I wonder if I'll make it through Don Quixote and Count of Monte Cristo in 2026. I'm starting light with brave new world, catcher in the rye, and then Kafka.
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Waste your employer's money. Steal back your labor time or whatever
Made butter today for the first time. Wasn’t difficult but it took some time, not a lot.
Half gallon (64 oz/1892ml) carton of 40% heavy cream from Costco makes 1 quart (32 fl oz) of buttermilk and about 2 pounds of butter by eye (didn’t scale to confirm). It all fits in a 5 quart KitchenAid mixer for the churning.
I can confirm that we should all be making chocolate chip cookies. I can't confirm any of the other stuff.
Next on my reading list:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/588857/toms-crossing-by-mark-z-danielewski/
1,232 pages.
NGL, in a pinch get a good nature sound app and pop in the earbuds and just crash out on the sofa and listen.
I have been using one called Naturespace for a decade and it's glorious. Best track is called The Imaginarium. Whoa.
I've been using a mix of nature sounds to help fall asleep for years. If I'm having a particularly rough night, I'll play some repetitive calm music I'm super familiar with as well, EQ'd to just be barely audible through the nature sounds. ADHD brain uses all the extra energy that would be keeping me up spinning ideas around to tune one or the other of the "two" audios out and I'm out pretty quick.
I use a version 1.3.3 of an app from F-Droid, Noice, for the nature sounds. Later versions added premium features and load the audio from a remote server. That's the last version with everything local.
PowerAmp for the music. Took the "Soft" EQ preset to keep any "sharp" sounds from coming through and lowered the overall volume of it, then applied it to a specific "chill/sleep" playlist I made.
Both apps have sleep timers so they can shut off automatically after a set time.
Have you ever listened to field recordings? It's a genre of audio recordings that include nature sounds. Bandcamp has a wide selection, sounds like you'd be interested.
Oh, I'll check that out! Part of why I like the Naturespace recordings so much is that many are straight field recordings. There used to be an iOS ap called Ambiance that had the ability to record and share one's own soundscapes. there were thousands of files available to download through the app and it was maintained until Apple dropped the 32-bit downloads from the AppStore. I got the best ones I could and have it still on a handful of older devices. Got to crack it open at some time and excise the sound files as it's only a matter of time before the devices get spicy pillows and fail.
Birdwatching: get and support the Merlin app. Its a great way to find out what birds live or pass through your area.
Same with iNaturalist for plants and fungi!
My immediate assumption is that any observations made by me are meaningless noise and that I should avoid making them unless I see something really weird. But that could also be a problem because then it looks like shiny Caterpie is really common in this area while the regular one is rare. Do you know what behavior the creators of the app prefer?
I do not know, and I didn't find much on their site other than a few good practices listed here: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/community+guidelines
They do have a forum where etiquette questions come up, so that might be a good place to get a feel for it, e.g. https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/inat-posting-etiquette-questions/15317/5
The main thing seems to be honesty about your observations (if you're unsure of an ID, note that) and be available for comments and corrections on your posts.
Good luck!
It's definitely good for people who struggle with a wide array of mental health issues, and is good prophylaxis against the same.
We need friction between us and the things we want to do, otherwise the things we want to do will feel meaningless and hollow
What is the 48 cookies doing in here lol.
My stand mixer would cry trying to make 48 cookies in a go. I'll stick with 24 and eating them all up then making more!
I think part of the problem is we've really perfected computers to where they're overly-effective entertainment machines. You can play games that suck you in for hours on end, you can watch videos and movies on any topic. Hour long video essays on isoteric and ultimately unimportant topics. 2-10 second videos each delivering laughs, cultural experiences and information, all queued up to watch one after another so you've watched 10 unrelated videos in a minute. And if that's not enough stimulation now it's becoming common practice put an unrelated video on part of all of the screen so you don't have to get worried about being bored for a few seconds. Pepper the video with split second clips from popular shows or movies for an added laugh and remembering the reference fondly and you've got a recipe to never be bored for a single second.
We've defeated boredom and it shows. Now we as a society have to learn why being bored is good again, why our brains need some boredom so that everything else can have meaning.
People need to relearn how to go make stuff. Read books, read magazines, play instruments, ride bikes and skateboards and run and jump and have fun away from screens. I think this is a growing trend as people realize how bad for us these dopamine drips that are fed to us on our phones, computers, game consoles, etc. the rise of products and services to add friction to accessing our computing devices, the resurrection of feature phones, phones with intentionally boring screens to discourage use, etc.
I've tried this and part of the problem is if you're already tired, being bored doesn't suddenly make you capable of doing more, now you're just tired and bored. It's better in the long term because the times you might not be tired you'll be more willing to do things instead of the instant dopamine activities, but I'm not sure if that's worth all the time spent being super bored.
maxxing
This is how they taught you to spell?
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