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sidereaWhat country do you currently live in?
What is your age?
12-19
0 (0.0%)
20-29
1 (25.0%)
30-39
0 (0.0%)
40-49
2 (50.0%)
50-59
1 (25.0%)
60-69
0 (0.0%)
70-79
0 (0.0%)
80+
0 (0.0%)
To the best of your knowledge, if the US were to go to war tomorrow, against what country would it most likely be?
daily_illuminator_feed
A couple of weeks ago, after delays and hiccups we're still learning from, the slipcases for the first set of Fighting Fantasy's triumphant return to the United States arrived (as we proclaimed in a Kickstarter update). Since then, we've been steadily shipping the thousands of orders to eager fans.askamanager_feedIt’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. My boss told me I had to be on camera while sick
My department hosts a monthly zoom meeting to a large audience. That week I was working from home with a terrible cold (coughing, sneezing, runny nose, the whole package). The day the meeting was scheduled to occur, I emailed my manager excusing myself for not having my camera on as I was sick.
She emailed me back with, “Please be camera ready for the meeting, all participants are expected to be on camera.” I was not presenting; I am just required to attend, and not having my camera on would not pose any disruption to the meeting. I didn’t have the energy to even reply back, so I complied with the ask.
All 100+ participants saw me constantly coughing, sneezing and cleaning my nose (I had my phone on mute). To be honest. I was embarrassed. I got a few “feel better” messages afterwards, which prompted me to realized some people did notice I was sick.
I would think a good manager would understand that the best approach is to have the sick person have their camera off to ensure no distractions. But now I’m wondering if I should’ve pushed back? Or is it the norm to be in camera even if you look like you have the plague? Should I say something now?
Your manager sucks. Even in meetings that are generally camera-on, it should be fine for people to go camera-off if they’re sick (or having connectivity issues, or pumping, or a whole variety of things).
Whether or not you should have pushed back depends on what you know about your manager. With some managers, it would be fine to say, “I’m really not in any condition to be on camera but if you’d prefer I skip the meeting instead, let me know.” With others, that would cause more problems than it would solve.
But you definitely don’t have anything to be embarrassed about! People clearly realized you were sick and probably just felt bad about it.
2. What’s the best way to tell an organization that their volunteer is obnoxious?
I just had a fairly wild interaction with a volunteer for an organization I professionally partner with (i.e., my NGO and their NGO have had joint projects in the past). This volunteer has stepped up to lead a major project and asked for a meeting to pitch that my NGO should endorse his project. Not only was his presentation fairly unimpressive, but I found him to be wildly condescending and aggressively sure that he is right in all details even when he is not. A real low point was the moment when he interrupted me to explain the details of my own work, that I’ve been leading, as the director of my org, for 5 years.
I’m not going to endorse his project. This partner NGO is very lightly staffed and relies heavily on volunteer work, but they do have a few paid positions. Should I reach out to the actual staff and tell them why they didn’t win my endorsement?
Frankly, I kind of want to chuck this whole encounter in the memory hole and move on, but maybe if I report my experience with the volunteer it will save some future human from having the same interaction I did. Any advice for wording I could use?
If you didn’t have contacts at the other org, I’d say to leave it alone … but since you’ve worked with them in the past, I’m assuming you have contacts there and, yes, it would be a professional courtesy to let them know that the volunteer they have leading a major project is alienating partners and coming across so badly.
I’d say it this way: “I thought I should let you know that I met with Malcolm Mulberry recently because he wanted our endorsement of the X project. The way he conducted himself in the meeting was so off-putting that there’s no way we can endorse the project (for example, aggressively confident about things I know him to be wrong about, and interrupting me to explain the details of my own work that I’ve been leading for the last five years). I don’t know if you’ve had the chance to work with him closely, but as someone who cares a lot about the work you do, I felt I should let you know what happened.”
