i can see the light at the end of the tunnel
then again it could be the train

Goes hard. Gonna save that line for later.

I found myself a copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four printed by Harcourt, Brace and Company for $20. It didn’t have its dust jacket, but everything else about the book seemed quite fine. There isn’t really much on the inside indicating specifics, but everything I found about it online would suggest that it’s the first US hardcover edition from 1949. It has to be the oldest book in my collection so far and my favorite from a publishing standpoint.

That’s the wild thing—I’ve tried all sorts of ways and it reads like a viable meme whichever way I read it.

I finally have my accommodations settled with the university and I started really using them. Joined a disability rights club and I started helping out a couple friends with their Discord servers. It feels like I have things properly tuned in to my pace for the first time in a while, and it feels like I’m seeing that pay off.

Also it’s been a hot minute since I’ve been on. Glad to see things are holding up and glad to be coming back 👍.

A couple of my local groceries sell packed chicken feet, and I absolutely love them for stocks. They’re packed with gelatin and I end up with silky stocks that look like Jello in the fridge. Store rotisserie chickens are also great for stocks in my experience. I get a meal or few out of most of the meat, then you chuck the rest in a pot to turn into stock.

I think at least one of my local groceries also used to sell ox tail. Great for beef stock, but I think it got expensive after it became a trendy cut for some reason. I don’t remember how that happened, I guess people got in the know 🤔.

Kosher salt, and by extension salting by hand with a salt cellar instead of using a salt shaker. Salt is some real basic stuff, I’ll definitely admit. But switching from table salt and changing up my salt game was a small detail that really got me into cooking.

I grew up in a house that was entirely table salt and salt shakers, so I didn’t learn about kosher salt until I started to learn more about cooking on my own. Handling kosher salt by the pinch and the hand made it much easier for me to develop an intuitive sense of seasoning food. If anyone is wary about over salting or doesn’t trust their salt shaker not to turn their meal into a salt lick, I highly recommend giving kosher salt and salting things by hand a try.

Adam Ragusea does a better job than I can at the moment of describing kosher salt’s context and advantages. I’ll leave the elaboration to him, but I’d be happy to give my personal perspective on details if asked. Apparently kosher salt is primarily an American thing according to him? I didn’t know that until reviewing the video for my comment.

I think this is the first piece of yours I got to see here that used both digital art and the knitting. It’s seriously cool stuff and an awesome way to get texture in!

I don’t think I have a strong opinion toward bots. They could get gimmicky and unnecessary, but I never felt like they detracted from my experience to a noteworthy degree. I don’t think I ever disliked bots too much on Reddit? But then again, I rarely liked or wanted bots, either. I have a loose leaning toward letting people reasonably experiment with how they interact with a platform online, but “bots” as in the kind of stuff I remember from Reddit seem like a relatively weak expression of that. If I had to put an opinion down, I’d say that I’m in favor of their continued presence with the caveat of some guidelines and defined best-practices. Otherwise, if I wake up one day to learn that bots are banned on Beehaw, admittedly I wouldn’t be all that bummed about it.

th3raid0r and Lionir seem to get pretty well at the kind of recommendations I’d like to see. Bots ideally should provide a meaningful contribution to communities. Bots should be clearly labelled and identifiable as such. Bot creators should have consent from the community’s moderators to have a bot interact within the community. The Cardinal Be^e Nice applies here, perhaps to a greater degree: bots shouldn’t be used to fake engagement, impersonate people, commit technical attacks on the community, etc.

the_itsb also reminded me of another aspect: we may want to consider how active and populated a community is. Bots take up the attention and visual space of everyone else browsing a community and its discussions. It strikes me as a worst-case scenario, but I could imagine it’s possible for a bot overabundance to choke out legitimate conversation. That’s enough for me to start thinking twice about whether or not I have a loose stance on this.

