It is somewhat disturbing as a concept. Industrialized slaughter has heavy implications from how we treat our environment and even each other. The tech’s simplicity makes it more disturbing to me. It’s not something elaborate or really man-made, it’s a harnessed form of nature. Basically a contained version of what happened to those people in that sub to the Titanic.

Lobsters don’t have brains in the same way we do, they have nerve clusters distributed through their segmented bodies. As such, it’s likely we will never understand what they experience.

There’s a ton more data and history here (Wikipedia: pain in crustaceans). I’m glad we as people continue to question the ethics of animal consumption. We have more food options than most other animals, and we can take advantage of that if we wish to.

I do like that it reduces food waste, because I do think if we are killing animals, we should at least make full use of them.

Looking at the Buldak Original ingredients list, it looks like many of the same ingredients, but in reverse proportions.

Buldak has a lot of chicken flavoring/bullion to make the chicken flavor (dak=chicken) and a lot of pepper flake to make it hot (bul=fire) and then soy sauce and seasoning.

The fried chicken sauce doesn’t have the chicken flavor since it’s intended to go on actual fried chicken, and I don’t make it super hot. It’s a little more earthy and a little sweet.

I use a decent scoop of gochujang paste (lower heat level), a nice amount of minced garlic, a splash rice vinegar, a tiny blep sesame oil and some sesame seed, and then honey or brown sugar to taste, then soy sauce to get it to a nice dipping sauce consistency.

I don’t measure it, I just make it for making fancy pizza, so I eyeball it in a ramekin and then drizzle as desired on pizza.

Huh, that makes sense the real deal would also be a bit more finicky and dependent on a lot of variables that industrialized product wouldn’t be affected by.

If I were to see someone shaving it off the real deal, I’d give it another try, but at this point I’m done with the stuff otherwise and even if the real deal is a better version of that flavor, it hasn’t inspired me enough to cough up the money for a small real truffle for myself.

I used to get the blackened tenders, but I must be the only one because they always took so much longer to get than the regular tenders. They’re pretty alright though otherwise.

That sounds like a pretty good combo pizza!

I was hesitant to have Hawiian pizza the first time, but I instantly liked it. I soon changed it up though to get bacon instead of ham so it adds crunch and smokiness.

Korean fried chicken sauce is also good on pizza.

We come up with some particularly interesting ways to execute lobsters, that’s for sure. I’m not sure we dispatch any other food animal in so many ways.

Lol always a possibility. I’ve tried both a few times to give them a fair shake, and while I taste amazing flavor elements in both those things, the cons just always outweigh the pros. 😅

Yes, no matter what flavor enhancer you’re adding to a dish, once it starts replacing the actual flavor of the main ingredient, you’ve gone way too far!

Extreme hot sauces, over hopped beers, etc

All the chain chicken joints (Popeyes, Bojangles, Dave’s, etc) taste so salty as it is, but KFC is off the charts too salty for me to enjoy.

The best fried chicken (for me) is actually from a gas station chain here, Royal Farms, which I coincidentally had tonight!

I still wouldn’t put it as an S-Tier food or anything, but I think it’s well ahead of the bigger brands, and especially KFC.

I see truffle fries most commonly, and I’ve taken to calling them “pig stink fries” in reference to the horny truffle finding pigs. 😁

Nice to randomly bump into you again btw, I haven’t seen a comment from you in a bit!

Anything “truffle” I’ve ever been offered smells absolutely terrible to me. While not near as powerful as durian, the smell and taste give me a bit of that vibe.

Perhaps it’s all just been fake truffle oil type crap and real shaved truffle is amazing, but nobody’s ever given me any of that or inspired me to try it.

Lobster High Pressure Processing

Text Article if you don’t want to watch a video, also has more details

There are now machines that will remove the lobster meat from the shell without cooking it, so you can have 100% of the edible stuff with no shell bits.

It comes at a premium, but if speed and a hassle free experience are what you’re after, the tech exists!

I am glad you got something important out of reading it! I hope you don’t either. ❤️ 🦉

I’m glad I could word it properly. I always worry about noy adequately capturing my feelings on emotional things.

I was a little bummed at first when the talk took the turn it did, because it was entitled something like “Minimizing Stress in Animal Patients” and I thought it was going to be things like covering birds’ heads to calm them down and such, but halfway through it took the euthanasia turn.

But the lady giving the talk presented it calmly and sensibly like I tried to do here, and I think framing it as the ultimate neutral position when that is the least worst outcome left was very helpful. It’s obviously the least favorite part for anyone involved in the care of animals, by occupation or as a pet owner, but it’s something we ultimately will be involved in, and should be an act of compassion.

In a different reply in this thread I touch on my experiences in hospital with humans as well, and tl;dr I think it is insanely cruel we cannot offer that compassion to our fellow humans.