3. Should I go after a job with a client — exactly what my boss feared would happen?
I received praise, with raises, for my performance at my firm, and was assigned to their largest, most profitable project. After a year, my manager asked me to spend time at the client site once a week. After six months of that, I discovered my manager had withheld from me that the client wanted to hire me directly. Though this was wrong of the client and I would have declined, this secret blew up because my manager had misled the client into thinking I knew, but my surprise contradicted this. This led to a very awkward moment in which I felt I had to defend my manager’s behavior to save the client relationship.
From that moment on, my manager became extremely paranoid, micromanaging everything I did and overriding decisions I made that resulted in rework because he was too far from the detail. This caused confusion for the team and extra costs for the client. He terminated my on-site presence, taking away tasks that I had once held, and then suddenly began attending meetings he rarely did before.
When he sensed my frustration, he dangled a new project with a new client, as a carrot. I took it, and our team’s success resulted in a second and third project from this client. However, my manager continued to micromanage me, and yet, when he inserted himself into every email, chat and meeting, he rarely read the project documentation first. As a result, when he took over meetings he asked the client questions and made suggestions that had long since been covered by me. It presented a poor team dynamic to the client, and I wasn’t sure if they might read this as my manager’s incompetence or his lack of confidence in me. Over the five months of this project, I had several meetings with my manager in which I brought up my concerns. He promised to change, blaming his behavior on worries that our most lucrative client had scaled back work, which made my project more important. However, he never changed, and I eventually gave notice when my frustration reached a boiling point.
I had a parting lunch with my manager’s manager and, when she asked about my decision, I explained all that I have explained here. She had no knowledge of any of it and, in her efforts to keep me at the firm, tried to minimize the issues by saying that my manager was the future of the company, and his reactions were normal as they had had an employee poached in the past. I left surprised and disappointed that my experience apparently meant nothing, but this did affirm my decision to leave.
People who know of this tell me that my allegiance to my old firm should no longer keep me from going to the client and seeking employment. I will not do this because it would affirm my ex-manager’s fears, but it does pose an ethical quandary, and I’m curious what you think.
If you’re interested in working for the client and you don’t have a written agreement with your old employer that prevents you from approaching clients within a certain amount of time after leaving, go for it. Who cares if it affirms your former manager’s fears? He treated you (and the client) poorly, and this is a natural consequence of his decisions. Don’t stop yourself from doing what you decide is best for you professionally just because of how he might feel about it!
He’s had enough influence in your life at this point; you don’t need to offer him more when you don’t even work for him anymore.
4. Do I have to attend our year-end party?
I work in higher education and my current position is part-time and grant-funded. It is coming to an end in December/January because of lack of interest in the community. Don’t worry, I’m well on the job hunt and have had some good fortune in the interviews and connections in the school. But my department likes to throw a lavish year-end party and I’m not really interested in going. I’m not feeling very excited about going since my contract is not being extended, and I feel a bit left out of some things in the division. Should I go? Should I sit this one out? If I sit this one out, what is a good excuse?
You don’t need to attend the party if you don’t want to; you can simply say you have a commitment scheduled at the same time that you can’t miss. But it’s worth considering whether there’s networking value in making yourself go for an hour anyway.
Related:
how to survive your office holiday party
5. Leaving graduation dates off your resume because you’re young
I’m in my late twenties, five years out of my bachelor’s degree, and starting to be eligible for some mid-level jobs (like 5+ years of experience required vs. entry-level). However, I’m feeling self-conscious about including my graduation date (2020) on my resume, especially when I can guess I’m at the younger end of candidates for a particular job. Maybe because of the weirdness of the pandemic, I think a lot of people have a subconscious feeling of “2020 was only a few years ago,” and they could dismiss me as inexperienced despite my work history.
There’s a lot of advice on when to leave graduation dates off to avoid age discrimination (generally 40s or so), but what about if you’re younger, have a fair amount of relevant experience, and want to be taken more seriously? Or would it lead to a “Streisand effect” and make it look like you’re hiding something?
