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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1603 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 9, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Can someone explain US spiciness levels to me?

I recently tried Dave’s Hot Chicken. I have been meaning to try it for a while ever since they went viral. There was a bogo deal on UberEats so I ordered 1 Reaper, 1 ultra hot, 2 Hot, and then I guess a deliver mistake got me 2 mild tenders and later saw on a receipt I got a DoorDash order so I had that for lunch the next day. Here is my spice ranking Reaper - death 10 min of pain Ultra hot - taste nothing Hot - taste nothing Mild - taste nothing

This seems normal for a lot of American joints. A lot of the spiciness levels I can barely taste a difference and then they sometimes I have a crazy level. Why is this? I came up with two models:

  1. They are getting spicier. Medium is 3k Scoville, hot is 10k scoville, ultra hot is 25k scoville. Human variance for tasting spice varies widely so it’s actually very hard to create hot varieties for the customer to agree is hot. And myself personally has built up a tolerance of let’s call it 50k scoville before I taste something (I’m making these numbers up). And then it’s easy to just dial up a 300k scoville reaper like level.

  2. The restaurants lie and most Americans have little spice tolerance so all varieties of hot are generally similar but they do the tight range of spiciness level because customers like thinking they had something spicy.

Only time I’ve seen this broken would be at authentic Chinese spots. Where I could order let’s call it level 3 spicy. Where I remember a waitress warning me that this is Chinese hot and not white boy American hot. I ordered that and loved it.

I often find myself wanting to order something spicy that will have a pleasant pain but it seems fairly rare in American coded restaurants.

This is my personal average restaurant experience of the spiciness scales in the US.

Rating Thai place example Indian place example BWW example
🌶️🌶️🌶️ Crying while eating (only available if ordered with a majority-brown group) Pray for your butthole Vindaloo (only available if ordered with a majority-brown group) Blazin'® or Wild®
🌶️🌶️ Ordered "spicy" with a majority-white group Madras Mango Habanero™
🌶️ Labeled "spicy" with no waitress warning Tikka Masala Asian Zing®
White people: black pepper is too spicy Not labeled "spicy" Korma Honey BBQ

I skipped a bunch of the BWW spiciness scale, but everything below Asian Zing on that scale is hardly spicy, IMO.

Impressive. Paging @ToaKraka to assess your mad formatting skillz.

Yes, the choice of table was a small tribute to the fallen.

My understanding is that he is throwing a self-described tantrum. I don't know if he will return. In that case, IMO, the most productive use of this time is if he is busy finishing his house project. There is also the slightly more disturbing possibility that he's in Australia.

A third possibility is that he had a spectacular crashout, for... reasons, and his story (mildly NSFW) is allegorical.

And that was that.

I suppose falling in (Culture) War in the most banal possible way is a tale as old as time:

He fell in October 1918 [2026], on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front that the army report [mod log] confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.

He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over, one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come.

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