Emchap's Shit from the Internet 03/3/21 š
This week has been mostly good but also exhausting. Work is busy; Iām feeling professionally productive but the office remains somewhat lonely and hard to make friends in. This is one of the first times Iāve been closer to the salespeople (who I work with very closely) than the devs (who I have failed to get much of a read on) and of course nice people are nice people but itās been a somewhat strange change. Nobody is mean, everybody is very competent, but if I could start a new job again I think I would choose to do it, uh, not in a pandemic.
I am for the first time in a long time feeling somewhat drained every time I go to write these each week, so this weekās essay is both short and boring. With any luck things will calm down or the pandemic will end or anything will happen to break the monotony of life right now, and Iāll have things to think again. Until then, this!
I did, in a more cheerful bit of news, discover that my several-jobs-ago employer still has my head, wearing a witch hat, aliased to :sso: in their Slack, which made me chuckle. My legacy lives on!
Shit to read
Work is slammed this week and so this list is unusually short. I particularly enjoyed this piece on what it really takes to get instagram model toned, including pointing out that the answer isnāt exactly news (time, strength training) but also highlighting that getting toned in that way requires gaining weight, and that starvation diets are by every metric counterproductive.
Hey dudes, remember fucking Thought Catalog?
I went on a real deep dive about Penelope Trunk the other day (I have normal hobbies). It turns out sheās still at it, though five years ago she was pretty roundly denounced for being an asshole. I had completely forgotten the entire revelation that her husband was beating her and that she stayed with him for so long; it does at least seem like she eventually left him (or rather that he left her), thank Christ.
I like this poem very much.
Shit to eat
Get a few potatoes.
If, like me, you are bad at keeping potatoes cool because you live in California, first google āsprouted potato kill?ā before deciding itās fine if you cut the sprouts off.
Learn in the course of googling that your vegetable peeler has a fun little melon baller to scoop the eyes out. Neat!
Peel the potatoes, rinse them, and cut them into half-inch width sticks.
Heat the oven to 450, and while youāre doing that, cover the potato sticks with an inch or so of water above them, and heat them over high heat for 10 minutes.
When done, dump into a colander, drain, and let cool while you put oil on a foil-covered baking sheet and let it sit in the oven for a few minutes.
Pop out, pop the fries on, coat with oil and salt, and into the oven for 20 minutes.
While that is happening, dump half a bag of frozen shrimp into a bowl of cool water.
After 20 minutes, flip the fires over, put back in for 5 more.
Flip and another 5. Make sure your fan is running or your smoke alarm will lose it.
Take them out of the oven, sprinkle with more salt and rosemary, and set aside in a bowl.
Turn on your broiler.
Take the thawed shrimp, toss in a bowl with oil and salt and several sprinkles of this particular Penzeys blend, and dump onto the baking sheet that used to hold the fires.
Pour the shrimp out in a single layer, put them under the broiler for 2 minutes plus or minus one (until theyāre pink) and take them out.
Enjoy shrimp ān fries like a southern moules frites, on your couch.
Shit to watch
Do I feel creepy about watching these very up close Japanese spa ASMR videos? Yes. Are they soothing? Yes.
I am much less involved in the vlog brothers than I was a long time ago but I thought this was insightful, and felt very true as someone who is increasingly conscious of a private and public self.
Shit to buy
Super jazzed about this boiler suit, which I just bought.
I thought this Native-made top was very pretty.
Did I just buy a birthday cheese plate to eat by myself I didnāt not.