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Why not both? I'll go with Thaist. $10 Amazon gift card, or $75 McDonalds gift card?

You're pretty legit. When the time comes, you'll be one of the few spared. Every day? Just one style? Crap. Crap. Crap. CRAP. I'd probably have to flip a coin between Mexican, Thai and Japanese. Hm... Probably Japanese, actually. I love me some ramen, teppanyaki, katsu, sushi, and a bunch of other things that I'd be downright horrified to lose out on. Not having burritos and Thai curry would be horrible, though... GRATGRWSIUOFDKJGBFDCBHF Let's just go with Japanese. Dammit, now I want ramen. ____________________________________________ Your home, and everything in it is going to be destroyed by a series of absurd events of a mysterious and indistinct nature. You have three minutes to grab whatever you can without risking death. What do you save?

If I'm really hungry, and I'm just preparing a can of soup or something for myself, I'll eat a spoon full or two cold. I've received some very strange, freaked out looks for this. ... I also eat most of my leftovers cold. Unless it's something that reheats very easily, or is only part of a larger meal (say, spaghetti sauce or burrito meat). How do you feel about Mexican food? Give me some details.

I bumped into Notch once in a back hallway, at PAX. I looked at him, nodded, and kept walking. Same with Wil Wheaton. I ran into Nobu Matsuhisa in LA on my way out of one of his restaurants. I blinked and kept walking. Hrm. I ran into M.A. Larson at a convention once, again, didn't much care. Uhh... that's about it, unless you count just being in the same room with folks, in which case you can add Nobuo Uematsu, John de Lancie, and some others during convention time. I also attended a fairly small event held by Bernie Sanders some months back, which was fairly awesome. The place I used to work as a locksmith at occasionally had the local professional athletes from the NBA/NFL/WHATEVER come in. Caused some of the other folks I worked with to go ga-ga. I never much cared. ... I have boring reactions to celebrities. I'm sorry. :'(

Pffft. No. Food is food, anyone that claims that eating a particular thing or liking a particular thing makes you a hipster needs to get a swift smack to the face.

Swimming, definitely, and by far. I haven't done any in quite a long time, but it is something I've been intending on getting back into as time goes by. One of the main things limiting my swimability at the moment is the fact that I don't much care for public pools (and, even if I did, I don't have easy access to any at the moment) due to sanitation concerns, and there aren't too many lakes or rivers nearby that are pristine enough for me to consider. Yes, I'm picky. I know, it's terrible. I HAVE BEEN NINJA'D... but... wait... dammit, you goofy bunny, you forgot to add a question for me. :'( Okay, okay. I guess I'll just stick with my response to the swimming question: Swimming, definitely, and by far. I haven't done any in quite a long time, but it is something I've been intending on getting back into as time goes by. One of the main things limiting my swimability at the moment is the fact that I don't much care for public pools (and, even if I did, I don't have easy access to any at the moment) due to sanitation concerns, and there aren't too many lakes or rivers nearby that are pristine enough for me to consider. Yes, I'm picky. I know, it's terrible. As for my question --- A banquet is being held in your honor! Those around you gather to celebrate something spiffy that you've done, be it intentional or unintentional. As the guest of honor and target of all of this acclaim, you've been given a task for this event: You must select five main courses for the feast to come, four side dishes, three beverages, two deserts, and one guest of honor. What do you choose? If you skimp out on details I will murder you.

I can definitely agree with you on the topic of barbecue sauce! As for tempeh, it's actually one of the only soy based foods that isn't from China - it's actually Indonesian in origin. It has a firmer texture than tofu (thank goodness), and a more distinct taste (again, thank goodness). Apparently it also has more fiber and protein. If you're curious, there's some comparison stuff here.

I'm not a huge fan of tofu either, to be honest - I just use the sauce without adding any tofu. I've had tempeh a few times though, which is similar, and found it to be fairly decent when grilled and slathered in barbecue sauce. o_______o I'll definitely pass on shrimp ice cream.

