Have not had a microwave in our home for at least 16 years, and don’t ever feel like we are missing anything. There’s literally never any ordinary household situation that requires that fast heating. Just put your leftovers in a pan and stir them occasionally!
A good modern microwave is a fairly magical device, most people don't know how to use it right though. It's definitely useful the more you read recipes that specifically use it. It's like not a top 10 device but its like #11.
Check out peeled steamed asparagus in the microwave, quick, beautiful and delicious.
I had never trusted the automatic “reheat” options that a lot of microwaves have had for years, until just recently I tried it out for reheating some chicken and pasta - and it really did a decent job. They’ve obviously iterated. (I don’t even know the model, but it’s a larger one probably two years old that I bought at goodwill for $30)
It's also great for reheating frozen rice. I make 14 servings in my rice cooker (I'm using a serving size where 1 serving is about 200 calories) and then freeze them in individual freezer bags.
They will keep fine that way for months. Food Network says 6 months but I've never taken more than 2 months to use 14 bags so don't know how accurate that is.
To use I take one or two of the frozen bags, empty them into a large microwave-safe bowl, add a little bit of water, and cover. Microwave for 3 minutes on high in my 1200 watt microwave, or 4 minutes if I used two bags.
Commercial break? I can’t remember the last time I saw one of those!
For popcorn there’s a third option: get an air popper! They’re fast and convenient, make great popcorn, and allow you to precisely control how much fat you add (since they don’t use fat to pop)!
But then I have a kitchen gadget ONLY for making popcorn. The microwave is multifunctuonal.
I don’t see many actual commercials anymore but I do value being able to get up during a movie with other people and make popcorn without asking them to pause or missing much context.
Maybe I’m weird in this way but pausing movies breaks my immersion, even if I miss a bit of context while I’m out of the room.
The key is to find the perfect moment to pause. Usually this is at the end of an act, during the fade-out.
Are you a fan of Alton Brown? He seems to be at the vanguard in the war against “unitaskers”. I would imagine he’d make his popcorn in a pot with oil, though!
No OP but personally I don't like to nuke things. Not because I'm scared of microplastics or radio waves or any nonsense but precisely because I value my time - the time I spend cooking and in the kitchen is some of the best time of the day.
I much prefer to spend 5-10 minutes bringing leftovers back to life in the pan, maybe adding some extra water or balancing the seasoning as I do so than chucking it in the microwave and hoping for the best.
Essentially instead of being time I minimize it's time I value more than what I would be doing otherwise (usually coding).
Mind you I work from home and have the luxury of plenty of time to prepare the majority of my meals and am definitely a "foodie" so it's unlikely this is for everyone, just my perspective.
Warming up with sous vide can restore most meats to be nearly indistinguishable from fresh from the oven/grill, however I've gotten worried lately about the heated plastic bags.
I never watched TV growing up and by the time I got money to buy my own already developed habits that didn't include TV. I have a big TV for watching films and some occasional YouTube however. I really enjoy films.
I own a microwave but I rarely use it. I cook most of my meals fresh. I might use it for reheating something or melting some butter maybe once a month. Most of my meals are cooked in the oven or pan. I love to cook though so batching cooking up just so you can zap things throughout the week isn't something that appeals to me, etc.
So not really conscious decisions, just two things I don't really do. Am I really that weird?
No, you're not weird. For a while, some people made a point of saying that they didn't watch TV as some kind of strange virtue signaling/position of snobbery and I got the same feeling from the GP statement.
Well, young people don't really watch that much TV these days. Why would they? I mean, you have to choose a channel and then you're watching the same thing for ages, like 25 minutes or something. Boring! And you have to sit there with your family for that whole time. I guess it's ok if you're really old and can't move very much, though that seems like a kind of torture where you can't move so you have to keep watching the same thing over and over.
Biggest problem is app embedded web views don’t count as Safari, so if you try to block the web on a mobile, you have to block or time restrict every default app that has the remote possibility to open a link to a web view. Looking at you, Stocks…
I was so proud when I noticed my young child using the always allowed Libby app for hours on end. Finally, setting time limits has turned them into a book worm!
Only to realize there’s a built in browser that you can bring up if the book embeds a link.
It’s a safari browser but under the rules of the Libby app.
My kid routinely asked for access to Photos, which seemed pretty benign. Turned out she was screen recording entire Netflix movies and saving them in her Photos cache, not only bypassing every single restriction but also tanking my iCloud storage quota.
