Så kom och dansa med oss, klappa era händer
Gör som vi gör, ta några steg åt vänster
Lyssna och lär, missa inte chansen
Nu är vi här med CONCRETEdansen

Anybody who is afraid of exclamation marks is afraid of sincerity and needs to be exposed to more until they've gotten over that and embraced it.

Anybody who uses a whole lot of exclamation marks is also probably a bit nervous about not being accepted and so should get hugs and acceptance in abundance until they feel safe.

Thus, exclamation marks are always a good thing and we need more of them. !

Aww you make me happy. I'll reward that by telling my possibly boring long story. : )

So I didn't spend much time on the chans because it felt like selfharm and I try not to do that now, but I did and also Minecrafted and they had this temporary server they were building where the different sections of 4chan would like build and fight and stuff.

They call it 4craft. I was young then and had more free time but wasn't willing to register on Discord (still haven't; I know you don't have to use your voice on there but I just prefer text) so I didn't play in the actual team factions part, but I did play the initial server, one year (2012 or earlier, I think.)

This isn't the REAL server. It's a practice server. So there weren't a lot of people on; only like a dozen or fewer, and they were far from spawn and busy. And they've all changed their spawn point to their faction base.

Spawn is also protected for like 100 meters in every direction and you can't alter blocks.

This is only practice, of course. But still, once you get away from spawn, there are the hate speech symbols and the cobble penises and stuff.

I start by making some big floating obsidian peace signs and smiley faces (trolling the haters) using the old (doesn't work now) redstone-to-obsidian trick. Now anyone who leaves spawn will (gasp!) see floating NICE THINGS high in the air and will either be angry and ineffectual or will have to like pillar up and use their iron pick to ruin it or maybe cover it with cobble IDK nobody really tried and my technique for building is pretty efficient I'm good at creating gravel pillars that can be removed from up high or down low by the careful placement of torches and occasional pouring of water (you pour water, it breaks a torch, gravel falls, and the gravel all lands on ANOTHER torch and becomes items, and another pouring of water breaks the other torch and now there's no pillar or evidence.)

Right.

But that's all outside of the spawn-area protected radius. I can't touch spawn! ...or can I?

(I can)

I go right to the edge of spawn and pillar up to almost sky limit, build a small island (like 5x5) and then erase the pillar so nobody will see me unless they're looking for me. Now I lay down a sand block and a cactus on it, surround it with wooden pressure plates, and run some redstone wire away from it. And put one stone up above the cactus and a little to a side. Every now and then the cactus grows a notch, a block breaks off and usually lands on a pressure plate, and the redstone goes ON. And when the block evaporates, the redstone goes OFF.

Super cheap to set up. Takes like two minutes to get the materials.

Then? I set up so the wire goes to a single piston. When the piston is off, lava is falling to the earth. When the piston is on, the lava is stopped and water falls instead. Or was it the other way around? It's been a while. Super cheap, anyway, and you can just lock your crouch button down so nobody sees your username, hide somewhere, and while you're AFK this thing drops water, then lava, then water, then lava, over and over again and makes A HUGE TOWERING MOUNTAIN OF COBBLE.

And yeah, there's lag, because this mountain of cobble is FULL of little holes and the game is constantly trying to figure out whether the holes are lit or not (lava is weird and glitchy) and also whether there are monsters spawning and then despawning in some of them. Or so I think.

But I don't build just ONE of these islands. I build a ring of like sixteen of them or more, all surrounding spawn. And although I can't modify spawn? The game can. So lava and water keeps flowing into the spawn area.

I came back from a long AFK and found that spawn was completely covered up to more than 20 meters with cobble mountains. (Then I took down my "volcano generators" because I don't need bad guys learning my tech)

And then I got curious and I broke my bed and typed /kill to see where I'd spawn. I spawned in the mountain, in one little randomly-gapped cavetunnel stretch inside, and I couldn't get out by mining; it's within the "no modify" zone so the rocks are unbreakable.

But I think they had teleports or something I'm not sure; I managed to teleport out to my set home. Anyone who was logging in for the first time, though? Would be fucked.

And that made me feel a bit bad after a while.

..so I carefully mapped the cobble and the cave, and I found a place within nine meters of spawn that was next to to that internal cavetunnel, and I couldn't open it with a pick it's unmodifiable, but I used a piston and snow blocks to push a block of TNT right up and a little into the mountain, then used that piston and more snow blocks to push a block of redstone next to the TNT. And it went boom and it took more than one try but I got the tunnel open and that way the new players on that server wouldn't be automatically trapped any more.

But for almost a week, no new players could get on that server.

Then a month later the server was deleted and they set up the REAL 4craft server but eh, that's showbiz.

Lots of other vandalism happened, but nobody ever took down my sky-limit peace signs and smiley faces, and it's a good memory.

