ConalFisher's recent activity

  1. Comment on What have you been eating, drinking, and cooking? in ~food

    ConalFisher
    Link Parent
    Green tea is definitely one of the more finicky beverages to get right especially in comparison to the likes of black tea of coffee. It's super easy to brew it for too long or at too high a...

    Green tea is definitely one of the more finicky beverages to get right especially in comparison to the likes of black tea of coffee. It's super easy to brew it for too long or at too high a temperature or with too many or too few tea leaves, all of which will impart bitter flavours or a distinct fishy aroma on the final product. Great if you're a weirdo who likes making everything with a thermometer and a timer like me; less so if you just want a hot drink with no fuss. Green tea is all fuss.

    Absolutely down for genmaicha in all its forms! Green tea sellers will unfortunately just see it as something that they can put their old/lower quality tea leaves into (which it was traditionally designed for to be fair), but I like to make it at home from time to time with any leftover tea leaves I end up with, or sometimes just using a freshly opened box to make a load in bulk.

    1 vote

  2. Comment on What have you been eating, drinking, and cooking? in ~food

    ConalFisher
    Link
    Have been on a green tea journey for the past year or so. Got a handmade kyusu (a type of japanese clay teapot) and a bunch of high quality sencha leaves. If you've never had actual good green...

    Have been on a green tea journey for the past year or so. Got a handmade kyusu (a type of japanese clay teapot) and a bunch of high quality sencha leaves. If you've never had actual good green tea, the kind that doesn't come in teabags and isn't steeped in boiling water for 5 minutes, you're missing out. I used to roll my eyes whenever people said this about anything, but honestly it's better than any drug out there. I now have a little tea-making ritual in the mornings which just makes every day better by default. I am unfortunately extremely sensitive to caffiene so any more than two cups makes me jittery and anxious the whole day, but those two cups are the best part of my mornings now.

    This is the precise brand & type of tea I've been drinking recently. It's a light-steamed green tea which has a lighter flavour, I also really enjoyed this deep-steamed green tea from them but I generally prefer the flavour of light-steamed teas (though I am in the minority apparently).

    I've recently purchased some white teas to try, and I'm probably going to buy some fancier teas in the future as well. Tea is good. Drink more tea.

    1 vote

  3. Comment on Legacy is a delusion in ~talk

    ConalFisher
    Link
    You're effectively describing Terror Management Theory here. TMT says that there is a fundamental conflict in human nature caused by us being intelligent enough to realise the inevitability of...

    Legacy, or the eternal rewards I'm leaving out of the conversation, is a big shiny counterpoint to impermanence. You might even call it a psychological coping mechanism. We all need them sometimes and a key part of their operation is that they're not entirely rational.

    You're effectively describing Terror Management Theory here. TMT says that there is a fundamental conflict in human nature caused by us being intelligent enough to realise the inevitability of death, which when combined with the natural self-preservation instinct, causes an inescapable existential terror that we spend our lives either ignoring or deluding ourselves about, through religion or philosophy or aligning ourselves with something larger than us (nationalism, culture, family, etc), things that offer immortality, either literal or symbolic. It's why basically every single popular religion promises life after death in some way, shape, or form. It's why people align themselves with their glorious nation that will last a thousand generations.

    6 votes

  4. Comment on Tom Merritt's opinion on if Mozilla should join Chromium in ~tech

    ConalFisher
    Link
    Tom is an idiot, as is anyone who's in favour of the ever-approaching monopolization and centralisation of the internet.

    Tom is an idiot, as is anyone who's in favour of the ever-approaching monopolization and centralisation of the internet.

    25 votes

  5. Comment on The sham legacy of Richard Feynman in ~science

    ConalFisher
    Link Parent
    She's one of my favourite content creators on Youtube nowadays, but I do think she could do with having someone edit her videos a bit as she does often end up repeating herself a lot. Some of it...

    She's one of my favourite content creators on Youtube nowadays, but I do think she could do with having someone edit her videos a bit as she does often end up repeating herself a lot. Some of it is her style of presentation of course, repeating things for emphasis from slightly different angles (which I'd imagine works well in an academic lecture setting), but there were moments in this video where she sorta just said the same point over and over for five minutes where it could have been "here's the point I'm making, here's 3 examples of that thing" rather than "here's a thing from the book, therefore x, here's a thing from the book, therefore x, here's a thing from the book, therefore x, therefore x".

