I think it probably still has to be Christmas sandwiches. It’s a whole British style Christmas dinner in a sandwich.

• Slices of freshly roasted turkey
• Stuffing
• Sliced up roasted pork sausages
• Bacon
• Baked ham
• Baby peas
• Bread sauce
• Thick, salty, meaty turkey gravy
• Cranberry sauce

The key is in stacking it high without it all falling over and then squishing it all down to hold it’s shape. Traditionally for my family it’s the most commercial, crappy supermarket white sliced bread you can find, but I have had it with some pretty yummy sourdough. The bread is important because with all the greasy mushy sauces, it needs a tight crumb structure so you don’t get bits of sauce coming through the holes as you bite. You want something soft because you don’t want to be chewing and tearing hard crusts whilst trying to keep the delicate sandwich all together, but if it’s too soft then it tends to fall apart from all the moisture in the gravy and bread sauce. Sometimes toasting just the inner faces of the bread can work, but it has to be lightly toasted to make sure the bread retains some flexibility during the squish down step.

We all like the sandwiches even more than the actual Christmas dinner, which is already awesome.

Cheapest Logitech mouse I could find in the supermarket about 6-7 years ago.

As others have said, it might be more to do with my browser choice, browser settings and extensions. That said I remember when I first started seeing these years ago that sometimes it’d think I was a robot and sometimes it wouldn’t and maybe it was a placebo effect, but I felt fairly confident then that me jiggling the mouse really helped. Now it doesn’t matter what I do. My natural movement, a deliberately wonky but still single and continuous movement or a totally artificial mouse wiggle after the clock, I’ll always have to do captchas.

I’ve learned from these that I must definitely move my mouse like a robot since it always asks me to do more puzzles afterwards. This is even if I try jiggling it around after clicking just to try and convince it.

Can attest, did pee in it.

If you don’t count Solitaire then I think it’d probably be Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure. I suppose technically it might have been this other game where you’re a rabbit and it somehow involved spelling, but I don’t remember what that was called and it was only on my friend’s family’s computer and it was educational so it doesn’t count. It was on a floppy disk that was actually the floppy kind.

Can confirm it’s not a thing that’s happening on my pixel and hasn’t happened on any of my android phones so far.

Them were’t dairz

Biology class circa 2001-2003

I think you’re missing the point of why that phrase became a bit of a joke and is considered unhelpful. It’s not written off because people think mitochondria are unimportant or should be written off, it’s because when you’re a teen learning this stuff and they’re trying to explain how cells work, mitochondria are a particularly strange and complicated thing that’s thrown in to the mix, and it sounds important and complicated but in lieu of any real details there’s the sudden brick wall of this weirdly uncharacteristic phrase that doesn’t really sound like how you’re teacher normally speaks, doesn’t really read like how the rest of the textbook reads and other than some vague allusion to “power” fails quite spectacularly to tell you what mitochondria are.

Part of what made it maddeningly confusing was that these lessons are getting you thinking about how mechanisms can coalesce to form larger systems, encouraging you interrogate macro scale phenomena down to the smallest scales and see how it all ticks and then suddenly they hit you with this magic “powerhouse”, very poorly explained, and which because of that poor explanation appears somehow irreducibe. You know mitochondria have “power” of some sort but any of their own mechanisms are conspicuously left out of the picture. This is probably for good reason because of the difficulty of making a syllabus that isn’t too deep or broad for the time available and for teenagers to pick up but it’s a very sudden brick wall. HOW do the mitochondria power cells? Do the mitochondria have cells? Do the mitochondria’s cells have mitochondria? How are they transmitting this power to our cells? The way this phrase was used was more reminiscent of a slogan, or an ad campaign and quite unlike much of anything else one remembers from biology class, it felt very… out of context. Even the choice of the word “power house” always felt weird, as it wasn’t for me at least, a word commonly encountered so to use it as an analogy really undermined it’s ability to help you grasp anything as it sought to explain one concept in terms of another only vaguely understood concept. I gathered this was a similar term to “power plant” although other than a popular museum in Sydney I had never heard the term used outside of that goofy phrase and to say mitochondria function similar to a power plant, in that they produce power doesn’t really say much more than, “mitochondria are the energy source of cells” which is similarly meaningless in all but the most basic sense.

