Atheist Forum

Cassia wrote: Mon Jun 08, 2026 3:41 pm What do you do with 6 lbs. of cherry tomatoes?

I freeze them in one pound bags. Then when I make spaghetti or chili I run them through a blender real quick and toss them in as base. I think cherry maters are the best. Sometimes they can be a bit acidic but a tablespoon of honey calms it down and gives a nice, ever so subtle sweetness to it.

aitm wrote: Wed Jun 10, 2026 4:49 pm I freeze them in one pound bags. Then when I make spaghetti or chili I run them through a blender real quick and toss them in as base. I think cherry maters are the best. Sometimes they can be a bit acidic but a tablespoon of honey calms it down and gives a nice, ever so subtle sweetness to it.

I can't kill these things. But, yeah, they are delicious. A touch of honey sounds like a good idea. Have some sort of medium-sized, yellow tomatoes that are very hardy. Have no idea the variety as they came from a seed assortment pack. I just started some yard-long beans in my dead lettuce beds.

I just saw a pretty interesting video about how early humans survived large predators.

Early humans had almost nothing - no claws, horns, venom, thick hide, etc. They weren't particularly fast or powerful. So a predator like a saber-toothed cat could absolutely hunt down and kill a human.

But humans have a hidden weapon - vengeance. Humans would tell each other about the attack, band together, and drive off the saber-toothed cat and maybe even hunt it down in its own liar.

In nature, prey reacts to predators in the moment - zebras run, rattlesnakes coil and rattle, buffalo band together, etc. Prey that remembers and gets revenge at a later date is a highly unusual thing. So any animal that attacks people takes on a huge risk to its own survival. And while individual predators probably don't factor future revenge into their calculations - predators that preyed on humans got scarcer and scarcer, especially as humans mastered fire and pointy sticks. Predators that avoided humans tended to survive more often than predators who hunted humans.

Eventually, humans developed alliances of a sort not just with other humans, but with animals. Horses, oxen, dogs, cats, goats, chickens, and pigs. These too became risky prey for predators because harming them risked human revenge. And humans spread to every land environment on the globe - settling more in the valleys and plains than the tundra or desert, but settling to some extent basically everywhere.

Now, almost the entirety of mammals on land are either humans or human-affiliated animals (livestock). Humans didn't just survive against predators, they've almost entirely wiped them out.

Animal senses a predator: Runs away.

Animal senses a human: RUNS FASTER!

The biggest advantage early humans had besides tools was stamina. They would chase an antelope for days and days, so it could not graze and eventually it would collapse and then feed/clothe the tribes. Long distance/marathon running is relatively uncommon in land animals.

Yeah, there are ancient records of humans hunting prey to exhaustion. So that's a win for humans.

Also, humans are uniquely good at throwing rocks. Other animals can throw stuff, elephants for example. Even other apes can throw stuff, though not very accurately. But humans are the best at it. That behavior alone makes humans very dangerous, to predators and prey alike.

I am officially calling Android the worst operating system there ever was. So, I've gotten a handful of MP3 players, including a couple Android ones and have now settled on this:



So I also use this to try and write while I'm in the coffee shop and today for no discernible reason the simple text editor I'm currently using, called Simple Text Editor-- it's for editing text simply, got this weird little pop-up Basically a bubble with a hamburger button in it. I didn't like how this took up space in on the tiny screen, but what I hated enough to uninstall was when I it autocorrected a word without even asking. I write weird fiction, so I'm likely to make up word. THIS IS NOT ACCEPTABLE. Fortunately, I investigated and it turns out it wasn't the text editor, but G-Board, Google's stupid idea for a bad soft keyboard. It does that when you're using it, but it puts that stupid hamburger bubble on there and autocorrects without asking (ground black people). So I disabled it, because of course I can't uninstall, and downloaded a simpler soft keyboard, called Simple Keyboard-- there's a pattern.

The other annoying thing is using the music player turns the volume way fucking down by default and won't let you turn it up without giving you a nag screen about ho loud volume can damage my hearing. It's set to do this at an incredibly low volume, so I don't understand their game at all. Other than cover their ass. There are ways to disable this, but it requires some trickery I'm not in the mood to fiddle with right now, but I will get annoyed enough to do so.

I also have a few MP3 players for used mostly while jogging or gardening since they are lightweight. The user interfaces suck. You have to go all the way up and down to get bluetooth connect page (for my headphones) and then all the way up and down to play music. Getting to the main menu is hit or miss and often seems like a random sequence of the up/down and menu keys. They all seem to use the same shitty software.

theantithesis wrote: Sun Jun 14, 2026 7:19 amSo I also use this to try and write while I'm in the coffee shop and today for no discernible reason the simple text editor I'm currently using, called Simple Text Editor-- it's for editing text simply, got this weird little pop-up

Wait a sec... you're using an mp3 player to write? Like short story or novel-length stuff? Did I get that right?

Hydra009 wrote: Sun Jun 14, 2026 2:12 pm

theantithesis wrote: Sun Jun 14, 2026 7:19 amSo I also use this to try and write while I'm in the coffee shop and today for no discernible reason the simple text editor I'm currently using, called Simple Text Editor-- it's for editing text simply, got this weird little pop-up

Wait a sec... you're using an mp3 player to write? Like short story or novel-length stuff? Did I get that right?

It's Android, so, yes. I could just use my phone, but this has physical buttons.