What sort of merchandise / whatever collections do y'all have? I'm talking things like video games, preserved organs, plushies, figures, anime stuff, stamps, or whatever the heck you tend to accumulate. Talk to us about 'em. Photos get bonus points. ___________________ I like to collect games, old and new, and random bits of anime stuff. I've been somewhat limited due to budgetary constraints so I don't have as much stuff as I'd like, but this will be less of an issue around next year. For the sake of kicking things off, here's a photo of my junk shelf in its current form. It's a bit of a cluttered mess at the moment and some things are missing from it due to a lack of space, but it covers most of what I've got. I'll post some new photos of my collection as it grows, and after I go through the trouble of getting it out of the closet and onto some shelves. Please excuse the less than amazing photo quality, my phone is a bit of a derp. The top shelf: Stuffed at the top are a couple of stuffed animals, a remote control Tiger tank (or, more specifically, a remote control Pz.Kpfw. Tiger Ausf. H1 ^^), and some figures of assorted types. Sadly the Hello Kitty lunch box is somewhat hard to mae out. Moving down, we have some more figures, a crap ton of video games, some random old console accessories, a hard to make out metal T-34 tank model, and my Halofest badge from PAX Prime 2010... or 2011. Something like that. Books! And a zapper! And some special edition games. Also my old Gameboy pocket... not sure what happened to my old brick Gameboy, though. Last and least, my Overwatch box, Gamecube, Dreamcast, and Dominion set. A couple books, too. As well as a Sega Genesis that refused to be photographed. Ah well. But yeah, there you have it.

Aha, that does make sense. I love seafood, though I typically just stick to fishies of various sorts, myself... I save my more adventurous tastes for things that aren't plucked out of the ocean.

Huh. I've learned about something new. Don't quite think it'd be for me - scallops and clams aren't quite my thing, and I only typically eat tempura shrimp with dipping sauce of some sort, but still, sounds like a very interesting flavor combination compared to what I'm used to.

Wat. I've never actually seen this or heard of it before... what sort of seafood are we talking? And is that with a tomato sauce?

In general, I go fairly simple - pepperoni and salami. Sausage, perhaps, if it's sliced - for some reason I don't like the sausage crumbles that most people use. That said, there used to be a place near my parent's house that had a pizza called the Porkosaurus - pepperoni, salami, sausage, pulled pork, and glazed ham with BBQ sauce in place of tomato sauce. It was a terrible, sinful, and dreadful thing. It was also fairly delicious, but I only ever allowed myself to try it once. When I make pizza I usually just do pepperoni, though.

When I'm feeling especially lazy, I'll open a packet of extra spicy Mapo Tofu sauce, warm it up, and pour it over rice for breakfast. ... it's actually quite good.

Body pillow? Mm... I suppose, though I can't really think of any character I'd feel particularly compelled to put on it. A nice pattern, or pleasant pink might be nice though. I am so utterly resentful toward that show for not being to my taste. Monster girls, snakes in particular, are downright delicious.

The crazy and the fake - a lot of super specialized dating sites (not saying that one in particular) have a lot of fake accounts set up that can be managed by real people in some cases, or just automated. I registered for one out of curiosity once (having some suspicion that there wouldn't be enough people interested to make it viable), left my profile completely blank, and observed that I received one new message every week, plus or minus two days, from accounts that looked fairly mass produced.

These are the things I generally recommend, they've got a fair bit of variety to them. * Clannad - The greatest slice of life show I've ever seen in my life, anime or otherwise. * Fate/Stay Night - Fun action stuff. * Erased - Amazing murder mystery. * The Twelve Kingdoms - A regular-person-finds-themselves-in-a-fantasy-land show that's actually done right. * Spice and Wolf - Lovely show that follows a traveling merchant and the wolf deity that has taken to traveling with him. * Another - Amazing supernatural mystery. * Kara No Kyoukai - Fun, pretty movies. * Azumanga Daiho - Intensely hilarious high school comedy. * Moribitu - Fun action-packed fantasy. * Steins;Gate - Time travel!

Yeah, that's basically my experience and the main reason I found it to be a little tiresome. A five page essay on why Clannad is the greatest thing of all time should definitely be a thing, as an aside. < 3 Oh God, I've ran into this so many times that it drives me completely and utterly insane to even think about - this was especially prevalent during my relatively brief stint in the MLP fandom. Eeeerk.

