godot

I’m finishing off my bag of Counter Culture Field Trip, which I will miss. It was Aeropress today, I’m out of V60 papers. I have about 20 grams left, great for a lazy morning at home, but maybe I’ll have someone over and share it.

Knife stuff is pretty niche. A lot of what people do is based on experience and conjecture rather than a complete understanding of what they’re doing.

Your pocket knife, while cool and sentimental to you, is only a little more complicated than your dinner knives. You wouldn’t want to wipe down your dinner knives with a dirty shop towel and risk a chunk of sandpaper grit scratching them, or risk leaving behind a gross residue. But a disposable shop towel, paper towel, or clean cloth is fine for cleaning them. Maybe a q-tip for smaller spaces.

Polishing cloths have (minimal imo) value in handling heavily polished knives, those that have been taken to a very fine aesthetic polish. Not a typical concern.

Honestly, this is pretty good work. The oxidation you have left looks healthy and the pitting is typical of knives that age. The bevel is straight and clean, doesn’t look like the knife is bent. For what it’s worth I can and have done full polishes through pitting like that and in a recent restoration I chose to stop just a hair after where you are.

If the pitting really bothers you, smaller blades (particularly blades in pinned knives like that) are best polished by hand with minimal tools, power tools are too fast to be precise and the pinned handles are too close to the blade to keep them safe. You’d want to mask off the handle, place the blade on a soft surface butted up against the edge of the table, handle off the table, and polish the blade with heel to tip strokes of a dowel wrapped in sandpaper, starting around 100. Once all the pitting is gone (and only once all the pitting is gone) you’d go up gradually in grit to maybe 240; where you stop is a personal preference, but it’s going to oxidize a little in the future, so a super clean polish wouldn’t last.

I would not suggest learning to sharpen this freehand. Small blades are hard and knives without locks are hard. Get a legit pro to do it (they can take out the recurve in a few minutes) or buy a Sharpmaker (which can handle recurves well). Recurves in working knives are not a big deal.

Every frozen and defrosted non-dairy milk I’ve had (mostly almond I think) did end up grainy, but still usable. Freezing it for baking is still reasonable. The time to defrost it would bother me.

If your household drinks a lot of sweet coffee drinks, yes, make a big batch of oat milk syrup to extend the shelf life.

I would personally make a huge batch of congee with a ton of ginger, garlic, shallots, and if you eat meat chicken (chicken arroz caldo). I use coconut milk for rice porridge, but oat milk would be good. I’d portion it into pint containers and freeze them. It’s cheap, freezes well, and could easily use up as much milk as you’d like. To my palate it’s a huge upgrade on chicken noodle soup when I’m sick, so it’s good to have frozen in advance.

If you have occasion in the next few weeks, it would be good for flan or blancmange as a dessert. I’ve never made blancmange with oat milk but it’s usually nut flavored, so I’d expect that to work really well, probably better than dairy milk. It’s a good time in the northern hemisphere for fruit sauces, too, so fresh compotes are on the table, and maybe toasted almonds.

Bummer.

I’ve been reading manga for a long time. I started with print and moved online to deeper cuts. A lot of those series are still not officially translated. I’ve been consuming fan translations, official digital translations, and print manga since.

No one should be surprised this happened to MangaDex. It was too convenient and too well known. A lot of the stuff that was removed is niche, but a lot it isn’t. I get why license holders don’t want Spy x Family and Blue Lock available for free on a massive website that tons of people know about.

However, I will not suddenly be pouring money into translators’ pockets. I’m going to read a lot less manga. To me MangaDex was even more useful as a hub than it was for being free. Excellent usability, good library function, okay searchability, great responsiveness, and no shitty app. No, Viz, I’m not going to download your shitty app.

It’s not 2002 with amazing fan forums. Reddit is a bot cesspool (with a shitty app). I don’t have peers who consume manga anymore. Without something like MangaDex I won’t know what to try or buy and I’ll be out of the habit of starting new manga. The money I was spending on manga related stuff, largely at cons, sometimes a lot of money, is going to drop a lot. I hope fifty more free downloads of the shitty app were worth it.

