Casual Conversation
He was palliative with cancer, and on the palliative ward when we last talked, I haven't heard from him in four weeks so I assume it's happened. He was only 40 and had had a kidney transplant, and was awaiting a debulking surgery for a very large tumour, and then got a fungal infection and was admitted. I am going to assume that ended up ending badly. I'll miss you friend. I enjoyed our talks. He did get a cruise in and was writing a book before he apparently passed. So those are good things, but I really will miss him. Be nice to people, Lemmy.
I can and do eat cheese. I just am tired of having it be a major part of everything I eat. Tonight I made some angel hair pasta, which was delicious. Cheese was involved of course!
Feel free to have a look at [!movies@lemm.ee](https://lemm.ee/c/movies) - [!showsandmovies@lemm.ee](https://lemm.ee/c/showsandmovies) - [!animation@lemm.ee](https://lemm.ee/c/animation) - [!horrormovies@lemm.ee](https://lemm.ee/c/horrormovies)
As of 10:15am EST, I am no longer married. From what I’ve heard from other divorcees, my ex wife and I have had a unicorn of a separation; in that we still get along and work together for our kids. Regardless of how frictionless the process has gone, it’s still a relief to put that chapter to rest.
Hello there, I'm currently doing my first ever night of dispersed camping at a local national forest here in USA. I plan to have this trip go two weeks, though I will be happy enough if I can make it to one without issue. After I'm done here I'll go sightseeing at a big state attraction that my parents always talked about. The only camping I ever knew about was campgrounds where you pay money for a site or a cabin. I had no idea that dispersed camping was a thing. In certain public lands you are allowed to just park off the road and camp out for a certain amount of time. Each place has their own rules and exceptions but its generally 2 weeks before you have to move a couple miles. I'm essentially allowed to live here in nature free of charge for as long as I like. I just need to observe and respect the rules and limits of the state. The idea of doing this makes me feel a sense of freedom that I really needed in my life. The van is pretty much converted out. Ive got a comfy bed. Ive got enough solar panel power for charging devices, keeping lights on, and coffee in the morning (theoretically). Ive got propane heating. Combine that with food, water, clothes, and cleaning supplies to make for the bare minimum of a comfy existance. Despite all that, I'm out of my comfort zone. All the preparation in the world couldn't offset this feeling I have right now. The feeling of being in an unfamiliar new place and unsure if I'll be okay. Perhaps a real adventure requires at least a dash of uncertainty. Its dark and quiet in a way I'm not used to. Stillness is a little unsettling when youre used to noise and commotion. I'm also right off a busy ish road so theres a car passing every now and again which is a little noisy but not unwelcome. If something does go wrong I'm parked in a way that I can just turn the key and go. I need to clear the way to driver seat a little better currently blocked by food bag. All my windows are covered well so nobody can really peek at me. Not that I think anyone is out here to peek in. I realize now that my sneakers arent exactly meant for off path forest exploration. I will get some good boots for the next trip. Im an overthinking planner type person so its fustrating to forget things like this. But before I left I told myself that I wasn't going to be able to think of every detail, and to just try my best and learn from the experience. I'm going to make mistakes and learn as I go and thats okay. If you actually managed to read through this I thank you.