    Plus I think her content sorta toes the line between long-form explanatory content and full on video essay; some of her videos are great for having on while playing a game but others (like this one) really require your full focus. The problem is that you can get away with minimal editing and a semi-improvised script for long-form background content, but a video essay requires a lot more structure. To use a contemporary video essay metaphor, she's trying to create a Jenny Nicholson video, but she's covering a HBomberguy topic. ROBLOX_OOF.mp3 wouldn't have worked if they'd just bullet pointed a bunch of things, sat in front of a camera, and just talked about each thing off the cuff.

    2 votes

  6. Comment on Coffee prices surge to highest since 1997 on supply fears in ~food

    ConalFisher
    Link
    Gonna be an awful lot of these supply fears in basically every single type of crop over the next few years and decades; we're at the point now where climate change is really beginning to kick in,...

    Gonna be an awful lot of these supply fears in basically every single type of crop over the next few years and decades; we're at the point now where climate change is really beginning to kick in, and it's only getting worse and worse from here. Coffee is the least of our concerns, already we're seeing mass harvest failures in staple crops like rice and wheat all over the world.

    15 votes

  7. Comment on What have you been listening to this week? in ~music

  8. Comment on Maybe Bluesky has "won" in ~tech

    ConalFisher
    Link
    Anything is better than Twitter now, but I feel like as it is currently Bluesky is just... A bit of a left wing echo chamber, though it tries to claim otherwise. I hope it'll evolve as more people...

    Anything is better than Twitter now, but I feel like as it is currently Bluesky is just... A bit of a left wing echo chamber, though it tries to claim otherwise. I hope it'll evolve as more people sign up but the early adopters have undoubtably been mostly politically-oriented American left wingers and the content on the site reflects that. Posts mostly fall into two categories: "Common interest" posts with very broad appeal (nature photos, relatable anecdotes, very safe jokes, etc), or American politics. I've got nothing against left wing politics to be clear, I just don't find the site particulary interesting at the moment over it.

    Ultimately I just worry that it's a lot of artificial hype in this initial stage, and once it dies down people will be left with little of substance. I find that it's quite common in left wing spaces (speaking as someone who's been involved in an unfortunate amount of Reddit moderating) for enormous hype trains to form over something with everyone patting themselves on the back over how great it is and how everyone is on board while shutting out any and all dissent, only for the hype to slow, the dissenters to realise how numerous they are, and the whole thing flips on its head with the dissenters getting to be smug over how stupid the whole thing obviously was (from their perspective at least). Then your average person without a stake in the thing decides to steer clear entirely to avoid being lumped in with the weird ones whom everyone is laughing at.

    3 votes

  9. Comment on What creative projects have you been working on? in ~creative

    ConalFisher
    Link
    Composing music mostly. Currently in the "procrastinating via planning and reading up on theory stuff" stage of the process, which is always a fun place to pretend to feel productive in. I've also...

    Composing music mostly. Currently in the "procrastinating via planning and reading up on theory stuff" stage of the process, which is always a fun place to pretend to feel productive in.

    I've also been learning to code for a good while now. Decided to start in C because it looked fun and is super helpful to know, and it's been going well. But damn is there a lot of stuff to learn, I've been learning for a few months now and I still feel like I'm just doing glorified math problems rather than actually making anything resembling a piece of software. Hopefully it'll click one day and I'll understand how to go from dumb code to a thing that does stuff, probably after I inevitably abandon C for a more handholdy language that doesn't require a compsci degree and 600 lines of code to open a blank window.

    2 votes

  10. Comment on Hi, how are you? Mental health support and discussion thread (November 2024) in ~health.mental

    ConalFisher
    Link
    I really hate how much of mental health solutions these days revolve around "just don't think about those things", because of how powerless it makes me feel while also being rather objectively the...

    I really hate how much of mental health solutions these days revolve around "just don't think about those things", because of how powerless it makes me feel while also being rather objectively the best solution (besides just fixing the issues). I think I do a pretty good job at steering clear of the 24-hour news cycle but all the same I really struggle to think of anything on the global scale that's going well, it really seems like with the rise of fascism around the world and the ever-present certainty of climate change ruining everything forever, there's just no hope outside of a few miracles. And the only advice that seems to go around is "vote and don't think about it". And I hate that. I feel perpetually anxious about this stuff (amid many other things closer to home), it seems that there really isn't a realistic solution for any of it, and the not-thinking-about-it strategy only gives very temporary relief when I'm able to successfully distract myself with something.

