I’ve just finished a long work week, got home, and made a gin and tonic, and I’m looking at the ice cubes bobbing in it and noticed something I’d not paid attention to before: the
cubes seem to be opaque in their core but more-transparent towards their crust. You can see what I mean in this photo.
Now other photos, like this one, show that the effect isn’t universal (and I’m pretty sure I’ve
seen perfectly clear ice cubes before, too). So… why are mine opaque?
If it helps:
Mine were made in a conventional food freezer at -20°C
I’m in a hard water area
I’m using an ice cube tray which makes “cubes” that are actually trapezoidal prisms
This is MegaMegaMegaMonitor. It just seemed to make sense that if you get gilded in /r/MegaMegaMonitor, you’d go somewhere. Here is that
somewhere.
Being here’s quite cool: it gives you an extra special “gilded” icon and tooltip instead of your regular “Uses MegaMegaMonitor” icon (if
you have one), when other people look at you. Note that like all MMM data changes, it can take a few hours, even up to a day, before people start seeing it!
And that’s all you get. Here’s a list of the ultra-elite who found their way here.
If you get gilded here… nothing happens. Honestly.
I’m pretty sure that an outside observer, given the advance knowledge of this blog post, could easily tell when I’m in the process of getting over an illness just by the food I eat. I’m
pretty sure that I have a particular ‘tell’ in the foods I look for when I’m on the cusp of recovering from a cold, like now: or, I suppose, on those rare occasions that I’ll have drunk
enough to be suffering from a hangover.
Take this lunchtime, for example. I’ve been off work for the last couple of days, laid low by what seems to be the very same cold that I was sure I’d dodged when everybody else got it,
last month (I blame Annabel, the contagious little beast, who’s particularly keen on shoving her hands into people’s mouths). Today I’m back on my feet, but working from home: I skipped
breakfast, but by lunchtime I felt able to face some food, and quickly determined what it was that I really wanted:
An egg and cheese wafflestack. If you think it looks calorie-laden and disgusting, then you’re right: but you wouldn’t be saying that if you were recovering from an illness!
Egg & Cheese Wafflestack
Serves: 1 unwell-but-recovering person
Preparation: 15 minutes
Difficulty: if you can’t make this, get the hell out of the kitchen
Ingredients
4 × frozen potato waffles. I’m using Birds Eye ones, but honestly, who can tell the difference?
~ 30g mature cheddar cheese, grated or thinly sliced, brought to room temperature so it melts quickly
2 × eggs
A little vegetable oil
Tomato ketchup (alternatively, brown sauce works well)
Method
Grill the waffles in accordance with the instructions. Meanwhile, fry the two eggs (“sunny side up”: keep the yolk fluid). Assemble in stacks, with each stack consisting of cheese
sandwiched between two waffles, topped with an egg and the ketchup. Serve immediately. Eat as quickly as you dare.
So now I’m sitting here eating the taste of delicious recovery, generating 4096-bit strong probable prime numbers (like you do), and reading the feedback on a browser plugin I released
recently. And every part of that is a huge improvement upon lying ill in bed.
tl;dr: First time here, clicked Wishlist Search, and it suggested the person whose song I was listening to at the time. Spooky as hell.
So here’s what happened to me today. Feeling unwell – bit of a cold and grumpy about it – and sipping a Lemsip to try to stave off the worst of the sore throat, I found myself
stalking a few people on Reddit, discovering new subreddits based on what they’ve commented in etc., and I discover /r/Random_Acts_Of_Amazon.
I put on some music while I surf – just a selection of MP3s that I’ve bought recently. The song that’s just come on is Peter Hollens’ and Malukah’s awesome cover of Christopher Tin’s
Baba Yetu (better known as the “Civ IV theme”). If you haven’t heard their cover of it yet, here it is on YouTube.
“Random Acts of Amazon?” I think to myself, “What’s that all about then?” I read a little bit of the newbie guide, then try clicking on the “Random Wishlist” button, just to see who
it picks out for me and what kinds of things they want. It picks out a random user… /u/peterhollens.
Wait, what? That’s got to just be a naming coincidence, right? That can’t be the same Peter Hollens whose song literally just started coming out of my MP3 player right
now, can it? I hop across to his intro thread and read some of his other
posts. “What the fuck,” I say out loud, “Is this random wishlist tool psychic or something?”
But no, it just turns out that on the one and only time I’ve ever been to this sub, and the one and only time I’ve ever clicked Random Wishlist, it happened to choose the
person whose song I was literally just listening to at that time. That’s insane.
So here’s a gift, Peter. Clearly the Universe wants me to send this to you. I don’t believe in destiny, but clearly it believes in you and
I.
Thanks to the data that /r/MegaMegaMonitor collates, I’ve been able to throw together some fun statistics about the MegaLounge chain. Let me share
some graphs with you:
Gildings per MegaLounge
As you’d probably expect, the lower (and more-populous) MegaLounges see more gilding than the higher ones. But…
MegaLounge generosity ratio
…if we take the ratio of the number of gildings per MegaLounge to the number of accounts in that MegaLounge, we get a ‘generosity score’, and that’s not so
clear-cut. The most generous MegaLounges are /r/MegaLoungeSol and the secret MegaLounge, followed by /r/MegaLoungeDiamond, /r/MegaLoungeRussia, /r/MegaLoungeVII, and /r/MegaLoungeVI. I wonder if these are also the lounges with the least content? Perhaps they’re places that people stop off at only as a steping stone on their
journey?
The least-generous MegaLounge is the latest one, probably because there’s nowhere to go yet as a result of being gilded there, but the second least-generous… is /r/MegaLounge itself! I feel like I should go there and gild some people, just to buck the trend!
This is all just something fun I threw together while I’ve been off work sick today. If there’s anything else that anybody would like to see extracted from MMM’s data, let me know:
it’s all interesting stuff!
Thanks to the data that MegaMegaMonitor collates, I’ve been able to throw together some fun statistics about the MegaLounge chain. Let me share some graphs with you:
Gildings per MegaLounge
As you’d probably expect, the lower (and more-populous) MegaLounges see more gilding than the higher ones. But…
MegaLounge generosity ratio
…if we take the ratio of the number of gildings per MegaLounge to the number of accounts in that MegaLounge, we get a ‘generosity score’, and that’s not so
clear-cut. The most generous MegaLounges are /r/MegaLoungeSol and the secret MegaLounge, followed by /r/MegaLoungeDiamond, /r/MegaLoungeRussia, /r/MegaLoungeVII, and /r/MegaLoungeVI. I wonder if these are also the lounges with the least content? Perhaps they’re places that people stop off at only as a steping stone on their
journey?
The least-generous MegaLounge is the latest one, probably because there’s nowhere to go yet as a result of being gilded there, but the second least-generous… is /r/MegaLounge itself! I feel like I should go there and gild some people, just to buck the trend!
Most-gilded Redditors in the MegaLounges
It’s possible to get from /r/MegaLounge up to the x35 MegaLounge with just 33 gildings, but nine Redditors have impressed others with their
MegaContent so much that they’ve attracted significantly more. /u/love_the_heat leads the way with a massive 76 MegaGildings, followed by /u/Gold_4_No_Reason and /u/madazzahatter (there’s quite a gap, then, before I come in at fourth place).
This is all just something fun I threw together while I’ve been off work sick today. If there’s anything else that anybody would like to see extracted from MMM’s data, let me know:
it’s all interesting stuff!
