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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: November 13th, 2023

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  • As a fellow American, I’m going to make a big assumption here and advise you to engage with more people outside. Lemmings are great and all but we do not represent the real world. I can say this has helped me and man, am I worlds better for it.

    Right now, the internet is quasi-weaponized against everyone’s better mental health. A lot of people are being fed propaganda that aligns strongly with their beliefs, with many people being sucked into a narrow, amplified, and semi-fictional view of reality. You have to dig deep to find real journalism, facts, and then puzzle together a less biased worldview; few people are there to do any of that legwork for you these days. It’s all exhausting and a recipe for mental illness if you do it constantly.

    Instead, try to get out there and just talk to one person; better yet a stranger. Even if it’s just smalltalk. Even if it’s about the weather with a librarian or a checkout clerk. ANYONE. If you can make your way to a club, mutual-aid hub, local meetup, whatever… that’s even better. The goal is to just verbalize with other humans. The rest will follow from there.




  • For me, the big problem with adapting to modern electric (resistive coil, not induction) was the fact that the coil takes time to get to temp and stays hot after you remove power. That hysteresis is a problem for everything but boiling water, and is completely unlike gas or induction. It takes practice to get used to it - I always wound up keeping a burner clear so I could move my fry/saute/whatever off the heat when needed.

    The heat cycling you mention is another one. It can cause spikes in temperature, especially when you’re doing something small like sweating half an onion or something like that.

    Back in the bad old days, electric ranges were 100% analog with no PWM. Power in was determined by a variable resistor, so the coil was always humming along at 60hz, just at a different wattage. This was a better arrangement, IMO.









  • I think that gaming is headed fast into some kind of deep economic divide.

    On the one hand, we have high-end gaming that chases seasonal updates, massive multiplayer experiences, requiring high-end system specs to even start. It’s all practically a subscription model one way or another: keep buying new games, DLC, hardware, just to keep playing with your friends. Alternately, sign up for a subscription to play all this stuff in the cloud, dodging the need to maintain your own hardware, but never really owning anything in exchange.

    Then there’s the other way.

    Right now, we’re sitting on top of nearly 50 years of video games going back to the primordial sludge of Pong. Modern system specs are far more than what’s required in almost all cases so it’s practically all there for the taking for cheap. I promise you, there are grand single and multiplayer experiences to be had by dipping into that monstrous catalog. At the same time, some of the very best of those are getting new life with modern updates, fan-edits, fan-made content packs, and so on. Finally, there’s the hobby and indie scenes, where new things are being made all the time in various game-jams, early access on Steam, and so much more. You have to dig for all of that of course; the people pushing you to pay a high price for entertainment will never make this easy.




  • Fascinating. It’s worth mentioning that (normal) honey can be used to preserve meat, thanks to its antimicrobial and hydrophilic properties. I guess that’s what’s going on here too: they use a kind of nectar honey to keep the meat component from going off. That said, this kind of food preservation isn’t immune to botulism so do be careful if you try this.

    Now I’m wondering when/how this behavior evolved. Did these guys come first, and honeybees figured out how to eat pollen as a protein source as an evolutionary step, the other way around, or separately at the same time from some parent species?




  • I was gonna say. This idea has been floating around for decades.

    Bottom line: Yes it will work. It will also involve transporting nuclear warheads to another country, which probably violates all kinds of treaties and will set governments everywhere into a panic of epic proportions. The knock-on effects of nuclear contamination will be a problem for the local population, local water table, and local ocean currents. You can bet your bottom-dollar that these, and possibly more, problems will be shouldered solely by the soon-to-be-god-forsaken masses of whatever country eventually okays this idea.


  • We’re being actively goaded in that direction by bad-faith actors all over social media, including here. Those of us with brains are keeping our powder dry since it’s obvious that these trolls can’t speak for all the steps that sit between conflict and resolution. Said trolls also don’t understand that the majority of gun owners are trained and know better. It’s not like you can buy bullets at 7-11, and having so many firearms around doesn’t automatically make this a volatile situation, hence the constant pushing you see online.

    What I can say is that the political divides you’re seeing online are showing up in the real world, where people aren’t able to overcome propaganda and programming. In my experience, people generally stay off the topic of politics in public because they want to have a good day. Occasionally you spot someone wearing trump stuff, but I take that in stride along with people wearing offensive t-shirts and the like: it’s just trolling, plain and simple.

    Overall, it’s not great.