Cinnamon is the bomb in non-sweet foods too. A Chongqing hot pot has dried chili peppers (OH SO MANY!), Sichuan peppercorns (red and green), star anise, cassia cinnamon (as opposed to Ceylon cinnamon), bay leaves, Chinese black cardamom, Doubanjiang (a peppery bean paste), fermented black beans, garlic, ginger, scallions, onion, and coriander (cilantro).

If I haven’t made people cringe with at least one of those ingredients, I’ve found someone with a very broad palate! 🤣

Caffeine is very stable, yes. But you’re not adding much if you’re adding just the dregs post-brew. Most of the caffeine is gone by the end of a normal brew. (This is quite unlike tea where you need several brews to get all the caffeine, so despite teas having more caffeine by weight than coffees most of the time, brewed tea has less.)

I agree with the first two and sometimes the last (though I tend to go for stocks instead to get the umami). I’m really not a fan of the onion and garlic powder, though. If I need onion and garlic I get onion and garlic. Don’t like the powder forms.

What I did in an old C&S campaign was purloined lettered the Hell out of the lab.

The PCs invaded the wizard’s keep. They quickly searched the grounds, kicking down doors and making sure all the guards were subdued before hitting the main tower. There they fought their way up the tower to where the most defended room in the keep was. After disabling most (not all!) of the traps, magickal and physical both on the entrance way, and taking their lumps for the traps they missed, they broke into the proper lab, all filled with glassware and books and components and braziers and whatnot.

Only to have it turn out that everything in there was common and useless stuff glamoured up to seem important until you touched it.

In the mean time, while the PCs were being kept busy in the keep’s tower, the wizard came out of the basement crudely hidden under straw in the stables with all his most valuable stuff packed and carried out of the grounds to a safe distance before he triggered the final trap that turned the tower into a towering inferno.

The fools hadn’t even rolled to check for anything in the stables; I mean it was just the place where the horses were kept, right…?

Parsley is fine in things like tabbouleh (and indeed it’s perfect in that) but that aside, yeah, I’m not a fan of parsley in most things.

Definitely. Also Chongqing hot pots.

Incidentally here’s a guide to help you distinguish between the flat-leaf parsley and cilantro/coriander:

The cilantro is the leaf next to the parsley.

There’s two kinds of parsley (not including coriander/cilantro which is its own headache):

1. The flat-leaf stuff that has a mild flavour but no texture and is better replaced with coriander if you’re not one of the mutants who tastes soap when eating coriander.
2. The frizzy-leaf stuff that has a stronger flavour and a texture, but the flavour is bitter and the texture is kind of like eating hair.

Yeah, cinnamon (“true” and cassia) bark is a great spice!

Black pepper. Chili pepper. Sichuan peppercorns …

… you might be spotting a pattern?

We’re heading into hot season, so right now undies and a ratty tee.

No. I would not wear these outside.

Π (Pi) males: covered in a crust and baked. Smoke a lot of weed.

Ν (Nu) males: an alpha male with added rap.

Ξ (Xi) males: look like Winnie the Pooh.

Indeed.

You’re making zero sense now. Perhaps if you communicated in, you know, sentences instead of single words, you’ll make more sense.

Before you fuck up even more, there are three flags there.

One is my nation of birth. One is my nation of citizenship. One is my nation of residence.

Which one of these bugs you and makes you babble in non sequiturs and single-word responses?

I’m failing to see the link between “personality type” and the PRC.

Would you care to explain?

In that capacity, yes, I like personality types. Anybody who spouts any of the self-identification personality types (whether astrology, blood type, MBTI, graphological type, etc.) is someone who is not a serious person and can safely have their opinions on almost any topic dismissed without further regard.

What I hate about them is what they represent: the absence, after all this time, of any kind of human intellect.

“Personality types” are all bullshit and all bad for humanity in general.

Yes. All of them. No exceptions. There’s nothing special about the manosphere personality types beyond them being made up by some seriously icky people.

You’re falling for the trap in this “sigma male” crap that astrologers and other charlatans have laid out thousands of years ago: a vaguely formless definition that is mostly-flattering but doesn’t actually nail down anything concrete nor provide any form of predictive validity. If you gave that hand-wavy definition to a hundred people selected at random, pitching it as a custom “personality profile” made by “careful psychological evaluation”, well over half the people would be amazed at how clearly you “read them”.

Despite it being just a few sentences of glurge designed to make you feel good about yourself.

It’s nonsense. It has zero validity at any level. (As does, in fact, the whole notion of a “personality type”.) Saying “I’m a sigma male” is about as credible and nonsensical as saying “I’m a Taurus” or “I’m a Chicken” or “I have type A- blood” or “I’m an ENTP” or “I’m high in Openness and low in Neuroticism” or “I’m a Type 8, the Challenger” or “I’m an Expressive” or “I’m a Type D personality” or “I have a ‘dominant’ personality stroke” or “I’m an ESE” or “I’m a Sunshine Yellow”.

And yes, each one of those is a real “personality type” from some tradition or another, and each of these has millions or more who believe it applies to them perfectly, despite some of them going as low as only four types. The world is full of this kind of foolishness, and it’s all gibberish and nonsense.

If you want a better, more scholarly take-down of all this “personality type” stupidity, look no further than Bertrand Forer who in 1948 already had the entire field tossed into the garbage can with a single, very simple experiment. The fact that post-Forer we still invent these nonsensical categories is just more evidence that human beings are too stupid to have nice things ever.