that the chef things they’re creating for you may not be the combination that you actually get, and you going ‘this ingredient tastes horrible actually, i don’t like it’ isn’t a sign that you just need to ~develop your tastes~ or whatever.

If i’ve never tried something, and i don’t find it disgusting for non taste reasons (e.g. i don’t like eating eyeballs, even if they taste good), then i’ll give it a try and i might be surprised, but with a few specific ingredients that i’ve tried a LOT of times from people telling me i just need to develop a taste for it, and that i can taste even when people who like it can’t tell it was an ingredient, I’m gonna need a lot of convincing before i pay $200 for.

jadagul

“Having better taste” is the job of most artists. When I buy a book, I don’t expect to tell the writers which words to use. When I go to a jazz concert, I don’t tell the pianist he should try a different bass pattern for the rest of the song. When I buy a painting or a print, the artist’s choice of composition is at least as important as their skill in actually constructing the picture.

I’m sensitive both to cilantro and to greens in general, so I understand where you’re coming from. There are some things I’m really not going to like!

But if I want to pick my own food, I’m not going to pay someone an extra hundred dollars for his ability to make really good and sophisticated food choices. And when I do go for a tasting menu experience, if I only like six of the eight dishes, that’s fine. Trying a bunch of stuff and being challenged for it is what I’m paying for.

(And one thing I realize is probably non-obvious: it’s not like the chef plunks down one big plate and says “here, this is what you’re eating tonight”. You generally get four to ten distinct dishes, and often a dish will have two or three separate components. I’d have been really unhappy to have been given a meal of the sea urchin sashimi, but I’m glad I got to have two bites of it and then get the next course).

cromulentenough

yeah if it’s like a tasting platter (or like, tapas) then that makes more sense.

Source: fatpinocchio
cromulentenough

Anonymous asked:

Why doesn't someone like Gates just donate a whole bunch of money to Against Malaria Foundation until it's not the best use of money anymore?

slatestarscratchpad answered:

I think for Bill Gates the answer is “because he already gave $5 billion to his own personal anti-malaria foundation, which probably works at least as well as AMF.”

I think for Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna, the answer is “because their organization, Open Philanthropy, has committed never to provide more than half of the funding to any charity, because then that charity would lose its independence, and they are already providing half of the funding of AMF.”

I think for most other billionaires, the answer is “because they’re dumb and bad”.

Source: slatestarscratchpad
cromulentenough
andthewasp

if im gonna be famous i want to be flo rida famous. this man has three billboard hot 100 #1 hits and no one can name a single thing about him except for the fact that he is from florida. no annoying stans, no controversy. just radio friendly bops. this is the type of cryptic celebrity status i wish to achieve. he just pops up once every few years makes a hit song then goes back to wrestling alligators or recounting elections…..or whatever it is that floridians even do. he allegedly has a net worth of $30 million dollars and i dont even know what he looks like. has anyone ever seen a picture of this man??? no. can anyone of you even tell me his real name without googling it first??? no. all we truly know is that he likes them apple bottom jeans and the boots with the fur that she had on but we dont even know what HE was wearing in that situation do we??? this man has the right idea i respect you flo rida i really do

Source: andthewasp
tanadrin

Notes for a Future German

tanadrin

The German language is currently spoken by about 90 million people, primarily in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Due to the late unification of the German state and some high-octane political idiocy, what little colonial empire German-speaking countries had in the 19th and 20th centuries had entirely ceased to exist by 1945, so German is not now in any sense a “global language” in the same way as English, French, or Spanish. It does, however, possess a long written history, has been the native tongue of numerous influential writers, artists, poets, and philosophers, and currently is the tongue of one of the most influential members of the European Union. Moreover, it is itself a historically diverse language that has maintained a greater degree of dialectical diversity than languages like English due the political history of central Europe. “German” is in fact a collection of dozens of regional dialects, papered over by a standard register which serves as an interlanguage for, say, Bavarians and East Frisians to communicate. The greater West Germanic dialect continuum, however, runs from the Austrian Alps, to Switzerland, to the North Sea, and west to the swamps of the Netherlands–and, once upon a time, as far east as what is now Kaliningrad.

German’s certainly not going anywhere–it’s not one of those half-pickled languages like Irish, nor is it solely the language of a single small country like Lithuanian. But there is no global gravitational pull, like the international registers of English, to unite any far-flung German dialects that might remain, so it’s reasonable to imagine new varieties might find themselves seeded wherever a large number of German speakers congregate, and are isolated from their fellow Teutophones for a couple of centuries.