...but don't build one of these on a server or vanilla legit save game you like; once you've built one of these volcanoes it will create HELLA lag and it's not something you can manually remove you need creative commands like /fill or something. Flying around with infinite TNT and silverfish and such won't even put a serious dent in it.

I haven't played Minecraft seriously in years but I miss it sometimes; watching PiroPito YouTube videos about it lately. The guy sucks but he's sweet and is playing without any references and just figuring it all out himself.

I am being silly, but this is the sort of thing I mean. I really do like touching it. There are places to buy it online but I'm not bougie enough for that. Yet. Some day.

In Japan, they put shark skin (no doubt from sharks that died of natural causes and surrounded by loved ones and then donated their bodies to culinary science) on wooden paddles and rub wasabi root on the skin so they can eat the result with slices of raw fish, honoring the memory of the sharks who also ate raw fish.

It's beautiful and delicious.

And the skin IS super nice to touch! I wish I was a shark. : (

Edit: Not compact. I see now that you can do WAY better by using observer blocks. I kind of stopped playing so much about when observers were added because my friends stopped and I got into other games.

Original answer:

Not even close to that compact. As I recall (the linux box I've got Minecraft on is currently partially disassembled) it was as simple as a three or four blocks per binary digit (one piston body, one sticky piston head, one repeater, and a block atop the piston head) and a block with a button on it to lead the way.

I never did build anything that needed to be able to count, and if I had I'd probably have just counted seeds into and out of a chest or something, but it was a concept.

I have a story about using cacti and pistons to make a server unplayable, then using snow blocks, pistons, redstone blocks, and TNT to fix it. But that's a story for another time.

I haven't played in a bit, but isn't that still pretty doable? I had a binary counter (just repeaters and up-facing sticky pistons, IIRC) more than five years ago. If you're interested I could load it up and remind myself how it's made and post it here. Seems trivial to get the lamps lit.

(Or you're just joking in which case n/m)

For meat eaters, sous vide is great for making the meat just the exact perfect amount of cooked and not too much. If you boil or even simmer meat you're probably killing the most of the flavor and texture unless you get the timing exactly right.

For omnivores, vegetarians, and vegans, sous vide is great for keeping already-cooked food cooked at exactly a temperature where it won't go overdone and where it'll be warm enough to eat it when you take it out.

...but sous vide is kind of not great for cooking things like vegetables and potatoes, and it does create a plastic bag worth of waste for most meals.

tl;dr: if you're not cooking meat, sous vide is only as useful as having a crockpot set to "warm" (the lowest setting on mine, anyway, and still it's hotter than 60c which is the maximum temp I use) and putting tubs or baggies of food in it so you can just pull out the food (without diluting it) and eat. Which I might try doing if I ever have to live alone again.

Short version: Crock pots are hotter than sous vide. Sous vide cooking is where you suck all the insulating air out of a container of food, plunk that container in water that is carefully controlled to be warm enough to cook but not so warm it'll ever overcook, and then pull it out whenever you feel like it's done and you're ready.

There are many brands of premade "water ovens" for sous vide (which translates to "under vacuum" IIRC) or some people improvise but if you're trying to be lazy you can't take the time to slowly watch a pot of water on the stove that you keep turning the heat on and off of, and you may not want to spend time hacking a crockpot to be colder. But you can. I learned about it from a book I found called "Cooking for Geeks" but the internet can probably help too.

If you're vegan, and it seems likely, you could possibly actually just use a crockpot full of water and just bag up various warm foods (beans, stew, mac&cheese, eggplant and tomato stuff...) and plunk them in that water. ...and then leave the crockpot on all the time and rescue and eat food whenever you want.

I'm flexitarian with an emphasis on not eating beef, lately, but my lifemate eats chicken a lot so we've got the water oven instead.

If I didn't answer enough, lemme know and I'll try again and maybe try to be shorter. : )

Okay, pushpin on the sink-fulla-water thing. Now we talk about meat.

There are like five temperature ranges that matter for meat.

1. Too cold for bacteria. (Yay!)
2. Warm enough for bacteria and also not cooking yet. Danger! Minimize time in this zone!
3. Cooking! Proteins unravel and the meat becomes less tough! Flavor is released Yay!
4. Cooking! Proteins that have unravelled? They start getting all tangled together in new ways! Oh no; it's overcooking! This is why overboiled meat can taste dry and bad even though it's literally wet. Boo!
5. Actually burning. Boo.

When we cook meat, we take it from level 1 or level 2 and we put it on level 5 heat and then time it so that we take it off while it's still internally mostly at level 3 or 4, with maybe just a bit of 5 for flavor and color on the outside.

