We found the holy grail of crispy pork shops on Koh Chang over the summer. Everybody on that trip still talks about it. We were there to visit students interning on the island, so I was with a couple coworker pals and we brought Max along as well. Tee drove us to Bangkok, where we stayed at his condo for a night, then we set out for a few days of island life.
This was probably the best meal of the whole trip because the prices were cheap (less than 2 dollars a dish) and the portions were huge!
Of course, the place is a total hole in the wall, and run by the friendliest people.
Thai soi (street) dogs are mostly chill. This huge concrete lot near our house was supposed to be a fresh market years ago, but before it was completed, there was a huge storm. It toppled the poorly-constructed first market area roof and someone was killed by the falling roof while several others were injured. As it turns out, it was built too low and gets flooded a foot deep for the entire duration of rainy season anyway. This doggo and his friends run around here freely now.
This is a pretty common demonstration at schools and government offices in this country. Seemingly. the more run down the venue is, the crazier the demonstrations are. I’ve seen them light the flames and wave the gas cylinders over their heads like Donkey Kong before.
The saddest cooking news I’ve heard in a long time: Black plastic products including spatulas are likely being made from recycled electronic waste like computers and televisions, many of which are treated with flame retardants and other chemicals. Flame retardants can dislodge from polymers easily and make their way into the surrounding environment. They are endocrine disruptors, which interfere with the body’s hormonal system and may be associated with thyroid disease, diabetes, and cancer.
These are my mainstay utensils for certain things I cook and I surely have a dozen in my kitchen including spoons, ladles, slotted and unslotted spatulas, etc., because sometimes silicon is too flexible and wood/steel are too hard. I do have blue plastic spatulas, but they are on the large side… Then even if I buy all the right size blue plastic ones to replace the black ones, we’ll find out that they’re made of recycled nuclear Smurf poop or something…
Hoi Tod is a Thai dish made by frying mussels (or sometimes, other shellfish, squid, or shrimp) in an eggy batter and wrapping up beansprouts and garlic chives with it. Those in the know usually prefer this dish to Pad Thai. It’s often served as street food, especially at night markets, but there are also small shops that specialize in it.
This particular joint was crowded when we visited at lunchtime on a weekday in a busy Bangkok district, but I thought it was pretty average — I thought it was too stuffed with undercooked sprouts, but that might just be due to my preferences. I’m used to a greasier dish with a more generously seasoned finishing umami punch in the gut. I thought this hi-so version was a bit bland. Also, eating this in a restaurant instead of at a fold-up table on the street means it costs double… However, in the third pic, you can see that they served a whole extra plate of crispy bits on the side, so that almost made up for it.
This is in the refurbished (!) restroom of one of my favorite restaurants in town. After careful observation, I have determined that it’s a MacGyvered pressure plate flushing mechanism that stinks of piss. It looked disgusting, so I just straddled it and stepped on the cleanest part when I was done… So weird.
I’m using GPT-4 to help write an ESL textbook, which is probably taking longer than if I just did it by myself. However, because I’m relying on AI for the graphics and audio files for conversations, it’s really forcing me to learn basic Python script debugging and troubleshooting for ChatGPT. The most frustrating things about this experience so far are:
ChatGPT forgets stuff all the time. If I ask it to compile a Word file, it will leave out parts that we finalized together. And sometimes, it can’t create download links for the file, or so it says.
It sometimes changes finalized content unless it’s explicitly told to leave it alone.
It is often not aware of what it can and cannot do. It specifically told me one night that it wasn’t technically capable of producing a certain kind of file, so instead it walked me through doing it in Python. The next day, I asked to do the same thing for another chapter, and it just instantly generated the correct file for me – kind of. I was still better off doing it myself, but still, it was a matter of where I wanted to focus my efforts – learning to do stuff myself, or coaxing the AI into giving me the desired results.
Using Dall-E to generate something useful is like trying to have a serious conversation with someone tripping on acid.
I have to get back to the textbook, but I leave you with these absolute gems of what AI thinks Bingo cards look like:
According to the file name, the prompt was: “A 4×4 Holiday Bingo sheet with a clean, minimalistic design suitable for embedding in a Word document. Each cell contains one of the following…”
When I pointed out that the grid wasn’t 4×4 (although that would be just Bing, not Bingo) and that there were duplicate entries as well as weird text and spelling mistakes, it popped out this:
“A correct 4×4 Holiday Bingo sheet in a minimalistic design. Each of the 16 cells contains one unique activity from the following list_ ‘Go to the beac…”
My way of dealing with is to change the activity completely, but I really hope image generation, of text in particular, improves quickly. GLAY SiOMIE PLAY SOMIES GAE SHOPPING.