It’s really common these days to leave your graduation year off your resume unless you’re right out of school. It used to be that candidates were advised to start leaving off around 40, but lots of people have started doing it way before that. An interviewer might ask when you graduated, but it won’t be weird to leave it off your resume (and definitely won’t create a Streisand effect!).
The post my boss told me I had to be on camera while sick, telling an organization their volunteer is obnoxious, and more appeared first on Ask a Manager.
heathercoxrichardson_feedLate last night, President Donald J. Trump shared on social media a deep fake video that appeared to be a clip from his daughter-in-law Lara Trump’s Fox News talk show My View. In the video’s split screen, Lara Trump, on the left, says: “President Donald J. Trump has announced a historic new healthcare system, the launch of America’s first MedBed hospitals and a national MedBed card for every citizen.” As she speaks, the video shows a building with the caption: “MEDBED HOSPITALS: THE NEW ERA IN HEALTHCARE.”
Then the video shows a clip of Trump saying: “Every American will soon receive their own MedBed card.” As the video shows what looks like a futuristic hospital, complete with what appear to be podlike beds, he continues: “With it, you’ll have guaranteed access to our new hospitals led by the top doctors in the nation, equipped with the most advanced technology in the world.”
The camera then goes back to Trump saying, “These facilities are safe”—the camera switches back to a hospital scene—“modern, and designed to restore every citizen to full health and strength.” The video then switches back to Trump, who says: “This is the beginning of a new era in American healthcare.”
Lara Trump takes over as a scene of people applauding Trump runs beside her. She says: “In this first phase, only a limited number of MedBed cards will be released. Registration details will be announced very soon.”
MedBeds are imaginary magical beds, sort of like a tanning bed, that diagnose or cure health problems instantly and painlessly. The idea is popular in QAnon forums, and believers claim that Trump is already secretly installing the beds in hospitals.
It is unclear why Trump posted an obviously fake video, touting an obviously fake product, although healthcare is uppermost in politics these days. The Democrats say they will not agree to the Republicans’ continuing resolution to keep the government open unless the Republicans agree to extend the premium tax credit that subsidizes health care insurance for people making between 100% and 400% of the federal poverty limit. Without that extension, millions of Americans will lose their health insurance, and healthcare premiums for everyone in the Affordable Health Care market will go up, often dramatically.
If MedBeds were real and “every citizen” could use them, as the deep fake video suggests, no one would need to worry about losing their healthcare insurance.
Someone took the video down from Trump’s timeline this morning.
On Friday, Republicans took the stand that Democrats would pay for shutting down the government. A White House official told Dasha Burns of Politico that Trump would not negotiate. “He read all the sh*t they’re asking for, and he said, ‘on second thought, go f*ck yourself,’” the White House official told Burns. Yesterday, though, Punchbowl reported that Trump will meet with Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY). House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) are expected to be there as well.
The government is funded through Tuesday, September 30.
Also taking place Tuesday is the meeting Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth abruptly called last week for hundreds of the nation’s top military officers at the Quantico, Virginia, Marine Corps base. When Trump talked to reporters on Thursday, he did not appear to understand that Hegseth had called U.S. military officers to Quantico, appearing to think he had invited military leaders from other countries. “I love it, I mean I think it’s great,” Trump said. “Let him be friendly with the generals and admirals from all over the world. You act like this is a bad thing. Isn’t it nice that people are coming from all over the world to be with us?”
Today Tara Copp, Dan Lamothe, Noah Robertson, and Alex Horton of the Washington Post reported that Trump has decided that he will go to the gathering himself.
Trump told Yamiche Alcindor and Alexandra Marquez of NBC News: “It’s really just a very nice meeting talking about how well we’re doing militarily, talking about being in great shape, talking about a lot of good, positive things. It’s just a good message,” Trump said. “We have some great people coming in and it’s just an ‘esprit de corps.’ You know the expression ‘esprit de corps’? That’s all it’s about. We’re talking about what we’re doing, what they’re doing, and how we’re doing.”
