Lvxferre [he/him]

I have two chimps within, Laziness and Hyperactivity. They smoke cigs, drink yerba, fling shit at each other, and devour the face of anyone who gets close to either.

They also devour my dreams.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 12th, 2024

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  • Small correction: the vitamin in question is the B₃ (niacin), not the B₁₂ (cobalamine) like I previously said. (I just checked it.)

    Mexican and Tex-Mex food is something of a staple around here, so I’m surprised to hear that cooks use lime with maize. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it in any recipe, but maybe that’s kind of a Gringo issue.

    Odds are you already ate it, either as masa harina (the one used for tacos) or as hominy: the maize is cooked in limewater, then washed, then further prepared. It’s just that nowadays odds are you already buy it after it was slaked in lime.

    Nowadays it isn’t a big deal, because food sources got extremely varied, but for the Aztecs and neighbouring peoples it was a way to prevent pellagra.

    Oh wow, interesting. I’ll have to see if the Brasilian restaurant nearby is still around. I’ve been quite remiss in not checking them out, sadly. :/

    In case you’re looking for it, the local name is “doce de abóbora”. It should look like this:

    Sometimes cut into fancy shapes, like hearts or similar. Or simple cubes, specially if homemade. It can be made with either pumpkin proper (abóbora moranga) or butternut squash (abóbora menina).

    (Key) Limes are of course integral to making ceviche & tiradito. Is there a counterpart in Brasil?

    None as far as I know. Tiradito is almost unknown; ceviche is somewhat well known but associated with Peru, much like sashimi is associated with Japan. (Kind of weird how the Japanese community in Brazil managed to spread yakisoba and gyoza [aka pastel], but sashimi is still seen as “exotic”.)

    In fact the only two dishes I recall using raw meats use beef instead:

    • carne de onça (lit. “jaguar meat”, but more like “meat eaten like a jaguar would”) — it’s German Mett, but with beef instead of pork. Still to be served over rye bread, with onion, and some raw yolk.
    • quibe cru (lit. “raw kibbeh”) — it’s the kibbeh nayyeh the Levantines eat, brought by immigrants. (I’m not even sure how well known it is; I eat it often because the only person who got enough patience to teach my mum cooking 101 was a Lebanese granny.)

  • By “lime” I mean calcium oxide, not the citrus. Same name, opposite pH. They usually get it by crushing and roasting seashells.

    Calcium oxide is strongly alkaline, to the point it might cause you harm in large quantities. But just a bit is fine*, and the alkalinity makes the alkaloid (cocaine) in coca leaves to become soluble, so it’s actually absorbed by the body.

    This is the same idea behind crack cocaine, by the way: bake it with baking soda. But for the native peoples of the Andes it was fine, the amount of cocaine you’re getting from chewing coca leaves is rather small. Just enough to fight the lack of breath when you’re on the mountains.

    *that reminds me some dishes that use calcium oxide. The folks in North America use it with maize, so it becomes gluey (important for tacos!) and releases the B12. In the meantime, here in Brazil people use it for candied pumpkin cubes, so they get a nice and chewy “skin” around the pasty interior.

    On the fruit: it seems to me that Mexicans and Sicilians love to pour citrus juices over almost everything. Not a bad habit; like you said, that tang does wonders to balance some flavours.








  • Oh, that reminds me someone I banned some months ago. It went like this:

    OP shared some on-topic but borderline NSFW content, in a comm I mod. I requested (not demanded; just requested) OP to use the NSFW tag, so people (incl. me) could go wild discussing it, without making others uncomfortable. OP did it just fine, no issue, I know that poster and they’re a fairly reasonable person.

    Then a second user started stirring shit up about my request. Their complain was TL;DR “I assume you’re overly sensitive, grow a thick skin” and using an ableist slur as a slur, in a way that targets a marginalised group. I gave them a 3d ban. Just three days, as it was first offence… and because if you give this sort of user enough rope, they’ll quickly find a way to ban themselves.

    Bingo. And as soon as I banned them, they started DM’ing me. Ban elevated to permaban, messages reported, and admins eventually banned them. :-)




  • I’m actually using more those resources (em dashes, three points lists, “it’s worth noting that”, “it’s not X, it’s Y”, etc.) after AI popped up. They’re a damn good way to detect assumptive people, eager to conclude based on little to no info or reasoning; the same ones OP is complaining about. They don’t want a conversation at all, they want to whine, so if you give them a low-hanging fruit you can detect them early and block them as noise and dead weight.

    That’s in my “casual” writing style, though. Professionally (as a translator) I mostly play by the tune, trying to preserve the style of the original. (Plus I barely translate things into English, it’s usually into Portuguese, very rarely Italian.)

    That might not necessarily be the case – there is a possibility every example is completely organic – but it’s a sign of the times that we can’t just relax and assume the things we see and hear were made by people.

    Guys, I found em dashes! The author is a bot! Bring me my pitchfork! /jk (those are en dashes, by the way.)




  • [François] The revived people of South America helped me to learn it [Spanish]

    Things like this are the ones that make me like the least this part of the series. It shows how much they rushed research.

    There’s no way they’d learn Spanish in Araxá, most of the population there speaks Portuguese. In fact, I don’t even know why they decided to mine niobium there, if they entered SA through the Amazon river delta; for reference they’re further from each other (2000km) than Berlin from Moscow. Plus there are niobium deposits in the Amazon basin, smaller and less profitable but still enough for their purposes.

    And the whole idea of going to Catalunya feels silly. There are some fluorite deposits in Sant Cugat del Vallès but they’d need to walk something like 15km from the coast, on a rather hilly terrain. Transport is hard. There are better deposits in Asturias, by the coast, but no olives. But you know, where there are fluorite deposites near the coast? And olives? Tunisia. Plus dates; amazing travel food, tasty even if dried for long-term storage, and with a high caloric content. I should stop chewing on those everyday, though. They certainly don’t help with my weight.


    Those things don’t make me say “bleeergh, I’ll drop it!”, but come on… it’s a stain in a series that shone because of all the research behind it. Granted, mostly Chemistry, but still.



  • I guess I think of Bertia as the MC, even though Cecil is supposed to be the MC.

    Cecil is the main character, but Bertia is the protagonist.

    People often use both interchangeably, because they often refer to the same character, but here I think the distinction is useful:

    • main character — the character we “tag along”, following the story through their point of view. Note how almost every scene showing Bertia also shows Cecil, but the opposite is not true.
    • protagonist — the character driving the plot. Bertia is clearly the one doing so: from her world knowledge, her desires to keep the plot intact, and even her interactions with other characters. Cecil might act behind the scenes, but it’s more accurate to say he simply reacts to whatever Bertia comes up with.

    This distinction is also something you see in spin-offs: the protagonist is usually the same as in the original series, but the MC is a different one. And this series plays a lot like a spin-off to an inexistent main series, since you’re following the love interest instead of the otome villainess.

    And also in Sono Bisque Doll, at least at the start (Marin as the protag, Gojō as the MC). Later on it becomes a mess, and likely on purpose.