As long as you’re getting “favorited”, it’s working as intended. Retooting (sorry, I know that’s not what it’s called I just enjoy the term) is less a determinant of what kind of interest there is on your post, but if you’re getting any at all, you’re doing good.
Mastodon as a whole isn’t really about this kind of discussion. Just like Twitter was not going to have the same degree of interaction that reddit offered. Mastodon serves a different purpose, so it’s very difficult to make it work for threaded discussion, even though you can even use it to interact with lemmy (or other federated services).
If you don’t want to use Mastodon as just a place to send your thoughts into the world, you have to follow hashtags that are about discussion and engagement. They can be hard to find, and often aren’t great because most people use instances that limit character use. Hard to have a nuanced talk with under 500 characters.
I mean, you quoted the line and missed the last two words as umami. That’s absurd, it’s right there to see.
Up until the term umami spread outside of Japan, nobody called the flavor that. And it still took longer before people figured out that it was its own taste in the same wau sour, bitter, salty, and sweet are; that it has distinct receptors.
Before that, there wasn’t really a specific term in use. When people referred to what is now called umami, the vocabulary was different. Savory and meaty are the two I remember being most used, and they have other usages for food. Savory is very often just used as an antonym for sweet, and meaty just means “meat like” without drawing a distinction between the saltiness and slight metallic tang of meat from the part that is umami.
I don’t know how old you are, so you may or may not have been around during the spread of the term and its eventual discovery of having its own receptors. But it was “viral” in the way it initially crept in, then exploded as every cooking show started talking about it and familiarity with the term spread. There was a collective “ohhhhhh! That’s what I’ve been experiencing”, and the word got adopted. Now it’s a part of the collective lexicon.
Nutritional yeast, aka flake yeast.
Intense flavor, goes with damm near anything parmesan goes with, and things it doesn’t. It’s fairly cheap, lasts ages when stored decently, and it packs a nutritional punch.
People like to talk about how umami’s spread as a specific flavor into awareness in the west was a massive shift. But a lot of people got locked into the soy and fish sauce focus that was the first thing that western tastes became familiar with as umami. Even when folks are aware of other things, they still tend to think in terms of sauces and complex recipes for pastes and fermented products. But good old yeast is right there, cranking out a deep and rich flavor.
So it gets slept on pretty hard. It doesn’t help that it isn’t marketed well. A lot of people that have heard of it think it’s more along the lines of a vitamin you take on its own, or lump it in with woowoo nutrition in places where it’s called nutritional yeast.
One of my favourite things that really focus on it as a major flavor component is roasted cauliflower. You mix it with the spice blend, and toss it in a bowl, and it opens up with that rich, heady scent that yeast has. I don’t measure for it, it’s just dumping a bit of garlic and onion powders, salt & pepper, then some paprika. Then maybe two to three tablespoons of the yeast. It’s mouth watering, just the smell. Fuck, my mouth is watering thinking of it.
You get that amazing caramelized flavor from the roasting, that delicate floral note that some cauliflower has, the slightly sulfuric tang too. Then the spices lift those, and the yeast ties it all together and becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
Main one is applicable to any online space.
Hang back when you check out a new place. Get a feel for things before jumping in because, like reddit, not only does lemmy have a culture, each instance does, and each community on each instance does.
You go to a meme community in one place and crack a dark joke, everyone laughs. You do it on another, you get banned. Yet another and you’re in a flame war.
But it doesn’t just apply to things that controversial. It can be simple things like calling someone dude. Or talking about cars, or dogs, or weather. Sometimes, in some places, there’s a culture that isn’t obvious until you’ve scrolled through for a while. Again, this isn’t specific to lemmy, or even only online.
Always do a vibe check when you’re new somewhere, anywhere.
I think part of the problem is that it’s hit or miss whether or not it’s spelled/spoken with ñ or n, in advertising and labels. Here in the US anyway.
What’s funny is that the ñ spelling and pronunciation has bled over into native spanish speakers. My friend’s husband is from Nicaragua, and his entire family pronounces it ñ. One of my neighbors though, from Guadalajara originally, it’s n only.
I’d also say that habanero is ñ friendly. It looks like it should be pronounced habañero, unlike a fairly similar word, Enero. It’s easier to say habañero than eñero as well. The a leading into the n does that for some reason I can’t figure out.
However! Pero and perro blows people’s minds. While I don’t hear it with native speakers, damn near everyone else I’ve run into pronounces them the same. I do, and I know better, because I can’t make my tongue work right.
I’m passingly fond of cunt nugget, but I can’t pretend anything is as fun as motherfucker.
Motherfucker doesn’t fuck around. It goes right up, spits in the eye of your enemy and makes it clear you are there to fuck with them, and they gonna find out.
Bonus points if you step to your high voice, or do a whisper growl.
Well, I grew up on Knight rider and Dukes of Hazzard, so I’m definitely a fan of car stunts.
But the f&f series often relies on way too much bullshit and CGI instead of showcasing what cars can actually do. Since the dialogue and plots are ham fisted, I don’t actually watch the movies any more, unless they’re on where I don’t have a choice. That’s how I’ve seen what I have.
