Life

[Scrobbs]

Heh. Sounds almost like a cop show. How about a storyboard about the children thing and then do the whole angry crim coming round to do the creator. You know, make it meta.

In reality, probably best to say you're busy, and that you couldn't give the project the time it so clearly deserves. Without a trace of sarcasm, obvs.

[Scrobbs]

Try to head off the call in a month by saying that the project you're on is long term or whatever.

[Roderick]

'Yeah, from now until my funeral I'm totally busy with work.'

'Your funeral will be earlier than you think.'

BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP...

[brkl]

  On 12/13/2012 at 6:59 PM, Armchair General said:

What! What! What! The EMPIRE was built on tea! We need to swap addresses and I'll send you some fine English tea and you can send me some Finnish tea and we can compare!

I'm reeling from your comments! Blasphemy!

Hah, we can do that. But I'm not really implying Britain (I was in Scotland) doesn't have good tea, only that most people just drink whatever. Tea is a bigger consumer product there than in most countries, so they have more cheap brands of it as well.

[ThunderPeel2001]

  On 12/12/2012 at 10:37 PM, toblix said:

America, we need to talk ...

... about your candy. A while back I thought «hey, USA is so great, I bet they have great candy!» and I e-ordered a box of purportedly typical US-American candy, and I have come to the conclusion that it's all terribly, artificially flavoured tongue-scrapingly awful. So, either my candy box was badly curated, US-American candy is terrible, or there's just a vast candy-cultural gap that prevents me from enjoying your Jujyfruits and Milky Ways. If you live in the USA, tell me, what's your favourite candy?

No! They're chocolate is absolutely terrible (although a lot of Americans can't tell). Their "go to" chocolate bar, Hershey, is absolutely revolting -- it's like someone mixed a ton of sugar with a bit of wax. America's deserts, however, are absolutely fantastic. They just seem to have a huge blind spot when it comes to decent chocolate.

[ThunderPeel2001]

  On 12/13/2012 at 9:30 AM, brkl said:

I actually had a horrible time finding good tea in Britain. All I could find were cheap teabags, which might as well have been Lipton. Eventually I found some, but I had to go looking for it.

Huh...? What type of tea were you looking for?

[brkl]

Just decent black loose-leaf tea. Maybe the shops near me were especially crappy, I dunno.

[ThunderPeel2001]

  On 12/14/2012 at 6:16 PM, brkl said:

Just decent black loose-leaf tea. Maybe the shops near me were especially crappy, I dunno.

I think every grocery shop in the entire of the UK sells high quality black tea (aka "breakfast tea"). It seems completely unfathomable that you couldn't find any!

[Frenetic Pony]

  On 12/14/2012 at 5:40 PM, ThunderPeel2001 said:

No! They're chocolate is absolutely terrible (although a lot of Americans can't tell). Their "go to" chocolate bar, Hershey, is absolutely revolting -- it's like someone mixed a ton of sugar with a bit of wax. America's deserts, however, are absolutely fantastic. They just seem to have a huge blind spot when it comes to decent chocolate.

This! This is confirmed, we are awful and should be punished. To get GOOD chocolate I need to go to the fancy grocery store that sells all organic fruits and vegetables.

Which is, it's sort of like... there are three "tiers" of candy in the US, with little wiggle room in between. There's the stuff that's part of the reason there's so many god damned fat people here. Hershey's is awful, Reesus, now Reesus isn't bad if it's Haloween or just "there". Same with sour candy. If it's there, Sour Punch or Warheads or etc. are kind of cool.

Tier 2 gets expensive. Tier 2 is the organic, fair trade cocoa bars with percentage of cocoa clearly listed on the label and stuff like cocoa nibs, or coconut and honey, or peppers in them. This, oddly, is just about the only candy in tier 2, because from here it jumps to tier 3. Tier 3 is specialty chocolate shops that charge you 2 bucks apiece for a coin sized area, though thick, chocolate. A little slice of heaven.

But that's not the point. The best deserts you'll probably only find in America aren't candy. They're cookies, baked goods. Europeans are absolute, utter shite at cookies. In fact from what I've heard from numerous, addicts, are that you're not great at all (England, France, Portugal, Germany, Spain, and Italy were the countries "surveyed"). We've got bakeries scattered everywhere that sell cookies, soft, warm chocolate chip oatmeal, or just crazy stuff, for $2-3 apiece and it feels like a deal because you'd probably pay more. Sure, if you go to France the croissants are good. But sticky buns, and croissants, and morning buns, and cakes, and carmelitas, and etc. You go into a proper bakery in the US and you are in a wonderland of baked goods with variety enough to fill up several counters of space.

[Lu]

Suck my stroopwafels.

[Nachimir]

American sweets/bars with peanut butter tend to be good, but the chocolate is indeed shite. I brought a load back for my housemates one year because it had cool names, and we were all disappointed.

[melmer]

I remember the first time I tasted a hersheys kiss, expecting a luxurious and smooth choclate like galaxy... Dear god that is some fake ass nasty choc choc

[ThunderPeel2001]

*shudders*

[Roderick]

During my time in LA I made the poor decision to try a bar of, I do believe it was Hersheys. I couldn't believe that it actually tasted like vomit. I honestly thought there was something wrong with my bar, it had this artificial acidic taste to it. Last chocolate I bought in the US! Damn.

[Ben X]

  On 12/15/2012 at 12:12 AM, Nachimir said:

American sweets/bars with peanut butter tend to be good, but the chocolate is indeed shite. I brought a load back for my housemates one year because it had cool names, and we were all disappointed.

Reese's Peanut Butter Cups are amaaaazing.

[Luftmensch]

  On 12/15/2012 at 10:34 PM, Ben X said:

Reese's Peanut Butter Cups are amaaaazing.

Just don't get the kinds that come in novelty shapes, like christmas trees and easter bunnies. The pb/chocolate ratio gets off. Personally, I prefer the classic size, but my sister things the mini cups are the ideal. Reese's pieces are also pretty great.

M&Ms, the regular kind, are bland milk chocolate, but recently they're getting more adventurous. You can get dark chocolate M&Ms in different varieties, and the crispy and pretzel varieties are kind of delightful. I'm pretty sure you can get M&Ms almost anywhere though.

Again though, Kit-Kat is irresistible to me. You can probably get it in dark chocolate most places too.

Here's a couple interesting links:

Why do British and American chocolate taste different? (very thorough answer)

Wikipedia page for American Chocolate (not very thorough)

[Joewintergreen]

those are the same link, you silly man

[Luftmensch]

Whoops, so it is. Fixed!

[toblix]

I just developer tooled the «extra garlic» input field of a pizza form to add 20x garlic to a pizza I'm having delivered. Based on the automatic email receipt, it passed validation on the back-end. The point, which is based on my observation that everything gets a separate line on the physical receipt, is to create an extra-long, extra-awkward pause as me and the pizza delivery person wait out in the freezing cold for the little printer to print all those lines of extra garlic. I'm pretty excited.

[toblix]

[MrHoatzin]

Similarly, my birthday on these here forums is March 20, 1455.

[brkl]

Did you eat that pizza, toblix?

[toblix]

  On 12/17/2012 at 4:21 PM, brkl said:

Did you eat that pizza, toblix?

Working on it.

[syntheticgerbil]

How can you tell that story and not take a picture of that raunchy pizza you ordered?

EDIT: NEVERMIND

[Ben X]

Toblix, the way you took the shot of that receipt makes it look like the camera is zooming in as I scroll down the page with my cursor key.

Was the silence suitably long and awkward?