thirdorbital

joined 2 years ago
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While perusing my local liquor store over Labor Day weekend, I found something I simply couldn't resist. Art of the Spirits is a small distillery out of Colorado Springs with a few interesting selling points. Most obviously, the artwork - each bottle has a label based on an oil painting by Danial James or David Uhl, two Colorado artists made famous by their work for Harley Davidson motorcycles. I'm a big believer that a handcrafted whiskey is a work of art in its own right so I love the pairing here. Less obvious is that this distiller has specifically targeted the barrel pick market. Each of the five whiskies shown here is a cask strength single barrel selected by Goody Goody. The three Bonnie-and-Clyde themed "Final Run" bottles are actually the same spirit, just finished in different ways to bring out different flavors, whereas we also have as "Easy Elegance" and "The Originals" are a bit different. All five bottles were in the $80-$100 range each at my store.

I will put my individual reviews below, but overall I am impressed by Art of the Spirits. This is a very competitive price point, and none of these are likely to become an everyday favorite. Keeping in mind that these are cask strength limited editions I always felt like I was getting my money's worth though. Which is best? That's hard to say. "The Originals" was my least favorite and the one of the five I wouldn't recommend. The flavor profile was certainly unique but not something that really clicked with me. I can also say that I preferred the Ruby Port "Final Run" over the "Tawny Port" as those are similar enough that a head-to-head comparison feels fair. Between the Ruby, the Madiera, and they surprisingly complex Rye "Easy Elegance" I find it impossible to crown a victor however. All three are excellent and which I prefer depends entirely on my mood at the moment.

 

Distiller: Laphroaig

Product: Cairdeas

Bottle: 2023 - White Port and Madeira

Category: Islay

Aged: Three quarters finished in second fillMadeira, one quarter finished in first fill white port

Nose: Green apples and peach cobbler over the distinctive Laphroaig peat smoke

Body: Harsh peat smoke is quickly tempered with candied oranges, honey, vanilla, and buttery dinner rolls.

Finish: Miles of lingering campfire smoke with a bit of salted caramel underneath.

Activation: Helps to marry the sweet fruits with the oily iodine peat, creating a single coherent flavor where once there were distinct layers. Recommended.

Notes: Laphroaig Cairdeas is one of the longest running special editions in the industry, although apparently this is the very first offering by new master distiller Barry MacAffer. Certainly more distinctive than last year's unimaginative “Warehouse 1” release, this bottle grows on you with time. It doesn’t break much new ground - aging harsh peats in wine casks is a time honored tradition by this point - but it is remarkably well balanced, with none of the chemical or medicinal harshness that you might expect. Things might be looking up at Laphroaig.

 

My wife and I each have our own gaming rig and we have played a ton of games without issue. However, trying to party up in D4 isn't just laggy, it's unplayable. I'm talking jogging in place for minutes at a time, can't interact with doors or equip armors, completely busted. Solo play has what I'd call "normal" lag but nothing like being in a party.

Cross play and Cross platform chat are off. BNET launcher is closed. Updated drivers, etc. No torrents or VPN or anything like that running. It's got to be server side right? But if everyone's experience was as awful as ours I'd expect to here much more complaining. Anyone got any other suggestions?

[–] thirdorbital@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I'm not voracious by any means but recently I have been enjoying combining a book with my other hobbies. Sitting outside tending the grill? Grab a few pages. Going on a weekend camping trip? Might as well bring a novel along. Change of pace / scenery from hectic daily life also seems important to this.

[–] thirdorbital@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Sorry, I don't use wefwef. In the main browser, you can navigate to the community and the "block" button is right below the "subscribe" option.

[–] thirdorbital@sh.itjust.works 43 points 2 years ago (6 children)

Near as I can tell, there are certain communities that have a "rule" that every time you browse that community, you must post something before you leave. This leads to a lot of low effort shitposting that I guess some people find fun but I just blocked those communities so my /All feed wasn't cluttered.

