Having Children

Having children is the most selfish thing a person could do. The desire to procreate stems from a fear of death. You can't handle the thought of your existence ending. You want to make more people that have a part of you in them. When you're lying on your deathbed trembling in fear, you want to be able to look up and see younger healthier versions of you. This will ease your fears and make it ok for you to die, because you can convince yourself that a piece of you will live on, so you're not really going to die. You want those children to have children, to keep the cycle going, to keep a piece of you alive, no matter if that piece keeps getting smaller and smaller with every generation.

The desire to have children is, at it's core, a desire to live forever. There are some other motivations such as societal pressure or wanting to have people to take care of you when you're old, or just wanting more people in your house because you're lonely.

Some people say having children is the most selfless act. This is understandable, but completely wrong. The desire to have children is purely selfish. However, the things you must do to get the result you want (healthy children who will survive and have more children after you're dead) are very selfless. Changing diapers, getting the kids to sit still and be quiet in the car, paying for college. These are selfless things that you do to get to the selfish ends that you desire. This is where people get confused, they mistake the selfless acts for selfless motivations.

Some parents like to bull**** themselves and everyone else by claiming to really enjoy all the selfless acts and work that goes into raising children. They want you to believe they had kids just for the fun of changing diapers, begging the kids to sit still and be quiet, spending ****tons of money on toys, clothes, college, etc. These are usually the same people who think most parents have "unconditional love" for their children. Any objective observation of most parent-child interactions will expose this as complete hooey.

You have a strong desire for these little pieces of yourselves to live according to how you want them to live. To have the same opinions and world views you do. To have the academic and career achievements you want them to. To have the sexual partner you want them to. To practice the religion you want them to.

Look how easily this "unconditional love" goes out the window. The child gets bad grades and doesn't like school as much as you want them to. The child is homosexual, or simply doesn't mate with someone you approve of, or doesn't want to mate at all. The child doesn't believe in your religion. The child doesn't want to follow the career path you had planned for them.

You probably want to respond with something like "well of course, I just want the best for my children because I love them, and this is how I think they'll have a better life." Stop kidding yourself. You had children to avoid death. You had children to create younger versions of you. When the child doesn't follow your plan, you get angry not because it's not what's best for the child. You get angry because that part of you that exists in the child gets smaller every time they disobey you and deviate from the path you lived your life on. It's about you and your fear of death, it's not about wanting the child to be happier.

Me? I don't want kids. I want to die and not have anything resembling me live on. I want to die before I need help from anyone else just to live. I like being alone. I don't give a **** about what society thinks I should do with my life or my genitals. I end here, this is it.

Chocolate Mousse

A great chocolate mousse recipe is something you want to have in your repertoire. This chocolate mousse stays good for 3-4 days in the fridge, or can be frozen.

Do not ask me to convert these amounts to cups or spoons or whatever. Get a digital scale if you don't have one.

It will make a huge difference if you use a good chocolate such as Valrhona or Callebaut.

This makes about 1 quart.

135g half & half
14g sugar
2 egg yolks
3.5g silver leaf gelatin
18g cold water
81g 64% dark chocolate
230g heavy cream

Soak the gelatin in the cold water for at least 10 minutes.

Put the chocolate in a bowl. Chop it up into small pieces if you bought it in bars or slabs.

Heat the half & half, sugar, and egg yolks in a double boiler, wisking constantly, until the eggs coagulate and it thickens. Lift the gelatin out of the water and wisk it into the anglaise (half & half mixture) until it dissolves. Pour this into the bowl with the chocolate. Let it sit for a minute, then wisk it all together.

Whip the heavy cream until soft peaks form.

When the chocolate mixture cools down to about 30*C (you might want to put the whipped cream in the fridge if its hot in your kitchen and the chocolate is taking a long time to cool down) fold the whipped cream into the chocolate mixture. Put this in a sealed container and into the fridge for at least about 4 hours. The gelatin needs a long time to fully set and get the texture right.

It seems odd that your mousse recipe is so precise as to call for 81 g of 64% dark chocolate but just says "2 egg yolks". Given the variation in eggs, is there any point in saying 81 g instead of 80?

Cheesecake

My standard cheescake recipe:

8oz cream cheese
20g vanilla paste
75g maple syrup (use Grade B for a more intense maple flavor)
1 egg

Beat the **** out of the cream cheese until its really smooth. Use a blender or food processor, it will get the cream cheese smoother than a mixer can.

Add everything else and beat the **** out of it some more.

Pour into 3 ramekins. Add some fresh fruit if you want (blueberries, cherries, strawberries, whatever). Place the ramekins in a baking pan, then pour water in the pan about 1/2 inch deep. Bake at 300* and rotate them after 20 minutes. It will probably take 30-40 minutes. If you notice the tops cracking, turn down the heat to 275.