So many new members lately. Does... does this mean that I'm no longer considered a newbie? ... ahem ... Welcome to the forum! It's a fairly fun and pleasant place filled with lovely and wonderful people, apart from that one guy that smells like old pickles and sits around in the corner talking to himself while fiddling around with a spork... but we don't talk about him, or pay him any attention. He's harmless, I think. Probably. Probably.

I can second this. I'm not a full-time proxy user, but I do make use of PIA for accessing Youtube content that's blocked in the US, as well as on my infrequent forays into torrenting. Zero complaints about their speed or anything else.

Oh, I already knew that responses would probably carry an 'either' or 'forum' bias for that reason, though given that there's a Discord server associated with the forum I thought there might be a chatty sort or two that pop in from time to time that could make a pro-chat response. WAITING ON Y'ALL, COME ON, DON'T BE SHY. I will destroy you. I'm in a very similar boat. I got my start in relatively forum-like things around 1998 at the same age. Since then I've usually been a member of some community or another, often smaller ones that don't have eleventy zillion members and posts per day*. The technology has improved by ridiculous leaps and bounds, to say the absolute least! And yeah, I have nothing against chats or such, and do keep up with friends via IM, I just don't tend to look toward it for community stuff. As for social media... eh... I somewhat grudgingly use Facebook to keep up the folks I know that don't really do other forms of internet communication, though I'm blisteringly selective about who I add to my friends list there... I cannot count the number of cousins (plus one aunt) who's friend requests I've blocked with zero hesitation, for example. Somehow missed this in my response. Dammit. I don't have anything against Twitter, though having used it in the past I can't really say that it was for me - keeping myself from being long winded is a bit difficult, so the character limit really kills me on it.

What is your preferred method of communicating with people on the internet? Are you the sort that tends to gravitate to instant messages and chat rooms? Or do you prefer things that are more in the style of forum posts and emails? I'm a bit curious as to what folks here prefer, and what they think about the two. (Also, if it's not clear, the following is just my personal opinion on the topic, and isn't meant to be a ranting denouncement of anything) Personally, I've always tended to gravitate more toward 'long form' means like forums, private messages, and the like. I enjoy the fact that there's no need to respond to something immediately, and that the format makes it easier to engage with folks on a variety of different topics at once in separate discussions. I enjoy having the freedom to spend as much time and effort into a response to something as I like, which is why a lot of my posts can end up being a bit on the longer side. Case in point. With chat, meanwhile, I rarely end up engaging unless a topic floats along that I'm personally interested in, and tend to float back into the background once the topic has shifted to something that doesn't really fit my fancy... while this may seem an obvious thing, the fact that I tend not to have much interest in big trendy things of the moment often means that I just end up lurking and occasionally tossing a few lines out here and there. This has been my general experience both in broad, unfocused chat groups, and in those primarily focused around a single topic/franchise/property, and it often leaves me feeling fairly unsatisfied. Whereas on a forum you can fairly easily find topics of interest via the search tool and jump into them even if the thread has been forgotten for a bit, the flowing nature of chat rooms means that if you're not actively watching them to some degree or another, you won't have any way of knowing if the current conversations taking place are of any interest to you. While you can get around this to some degree, say with a lot of individual topic channels on a Discord server, or carefully configured text alerts, these solutions tend to be under or poorly utilized by participants (Discord channels), or a bit of an imprecise pain in the neck to set up (alerts). I suppose the fact that I enjoy reading and writing probably also helps to color my preference, since I rather enjoy going through well written and thought out posts that folks have taken the time to put a bit of effort into. I'm the sort of wonk that likes to pay attention to how folks communicate with each other, the tones that are used, the words they use, and that sort of thing - not for the purpose of judging someone for not taking as much time to do things as I do, but because I find it to be both interesting and useful in avoiding misunderstandings. I suppose I should also mention that I generally rate voice chats even lower than text chats for the reasons stated above - I avoid unnecessary telephone calls, and get irritated when they end up going on for more than ten minutes unless I'm extremely interested in a given conversation. People that used to try and drag me into Skype calls constantly tended to be extremely disappointed. Anyhow, what do y'all think?