Topic: The Chit-Chat Thread

They still have some @Anti-Matter but less than1%

@Morpheel I had a weird one the other day too. I finished a round of research tasks, spawned a Latios for my trouble, surprisingly caught it after a couple of lobbed balls...and then somehow ended up with a Magikarp? I think it got confused with a normal field research task or something....The good news is that I was able to engage the Latios again.

@NEStalgia I mean, I KNEW a lot of that, but that still doesn't change how bass ackwards some of that is....

I'm fortunate enough to live in an area where produce at farmers' markets is pretty reasonable, but also seasonal....

@NEStalgia it looked a little bit more nickelodeon than that

@Tyranexx there must be something going on then. I could not catch the cubone again, but well, that's fine.

I'm gonna go with "bugs". And not the monster kind. XD Few pieces of software are without them.

I’ve got to get a new battery for the truck. It’s only got 40 cold cranking amps when it’s rated for 690... But it was made 7 1/2 years ago, so I guess it’s time.

I’m working through my older Switch games and playing some Harvest Moon tonight while I catch up on Ash vs Evil Dead.

hot wing ice cream is gangsta

@Tyranexx we have one Farmers market left. It's owned by a prep school. There's a parking lot that looks like a Forza starting grid. Guess the pricing

Well there's another. A semi or two pulls up in a gravel lot and some hustlers that probably sold Rolexx in NY Battery Park last week sell questionable produce.

The rest of the old farms are either "56 estate homes starting in the low 700s", "Lux carriage homes from the mid 500s", a corporate 4 story campus, 55±luxury living community (5 floor prison like buildings. looks like The Projects sold to rich old people) ir, rarely an upscale strip center with a Whole Foods, Firepoint grill & wine bar, and and ACTUAL Rolex dealer.

It used to be all farms and orchards. Now theres a Porche dealer for every man, woman, child, and their "undocumented" live-in nanny.

Sounds kinda like here, only with hotels, banks, Dollar General, and Subway. I sometimes complain about not having access to some places of business, but we have plenty of those.

@ReaderRagfish Dang, it has been a year! May the toppings be ever in my favor.

Played some castlevania the adventure tonight. I hear it's the worst, but it's only a couple hours long so I'll try to finish it. Played a little super castlevania too. That collection is done right. 20 bucks is a steal.

@bimmy-lee Make sure to visit the Netherlands as well. I'd personally avoid Holland if I were you

Holy crap... I just spent like the entire day cleaning and reorganizing my incredibly nerdy apartment. I had no idea it would take so long.

You know, I love collecting all manner of nerdy things, Amiibo, Gunpla, Pokemon Plushies, anime figures and even some Lego... but all these things are real tricky to clean! Anyway, if I knew how to show pictures, I'd gladly show you guys. I am real happy with the results.

@Octane - Noted. I’ve heard it’s best to steer clear of the canal folk in Amsterdam. Something not right about them.

@bimmy-lee Whenever you decide to drop in, give me a heads up. I'll personally point out some worthwhile gastronomical places for you to visit. Might even join you in a bite (and a beer) or two...

@Tyranexx Funny you should mention your habit of cooking multiple portions at once: another thing we have in common. As a single guy, I also got into the habit of doing that, because I like to eat food made with fresh ingredients, but I don't like to shop everyday, so I cook in large portions. I do that with my chili, my pasta sauces and all of my various chicken/stir fry dishes.

But apparently, there's still some original American in me, because I go bigger than just preparing 2 - 4 meals to put in the freezer. I often use a giant wok, and make about 7 - 8 portions, eat one, and divide up the rest and put it in the freezer. I do this about 4 times a month, with various dishes, so I always have some variety in meals stashed away for later. The fish I don't freeze: I buy and eat that on the same day, most of the time, or only leave it in the fridge for a day. All depends on current prices of course. Over here, 300 grams of salmon costs about 7 euros, which amounts to almost 8 dollars.

What you'll get for that, is something like this:

or this:

If you like shrimp, you should try gambas. I believe they are tiger shrimp. Or perhaps they're called differently over there. Basically, they're just a larger species of shrimp. The Spanish people use them in their paella dishes. We just put them on a grill or barbecue soaked in a bit of garlic oil and herbs.

Concerning beans: I only ever make two recipes with them, which is either chili or a stir fry recipe that I learned from my mom. Other stuff I make, and which is highly recommended, is the following:
marinate some cut up chicken fillets (just cut in small strips or morsels) in some oil, ketjap manis (which is a sweet variety of soy sauce), sambal, cut ginger/ginger powder, garlic and curry powder. (all in amounts of choice. I don't do exact science in recipes. Some people like their food more spicy, or don't like garlic, so change whatever part of it you don't like)

Then either buy mixed, chopped up vegetables (over here, super markets sell them as ready-made packages, calling it either Asian, Thai, or Chinese vegetable packages), such as pepper/paprika, onions, white cabbage, bean sprouts, carrot, leek, (white) mushroom and such, or chop them up yourself. As a final ingredient, and this is the only processed food I'd use in the entire recipe, take a bottle or some satchels of what we call stir fry sauce/paste over here.

