My top three resources for cooking:

Alton Brown. I've been a fan of his for over 20 years at this point. He used to make cooking shows for the Food Network, but has been making YouTube videos that are, IMO, his best work yet. He's like the Bill Nye of cooking. Each episode is a deep dive into a topic, with explanations of the science and history behind the steps of the recipe.

J. Kenji López-Alt. He's behind Serious Eats and has a YouTube channel. Serious Eats in particular prefaces their recipes not with filler stories like some sites, but detailed explanations of the decisions they made for the recipe, and often different options you can take. When I want to cook something new, I will usually look for a bunch of recipes from different sources to get a feel for what they have in common and how they differ. If there's an article on Serious Eats, especially by Kenji, I can probably just stop there.

Brian Lagerstrom. These are the most conventional cooking videos on the list, but he's also THE most directly practical cook on this list. By that I mean, there have been more occasions where I've seen him make a recipe, decided to try it out, and actually done it fairly soon after with success. The recipes are very well-explained, and sometimes even shows you why you should do things a certain way by showing you what happens if you don't. Every food presenter will workshop recipes, but it's rare that they show you the failed versions to teach you something!

All of these are great for explaining the process of cooking. It's one thing to just copy a recipe, but understanding the why behind it is so much more useful to teaching you how to cook in general. That helps you build overall skills, and develop the ability to modify recipes, improvise, and maybe even develop your own recipes.

I'll also second Chef John and Babish. When I go looking for a specific recipe, they're names I look out for and know have good information. I also quite like Adam Ragusea, but he is the reason I installed SponsorBlock. (He's gotten much better, but there was a particularly annoying period where he was REALLY chasing ad dollars. Can't really blame him, he has a family and wanted to make a career of the channel, and did.)

Best of luck! Cooking can be fun, and such a good skill to have. :)

I always like to bring up that the Republican Party of Texas, I think in 2012, made it an explicit part of their platform to oppose teaching critical thinking because it undermines parental authority.

The first thing I thought when I played it was mechanically, this is exactly what I wanted Oblivion to be.

Mithril step stool

But he sold it

Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

Christ, what an asshole.

Thanks for the tip! In the short term, I'm content to just not connect it, but I definitely want to look into blocking it just to prevent a repeat with guests. It's also super handy to know that I can connect it to the local network without connecting it to the broader internet, in case I decide to do some (self-hosted) home automation.

I'm suffering for that right now. Sony Bravia.

Firstly, I didn't want to buy a smart TV, but that's pretty much all that's sold anymore. I also didn't intend to connect it to the internet, but a well-meaning guest wanted to watch TV at night, and thought he was troubleshooting, not realizing he was in the TV menu and not the streaming box.

The TV updated, and IMMEDIATELY got worse. Formerly, if I turned it on, it would go straight to the streaming box. Great! As shitty updates do, it changed the settings, and would instead open to the TV's menu, so it could advertise streaming services. It also forgot that the TV input is HDMI 1. It became strictly worse, in the rare edge case of every fucking time you turn it on.

I don't trust it to not automatically connect, or to forget my login credentials, so I go to do a factory reset. It's literally an option in a menu. The TV gets stuck in a boot loop. Talking to support, they think it broke the mainboard. A factory reset bricked the TV.

It's under warranty, but this is fucking crazy. NEVER connect your TV directly to the internet.

Fun and completely unsurprising fact: this is already the case with Ronald Reagan. He's buried at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, which charges admission.

These people never stop grifting, even in death.

I've had "When Will You Die" by They Might Be Giants in regular rotation.

We'll exhale, we'll high-five

We will know at last how great it is to be alive

We'll be lining up and buying tickets

And then we'll be jumping up and down on your grave

Computer, end simulation.

COMPUTER! END SIMULATION!

Sorry, this is the first I've heard of Palantir Gotham.

Jesus Christ, I hate media-illiterate nerds. Batman, famously, DOESN'T TRUST COPS!