There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary, and those who don’t.

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

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.

Damn you all, because I’m now emotionally invested in this

Maybe the whole trope of “Vampire Lord manipulates thralls by promising to turn them into vampires, but never actually does it” is actually just because of ADHD causing them to never get round to it.

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.

Whilst I broadly agree with your sentiment about people being weirdly judgy about some coping measures as opposed to others, I can’t help but sympathise with the people who express concern; I do think there are some coping measures that are better than others, in terms of giving us the best chance to grow and potentially thrive. I’m reminded of a couple of words that a chronically suicidal friend of mine coined to describe this kind of thing: “vivagenic” and “vivalytic”, roughly meaning “life promoting” and “life destroying” respectively.

For me, there are times when indulging in substances like cannabis is vivagenic. However, I know that I am also prone to chasing an unhealthy kind of escapism sometimes, resulting in substance use that’s vivalytic in nature. Although sometimes the solitude of smoking alone is sometimes exactly what I need, I have found a decent correlation between solo smoking and the vivalytic kind of smoking. My own ADHD probably plays into this.

It’s not for other people to decide what is vivagenic or vivalytic for you, but I wonder whether some of people’s judgemental comments are because it’s harder for people to see how you’re doing when your coping measures are skewed towards more solitary activities. Beyond their concern, they may also be coming at this from a sort of selfish angle of preferring when you were doing the dance stuff because they may have perceived you as being more of a member of that community — even if they weren’t directly interacting with you in that context, it’s reassuring to see the people we care about appear to be coping, and community dance is much easier to fit into a conventional model of “coping”.

It can be difficult to discern what comments are worth listening to when there’s so many: some may be perceptive friends struggling to articulate their concern about potentially vivalytic coping measures; others may be unproductively projecting their own values onto your life and feeling unwarranted concern at things that are working well for you; and then there are people who are just assholes who don’t care about your wellbeing but will judge you whatever you do.

This comment got longer than I planned, so I’m not sure how to end this. I suppose the thing that caused me to start writing is that I related to your comment a little too much, and I felt compelled to share my well wishes. I don’t know what is best for you, and I know we’re all just doing what we can to get by, but you seem like a pretty cool person, so I hope you don’t become too isolated, regardless of whatever your coping strategy is. I’m not suggesting you should be doing the dance stuff instead, because God knows I understand how ADHD can lead to a rocky relationship with moderation. I don’t know what I’m suggesting. ¯_(ツ)_/¯ I’m just a random internet stranger who was surprised by an emotionally impactful thread on a meme post, but I wish you the wisdom to recognise what strategies could help you live, rather than just helping you to survive. I also wish you strength, because it’s exhausting to have to constantly fend off others’ judgement in order to carve enough thinking space for oneself.

I’ve come to understand that feeling this way is just part of being an adult. I suppose this means that we’re doing it right, so props to us for continuing to tread water (even if it may feel like we’re barely doing that).

Yeah, it’s the consistency of it that’s so impressive.

Proton is so good that even when a game has a native Linux version, I often opt for the Proton version (so my games are all in one place). I was even able to install mods for games like Baldur’s Gate 3 (albeit with a bit of tinkering)

Truly, this blurs the line between memes and art

"Always forget the name when I want to remember it. "

Is that a problem you run into regularly?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFDcoX7s6rE

🎵I want it awl, I want it awl, I want it awl, and I want it now🎵

(The song that gets stuck in my head whenever I use an awl)

Do you have fun with the tinkering?

Maaaaaate, this is awesome! The disabled spaces and curb cuts in particular is on my to-do list, because I am excited about how powerful openstreetmaps can be for disabled people if there is enough data there.

The closest that gets me to empathising with them is thinking about times in my life where I have done stupid, harmful-to-me things as a sort of lashing out to claw back any agency I could. For example, deliberately flunking a test because failing by choice felt safer than trying as hard as I could and doing badly anyway; I didn’t realise what was happening at the time, but in hindsight, decisions like that were all about my inability to cope with uncertainty and vulnerability.

I think that people who are unfathomably kind are probably a lot like me, in that they feel scared if they look at the state of the world. They probably recognise in their gut that there is very little that they, as individuals, can do to improve things, and that’s scary to them. However, instead of learning to sit with the discomfort of uncertainty and learning how to lean into the vulnerability to do some collective action, they lash out at the world. Being awful to some poor person who is also overwhelmed doesn’t solve any of the root issues, of course, but I think that it’s cathartic to them to be able to impact the world in some tangible way — it makes them feel less powerless to be able to fuck up someone’s day. Plus I reckon there’s probably some transference stuff going on, where being unkind to an individual may set them up to be a sort of repository for all the bad feelings they have inside them, like a subconscious scapegoat

Hateful people still baffle me, but over time, I find myself able to empathise with them more. I find people like this quite tragic, because I know that I would have killed myself long ago if I didn’t find community and solidarity to keep me pushing onwards. It seems like quite a bleak existence, and it hurts to see them poisoning themselves with their shortsighted hate.

The only thing that I would miss is contactless payments via my phone.