I usually take either a lemon grass curry sauce, or a red sweet and sour sauce, sometimes adding in a small tin of tomato paste (edit: in the sweet and sour sauce, NOT in the lemon grass sauce. For that, just use a transparent binding agent), to make the sauce a bit thicker in consistency, also since all of the ingredients when combined, make for a lot of fluid/water release/build-up in the pan, and we don't want the final dish to get too watery.

Use a large pan or wok that you can stir fry all of it in. First the chicken, and when that's about three quarters done, add in the chopped up vegetables, stir fry for another 6 to 8 minutes, and finally add the sauce. Mix the lot up, and you're done. Keep that simmering on a very low fire for a minute or 5 more, so all the flavors can combine, and the sauce will soak into the chicken.

I eat that kind of food with brown rice, so I prepare that simultaneously, which isn't really much of an added effort, since it takes just 8 minutes to cook, and then I leave it to rest for another 4 minutes, with the lid on the pan, so the rice will be nice and loose, instead of sticky.

It may sound like a lot of work, but it's a rather quick and easy recipe, that can be made in large quantities, so it can also be used as something that you can portionalize and put in the freezer.

As for white bread: in restaurants, I do also eat it, like french rolls, or french long breads, that they often offer with meals, or as an appetizer with garlic butter. And I eat the odd croissant every now and then, but my regular sliced bread, that I eat every day, is spelt bread.

Not all true. Processed meat/food is actually more damaging to the environment, also because of the extra ingredients/additives needed, which also need their own factories to be manufactured. And the damage to one's health ultimately also costs more money, although that obviously isn't factored into the bills that the maker of the processed foods has to pay...

I think you also need to go see that "The Truth About Sugar" BBC documentary that I recommended to @Tyranexx...

Sad to hear that there's so few places where you can get fresh foods around your whereabouts. I would think that there was at least one large super market or grocery store in the area for normal, non-Forza starting grid people...

@bimmy-lee "I’ve heard it’s best to steer clear of the canal folk in Amsterdam"

Yeah... they make beer from the water there...

Seeing as I'm "just" an immigrant, I'll try not to be too insulted...

@ThanosReXXX - Beer from water, now that’s a real miracle. Would bring a tear to my eye. I imagine “canal folk” would cover a large swath of the population. In all honesty, I have a number of friends who have visited your town, and they all say the residents are mostly very friendly and helpful. That could be skewed by our Merican standards where it’s a good day to simply not get berated and/or assaulted. Or shot.

@bimmy-lee I was jokingly referring to the canal water. You wouldn't want to have your beer being brewed from algae-infested canal waters, even though some of these extremist vegans say that algae are good for you...

And canal people? Better not refer to them like that if you ever visit. They might take offense and throw you in for an involuntary swim...

And it's a city, damned! Amsterdam, the great city of yore, birthplace of some of the ancestors that actually founded several well-known American places, such as New York and Brooklyn.

But all joking aside: you'd be surprised to find that only about half the people over here are really living on or around the canals. Those are predominantly in and around the center of the city, and Amsterdam has grown quite a bit over the decades. There's a whole green area on the outskirts, with hardly a body of water in sight, except maybe for an artificial pond or a ditch in the back of their garden.

But yeah, most of them are indeed quite friendly, especially if you're not an Air BnB client, because they hate those.
Regular tourists are nearly always welcomed and even celebrated. The city thrives on them for a large part, so no surprise that they would be welcoming. And there's dozens of nationalities here as well, so almost anyone can find a little piece of home here, which is also what I found, once I decided to land here for good.

@ThanosReXXX - I have a weird habit of referring to any urban area as a town. Not sure why. But Amsterdam is most certainly a city, even though I don’t exactly know the parameters for distinction between the two. I’ve never used Air BnB and probably never will. Something about it doesn’t sit right with me. I’m sure that’s an absurd statement to many people, but I yam what I yam. I’m going to Denver, CO next week and probably could have saved money on an Air BnB, but I just couldn’t do it.

@bimmy-lee I actually had the same "problem" or quirk. Even though I actually came from a small town (Benicia, California), I also used town sometimes. That's actually why I found it funny you did as well. But Amsterdam as a whole is probably quite a big bigger than Benicia, if not in square miles, then most certainly in number of inhabitants.

Part of my own mis-usage of the word town, also comes from phrases and sayings such as "going into town", "about town", while in Dutch, the difference in pronunciation between town and city isn't as immediately distinguishable as it is in English. The Dutch are often more literal with meanings of words, and even though most of us know that a town is basically just a smaller version of a city, no one in a native English speaking area would call a town that, in every day language.

Well, the Dutch do...
Dutch for city is 'stad' and Dutch for town is 'stadje'. The added 'je' is what makes any word transform into a smaller version of that word. To give another couple of examples: 'huis - huisje' (house - little house), 'paal - paaltje' (pole - little pole), 'bier - biertje' (beer - small beer). The word 'beer' sounds the same in Dutch, by the way, in case you're wondering.

And yes, as you may have noticed, words that don't end in an 's', 'd' or 't' sound, get a 't' added in their spelling, when they want to express that it is a smaller version of the same object or place.

You might think that this is making things needlessly complicated, but trust me: in Dutch, leaving that 't' out and saying 'bierje' sounds even weirder, and trying to order one pronouncing it like that, might make the waiter or the bartender think that you've already had more than enough beer, considerably reducing your chances of getting a refill...

@ThanosReXXX - Interesting. I have no use for a biertje though. I like biers extra groot.