I like to make cheesecake in ramekins instead of springform pans. Ramekins are smaller and cuter, and you can eat it straight from the ramekin without having to take it out and cut it up. I don't make a crust cuz frankly I've never had a cheesecake crust that I thought was really good. But sometimes I make a streusel and sprinkle it on top. You could also brulee the top and make it look like creme brulee.

One experiment I did recently was trying to get a lighter texture by adding whipped egg white. I seperated the white from the yolk in the egg and whipped it to stiff peak (with a little sugar for stability). It worked great, the cheesecake was definitely lighter, and the volume increased so that it fit in 4 ramekins. The only problem was the fruit all sunk to the bottom because the less dense batter couldn't hold it up. So fruit is served on the side when I do that from now on.

The recipe is actually 27g of yolks, which is about 2 yolks, but I always use 2 yolks when I make it at home because I don't want to waste eggs by using less than a whole yolk. If I was making this in a professional kitchen I could measure out 27g of yolks without worrying about wasting eggs. The 81g chocolate does not have to be EXACTLY 81g, this is just what you want to aim for. It'll be fine if it's within about 3g.

I read this a few weeks ago. It's an interesting perspective.

The Meaning Of Life Is Like A Cereal Bowl

The problem for me for creating meaning to my life in this way is that my severe social anxiety doesn't allow me to have friends to squirt milk out of their noses and create emotions.

I hate pretty much all forms of transportation.

Cars

I've had two in my life. The first was a Honda Accord, silver, black leather interior. It was a really good car for the price imo, not that I know a lot about cars. 2nd car I had was a van which I lived in for about 5 months from december 2008 to april 2009. Long story short I liked living in the van, but I was super depressed at the time and spent my days mostly staring at the sky or crying and listening to Bjork.

The main problem with cars is that it's a great way for everyone to extort money from you. Insurance, BS parking tickets, registration fees, etc.

Planes

Planes suck mainly because of all the **** you have to go through at airports in order to get on/off the plane. Also they're loud as ****. Sometimes I have to pause the movie I'm watching at home when a plane flies over because I can't hear anything even though I'm wearing headphones. **** you planes.

Trains

When I was little I was really scared of trains. I'm from chicago and my parents were poor and stupid, so we took the el trains often. Whenever I was standing on the platform I was amazed at how easy it would be for someone to just push me onto the tracks as the train approached. Or I could just trip and fall onto the tracks. I would nearly have a panic attack every time I had to stand on the platform to wait for a train.

Bicycles

There's nothing more pathetic than an adult riding a bicycle. Streets are for cars, sidewalks are for pedestrians, bicycles are for children. Time to grow up. You know it's gonna get stolen eventually anyway.

Walking

The best way to get somewhere imo. Of course this limits the range of travel, but I'm willing to take a train or cab if I want to go somewhere too far to walk.

The one downside to walking is that crazy hobos like to **** with you and ask you for **** all the time. The worst are those low life scumbags holding clipboards or stacks of flyers and trying to convert you to their religions and/or political views. It really should be legal to shoot those people.

something I've been wondering for a while: if you put two sexuals in a room together, how long does it take for them to start bangin? And how does thatwork? Like does oon e sexual say to the other ok i would like to start bangin now and theo ther one is like yeah sure or is some protocol?

when i was little i never wanted a job. When people asked me what i wanted to be when i grow up I just said I dunno, but I was lying I really did know. I wanted to be retired. I wanted to be old and live in florida or some hot place and just play golf and cards all day and eat dinner at 5pm and watch a movie and go to seleelp. I didnt give a **** what happened from age 15 to 60 i just wanted to fast forward to when I retired.

When I was about 12 I realized I couldn't do that so instead I became a lazy underachiever and now Im 30 and live with my parents and don't really do anything so I still achieved my dream of not working hard.

The more you study gender theory and sexual orientations and all that ****, the more you forget that most people never have to think about that **** at all.

They're just straight and cisgender. The default. Society accepts it without question. Everything you need to know about being straight you learn in high school sex ed class, or from your friends, or from TV.

It's easy to lose touch with how most people think and how they're taught to think. It's easy to start being a condescending douche when people don't understand what the word asexual means.

So I'd like to apologize to all the people who've asked me naive and uninformed, yet honest and innocent questions about asexuality, and I've responded with snarky abrasive non-answers.

Of course, some of the questions are coming from a position of skepticism and judgement. When faced with this, I should be more compassionate and keep in mind that I'm telling people something that's contrary to what they've always been told about human existence.

If a person has been told all their life that the earth is flat and then some dude comes along and says it's round, this will naturally be startling and maybe upsetting. It might cause them to get defensive and try to rationalize a way to prove me wrong.

Even if people insist on being judgemental towards me after I've done my best to answer their questions, then whatevs. What other people think about me is none of my business.

With that being said, I'd like to invite anyone (if anyone is actually reading this lol) to ask me what it's like to be asexual, if you're at all curious about it.

Tranny

Recently I've decided to make sure I never use this word, either irl or on the interwebs. Not that I can ever remember using it, but I want to make sure I don't. And if I see someone else using it, I'm going to call them out for being an *******, a bigot, and a misogynist.

