It seems like I may be dipping my toe back into "reading" through audiobooks. I realized that instead of listening to random YouTubers at work, I can listen to more intentional writing this way.

How do y'all feel about them? If you listen, what sorts of productions do you prefer? Are there any particular ones you think are spectacular, a cut above the rest? Do you listen to them in addition to reading the book as like a companion piece or instead of the book?

I've listened to some GraphicAudio books now and I like having a full cast for the characters, they've got some good voice actors. Though they're listed as unabridged, I worry they've still perhaps dropped paragraphs. But I think I'd end up zoning out more on single narrator books.

Part of why I never engaged before is because I have poor auditory processing, so I figured I just couldn't keep up. At least for simpler texts, I haven't had much problem, and it may be helping me improve in that respect. I hadn't tried before, but now I can watch YT vids at double speed without missing anything.

I started since my partner was interested so I set up audiobookshelf and some other services for grabbing files. It's been a great piece of software to use, there's other software that can manage and serve audiobooks, but none puts them first like abs does. Do recommend if you're interested in self-hosting audiobooks.

Hi folks. I'm in way over my head with an AWS problem. Mainly because I don't understand how to use AWS at all, but in 2013 I used a tool called FastGlacier to backup my data (including baby picture and videos) to Amazon Glacier. I also had them on a local drive and a HDD I gave to a friend. Alas, my drive failed a few years ago, and he lost the other in a move.

Anyway, I'm not a coder, and AWS baffles me. I'd like to retrieve these data but don't know where to start. Would anybody well versed in AWS be willing to walk me through the process? The AWS guidance is over my head.

Many thanks in advance.

Japan is understandably a hot travel destination in general, but I've seen it come up here on Tildes several times, with many people sharing their stories. This is and isn't that.

I traveled to Japan (and Korea) over a year ago, and I've been rotating this post in my head nearly the whole time. If you want to skip my word vomit: tl:dr it was kind of mid, there are parts I would return for, but many that are very off-putting (especially as of this moment with Japan's politics).

I'm a millennial, and by most accounts, a weeb. I was first was exposed to anime/manga via Slayers, Sailor Moon, Tenchi Muyo and other early Anime that played occasionally on network television, around the late 1990s, which evolved as it did for most of us with Toonami, Adult Swim, and renting movies like Akira and Ghost in the Shell at Blockbuster. I've been regularly consuming Otaku culture essentially my entire life, and my wife was exactly the same as me, we both read Manga and watch Anime as a regular pass time. I was also completely aware that Otaku culture is generally looked down upon by genpop, probably moreso a decade or more ago till now, but I wasn't under the impression that Manga/Anime was how Japan actually was.This isn't to say we had some idealized view of Japan or Tokyo (where we spent our vacation), we've done a lot of domestic and international travel up to that point, so I believe we had realistic expectations going in of how our vacation would go. To be clear, it's not that those expectations weren't necessarily met, but there's some things that I started to realize I may have overlooked, tidbits of Japanese culture that you will get glimpses of in their media, and specifically, the types of media I related to, the series I found most interesting to me with characters that aligned with my own values, or something like that.

You will hear many testimonials of how great visiting Tokyo can be, and I want to caveat with the single complication that made things unreasonably difficult and why I would exercise caution if you are in the same position, but being perfectly frank, it was only one component: We traveled with myself, my wife, and our 2 year old daughter. To clarify, I do not have a difficult child, in fact by almost all metrics she's extremely well behaved and easy to travel with, if she wasn't I would never have considered a 14+hr flight, so take everything I say that I have a near saint of a toddler, she wasn't the problem at all.