So, don’t blame the mocking meme for dismissing mitochondria, blame the weird ass phrase the meme mocks for completely failing to explain anything about them and relegating them to a single, cryptic, hand waving sentence.

Definitely did it in Australia.

I think a big part of why it took off and lives on as a meme in the internet forums sense of the word, was the familiarity of the bizarre and unnatural phrase to the young adults using those forums who remembered it from biology class.

Certainly that’s how it was for me because before Digg, or Reddit, even before Facebook (though I guess not that long before), I had had that phrase uttered sincerely as part of my education and it was so uncanny and funny to see that this highly specific and distinctive phrase was used rote, word for word, at schools all over the world and was as memorably unhelpful to others as it had been to me. Perhaps the positive feedback loop from this phrase’s new life on the web really has fed in to education in a life imitating art kind of way like you describe, but I can assure you it definitely predated it’s status as a joke, and that’s where that joke came from.

I have so many because I realised recently that most of my favourite foods are basically if not literally sandwiches in some form. What springs to mind now though is the English Fry-up crammed in to a baguette. I almost said the ‘full-English’ but admittedly it’s not quite the full English.

• A crusty but still quite soft baguette is best, similar to bahn-mi bread but longer and not as chewy
• 2 fried eggs
• 2 Cumberland pork sausage (or Irish sausages if you can get them 'cos they’re so good) slided in to longish strips on a bias
• Long rasher bacon strips to match the length of the baguette (can fold them if they are a bit too long)
• 2 hash browns
• Heinz baked beans (just a couple of teaspoons)
• Brown sauce
• Ketchup
• A glare from the grumpy Polish woman that made it for you.

Ok it’s just a well known breakfast but shoved in a baguette but somehow it does something magical to it. Especially loved this in the UK when I had a bad hangover and I could just about drag myself to the little Polish run cafe near my place. They were great, albeit grumpy.

Is that a crumpet in the middle there?

You’re probably going to have to have a chat with your mum about this because if there’s not a good specific reason for her concern, then it would be helpful to you if she could relax on this issue because it’s impinging on your ability to enjoy your life as an adult. She should care about that and if she doesn’t that tells you something. Ideally you could avoid the whole issue by meeting your date somewhere other than your house, although it will be awkward if you are unable to return home with them at any stage. Can your sister or any of your friends give you a ride to meet your date elsewhere?

A point of confusion I have from your post is whether you’re asking about your rights to date people, or just your rights to have them pick you up from the house. As far as dating people is concerned, you say you’re 25, you can do what you want neither your Mum nor your sister have any choice about it. You do not have to justify this or use your recent birthday as an excuse for anything because there’s nothing to excuse. Whether you want to date people is up to you and you alone.

If your Mum specifically requested that you not bring your date to the house it would be rude to just ignore her, particularly if she has some special reason to be extra careful, but it’s also a very strange request for her to make of her 25 year old adult-child so you’ll definitely need her to give a pretty good explanation why you shouldn’t do this. Similarly, it’s a very strange situation to be in that you’re worried about your sister watching camera footage of you as some kind of evidence of wrong doing, why is she in a position to do that and why would she want to? How old is she? Such behaviour is bizarre and controlling.

A lot of the details of your post sound like you’ve been living in strange and possibly abusive circumstances where your mother and sister are putting a lot of effort in to monitoring and controlling you, which they do not any rights to do. In most places I know of, a person is legally an “adult” at 18 years of age, how long have they been doing this to you? Were you allowed friends and relationship in school? What about afterwards at work or university?

Do you want to continue living with your mother? It might be a good idea to start gaining some more independence in your life so you can safely choose to live in a different arrangement if you want to. No offence, but the way you write does sound strangely young and naive for a 25 year old, especially the idea that you need to have either your mother or your sister around to look after you. Do you have friends that know about your living arrangements? Do you know many people outside of your house? If you tried to make friends and spend time with them, is that something your mother would try to stop you doing? It sounds like you’re very isolated and your Mum is keeping it that way on purpose. Unless there’s some very specific context that can explain all these details, then it sounds like there’s something very wrong about how your family is treating you.