Unfortunately as people move away from Reddit, invariably some number of them will end up here and we'll end up flooded with even more useless Reddit comments like this.
However, the person you're replying to has an account from about 5% into the lifespan of this site, so can hardly be accused of being a recent reddit migrant.
As an average scunt main I would to inform you that you are wrong. You say that the pyro nerf was bad. Duck you (politly) pyro is dumb. I hate it when I get spy checked by m1 combo every second stop. Pro play is good game good j_peg #1 pro player, bad water mid, sawmill foeva. Crits make tf2 good I know random crits can be poopy sometimes but it’s funny random crit amazing yes gamim
> As an average scunt main I would to inform you that you are wrong. You say that the pyro nerf was bad. Duck you (politly) pyro is dumb.
average lime scunt main vs typical loch n load enjoyer (oh no I already did that bit)
I loved LnL+sticky+Persian persuader… play with stickies since you have plenty, save the LnL for spamming chokepoints (which is fine since regular GL explodes on impact too) and busting sentries, grind on the engineer’s dead buildings and turn it into three full-health packs.
Wanted more ammo? We had a tool for that: it was called “dying and going back to the respawn room”.
I get that scouts hated the OG two-shot LnL (with a chance of a 1-shot-kill) but scouts also control the engagement because of higher mobility, everyone used atomizer which gave triple jump even while using another weapon (before that was later nerfed), and you get one more jump than I have shots. Plus it’s specifically a “fuck that one class specifically” loadout with a large downside of having to actually hit your shots instead of rollers, and half the ammo loaded. I know that’s a controversial take but LnL was fine imo, if you push the fight and I land two direct hits (or your number comes up on the first pill) on your high-speed mobility class with triple jump that's a mistake on your part. If you want to make it nospread so damage output is fixed and it's guaranteed to take 2 hits... that's fine too, nocrit+nospread is better overall imo.
Same for Pyro. He has a flamethrower and a shotgun, if you as a scout choose to run in and force the fight over open terrain against a pyro who knows you're coming... you die. You can still kill him with two meatshots with no chance of response if you flank him unaware, the flare gun moves slow enough you can dodge. To not die to the shortrange juggle class, don't approach the shortrange juggle class with your mobility class. Skill issue, you have a pistol if you really need to plink on him, he either needs to land flares or use the shotgun, you 100% have the control of the engagement at all times right up until you let yourself approach and be juggled.
But yea modern scorch shot is busted, I think that one's just not fun for anyone, I don't feel good about just blind spamming with AOE fire grenades that block a choke for a couple seconds either. Not sure the current weapon design is saveable for that one, I run it too when I play pyro (because all the rest of pyro's combos have been stripped away) but it's basically a better version of the detonator in the sense of being horrifically annoying to play against for zero effort on the pyro's part. On the other hand, it also forces snipers to at least occasionally interact with the rest of the playing field.
The two I’m really torn on are rescue ranger and short circuit. Short circuit used to be actually fairly important for clearing stickies/etc, I’d use it plenty myself on offense pushing out of the gates etc, even as a demo main I felt it was reasonable (up until you got like three of them just vaporizing everything while they repair or rescue ranger). It went through a number of variations and I’m not sure any of them felt super great but it also did something kinda important and the class is otherwise very weak offensively (except for other unpopular weapons like mini sentry). Not that I like a couple turtled up engies vaporizing my shit but like, uber a heavy or a couple snipers with charged machinas to alpha-strike it, 2 charged shots on a sentry is instadeath even if they're swinging wrenches. That was always the charm of “silly little game” TF2, no matter how fucking lame a given strat was there was always something you could do to break it with an even sillier strategy.
Until the vaccinator came along that is. Like god it was decent to start with and was just buffed incessantly in the last few years. Oh you can trivially swap resists to block any class/loadout variation made to counter you, even pop multiple resists at a time, and oh also the charges now follow the patient so you don't even need to keep healing them? Yea just keep buffing it that's great /s. Meanwhile quickfix was done dirty, airblast immunity on uber was a situational strat for pushing on ramps (thundermountain, upward, etc) and you were vulnerable to damage to offset that, just shoot them till they die (damage, my one weakness!). That was fine, what was the problem?
Rescue ranger is another tough one to balance. I kinda feel like you shouldn’t be able to run both Short Circuit and RR together, that’s maybe a little too much mobility and tankiness for sentries especially when you have a couple engies. Forcing engineers to commit to the nest or walk the sentry out by hand is not a bad thing imo. Maybe that's a thing like the Equalizer where it really should be two weapons - the "repair gun" and the "teleport the sentry" gun... or just not have teleporting sentries.
