My wife and I love cheese and often have it for a snack, especially if we’re drinking, so I usually keep a few different types to serve with crackers. Our son brought his GF over one time and everyone wanted a snack, so I brought out a cheese platter, and they both loved it, especially the GF, so now they always ask for cheese when they come over.

Today, Christmas, they came over with a couple who are their best friends. We had a couple others too, so I bought close to $100 worth of different cheeses. We had Wensleydale with blueberries, stilton with lemon and honey, aged white cheddar soaked in red wine, havarti, guda with hatch chili, warmed camembert, and regular aged cheddar. It was pretty fun seeing everyone trying them all and talking about which the liked the best.

Very true. The harder cheeses have very little lactose, and the softer cheese have more. When they make cheese, the curds separate from the whey. The whey is liquid, and has most of the lactose.

Okay, I haven’t told this story for a long time, and it’s Christmas, so here we go:

When I was dating my first wife, I went to her parents for Thanksgiving dinner. Among the dishes on the table was blackberry jello with grapes in it. Seemed like a 50s kind of dish, but whatever. I took some of everything, and planned to clean my plate. My future MIL was telling a story when I put the first bite of the jello in my mouth, and my brain screamed that something was horribly wrong. I thought there must have been something rancid in the jello or the grapes - the grapes didn’t even have the right texture. I was about to spit it out - it was revolting - when I realized it was a taste I’d had before, not something rancid. All this was really just a moment, but it seemed like forever before it clicked: it wasn’t grapes, it was green olives. She made blackberry jello was green olives in it.

I thought for a moment that it was a prank, though that family wasn’t the pranking type, because no one else had taken any except the mom, but she had a mound of it and was eating it. I finally said, “It was surprising to bite into a grape and find out that it’s an olive,” and everyone tittered. Future MIL said that no one else likes it, but she does, so she makes it for herself.

It should have been a warning.

Who is she?

I’m my late teens and early twenties, I had several occurrences of gay guys hitting on me, to the point where I started to worry that there was something about me. It seems funny to me now, but I really did have a period of wondering if I could be and was just repressing it because of my Catholic upbringing. But ultimately I realized that I just didn’t find guys attractive at all, and even the thought of kissing a guy was kind of a boner killer. So I get what you’re saying, even though on the surface it sounds funny to say you wondered if you could be gay.

Sometime later I ended up with a couple of close gay friends, and I mentioned it to them. They said it was probably because I put out a very non-judgemental vibe and didn’t seem like a homophobe, so it probably didn’t seem risky to hit on me.

Looks like it might be the latter. I see this profile, but the cake day and the last post were both over a year ago.

Wasn’t shittymorph one of the ones who came here with the exodus?

I’m just barely a boomer, but I’m also a software engineer/manager. Sometimes younger folks assume I need help with computers/tech, or are surprised when I’m knowledgeable about them. It’s starting to change for me, too, though. I haven’t kept up with newer languages, and as a manager I really don’t write any code outside of the occasional Excel VBA, so I’m getting pretty stale.

Hard to believe that cold spots could stay for more than a moment with the Brownian motion.

No, that’s bullshit. Maybe you just don’t remember his first term. His picks then were the worst ever, but not nearly at this level. It was infuriating. You don’t remember the harm Betsy Devos did to the department of education? It’s the cabinet members who cause much of the destruction.

Oh, well, silly me then. No, like the other guy said, it’s very stretchy. If you have your own scrotum, it’s easily confirmed. If you have girly parts, the skin is very similar to the outer labia: very sensitive to scratching, but it doesn’t hurt to stretch it.

This whole thing is so soul crushing. I’ve always stayed informed to the point that I consider it a part of who I am. Now Trump and the Republicans control all branches of government, he’s putting in literally the worst possible choices for cabinet positions, they’re actively planning on some of the most abhorrently racist actions, and Trump is spinning up his grift machine. All of the checks and balances have been removed and replaced with loyalty assessments, and so we’re sitting here with no reasonable way to avoid the disasters. My chest is constantly tight and I just don’t think I can keep tuned into live coverage of the national disaster.

Not sure there was a right answer in this one. We legitimately bitched about Trump not supporting a peaceful transfer of power. Now he’s legitimately won the election, and Biden is trying to support a peaceful transfer of power the way we have for every election other than the one Trump lost.

I don’t think they’re asking about the stretching, but about having a puddle of alcohol on your scrotum. That was my first thought as well. Probably okay if it’s wine, but not sure about something high proof.

Any Warcraft 3 players read the headline and automatically respond with “I’m not ready!”

Heh, understandable. I’m one of the older Lemmy folks, I’d guess. I’m a software engineering manager for an aerospace company.

My wife and I moved into our first house together on Halloween, 1995, so that night we drank a bottle of champagne, watched Young Frankenstein, and handed out candy. Every year since then we’ve done the same thing to celebrate our anniversary of living together, though sometime a different movie. This year, we couldn’t find our DVD, so decided to stream it and found what you did. Apparently Disney bought it and for some reason decided not to make it available. Very frustrating.

That’s a good theory. It’s long been held that the more population dense area of the country skew liberal because diverse people jammed together learn to understand and get along with each other. You could make an argument that growing up on an internet with unfettered voices expressing themselves would be similar.

But the underlying racism that seems to fuel modern conservatism seems to be growing in all areas. I’m in California, which is about as blue as it gets, but like 40 percent of people voted for Trump.

I’ve been saying here for ages that the perception of boomers being overwhelmingly right wing and younger generations being overwhelmingly left wing is far, far from accurate. You can look at the demographic data from the prior two elections and see that, yes, there were more conservative boomers than liberal, but it’s not a big margin, and for younger generations it was flipped. Now it appears the younger folks are more conservative than liberal.

As a very liberal boomer, it’s been frustrating to get so many truly hateful responses, even recently, based on nothing other than the year I was born. I kept feeling like that level of intolerance didn’t bode well, and now I’m thinking that concern was validated.

That seems high, though I guess if they’re doing it in a state with high renewable energy, that’s what they’re using. It uses a crazy high amount of energy though.