If you’re sick of talking about That Man, talk about anything other than him here. And enjoy the weirdest pic I could rustle up on short notice.
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Open Thread to boycott the inauguration and talk about anything but Trump
Today I’ve been studiously reading all the news that isn’t about the US.
The avalanche in Italy that seems to have killed 20-40 skiers is making waves. They are finding some survivors, but still awful.
The fire in Tehran that killed 20-40 firefighters is not so much in the news. I only learned about it because of an Iranian friend who posted in farsi with a moving picture of a firefighter bawling his eyes out (Facebook’s translation was completely illegible). I had to scrounge around the AJE website to find it:
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/01/tehran-rescuers-scour-debris-trapped-firefighters-170120073457824.html
In Gambia, the outgoing president is finished. The army chief has pledged support to the new president and told his troops to “welcome [ECOWAS forces who are invading] with a cup of tea.” Looks like civil war is averted. The old president seems not to realize it’s over, so he might actually be arrested and tried rather than getting a cushy exile.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/20/the-gambia-jammeh-has-agreed-to-leave-new-president-tweets
2016 is the warmest year ever in the analysis of most data sets, beating out 2015 by about 0.1 degrees C. 2016 was an El Nino year, but that only provided about 0.1 degrees C of warming… which means that without El Nino, 2016 would still be tied for warmest.
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-noaa-data-show-2016-warmest-year-on-record-globally
IP and Scildfreja, just wanted to send some more well-wishes – and my heartfelt admiration for your integrity and all-round good-peopleness despite dealing with shit nobody should ever, ever have to.
Nettle soup is delicious!
Fresh nettle is pretty obnoxious stuff, but cooked or dried it becomes food. Nettle tea is quite relaxing.
I first had nettles at a fancyish restaurant in Chicago once and never forgot about it. Next time was years later, when we harvested a pot on the roof out back that had gone to weed — a nettle had taken up residence where a tomato plant used to live; we found a recipe and made it, and it was wonderful.
After that, my girlfriend went a bit nuts on nettles, picking them whenever she found them and making many delicious meals. Then one day she served up basically just nettles with nettles. That was a bit much.
I’m sure we’ll get back into the swing of things when it’s the season again (and when/if she moves back down here; not many nettles in Iqaluit).
Oh, lol, didn’t even see that IP had already answered that. Didn’t mean to just ignore that the question was answered.
eta: For some reason I thought that one cooked the prickly flowerhead part of the nettle, but the internets tell me it’s the leaves that one eats. I’ll have to remember this the next time a nettle springs up in the garden.
@Fishy Goat:
That is the only GIF I’ll ever need now…
Anyway, I decided to watch the first three episodes of Portlandia’s new season despite some hesitation – I really didn’t like the previous season – and found myself actually enjoying it. Helps that they’ve replaced the obnoxiously caricatured feminist bookstore owners with MRAs who take themselves too seriously while no one else does…
https://youtu.be/z6IhNcnLwiw
@kupo
Underwater construction is fun. I let my home base and various “colonies” determine my routes. For the fun of it I’m testing a hypothesis about tunnel and resource concentration at the bottom if deep ocean biomes. I prepare little “mining colony boxes” with construction equipment and supplies.
I Did a glass tunnel from a nether gate to an underwater monument and tunneled in through the leg. I tried alternating red and blue blocks but I don’t see purple.
Underwater animal pens, wheat farms, and an underwater village attached to the drop chute of a gold farm was fun. I got a little excessive with it. I made an afk fish and junk farm, underwater.
PoM: You eat the leaves and young stems. Use gloves to handle them, even to chop them, and it all comes out fine. Use your bare hands and it’s … unpleasant.
@Brony
I made an underwater atrium once. That was fun. Endermen loved to come steal dirt from it for some reason.
@Brony
Nettles taste sort of like a blend of spinach and mixed herbs. At least when boiled as a soup.
My nettle leaves came in bags with various twigs mixed in, so I had to strain the actual nettles out from the soup. Other than nettles, the soup contained fried shallots, butter, vegetable stock, cream, flour, fennel seeds, soft boiled egg halves, chives, and roasted onions. It was good, but I think I put too much nettle in. It came out with a very strong flavor. Together with the egg it was great, but by itself it was somewhat overwhelming. I will make some tweaks next time.
