because soy is such a dominant flavor, that’s why. it tends to over power everything and all you can taste is the soy sauce.

the issue with salt is not salt in cooking, it’s salts in processed foods used as preservatives.

Unsolved Mysteries made me terrified of being abducted by aliens. I had night terrors a few times from it and anytime a weird light flashed through my bedroom at night I screamed my head off.

Salt. people don’t use enough salt.

wanted reddit from 10+ years ago when it was a smaller more chill site more interesting in being nerdy and curious than being political grandstanding. used to be such a fun place to kill time and learn cool shit and read interesting stories. it was glorious until 2016 and started going downhill rapidly, IME. I was first banned from reddit in 2020 for ‘inciting violence’ by talking about my cat hunting rabbits. thought it was insane, and a few months later I was randomly unbanned. OK. Stopped using it in '22 entirely as I constantly being reported for random comments as ‘racism, violence, hate speech’ when I was often pointing out those behavior and attitudes.

fediverse cool at first but now it’s rapidly growing into another reddit with a ton of people here who are just to be crappy and spam their weird agendas and go around endlessly self promoting themselves and hating on anyone who isn’t like them. it’s increasingly just a site for people to dump their insanity and delusions and seek validation for doing so. I have blocked so many people in the past few months it’s insane, my block list is 100s now, and in '25 it was maybe a dozen.

That said there are still some pretty good thoughtful threads on here about various issues, usually for the first few hours they are up, but once they get some traction the crazies come out to harass anyone remotely thoughtful and call them names. I’ve seen some wonderful empathetic and compassionate discussions get completely derailed by shitheads, who also mod-report these thoughtful and interesting things as ‘hate speech’ because it doesn’t align with their simplified black or white view of the issue, and their missions is simple to shut down any discussion that isn’t a catchphrase or other bumper sticker takes by calling it hate speech, just like my comment about my cat killing rabbits was ‘animal abuse’.

dumb people ruin everything because they basically throw a tantrum when they can’t fit the square object into the round hole and declare that the square space must therefore be a hateful bigot, because all the world must be round holes and only things that fit through them should be allowed to exist.

my favorite is the ‘love to travel’ types. point out that their trips to antarctic are toxic for the environment there and they lose it on you. because cute pics with penguins are worth it!

They can be used to launder money though.

That’s why art is so inflated. It’s used as a means to launder, because it’s the value is so arbitrary.

What’s baffling is I meet people my own age, who make like 200K a year who also think this exact same way. They think their life right now is impoverished and they deserve to be a billionaire one day. Half my first dates the past couple of years tell me how ‘difficult’ their life is because they can’t afford first class plane tickets.

It’s mind-blowing to me.

No, it’s just your typical double standard shit. If I asked the that, I’d be an asshole sexist pig. If they asked me that, they are just trying to figure out if I am a womanizer or ‘inexperienced’. When they do it it’s a ‘good thing’, when I do it, it’s ‘bad’.

And nobody is ever happy with the answer unless your number is basically the same as theirs. If your number is significantly different, than you are ‘judging them’. Because what they are really asking, on a deeper level, is you to validate them and their life choices.

It’s not any different with money either. You have to answer them with the number in their head they have pre-determined is ‘correct’ or you are not worthy of them, or you are going to steal/abuse them. This is regardless of their own financial status. I make a great salary and am happy with money. But I meet women who think I am going to to steal their money and force them to pay all my bills if I make like 10K less than they do, which is a trivial amount to both of us. But this ‘fear’ is almost always a projection of her desire to be the person who steals the money and has their bills paid for them, or some deep belief that any man who can’t pay her bills for her is not a ‘real man’. I meet so many women I am at the same financial level as who tell me I am too poor to date them… it’s just hilarious to me at this point. They basically have to come up with a conspiracy theory to justify their greed that a man must make 2-3x their income to be ‘good’. And in my dating bracket, that means a guy has to make like 500K salary, which is a top .5% salary. Hence the refrain ‘there are no good men’. All the men who are moderate successful making 100-200K are ‘losers’ who are just going to financial use and abuse her, or something.

because everyone thinks they are middle-class, and everyone aspires to be rich.

very few people think improving the conditions of the working class is a worthwhile goal… the goal is to get out of the working class and feel superior to them.

i grew up a white working class town. Everyone in my town played the lottery and complained about immigrants. They did very little to actually try and improve their town lives… they thought doing so was ‘gay’. They wanted to send their kids to college, but then complained how college ‘corrupted’ us all and turned us into homos, especially when we moved away and got good jobs and had better lives.

Good policy is boring. Good government is boring. A company with moderate growth targets is boring.

Well-informed, articulate, and smart opinions… are boring.

They aren’t designed to do that.