[–] thirdorbital@sh.itjust.works 23 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I don't love this example because enjoyment of the object isn't really a cost. If I buy a book or a videogame or a movie, the time it takes to enjoy the media is the value, not the cost.

If you're talking about maintenance and upkeep on your car, that is a different type of cost that has to be weighed against the cost and time expenditure of a bus pass or whatever your alternative was.

In other words I feel like this is a catchy phrase that kind of falls apart once you start to dig at it.

[–] thirdorbital@sh.itjust.works 10 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I feel like there's a lot more to this than "pay it twice". If you're talking purely in dollars, then you'll want to consider maintenance and upkeep over the expected lifetime of the object and compare that to alternatives. Additionally, everything has an opportunity cost because no resource is limitless and you could have allocated it elsewhere. Finally, emotional and other intangible benefits are something that most people have a very difficult time quantifying.

If you want to say "consider more than just the purchase price" then I'm with you.

[–] thirdorbital@sh.itjust.works 6 points 2 years ago (12 children)

I'm not certain all that is necessary but I agree there should be no more than one active vote at a time and it should be pinned to the top. It's quite easy to miss what's going on if you don't happen to log in every day.

[–] thirdorbital@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 years ago

I have an awful 1.5 hour commute to work. Ideally I'd like to be fully remote - but my company insists that isn't going to happen. My second choice would be convenient, safe, and affordable public transit - but my city insists that isn't going to happen. Autonomous cars wouldn't be a perfect solution but it would be a heck of a lot better than the road-raging humans I have to deal with now.

[–] thirdorbital@sh.itjust.works -1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Based on our positive interactions thus far, I'll respect the spirit of the question and try to answer truthfully.

I live in a blue city in a very red state. Many of my friends and most of my family are deeply conservative. I have a lot of empathy towards poor, rural, (mostly white) conservatives. They are told since birth by their parents, teachers, pastors, and other authority figures that if they work hard and pray harder they'll have a good life. Of course, this rarely works out because various demagogues like Trump abuse their loyalty by promising the moon and then robbing them blind.

The majority of these folks aren't inherently bad people. They're poorly educated, economically oppressed, and sick and tired of being told that they are the part of the problem because their ancestors owned slaves and Reagan was an asshole. They've gotten the short end of the stick for years! Is it any wonder that they cling to misinformation that gives them a common enemy or insists that the shitty state of the world is not their fault? Can you blame them for making a distasteful joke out of ignorance?

Hate is never acceptable. But all too often, "liberal" communities go straight to demonization and never attempt to open an honest discourse or rehabilitate people from years of lies and misinformation. Poor rural conservatives are victims too and deserve our respect and our empathy. Many are too deeply indoctrinated to engage meaningfully. But some aren't. And shunning them, refusing to talk to them, leaving them alone in their echo chambers doesn't do anyone much good. At the point where nearly half of Americans think that Trump is a good idea, the rest of us need to take a long hard look at ourselves and our institutions and ask how things got this way. I refuse to accept that it's because people are inherently assholes, there must be more to it than that.

I don't blame anyone who just wants to come online and look at pictures of cats and unwind and not deal with all this heavy bullshit. But I think the world would be a better place with a little more empathy. Call me naïve. Call me idealistic. But for my part I'll keep trying. Thanks for the meaningful dialogue on the subject.

[–] thirdorbital@sh.itjust.works -3 points 2 years ago (3 children)

There's a lot to unpack here. For brevity I'll just say I've looked through a few of the linked threads and spent a few minutes on the EH home instance. I don't claim to be an expert or know the full back story. I have seen some horribly unfunny memes, several jokes in poor taste, and some problematic assertions with regard to LGBTQ issues. Not my crowd at all. But in my admittedly limited time it also hasn't been enough to induce the moral panic many users here are having. I mean really, "calls for extermination of marginalized groups in support of fascist government actions"? That's quite a leap from the childish shitposting I saw.

