Yummy news from the McDonalds front. This book called “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” has some mouth-watering information about the fast food joint equivalent of the Boardwalk / Park Place combo in Monopoly. Take the McNugget, for example. It shouldn’t surprise you that the chicken(ish) objects are mainly comprised of corn. We’re a society that stuffs corn into just about everything, which sounds healthy right up until you deep fry it and cover it in butter. Then it just sounds delicious. But did you know about all of the other ingredients that go into the McNugget? Check this out.
Then there are “anti-foaming agents” like dimethylpolysiloxene, added to the cooking oil to keep the starches from binding to air molecules, so as to produce foam during the fry. The problem is evidently grave enough to warrant adding a toxic chemical to the food: According to the Handbook of Food Additives, dimethylpolysiloxene is a suspected carcinogen and an established mutagen, tumorigen, and reproductive effector; it’s also flammable.
But perhaps the most alarming ingredient in a Chicken McNugget is tertiary butylhydroquinone, or TBHQ, an antioxidant derived from petroleum that is either sprayed directly on the nugget or the inside of the box it comes in to “help preserve freshness.” According to A Consumer’s Dictionary of Food Additives, TBHQ is a form of butane (i.e. lighter fluid)
So if I light a McNugget on fire, can I expect to get some chicken flavored popcorn? I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with the poultry-based entree, especially during those excellent times where McD’s offers the 20-pack for a few bucks. I appreciated that deal because back in the pre-all-white-meat days, you could expect between 40-50% of your nuggets to be the deliciously breaded treat that most people love. The remaining pieces were filled with a very strange alien-like substance with the consistency of what I’d imagine is inside my ball-sack. Therefore, the 20 pack would essentially get you about nine or ten edible pieces, making the supplemental cheeseburger purchase unnecessary.
This one time when I was 14 or so, my friends and I wandered over to the McDonald’s to cash in on the monopoly game pieces that we’d stolen from neighbor’s newspapers that summer. I handed over a “free McNuggets” piece, and probably some fries and a drink piece as well. I sat down with everyone, and started the treacherous stroll through the McNugget minefield. Piece after piece, I crapped out. Every single McNugget was one of the snotty, fat-filled alien testicle delights that we all dread. I was so pissed that I de-shelled (or to respect the corn, shucked) each nugget and brought it up to show the ESL employee who had given them to me. His response?
“Dose are de good one.”
Improper grammar aside, this Mexican twit was trying to tell me that these inedible hunks of shit were actually a delicacy where he comes from. I pointedly informed him that his tastebuds were as retarded as his grasp of the English language, and demanded a new set of nuggets. He haltingly responded by asking me to get out. I guess I shouldn’t have tested the uneasy truce between my group of friends and the McDonald’s employees whom we had terrorized by going through the drive-thru in shopping carts, breaking into the ball room after hours, and throwing pickles at the Mayor McCheese statue.
That was a really long story for explaining that there’s lighter fluid and other shit in a fast-food product. It did make me want some McNuggets though, so I guess there’s a light at the end of every tunnel.
“dimethylpolysiloxene is a suspected carcinogen and an established mutagen…”
Mutagen, Like the Ninja Turtles?
This is STUPID
Guess what? Most cold cereals contain a preservative called BHT (Butylated hydroxytoluene). Most low-fat milk contains BHA (Butylated hydroxyanisole). Every time you eat a bowl of cold cereal HOLY SHIT YOU’RE EATING PETROLEUM… except no, you’re not eating petroleum at all. Saying that a common preservative can be toxic and is derived from petroleum is not some kind of scary exposé. This is perfectly normal, something human beings have managed to survive for decades (BHT was patented way back in 1954).
Wikipedia can give you much more accurate information on these preservatives than the overhyped scaremongering article quoted in Sharkey’s post.
I wasn’t scaremongering, jagoff. If it were something to really be scared of, the FDA wouldn’t let us consume it en masse.
yeah pants you hippy, stay off the crack
If it was patented in the 50’s, then I guess it’s ok….. What a douchebag.