One thing that I expected to be absolutely amazing in 2024 from online vendors was product recommendations. That vendor, assuming you use a single, persistent account to do purchasing, has a full list of your purchase history. They may well also have browsing data. And so, given all that data to mine and analyze, one of the few places where I actually *have* tried to see what a vendor can do in terms of analyzing my preferences...has been really unimpressive. I'm mostly thinking of Amazon and Steam, since they're the online vendors that I use the most; Steam in particular has a considerable amount of data it can gather, including video game playtime. Yet even though Amazon grabs some eyeball space on every page to try to recommend products, I have rarely been recommended anything I actually want to buy on Amazon. Occasionally, sure, but virtually everything I get is via plain old searching. And the most-successful recommendation approach Amazon uses, by far, is just asking me whether I want to purchase more of something that I've purchased in the past. I'll grant that *maybe* there's subtlety there that I can't appreciate from the outside, like computing frequency at which a given "repurchase" recommendation happens or taking into account past average purchase frequency, but it doesn't seem like the most-sophisticated form of recommendation. Granted, I normally make it a point to limit Amazon's data-gathering. I browse logged out, make a list of what I want to buy, clear browser state, and log in only long enough to make a purchase. That probably makes it harder for Amazon to associate me with my browsing behavior. But it does know what I actually buy. And it has a pretty substantial history there. And for Steam, Valve knows what games I play, how long I've played them for, and assuming that there's any mining based on game achievements, even -- at least as an abstract concept that would permit for correlating preference across video games -- what I do *in* those games. Like, players who get "evil path" achievements in one game maybe prefer video games with "evil" routes, stuff like that. But I have browsed Steam's discovery queue zillions of times, and while I've probably found a game or two on there, the success rate of its recommendations is abysmally low. Probably the most-useful recommendations system on Steam is the "similar games" section when viewing information about a game. But I'm pretty sure that most games I find on Steam that I actually like are just by using user ratings and searching for tags. While, Steam's scoring is opaque, and it's possible that they're using some degree of input, I don't think that it's making use of information about *me* there. I wouldn't be surprised if it's nothing more than ranking games based on their player review score, which...isn't much more than things like MetaCritic and similar have done. I've occasionally had luck looking for games that have very high hours played, with the idea that people wouldn't play a game a lot if they didn't like it. That makes some use of aggregate data about users, but not about me. Most video games that I get on Steam that I like are games that I've discovered somewhere other than on Steam, often looking for human "roundup" articles comparing collections of similar video games and giving a brief blurb about pros and cons. That's not new technology. That comes as a very great surprise to me, when one considers the enormous amount of effort and resources that goes into harvesting and mining data about people. Now, okay, a lot of that is for ads. And advertising isn't exactly the same thing as doing good product recommendation. An advertisement is trying to effectively get someone to buy a product regardless of whether they'll ultimately like it or not, whereas a product recommendation -- at least in the ideal, user-focused sense -- is trying to find products that people will like. But there *has* to be a substantial amount of overlap between the two. Advertisers don't want to waste money advertising to people who won't buy their product, so trying to find people who are interested in their product is a major part of advertising. I haven't used any systems that log my music-playing and make recommendations; I'd rather keep my privacy there. Perhaps if I did, that area would be more-successful. But by and large, it's an area that I'm very surprised is not more successful than it is. It's a "flying cars and jetpacks" thing, something that I'd always vaguely expected of the future, but which never seemed to really arrive. Product recommendation systems never really got to the point of anticipating my needs very effectively, even where they have what I'd consider a fair amount of data to work with. What's your experience? Does it differ from my own? Do you find that product recommendations from vendors are really useful, pretty much hit the nail on the head for what you want? How do you "find" products? Am I missing something, maybe like merchants on Amazon or publishers on Steam trying to game the recommendations system one way or another, and poisoning its inputs?
Feel free to have a look at - [!movies@lemm.ee](https://lemm.ee/c/movies) - [!showsandmovies@lemm.ee](https://lemm.ee/c/showsandmovies) - [!animation@lemm.ee](https://lemm.ee/c/animation) - [!horrormovies@lemm.ee](https://lemm.ee/c/horrormovies)
