Peanut-butter-cream-filled donut. A long john-shaped donut with peanut butter cream inside and chocolate icing on the top and a light dusting of chopped peanuts on top is usually what she grabs. Good stuff.

My favorite cake fluctuates often, but I usually prefer cake with something special going on. German Chocolate, Carrot, Spice, Lava, that sort of thing. Yellow and White and Chocolate (and even Confetti) are all fine, but they’re not amazing.

Though I fully admit, I’m more of a pie person.

I love my mother-in-law. I mentioned one time sixteen years ago that I enjoy red velvet cake, and for the following decade every time she got donuts there was at least one red velvet donut in there.

Now, while red velvet is delicious, it’s basically just chocolate. The real joy of red velvet cake is the cream cheese icing, which was never included on the donut. And even with the icing, it’s like my #3 or #4 favorite cake, and she never brought me a german chocolate cake donut.

She has learned that I prefer the peanut butter cream-filled, though. Now that’s the one that’s always included. Which is part of why I always tell people I lucked out marrying into a super great family.

That’s some “Gift of the Magi”-level stuff right there. “Oh dang, I threw away a bunch of boxes yesterday!” “Oh no, we were going to help you clean your house!”

9:31 is the current time. It’s unclear how long the video is.

I keep getting caught off-guard seeing current photos of Torvalds. He’s just like…a guy.

And honestly I’d rather my mission-critical software be written by “just a guy” than by whoever Mr. Battlestation is down there on the bottom.

Honestly so many people were making jokes about him being from Chicago and liking deep dish pizza that I didn’t understand this meme at first.

The ones where they just tape the animals down to a cookie sheet are hilarious to me.

Whoa, this is like…real-time archaeology of my own brain. I know for sure I’ve read this tweet before (when I was writing it, I was about to write “New Jersey” but that didn’t sound right so I left the state off entirely). I bet I probably have also heard the Italian grandma story, and mixed them both in my head because what are the odds that there are three such stories? (including the one I posted originally about the mafia front that went legit because the pizza biz was better).

There’s a long history of people misunderstanding the purpose of quotation marks and using them for emphasis. It’s not quite to the point where the misunderstanding has taken over, and at this point it is unlikely given the fact that asterisks seem to have overtaken that role, but I remember memes about this from twenty years ago or so.

It’s even more pronounced in countries where English is not a primary language, which is likely where most silica gel packets are packed.

Your story is so familiar, I wonder if maybe I misremembered that one.

Local places are always one or the other: either they’re the best thing you’ve ever eaten and you can’t wait to get back there and have it again, or they’re just the worst. I guess that applies to mafia fronts, too.

A maybe-related but maybe-not story: I heard someone talk about walking into an out-of-the-way pizza place. Inside, there were no customers, but there was one employee and there seemed to be a few guys in suits just standing around talking to him. Everyone there was surprised to see anyone walking in, and even more surprised when he ordered a pizza. The pizza took ages to make, like over a half hour, but he did get a pizza; they handed it to him and hustled him out the door without even taking his money. I think they might’ve even locked the door behind him, I don’t remember.

The way the story goes, he took it home and ate it, and it was the absolute best pizza he’d ever had in his life. But every time he tried to go back after that, the place was closed.

I keep thinking about the pizza store that was opened as a front for the mafia but did such good business that they quit doing the mafia thing and just sold pizzas full-time

Obviously that doesn’t mean that the next 4+ years are going to be particularly pleasant for the people who live here, of course.

Move all of their actual statues into museums where they can live next to images of their injustices and retributions for all eternity. Rename their libraries and airports after those who died opposing them. Salt the ground from which their authoritarianism sprouted.

all machines built by man are destined to eventually fail

Every fascist regime in the world has fallen or is in the process of falling. It’s not a matter of “if,” but of “when.”

Laugh tracks usually have nothing to do with how funny a show’s writing actually is, but studies regularly show that people have a more positive experience with TV comedies when they have a laugh track. I assume it’s probably something parasocial.

See also: Community.

Look at moneybags over here being able to afford eggs.

Voice to text -> AI expansion -> Character Encoding -> Character Decoding -> AI summarization -> Text to voice

We should’ve just stuck with voice calls.