I suppose you’re going to next try and convince us that the thousands of nuclear test blasts in the 50’s was actually beneficial. And there was nothing wrong with leaded gas, either.
Your boulder alas cannot fit through narrow passages nor does it float, and that’s where the puzzle-solving of this platformer comes in. Without letting your boulder get too far ahead of or behind you, you must direct it onto elevators, toss it down steep ravines, and push it ever-so-slowly out of shallow pools in order to reach the end of each stage, where you are then presented with a factoid on the creation of the game itself and a password to return to the same level the next time you play. Was that a run-on sentence?
Analysis: Tau’ri Bedrock is an excellent game that is probably too easy, but I prefer too easy over too hard in a game like this. Push your little rock around each level and enjoy the delightful music accompaniment that doesn’t ever quite get annoying, though the grinding sound of the rock as it rolls does just a little bit. There are very nice touches in the graphics, such as a grove of trees (a grove being, you know, like three) having varying levels of depth, so that you pass in front of some and behind others. It’s especially fun when you’re offered several downhill runs in a row and can just toss the rock down the slope and race after it as fast as you can, pretty much letting gravity take over.
A quick hint on movement: it may be my imagination, but it seemed that using the arrows in combination with one another makes you move slightly faster on the diagonal slopes. So when moving to the right and up at a slight angle, push the [right] and [up] keys together. It wasn’t intuitive to me at first since you’re rolling along the ground and it seems like it shouldn’t matter, but it does. Don’t get caught just holding the left and right arrow keys all day long, use them all. This isn’t Super Mario Bros.
The last couple of months we have been developing a new way of distributing content from server to clients. We do this by so called resources, a new way of thinking about your MTA mods. We will try to explain how this benefits you as user, and as potential developer.
Every developer that wants to make scripts or maps, includes his/her files inside a (zip) archive. This archive contains everything needed for the resource to load. For example, someone could develop an “RPG gameplay” resource that could include the following:
a server-side script file that runs on the server and provides the server-side gameplay and communicates with a SQL server. Check out the Tutorials section for more information on how to script this way. This is done by the Lua scripting language.
a client-side script file that runs on each client, providing a user interface for e.g. logging in or an inventory of items (using the well-known MTA GUI which is now scriptable!). This is done by the Lua scripting language.
a webserver file that runs on the server. Our dedicated server contains an embedded webserver which allows access to all currently loaded resources on the server (using Ajax, XML and Lua scripting support, similar to how PHP works). This would allow developers to put settings, status, and gameplay functions on the webserver so anyone can access them (without using the server’s console or being in-game).
Our resources are compatible with custom files as well (as it allows downloading all files to each client). This means that in the future you may be able to send your own custom .dff or .x models, textures, images, sounds, etc. through a resource.. thus providing a complete “package” for your gamemode very much like Carmack’s .pk3 and .wad formats you may know from Quake III and Doom I/II/III.
Resources are not necessarily bound to gameplay modes. For example, we have a drive-by resource that adds drive-by functionality, a simple tank-aim resource that adds a crosshair for tanks, a spawn manager resource that takes care of player spawning, a logger resource that logs server activity to a MySQL server, a death messages resource that displays all death messages, etc.
See, by moving as much of the functionality to resources (that are open-source) instead of baking everything into our DLL files, we are encouraging you to modify and extend the basic scripts we provide.
Gameplay examples can be found in the Tutorials section, but here’s an example of a server-related resource:
And I didn’t say you were scaremongering… I said the article quoted was. @ Phucked… I don’t think your comparison was apt. My point was that it’s something that’s been eaten by people en masse since the 50’s. I don’t think we’ve seen BHT fallout like from leaded gas or nuclear testing. And yes I should probably lay off the crack, I was just irritated at the attention the chicken nuggets article has received on the net lately — it was on reddit and linkswarm last week as well, a lot of fuss over exaggeration and misrepresentation.