vogon

the evil "Website Boy"

member of @staff, lapsed linguist and drummer, electronics hobbyist

zip's bf

no supervisor but ludd means the threads any good


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bluesky
if bluesky has a million haters I am one of them, if bluesky has one hater that's me, if bluesky has no haters then I am no more on the earth (more details: https://cohost.org/vogon/post/1845751-bonus-pure-speculati)
irl
seattle, WA

(a post for jenn schiffer's microblogvember)

there's two basic kinds of these things: wire slicers and cheese planes. cheese is a very important substance to me, so I have used each of them more times than I care to count.

cheese planes are comically bad. every time I use one, I get about an inch of a perfectly flat cut, followed by the plane wandering either up or down (usually up). and if I manage to get all the way to the other side of the block of cheese without screwing it up, it always breaks out and leaves a nice chin that I wanted to be part of the next slice of cheese I was going to cut.

wire slicers are mostly Fine, I Guess except for three things:

  1. the wire never sits flush on the counter, so you get slices with chins the same way you do with cheese planes.
  2. cleaning and drying them1 is a royal pain.
  3. the wire is fragile and I've lost a handful of wire slicers to the wire either pulling out of the little retention clip on the side or just rusting through and breaking.

years ago I gave up on getting perfect slices of cheese, and just resigned myself to using a knife and learning to put up with the imperfection.


  1. maybe it's just because I haven't bought one in like a decade but I don't think I've ever owned one that had a stainless steel wire; the body tends not to rust up if you don't dry it, but the wire always has.


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in reply to @vogon's post:

I grew up without ever hearing of cheese slicers until I got to college and remembered being immediately disappointed when I tried the one my roommates bought and realized it worked way worse than just cutting cheese with a knife

metallurgically speaking, stainless steel tends to be very hard/inflexible so it's more likely to break in a shittier way.

however, if i'm doing some sort of party thing (remember getting together in person? me neither) my suggestion is plain old dental floss. it's cheap and if it starts getting gummed up, you can just pull out some fresh floss! this also works with cake to get cleaner slices

My parents had the cheese plane and it always managed to cut a weird triangular cut of cheese. That said, I managed to break a knife a couple of years ago trying to cut a big block of cheese in half (bad technique + cheap knife I think). I usually grate my cheese and just buy pre-cut slices. I have a cuisinart food processor that can grate, now I wonder if they have an attachment for slices. More cleanup required though..

We own a "mandoline slicer" that is extremely cumbersome and frankly kind of dangerous for just a little cheese, but it would outperform those other options in making nice slices. The cleaning is also tricky. I typically wind up using a nice (and actually fairly large) knife so that I have control and power