Fondots

Fondots, 6 months ago

My earliest really solid memory was getting our first dog when I was about 3-4 years old. I remember odd bits and pieces from before then, but that’s probably the earliest thing I can conjur up in any significant detail. Things before that are just kind of brief flashes and glimpses with no real context, glimpses of preschool, Christmas, playing with different toys, etc. but I remember the days leading up to bringing her home very well, my mom finding a classified ad in the newspaper, she was advertised as a chocolate lab (she was white and gold, and maybe there was lab in her mix somewhere but that wouldn’t have been my first guess, didn’t matter once we met her, she meshed right into our family like she’d always been part of it)

Interestingly it’s also my sister’s earliest memory, she would have been about 2, so definitely a very important moment in both of our lives.

Fondots, 6 months ago

Back in the 90s maybe into early 2000s, my family managed to acquire a lot of VHS tapes, and some of them were fairly obscure

Two that I remember particularly fondly were 2 animated movies

Epic: Days of the Dinosaur, which was about 2 kids raised by dingos, kind of a weird fantasy movie

And Return to Treasure Island, which was pretty much just a straight-up if somewhat comedic adaptation of Treasure island, which was apparently made the USSR, and the Russian version had live action sequences that didn’t appear in the English version I had.

Fondots, 7 months ago

I keep an eye on what my local Indy/art house theaters have coming up, it doesn’t catch everything by a longshot but it usually does a pretty good job of catching some of the highlights.

I am lucky enough to have a good handful of those theaters reasonably close to me, and to some extent they seem to coordinate with each other so they’re not all showing the exact same movies.

Even if I don’t get a chance to see the movies in those theaters, it at least gives me an idea of what’s out or coming out soon.

Also support your indy theaters in general. The ones near me are generally a bit cheaper than other theaters, and while the seats may not have the latest reclining gimmick or whatever that the major chains are rolling out, the floors aren’t sticky, the audience stays off their phones, the staff actually gives a fuck, and often the buildings are just a lot more ornate and interesting than modern theaters. Just an all-around better experience.

Fondots, 7 months ago

I really want to get onboard the smart watch thing, but my usual daily wear watch for the last decade or so has been a Casio protrek prg-550, which is solar powered so I haven’t even had to change a battery in all that time, let alone worry about charging it, so I really kind of don’t want to switch to something I have to remember to charge every day or every couple of days

Fondots, 7 months ago

Yeah, there are definitely a few options that have better battery life than others, but so far none of them have quite put the whole package together for me, I’m a bit picky about what software and interface I want, what kind of features and options, and most importantly I want it to look good.

The Garmin is pretty close to what I’m looking for, and has some nifty features, but after all these years wearing my protrek I’m kind of looking for something a little dressier looking for my EDC watch. The Garmin would probably be a pretty good fit for my camping and hiking and such needs, which is a main reason I got the protrek years ago, but isn’t quite what I’m looking for in my day-to-day life right now

Fondots, 7 months ago

I like the thickest T bone can find. I know that the two halves of it have somewhat different cooking requirements and that the bone and how the meat shrinks a bit when cooking can make getting a good sear tricky, but it’s just such a big showy steak that I love it and I really enjoy gnawing on the bone. It’s one of my go-to “wife is out of town, time to treat myself and throw table manners out the window” dinners.

Most of the time I go for strip steaks, I think they’re probably about the best bang for your buck steak there is (and are basically half of what makes up my beloved T-bone)

Sear them up in the cast iron with some clarified butter, some fresh herbs, salt & pepper, or maybe Montreal steak seasoning.

Probably the tastiest steaks I’ve ever had were some humble chuck steaks, but that’s one that kind of needs the full sous vide treatment to really shine. If you’re willing to put in the effort they’re amazing, otherwise they’re just a few steps above shoe leather.

Fondots, 8 months ago

Which ancestor? I’m a mutt of several different European ancestries, I don’t speak a word of even modern Polish, Italian, or Albanian, let alone any archaic dialects, so I doubt they’re going to be able to sus out that I’m a time traveler, what they do make of me is up for debate, probably nothing good but I doubt they’d land on time traveler from the future. If I end up in one of my Irish ancestors’ villages, odds are they’re speaking Gaelic, but can probably find an English speaker somewhere who might catch on that my dialect is very unusual, though unless I do something to tip my hand about my future knowledge, I still doubt they’d suspect time travel. Scientific knowledge could be written off in different ways, and I don’t know enough 16th century history to really be able to say or do anything prophetic.

If my goal is to avoid being outed as a time traveler, I can probably play dumb well enough not to tip my hand. They might assume I’m an idiot, insane, a witch, a demon, a fairy, etc. but I can probably avoid being outed as a time traveler.