Let us imagine, oh, say, a Berlin-based gang of transhumanist artist types founds a commune on one of the moons of Jupiter a hundred and fifty years hence; fiercely pursuing a kind of techno-socialist utopianism, they largely isolate themselves from the rest of the Solar System, allowing their language to develop on its own for a time. Although they are drawn from many backgrounds, the language of a narrow majority of the group is German, albeit a form influenced by the Berlin dialect–Missingsch, with some Turkish, Arabic, and English spice sprinkled on top. What kind of language might we anticipate?

Keep reading

warsofasoiaf

Anonymous asked:

Why do you hate rhaegar?

moonlitgleek answered:

I don’t. But here’s the rub: there is this rising attitude on social media that treats criticism of any character, often fictional but sometimes real too, as hate, which mostly aims at devaluing the examination of their problematic behavior or actions and turning the table on those who offer criticism in the first place. It’s rather easy to circumvent any discussion of the less-than-savory actions of someone when you dismiss anything that comes from “a hater” as a biased nitpicky view. It’s a comfortable place to be to label anything you disagree with as hate and refuse to engage with it.

So no, anon, I don’t hate Rhaegar. I’m rather fascinated, if also frustrated, by him and the place he occupies in the narrative. But what I do hate is the insistent attempts to exonerate him from any wrongdoing wrt the rebellion, Elia and Lyanna. What I do hate is the drive to minimize Elia and Lyanna and what they went through to justify Rhaegar’s actions. What I do hate is the willful misconstruction of events in the name of beautifying it, and the labeling of fans as “fanatics” to undermine their arguments. I honestly don’t know if this is a side effect of purity culture or a manifestation of the degree of bias one tends to show towards their favorites or what, but I often find myself wanting to scream that’s it’s okay to love or have sympathy for a flawed or a villainous or an awful character without the need to bend over backwards to prove that they are actually not that bad and that their detractors are just haters.

(For the record, I don’t think Rhaegar was awful or villainous, but flawed? boy oh boy. The man makes me want to scream sometimes with his one-track brain and his willful inaction)

There is a big difference between hate and engaging with actual book canon. It is the book canon that shows that Rhaegar failed to act on whatever plans he had to overthrow Aerys to the point where he completely threw them away in favor of absconding with Lyanna. It is the book canon that provides heavy suggestions that his actions with Lyanna were motivated by his prophetic concerns rather than love. It is the book canon that tells us that Rhaegar chose to fight in his father’s name which necessitated exacerbating Aerys’ tyranny by killing those who rose in rebellion out of self-defense. It is the book canon that shows Rhaegar publicly humiliating Elia and abandoning her soon after a difficult birth that almost claimed her life. It is the book canon that acknowledges that Lyanna was a “child-woman” and paints the circumstances of her residence at the Tower of Joy as suspect. Analyzing canon and using it to inform speculation is not hate, it is literary analysis.

Perhaps, instead of labeling everything that so much as acknowledges that Rhaegar fucked up as hate, you might want to ask why people bend over backwards to claim that Rhaegar had a right to leave Elia because “he didn’t love her” as if that justifies humiliating her and endangering her life, or that there is absolutely nothing wrong with the fact that he carried a 15-year-old across the continent to his wife’s homeland to impregnate her and leave her in isolation with clear instruction to his Kingsguard not to let even her own brother through, or that he was forced to fight for Aerys to protect his family as if he wasn’t the one who caused the danger to his family in the first place, or that treating Robert, Ned, Jon Arryn, Hoster Tully and hundreds of others as acceptable collateral damage to retaining the throne was not tyrannical, or that Rhaegar didn’t needlessly cause a major political crisis that set the rebellion in motion.

warsofasoiaf

It’s a good response on its own, but the idea that disliking or criticizing a character as “hate” is something that merits repeating.

-SLAL

Source: moonlitgleek
azdoine

Anonymous asked:

Instead of reading the manosphere to figure out what men like, you should play ddlc. Men love that game.

worldoptimization answered:

… okay

worldoptimization

Multiple people have now facebook messaged me to tell me that DDLC, while “cleverly constructed”/“does some cool things,” is probably not worth my time. I’m honestly tempted to play it now just to see what inspires such strong feelings of mild positivity

azdoine

centrally-unplanned:

Lol who are these jokers? DDLC is banging and has a rabid fanbase, its certainly not for everyone but I think it clearly falls into the “love or hate” camp, over the “mild positivity” camp.

Lol who are these jokers?

Metacontrarians, probably

Source: worldoptimization