cumpig

Cheddar Big Booty Cheeseburger

xmpp:oats@qq.cumpig.love (Cum Pig) — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 11:09:11 -0700

/!\ this browser doesn't do videos.. /!\ you can download it and watch in your video player of choice instead..

the news anchors are trying so hard not to laugh. always nice to see some happy news stories.

Oven Chicken Shawarma

xmpp:oats@qq.cumpig.love (Cum Pig) — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 10:53:47 -0700

Simple, versatile

This recipe takes little time or effort but yields great chicken that is easy to use in many ways. I've used it in pitas, over rice, over pilaf, simply in a bowl with some toppings, and even as a simple sandwich on wheat bread.

Ingredients

boneless skinless chicken thighs, 1kg (2lb)
tumeric, 1/2 teaspoon
paprika, 2 teaspoons
ground cumin, 2 teaspoons
ground black pepper, 2 teaspoons
kosher salt, 1 teaspoon
lemons, 2, juiced
olive oil, 1/2 cup

optional:

red onion, 1

Instructions

Juice the two lemons into a large bowl, this bowl will hold everything ultimately
Add the spices, salt, and pepper to the bowl
Add the olive oil, and whisk it all together til well combined
Place the chicken thighs in, I usually open them up all the way to expose the most surface area to the marinated
Use tongs to rotate the chicken thighs in the marinade to ensure they're well coated
Cover with plastic wrap, and place in the fridge for no less than 1 hour, and no more than 24 (its not the end of the world, but ideally within this range)
After cooling, get a sheet plan and put about 1tbsp of olive oil on it
Use the tongs to place teh chicken on the pan spreading it out
If you are using a red onion, toss it in the marinade before placing it on the sheet pan with the chicken
Pour the remaining marinade juices across the pan covering the chicken
Heat oven to 220°C (425°F), once heated place cookie pan in oven for 30-40 minutes
Remove from the oven and allow to cool about 2 minutes
Cut it up into pieces or keep whole, depending how you want to use it. Probably easier to cut it up if you plan to freeze it

Credit

This recipe is originally from the NYTimes Cooking section, I've really enjoyed their recipes lately. They even include a video for this one, which is a nice touch. I especially like when they have a linked article that provides some context to a recipe, or a neat related story.

Oven-roasted Chicken Shawarma

Freezer Food

xmpp:oats@qq.cumpig.love (Cum Pig) — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 17:26:38 -0700

Foods that can be prepared ahead of time, and frozen, and then easily restored to their former glory, are really my favorites. Luckily, this is many dishes, many things freeze well.

Lately I've been on a big soup kick, making gallons of soup and freezing them into large blocks. I've been using a knock-off brand of these silicone freezer trays which have been a great tool for freezing soups and chili (perhaps chili is itself a soup). It really makes it easy to prepare meals for the future. When I want some, I pop out a block or two of a meal the night before or morning of, and let it thaw in the fridge. In a pinch I can put them in a bowl of water on the counter and thaw a bit quicker.

I've been making these things and freezing them, perhaps I'll write about the recipes later.

Chicken shawarma
Bolognese sauce
Split pea soup
Tomato bisque
Butternut squash soup
Chili

They all freeze amazingly well. It's very rewarding to have my meals ready to eat through the week with ease. I can spend one day on the weekend preparing a bunch of them, and freeze it all at once. Also the 250mL cubes are a great size for portioning out meals. One wasteful thing I hope to solve are using plastic sealable bags in the freezer. I know they make some reusable ones, perhaps that is what I should use. I can't really mix and match the cubes in a tub like ice cubes, I think they'd freeze together and that'd be a nightmare to reheat.

For things like chicken, I just freeze it in a bag as well. I think that is the easiest to replace with something reusable instead of a single-use sealable bag.

bartkansen

xmpp:oats@qq.cumpig.love (Cum Pig) — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 09:40:44 -0700

On Messaging..

xmpp:oats@qq.cumpig.love (Cum Pig) — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 15:19:44 -0700

Messaging is a fractured nightmare on today's internet. There've been a lot of messengers for a long time.. AIM, QQ, MSN, ICQ, Yahoo! so many that 3rd-party clients such as "Trillian" became popular, to have one application that aggregates your messaging applications into a mostly unified experience. What confounds me is how little progress has been made during my lifetime in unifying these platforms. The problem has only gotten worse with time.

I realize peoiple have different views and requirements, but I'd think we'd have a better standard for federated communications besides e-mail.

Nowadays, there are so many methods for contacting someone, I have many parallel chat threads, with many people, across many platforms. To enumerate all the ways I could call someone with my phone, it's almost endless. I suppose that is refreshing in a sense, to have so many ways to perform end-to-end encrypted calls and video. Truly, a valuable feature beyond measure, yet the most common denominator still wins: people still have PSTN numbers , which offers no such encryption or security, let alone video!

federation, stagnation

XMPP , the "extensible messaging and presence protocol" seeks to offer a federated solution to messaging platforms. It is the core technology behind a lot of well known platforms such as WhatsApp. Anyone can spin up their own instance, hosted on their own domain, and begin exchanging messages with anyone who also has a server. It's very similar to e-mail in this way.

The community around XMPP seems fairly active, at least they produce a lot of specifications and standards. Anything that some modern messaging application achieves, often ends up as a specification for XMPP at some point, even stories the feature that has found its way into every app it seems, even Signal has managed to stuff in a stories feature. Somewhat comically it has an app-level configuration flag to disable it entirely. I imagine there was a lot of internal conflict at Whisper Systems when implementing stories.

Yet, with this, XMPP has stagnated. Fractured in its own ways, the XMPP landscape had far too many clients, servers and confusion behind usage for the average person, and it's mostly been abandoned.

a glimmer of hope, extinguished

For a short period of time, Google's GChat which was utilized XMPP, and was available in the majority webmail client, GMail. That really empowered XMPP (called Jabber at the time) and gave it a lot of users out the door. Like all things good made by Google, it was shut down hastily and prematurely. Google notoriously destroys everything good they create.

Someone high up at Google has a saying:

If it ain't broke, keep fucking with it 'til it is, then get rid of it forever.

Anyway, they shutdown GChat, to create Hangouts, which was also short lived. Then they had something called Alo and something called Duo (for some reason video and chat they wanted split?) those failed almost immediately. Now... there is nothing, no chat features. My guess is they want you to talk to their AI offering, Gemini, more than they want you to talk to other humans.

the famous 'clipper chip'

a future is possible

There could be a future still for XMPP. A lot of companies have came to the conclusion to use it as a basis for their messaging features. What I think needs to happen is that there needs to be more demand from customers for features that are interoperable. However, these days companies don't really care what the customer wants, it's about what their shareholders want.

If some large company such as Meta or Google were to bring back an XMPP service en masse that permits federation, we could be in a new world of messaging. I think something like that could easily take over the silos we see today: iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, Viber, Line, WeChat. These are the biggest platforms across the world, and none of them are good.

The best of the commercial options I've found to be Signal messenger . Until recently they required sharing ones phone number to become contacts, but more recently this has been changed such that you can associate independently of your phone number.