Every year, against all evidence that this is a good idea, someone in the group suggests we do Thanksgiving together. The suggestion always comes from d4rkfl0w, because d4rkfl0w has an inexhaustible capacity for optimism about events that have gone wrong literally every single time they have been attempted. He is the human embodiment of "it'll be different this year." It is never different.
This year it was at gh0stwire's apartment, because gh0stwire has the largest living space, which is a generous description of a two-bedroom apartment in which sixty percent of the square footage has been claimed by networking equipment. His living room contains a couch, a coffee table, and a full-height server rack that he calls "Harold." Harold hums at a frequency that makes your fillings vibrate. It is not a relaxing environment for a holiday meal.
The plan was simple: everyone brings one dish. Seven people, seven dishes, one turkey that d4rkfl0w volunteered to cook because, and this is a direct quote, "I've been watching cooking videos and I think I really understand turkey now." There is no sentence in the English language more dangerous than a man who has recently watched YouTube saying he "understands" something.
The Turkey (d4rkfl0w)
d4rkfl0w arrived at gh0stwire's apartment at 7 AM to begin the turkey. He arrived with the turkey, a roasting pan, a meat thermometer, and a printed recipe that he had annotated in three colors of highlighter. He also arrived with a sous vide machine, a kitchen torch, and a bag of something he described as "truffle salt I got off Amazon." Nobody asked him to bring any of these things. The recipe called for salt, pepper, and butter. d4rkfl0w has never in his life followed a recipe as written.
The turkey weighed twenty-two pounds. gh0stwire's oven, which had been used primarily for reheating pizza and once, memorably, for drying a router that had fallen in the sink, was not large enough for a twenty-two-pound turkey. d4rkfl0w discovered this at 7:15 AM. He did not tell anyone. He simply spent the next thirty minutes trying to force the turkey into the oven through what I can only describe as a series of increasingly desperate geometric experiments. At one point he turned it diagonally. At another point he removed the oven racks entirely and tried to wedge the pan in at an angle, which resulted in the turkey sliding off the pan, onto the oven door, and partially onto the floor.
d4rkfl0w picked the turkey up off the floor. He rinsed it in the sink. He put it back in the pan. He did not mention this to anyone until approximately 9 PM, after everyone had eaten, at which point he said, "Oh yeah, the turkey touched the floor for a second but I rinsed it," and CryptK left the room and did not return for twenty minutes.
The turkey eventually went into the oven after d4rkfl0w removed something he described as a "metal shelf thing" that turned out to be part of the oven's self-cleaning mechanism. gh0stwire has not been able to run the self-clean cycle since. d4rkfl0w says this is a feature, not a bug, because "self-clean cycles are bad for the oven anyway." gh0stwire has not forgiven him.
The turkey took nine hours. The recipe said four and a half. d4rkfl0w blamed the oven, the altitude, the humidity, and at one point, Harold, claiming the server rack was "generating ambient heat that was confusing the thermometer." The thermometer was digital. It was not confused. The turkey was simply enormous and the oven was running forty degrees cooler than it claimed because nobody had calibrated it since it was installed in 2019.
The Mashed Potatoes (CryptK)
CryptK was assigned mashed potatoes because mashed potatoes are, theoretically, the simplest thing a person can make. You boil potatoes. You mash them. You add butter and salt. A child could do this. A golden retriever with thumbs could probably do this.
CryptK arrived with twelve pounds of potatoes. Twelve. Pounds. There were seven of us. That is approximately 1.7 pounds of mashed potato per person. When asked why he had brought twelve pounds, he said, "I calculated the caloric needs of seven adults for one meal assuming moderate physical activity and a twenty percent surplus for leftovers, then converted to potato weight." This is a real sentence that a real person said in a real kitchen on a real holiday.
He peeled all twelve pounds by hand because he does not trust electric peelers. He peeled them with a ceramic-blade peeler he brought from home in a case. The case had foam padding. It was a pelican case. For a peeler. I watched him unpack this and I said nothing because some things are beyond commentary.
The mashed potatoes were, admittedly, incredible. CryptK had used Yukon Golds, which he described as "the correct potato for mashing, the only correct potato, and anyone who uses a Russet for mashed potatoes has made a choice I cannot respect." He added exactly one stick of Kerrygold butter, a quarter cup of heavy cream warmed to precisely 140 degrees (he used his own thermometer, also stored in a case), white pepper instead of black because "black pepper leaves visible specks and that's chaos," and a quantity of salt he measured on a kitchen scale to the tenth of a gram.
