#robustcornhusk

[nohoperadio]

More advice from the advice post, see the tag for previous installments.

First of all @ the several people sharing experiences with wake-up lights and related topics, I appreciate you but waking up is literally not a drama for me, I'm decently good at waking up, I'm not looking to hack this particular piece of my life right now. I'm sure there's small gains to be had but in my case I can't see it being worth the effort unless the intervention is literally like zero-effort zero-cost! But thank you I love you all very much

@toasthaste:

it's a bit more people-centric so it might be too much to start out with but the one main hobby i know you do have is reading, maybe a local book club? I've only been to one meeting of one (gay) and the book kinda sucked but the process of everyone being very delicate about that and then realizing everyone else ALSO thought the book kinda sucked and then letting loose was really memorably fun.

There's a book club I've tried going to I think 3 times over the years and never had a great time with, although conceivably a smaller one would be better because there were like 25ish people each time at that one, I should maybe look what other ones are happening.

i guess there's also running groups? and i bet the endorphins and stuff you get from running could actually hijack you in useful ways, make socializing temporarily less scary.....

I actually keep meaning to attend the weekly gay running group in town and then getting too scared or drained to do it. Hm...

@robustcornhusk:

if you cook / have to store food a lot, and aren't averse to plastic, so-called deli containers are some of the best storage containers i've found. one lid! they stack neatly! easy to buy extra of just one size! like mason jars, except actually convenient instead of merely aesthetic. sometimes when you're cooking, you're going to say "damn, i wish i had a second ___". if it's small and cheap, get a second ___. 7 sets of measuring spoons, sorted by size into a nail polish organizer. 9 little spatulas! 5 metal mixing bowls! 6 half-sheet pans! 8 quarter-sheet pans! ... 7 kitchen scales (they each have a purpose). specifically small things, or where N of them takes up barely more room than 1 of them

Hmm yeah the deli container thing sounds legit, I will probably do that one. My cooking is rarely ambitious enough for me to frequently wish I had a second blank but I do feel like I've had that thought occasionally, I just can't remember what objects I had it about... I'll try to pay attention next time it happens

@embrassant-le-ciel:

Moisturizing your skin is worth it! If the texture isn't a nightmare to you, use a body oil (or wet-skin lotion) after washing while your skin is still wet and then towel off. A facial moisturizer with some sun protection factor is also a good idea!

Yeah this sounds nice actually, I moisturize my hands but nothing else, curious to see how a whole body thing feels :o

Pay attention to what brings a genuine smile or laugh to you during the course of any given day. It is very easy to recall our struggles, but takes active work to cement the bounteous mirthful moments life has to offer. Acknowledge them when they float on by. Maybe even write down the ones that you want to hold on to.

I try to be like this! Except the writing it down part. Man I wish I could figure out what enabled me to successfully keep a daily diary for those few months last year, it's such a powerful habit. Honestly it's probably just that the writing-producing part of my mind got redirected towards tumblr posts and didn't leave room for anything else. Which I mean blogging is better than journaling so I endorse the trade-off if that's what it is, but it's not better in every way! And this is a thing notebooks are better for

Make sure you know where to find all of your most important documents, personal, financial, and prized, and make photocopies if you can. Keeping them all together in a (preferably fireproof) container or other secure storage location is perhaps the best practical advice I could actually give. Bureaucracy is so hard to deal with after disaster.

You know as sensible as this sounds, I'm trying to think of a single physical document that it would matter if I lost it and I'm drawing a blank. All the bureaucratic institutions I interact with are happy to do things via email and websites I think? Maybe where I live is just less paperworky than where you live? Or maybe I'm just a big idiot and am forgetting about a bunch of stuff

[blueaubrey]

how is your son stuffed? he looks firm, like a puffed cheeto. i adore him

He is stuffed using a lot a lot a lot a lot a LOT of polyfill! Something like 3+ bags. He's HUGE and he's HUGGABLE

[maklodes]

I think one approach you could take is to simply keep a supply of clean fresh water, and a supply of dry mung beans (you could try other things like soybeans or alfalfa, but I don't have a lot of experience with that). Then you could sprout them as needed, and they'll generate vitamin C during the sprouting process, presumably by metabolizing more stable compounds.

There will be like a week of delay between when you start sprouting and they're really ready to eat, and eating raw sprouts carries some risk of bacterial illness (circumstances conducive to sprout growth are also conducive to other stuff growing). Also, you might need to eat a lot of bean sprouts to get enough vitamin C -- not a huge amount in terms of calories, but a big volume, mostly water.

The dry beans themselves should last at least a year in decent storage conditions before they lose their ability to germinate. Maybe 2-3 years.