@NickNameNick
The bookstore in question threw them out over that, in fact. They are real, and they really are radical feminists, and they really are very, very angry at the way they were portrayed.
My Minecraft style is creating ridiculously time/resource consuming and ultimately pointless projects. For example, I’ve tried to recreate a pokémon map on an artificial 400×400 dirt platform in the middle of the ocean. I’ve also built a skyrail about 8000 blocks long, lined with every different type of block in the game (including beacons), and supported by intricate but pointless columns every 100 blocks. I made a nether tunnel out of packed ice, hay bales and paintings. A very long bridge made entirely from obsidian. A long time ago I recreated level 1-1 from Super Mario Bros, as pixel art. Oh, and I built the Brooklyn Bridge leading to pretty much nowhere.
wwth – re: weight loss surgery, let me suggest some reading on a currently inactive blog archive called Junkfood Science. http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2007/02/why-we-never-hear-why-people-dont-talk.html
Particularly her Bariatric Series which can be found about a third of the way down in the right sidebar. The author is a nurse with a degree in statistics. The link is to a page that will start you off.
Years ago, I was allowed to join an online discussion group* called “ossg gone wrong” (as a lurker only; I wanted info because a friend was getting wls and active participation was limited to people who experienced wls and its side-effects and complications.) Common side-effects include ulcers, acid reflux, IBD, Ulcerative Colitis, malnutrition, severe anemia, intestinal blockages, inability to eat certain (or sometimes any) solid foods and the list goes on.
A friend of mine and her mother had the surgery done and were lucky; none of the nastier side-effects, just not much lasting weight loss. My friend lost about 60 lbs. and has gained back most of it. This is not uncommon, from what I have seen and read.
Her mom lost about the same and has kept it off, but has an iffy appetite because of all the foods she can no longer eat and has a hard time keeping herself nourished because she dislikes protein shakes, which are AFAICT required for wls patients. This has caused her untold problems; weakness, which caused a couple of falls, one of which resulted in a broken ankle, repaired with a pin that got infected and never healed properly resulting in a two month stay in a convalescent hospital to get the infection under control (read: make sure she eats properly.) All of her doctors have cited her malnutrition as causative/contributing factors. None of them go so far as to say wls was a bad idea, though.
*it went defunct a couple of years ago, the stories made my hair stand on end regularly.
Sorry for the turquoise elk, this is a bugbear with me, so seek out other opinions, too.
Many hugs to all of you, I’ve also found it helpful to process by sharing my experiences. Keeping those feelings inside can cause them to eat away at you.
Funny, my first minecraft building project was an underwater one as well. I didn’t get endermen bothering me but squid would often try to swim in and get stuck. Best thing I made was a castle in the sky with a railcart going across the tree tops of the jungle. This was on a regular map which happened to have a giant cave with underground waterfalls, really cool.
I’ve been playing the virtual ports of the original Pokemon games. Apparently you can transfer Pokemon from those virtual console ports to the Pokebank, so I’ve been using glitches to get a shitload of Mews and other legendaries for whenever the Pokebank is opening up for Sun and Moon.
Minecraft is awesome! I play on a heavily modded version, and I like to build machines with my mods. Lately, I have been building a railroad network with remote junction switching.
Thanks, Hambeast!
I’ll definitely look through it later. My brother is so picky about what foods he eats and I don’t see any attempts to force him to eat foods he doesn’t like being successful. So malnutrition is a worry for me.
I’m really disturbed that a doctor is pushing surgery before he’s even tried food journaling. I suspect his portions are bigger than he thinks they are and we should work harder with him on portion control before resorting to a drastic surgery.
Yay another mod player! *high five*
I’m trying to find a good pack that balances magic and tech evenly, but so far I haven’t found anything that’s like “Yes! Perfect!” I’ve found that Unabridged is alright, but there was one that I tried called Mech & Magic that only had Botania and that was it for the magic mods.