The future is harder, if time travel is a known technology/phenomenon, I imagine I’d be outted pretty quickly. If not, I suspect I’d probably be treated as insane or an amnesia patient or something, I can’t think of any reason they would assume I’m a time traveler unless I make it a point to bring it up, maybe if they run some blood tests and notice I’m missing immunity to common future diseases or radioactive contamination from WWII or something. Even then they would probably assume I’m a descendant of a secret bunker cult or something along those lines that wouldn’t break the laws of physics.

Fondots, 8 months ago

I support the merge for now, but I’d want there to be a plan in place to reopen them at some point if/when there is enough of a user base to support them

Ideally those communities do serve different niches even though there’s a lot of overlap and it would be kind of a shame if we reach a point where there’s enough of a community ready to use them but they’re stuck with the community locked up

Fondots, 8 months ago

I have no idea what the mod tools and such are like on Lemmy, so I don’t know how feasible it is, but I feel like a good way to do it would be to enforce tagging posts, and once we hit a certain threshold of users using that tag the relevant community gets reopened

Making up numbers on the fly, but maybe something like after 100 different users have made posts with a certain tag and at least 10 of them have made at least 5 posts the relevant community gets reopened, and the main cooking community makes a stickied post and makes some automod comments or something advertising that it’s back open.

A lot of online communities get a lot of their content from a handful of power-users, so making sure that you have a handful of people who are repeatedly making relevant content I think is just as important as making sure you have bulk people who may only contribute occasionally, which is why I included having some users who have made multiple posts

Also when that critical mass is reached, some strategic timing for when to reopen them may be a good idea. Might get some extra buzz and activity to kick things off by reopening BBQ a couple weeks before memorial day when people are getting ready for summer cookouts and ask culinary around November as people are starting to plan for thanksgiving and Christmas

Fondots, 1 year ago

Back in my marching band days, we swore by blistex DCT as our lip balm of choice.

Take it from the people who spend all summer out in the sun preparing to press pieces of metal up to our lips in sometimes freezing weather.

Fondots, 1 year ago

First, just in case you’re using actual gasoline in your lighter, stop doing that and get some lighter fluid. Not sure if maybe that’s a term that varies from one region to another, like how what the US calls “gasoline” the UK calls “petrol.”

With that aside, most likely you need to pull the wick (the string) out a bit and trim it. If you don’t have enough wick left you may need to replace it.

Fondots, 1 year ago

What he needs is lighter fluid, not butane or gasoline.

Butane is a gas that’s stored under pressure as a liquid, there’s no way to add that to a Zippo unless you get one with a butane insert (which he doesn’t have since his has a wick)

Lighter fluid (which is basically/mostly naphtha) is a flamable liquid used in zippo type lighters.

There’s also charcoal lighter fluid which is still another flamable liquid that’s usually either mineral spirits or alcohol based.

Fondots, 1 year ago

There's a "new communities" community that you can try posting to (I'd provide a link, but I'm still kind of figuring things out myself)

Other than that, biggest thing is probably just to keep up with it, if you build it they will come. Make sure you're keeping on top of whatever moderation tasks need to be done, no one wants to join a community that's overrun with spammy bullshit or has a crappy vibe. Create content, people also don't want to join a community where no one is posting (but don't get spammy about it yourself, personally I think it's a bit of a turn-off if I see it's all just the moderator posting himself day in and day out) engage with your members, upvoted, comment, ask questions, offer answers, be the kind of member you want to attract.

Be patient, things are growing but Lemmy doesn't have reddit numbers yet, we're all learning, things are changing fast, but building good communities will take time.

And of course, promote yourself like you're doing here (again without getting spammy) if you see people talking about bass, work it into the conversation. Lurk the music/musician subs, make the occasional shameless self promotion post.

Maybe trick a few fishermen like me into joining who thought it was about the other kind of bass.

Fondots, 1 year ago

I used to have a lot of keys on my keychain and normally kept them clipped to a belt loop with a carabiner. To keep them from jingling too much I used to keep a hard drive magnet that I scavenged from somewhere stuck to them. Not all of my keys were magnetic but enough of them were and the magnet was strong enough that I could sandwich the non magnetic ones between the other ones and they'd all stick together.

It disappeared on me one day, probably stuck to some metal lamp post or something that I happened to brush up against.

I need to check how magnetic my current keys are to see if it could work, but I think if I ever find myself with another magnet of an appropriate size and strength, I might revisit that idea and put the magnet in a small leather fob or something to keep my keys from jingling.