I worry that most Lemmy instances are too young/inactive for this kind of bot yet. I don’t think we’re past the tipping point where the people commenting will automatically outweigh the bots, and I don’t think those bots are fun unless they’re dramatically outweighed by normal human interaction.

That’s an interesting way of putting it that I didn’t immediately consider.

I don’t necessarily like them, but I’m not really all that against them, either. If we don’t have the activity to balance out bot input, however, it might be reasonable to limit them one way or another. It seems to me like a worst-case scenario, but if a community or thread has what feels like a noticeable amount of bots, that would be a turn-off for me.

If the community decides to limit bot traffic either partially or entirely, it might be good to revisit that decision later on if there’s an upward trend in users and activity.

Do spoiler foldouts maintain their functionality across UIs, either directly or in essence (eg. popup instead)?

Part of me wishes that Lemmy also had spoilers that reveal in place, but foldout spoilers have some functionality that makes me appreciate having both on hand. I’d bet bots could benefit from using that to minimize visual space if we go through with it.

Almost makes me think that we have a fighting chance to make tags on Lemmy work. Part of me would want to see tags get some unique formatting like post flairs, but even just inline tags would be a leg-up.

Or maybe both in-line and post tags. Neat stuff to daydream 🤔.

That’s wild to imagine! Any recollection of how high up those ceilings might have been? The gyms I remember in the US had ceilings that were something like 2 or 3 stories high, if I had to guess. That strikes me as quite the height to jump for a fitness test. Just for the height factor alone I can’t picture myself having the guts back then to do it. Dunno if I’d even have 'em now 😨.

No, not really. Graduated from high school in California in 2017. Both my middle and high school, however, had the equipment and stations on hand. It feels relevant to mention we also had what looked like climbing pegboard stations: boards on a wall that’d go something like 6 – 10 ft., 1.8 – 3m high that someone would climb with pegs. We didn’t use those, either.

There might’ve been one or a few times that my freshman PE teacher had us climb or swing on a rope as part of a circuit? He had the good graces, at least, to give the rope foot and hand knots to work with. That was definitely an exception, however, and wasn’t part of anything mandated by the district nor the state. Pretty wild, though. I kinda wish my schools did more to push that. I sure wasn’t the athletic type, but my arm strength could’ve benefitted from it.

I’ve been in touch with my therapist over maybe three distinct periods since 2018. It was always surprisingly slow, draining, and exhausting to get things started for a range of reasons. Slog aside, however, it was always incredibly worth it to get a professional perspective and to begin with professional solutions. By no means has it been perfect, but it’s been much better. I think it’s fair to say it’s been life changing, even. I’d always recommend people consider professional help if it even crosses their mind and they’re in a position where they can access it. All the best in finding a therapist!
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Ditching music streaming sounds cool! I think I’ll still have a place in my playlists for streaming to handle stuff like music I’m trying out or some lower priority tunes, but I’ve been gradually building up my own library. There’s something really satisfying about having the files on my own hardware, or at least having something I purchased online rather than relying on streaming. I’ve had the rug pulled under me with songs or shows I was streaming before. It’s always a bummer to discover one less song or episode in my media library 😞.

Thanks for the heads-up. Part of me isn’t too surprised given how long some side-effects lists can get, but for the most part it didn’t occur to me that my taste getting funked up was potentially in the cards.

I’ve been on Adderall for maybe eight-so months now. It hasn’t perfectly resolved my challenges, but things have been much better compared to taking nothing. My psych recently asked that I start taking my blood pressure to send that in, and it looks like it’s elevated. I’m doing what I can to bring it down, but given my understanding, I won’t see results until later. I think I’ll be okay if I’m put on a different medication, but I’ll admit it’s not fun to think about.

It’s the first I heard about longboarding on trails, too. I’d be interested to learn more about what that’s like.

