To hell with the turtles!

Wisconsin gets fucking serious about their German sausages. There’s a joint down from y’all’s state capital that used to serve a pretty good cheddarwurst but it’s been a few years since I’ve been.

Are you asking me for my super secret family recipe?!?!? Sure thing! But I have a lot to say about it so get ready for the infodump. You’re not just getting the proportions, you’re getting too much information.

Let me start by saying it’s hard to mess up SPG. Get roughly equal parts salt and pepper, add a little garlic, and you’re good. Some folks also add onion to theirs and that’s pretty good as well. I know guys who have won local smoking competitions who eyeball that shit.

His everyday mix is one part dried, minced garlic to three parts sea salt and three parts coarse ground black pepper by volume. On brisket he uses another part pepper to help develop that deep bark.

My everyday mix is one part dried, minced garlic to two and a half parts coarse ground black pepper and three parts table salt by volume (I had an iodine deficiency and don’t want to remember to take my supplement). On brisket I use his blend.

For the garlic I generally mince it and spread it on parchment paper then pop it in the oven on 170f for an hour or so. However much garlic I end up with decides how much SPG I have so generally I’ll do a whole bulb at a time. You could do the same thing with the jars of minced garlic you can buy at the store, McCormick dried minced garlic, or even garlic powder. I happen to prefer the flavor of doing it myself but not everyone has the time, extra garlic from their garden, an oven, desire, or whatever to do it and honestly the difference in results isn’t going to be greatly noticeable to most people.

I’m an enthusiastic amateur taster with a terrible palette and I bet it would ruin it for me, too.

Watch your mouth, I might be a lady! I mean, I’m not, but I could be!

Honestly, using that kind of language…You’re a **** ********* ** ******.

I don’t think you’re a ****

I think this is one of those cases where we’re using different language but completely agree.

What I meant by mistakes was that they weren’t making trial mistakes. They were making dumb ass political calculations when they should have been seeking justice. I generally think of that as a “tried and failed” tactic rather than “we were misguided”.

That being said, you’re right. Playing politics rather than treating everyone equally under the law is a huge fucking mistake.

3 mini PCs, 4 players each, round robin Mario Kart tournament.

I semi-regularly need between 6 and 8. When I throw a barbecue there’s live music, a large selection of meats with plenty to snack on while everyone is waiting for the brisket and ribs to finish up, vegetarian options that are more than just sides or salads, vegan options if any of my vegan friends stop by, games like darts and cornhole, video games, drinks, and general fuckery.

I like to do it big and I’ve got the means and space to do that.

Let me start by saying I do get the sarcasm. I’m one of the people who likes to solidify behind the leftmost feasible candidate which is always the Dems.

Now it’s exactly the time to go full bore third party and try to get ranked choice voting on ballots. Make the joke all you want about it being too late, I stand behind my decision and believe that anything after primary season, no matter what fuckery occurred during the primaries, is too late. No one thinks it’s too late today except people who are paid to think that.

Some are absolutely exactly who you have described. Some want to pretend that it’s really the Democrats that are super racist so they keep around their tokens so they can say “I have a black friend!”. Others are entirely disengaged and don’t give the slightest shit about it one way or another.

They’re not a monolith and they have to pander to each of these groups differently. For the first they pander to literal members of organized Nazi groups and peddle shit like the great replacement theory. For the second they appoint folks like this and point out folks like Gregory Cheadle and say “That’s my African American!”. For the third they yell about how prices have gone up and promise they’ll bring them down with voodoo economics. It doesn’t matter that the economics are lies. It doesn’t matter that they’re using women and people of color as props. All that matters is they tell enough conflicting things that everyone gets to latch on to their own lie and say that everything else was just bluster.

These weren’t mistakes. Some of them were slow walked because they were friendly judges waiting to see when they could dismiss without it coming back. Others were slow walked trying to fuck Trump during election season.

This was a miscalculation by state officials who cared more about playing politics than they did about justice.

I always figured this story was about how Lot was molesting his daughters and blamed them for it.

I’m not going to say what I assumed happened to her, but I’m really relieved to hear this.

As someone who has several mini PCs with HoloISO, I totally hope they put out an official box because I’ll replace all of mine. I’ll repurpose one of my current ones into something fun and give the others to some local nerd who wants to do nerd shit.

I get the cheap GameSir controllers and they work fine. I’ve got probably 10 of them running around and I need to grab two more to replace my dying Stadia controllers. None have given me a moment of trouble.

That said, I’m not picking up two more if there’s a new steam controller coming. I’ll wait. I don’t usually need more than 8 at once so I can put it on the back burner for now until I need to host a holiday.

We all knew this was going to happen. Even the optimists like myself figured it out when sentencing was scheduled after the election.

I go to Wurstfest almost every year. I couldn’t make it this year for personal reasons. I just love the fact that there’s a whole festival about sausages. That’s it. There’s also plenty of beer, dancing, and music but mostly they just want you to put their sausage in your mouth.

You were talking about the run up to the end. You’re moving goalposts. Would you like to try to redo this so that you stay on topic, or do you want to complain?

I don’t care either way, you’re a useless person to me. But I thought you might want to try to at least make it look like you’ve got a real problem with this specific thing rather than just being miserable and trying to make everyone around you miserable as well.

Yep. If I’m feeling depressed I’ll slap on Bojack. If I’m feeling good, Disenchantment. That’s pretty much the only things I watch on Netflix when I sub it for a month to see if it’s gotten any better.

Smoking meats is a hobby. To get dinner ready, you start at 3am and tend the firebox all day. You try different rubs, woods, and techniques to make the product of your craft the best it can be.

3am?!? What tiny little brisket are you doing at 225 to start that late? You’ve got to leave time for it to rest.

Ok, in all seriousness this is one of my main hobbies. By that I mean I do it often and I’ve stuck with it for years while other hobbies have come and gone. I’ve got a couple of offset smokers, a drum smoker that I built, and a pellet smoker when I don’t have the time to tend the firebox but still want to smoke something.

I said all that to say this: there are plenty of people who couldn’t give two shits about smoking meats who absolutely come ask me questions about it. Not because I’m the best, and not because they want it to be their hobby. But because I’m excited to talk about it. I also tend to bring full plates with me for my friends (and usually a couple of extras) so they get the benefit of having food.

I’ve also had women ask if they can come hang out next time I crank up the smoker. It’s an easy way in for someone who wouldn’t normally be confident enough to approach you.