In a phone interview with NBC White House correspondent Yamiche Alcindor today, Trump suggested he was backing off from the threat he posted on social media to send troops to Portland to handle “domestic terrorists.” The Democratic governor of Oregon, Tina Kotek, has told Trump and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem that there is no need for troops and they do not have the authority to deploy the military there. “We can manage our own local public safety needs,” Kotek said. “There is no insurrection, there is no threat to national security.”
Evan Watson of KGW8 in Portland, Oregon, reported that Trump told Alcindor they were “looking at” sending troops. “I spoke to the governor, she was very nice,” Trump added. “But I said, ‘Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? My people tell me different.’ They are literally attacking and there are fires all over the place...it looks like terrible.”
In fact, Zane Sparling, Fedor Zarkhin, and Zaeem Shaikh of The Oregonian/OregonLive noted yesterday that Trump’s first threat to send federal troops to Portland came on September 5, a day after the Fox News Channel aired a “special report” about a protest that had taken place four days before, on Labor Day. The report about the Labor Day protest misleadingly mixed in clips from 2020 showing protesters burning the base of the Thompson Elk fountain and a federal officer pepper-spraying a person.
This afternoon Hegseth called 200 members of the Oregon National Guard into federal service for 60 days. Less than six hours later, Oregon attorney general Dan Rayfield sued President Trump, Secretary of Defense Hegseth, Secretary of Homeland Security Noem, and their respective departments, saying the National Guard has been unlawfully deployed for law enforcement duties.
Late this afternoon, Trump praised his remodeling of the Oval Office to include copious gold fixtures, some of which match polyurethane appliqué available from the home improvement store Home Depot. On social media, Trump posted: “Some of the highest quality 24 Karat Gold used in the Oval Office and Cabinet Room of the White House. Foreign Leaders, and everyone else, ‘freak out’ when they see the quality and beauty. Best Oval Office ever, in terms of success and look!!! President DJT”
—
Notes:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/qanon-conspiracy-involves-magical-bed-084947430.html
X:
i/grok/share/wf4ZqWWnBuTtVa157IcJhoI1z
Bluesky:
alkapdc.bsky.social/post/3lzujov6tg22d
atrupar.com/post/3lzwdt5r67c2w
dumbing_of_age_feed
Every month at the Dumbing of Age Patreon there’s two new exclusive bonus strips — one that patrons get to vote on, and another that’s my choice! This month, JOCELYNE got 80 votes! I wonder if she’d still have gotten 80 votes if folks’d known she was showing back up in the strip like in two days. Probably! Read this bonus strip and hundreds of previous at the Dumbing of Age Patreon!
Also, if you pledge up to $5 or more per month, you can read TOMORROW’s strip RIGHT NOW, every day!
shadowkat
james_davis_nicoll
marthawellsdaringfireball_feedMy thanks to Drata for sponsoring this last week at DF. Their message is short and sweet: Automate compliance. Streamline security. Manage risk. Drata delivers the world’s most advanced Trust Management platform.
dr_drang_feed[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.]
I watched this Numberphile video a few days ago and learned not only about Harshad numbers, which I’d never heard of before, but also some new things about defining functions in Mathematica.
Harshad numbers1 are defined as integers that are divisible by the sum of their digits. For example,
so 42 is a Harshad number. On the other hand,
so 76 is not. You can use any base to determine whether a number is Harshad or not, but I’m going to stick to base 10 here.