I used to actually love Domino’s but then the pizza got a little worse, then a little smaller, then smaller again, then more expensive, then quite a lot more expensive, then the voucher system that was keeping prices under control was trashed and then the pizzas got way smaller again.

This was a blessing in disguise though really. I tended not to explore the local options before this because they were only occasionally good in one’s area if you were lucky and always much pricier. Since Domino’s pricing stopped being cheap it made it worth searching for cheesier pastures and there’s a local joint near me that does NY style and it’s really good. That was really just luck though, honestly there’s a lot of really crappy neighbourhood pizza joints that people assume will be better because they’re not a chain when they’re really no better I’m glad I seemed to have landed next to the cream of the crop.

In general, we just… do. What that looks like is going to be different for everyone and how you get there will be unique to you, but even without trying you almost certainly just will… get over it. Necessity if nothing else will help with that. You’ve still got to feed yourself, maintain your friendships and any other relationships you have, pay your bills, advance your goals and carry on. Life doesn’t typically care very much that you’d really rather just put it on hold and ruminate for a while.

I guess that doesn’t sound very helpful but time has a way of doing the getting over for us. Sometimes you need more of it, depending on the source and magnitude of your pain, but eventually enough time is all you need.

To put it in perspective, if you’ve ever experienced this before, the previous crush likely doesn’t feature too loudly on your radar right now and yet they might have been your whole world at one stage. If this is the first time you’ve been through this, it probably won’t be your last and there are probably similarly painful experiences in your past that seemed very important to you when they were fresh that are all but forgotten now. Try to remember that you walked that passage from all consuming fixation, to just a memory before and you can walk it again.

On a more practical level it probably would help things go faster if you could avoid too much contact with the person for a while so you don’t have to keep raking over the unpleasant emotions associated with the rejection and don’t have to keep fighting the urge to try your luck again when reminded of how much you like them, but then again often work or school or other environments can force you to have to see someone repeatedly even after there’s awkwardness between the two of you. In that scenario, well, to repeat the initially glib and unhelpful sounding advice, it’ll just happen with time, even when it feels like it won’t, don’t worry - you will get over this.

7/10 it’s 'aight

They got weirdly expensive for obscure reasons. People have always shit on them for the quality of their food but I’d wager that like myself those critics have probably had their fair share of golden arches to be able to make that assesment and until recent times probably continued to do so all whilst grumbling about the quality. I’m not disputing the low quality, it has always been a product of economic efficiency and not culinary prowess, but nevertheless they have for many decades represented a kind of minimum standard that almost everyone was willing to settle for because of low prices, consistency and ubiquity. Now they have abandoned the cheap part of this triangle. I don’t understand what’s going on in old Ronald’s bright red head these days because if you don’t deliver on the cheap part of the equation then there’s not much else left to recommend McDonalds. They’re still consistent-ish (even that’s kind of going by the wayside) but that doesn’t say much when they’re consistently bottom of the barrel whilst also being expensive to top it all off. Ubiquity is still a strong draw, they’re kinda crappy, and overpriced but they’re still here wherever that is in the world, but ultimately that only works so long as nothing else is here too since they no longer compete on price.

It’s a weird strategy to have opted for having invented and perfected the streamlined factory food restaurant model that took over the world. It worked miraculously well, why would you fuck with arguably the most important part of the trifecta? Evidently it wasn’t the masterplan of super smart business minds that can see well past my simple analysis because lo and behold, if you sell cheap crap and then raise the price so it becomes expensive crap, you tend to get fewer takers.

It is necessary to build more housing stock, but if you simply do that alone while there is still significant incentive to buy investment properties then the developers will obviously sell to those that pay and it’s typically those with means that will pay, which tends to be people who can afford multiple properties more than those who are struggling to afford one place to live in. Obviously if you’re a developer looking for a return on your investment you’ll price according to what those people will pay so that housing stock is quickly swallowed up mostly by landlords who will want to recoup their investment by charging higher rents and so on.

“this was our last HVAC guy”