Tokyo is not toddler friendly, Tokyo is toddler hostile, weird things you would overlook or not even think about as adult travelers will consistently cause problems. Tokyo is great for walkability if you are able bodied, it is a far cry from being ADA compliant as we're used to stateside, expect to carry a stroller as I did up stairs many, many times. Over our trip there, you notice things: not a single native Japanese takes a toddler outside, like at all, let's ignore birth rates for a moment, because kids were present, but not a single kid under 3 was anywhere to be seen. Not in restaurants, not at parks, not in malls. The possible sole exception is Odaiba, which is designed to be a family friendly area. This begins to cause friction almost everywhere else though. Kids menus are few and far between, rarely will you find high chairs, and frustratingly: many restaurants will not give you a to go box, that's just not a thing there, so expect to simply waste food or money if you order a main for a toddler (because there is no kids meal) etc. There is also nearly nothing catered to toddlers....basically anywhere, again this is pretty in line with our expectations, but when we went out of our way to find solutions, and they still didn't seem possible (or were inexplicably closed....they will actually CLOSE parks if there is a light drizzle) it begins to wear on you. Similarly shopping! One of the biggest draws of being in Tokyo, will be rather limited, both in things that would fit a 1-4yo and in physical dimensions of stores, which may or may not accommodate you pushing a stroller. The busy tourist areas are also quite challenging to navigate, and especially in places like Shibuya, a lot of the joint restaurant areas will have exceptionally small tables or standing room only, as will most Ramen or Tempura restaurants. "Family restaurant" is a category in Japan because taking a family elsewhere is difficult.

I can handle almost all of this, but it's coupled with, and again, I am a parent, I understand that children can be taxing, but there's a low level of animosity ever present almost anywhere you go, of course there's background radiation of, you're a tourist and not a local, but couple that with now you're being a difficult tourist, and you can start to tell people do not want you there. This isn't to say we didn't have good experiences, many native Japanese were very accommodating to us, helped us out, were happy to see a cute kid etc. I don't want to paint it as the experience was entirely negative, it wasn't, but it was SO MUCH WORSE than literally anywhere else I have traveled re: having a toddler or child with you, and it's not really conveyed because well, most people traveling to Tokyo do not have kids in tow (and I have heard that for example Osaka and other cities are better about this, so I don't want to paint a broad brush.) There were also plenty of tourists traveling with kids, and even when we didn't share a language, we exchanged knowing glances of how tired of the whole situation we were.

Also the food is seriously overrated, give me hate if you want, but the US has better food, especially LA/NYC. You can get better sushi, cheaper, in LA than Tokyo. It's the truth. The hamburg steak at Tsubame Kitchen in Shinogawa was an exception, that was delicious.

There's a manga I love: Moyashimon, it's about a college student who can see microbes (including the eponymous Yeast), that's entirely unimportant to what I want to talk about. The characters are extremely relatable, I believe I was also in university when I first read it, and many parts resonated with me, and I found the morals of the characters fairly normal. Almost all of these characters are outcasts or pariahs by Japanese standards. Conformity is still very much the norm in Japan, and especially the majority of Tokyo outside the kind of touristy (or counterculture) areas like Shibuya, Akihabara, Kabukicho etc. As we were heavily jetlagged, the majority of our days would start around 5am, the sea of salarymen is absolutely nuts. Thousands of workers in suits, every day, bright and early, and returning at rush hour. Moyashimon deals a lot with the difficulties the characters will face when they leave college and are forced to conform, they will have to be clean shaven, they must stop dying their hair, they must conform to the gender presentation they were assigned at birth. The story, and many other media in the same vein from similar authors, is critical of the culture of conformity. The current Japan, in current year, is still xenophobic, homophobic, transphobic. In relating to these media, whether it's moyashimon, or the works of Nagata Kabi, or even something like HoriMiya (which tragically kills almost all the social commentary of the original work in both the redraw manga as well as the anime), I was relating to being critical of Japan's culture, of being critical of those things.

I don't really know where else to go with this, sorry for the word vomit. I had thought that I knew what to expect when traveling to Japan, I did my research, I knew how to not be rude, not to be intrusive, how to generally be my version of a "good tourist", and it wasn't that my expectations were wrong, I simply found out I liked Tokyo less than I thought I would.

Some serious positives though: meeting my friends who live in Tokyo was great, and we absolutely had a blast, I'd have not had half as much fun if I didn't have people who lived there that knew the places to go and what to see. The climbing gyms and bouldering scene is WORLD CLASS. B pump Ogikubo is famous for a reason, and the national training center in Odaiba was also a highlight.

Maybe this will give some added balance, I'm not sure. This is just the experience I had, there were highlights and lowlights, but overall, I just did not jive with Tokyo in particular, and I would like other people to at least consider that they might not, too.