At the end of the day, a majority of sh.itjust.works does not want to associate with exploding-heads, it will likely defederated, and life will go on. I just worry that when the first response is always to silence those we don't agree with, the future of Lemmy looks very fragmented and full of tiny echo chambers. As I said elsewhere, blocking and banning a few bad actors is a small price to pay for having a vibrant sustainable community.

[–] thirdorbital@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

That's a fair point and an interesting distinction regarding hosting content - I had assumed that your home instance was simply fetching content hosted from elsewhere but I really don't know much about the underlying technology.

And we can certainly all pack up and go separate ways. I just worry that excessive fragmentation is an existential threat to the success of the ecosystem. Today I don't feel like there are enough users on Lemmy to reach a self-sustaining critical mass - if the barrier to entry is too high, we won't get enough engagement and this could turn into another failed experiment like Google+. If the price to pay for having a full vibrant community is downvoting and blocking some bad users every now and then that's something I am willing to do.

Finally, I think this interaction has been a good example of what I hope to get out of Lemmy. I don't agree with many of your points, but I am glad for the conversation and think I have learned something by exploring a point of view different to my own. If we had been siloed with only like-minded people, that would not have happened. Food for thought perhaps.

 

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/467414

Distillery: Compass Box

Product Line: -

Product: Canvas

Aged: Vino naranja and American oak

Category: Blended

Nose: Delicate custards and marmalade. A citrus of bitter sort, with under-ripe figs.

Body: Rich honey over apricots and oranges. A light, English muffin sort of biscuit. As it goes on, a rich dark chocolate encroaches.

Finish: A bold, malty surprise. Loses nearly all the delicate fruit notes in favor of wheats and grains and fresh baked bread.

Activation: Really opens up some of the rich juicy fruits. Oranges, grapes, pears. Recommended.

Notes: I've always been fond of Compass Box, but they went through a phase for a while where seemingly every new limited release was (over) aged in a sherry cask. I'm glad to announce that Canvas breaks this pattern- in fact, there’s no sherry here at all! Just some Spanish orange wine, a beverage I didn’t even know existed until I picked up this bottle. It’s sweet and rich and creamy and endlessly drinkable, without that bitter or medicinal quality that can frequently come through with sherried casks. After such a fruit forward body, the malted finish is a welcome surprise as well. One of the best blended malts I’ve had in a while, though it is on the pricier side at ~$135.

 

Distillery: Compass Box

Product Line: -

Product: Canvas

Aged: Vino naranja and American oak

Category: Blended

Nose: Delicate custards and marmalade. A citrus of bitter sort, with under-ripe figs.

Body: Rich honey over apricots and oranges. A light, English muffin sort of biscuit. As it goes on, a rich dark chocolate encroaches.

Finish: A bold, malty surprise. Loses nearly all the delicate fruit notes in favor of wheats and grains and fresh baked bread.

Activation: Really opens up some of the rich juicy fruits. Oranges, grapes, pears. Recommended.

Notes: I've always been fond of Compass Box, but they went through a phase for a while where seemingly every new limited release was (over) aged in a sherry cask. I'm glad to announce that Canvas breaks this pattern- in fact, there’s no sherry here at all! Just some Spanish orange wine, a beverage I didn’t even know existed until I picked up this bottle. It’s sweet and rich and creamy and endlessly drinkable, without that bitter or medicinal quality that can frequently come through with sherried casks. After such a fruit forward body, the malted finish is a welcome surprise as well. One of the best blended malts I’ve had in a while, though it is on the pricier side at ~$135.

 
 

Any hikers, climbers, or wanderers here? Where's the most exotic place you've had a glass of whiskey?

 

Reviews, recommendations, tasting notes, gift ideas and more. Pour a dram and have a civil conversation.

https://lemmy.world/c/whiskey !whiskey@lemmy.world

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