After watching the video, I started playing around with Harshad numbers in Mathematica. Because Mathematica has both a DigitSum function and a Divisible function, it’s fairly easy to define a Boolean function that determines whether a number is Harshad or not:
myHarshadQ[n_] := Divisible[n, DigitSum[n]]
Mathematica functions that return Boolean values often end with Q (Divisible being an obvious exception), so that’s why I put a Q at the end of myHarshadQ. A couple of things to note:
Divisible and DigitSum accept and return lists. Therefore, we can give myHarshadQ a list of numbers and it will return a list of Boolean values.DigitSum accepts only integer arguments, myHarshadQ throws an error if you feed it noninteger arguments.To get all the Harshad numbers up through 100, we can use the Select and Range functions like this:
Select[Range[100], myHarshadQ]
which returns the list
{1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12,
18, 20, 21, 24, 27, 30, 36, 40, 42, 45, 48,
50, 54, 60, 63, 70, 72, 80, 81, 84, 90, 100}
You can check this against Sequence A005349 in the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences.
There are a couple of ways to count how many Harshad numbers are in a given range. Either
Length[Select[Range[100], myHarshadQ]]
which is a straightforward extension of what we did above, or the less obvious
Count[myHarshadQ[Range[100]], True]
which works by making a list of 100 Boolean values and counting how many are True. The Count function is like Length, but it returns only the number of elements in a list that match a pattern. Both methods return the correct answer of 33, and they take about the same amount of time (as determined through the Timing function) to run.
While Mathematica doesn’t have a built-in function for determining whether a number is Harshad, it does have an external function, HarshadNumberQ, that does. This can be used in conjunction with ResourceFunction. The call
ResourceFunction["HarshadNumberQ"][42]
returns True. Similarly,
Select[Range[100], ResourceFunction["HarshadNumberQ"]]
returns the list of 33 numbers given above.
The resource function is considerably faster than mine. Running
Timing[Count[ResourceFunction["HarshadNumberQ"][Range[10000]], True]]
returns {0.027855, 1538}, while running
Timing[Count[myHarshadQ[Range[10000]], True]]
returns {0.06739, 1538}. The runtime, which is the first item in the list, changes slightly from one trial to the next, but myHarshadQ always takes nearly three times as long.
To figure out why, I downloaded the source notebook for HarshadNumberQ and took a look. Here’s the source code for the function:
SetAttributes[HarshadNumberQ, Listable];
iHarshadNumberQ[n_, b_] := Divisible[n, Total[IntegerDigits[n, Abs[b]]]]
HarshadNumberQ[n_Integer, b_Integer] :=
With[{res = iHarshadNumberQ[Abs[n], b]}, res /; BooleanQ[res]]
HarshadNumberQ[n_Integer] := HarshadNumberQ[n, 10];
HarshadNumberQ[_, Repeated[_, {0, 1}]] := False
I won’t pretend to understand everything that’s going on here, but I have figured out a few things:
First, HarshadNumberQ is obviously defined to handle any number base, not just base-10. And it can handle a list of bases, too, so if you want to check on how many bases in which a number is Harshad, this is the function you want.
Second, HarshadNumberQ uses an argument pattern I’ve never seen before: n_Integer. This restricts it to accepting only integer inputs. It returns False when given noninteger arguments; it doesn’t just throw an error the way myHarshadQ does.
Third, HarshadNumberQ uses Total[IntegerDigits[n]] instead of DigitSum[n]. This, I believe, is at least part of the reason it runs faster than myHarshadQ. For example,
Timing[Total[IntegerDigits[99999^10]]]
returns {0.000084, 216}, while
Timing[DigitSum[99999^10]]
returns {0.000146, 216}.
Finally, the SetAttributes function is needed because Total would otherwise have trouble handling the output of IntegerDigits when the first argument is a list. Let’s look at some examples:
IntegerDigits[123456]
returns {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6}, a simple list that Total knows how to sum to 21. But
IntegerDigits[{12, 345, 6789}]
returns a lists of lists, {{1, 2}, {3, 4, 5}, {6, 7, 8, 9}}, which Total has trouble with. Calling
Total[IntegerDigits[{12, 345, 6789}]]
returns an error, saying that lists of unequal length cannot be added. We can get around this error by giving Total a second argument. Calling it as
Total[IntegerDigits[{12, 345, 6789}], {2}]
tells Total to add the second-level lists, returning {3, 12, 30}, which is just what we want. The problem is that this second argument to leads to an error when the first argument is a scalar instead of a list.