    I wonder a lot these days about what constitutes mental illness when it comes to this stuff. I experience a lot of feelings of anxiety and depression (nothing at dangerous levels fortunately, though I do worry about the downward trends I notice in my psyche), but I don't feel like any of it is irrational. I worry about real events at about the level that should be expected by a human faced with existential threats, and the feelings I feel as a result are proportional to that. It's just that everything... Kinda fucking sucks these days. And I hate the notion that a doctor could look at that and go "looks like you're sad about everything being fucked, here's some pills that'll make you stop worrying about it" as if that's anything other than just burying my head in the sand. I'm no radical, I'm attuned to the fact that 90% of all politics and everything bad is forgotten and irrelevant in a century, but I just wish there was anything out there that could give hope.

    I'm just gonna re-read The Lord of the Rings every few months until that happens.

    13 votes

  11. Comment on Takashi Yoshimatsu - And Birds Are Still… (1998) - If you like Studio Ghibli's soundtracks I'd strongly recommend checking this guy's music out! in ~music

    ConalFisher
    Link Parent
    I absolutely love his Piano Concerto! I figured I'd post this shorter one as it's more accessible, but I'm a huge fan of his works as a whole. Personally I think he's at his best when he's working...

    I absolutely love his Piano Concerto! I figured I'd post this shorter one as it's more accessible, but I'm a huge fan of his works as a whole. Personally I think he's at his best when he's working with orchestral colours, my singular gripe with his music is that his harmonic language can be a bit stale for my tastes (keeping in mind that I've had my sensibilities melted by a composition degree). But his orchestration skill is stellar, and he's maybe one of the best melodicists in recent memory too.

    There is a distinctive "neo-romantic" school of contemporary tonal music in Japan, influenced a lot by Debussy, Takemitsu, Messiaen, and that I think is the source of a lot of the similarities in the music of Hisaishi, Kondo, Yoshimatsu, and a lot of Japanese film/game music in general. Yoshimatsu isn't really a well-known composer in the West for some strange reason, despite being one of the leading Japanese contemporary composers for some 30 years, but I'm glad to see he's getting picked up by ensembles more and more. Still waiting to hear something of his live though!

    1 vote

  13. Comment on Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid in ~health

    ConalFisher
    Link Parent
    A lot of people recommend cast iron and for good reason, but if the maintenance is too much of a hassle for you I'd recommend looking into carbon steel cookware. Extremely common in woks but you...

    A lot of people recommend cast iron and for good reason, but if the maintenance is too much of a hassle for you I'd recommend looking into carbon steel cookware. Extremely common in woks but you can find skillets made with it also; it's basically halfway between a cast iron and a stainless steel pan, being reasonably light and durable, and much less of a hassle to cook with then cast iron (though honestly I have never bothered babying my cast iron, I just cook with it and dry it well afterwards and call it a day). There is a seasoning process but it's much less involved than with cast iron: The first time using it you just heat it up a ton and then rub oil into it with a paper towel until the whole thing's changed colour, takes 10 minutes. After that just be sure to preheat it until smoking, rub a really small amount of oil on it before throwing your food in, and it'll be fine. Dry it well to prevent rust.

    As for cooking utensils I almost exclusively use wooden utensils and have never had issues. I really don't get the hype around metal utensils being better or having more control, if you can't scrape off fond with a wooden spoon then you've already screwed up. I have a silicon spatula for anything more delicate, and that's basically it.

    2 votes

  14. Comment on What are you reading these days? in ~books

    ConalFisher
    Link
    Every day when walking to work I pass by my local second-hand book store, and I have a terrible habit of just buying cool books knowing damn well I'll never read them. But, yknow, I got the Iliad...

    Every day when walking to work I pass by my local second-hand book store, and I have a terrible habit of just buying cool books knowing damn well I'll never read them. But, yknow, I got the Iliad for £2, so at least I have it now, there are worse vices to have for sure. I'm not brave enough to venture into the realm of obscure authors I've never heard of so 90% of what I've read is popular/genre-defining.