Eh, none of them to that degree. There’s really nothing that’s ever been on TV that I can’t be patient with, and I can’t binge watch much of anything.
However, Metalocalype and The Venture Bros, I can watch more of at once than anything else, even animated media that I technically like more. Which seems weird on the surface, but the reason is that I don’t have to watch every second of those two to enjoy every second of the episodes. Particularly on rewatches, though it was the case when they were new anyway.
If you want to talk about the other shows that are almost bingeable for me, but I need to be able to sustain watching, that’s Samurai Jack and Primal. Both of them take animated storytelling and turn it into a form of art that transcends a single genre. Brilliant scripts, and the art styles were and are compelling in a way nothing I had seen before matched.
Part of the barrier is just attention span. Since I had to give up stimulants of any kind, including caffeine and nicotine, I’m reminded of why school could be so damn hard when I was a kid. Not the most severe expression of attention issues, but enough that after a few episodes, I need a break from being locked in fully.
The other part is just being old and not wanting to sit in one place and get stiff and sore.
Well, in a post covid world, you aren’t the first person to have this problem. People that could taste and smell fully temporarily or permanently lost some degree of one or both senses.
And recipes are the answer. The handful of people I know that have dealt with it have managed to still make good food that way. And there’s professional cooks that have allergies but still cook things like shellfish that way, and do just fine. The reason it works is that a well crafted recipe doesn’t need tasting or smelling. Not all recipes are well crafted, but most of the ones you find at places like America’s test kitchen, serious eats, or other sources that actively test and adjust their recipes are. Those two resources are going to get to what you need long enough to find other sources that you can trust to have tested things.
Now, there are still going to be problems. Some cooking directions rely on smell. The biggest one is garlic. Almost every single pan cooked recipe is going to tell you to add it and stir “until fragrant”. But, again, there’s a simple solution. Counting. Garlic will become at least mildly fragrant in a pan at a five count. After a ten count, it’s mostly gone and the garlic starts becoming bitter. So, as long as you don’t count absurdly slow, keep it between 5 and 8, and then add the next ingredients in the instructions of the recipe (it’ll usually be a liquid or a larger amount of meats and/or veggies).
Now, that only really applies to pan cooking. Garlic in other techniques doesn’t need that much attention.
However, you can even bypass the “until fragrant” via bypassing the pan cook entirely. Roast your garlic ahead of time. There’s instructions on how to do it online, and it’s very forgiving. So you just add roasted garlic in with any seasonings, and you’ll get a nice result. Won’t be exactly the same, but it’s foolproof because it eliminates what can go wrong in the pan.
Another big one is the “to taste” instruction. That’s almost always going to be with salt and pepper. When it’s something else, you really end up needing a taster to help because it’s unusual, and there’s not much info out there on how at adapt each and every herb or spice.
But, people have worked out a kind of baseline https://www.thespruceeats.com/cooking-with-salt-1807478. You shouldn’t skip those kinds of salt additions, ever. That’s because they contribute more than taste. They contribute to the cooking process. The best example of that is when cooking meat or large pieces of vegetables via roasting. See, the Maillard reaction happens better and more evenly when the ingredients are salted before cooking.
So you can always add the rough amounts from that page and the handy little illustration it has until you memorize or write them down.
When you do that, you don’t need to add anything “to taste” because the pain eating can do that better than you to begin with. Most of the time, the instruction “salt to taste” is towards the end, so all you’re getting is flavor enhancement.
If you want to add some then, or the instruction is earlier in the recipe, you can usually add a half teaspoon to any recipe that doesn’t already have salt or a heavily salty ingredient like soy sauce. Some folks will be fine if you add an entire teaspoon, as long as the recipe feeds at least 4 people.
Pepper though, that’s a bit tougher. It’s an ingredient that benefits a dish at any point in the cooking process, doesn’t change that process, but does change the flavor depending on when it’s added. So you definitely want to add some at the point in the process the recipe says. Generally, a half teaspoon is going to be enough that eaters can adjust at the table and it won’t be too much for anyone not chemically sensitive to piperazine. If you know the people well enough, you can adjust to their preferences when a “pepper to taste” is included.
Most people, in a dish serving 4 are going to tolerate a full teaspoon, but it likely will dominate the dish more than is ideal overall. Tolerating isn’t the same as liking, after all. So, as long as you don’t dump more than that in, it’s not going to ruin anything.
Another little trick for pepper, if you have control of your kitchen, is to keep two containers. One, you set aside for a year, the other you replace regularly. The old one is going to be milder, so it can work well for giving some pepper taste, without overwhelming things. Now, I don’t prefer that method since it’s easy enough to just reduce amounts. But one of the people I know that lost part of their taste to covid swears that is e reliable.
His explanation is that it gives enough pepper taste that he can make mistakes, and not have the end result be hot. A lot of the piperazine fades when you have preground pepper to begin with. The longer it sits, the closer it gets to the bare minimum it’ll ever have.
Like I said, I don’t advocate for that, because adjusting is easier, but that’s me.