My brother used to do a lot of longboarding when I was growing up. He was more into doing things on smooth/paved ground as far as I knew. Going down hills was his thing; had a few buddies he’d do it with. I remember he had the road puck gloves for it. I should ask if he still has those lying around in some drawer of his apartment. Scraped his knees and arms plenty of times, occasionally pretty gnarly. Probably broke at least one bone 👀?

I never got into it myself, but it was some cool stuff to see from the side while he was still into it.

Goin’ aight. It was fun last week, but pretty busy for a summer week for me too. I had a friend over while they were in town for the summer, got to see Les Mis while there was a performance in SF, and was unexpectedly enlisted to help another friend practice for their driving test. All a great time, but maybe I’ll get some more time this week to tend to some personal hobbies and projects.

Maybe there’s a conspiracy? Maybe there isn’t. There isn’t much I can do outside of weening off my use of them, ultimately deleting my content there, and using and encouraging alternatives. Past that, I’ve come to find out it isn’t worth the trouble for me to give that kind of thing too much airtime in my head if I can help it. If I wake up one day to learn that there’s A Whole Thing going on, though, frankly it wouldn’t surprise me all that much.

If I had to give it an absolute Yes or No based on what I know and figure, however, I’d say there isn’t a conspiracy. I’d wager that it’s just the likes of ignorance and capitalist business practices.
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I’ve heard that the economic landscape in the past decade-ish allowed certain sorts of companies and people to do business in a way that likely wasn’t as sustainable as they thought. 2020 comes around, the economic landscape changes for intersecting Reasons, and I’d figure that the companies and people operating the least sustainably realize they have to change it up if they want to rake in the dough. Some of these businesses were social media platforms, and some of those platforms are lead partially or entirely by people like Musk or Huffman, who make some Less Than Thrilling decisions because they think it’s a sound bet to get a lot of cash. That’s not to say their decisions are sound bets, let alone good in sum, but I’m inclined to give the benefit of the doubt and say they weren’t decisions made in a vacuum.

As much as we may use platforms like Reddit or Twitter to connect with one another or find and do something besides consuming and entertainment, we have to remember that these places established themselves as capitalist businesses. They are for-profit companies that ultimately answer only to the likes of a board, their shareholders, or their leadership. I think it’s reasonable to say that the end game for a lot of these businesses is to make money. A lot of it. The consumer’s most important purpose in this approach is to serve as a means to that money. There might be exceptions here and there that are given various labels, both inside and outside of a capitalist lens, but Twitter and Reddit certainly don’t read like exceptions. Ill-advised or not, if the right people at Twitter and Reddit genuinely think their recent decisions will make them more money, it doesn’t surprise me that they’ll do it. The trouble is that there’s typically more to life than a dollar—actions tend to have consequences outside of their intended ones, especially at this scale. Even if Twitter and Reddit didn’t mean for this to put a dent in the ability to organize (or even to just be like, a Shitty user experience,) it can, and will, have that effect.

Writing it out, it’s kinda funny. I still don’t think there’s a conspiracy per se, but the effects of these business practices create the sorta symptoms you’re talking about, anyway. How does the saying go? “The system is working as intended”? Whether that’s better or worse than a literal social and class conspiracy I’d say is up to the individual.
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As an aside, this is why I think projects like Lemmy and Mastodon are a big deal. Actually making the platform has got to be one of the hardest hurdles to get a social media network started. For all their faults, stuff like this is ready to slap onto a server and run, and it’s free and open source. That lowers the barrier of entry drastically to let people try and make this kind of thing work in a non-profit format.

“WHY DOES IT HAVE HUMAN TEETH,” a dismayed commenter asked. “IDK WE DIDN’T MAKE THEM,” the wildlife agency replied.

any volunteers to Brush The Teeth on the next one? lil thing looks like it could use it 👀

Festus looks absolutely foul and mighty. An absolute sight to behold that I wouldn’t want to be up against 😨

I’ve been following the last few posts and I loved seeing Festus develop over the week. That linework was already technically outstanding but I think you most definitely did Festus justice with the coloring and shading. Great job! 👏