We had mashed potatoes for six days. The leftovers filled three containers. n1ghtsh1ft ate mashed potatoes for every meal from Thursday through the following Tuesday and reported no ill effects other than "a general feeling of being insulated from the world."
The Green Bean Casserole (n1ghtsh1ft)
n1ghtsh1ft was supposed to bring green bean casserole. This is a dish that consists of green beans, cream of mushroom soup, and fried onions. Three ingredients. It is the first recipe that appears when you Google "easy Thanksgiving side dish." It requires an oven and approximately forty minutes of effort, most of which is the oven doing the work while you watch.
n1ghtsh1ft did not make green bean casserole. n1ghtsh1ft arrived at 4 PM — five hours after the rest of us — carrying a Popeyes bag. Inside the bag were: twelve biscuits, a large container of mashed potatoes (additional mashed potatoes; we now had approximately sixteen pounds of mashed potatoes), a gallon of sweet tea, and a red beans and rice.
"Where's the casserole?" VexNull asked.
"I forgot to buy the stuff."
"You had two weeks."
"I forgot for two weeks."
"So you went to Popeyes."
"They were open. Also I was hungry on the way here."
"On the way here. To Thanksgiving dinner."
"I didn't want to show up hungry."
"TO THANKSGIVING DINNER."
n1ghtsh1ft ate three Popeyes biscuits and fell asleep on gh0stwire's couch at 6:30 PM. He woke up at 11 PM, ate a plate of turkey and CryptK's mashed potatoes, and fell asleep again. He did not leave the apartment until Friday afternoon. gh0stwire found him at 8 AM Friday still on the couch, wrapped in a blanket that nobody could identify the origin of, watching YouTube videos about deep-sea mining on his phone with the brightness set to maximum.
"Morning," n1ghtsh1ft said.
"It is morning," gh0stwire confirmed.
"Is there more turkey?"
There was more turkey. There was always more turkey. The turkey was twenty-two pounds. Seven people cannot eat twenty-two pounds of turkey. This is a mathematical certainty and d4rkfl0w knew it when he bought the turkey but his response to this was "more is more" which is a philosophy that works for RAM and bandwidth but does not translate to poultry.
The Pie (Ph4ntom)
Ph4ntom was not in attendance. Ph4ntom has not been in attendance at any group event since 2022. Ph4ntom's physical location is, as always, unknown. However, at precisely 3:47 PM, a DoorDash driver arrived at gh0stwire's apartment carrying two pumpkin pies from a bakery none of us had heard of, located in a city seven hundred miles away. The delivery instructions read: "Leave at door. Do not ring bell. Happy Thanksgiving. — P"
The pies were still warm. We do not know how the pies were still warm after being delivered from seven hundred miles away. We have stopped asking questions about Ph4ntom's logistics.
The pies were excellent.
The Cranberry Sauce (VexNull)
I made cranberry sauce from scratch. Fresh cranberries, orange zest, a cup of sugar, and a cinnamon stick. It took fifteen minutes. It was perfect. Nobody ate it because d4rkfl0w had also brought cranberry sauce — the canned kind, Ocean Spray, still in the shape of the can — and n1ghtsh1ft said he "preferred the cylinder version because the ridges give it structural integrity on the plate."
I stood there holding a bowl of homemade cranberry sauce while seven adults fought over a cylinder of jellied corn syrup that costs a dollar forty-nine.
This is my life. I have three degrees. I have four certifications. I once found a zero-day in a kernel driver during a lunch break. And I am standing in a kitchen holding cranberry sauce that nobody wants while a man who brought Popeyes to Thanksgiving lectures me about the "mouthfeel" of canned cranberry products.
I ate the cranberry sauce myself. All of it. Over the course of the evening. Out of the bowl. With a spoon. While making eye contact with d4rkfl0w. He did not comment. He is capable of learning.
The Aftermath
The meal was eventually served at approximately 5:30 PM, which was six hours later than planned. The table was gh0stwire's coffee table, because his actual dining table is covered in switches and is not, at this time, available for food-related purposes. We sat on the floor, the couch, and, in n1ghtsh1ft's case, a stack of pizza boxes that had been repurposed as seating.
SsSnake called in via video. He was eating what appeared to be a perfectly normal Thanksgiving meal, alone, in a well-lit room, at a table, like a functioning human being. He watched us eating turkey off paper plates while sitting on the floor of an apartment that smelled like server exhaust and burnt rosemary (d4rkfl0w had attempted to torch the rosemary garnish with the kitchen torch and it had gotten out of hand briefly) and he said: "You all seem well."
CryptK said: "This is the worst meal I've ever eaten and I will be here next year."
He was correct on both counts.