This is not a practical question (unless I end up sent back in time several hundred years and press-ganged into sailing the high seas), but is there any way to preserve vitamin C using regular home-cooking methods? It's very heat-sensitive, so canning or food-safe bottling methods seem likely to destroy it. (Note: the British navy rather famously did destroy all the vitamin C in their lime juice rations and simply failed to notice, since their ships were too fast to matter by then. This turned out extremely poorly for polar expeditions, where they actually needed their anti-scurvy measures to work.) Maybe lacto-fermented sauerkraut would work, but it's not clear to me how the vitamin C content holds up over time under realistic storage conditions (certainly much worse than the vitamin C numbers you'll see if you google "vitamin C sauerkraut" and credulously assume those numbers).

[st-just]

Bean, sweet potato and Kale slop loosely based on the much nicer looking one @robustcornhusk posted a while back.

[metastablephysicist]

canonical meta household recipes:

the beans (thank you robustcornhusk and toasthaste)

creamy dreamy (mac & cheese)

pasta eggy

cringe lentils (also based lentils)

slop (mashed potato mixed with a protein and vegetable)

very brown rice

[myfootyrthroat]

Vegan canape ideas. Go!

(@robustcornhusk I dunno why, but I feel like you'll have something.)

[nohoperadio]

I did have it switched on (I think after seeing you mention it sometime) and I have indeed spanked that optimize button at some point, I might implement a way to remember to do that every month... I assume there's no downside to optimizing "too" often?

anyway reblogging for good info and to remind my readership that all the cool kids are doing anki now, that's us, we're the cool kids, we're doing anki, you could join us if you're cool enough...

lovely friends using anki:

are you using fsrs?

if you're using fsrs, have you smacked that optimize! button in the last month?

[adiantum-sporophyte]

@robustcornhusk I came very close to referring to you and your partner as the Spiderses Georg of vegan baking when talking about egg replacement

[myfootyrthroat]

We're looking at making/buying a non-cloud doorbell camera for the house. I'm not afraid of working with an Arduino/Rasp Pi, etc if necessary, but obviously if I could just buy something affordably, I'd rather do that. Basically something where someone could ring it and it would ping people on the local wifi (or maybe through an API like Adafruit IO, but not Amazon, etc). Anyone have any recs?

(@robustcornhusk this seems especially up your alley)

[maklodes]

Having a 14 tea bag box and a 20 tea bag box seems like an oddly close level of package-size based marketing segmentation. I could understand selling, like, a 3 tea bag sampler packet and a a 14 tea bag standard box and a 70 tea bag bulk carton, but now I'm curious about how it pays off to have a 14 and a 20. Who says "I need to shit myself 43% more than a 14 tea bag box's worth?"

Maybe it has to do with whatever vendor is selling them the cardboard boxes? Like, maybe the vendor ran out of the smaller box they use for 14 bags, but had a slightly bigger box in stock, and they just rolled with it and put in 20 bags? (Or vice versa.)

I think there's perhaps a certain cachet to calling something a "California dieters' drink" and there's a certain cachet to calling something "ancient China royalty formula," but I'm not sure these two things synergize very well.

[adiantum-sporophyte]

@robustcornhusk sure, we have the street redesign with which

what the FUCK is going on

but sometimes your traffic signals don't work, so, impossible to say which city is more functional

[robustcornhusk]

[friend] has scheduled some kind of emotional breakdown

very polite???

@robustcornhusk

[gendercensus]

@robustcornhusk:

Hello I'm Cassian (@cassolotl) and I do the Gender Census, and this is literally my partner Avery (@averixus), no joke, who does the Tradescantia Hub! :D And also congratulations you are the first person who lives in the Venn diagram overlap of finding both of our impersonal sciencesque projects immediately recognisable! I'm not sure what exactly you have won but it is probably very nerdy?

[adiantum-sporophyte]

but this time they didn't!

deal with your dry crackers in backpack-style problems before they become wet crackers in backpack-style problems

[sinesalvatorem]

This isn't so much social skills, so much as a skill/piece of knowledge useful for having social skills: When people on tumblr say "message me", do they mean "send an ask" or do they mean "that button, usually in the top right corner, that says 'message'; use that"? I'd think the first, but also given that the first contact is often a question, I'm not sure...

I think it varies. A lot of people still haven’t gotten around to using the messaging system. I don’t think anyone will think you’re doing something /bad/ if you use their dispreferred method.

I think it leans more toward “use the message button”? That’s definitely what I mean when I say it. I much prefer talking to people on messenger rather than via asks, because ask conversations are way harder to keep track of.

[isaacsapphire]

@robustcornhusk linked to this in reference to voice, but it dredged up a lot of thoughts and memories. I was surprised that the author was surprised in retrospect by the anorexia theme and hadn't noticed it on their first few read-throughs. We're talking about books about the glamour and flash of LA and Vegas in the 90s; of course the heroines are heroin-chic anorexic!

The retrospective judgement of it, the present day shying away from even the willingness to admit that it's true but wrong to say, that whole desire to cover up how the (not looking like a) sausage is made.

The books themselves shy away from f/f, certainly... But again, so did the world, and they're a pretty accurate documentation of what a certain subculture was like then. Francesca Lia Block was a queer YA author once.