I feel very sad.

We’ll see if something else decent pops up. MangaDex had a good run. And this forum is actually not negligible; I’ve started several manga because I saw them here.

Why would China be desperate?

China offers the cheapest high spec manufacturing in the world. If the US doesn’t buy that manufacturing, that leaves the rest of the world. Of course China wants American money, but it’s not going to devastate their economy in the short term. It’s a reasonable cost for providing China with so many opportunities, which they are aggressively pursuing, to cultivate deep seated international power.

The prevalence of Chinese manufacturing actually is a national problem for the US. While China has its pick of buyers, the US is stuck with one seller. The US should have been working for twenty years with India, Pakistan, Brazil, Indonesia, Vietnam, and maybe even some counties in Africa to create access to alternatives. It didn’t.

Weaning the US off Chinese manufacturing would take decades of elegant economic policy and diplomacy featuring several countries. China knows this is where it actually has power over the US.

To a long term hockey fan this is funny on several levels. I don’t even know if the shirt is sincere or a joke. It gives me incredible joy that I’m not sure.

That is pure gold, an onion of hockey jokes with layers so stupid it’s impossible to explain succinctly.

One beer a day is pretty tight considering the circumstances.

The last few games were awesome. The Super Metroid race was hard to follow, but the runners were a lot of fun together and the finale was incredible.

I like a lot of what GDQ has become.

No. I think it’s for the reasons outlined or suggested in the link I included: increased cost of healthy ingredients, decreased accessibility to the same, people struggling to find time to eat well in the increasingly fast paced world, etc.

My mentioning my personal preference is mostly a concession to nuggets of truth in the 4chan post. It’s also true; there is nothing common about how I would prefer to consume quality food.

Between 1975 and 2016, the prevalence of obesity in Europe rose 138%, with a 21% rise between 2006 and 2016. The prevalence of overweight rose by 51% between 1975 and 2016, and by 8% between 2006 and 2016. It is expected that by 2030, over half of Europe will live with obesity – up to 89% in some countries. No Member State is on track to reach the target of halting the rise in obesity by 2025.

https://www.eufic.org/en/healthy-living/article/europes-obesity-statistics-figures-trends-rates-by-country

The proliferation of unhealthy eating is a big problem for most of Europe, too. They’re on the same path as the US for mostly the same reasons, just a few steps back.

That said, if I’m going to be fat, I’d rather it be because of schnitzel the size of a dinner plate or cacio e pepe over a Monster Burger.

A family in that sort of situation has considered many options. Willing the house to the brother is the easiest, the poster and their mother have reasons for opting against it. They are likely good reasons; in the broader sense, willing property to someone who cannot care for it can in many scenarios be a bad idea.

It’s dangerous to assume the brother would be safe from predation if he owned his home; the poster could do a lot worse than just not paying the bills. This person apparently lacks the ability to pay taxes and ensure proper maintenance. Even just to help with that, the poster will need access to their brother’s banking and tax info. If the brother is compliant it would not be difficult for someone to take advantage of that situation.

Alternately, using their legal ownership of the home the brother could potentially shut the poster out and might actively sabotage efforts to maintain and pay for the home. In that case the property could suffer substantial damage, become dangerous/uninhabitable, or even be lost despite the poster’s efforts. Many people have destructive tendencies.

The more certain way to protect the house for the brother would be to place it in a trust, but that’s not a panacea. Setting up an ironclad trust to prevent selling the house is great until the brother can’t get up the stairs, or the whole family decides to move to Canada, or the brother goes into assisted living, or the property value skyrockets. A trust will also have tax implications and potential costs that need to be considered.

I assume and hope the mother has been advised by a decent estate lawyer on their options. There are scenarios where willing a house to a sibling is the best course of action. I wish the poster luck and hope they’ll act in the interest of their brother for their entire lives.