As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their weekend. Did you make any plans? Take a trip? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

With my sister arriving from another continent along with my nephew/godson and brother-in-law, and my mother also coming from abroad to stay with us, I had the first reunion from this side of the family in more than 2 years. It was awesome for obvious reasons, and one of them was the fact that women in my family usually love food and cook very well. I'm not a bad cook myself, but they're tough competition.

So I had the idea to take a few pictures and share them with Tildes, along with some commentary.

Theses dishes are typical of our region of Bahia, Brazil. They may have versions in other states, usually with significant differences.

All foods are savory.

With one exception, all photos were taken in my kitchen.

1. Shrimp Stew

Just shrimp with some spices and farofa de mandioca^[1]. The quality and freshness of the shrimp are one of the most important factors, and living in front of the ocean certainly helps.

Images:

• Shrimp in the pan
• Farofa de mandioca
• Shrimp and farofa on the plate

2. Lambreta

A kind of clam that's only available in Bahia (or at least mainly appreciated here). Like many things from our coast, it's naturally tasty and doesn't require much preparation. Salt, onions, tomatoes and lemon juice are more than enough. They're quick to cook — lambretas are ready when they naturally open.

Image: Lambretas on the plate (source).

3. Mangrove Crab

Our crabs are very different from what most people are used to eat elsewhere. They do not come from the sea, but from manguezais^[2] (mangrove vegetation), an ecosystem that grows in brackish water (salt-water and fresh-water mixed together).

These crabs are smaller and carry less meat, but are way more succulent, with a unique taste that is hard to explain and easy to love. We use a variety of ingredients and spices to enhance their flavor, but it's overall a simple preparation, mainly consisting of water, salt, onions, and cilantro.

Many people, including my mother, used to cook them alive for a better taste. I convinced her to stop doing that and they're still delicious.

Image: crabs cooking in the pot.

4. Abará

This one is neither simple nor easy.

First there's a dough made of mashed black-eyed peas. When fried on palm oil, it becomes the acarajé. When you add palm oil to the dough and cook it in banana tree leaves, it is called abará. They're both highly sought treats across the country, and I happen to live in the most African city of Brazil, which has the best acarajés and abarás in the country :). It's really hard to digest, though, and it's not rare for tourists to feel sick after the first time they eat those. But they always come back for more! Acarajé and abará are actually "comida de santo" ("holy foods"), meaning they have ceremonial significance in the African-Brazilian religion called Canbomblé.

It's usually eaten with vatapá, an Afro-Brazilian dish made from bread (my mother uses black-eyed-beans for that), shrimp, coconut milk, finely ground peanuts and palm oil mashed into a creamy paste.

Abará is a popular street food in our region of Brazil, sold mostly by women from humble origins. Along with acarajé, it's a point of contention with neo-charismatic "baianas de acarajé" who sell the same product using the name calling them "Jesus cakes". They do so because, for them, religions of African origin are literally "the Devil".

Ingredients

• Cilantro
• Onion
• Tomato
• Peanut
• Dry Shrimp
• Black-Eyed Peas

Image: the ingredients together (minus the black-eyed peas).

Preparation

The vatapá must be constantly stirred. It is quite thick, so that's a labor-intensive job. Everyone must help.

Image: stirring the vatapá.

Images of the end result:

• Image 1
• Image 2

Footnotes

^[1] A gift from our Native heritage, it's the toasted version of "farinha de mandioca", a kind of rough flour that enhances the flavor and texture of the dish.

^[2] The equivalent page on Wikipedia only address the mangrove trees, and doesn't really convey that manguezais are unique ecosystems in which includes those trees.

A while back I developed a desktop-based text editor (Scrivenvar) that uses the Chain-of-Responsibility design pattern to help me author fairly involved text documents. The editor's high-level architecture resembles the following diagram:

https://i.imgur.com/8IMpAkN.png

Am I reinventing the wheel here? Are there any modern, cross-platform, liberal open-source (LGPL, MIT, Apache 2), text editor frameworks (such as xi or Visual Studio Code), that would enable (re)development of such a tool?

