Is it really black magic if you order the demon to destroy a robocall server farm?

Asking for a friend.

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Below the fold, there’s a good joke and a bad one.

NSFW

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I’ve been having a lot of fun with my new pressure cooker, purchased with a pile of Amazon gift cards that were lying around. It wasn’t a budget model, but it’s the top recommendation from America’s Test Kitchen, and after picking up a few good cookbooks (1, 2), a cheesecake pan, and parchment rounds, I’ve had plenty of tasty, hearty meals, and several cheesecakes so good that I can no longer risk making one unless I’m sure I’ll be able to give away most of it.

Note that there are several versions of Fissler’s pressure cookers, and I couldn’t be sure if the various Marketplace dealers were selling the right parts, so I went to authorized dealer Kitchen Universe, whose listings include the actual part numbers, so I could verify them against my manual.

Alton Brown’s eggs under pressure produces perfect, easily-peeled hard-boiled eggs by the dozen. Namiko Chen’s Japanese curry is much better than the standard back-of-the box stovetop method. The America’s Test Kitchen cookbook linked above has a fantastic beef short ribs recipe with a rich sauce that goes great over steamed or fried rice.

My own humble contribution is gyro meat. I started with This Old Gal’s recipe, but found the 8 cloves of garlic a bit overwhelming, and switched to The Dread Pirate Paramour’s spice mix, doubled or more as recommended in the comments, along with a little advice from Alton Brown.

I didn’t bother making my own tzatziki sauce. In my experience, most gyro joints serve a thin, watery tzatziki that tastes mostly of cardboard, that’s nothing like the thick, creamy sauce that helped make George Psyhogios an OSU legend. My best attempt so far to reconstruct that memorable flavor has been a 50/50 mix of whole-milk greek yogurt and Safeway’s “Better Living Brands” Tzatziki Cucumber Dressing.

I’m up to five regular visitors, and the most common ones are getting comfortable enough that they don’t vanish over the fence when I open the front door. Instead, they wait to see if I’ve got a bag of food in my hand, which has allowed me to get a few pictures with a real camera.

Scrawny

Queen Of The Chairs, she’s out there almost every day now, and has become bold enough that she’ll let me get within three feet as she waits for the food and water dishes to be filled. She doesn’t like me, and will hiss if my hand gets within about a foot, but she’s the boldest of the lot.

Tubbs

Like his Neko Atsume namesake, he’ll eat everything that I leave out if nobody beats him to it, and I often see him making the rounds from porch to porch. Fortunately, he seems to have a lot of places to visit, so most days the other cats get food.

Smoky

I’m stunned that he refrained from fleeing long enough for me to get even one in-focus picture.

Whitefoot

Terribly shy, and mostly comes around after dark, so I’ve just got night-vision footage from the Arlo Pro cameras. Part of that same litter I found two years ago, and the first to spend a few days lounging on the chairs. That’s still the only decent picture I have. Update: finally got a good picture, and it’s not the same cat.

Caramel

Scrawny claimed his chair during the day, so he mostly comes by at night now, when nobody else is around. The others all seem to get along if nobody challenges Scrawny for the chairs, and I’ve got lots of late-night footage of them just hanging out together on the porch. Still no good pictures of him, just the one where he was hiding in the bamboo.

What’s missing in all of these pictures is any hint that they’re housed anywhere. They’re healthy, but they don’t have any tags or collars, and after the rains ended, Tubbs was pathetically grateful for the self-refilling water dish I put out. And they’re not socialized; Scrawny is the least skittish, but reacts violently to any attempt at contact. In his kittenish days, Whitefoot sat on the chair and purred, but now vanishes in a heartbeat if I start to open the door.

I liked the above-the-fold image from the previous cheesecake post so much that I went looking for more by the same artist. Often when I do this, I discover that the image I liked is a rare gem buried in a sewer (like the one artist who took his most attractive creation and drew her taking a dump; yeah, not going back there again).

The image I liked happened to be of CC from Code Geass, and it turns out that’s 90% of what he draws. Even many of his drawings of other characters are just CC in cosplay. Not necessarily a bad thing, unless you’re marathoning the whole collection to pick out a few dozen.

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What’s your social justice super hero name?

[your undiagnosed mental illness]
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[The weapon you used at your last peaceful protest]

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HuniePop and HunieCam Studio are deeply discounted in the Steam Summer Sale for another 24 hours, at $2.49 and $1.74, respectively. I found them both quite entertainingly naughty (or naughtily entertaining) games.