Let's not pretend that the word is used simply as a shortened version of transsexual/transgender. It's most often used to ridicule women for not looking feminine enough to conform to whatever female gender stereotype someone has in their head. It's also used as a general derogatory term for TS/TG people, about as offensive as the word f** to gay people.

When you call a woman a tranny, you're not insulting the woman, you're insulting all TS/TG people. What you're saying is you're upset that a woman doesn't look feminine enough to fit some stereotype you think is real. In other words, you're being an *******, a bigot, and a misogynist.

If you call an actual TS/TG person a tranny, you're just being an ******* and a bigot.

The curious thing is that people rarely if ever use the word towards transmen. And there aren't any equivalent derogatory terms for transmen. I think this is rooted in homophobia. Straight men are usually deathly afraid of ever doing (or even thinking about) anything remotely sexual with a male sexed person. When a male sexed person happens to look female, this could cause them to be attracted to, or god forbid, even do something sexual with a male sexed person. A transwoman threatens to make their deepest fear come true.

Chocolate Chip Cookies

Before I get to the recipe, I'd like to point out a few common mistakes. My mom makes all 3 of these mistakes btw. It's not a coincidence that I was desperate to learn how to cook when I was a teenager.

1. Baking the cookies directly on a greased sheet pan. The dough will splooch out and the edges will get very thin and burnt before the center of the cookie is done. You can always tell when someone bakes their cookies this way from the thin overdone edges.

2. Using iodized salt. It tastes bitter and awful, which is especially bad when you put it in sweet things. Use sea salt. It doesn't have to be some outrageously expensive pink mermaid vagina salt or whatever. Just not that bitter table salt ****. Also, add the salt with the sugar at the beginning of mixing. This will help it get evenly distributed and it will disolve into the butter and eggs. If you add it with the flour, as most recipes tell you to do, it won't disolve and you'll probably end up with clumps of salt grains in some cookies and none in others.

3. Not creaming the butter/sugar/eggs enough. You want to cream the butter and sugar until it's pale and fluffy looking. Then add the egg(s) and mix until it looks smooth and emulsified. Not mixing the butter/sugar enough will result in a dense sandy crumbly texture.

Here's the recipe:

113g (1 stick) butter
110g light brown sugar
50g sugar
50g corn syrup
1/2 t sea salt
1 egg
1 t vanilla extract
180g all purpose flour
1/2 t baking soda
180g chocolate chips

Cream the butter, sugars, corn syrup, and salt in a mixer until pale yellow and light in texture. Add the egg and vanilla and mix until emulsified. It helps if the ingredients are at room temperature, including the egg. Add the flour and baking soda, mix until the flour is about halfway mixed in. Add the chocolate chips and mix just until almost all the flour is incorporated. Remove from the mixer and scrape down the bowl. Mix in whatever flour is left by hand.

Put the dough in a bowl, or roll into logs about 1.5 inches in diameter using parchment paper. Refrigerate for at least 6 hours.

Heat the oven to 350*, get a good thick commercial grade sheet pan that's not dark colored, and line it with parchment paper. DO NOT put any oil or butter on the parchment. If the dough is in a bowl, scoop out with spoons, or a cookie scoop will be a little faster and easier. If the dough is in logs, slice them about 1/2 inch thick.

Another option is to make cookie bars. Get a good 8x8 inch stainless steel baking pan line it with parchment, dump all the dough in and smooth it out.

Cookies will take about 10-12 minutes. Cookie bars will take 30-40 minutes.

Notes on ingredients:

- Corn syrup is not necessary, but it makes the cookies softer and chewier. If you don't have any corn syrup, or prefer a more crunchy cookie, then don't use corn syrup and double the white sugar.

- I suggest Nielsen-Massey vanilla extract. The vanilla flavor is much better than Mccormick or some other generic brand. I've never been in a professional kitchen that had a brand of vanilla extract other than Nielsen Massey.

- I usually use Ghiradelli chocolate chips. They're widely available, cheap, and clearly a step up from Nestle. I don't use high end chocolate for baking, the subtle flavors will be lost, and in fact sometimes they become very bland (Callebaut for example).

Thoughts on corn syrup substitutes? I live in China and it's not readily available. A recipe I just tried called for basically taking sugar and water and cooking to the soft-ball stage. I think it turned out pretty well; seems to have a very similar consistency to corn syrup.

Corn syrup is just an unrefined glucose syrup made from corn. If you can find something labeled "glucose syrup" or "invert sugar syrup" it will be essentially the same thing, but made from something else. Honey would also be similar, but of course that would add a honey flavor to the cookies.

Cooking sugar (sucrose) to soft ball stage is not the same thing as corn/glucose/invert syrup even if you get the consistency exactly the same.

That being said, it might still work in the recipe, because I don't exactly know why the corn syrup changes the texture. Maybe I'll do some more experiments to find out.