Scrivenvar is written in Java, but to my chagrin, Java 9+ no longer bundles JavaFX. The text editor was based on MarkdownWriterFX, itself based on JavaFX. This means there's no easy upgrade path, so I'm looking to rebuild the editor either as a cross-platform desktop application or as a web application.

This is an intentionally broad question with a lot of different angles. It's also a question that's naturally hard to get solid grounding on now that nearly everything gets painted as false, misleading, or disingenuous by at least someone.

Normally in my ask threads I throw out a lot of potential talking points, but in this case I want to leave the question open, for people to take it in whichever direction they wish: What do we actually know about modern disinformation, especially related to (but not limited to) online spaces? What are some real, genuine takeaways we can hang our hats on?

Also, a point of clarity: disinformation here does NOT strictly refer to high-level government propaganda and can include something as low-level as, say, an influencer not disclosing product sponsorship to their followers. I'm interested in distributed falsehoods of any caliber.

Dear almost all other parents with kids between the ages of 2 and 5 years old,

I appreciate all you're doing. You are taking an active role in raising your children, and I applaud you for that... it's hard to do nowadays.

But this is a rant that I won't say to your face because I largely believe in parental autonomy. You need to hear it though. It's important, because many of your good intentions are crippling your child's development., and my own kid's. If at the end of this rant, you agree with it and aren't horrified or offended, PM me cause we could be best friends.

So let's start with the basics: If you take your young child to a children's play area, stop with the hovering. If your child can walk for more than 5 steps without falling on their face, give them some space (like more than 15 feet). Even if they get hurt, that is a teachable moment. If nobody is going to the hospital, don't worry about intervening. Sure they might get some scrapes and bruises, a couple of hard falls....but they will learn and they will grow. Shielding them from everything teaches them nothing. Hovering over your children also scares other children that are not yours, and discourages social interaction. I know this, because I am a very tall man who easily and accidentally terrifies anybody more than a foot shorter than me. It took me a few months to learn this lesson.

Next, let's talk about sharing. I know everyone wants to instill in their child that it is important to share. It's generally a good principal. But sharing is a two-way street, and every time you intervene whenever there is the slightest possibility of conflict, you're teaching your kid that 'sharing means to give whatever someone else wants to them no matter what' and you're teaching my kid 'you can totally take what other people want with 0 consequences.' My child can utterly dominate children twice as old because of this. I do my best to prevent that from getting instilled, but it's a long uphill battle when myself and my spouse are the only two teaching that lesson.

Children need to be able to have conflict with their peers. They need space from adults, and learn to interact with others their age. Yes there will be conflict, pain, and suffering. But there will also be joy, reconciliation, and fun. It's part of learning to be a human with empathy. My child learns far more about socializing in 5 minutes of interaction with your kid than 5 hours of interaction with me.

Next up: Potty training. My kid potty trained at 2 years old. They showed signs of being ready at 18 months, but couldn't quite verbalize well enough at that point. By 2 years, they were completely potty trained during the day. Took a while before being able to get through the night without accidents (tiny bladders have trouble going 8+ hours without peeing), but during the waking day 0 accidents for months on end. I see many of your 4+ year olds still wearing diapers and shitting themselves in the aisles in the grocery store, and it's one of the most depressing things ever. If your kid isn't potty trained by 3, it's your failing, not theirs.

I know my spouse and I are not the best parents (our stance on screen time is very controversial), but I also can blatantly see when development issues are forming as a result of hovering parents, both in my child and yours. Do these things, and everything will be better for everyone.

Signed,

A parent who is judging you harshly.

After using Shreddit to delete my Reddit history periodically for some time now, I finally decided to make a cron job to automate it on a weekly basis. I use it to delete every post and comment that isn't whitelisted, which right now is just a tiny subreddit for a musician I like that I solely moderate and a pinned post explaining why I have a bunch of karma but barely any posts.

After setting this up, it got me curious as to what tasks other people automate in their lives in order to streamline their workflows and eliminate minor (or major) routine tasks.

So, what do you automate, and how did you go about doing it?