I lost a day at some point in the last few days. It’s now Sunday, and I woke up thinking it was Saturday. I thought yesterday was Friday, and that today would be Saturday, and I planned out my day according to that belief. When I realized it was actually Sunday, I was suddenly a day behind on everything. So I had to spend the next several hours just mentally dealing with my schedule (such as it is) being wrecked and figuring out how to rebuild everything. Hopefully, I can operate correctly the next few days. But partially for that reason, today’s post will be another short one (by my standards…someone pointed out they didn’t really consider last week’s post “short.” And sure; it’s a subjective term. But first, a burger news follow-up.
As promised, I picked up a Wendy’s Krabby Kollab meal. This marketing arrangement celebrating Spongebob Squarepants’ 25th Anniversary (fun fact: I watched the first episode debut) features all two Spongebob creations: a Krabby Patty, a Pineapple Frosty, and some normal Wendy’s french fries. Now, logically, we can make a real Krabby Patty. And I don’t mean one of the 10,000 recipes you can find through {insert search engine here} that takes you to a recipe site that is *almost* impossible to use. Not that many of those recipes aren’t valid…Krabby Patty’s are actually pretty simple, if you make certain assumptions. The “official” recipe is a sesame seed bun, sea cheese, sea tomatoes, sea onions, sea lettuce, pickles, ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, a patty made of unknown ingredients, and a secret sauce of unknown composition. If we presume these burgers eaten by fish, crustaceans, and certain other sea life don’t contain…err…them…then we’re left with what we would consider “veggie” ingredients and the cheese. You can come up with undersea options to comprise the “veggie-based” condiments and presumably the cheese, the unknown burger patty and the unknown sauce; which leaves the known sauces. It is established in the recipe and in the show itself that ketchup, mustard, and mayonnaise do exist in Bikini Bottom, as do plain-old pickles. This is assumed only because the pickles are never paired with the “sea” prefix, while other veggies (and cheese) are so designated. So basically, a Krabby Patty is a veggie burger made using entirely sea-sourced ingredients, minus the sauces. Therefore, if you want to make a human analogue, just a make a veggie burger like hundreds of thousands of restaurants already do. They’re even pretty good at this point…there are some places where I prefer their veggie burger to other options. *Other fast food chains* already offer veggie burgers.
So what is Wendy’s version of a Krabby Patty?
It’s a Dave’s Single. With Thousand Island.

*Mild* Thousand Island, to be fair. As previously discussed, both Jack In The Box and Sonic use a spiced-up Thousand Island sauce, which isn’t uncommon. I bet if you’re a salad connoisseur, you’ve had some house Thousand Islands that required a gulp of water to get down. In the end it’s just a slightly different way to eat a Dave’s Single, if that’s your favorite jam. The Pineapple Frosty is tasty, but also a bit disappointing. There is no pineapple in it; just pineapple syrup. Mine wasn’t mixed well, if at all, and so I was handed a cup with a finger of dark-yellow liquid at the bottom topped by a scoop of vanilla ice cream. After mixing it myself with the spoon it was fine. A pineapple-flavored frosty is certainly a good idea, and it’s a bit shocking they didn’t already offer one; considering they already had pineapple syrup on the premises. At least I assume they use pineapple syrup in the pineapple mango tea; I could be wrong about that.
But here’s where we get eerie.
An accepted truth for me for the past 25 years is that I get violently ill whenever I eat at Chili’s. Not coincidentally, it’s always my body attempting to expel what I ate as quickly as possible. The assumption for the longest time was that they were using cottonseed oil to cook with…I’m allergic. And cottonseed oil was a bit of a fad for while starting a few decades back. Everybody was using it, seemingly. But I *liked* Chili’s food. So every few years I would try eating there again. We decided to try again a few days ago when we couldn’t think of where we wanted to eat. The food was fine, nothing all that special. There are places that serve similar food better in the area which we will likely stick to in the future. The menu is much reduced from the 90’s/2000’s; I can tell you that. Mostly pub food, with even the famous “Babyback Ribs” only appearing in two dishes. But you know what their new burger option is?

Meet the Chili’s “Big Smasher.” Yep, it’s even named the same. it is Chili’s simplest burger: red onions, lettuce, cheese, pickles…and Thousand Island. I didn’t order it. I’ve had my fill of Thousand Island burgers, and don’t consider them all that special to begin with. This is an *old* concept. But, a restaurant burger is usually considered a step above a fast food burger…even it’s a fast casual restaurant, which I suspect Chili’s is trying to be. “Sports Bar” has evolved into an entirely new concept that merges Planet Hollywood with Hooters, and Family Dining seems to have split between Upscale and Fast Casual. And now I need to find out if this Thousand Island Burger trend is infecting the “gourmet” burger restaurants, like Red Robin, Fuddruckers, Hopdaddy, or whoever else I remember in the near future. I hope not.
In Star Wars: The Old Republic, I’m almost done with my Nautolan smuggler. This has also refreshed me on the Republic version of several planetary stories. I think pretty quick I’m going to talk about the Smuggler story, as it is simultaneously one of the best and worst. Which is to say, it has some of the best writing, several good companions, and some horrible writing and one of the very worst companions. I even already started a second smuggler. Same reason as why I have two Sith Warriors: I realized I wanted to do a specific romance option in the base story, so I would need a “male” smuggler in addition to Nuleen. But until then, here’s a shot of Nuleen overlooking the starship graveyard on Hoth:

It’s worth noting half or more of the graveyard is actually blocked by the giant crashed starship that dominates the image. Hoth is one of the planets in SWTOR that seems to generate “love it or hate it” vibes. I tend to enjoy it except for the overwhelming *brightness* of the snow and ice. Hurts my eyes.
That’s it for now, see you next week!
Free Radical

