I Was Born With a Plastic Spoon in My Mouth
One key element of a successful life is adopting substitutes. Karens and Chads freak at a single ingredient changing in their pumpkin spice mocha latte with imported almond creamer. But resilient people can deal when the entire coffee shop is closed and just go down the street for convenience store coffee with fake Kreemer.
Let’s talk substitutes!
Birds Do It, Bees Do It
Many animals are adaptable. The Black Crested Titmouse in the header picture incorporates bits of plastic in its nesting material in addition to its regular choices of “pieces of fur, snake skin, and sometimes leaf litter.”
Bees will often visit hummingbird feeders and ingest sugar water to supplement nectar from flowers. For that matter, both bees and hummingbirds will take advantage of non-native flowers for nectar in addition to the flowers that were part of their original habitat.
Econ 101
Basic economics spends a lot of time talking about substitute goods and their effect on prices and consumer satisfaction. Meanwhile, corporate marketing companies do their best to turn people into Chads and Karens and refuse the most obvious substitutes — we’ve all known fanatics who refuse to swap Coke for Pepsi even on a hot summer day. But there’s a price to pay. If you’re an Apple absolutist, there’s a big surcharge for AirPods, and if you lose a pair on the road, you may find yourself wasting a lot of time hunting down the real deal instead of tolerating a cheap pair from a drug store next door.
What About You?
So, Deadsplintafarians, what are some substitutes you’ll happily tolerate?
For me, I have found that Impossible Burger is a pretty decent substitute for ground beef, especially for stuff like chili and meatballs.
Long ago I gave up on Adobe for graphics programs and now use GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program that is available for free on a bunch of platforms. Especially because Adobe has been aggressively changing their programs from things you own to things they tolerate when you use them, but you’d better be prepared for them to pull the carpet out from under you whenever they feel like it.
Do you swap out sprots teams if an owner does something crummy? Are you fine going between cotton and poly? Do you specifically seek out non-proprietary systems and unwalled gardens? What best fulfills your sense that if it works, it works?
Meaty Beaty
OK, maybe not every substitute is perfect. So with a counterpoint, here’s The Who.
How are our Canadian friends doing looking for a Rogers substitute? Shit out of luck I’m guessing.
What is Rogers?
Big internet provider that seems to have had a big mess.
I wonder if it’s going to end up being like Facebook’s outage a few months ago, where they basically had to drive techs to a remote building to turn Facebook off and then back on again to get it working. Way to run a company, Zuckerberg!
Ah, thanks. Maybe they all just need to turn off and restart their routers.
They need to clear their cache. Muhahaha.
The local version of Verizon and just as loved.
Yes. Fucking Robbers. My cell and internet is with those dipshits so I have been incommunicado for more than a few hours.
🤣
We never buy ground beef & I make meatballs, taco meat, burgers & meatloaf with ground turkey. It tastes as good to us (waits for wrath of Butcher). I’ve also found alcohol to be a good substitute for sleeping pills and a time machine.
You don’t have to wait for butcher. 🤬 ground turkey, it’s nasty! Just busting your chops. I mean, it is nasty to me. I’ve tried it and I find it inedible. There’s something about the texture that is off putting. But it probably has more to do with my picky eating than the meat itself. I will eat turkey bacon though.
Ground turkey thighs are a lot better than ground white meat, which is pretty blah. It’s harder to find them, but if you can get boneless you can semi-freeze them and pulse in a food processor.
The one I get is 85% lean, the pure white meat one is way dry & the tube ones are nasty. The one I get looks & feels like hamburger when u cook it.
I’m pretty adaptable. If there’s something I can’t or won’t substitute for I’ll just do without.
The only thing that I will not substitute with generic is M&Ms.
I do a lot of food substituting in recipes which usually works out well or at least close enough. But I can be obnoxiously Chad-ish in my substitutions. I recently came across a Taste of Home recipe for a frozen banana split dessert. I figured, “Why the hell not,” and it will show up as an FYCE, but the recipe called for a container of frozen whipped topping, thawed. Oh no. Normally, I would just make my own whipped cream and slather it on, I do that more often than most people I suspect, but for this I decided that to make a banana split variant from my childhood memories only Reddi-Wip would do. Sure enough it’s still made, and the “everyday” supermarket we go to had a few canisters, so I used that.
Fascinating, I know.
Redi Wip has prank potential that can’t be substituted with real whipped cream.
Life is all about loss. Learning to substitute has been a great life lesson for me.
If Robbers doesn’t get their shit together then I might need someone to cover tomorrow’s NOT.
I can access by phone but not my laptop. Will let you know later tomorrow.
Perfect timing!
I was running late getting home and very hungry so Taco Bell it was. I’ve waxed poetic before about the perfection of the Crunchwrap Supreme. 🙂
Anyways, the poor guy working the window as flustered because they were out of the diet soda I wanted and I was like it’s fine, you got diet pepsi instead?? Guy was surprised I just didn’t care that much.
I’m pretty agnostic about damn near anything that has a substitute, with a few key exceptions.
I am extremely particular about skincare products thanks to years of cystic acne, I am completely unwilling to consider most shoes thanks to shitty feet that need expensive shoes, and I will always drive out of my way for a brand-name gas station. I’ve bought bad gas too many times in my 20s so yeah, not risking a gas station I don’t recognize the brand.