This 7-yo girl is living large in England. Family has a nice villa, couple of slaves and servants, throws lavish parties, all that. OK, they're getting a *little* broke. The bathhouse burned and they can't afford to fix it, can't even find artisans to do the work, stuff like that. Her father is a tax collector and suddenly farmers are refusing to pay up. "Why are we paying for Rome's protection? When was the last time we even *saw* a soldier? Meanwhile, the Saxons are fucking shit up not far from here." And it goes downhill from there, fast. The girl ends up at Hadrian's Wall after a few years, and it's a mess. Slovenly soldiers getting drunk on duty, no one cares about anything, Saxons and Picts raiding everywhere. And it goes downhill again, fast. Next thing you know, no amount of money will buy a clay pot. Metal, of any kind? Forget it, no one will give up any. Roman coin means nothing, because you can't eat it or wear it. When she's 17, her and a few others get a pathetic little farm going. They're surviving, barely. Hell, they can't even figure out how to repair a thatch roof. A local strongman snatches them up to add to his tiny little hilltop, which is pathetic in itself compared to what the Romans had going on 30-years previously. At least they start making iron, but that's only because the warlord lucked out and grabbed the *one* guy who knows the process. But hey! It's got an OK-ish wall! At one point the young woman finds a nice perfume bottle in the ruins. All I could think was, damn, there's no way anyone, anywhere around her could produce even the *crudest* glass item. Guess you get the idea. I know the world is more resilient now, but COVID showed how thin the sauce really is. Supply chains are 2-weeks away from near total collapse. Almost every one of us makes a living, and has an education, that's totally irrelevant to survival. I'm in far better shape than most as I've got 2.5 acres of swamp, not far from a river. I'm no stranger to the local ecosystems, but I've thought about trying to live out there, and it's not doable without modern tech, not for me anyway. Example, I have plenty of guns for defense and hunting, but ammo isn't infinite. I can make my own black powder, and have black powder guns. I make my own charcoal and I guess I could get potassium nitrate from urine, but where do I get pure sulpher? I can reload shotgun shells, but I can't imagine how to make a primer. I can pour my own lead bullets and maybe shot, but how am I to power the smelter? Not with my two solar cells I'm not. (Get me the Fresnel lens from an old-school projection TV and I can melt *rock*!) Even the simplest items are out of reach. Clay pots seem easy enough, but I have no idea where to find clay locally. I certainly can't tell good from bad clay, don't know the temps and times required to fire it, none of the basics. The pressing need for food and hauling fresh water wouldn't allow time to experiment. I make my own soap, but I don't know how to get lye from wood ash. Even given that, it would take tons of trial and error with animal fats. Aside from food, shelter and water, cloth is easily the most essential item. "Always carry a towel.", is excellent advice. The one thing I often wish I had more of camping in the cold or wet is more cloth, of *any* kind. Even in the heat, we need cloth. Guess if I had a few sheep that would be nice, but I don't have a clue as to building a loom or how *exactly* one works. Warp and weft or something? Hell, I don't even know what it means to "card" wool. For that matter, I'd have no clue how to cure the animals hides I would hunt. Something involving urine again, that's all I know. Speaking of hunting, as rednecks think we could do well enough on that count. Don't know who else has noticed, but our fauna is falling apart, starting with insects. I get into some wild places and it's shocking how little wildlife there is. Just saw my first two copperheads, less than a week apart! That's after 5-years of tromping the woods, rivers and swamps. If I wiped out every squirrel on the block, that would feed my wife and I for 2-3 weeks, *tops*. And everyone else would be doing the same thing. We would *literally* be down to eating stray dogs and cats, fast. And back to defense, if you have *anything* and *anyone* knows it, you're going to have to fight. I can't stay awake 24/7 and neither can my wife. Scary to think, as in our fictional character's case, no matter what you obtain, someone stronger *will* eventually come take it. Ally with neighbors? Of course! But there's always a bigger fish, and being a big fish in a small pond is going to attract attention. “Their morals, their code; it's a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble. They're only as good as the world allows them to be. You'll see-I'll show you. When the chips are down these, uh, civilized people? They'll eat each other.” If I break my glasses and the contacts run out, I'm straight handicapped. I've never found used eye wear that was remotely "close enough", better off without. The Roman Empire had it good for a *thousand* years, never imagined it could end. And they were cavemen relative to our modern tech. Almost everything we know would become obsolete, overnight. But, not joking, we could live off our own trash pretty well. At least we'd have plastic containers and pull-tab fish hooks. (Seriously, I repurpose *loads* of crap I find in the woods and on the roadsides. You should see my tackle box! And I don't even fish.) What if the US dollar collapses? Global warming? (<- probably the most realistic threat) Nuclear war? A "better" version of COVID or the Spanish Flu? Diseases wiping out our factory farms? Guess what I'm getting at is that despite living in the richest era of human history, we're all the more fragile. I'm not seriously worried about my few remaining years, but I'm seeing that the preppers might have the right idea. Whew! Had to get some thoughts out! What are yours? The novel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalescent Damned good so far! And it's a trilogy!
Share one of your meals today!