The product of fandom run unchecked, this novel began as a short story and grew into something of a cult hit.
How to Forum

Dear people of the internet: Please stop doing these horrible idiotic things when you talk to each other.
The Best of 2018

I called 2018 "The Year of Good News". Here is a list of the games I thought were interesting or worth talking about that year.
A Star is Born

Remember the superhero MMO from 2009? Neither does anyone else. It was dumb. So dumb I was compelled to write this.
Marvel's Civil War

Team Cap or Team Iron Man? More importantly, what basis would you use for making that decision?
But were you violently ill again after eating at Chilli’s? I hope not because that would be deeply unpleasant.
^That (is the question sufficient characters for post etc)
Been a few days now, and no problems. I think it’s been about 10 years since the last time I tried, and the menu is completely different. That kind of follows, that things would be so different that it wouldn’t be true any more. But I spent 15 years repeatedly getting sick, and you would think something would have changed in that period, too.
I was going to say that it’s probably plain “pickles” because “sea pickles” can refer to several species of real plants and animals…but then sea lettuce is a whole genus of seaweed. And then I jokingly put in sea onions and got…this, so I dunno. No hits for “sea tomatoes” or “sea cheese”, at least.
Don’t know why you’d assume that. Lots of fish eat other fish. Most of the rest eat zooplankton, for some value of most, varying widely across habitats, according to my hastily-conducted internet research that is untrustworthy at best. Which zooplankton themselves eat other organisms to live. The percentage of fish that could be considered true vegetarians would appear to be reasonably low.
The true human equivalent of a Krabby Patty should probably be made from humans – other beings they share a society with, like the Spongebob characters. Most of whom would eat one another, or at least eat one another’s dissolving corpses if they floated by. Though Spongebob himself would have a preference for plankton and “detritus” – his human-equivalent burger would probably be yard clippings and trash.
It’s a fair argument. My own framing is based only on depicting the world of Spongebob as a fantasy hybrid of undersea life and people. The creator, Stephen Hillenburg, is well-known to have not only a lifelong interest in marine biology, but an actual Bachelors in Marine-science. (I’ve never seen that degree or related degrees hyphenated like that, but I don’t know everything and different colleges sometimes call the same degrees by different appelations.) Spongebob’s world is a bizarre mix of suprisingly accurate science and completely-insane fantasy.
Hoth was shot in my country, so I have always had a liking for it, for that reason. Incidentally, the place where it was shot – Finse – is a mountain pass with a rail line running through it. I would therefore assume that the train schedule was fairly important during filming, to not have containers or passenger cars in the background of science fantasy shots from a different planet. The Norwegian word for “the train schedule” is “togruta”. I wonder where the name for the Star Wars race of “Togruta” came from….
I knew about the filming location…you can identify a lot of the shots they got as most of them are distance shots where the camera is in the door of the hotel or wherever they were filming, to stay somewhat warm. The actor would run outside then do their acting (which was usually just looking around or coming back toward the camera) and then run back in. Lot of background shots that later had animation composited on.
I did NOT know about Togruta. Stories about the creation of the species are very hard to find, with most non-character-specific lore actually being added in the 2010’s in what is usually called “Legends” canon. The actual creation of the species, at least in appearance, is almost certainly correctly attributed to George Lucas. The first Togruta appears in the second prequel movie Attack of the Clones. And of course the entire Clone Wars universe spins off from that.
While the Lucas connection could conceivably go back to The Empire Strikes Back, Lucas himself was only rarely on filming locations at that time. He was involved in early drafts and financing, his original plan for all subsequent Star Wars movies. On the other hand, Lucas was clearly influenced by non-American cultures…especially words. It is easy to see him hearing “togruta” once and writing it down as a possible name for something in the future. In fact, the infamous “compendium where he had everything written down from the start” was in reality a notebook full of names and words and phrases.
I’m glad my little hypothesis seems plausible to someone with far more knowledge of the Star Wars development process in general.
I also tried the SpongeBob Krabby Patty Kollab. Like you said – and I predicted – it’s a Dave’s Single with Thousand Island. My wife was going to try it but then opted for a regular Dave’s Single instead. She did get the Pineapple Frosty though.
The biggest disappointment was the Pineapple Frosty. I was hoping for a DoleWhip which is like Pineapple Sherbert ( or Orange Sherbert or swirl!) but it was Vanilla with Pineapple Syrup. Actually, I wish it was just Pineapple Syrup they used, but it was more like Pina Colada Syrup. There was definitely a coconut flavor there that was corroborated by my wife. I actually ended up with both Frosties because my wife is very “Hell No” on coconut.
Around here, the only burger place that hasn’t seemed to jump on the 1000 Island craze is Whataburger.
The day after I ate my Krabby Patty, I read that Steven Hillenburg, the creator of Spongebob was against this sort of Fast-Food Promotion. Then I briefly felt guilty, but it’s okay. I didn’t know until it was too late.
Also, I read that the cartoon has confirmed that Krabby Patty’s are vegan – and not seafood.
Who knows what’s at the Chum Bucket.
I thought I had heard the Krabby Patty is vegan at one point, but a handful of searches produced enough conflicting information that I left it alone. It makes sense to *me* that it is plant-based, at least, but simply based on the argument that the “people” eating it represent a broad spectrum of sea life.
Clarification, as upon re-reading it may not be clear. It has always made sense to me that the Krabby Patty was 100% vegetarian in composition, more-so than a veggie burger in our own world. It doesn’t really click that it would inherently be vegan (we are talking Mr. Krabs, here; some Krabby Patties in the show were definitely NOT vegan) but if that’s Word of God, then it’s vegan.