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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • It’s not simply a reading comprehension thing with bullet points. If your questions require research on my end having them already structured in bullets does a few things to help with that process.

    The asker’s bullet structure gives something to mimic. You can even put your answers directly below the question, so the asker can be reminded of their own questions.

    The bullets also help skimming, if I need to see which item id is needed next it’s easier to do so without losing my place.

    Bullet grammar structure also allows for much terser sentences. If I need to reread your question it’s easier if I don’t have to ignore a bunch of words that don’t substantively alter the meaning.

    Do I need any of these? No. Could I put the questions into bullets myself for the reply? Sure. But it’s easier to spend more time and effort on answering your questions if you save me a few steps.



  • Of what others have suggested and that I’ve read: the ones most similar to what you’ve finished are:

    • The First Law series by Joe Abercrombie
    • The Expanse series by James SA Corey
    • Hyperion (at least the first two books, w/ optional two more) by Dan Simmons

    New recommendations:

    • Dhalgren by Samuel R Delany (content warning)
    • The Baroque Cycle series by Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash and the Diamond Age may both be better starting points for the author, but may fit your other criteria less)
    • The Book of the New Sun series by Gene Wolfe

    Other works that stretch your genre boundary but may evoke the right emotion:

    • Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
    • If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino
    • The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
    • Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
    • The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
    • Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff
    • Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M Danforth
    • John Dies at the End by David Wong


  • Go to a local music shop and look for musician’s earplugs with a rated dB reduction. At least -8dB, but a bigger reduction won’t make your experience worse, it’ll just make things even quieter.

    I have some from a major guitar manufacturer that I’ve been using at the infrequent shows I go to for a decade. They were $10 then, and it looks like that’s still true. I clean after using, but I wasn’t really expecting to get this many shows out of them.

    They don’t muffle sounds, it just sounds quieter. Without earplugs I need to stand on the other side of the room/field to be comfortable. I’ll still leave with ear pain and feeling exhausted. With earplugs I’m comfortable right in front of the speaker stack, and leave feeling exhilarated.

    They’ve been a huge upgrade in my enjoyment of shows and I’m very grateful to my friend for dragging me to the shop and making me buy them.




  • 6 instances, 1087 communities, 27 users.

    I should probably look at unblocking the instances. I used those blocks early on to remove a massive number of communities I was uninterested in, but it has the side effect of also functionally blocking those users.

    I do wish there were better tagging and filtering tools. Some of the communities I’ve blocked might have posts I’m interested in, but there’s currently no way to surface those from under the mountain of memes.

    I’d also love to be able to block posts but not comments from specific users. There’s a handful of topics I don’t care about, and some of the blocked users are just very interested in those topics.

    And auto collapse comments with inline images (although that’s more of an app feature than a Lemmy feature).




  • Too many. I wish Lemmy had post tags, it would make things easier. There are communities I would be interested in, if I had any tools to help see the things I care about.

    I’m left with more politics than I’d like, but that’s still preferable to anything I block.

    Broadly speaking:

    Memes Anime, mostly due to all the anime girl communities Sports Foreign language communities if I really can’t read anything, or I’m seeing too many posts in a row from them Communities that aren’t for memes but that are overrun with them. Sometimes if this is driven by a particular user I might block them instead Communities with porn in the name





  • It really depends what sort of recipes you’re making, but for cooking very loose approximations are often fine.

    I often have to convert to weight/mass in order to find out how much of an ingredient to buy. I have no idea how many cups an eggplant is. But once I get it home the recipe might as well say “however much eggplant you have.”

    If I’m truly off, I will typically scale up the recipe adjusting for the extra meat or vegetable content. I’ll more or less assume that 1lb of meat is interchangeable with 1lb of veggies. That’s not quite true, in particular with salt.

    Your mileage may vary though. Some recipes and ingredients are much more sensitive to deviations.