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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • I do have the family plan actually, I forgot about that!

    And I do occasionally. Certain live albums and more niche stuff can be hard to find, and one hit wonders can be tricky depending on the genre and time the song is from. The song I’m Blue by Eiffel 65 is only available in a longer club mix and not the radio edit, for example.

    I will say that, in my experience, it has a slightly larger selection than Spotify for classic stuff and different versions of the same song (covers, remakes, remixes, etc). For example, my husband was very excited that they had the whole readout of How the Grinch Stole Christmas by Boris Karloff (in two parts, but still) because they used to play it on certain radio stations every year around Christmas. On Spotify I was only ever able to find the same version of the song from several different albums of Christmas mixes.





  • Dude, vegans can and do eat fruits. For people who can’t afford seasonal fresh fruit, we have fortified foods like bread, pasta, rice, and cereals, most of which are also vegan. I specified rice and beans (and everything else you conveniently ignored, lol) because they make a complete protein, which is usually the only thing you need to monitor closely if you are vegan on a budget. Anything else and you are best off getting a multivitamin for best bang for your buck.

    Also, you saying none of us have been hungry and then lecturing us about not getting both fruits AND vegetables when fresh fruit is one of the most expensive things in a grocery store, outside of meat that is? You clearly have never been poor enough that you have been needing to have your ‘fruit’ be the cheapest jar of grape jelly you can find, or the cans of frozen ‘orange drink concentrate’.


  • Fruits are also available but usually tend to be more expensive and are usually considered a treat for people on limited budgets. Me not listing them was part of keeping to the usual budget shopping lists recommend for people with limited income. Unless you are further being a pedant and insisting that tomatoes are fruits and not vegetables.

    And while I am fortunate enough to live in the continental US, I mostly buy what is in season and local and therefore on sale for relatively cheap. And anywhere where that isn’t available, frozen veggies are available, often for even cheaper and with no difference in nutritional value or content. If you don’t have a fridge/freezer, dried veggies are also available in most markets (dried peppers especially) and canned goods are far better for you now than they ever have been, with only marginal decreases in nutritional value.

    Where do you live that absolutely no vegetables are available in any form for a dollar a can or five dollars for a family pack that would make a couple dozen meals for a family of four?

    (Edit: Or, if not in the US, where you can’t even buy local produce, unless you are in an area where there is famine. In which case you may object to the fact that almost half our farmable land is used to grow crops to feed to animals instead of being used to grow more food for humans.)



  • Interesting. I have not had any issues using their engine even with the issue with Bing’s API, but you are correct that they use Bing’s index. Given that there are only four indexes to choose from, that isn’t too surprising.

    I actually switched to them when I saw that DuckDuckGo was about to start providing ‘AI assisted results’. I wanted to ensure I was using an engine that actually respected my privacy and didn’t harvest my data for slop.

    Anecdotally, I can confirm that the results I get from SwissCows are very different and usually better than the ones I got from DDG. So I wonder how much of Bing’s API they use.



  • Disturbed’s cover of Sound of Silence is not only awful, it is an antithesis of the meaning of the song. Anyone who likes that version better than S&G’s arguably doesn’t understand the point of the song, and the fact that everyone holds it up as the gold standard of “covers better than the original” is even worse.

    A close second is Postmodern Jukebox and their horrendous tendencies to take tempos to an opposite extreme instead of finding more meaningful ways of changing the genre of a song. I like some of their stuff, but the number of people who love their cover of Welcome to the Jungle is mind-boggling to me.

    There are plenty of songs that I prefer the cover of to the original (Whitney Houston’s ‘I Will Always Love You’), or ones that just give the original a modern coat of paint without changing much else (Smash Mouth’s ‘I’m a Believer’), but these songs in particular are just awful imo.






  • If you are asking if she knew beforehand, yes. We once had to rush out of a restaurant because a dish included wine and I didn’t know until my mouth felt like it was on fire. She has been there many times as I have had to explain it to others, and when I have been checking food to make sure it doesn’t have wine or vinegar.

    If you are asking if I have mentioned it to her since she gave me the gift, no. I haven’t had the energy to try to deal with that conversation, I still have plans with people through New Year’s. I will probably bring it up in a few days, but right now it hurts to even think about and I just want to get through the rest of the holidays.


  • My supposed best friends gave me and my husband a bottle of wine for Christmas. I can’t drink wine because I have an allergic reaction to something in wine, and they are very aware of this after me having reactions to foods at restaurants we would go to together. So they gave ‘us’ a gift that I can’t actually have.

    This comes after my husband and I have spent the last year being there for them through losing their jobs, their car, almost losing their house, and a bunch of other drama. It also comes after we spent all day making a meal free of their allergies, as I always do, and after I spent several days making Christmas cookies that are safe for them.

    I don’t know if the bottle of wine is cheap or expensive, and it honestly doesn’t matter. Last year they got me an ornament for our tree, and it is one of my dearest possessions because it has a small poem about friendship on it. This year’s gift stung because of how much of ourselves we gave to them, only for them to clearly pick up something last minute and without any thought.

    I don’t really have any family or other friends to celebrate with, so the most important people to me besides my husband are them. It hurts to see how little I apparently mean to them in comparison…