I've been holding on to this thought for quite some time and don't know where to share this. Too long and not random enough for a shower thought, so here it is I guess. Car manufacturers really like their LEDs to be as fancy as possible lately, and more and more turn signals on cars have this "sequential lighting" show they do. Basically, the type of turn signal I have a problem with is the one that gradually fills up the turn signal light bar, then turns off everything when the bar is full, i.e. Audi cars in [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoqiS7CgZtE) IMO, not only does the animation feel clunky, I also think its a safety issue, albeit a relatively minor one. The point of indicator lights is to tell other drivers your intentions. They should be fully noticeable the moment you turn on your turn signals, and should not be halfway lit first. It probably would also introduce a delay in driver response, but I have no scientific evidence to back this claim up, so take this as just my opinion. Instead, they should do it the opposite way where the light bar fully lights up first, then gradually shrinks. Or the Mazda way of turning on quickly then dimming down slowly like in [this video](https://youtu.be/Fn4VFdCvnNQ?si=Og9tOgsBXf7hRyPD&t=32). Or the combination of these two, where the light bar has a gradient end that tapers away when shrinking. (Seriously, having a gradient or a gradual dim is so much more elegant. Why don't more cars do this?) Okay rant over. Thanks for coming to my ted talk.
Did your parents ever take a deeper interest in you and your interests outside of your needs?
The schizophrenic mix of lighthearted filler stories and serious tragic ones, the fake chemistry between the hosts. To me it makes them sound like aliens trying to act human.
Feel free to have a look at - [!movies@lemm.ee](https://lemm.ee/c/movies) - [!showsandmovies@lemm.ee](https://lemm.ee/c/showsandmovies) - [!animation@lemm.ee](https://lemm.ee/c/animation) - [!horrormovies@lemm.ee](https://lemm.ee/c/horrormovies)
I happened to notice today that the "Itchy and Scratch Land" episode of The Simpsons aired just over 30 years ago (on Oct. 2nd, 1994). That means that, for a full 3 decades now, I have checked every single gift, souvenir, and tourist shop I've been in for a Bort plate. Its not obsessive and I'm not going out of my way, but if I see a rack of novelty license plates I make a point to look for Bort. Anyone else, or am I alone in this particular pop culture predilection?
**First, apologies if this isn't appropriate for a community called "casual conversation". I just don't know of another conversational community to post in. I am more than happy to delete this on request.** ---- Does anyone out there seem to get addicted to their bad moods? Like, you've been feeling down on and off for a week. Instead of seeking out media, conversations, etc. that you know you like and makes you happy, you'd prefer to keep absorbing unhappy media and talking about unhappy things to keep you unhappy. It's almost like you begin to **enjoy** being unhappy and you don't want it to stop. What the fuck is even that though? Are some people just meant to be insufferable like that? I don't understand why this happens. When I'm happy, I want to continue to be happy. When I'm down, I want to continue to be down even if there is no discernible reason. Just curious on your thoughts. Thanks for your time.
Today I saw a totem pole made of skeletons. I tried to come up with a word for it, something like skeletotem pole and accidentally imagined a similar sounding scrotum-totem pole. Now you are going to imagine one. Do you draw faces on them? Position them to make eyes and stretch them out? You're welcome.
Over the years, I've run into a few things that weren't immediately-obvious to me. One of the big ones was eating pomegranates by opening them underwater. For those not familiar, pomegranates have a lot of red seeds and white husk between them:  Cutting a pomegranate or even opening a pomegranate tends to burst at least some seeds. The seeds are sticky and stain and tend to spray juice when pierced. However, if you just cut through the outer hull of the fruit, then open it by hand underwater in a bowl of water, any juice that would have sprayed out is just grabbed by the water. Even better, the (inedible) white husk floats, so it self-separates instead of sticking to everything. Today, I decided to try eating a watermelon with a spoon. In the past, that's tended to also make things spray, so I tried a [grapefruit spoon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapefruit_spoon), one with serrations that runs down the side. And that works great -- the spoon is like a knife, can go more-cleanly through the watermelon than a regular spoon, and still lets you scoop up the watermelon. Any other neat tips that might be unorthodox or that people might not have tried or know about?
Free speech is what he said 🙄 I am still being blocked.