Now that it's just me I rarely cook. I try to, the money you save from bulk meal planning is remarkable. A real game changer. That said, I can barely get motivated enough to do it. If it's a good week I might fry up some sausages or some porkchops one of the days. Too stingy to eat out so I live off of microwavable meals. I'm sure some of you can relate.

Anyway, Hoppin' John is a great, cheap, and relatively easy meal that was beloved in the US South.

What I used:

Black eye peas, 2 cups dry

A pack of bacon. I splurged on some name brand stuff.

Knew I wasn't gonna feel like chopping a bunch of vegetables so I bought some store cut mix. Celery and onions. It also had diced carrots with it. Whatever, I used them

I also bought some sweet peppers on a whim.

I even have bay leaf but forgot to put it in. My clove of garlic was discovered dead at the scene, so that sucked.

Parboiled rice, 2 cup. (There's actually quite the history around Carolina Rice). Thus was just some white, long grain.

Here's what you do:

Soak peas 2 hours or overnight.

Cook the bacon until it starts to crisp. I used some spatulas and tore it up in the pan when it was about half done. Set it aside.

Used a tablespoon or three of the grease. Saute the veggies until the onions caramelize. I had the carrots cooking for a while first.

Rinse peas, put in pot with veggies, two inches of water over the peas. Salt. Bring to boil and then simmer until peas are done (30 min to 1 1/2 hrs.) Mine was 45 minutes). Toss in bacon and put it on low while you:

Make rice.

You're done. Pour equal amount of one over the other. Enjoy.

Edit: Today I learned that UTC is an actual real thing and not just a setting I scroll past on my computer 😅.

They also complicate things.

It made more sense back before we had electric lighting and when everyone lived by the rising and setting of the sun. Now it doesn't seem to really matter.

Obviously, the whole world deciding where to start the time would be nigh impossible but it could be like: starting at this date, on the first day of the year, what ever point is farthest away from the sun is 00:00 from henceforth.

And then people just adapted to what that meant for their particular area. Somebody's morning might be 13:00!

Imagine if the whole world was on some global time schedule.

Edit: From my comment below

Look at the earth from a top down perspective. It's a pie. With 12 or 24 slices depending on the granularity. A clock, basically. It would take the same amount of energy to learn which slice of earth is lined up towards the sun for each hour as would be to learn anything else in elementary school.

After which, for the rest of your life you'd have an intuitive grasp of where earth is in its rotation and what "time" it would be for any place in the world.

It's spooky season.

Donovan's Season of the Witch is one of those songs that has been done best by the band. Kind of like Jefferson Airplane's White Rabbit. I've heard a lot of good covers and a lot of... attempts, but nobody has ever matched Grace Slick's delivery.

Same with Donovan's take. Lots of good covers (like Joan Jett's) but the original still stands out.

Sometimes though you run across someone unexpected trying their hand at a classic and it's better than you would have guessed

Here's Alanis Morissette's

Season of the Witch

You have to wade past a ton shit you'd never purposely look at, get side tracked along the way, and still never see everything you originally set out to see. It's a never ending loot box for content.

A few years ago anything you wanted to search for would generate hundreds of pages of results. From sources all over. If you structured your query well you could dramatically cut down the irrelevant results and then spend a bit of time skimming through the offerings until you found your target.

Searching felt like a hunt, it could take you to far flung corners of the web, and hitting the jackpot on some obscure forum was part of the fun.

Now searching anything feels incredibly frustrating. You know what you are looking for is out there somewhere but it feels impossible getting to it. Basically we have only two main routes now, Google and Bing (and I swear Bing is just copying Google's homework). I've tried a handful of others and they all fall very short.

Something has changed dramatically under the hood.

It seems like the results are very shallow and no amount of prodding will get either search engine to produce anything besides the laziest output. Any subject has a limited pool of sites they lean on and then pretend that that's all of the Internet.

It generalizes very quickly and if you try to counter by putting things in quotations it gives up.

Even in the rare moments I've buckled and used their stupid AI, it takes even more time browbeating the program to just deliver the damned specifics.

What is going on??

How do we get our old search back?

I swear every day of trying to navigate the web feels worse than the day before.

How did we get here?

There's got to be something better, right? Or something we can do to pave a new structure that benefits the denizens of the web better than the lazy slop our tech overlords scrape off the table for us. What can we do?

I was literally about to quit this week. I don't hate my job. But it's nothing special, just another fumbling company run by greedy owners trying to make a buck off the backs of others. So kind of standard. I'm so very, very, burnt out. It's been very difficult to get up and go do bullshit every day but, y'know, homelessness.

I've got undeveloped property I've been trying to get to for a while now. It's in the middle of nowhere but I want to put a storage unit on it and camper and live off grid for as long as I can. I'm only about to be 50 soon so still got a few years left (hopefully) but I've got health issues and can't keep doing what I have been for work. At least not full time, so I have to get creative.

And I have nothing left to stay for in the state I am in anymore. I could go now but keep putting it off. I've just been paying off debt and killing time.

Anyway, long story short. Manager texted me 'I hear you're trying to leave me' and I swear I thought he was talking about me quitting, since I had been pretty open about my plans with coworkers. Thankfully I replied with something neutral instead of blabbing out right. Little while later one of the owners called to offer a position recently vacated.

It wasn't a surprise, the guy leaving recommended me to the position and I indicated I was interested. Didn't hear anything else about it and kind of forgot about it.

I get to be my own boss, more or less, do more of the work I like and got a raise.

At some point earlier in my life I would have been ecstatic. But I'm so ready for this chapter to be over that I don't even care. I mean, it's nice, I'm a little optimistic about it but in the spot where gratitude should be there is only emptiness. Feels like this is a reflection of the general state of things. With me. The world.

Guess I will hold off the move until spring.

Thanks for reading my rambling. I haven't told anyone else.

With the frustrations from using the usual search engines growing I've been thinking about this a lot lately.

It seems we've poisoned the well by allowing the proliferation of advertising interests to dominate the web.

Like how hard would it be to make your own non-commercial index?

Only human made sites that aren't related to buying, selling, marketing, etc.

Could that be a federated open-source project?

I guess the same could be said for a coat, or clothes even, but there's something very blanket-like about wrapping a robe around yourself to hang on to the warmth and comfort when getting out of bed on a chilly morning.

To be fair, they were probably about the best carrots I have ever eaten.

I'm pretty drunk so I can't remember the coating they put on them. Some kind of ground pistachio, oil, and something something else.

The dichotomy of vegetarian food... vegetables are the sorriest of food types, but the people who eat them exclusively come up with amazing accoutrements to make them palatable.

Why does it seem that on larger platforms there are bots that downvote comments?

You can tell it's bots because all the downvotes happen at the same time. I can guess for astroturfing purposes one would want to upvote their targeted comments and downvote all others but on lemmy?