Owl is a doll.

Here’s a baby Saw Whet Owl, one of my fav owl babies.

It’s really tough anymore to post positive content here. It feels like spitting on a fire to put it out.

I’m from the US, but I’ve always tried to include everyone in my posts, at the price of looking ignorant every now and then when I get things wrong, but it’s nice when I’ve had people from across the world remark how they’re pleasantly surprised to see something local to them being covered by a non-local. I’ve learned so much in return from just having brief interactions with users from other countries, just by showing some genuine interest in them, their languages, and their home countries. But outside of my own posts, it’s hard to find a place on Lemmy where there doesn’t seem to be things looking to drive a wedge between us.

I used to be able to jump into random posts, even if it was something I wasn’t very familiar with, to try to get conversations going, but so many news/political posts just feel rigged to get people riled up, and I’ll scroll through and not find anything to interact with a lot now.

Plenty of people tell me that I’m doing something important by doing positive stuff here. I really like the small community we’ve got of people that regularly interact. It’s hard to feel like I’m making any kind of difference though. I’m going to show up as long as people are talking to me, but there’s plenty of times I ask myself why I don’t just devote this time back into music or my volunteer work. I’ve dropped all my news and politics podcasts at this point because I’m sick of hearing it all. I censor myself on discussing animal rights issues because I don’t want to add to the pile of negative stuff to worry about. I’ll keep at it the best I can, but a lot of people here are sure making it an exhausting effort some days.

Oh, I’m not saying all of it is hooey, just after the things you mention, there are rapidly diminishing returns.

I started with just an Aeropress and experimenting with different grocery store coffees. Then I got a Barratza Encore for my birthday. I switched to the OXO dripper pour over and prefer that cleaner taste, and my wife prefers the Aeropress still. She doesn’t notice the difference between grocery coffee and fresh ground, so she usually gets a flavored coffee, and I get a different single origin from Trade every couple weeks.

I probably spend the most of my friend group on coffee, at least home coffee, but I think it’s better than any coffee I get out, and I think the value ratio is still well in my favor for what I get. A coworker seemed interested in my setup and bought it all, but she seemed to like it when I did the work, and even that level of hands on was too much fuss, and her and her husband went back to using a French press without measuring anything.

I find the setup a bit much to do in the morning when I wake up and am all groggy, so I’ve gone to making it before I go to bed into canning jars, and I vacuum seal it so we can either warm it up or have “iced coffee” in the morning, and we think it tastes as good as fresh.

I read that as (19)30s documentary at first and was slightly confused until I clicked it! 😁

Spot on though! Especially about the made up lingo and the rituals to maximize his “throat velocity!”

Again, I won’t shame you if you do all that stuff and really enjoy it, but you should be self aware enough to know your level of fanaticism isn’t the norm.

The Tech is my favorite also! I have a couple handles, and the Tech may have been the last one because it seemed liked everyone was always calling it “too mild” or that our clogged too fast because the gap was too small.

It is the smoothest, most gentle, and least fussy handle I’ve got.

I had been so excited to get a Slim Adjustable, the most expensive of my collection, and that thing shreds me on any setting. 😮‍💨

The boar brush was nice when I shaved my whole beard, I liked the sensation, but it is fussy.

That is another great example. I bought a few used razors, but never spent more than $20.on any of them, and I bought a few blade sample packs and swapped a bunch for even more on a forum blade exchange so I probably had at least 40 kinds.

My beard grows every which way, so I shave whichever direction actually gets the hair off, and the blade differences are so miniscule. There were maybe 3 that tore me up for some reason, but the rest I probably couldn’t pick out blind.

So much hocus pocus there about something pretty dead simple. It is somewhat cute to see all the guys talking about soap scents and such, but one static article can easily cover all one ever needs to know about wet shaving.

Ignore all the chit chat and just enjoy cheap shaves.

Heck ya, some solid experimenting to me is way cooler than someone dropping massive cash on something. That’s kiiiinda interesting sometimes to see what’s new and experimental, but I’ll never spend that on it, so there’s limited use to me. But the fart sniffing stuff of overpriced scales and stuff like that, I can live without that type of content completely.

I find some beans to be a bit denser than others, so I don’t try to guess that, but I can hit the desired water target range pretty easily by eyeball these days.

The hardest part of my setup was finding a grinder setting that works for 90+ percent of the coffee I enjoy. I order something new every time, so it gives me a good baseline, and if I want to tweak it, 2 clicks up or down gets me where I want without much fuss.