This, as best I can tell, is where the
SetAttributes[HarshadNumberQ, Listable];
line comes in. By telling Mathematica that HarshadNumberQ is Listable, we can define the function as if Total were always being used on scalars, and the system will thread over lists just like we want.
Since I’m just writing myHarshadQ for my own entertainment and not for others to use, I can take some of what I learned above and rewrite it to run faster. Like this:
SetAttributes[myHarshadQ, Listable];
myHarshadQ[n_] := Divisible[n, Total[IntegerDigits[n]]]
With this new definition, myHarshadQ runs considerably faster. Calling
Timing[Count[myHarshadQ[Range[10000]], True]]
returns {0.013527, 1538}. This is roughly twice as fast as HarshadNumberQ, probably because the definition doesn’t deal with other bases or handle errors gracefully.
Now I can look at Harshad numbers over a broad range without having to wait long for results. To see how they’re distributed over the first million numbers, I ran
Histogram[Select[Range[999999], HarshadNumberQ], {25000}, ImageSize -> Large]
and got this histogram (with a bin width of 25,000):
The stepdown pattern repeats every 100,000 numbers, moving down each time. Let’s stretch out the range to three million and see what happens.
Histogram[Select[Range[2999999], HarshadNumberQ], {25000}, ImageSize -> Large]
The pattern repeats at the larger scale, too.
If you want to learn some other Harshad facts, you should watch this extra footage at Numberphile. There doesn’t seem to be anything directly practical you can do with Harshad numbers, but you can use them to exercise your mathematical muscles. Or learn new things about the Wolfram Language.
You might think Harshad numbers are named after their discoverer or, in accordance with Stigler’s Law, their popularizer, but no. See either the video or the Wikipedia article for the origin of the name. ↩
terribleminds_feed
Holy fucking shit, look at this Shrek-Ass Apple.
Sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself.
Before we begin, a note on how (and why) I’m reviewing these.
The why, first. Once upon a time, there was a land called Twitter, and in this festive, deranged realm, I spent a lot of time shouting my insane apple reviews to any who would hear. I did literally hundreds of them. It was silly, but fun, and we all had some fun together. And then the land called Twitter suffered a tectonic event, a cataclysm that broke it into pieces, and from the shattered fundament arose the dread land of X, which was awful, so I got the hell out of there and nuked the site from orbit. Which is to say, I also nuked my apple reviews in their entirety.
So, I want to rebuild that — and not just on Instagram, where I tend to post my “live reaction” apple mukbang “apple snack gang” reviews, because I don’t own Instagram, and a shitty person does own it, and I don’t want some digital serf just cultivating land for my social media monarchs. I own this space and feel like, hey, fuck it, let’s bring the apple reviews back, let’s formalize them, let’s codify them, let’s get them on THE BLOG because
THE BLOG IS ETERNAL
THE BLOG IS ALL
ALL HAIL BLOG
Or something.
As to how I review these: I eat the first bites of the apple on camera, post that shit to Instagram, and then I actually eat the rest of the apple on my own, in the quiet introverted solitude of my weird writer’s shed. I will peel the apples first, usually — sometimes the skin is a wonderful part of the apple, but honestly, I’m there for the APPLE MEAT. I’ll eat it, take notes as I go, and try to think really hard about what I’m tasting, which sometimes is “I taste muscat grape and paperback book paper and the wanderlust of a lonely but still-horny widow,” and other times is, “wow this tastes like an apple, you guys.” I’m sometimes sophisticated, other times, I’m just a dull penny, and we’re all going to have to deal with that.
I am not an expert on anything.
