AnarchistArtificer

I saw a post recently that your comment reminds me of. It said something like "leftists are often more concerned about not doing anything wrong than they are about doing something good". Along those lines, I agree with both your point and the message of the OP — that it is important now more than ever to actually do something. Mass action is more powerful than individual perfection

I pressured a friend of mine into watching Andor; they were reluctant because they knew very little of Star Wars, but they loved it. Andor pulls off the impressive feat of making something that's enjoyable to Star Wars fans and casuals/non-fans alike

"Markov Babble" would make a great band name

Damn, I didn't expect to get a soundtrack accompaniment to my science meme. I really enjoyed this, thank you for sharing it with us.

What's the context of this photo? I.e. what were you making/processing?

A Czech friend likes Kofola, a cola created in Communist Czechoslovakia, when Coca Cola wasn't available there. Nowadays, Coca Cola is available, but Kofola still reigns supreme — when I visited her, I discovered that the majority of pubs that I visited had Kofola as their "house cola" on the tap. Coca Cola was often available, but in comparatively expensive bottles, because it was not the default

This image saved my life once: [image] (https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/89e6fccc-0aea-4791-8f53-27a24ef51fe5.jpeg)

Image description: Roughly written graffiti on a wall that says "I'm fucking fed up and tired and I want to die but living is the most punk shit I've ever fucking done"

Courage the Cowardly Dog is crazy

Is there a particular cut of beef that's ideal for this?

I agree with both your original comment and the edit, but especially the bit about cast iron. Neglecting mine for an extended period led to uneven patches of seasoning, but when I got round to giving it a proper scrub, it was like hitting a reset button. I'm going to try to be better at basic seasoning/maintenance this time, but the joy of cast iron is knowing that it's super forgiving if you do mess it up.

Tangential to your edit: I enjoy being able to sharpen knives, but that's mostly because I'm a nerd who has other tools I need to sharpen anyway, so I already have the stones. Something that I found striking though is that when I was learning how to sharpen knives, I asked if I could practice on various friends' kitchen knives. Most of them were poor students, so I sharpened many cheap knives, and I was impressed by how well some of the cheaper ones performed compared once they were sharp. They held their edge for surprisingly long too.

I'm quite fond of my Wusthof chef's knife, which was a bit of an indulgent treat for myself, but I am utterly baffled by the gear acquisition syndrome that so many seem to fall into. It's not just that prospect of someone who barely cooks buying a $300 knife that perplexes me, but that so many of these people keep acquiring more knives. If they said that collecting knives was just their hobby, and that they were never intending to actually use them, then I'd shrug and say fair enough. That's pretty rare though — the underlying implication that these people seem to operate under is that the fancy knives make you a better cook (and that the perfect knife will make good cooking into an effortless, joyful endeavour). It's an odd culture that's developed.

I disagree with the "complaining about young people" line having coolness increase proportionally with age: when I was a young adult, I often joked about kids these days in a way that seemed to get a lot of laughs. The humour was in the fact that I was a young person talking about young people as if I wasn't one of them (and beneath that was me making light of the text that, likely due to being autistic, I have always felt isolated from my peer group).

Anyway, I got good at leveraging this for humour, but as I aged, the joke potential expired: I was too old for there to be any irony in saying "kids these days", but not old enough for it to be cool to complain about young people.

On the bright side, I am sufficiently old to be able to torment young people by misusing their slang. It's most likely effective if you use the slang in a mostly right way, so I enjoy the challenge of needing to actually understand correct usage of new slang. Amusingly, studying current slang as an outsider is a skill I'm well versed in, given that I had to do this even when I was young.

The thing about labels is that their usage depends on the particular context at time of use. I have a friend who is non binary, for example, but finds herself weary of explaining how someone can be femme presenting, use she/her pronouns, and be non binary. This means that when talking to people who aren't LGBTQ, she finds "lesbian" is the most effective label to communicate, even though it's a label she has largely outgrown the truth of. For some people, how they engage with identity labels is quite straightforward, and they present the same labels out to the entire world. For other people, more nuance is needed, and that's okay too.

That is to say that if you read the above comment and thought "bi but with a type sounds like me, but I don't want to call myself bi", that's fine. Labels like "bi" can help make oneself be more legible to the world at large, but you do not owe the world that. You are allowed to have complexity that doesn't neatly fit into simple labels, and even if you did strongly identify with a label, you're not obligated to divulge this freely.