They are designed to give people what they want. People want division and hate. It fuels their attention.

In the 1980s the people who had the longest listening times to Howard Stern were the people who claimed to hate him. The outraged fueled their attention such that they could not turn away because they wanted to see if he got more outrageous and offensive.

People are like kids in an candy store when it comes to negative content. They cannot get enough. They get addicted to the intense feelings the outrageous content provides.

Before algos things were random and they had to try really hard to go find that stuff. The algos spoonfed it to them and they lapped it up eagerly. Back when IG was just my friends, I saw one angry rant every few weeks, today it’s 20 angry rants and 20 ads, and my friends content about their kid or cat being cute is buried by 50 other posts which I can’t get rid of.

i can change myself. I can’t change other people. Other people seem to be embracing 1950s gender shit more and more.

I think that’s true today. When I was younger it def felt like people, of any gender, were more willing to try and understand other people. Like, people used to ask me what I like to do and why I like it… now they ask me what I like to do and tell me I’m an idiot for liking something that isn’t the same as what they like.

because gender roles.

you aren’t a ‘man’ and she isn’t a ‘woman’ outside of these roles. they are arbitrary rules, but people have deep emotional belief in them.

it’s not. it means we all suffer because so many of us want to be in happy relationships but the toxic bullshit people believe is totally preventing that. My dates use to talk to me like a human being, now they lecture me because I’m a ‘man’. They see me as guilty until prove otherwise, instead of just a fellow human being who they are trying to get to know.

and the other thing that baffles me is how petty and mean dating has become.

because she isn’t logical or thoughtful person. She is emotional and biased and has lots of irrational insane beliefs.

I dated a woman once who told me eating cereal was unmanly and pathetic. Like granola. I was suppose to eat MEAT and BREAD, and be a MAN. but eating a bowl of fruits, nuts, and grains was WEAK.

I just laughed and tried to dismiss it, but she was dead serious and basically said if I want to keep seeing her I’m not allowed to eat granola as a cereal in a bowl w/milk… only in bar form as a hiking snack or something. It was so arbitrary and bizarre.

I had a couple of people apologize to me after she was found out. That was cool. But most didn’t.

People love to make up fake bullshit. I had another issue with this other woman… that I never ever even met who kept going around telling other people who I slept with her and how shit in bed I was. I literally never met her, but people told me about it. Maybe she had a crush or something. it was fucking weird.

dating in my early 30s was great. once i got past 35 thought, it all went to shit. 9/10 dates i meet now give me this long premable about how their exes all sucked and i better be better than them. it’s insane. like they will approach me at a bar/event and just start ranting at me, and think it’s cute or ‘flirting’ because they are issuing me a challenge I have to overcome to prove my worth to them. because ‘real men’ want to prove their worth to their woman… yeah right

and the 1/10 one that doesn’t… has never dated and has basically no adult life experience. i did go out with a nice lady last month… but she was had zero real life experience and I’m not interested in that either. she had been living at home until she was 35 and just starting her adult life like she was 22.

every normal, happy, well adjust woman I meet is already married. that includes all my female friends over the years. the funny part is they are so chill you don’t even know they are married because they don’t really talk about their SO at all… because they are their own person and don’t have a partner who defines them and from which they derive their worth and self esteem… and if you flirt with them they just point it out and it’s no big deal.

before i was 35 i used to meet normal people who actually wanted to date normally. but the culture has changed it’s much more hostile and aggressive than it was even 5 years ago. even when I see other people on dates when I am out… often it’s weird and hostile interaction and it’s rarely relaxed. I miss going out with people who were relaxed and chill and who had passions and interests, instead of relentlessly trying to judge every aspect of me and then think they are above all judgement in their quest to acquire a fantasy romance novel of a relationship.

i blame all these gender toxic media shit. i grew up with the idea men and women were the same and our differences were funny and not a big deal. now people act everyone of the opposite sex is the enemy until prove otherwise by subordinating themselves to their ‘tests’ and ‘checklists’. It’s like people are looking for someone to hate more than someone to love, and absolutely no interest in a mutual understanding. but when i see videos of the shit that goes on on tiktok and instagram and all that… holy moly the ‘advice’ people give is just insanely toxic shit.

there is also a huge uptick in traditional gender role crap the past 5 or so years. in 2015 I never saw women demanding 1950s style relationships or demanding men pay for everything so they can be homemakers. now it’s easily 50% of the profiles I see on dating apps. not to mention the crap games where they insist on splitting the bill and then text you after the date that ‘you shouldn’t have let me pay, you are not the man for me’. crap.

a lot of women think a man with a cat is gay. even if they have a cat, or like cats.

it’s incredibly stupid. but incredibly common.