(I did write a book about apples but it’s fictional, and the apples in it are Quite Evil, so if you want Quite Evil Apples, then Black River Orchard awaits you. It’s also a very good Fall Times Spooky Season book — combining both the horror and the autumnal thing, if you are into such combinations.)
I’ll then start to keep these as a persistent list here on the site, linking to all these individual reviews. Look for that starting up maybe later this week!
Okay, that’s done, let’s review Shrek’s Ballsack — uh, I mean, this totally normal and not-at-all-scrotal apple.
My review, Knobbed Russet from Scott Farm (VT), late September:
The Knobbed Russet.
Also known as: Knobby Russet, who I’m pretty sure was a kid I used to play kickball with. Also called the Winter Russet, the Old Maid. I might add a few more names, myself: Bubonic Orb, or Frankenstein’s Kidney. Or maybe Satan’s Canker. Belial’s Bezoar? Whatever.
The last time I ate one of these was a great sadness. It tasted like depression. It had the texture of clumpy kitty litter. Sad dust. Moist sand. Nothing good. I don’t hate a soft apple, though it’s not my preference — but I really don’t like biting into an apple and getting a mealy-shit blah-smear on my tongue. And that’s what happened the last time I had one of these.
That did not happen this time.
This time! No mealy mush! No apple gruel piped into a lumpy skin bag!
We’ll be generous and begin with the taste, which is mostly pleasing. I’m used to russets being a little more interesting, overall, in which I mean there’s usually some complexity in the taste, and this is more a straight-line to its end flavor. When I barely had bitten it, and I mean my tooth had only just punctured ITS DREAD ARMOR I mean its skin, I was immediately greeted by a pinprick of powerful tartness. Like an electric thumbtack. Bzzt.
And the flavor bore that out — what I got from that was a strong lemon sorbet slash lemon candy vibe. Which is not unpleasant if you’re a person who likes sour candy! You eat this and your lips sing after, like you just ate a handful of Sour Patch Kids. It’s assertive, just not particularly nuanced.
The flesh itself — that densely-packed, finely-grained thing is beloved by some though I’m not necessarily one of them. It’s also not really a juicy apple — it’s not some dry sphincter, either, but it’s not bringing much to the party by way of juice. Still: the flesh is fine! The meat is good!
All that said, I think it behooves us to talk about its appearance. Trust me! I’d love to live in a world where we don’t have to be so shallow with our apples, but it’s actually a little relevant — ugly fruits and vegetables don’t get to live in the grocery store aisles, okay? People don’t buy them because we’re vain, horrible creatures who value looks first and everything else a distant second.
And admittedly, when I see this apple, my first thought is, “That barnacled sphere is definitely haunted. It has seen some shit. It may have Lyme disease. It might be an egg. Some foul beast will definitely emerge from that bungled scrotum and drag me back to its mother’s lair in the fens.” It’s vainy and weird — like if Shrek were possessed by Venom. But, to be fair, the longer you look at it, the more fascinating it becomes. This leper potato is its own creature, and it’s kind of beautiful, in a “swamp bolus” or “wasp gall” kind of way.
It isn’t fun to eat, though. Chewing that skin is like eating a wallet and all the money in that wallet. It’s a hard, unforgiving affair. Like being married to a coal miner. I don’t recommend it. Peel it to eat it. Which will be hard because it’s like peeling a rock, but you’ll get there if you put your back into it.
Anyway! This is a good apple. It’s a fugly one, but tasty in its way.
Let’s call it a 6.5, shall we?
(Reviews so far this year: Honeycrisp, Sweetie, Crimson Crisp)
Knobbed Russet: Sure it looks like the nutsack of a dying dryad but eat it
shadowkat
smbc_comics_feed
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skygiants512pixels_feediOS and iPadOS 26 bring many changes, including Liquid Glass, updated first-party apps, and new multitasking features for iPad users. This week, the guys talk through these changes and share impressions of Apple’s latest iPhones, AirPods, and Watches.