Iron bomber should not have existed though, non rolling rollers are not a good gameplay idea, but whatever. Same with air strike and the parachute… just doesn't play well overall.
But that’s what I mean is all of the worst decisions came in the last few years of TF2 development. Jungle Inferno was 2017 and the last few years of decisions before that were already downhill, you got scorch shot, vaccinator, quickfix nerf, iron bomber, airstrike, tons of completely random shit that wasn't needed and actually added balance problems in a lot of cases, matchmaking/casual, etc.
2014-2015 was pretty much the apex of “silly little game” TF2.
Your legacy baggage is my favorite feature. I may not need any documents open for an app right now, but what about 5 minutes later? Why would I wait for photoshop to start up again just because I was doing something else for a bit. It’s called multitasking and there’s a ton of working memory these days to the point of rarely having to check, not like the legacy days you refer to.
> Why would I wait for photoshop to start up again just because I was doing something else for a bit.
This is a part of what I was saying. Apps are cold-starting much faster today than it was back in the days of disk spindles. There are also ways to keep it hot, while not being active.
I am a professional artist who has been working with Adobe's tools since the turn of the century and let me assure you: Adobe's apps always take forever to cold-start. Always.
I recently got an M2 Air and Illustrator loads the fastest it ever has - I'm staring at the splash screen for all of five seconds before it's ready to get to work. Normally it's been more like 20-120 seconds for the past decade. I am quite sure Adobe will find a way to make their apps take several minutes to start up on the M2.
As a consequence, Illustrator cold-starts when I log in; the only time it stops running is if it crashes, or if I need to quit it to update plugins or the app itself. If I go off and do something else for a while it quietly gets swapped to disc by the system; the instant I switch back, it gets swapped into memory, ready to get back to work.
First off, thats not really in the spirit of account deletion in my opinion. Because you're making me pinpoint myself to another person that I want it deleted. Maybe I don't want a human browsing my stuff reading it wondering why I'm asking for it to be deleted. Even less privacy in my opinion.
But beyond that, it won't delete your messages. I guess they just own my words forever now.
> Because you're making me pinpoint myself to another person that I want it deleted. Maybe I don't want a human browsing my stuff reading it wondering why I'm asking for it to be deleted.
That's a pretty weird objection. Even if there was a button at the bottom of your profile page that you could push to delete your account, there's nothing stopping that button from notifying some real person behind HN who could peruse your posting history before deletion.
> Even less privacy in my opinion.
What "privacy" are you talking about? You've posted these comments to a public website, where any user can view your entire comment history.
> But beyond that, it won't delete your messages. I guess they just own my words forever now.
I haven't read HN's terms of use or privacy policy (I suspect you haven't either? Ironic, considering the tone of your post), but presumably, as a condition of signing up in the first place, you've elected to allow that practice.
As a fellow HN user, I think it would be really bad for the community if random bits of old discussions just disappeared, making it difficult or impossible to understand the conversation that was going on at the time. I certainly think there should be exceptions; say you accidentally (or regretfully) posted some personal information that should be deleted... I believe in that case the HN mods would do you a solid and delete it. And I know that in some (all?) cases of account deletion, they'll make up a new username to attribute your posts to, which would dilute any association the posts have with you (assuming you used a name that you've used in other places).
Regardless, there's nothing stopping someone from scraping HN (or using the HN API) to mirror the content of discussions elsewhere. And they might not be in a jurisdiction where you can expect to get your data deleted if you really want to.
To me, these privacy/deletion laws are most useful to force a corporation to delete any data it has on you that it holds privately, and could use to identify you or monetize you or whatever. Once user-generated content comes into play, it feels like a different beast to me.
Oh you got me, I didn't read the policy when signing up. Like 98% of people.
Yet from a site dedicated to creating the modern web, I assume modern web practices are followed.
Even 20 years ago in forums you could go through and delete your posts and edit your comments to blank. Add in 20 years of "we should be able to delete our accounts!", I had figured HN follows this practice.
Whatever, I don't care, I just make a new username once every few months.
dang can and will delete any post or comment you've made if you ask him to, and the FAQ literally says while they prefer not to delete your entire comment history they will if that's what you want.
Yes, although HN has a (transparently spurious) legal argument for why what they do is OK, so you may have to actually take them to court to make it happen.