Though it did have Cooking for Blockheads, which I like, and it also had Nomadic Tents, which is like hella awesome pocket dimensions. It also had a mod that allows you to breed chickens to get resources like diamonds and ores, which is cool, but it seems like a lot more work than say Magical Crops, which can easily get into hella OP territory very quickly. (Especially when you automate that shit. I love using Thaumcraft golems to plant the crops, and then using alchemical chests and item grabbers to just suck it in for harvesting. Then I set up a system that transfers the essences into a main storage for when I need to use them.)
The only tech mods I’m decent with are Mekanism and a teeny bit of Forestry, but I’m super good with Thaumcraft and Witchery, and I’m alright with Ars Magica and Botania, so I wanna find a modpack that has at least three of those four and stuff like Mekanism and Random Things.
Unfortunately, that means that the modpack would have to be HELLA HUGE.
Part of me wants our Kirby friend to bring back the server, and part of me is like “I don’t have time for that shit while working two jobs.”
I FORGOT CRACKPACK WAS A THING AND IS AWESOME U GUIS.
Seriously though, I forgot how many awesome mods Crackpack has. I like the food mods on top of my magic mods. <3
@WWTH
I have had weight loss surgery (wls) twice, no complications, so if you want to talk to an actual “loser” (yes, we often refer to ourselves as that in the wls community I am part of) let me know – we can set up some kind of chat or something. Happy to answer any questions you might have.
I want to say though that while complications happen and some of them can be horrific, if all you read about is that then you would soon form the opinion that it’s definitely not worth the risk. It’s always a highly individual decision though and depends on many factors. So be aware of the potential risks but don’t let them blind you to the possible benefits. Ultimately, your brother has to make his own decisions. Wls is not an easy or a quick solution and requires a lot of further work by the patient post-surgery. Having the determination to make changes is the most important factor in success – the surgery just provides one with a better tool than dieting alone (which, by the way, doesn’t work long term for most people).
WWTH: Bariatric surgery is considered pretty much a last-resort thing in Canada, after habit changes have been attempted. No journaling?!? That’s really odd. Definitely get a second opinion.
(I’m not a registered dietician, I just love one. And she hasn’t weighed in on this.)
I miss mods. Orespawn and thaumcraft are great. I had a modpack with about 100 including those and railcraft. Ultimate destruction? Total destruction?
My wife and I have a world on the Xbox one.
@kupo
I seem to remember something strange with Endermen underwater too.
@Imaginary Petal
Don’t they all get pointless though? I think those kinds of projects are neat. I keep wanting to do a sonic rainboom but I’m not organized enough. Yet.
I used to play Minecraft, loved it. Lots of fun. Tekkit and FTB and all that.
Then I found Factorio.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DR01YdFtWFI
It is multiplayer!
That’s the thing. He’s disabled and it’s going to be my parents making the ultimate decision. He lives on his own though and I don’t think he will be willing and able to follow the after care program without constant monitoring. He’s very proud of the independence he does have. Moving out of dad’s place was a goal that he worked on for many years. He wants very much wants to be “normal” and having to move back home and have his eating monitored would severely reduce his quality of life.
That’s why I’m side eying this so hard. He does work out but other than not buying sweets, there’s been no attempt at dieting really. The exercise is already helping with his health. He just hasn’t lost weight and that seems to be all anyone cares about. He has trouble with portion control and his diet has a lot of carbs and red meat so there are things to be tried before resorting to surgery. I haven’t met his doctor, but given how quickly he’s jumping to recommending surgery, I have to wonder if he just sees my brother as a disabled and fat inferior and not a human being whose life matters.
So far my dad just seems to think weight loss surgery is some sort of simple magic bullet. He’s been skinny all his life and I don’t think he knows anything about how fat people tend to get substandard medical care and doesn’t quite realize how much society would rather someone be skinny no matter the cost than be fat. My dad means well but he’s a bit of a mansplainer. Or at least he is with me. They’re checking his thyroid first and he actually started telling me what an endocrine system was. Like I didn’t learn that in middle school science. I fear he won’t listen to my concerns, but I do think I could have more success with my mom.
@Scildfreja
That is some fascinating complexity. I have trouble with the more implied depth like in dwarf fortress. I do better with the 3ds.
Scildfreja: I already lost enough sleep to Skylines because of you. I’ve learned my lesson: no more!
(I beat the second stock scenario last night without losing too many citizens when the dam blows, and building a beautiful city to replace the sunken town.)