Good point! Even if you make something and it doesn’t turn out in a way you like, you at least have an idea of how you can change what you did that time to get something more like what you do want.

Lol musician forum are always great for that. There ends up being a lot of work to convince people to just buy this one more new thing and you will have the sound you have always dreamed of. This either leads to people selling their last gear purchase to either buy the same thing in a new package or to rebuy what they sold off to buy their current gear, but now at an inflated vintage gear price. Or you get everyone buying the same thing and now you sound like every other tone chaser in your quest to find originality.

I also try to avoid staying directly behind them so I’m not in too much of a blind spot, and if there’s the opportunity to purposefully cast a shadow I’ll do that as well.

I don’t take offense to it. If someone that was built like me was the only other person around, I’d keep an eye on them also. It doesn’t have to be prejudice against them like people always imply in these posts, it’s just common sense.

One…two…thick Freddy’s coming for you… 😂

This is why I have a hard time with hobbyist forums/communities. I get the idea of wanting to hone your end result or what have you, but it always seems to veer off into obsession while getting results which are debatably any better than keeping it simple.

I weigh my coffee/water to keep the brew ratio the same, and that is fine-tuned enough for me.

You are correct. I just reeducated myself. They just have a record if you voted or not. Apologies.

One could look at that as more suspicious in the context of why they may be trying to collect this data. This is the guy that wanted Georgia to “find more votes” and a registered Republican voting for a Democrat sounds like one of those things that is “obviously a mistake” as you surely intended to vote R.

A registered Democrat voting for a Democratic candidate would be largely assumed, but if all your votes are going to another party, this may be the so far undiscovered “evidence” of the Dems stealing votes or doing fraudulent mail in or drop off ballots.

I don’t disagree with what you do, I just think it would stand out more if I were to be looking for statistical anomalies.

I get bummed that the political stuff has really taken over. I find myself spending more and more time just working on my own content and answering people’s comments than browsing the other communities. It’s draining scrolling past so much stuff to find the fun bits, but I don’t want to just block it and not see how our platform is developing as a whole.

A lot of communities have rules that posts need to be titled the same as the source article, which, while it prevents editorializing, it also brings all those ragebait headlines here. Plus I’d like to see Lemmy users’ opinions moreso than an article I could just read myself. I’d probably prefer more of the political post to be thoughts/feelings and then discussion is backed up by decent articles rather than an article being the post and comments are just all steered back to a single, often inflammatory article.

If half our content is just reposted mainstream media, why would one expect our comment sections to look any different than the comment sections of those mainstream sites?

It is somewhat disturbing as a concept. Industrialized slaughter has heavy implications from how we treat our environment and even each other. The tech’s simplicity makes it more disturbing to me. It’s not something elaborate or really man-made, it’s a harnessed form of nature. Basically a contained version of what happened to those people in that sub to the Titanic.

Lobsters don’t have brains in the same way we do, they have nerve clusters distributed through their segmented bodies. As such, it’s likely we will never understand what they experience.

There’s a ton more data and history here (Wikipedia: pain in crustaceans). I’m glad we as people continue to question the ethics of animal consumption. We have more food options than most other animals, and we can take advantage of that if we wish to.

I do like that it reduces food waste, because I do think if we are killing animals, we should at least make full use of them.

I usually dip the burger in additional ketchup along with the fries.

Burger King Double Bacon Cheeseburger, no pickle. Tastes pretty good and still a good value compared to almost any other menu item.

Close second is Wendy’s Double Stack in the Biggie Bag combo. Again, great taste for the price, and comes with nuggets, fries, and a drink.

Son of Baconator if I feel like being a piggie 😇

Looking at the Buldak Original ingredients list, it looks like many of the same ingredients, but in reverse proportions.

Buldak has a lot of chicken flavoring/bullion to make the chicken flavor (dak=chicken) and a lot of pepper flake to make it hot (bul=fire) and then soy sauce and seasoning.

The fried chicken sauce doesn’t have the chicken flavor since it’s intended to go on actual fried chicken, and I don’t make it super hot. It’s a little more earthy and a little sweet.

I use a decent scoop of gochujang paste (lower heat level), a nice amount of minced garlic, a splash rice vinegar, a tiny blep sesame oil and some sesame seed, and then honey or brown sugar to taste, then soy sauce to get it to a nice dipping sauce consistency.

I don’t measure it, I just make it for making fancy pizza, so I eyeball it in a ramekin and then drizzle as desired on pizza.