But? If you fuck it up? If someone distracts you and you leave that steak on the griddle 30 seconds too long? Whups; now it's cooked more than you wanted. 60 seconds? Now it's "well done" and you're sad. Sorry.

Okay, back to our pushpin about the sink fulla water. Some French dude was like "Yeauxxe" (that's "Yo" in American) "if we're efficiently thawing the meat by putting it in a bag with no water in it ANYWAY, why only heat it to level 2? Like, why not make sure that water is warmer? But not too warm; level 4 would be stupid and level 5 is right out and also people are already doing that with stew that's why stew meat needs so many spices. I have an idea, and I have technology."

And so this French dude put his steak (and maybe some dry spices; you don't need fresh with sous vide it's way efficient) (Also he might have used a pat of butter. I wouldn't use either; I like my meat nakie) in a plastic bag and vacuum sucked all the air out and then heat-sealed it so it was safe from getting wet. And then he dropped it in water that was about 54 degrees celsius. And he was very careful keeping the water at exactly whatever temperature he put it in at.

You remember how you have to take the steak off the grill within like five seconds of perfection or else it'll be overcooked or undercooked? Not the case if you have the temperature at exactly the right temperature. It's just not hot enough to overcook. Ever. And it's not cold enough to get bacteria.

You can leave the steak in an extra TEN MINUTES and it'll be just the same.

Or a half hour! Go take a shower?

Or, maybe you're not feeling hungry anymore and you leave it in OVERNIGHT! ...The only effect is it gets more tender.

Downside? Food takes longer to cook. Just like a slow cooker. You put a tender slice of steak in and it'll probably take a minimum of 30 minutes. You put a marbled steak in and you'll want several hours. You put a slab of tough meat in and you probably want a whole day.

But that's on you. ...and if you leave the steak in for a super long time? Like days? It might get a bit "too tender" if you can believe that. At which point I just cut it up and fry it with butter (it's cooked but I like to put a little sear on the outside to give it color and/or grill marks and to add that maillard reaction) and make tacos with it or eat it with eggs and veg.

And you can cook everything else too. You can put fish in the baggie and it cooks MUCH faster (in fact many fish will dissolve into mush if you leave them for several hours. ...but fish is super easy other than that; just set it to any temperature you like the heat of, plunk the vacuum-sealed fish packet in, and then when you notice you're hungry get it out and dump it on a plate and eat.

But with steak? You take the bag out of the bath, rinse the outside with cool water to chill it a bit, cut the bag open and drain the extra fluid and pat the steak dry, put it on a preheated griddle for like ten or twenty seconds (just seconds!) a side just to add maillard sear and pretty hash marks, and then eat!

Is good for making confits too, or for ensuring spices or marinades really get worked into the meat.

(Don't salt meat or use alcohol on it before sealing it up and sous vide-ing it; alcohol ends up metallic or something? And salt really gets multiplied by the process and you'll end up with too-salty food? Just add that stuff after you're done. Also fresh spices are fine but you may as well use dry; dry are cheaper and the cooking technique really extracts flavor from them.)

And if it's already cooked? If you have some baked beans or some stew or something? Just get it in a sealed bag or airproof tub and plunk it in the hot water. It's like a fridge but the food is warm when you take it out. !

I cook chicken at 60c, beef at 54c, fish at anywhere from 40 to 60 c it doesn't matter some people actually put it in the dishwasher but not me, and I currently have the machine set to 50c because it's just got some packets of already-cooked chicken-and-sauce in it, and also a packet of refried beans, and I took the salmon out of it that I left for four days and smashed it up in the bag and scattered it on shredded cabbage and broccoli and then added creamy hot sauce on it and ate some of it with a fork and now I'm sated so the rest of this is going in the 'fridge until the packet of garlic chicken I forgot about (whups I better raise the temp) is cooked soft (it'll be fine.)

A vacuum sealer is great to own anyway. 95% of what causes freezer burn is the dehydration of food's surfaces and the taste of freezer air soaking into food surfaces, which happens during the natural microthaws and refreezes that are constant in freezers. ...but if you've got all the air sucked out of the packet and it's sealed in plastic? No smells getting into the food, and the food's not evaporating dry on the outside at all. Food keeps super well in vacuum sealing. ...and in the 'fridge? It keeps like 3x longer. Or so I think based on my experiences.

So, to summarize: (TL;DR)

You hermetically seal some sort of food and plunk it in a tub of water that is carefully controlled to stay just barely warm enough to cook food, but not warm enough to overcook it. And, of course, cooking temperature is too warm for bacteria too and anyway the food's sealed up tight so you're safe. Then, at least 30 minutes later but you take as long as you need or want, you take the food out and do whatever you want to plate or finish it or just eat it as is sometimes I eat out of the bag.