I work at a wildlife rehab clinic. Just a guess, but we probably euthanize more animals than any vet, since for people to be able to catch and bring us wild animals, they are typically much worse off than most domestic animals. A third of patients are dead by the time they get here, or shortly after. The next third, we will have to euthanize within a few hours or days. That’s a lot.

We don’t do it because they are too hard to work on or anything like that. Our only goal is to return animals to the wild and have them survive. We try some far-out things sometimes to make that happen, and since most of us work for free, we do it because we love animals and want to see them survive.

I just attended a conference talk about the topic of animal suffering. It wasn’t specifically labeled as a talk about euthanasia, but it ended up being a large part of it, and attending made me feel a bit better about it.

When we’re treating animals, it’s like a balancing scale. We have their health conditions, stress levels, etc on one side, and we have our treatments and stress mitigating factors on the other. Ideally, we can either balance the scales or tilt them positive. But as time goes on, and if things are not improving, or get worse, even if we can stack more and more positive responses on the other side, that is still a lot of weight on the scale. It wouldn’t take a big nudge to make it crash. Or the negative side is stacking up and the positives have no chance to keep up or reverse things.

All this time, the animal is not living the life it was meant to live. Out in the wild, hunting, mating, etc for my animals, or being a happy, lazy, snacking, sunbeam soaking friend to you that a domestic animal should. And animals hide pain as a survival reflex. If they are sick or injured, they are always hurting more than you know, because they don’t want to be seen as that slowest wildebeest in the pack that the lions are chasing.

And the point of the lecture was this: no matter how hopeless the stack of negatives is, there is one thing that is guaranteed to instantly alleviate that pain and suffering. Euthanasia is not a positive or negative, but should be looked at as neutral, a zero point. No points on the positive side of the scale, but the negative side is swept clean. If you can do nothing to help your animal, or if the treatment itself is making their life miserable, you have the ability to take that stress and pain away. When to do that is an ethical question with no concrete answer. We address each case on an individual basis and come to consensus as a group. With your pet, that is you and your family. Are you keeping them alive because the animal is still happy or because you aren’t ready to let go to a hopeless cause?

I’ve tried to treat my pets, 2 of which died of failing organs, and for my cat, it was clear the treatment was making her suffer, and for my dog, she eventually has a seizure. Those were where I had to say to myself that what I was continuing to do was only for my sake, and it wasn’t helping me, and was certainly not going to help them. Looking back though, if I would have euthanized them a week or 2 sooner, I probably could have spared them days of pain, and I regret being what I consider to have been selfish acts.

Especially with a dog (I was not a dog person, but the death of my 2 dogs both crushed me immensely due to that pack bond they have with you as opposed to more independent cats) it can be hard to make the call. But when you learn they are that sick and are likely going to crash soon, don’t try to prolong that time, but do spoil the shit out of that dog. Take them on extra walks if they can. Take them to beautiful and smelly places like a state park or a sunset walk along water and walk extra slow so they can enjoy it in their dog ways. Feed them all the stuff they always wanted but wasn’t good for them. And when they start to not enjoy even that spoiling anymore, know you gave them the best life they could have dreamed, and accept that ultimate responsibility you took when you committed yourself to that dog the day you brought it into your home and made it part of your pack.

I hope that was helpful. I gave up having pets because it was hard to do that last step so many times. Now I work with wild animals and see death all the time, but it is less personal, so it is easier to see the positive/negative balance because it isn’t clouded by an emotional bond. No one wants to say goodbye to a loved one, human or pet, but it is a certainty of life, and because we live life at a different scale than they do (unless you have parrots, tortoises, etc!) that time is never going to feel like enough, even if you could keep that dog alive for 50 years. The length of their healthy days we have no say over, but we can keep the sad days to a minimum.

I used to be about the slashers, but now I like stuff that makes you use your imagination. It’s hard to make something that will scare a large group of people, but if it gets you to engage your mind or feelings to fill in the gaps, it fills it in with things you do find scary.

I just watched Weapons last weekend. I wasn’t expecting much, it sounded like a simple plot, but it really created a disturbing vibe that was creepier to me than the on scene deaths. It kept my attention throughout and though the ending went gorey, I think it would have been just as good without showing the result.

I’d completely forgotten about the spray. I started with spray deodorants originally, but switched to sticks after getting tired of tasting the overspray.

After that I tried gels, but at least the early ones were always sticky feeling. Not sure if they got better as once I tried the basic green Degree, it had everything I’d wanted from an antiperspirant and thankfully they seemed to have never changed it in all this time.

I have almost exclusively used Degree Sport since it came out probably 20+ years ago. The sole variation has been sometimes I got the powder scent if the sport was sold out and I think I used 2 sample sticks of Old Spice for paid surveys.

The Degree just works, is dirt cheap, and has a texture that doesn’t feel funny. Don’t mess with success.

I always love to hear it. It makes my day better to talk to you guys about owls and misc other animals too.

Owl of the Year Qualifier starts sometime next month, so be sure to come play along!