    I've really been enjoying H.P. Lovecraft's stories, they're my favourite kind of horror. Similar is Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves: Honestly I didn't finish it because Christ it's long and my attention span is garbage, but it's incredibly compelling. Outside of that genre I've been intermittently going through the Tao Te Ching in my quest to fill what Dennis Reynolds called "his God-hole": It's interesting for sure, though I'm not sure how I feel about its emphasis on essentially promoting societal ignorance in the name of a simple life, it feels a bit authoritarian. Still a cool read though, worth checking out if you know nothing about Taoism.

    Honestly though I'm a complete Tolkien stan, I've never been able to find anything that has ensnared my as much as his writing does. People give him flak sometimes for how he'll spend 2 paragraphs describing a tree but god damnit I'd read an entire book of that. Currently I'm reading Unfinished Tales, am about halfway through Of Tuor and his Coming to Gondolin and I'm in love with how descriptive it is, the way it describes the sparse landscapes and the feeling of solitude as Tuor travels west toward the the Great Sea. Then the whole interaction with Ulmo is just incredibly powerful. Absolutely worth a read if you've never ventured past Rings and The Hobbit.

    5 votes

  15. Comment on Timasomo 2023: Week 2 Updates in ~creative.timasomo

    ConalFisher
    Link
    Writing a short orchestral piece. Life has resulted in me making zero progress. Darn. Goals this week are to mostly structure the piece, and write a full section or two. Perhaps not full...

    Writing a short orchestral piece.

    Life has resulted in me making zero progress. Darn.

    Goals this week are to mostly structure the piece, and write a full section or two. Perhaps not full orchestration just yet but we'll see,

    2 votes

  16. Comment on What have you been listening to this week? in ~music

  17. Comment on Timasomo 2023: Week 1 Updates in ~creative.timasomo

    ConalFisher
    Link
    Writing a short orchestral piece. What I've done this week: Conceptualised & loosely structured the work That's about it. The beginning steps of a composition tend to be a bit boring in my...

    Writing a short orchestral piece.

    What I've done this week:

    • Conceptualised & loosely structured the work

    That's about it. The beginning steps of a composition tend to be a bit boring in my workflow, but eventually I'll put a note down, then another one, then that'll continue until there's a finished piece.

    What I'm going to do next week:

    • More structuring: Motivic material, broad formal layout, etc.

    • Write a few small sections and showcase them here.

    • Get a feel for where the piece is going and further hone in on what I want it to be like. No idea is set in stone in these early formative stages; maybe I'll end up going a completely different direction than what I'm thinking right now.

    3 votes

  18. Comment on Timasomo 2023: Roll Call in ~creative.timasomo

    ConalFisher
    Link
    Never participated before but this sounds fun! I'm going to write a short (~5m) orchestral piece, based on an 'image'. Something to do with snow and mountains, I'll work out the details as I go...

    Never participated before but this sounds fun!

    I'm going to write a short (~5m) orchestral piece, based on an 'image'. Something to do with snow and mountains, I'll work out the details as I go along. Maybe one day I'll make it into a multi-movement suite, but right now I'll limit myself to one good bit of music. 5 minutes of orchestral writing from scratch in a month will be a challenge, but I always work best with deadlines, so I'm confident I'll get it done in time.

    Bonus: I might also arrange it for 2 pianos, for no other reason than it's next to impossible to get orchestral music performed without having an 'example version' to show people first.

    3 votes

  19. Comment on What is your preferred VPN? in ~comp

    ConalFisher
    Link
    I've been using the free version of Windscribe for years now. 15gb monthly cap is more than enough for me (basically just use it for torrenting every now and then). I can't really afford a paid...

    I've been using the free version of Windscribe for years now. 15gb monthly cap is more than enough for me (basically just use it for torrenting every now and then). I can't really afford a paid VPN these days but when I could I used Mullvad and it was great, I'd recommend it.

    1 vote

  20. Comment on Video game voice actors are ready to strike over AI in ~games

    ConalFisher
    Link Parent
    They could probably ban it, but would it actually change anything? If governments in the 18th century had banned industrial textile mills for the purposes of keeping workers' jobs, would all our...

    They could probably ban it, but would it actually change anything? If governments in the 18th century had banned industrial textile mills for the purposes of keeping workers' jobs, would all our clothes be handmade today, and 10 times the price?

    7 votes