I use a "Sous Vide Supreme" water oven and a "Foodsaver" vacuum sealer, but people sometimes just hack an old slow cooker with a thermocouple and use that as a water oven, and I'm sure any vacuum sealer would work.

Oh I have information and I'm about to make it your problem. (I'll give a short answer too but this is the long one)

EDIT: If you're vegan or vegetarian, the short version is more relevant. You CAN cook veg from raw to cooked in a sous vide...but it's inefficient and a crock pot is better I think. Because veg requires a higher temperature usually.

So, for people who eat steak cooked medium-rare, the ideal way to cook a steak from the fridge might be to put it naked on a plate on the counter (the steak is naked. You can wear thigh-highs or garters or whatever) and let it warm to room temperature a bit and heat an oiled griddle or coal fire under a grate or something. Then, once the meat is not fridge-cold and the fire/griddle is hot, you sear it on both sides for maybe about two minutes per side (depending on the thickness of the steak) until it's about as firm as a marshmallow or so or just judge by time.

We call this "searing" and some people say it "locks in moisture". These people are wrong, but don't be too mad at them they're just parroting what they heard once. Actually it gives a nice "carmelization" or "maillard reaction" and it makes it tasty. ...aaand it cooks the meat, which is to say the meat (very tough when raw) proteins unravel and loosen and then start re-combining in more complex flavors and tender ways.

Anyway. You like to have the outside cooked a little extra, but you want the inside still to be a bit pink, right? So it has those meat juice flavors? But you still want it cooked. So you start with a not-too-cold steak and you're very careful not to cook it too long. Also, you pat the outside dry before you put it on the griddle or else water evaporating will interfere with the browning and you'll cook it longer to compensate and then your inside will overcook and it won't be all pink.

And pink is the loveliest color for insides.

This is why you left the steak on the counter too; if the inside is colder you heat the outside longer trying to get the inside warm and by the time it is the outside is all burned and you're sad and gnawing on charcoal patties. : (

You didn't do that, and you didn't get distracted, and you cooked the patted-dry room-temperature steak just exactly the right amount of time on both sides and then ate it right away and all the stars were in alignment you didn't have to pee or get distracted it was PERFECT! You rolled a natural 20. Good job you.

But it was dangerous! See, we don't keep the steak on the counter because it's warm enough once it's not in the 'fridge that bacteria can grow on it and make it gross or make you sick! Oh no! But you took a chance and got lucky I guess.

...but what if the steak was frozen? You can't leave THAT on the counter until it's ready to cook (or the outside will thaw and get bacteria and the inside will still be cold) and you can't just throw a frozen slab of meat on a pan it'll be burned on the outside and cold and raw in the center?

Well, what you do is you put it in a big bag and suck all the air out and then put it in a water-filled sink. Because air is an insulator but water helps conduct heat into the steak faster so bacteria doesn't have time to grow and it thaws through and then you can extract it and pat it dry and cook it.

This is common practice for frozen meat and a bazillion people did this with turkeys last week in the US trying to thaw a turkey from a rock to a ready-to-bake lump of monster meat. It worked fine.

I suggest sous vide. It costs a bit to get a water oven and a vacuum sealer, but once you have it? You can just drop packets of food in there and forget about them and then later when you're dying of hunger you can pull one out and it's cooked and you can eat it and it's warm and if you forgor it'll be fine it'll be fine for days and weeks and forever it doesn't go bad the food doesn't I have three packets in there right now and...I just have to get up the gumption to go back and eat the refried beans in a tortilla or eat the salmon mashed onto some shredded cabbage with sauce on top or...or maybe I'll just eat a hard boiled egg from the 'fridge instead because lazy.

What tune is in your head when you watch this?

I'm going to sleep so well knowing I won't be going to Thanksgiving and talking with my parents and their relatives.

I saw today while browsing imgur (trying to find a good picture of the muppet Animal for a meme. I failed.) that "they" (IDK the prosecution?) is releasing several more hours of the footage of Jan 6th so that randos like us can review it and say "hey, I know that asshole!" and report them.

I save the shells. Once they're dry it's fun to crush them to powder. It's like bubble wrap. The crumbly shells end up like sand and are allegedly good for plants.

I knew a drunk who would crack a raw one into beer sometimes so they were getting some food with their booze. I tried it. I'm not that desperate.

Sukiyaki is just swiping a strip of just-cooked hot meat or veg through raw coddled egg and then popping it in your mouth. It tastes good.

Or, just crack the raw egg into a glass and add a little hot sauce and worcestershire and drink it like Spike Speigel wanted to. 's called a "prairie oyster".

If you're an egg, I love you. If you were once an egg I love you.

what a cute mug that guy has!

Slimegirls? Slimegirls? Ah; slimepeople? Enfin! I kiss them all!