I realize this has become something like a political statement to do this for whatever reason. But a 100% wordcel medium where your only avatar is a text string of your username means if I want to talk about someone I have no idea what to call them. I have to use awkward constructions like “that user” or “OP.” This doesn’t sound nice. This disrupts the delicately crafted meter and flow of my sentences.

Mayhap we could introduce a teeny-tiny configurable logogram next to the username to disambiguate preferred pronouns. Or maybe even a subscript. It’d be small enough and faded so as not to impact the clean visual but visible enough to free me from having to guess.

Hi all. I'm interested on hearing about recipes you've come up with yourself, whether completely from scratch or variation on an existing one. Maybe you were lacking an ingredient one day, and subbed one that changed the recipe in a good way. Maybe you tried a dish at a restaurant that you love and attempted to recreate it at home. Maybe you had a bunch of leftover ingredients you didn't know what to do with, so decided to throw them all together and pray for the best. Or maybe inspiration struck suddenly one day for a perfect dish, and you gave it a shot. Would love to hear the backstory of the recipe if you have it. I'll start.

Cincinnati style daal. The family chili recipe growing up was cincinatti/skyline style chili. I've thus always preferred my chili without beans, and I love the depth of flavor cincinnati style chili has. My family even likes to use ground turkey meat because we think it absorbs the flavors of the spices better than beef does. When I moved to the UK, I suddenly had access to excellent Indian food, daals now being one of my favorites. One thing that immediately struck me about daals was the depth of flavor in them. The lentils serve to add texture and some creaminess, but the spices in it are the highlight of the dish. In fact, this kinda reminded me of my family chili. I began wondering, could I make a daal but with the spices from my family chili? This would be pretty nice, as turkey is kinda hard to find outside of christmas time here and lentils are a good low-cost protein. Well, it turns out the cooking process for daal and my family's chili are pretty similar, so I took a black daal recipe from dishoom and tried subbing the cincinatti chili spices for the spices in the daal. Many of the other ingredients between the two recipes are similar. And it's come out pretty good! I'm still refining it, it lacks some umami without the meat, but I think the next batch will be great. Serving it with naan and cilantro, instead of spaghetti. Always with shredded cheese and chopped onions of course.

Filipino Dip. One of my favorite recipes to make is chicken adobo, so easy to make and it's delicious. I usually have some chicken and sauce left after making a batch, and one day it occurred to me that there was enough sauce left I could dip a sandwich in it. Huh, that's kinda similar to a french dip. So I shredded up the remaining chicken, toasted a baguette, and sauteed a bunch of onions to add to the sandwich. It was absolutely delicious, and what I will be doing with my leftover chicken adobo from now on.

St Patrick's Day Ramen. So, this year I decided to make my family's St Patrick's Day meal. Kinda hard to do in the UK, as corned beef is really not a big thing. (Yes, I know they have the tinned version, no, it's nothing like the real deal). But I corned my own beef, and then braised it in red wine, and invited friends over to share. Afterwards, with all the corned beef gone, a friend and I were looking at the braising liquid. There was a ton of it left, and it tasted frankly delicious. My friend pointed out that it reminded him of a ramen broth, and so an idea was born. I bought some thinly sliced beef from the local asian grocery store, and assembled the ramen with it, the noodles, cabbage, thinly sliced green apples (I know it seems weird, but it's used in the family cabbage recipe), and pickled garlic/cucumbers made from the leftover corned beef brine. It came out delicious, and will definitely be doing it next year.

Oven roasted brussel sprouts and carrots. This came from a restaurant near me that unfortunately closed. They would make the most amazing, crispy, roast brussel sprouts and carrots served with a tangy, smokey dressing. After it closed, I would dream of these brussel sprouts, and I tried googling recipes to find something similar with no luck. I knew only a couple of things: that the head chef was Peruvian and said on the menu it had inspired this dish; there was mezcal in the dressing, likely providing the smokey component. So after researching Peruvian recipes, I've come up with a vinaigrette that's as close as I can remember: bragg's cider vinegar, juice from one lime, olive oil, salt and black pepper, and a splash of mezcal. If available, add a touch of aji amarillo paste. May need to add a little sugar for a hint of sweetness. It took some time to figure out a crispy brussel sprout too, as home ovens can't get as hot as a commercial kitchen, but also finally found an oven roasting recipe I was happy with.

Looking forward to hearing everyone elses recipes!