Ehhhh, I think you screwed up by over explaining. The point you’re endlessly actually asking about makes sense, and it’s a valid discussion to have, but it’s buried when you’re trying to ask something. There’s a limit in the human brain to how much information you can track in a question before you start losing parts. There’s one for raw information as well, but it’s bigger and easier to bypass. I hope, because this is going to be a long response.
The reason that “super straight” is offensive is because it implies that attraction to a trans person isn’t heterosexual when the expressed gender would make the attraction hetero. By the very fact that “super” is used as the modifier, it implies better as well. And that’s just bullshit, which I think you pretty much said despite it being buried.
If you have some need to draw a distinction between heterosexuality that includes trans partners, it’s inherently trans exclusionary. There’s nothing wrong with not being attracted to trans people, it’s when the implication is that there’s a difference between heterosexuals that do and haven’t experienced that attraction that you run into the wall.
However, for the purposes of discussing the matter, I think either cis-exclusive hetero or trans-exclusionary hetero would be the most effective terms cis-exclusive would mean that your attraction is limited to cis people, with no rejection of transness in that you would be expressing it as attraction first. Trans,exclusionary would be for those that reject transness ideologically or for reasons other than raw attraction.
Now, I think it important to note that a lack of attraction by itself doesn’t mean anything else. It isn’t some kind of glaring proof of bigotry. The way humans form attraction leads to the unfamiliar having a greater weight in what base attractions factor in. As an example, not being attracted to white people doesn’t mean you’re a bigot, it just means that the collective set of characteristics of white people doesn’t match your inner “template”.
Now, that template may well have been formed because of bigotry, be it internal or external, but it isn’t the proof of the pudding. Just by virtue of growing up with little or no exposure to other physical traits than your own ethnicity can cause your template to be limited to those that look most like what you’re used to. The unfamiliar is, on a primitive level, a questionable source for mates.
It’s how people handle their templates that matters, not that they have them. If I say “white women are ugly”, that’s shitty, and a form of bigotry. If I say “I’ve never met a white woman that I’ve been attracted to”, that’s a statement of fact (well, not for me personally, this is an example, not a statement of my own preferences). Now, I could be saying it politely and still be a bigot, but saying it isn’t proof of bigotry.
This applies to trans people too. Acknowledging that you’ve never felt attraction to a trans person is a statement. Saying that they’re ugly is shitty, and is probably bigotry, depending on the reasoning. Saying they aren’t women/men is bigotry.
So, the why matters more than actual terminology, which means that more options in terminology are helpful when discussing the matter in general. The two I suggested are already what I use in my head when thinking about the subject of attraction as a whole, and how transness factors into the individual “templates”.
Now, as a personal example, I don’t have many limits in terms of what kind of women I feel attraction to. Race has never factored in at all. The range of physical features I feel attraction to is very broad, and tends to be more about details than categories (like noses; size doesn’t factor in, proportions do). As such, I can’t ever say I wouldn’t be attracted to a trans woman. I can, however, say that I would never be attracted to a trans man because I’ve never been attracted to a man. Tbh, I’ve never experienced attraction to anyone that strongly presented as male, even when I knew they were women. My inner template has an edge in the androgynous range of features and traits, and once it crosses into a perception of a person being a man/male, attraction goes away.
I included that as a comparison, because what/who I personally feel attraction to isn’t the same as examples used. For the same reason, I specifically have experienced attraction to trans women, but never in a circumstance where it mattered. Thus, I don’t fit either the cis-exclusive or trans-exclusionary labels, to the best of my self awareness.
Now, I get it. Trans identity is only fairly recently in general awareness. It’s been in my lifetime that it went from being something even most bigots didn’t really know existed (and they look for people to hate because that’s their fetish, hate) to being something that’s a topic of common discussion. So there’s going to be people that just don’t know enough to matter still talking about the subject. Ignorance isn’t the same as hate, though they sometimes wear the same hat. That’s where some if the things you talked about (l.e. “secretly gay”) come from. They just don’t get it.
That’s why I agree that the term “super” straight/gay is bullshit and needs to go away. But there is room for terminology to indicate the layers of attraction in conversation, as long as people aren’t being dicks about it
Well, whether or not it makes you a bad person now is up to you.
Regret, shame, they’re a great start, but they’re not enough to make you a good person.
Number one is taking steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Yeah, some of that is fixed by getting older and developing more. But not all of it. The proclivity to follow others alone is something you have to root out of yourself.
But a big factor is what you do with what already happened. Have you tried to make amends? Not everyone will want to deal with you again, and even those that will give you a chance might not accept any apologies. And you have to accept that, because an apology to make yourself feel better isn’t an apology, it’s a continuation of your abuse to others.
You fucked with people, now you gotta make it right.
The mods do their job. I don’t know for sure which ones are and are not active, but reports get handled same day in every case where I’ve reported, or been reported. I’d have to check the mod log to see if there’s been recent activity in that regard, but don’t have interest in doing so when anyone can.
On my pen name account, I moderate two communities, and it would sometimes be months before I’d do anything on the account that would show up because those communities were very slow, and I’m subscribed to them on this account. No need to switch to that account when there’s no mod action needed, unless I want to post/comment on it, which is fairly infrequent.
Lemmy is way more forgiving of relaxed moderation.