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What did you do this weekend?
As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their weekend. Did you make any plans? Take a trip? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!
I only had one day this weekend. I'm feeling super drained right now. :(
So in a few weeks me and my boyfriend are going to do a cruise that will take us through the Panama Canal. I've been slowly gathering some of the stuff we will need to travel with. So while I was taking my dear grandmother out to dinner, I went to the Joann fabric store. There's going to be a pirate themed night so I figured that I would make some head scarves with some of their interesting prints since it's one of the easiest projects I could do. I picked out a yard of four different fabrics so there would be a choice later on. They were selling a huge selection of lightweight fleece prints for just $1.99 per yard, and it took everything out of me to stop me from trying to make a blanket. Though in retrospect it might not have been a bad idea to pick some up for future projects....
Coincidentally, I have no idea how I have managed to get into sewing. I'm absolutely terrible at it and I have no real sense of style. Perhaps as someone who works primarily on computers and systems, I have just fallen in love with the concept of actually having tangible results after I finish.
Be careful - loving tangible results from your hobby may mean you wind up with one or more craft side gigs. When you're tired of the cognitive overwork, it's so healing to produce objects that your craft will improve rapidly. The next thing you know, people will start asking to buy it. It's probably not going to remunerate you quite well enough to quit an IT day job, but creating does save some therapy costs.
I received my Helios 44 (an old Russian lens) and went out to take some pictures with it. You can't really shoot into the light with it but otherwise it looks fantastic (that bokeh):
https://imgur.com/a/FqoAWYU
Being all manual, I also find it more fun to use that my more modern lens.
Love that elegant bokeh - nicely done.
Dang, those are some incredibly desktop background worthy photos. Well done!
Thanks! to be honest the lens is doing a lot of work there (alongside the sunset light). It's crazy that this thing is probably more than 60 years old already.
Heh, it's all relative, I guess. I wouldn't have the first clue about how to shoot photos with a manual camera, let alone compose nice looking shots using it. :P
This is probably more appropriate for the weekly fitness thread, but I ran in the Wellington Round The Bays 10k run for the 3rd time! I had both a good and bad outcome:
I hadn't been running or training for this event, after many months without running consistently, and as such expected a pretty poor result—having only done a handful of 3-5k practice sessions over the previous two weeks. My goal was 57 to 60 minutes, but I managed 53 minutes, and felt great while doing it! Really proud of myself for that.
The bad news is it's also my worst showing thus far: a year ago I completed the same event in 50 minutes, and a year before that in 47 minutes. I think next year with consistent, regimented training, I can get to under 45 minutes and a top 100 placing.
Next big event for me is the Wellington Half-Marathon in June, which will be my first official race-timed 21k.
My nephew/godson is here from Europe after two years, so I did lots of kids stuff with him. It's a good thing he's obsessed with Spider-Man (also my favorite as a child!) cause we're watching the 1994 animated series together.
I mean, I am actually watching, he's just seeing some colors and shapes that he's excited to recognize.
It's awesome.
Yes, the very same. I actually don't have any issues in communicating with him in person, but the video calls are still hard for me. I have trouble "feeling" that there's a person there, it's just shapes and sounds for me, you know? That's one of the reasons my therapist once thought I might be on the autism spectrum.
I'm making sure to be as much with him as possible in these few days.
Thanks for remembering it, and for your nice words!
I just got an instant pot a few weeks ago and having been putting it to use. I'm planning on organizing a chili-making competition at work and decided to try my hand at making chili to have a recipe ready for presentation there.
There are a lot of vegetarians and vegans in the office. In order to get the most votes that means I need to make a vegan chili. I wanted to try making something with Impossible meat anyway and took this as an opportunity to do so. I couldn't find Impossible meat at Wholefoods but managed to get some Beyond meat. After substituting out the beef stock for salty water (and compensating for lost flavor by adding extra heat with some peppers) I ended up with some damn good chili. There are a couple small changes I'd make for the competition but overall I'm impressed with how well everything went.
Something a bit funny about using fake meat - normally I cook the meat first in a cast iron pan and use the drippings to flavor my veggies. But the oddly neutral scent to the uncooked Beyond meat prompted me to do things in reverse. I used my sautéd onions, peppers and garlic to infuse flavor into the fake meat.
I've found umami boosters like dried porcini and smoked paprika improve the flavor of vegan meat substitutes - there's a place for these in chili. Another thing - if you're serious about chili competition, use fresh spices as whole as possible, then pan-roast just until aromatic, and grind them together. Add your chili spice in three tranches - the first while sauteing ingredients, the second when everything goes into the pot to simmer, then the last just after removing the pot from the heat. Adjust salt and pepper heat to taste when it's at serving temperature.
This is actually what I did!
Thanks for the tips.
CW: sex and drugs and just general weirdness
I don't think I've ever truly lost concept of time until this last weekend. So many things happened with so little sleep. I went to a queer rave on Friday night and danced my heart out to the most technically amazing vinyl spinning skills I've ever seen in person by two insanely cute trans DJs from Chicago. At some point during this night my girlfriend met another trans DJ at the urinal and we got invited to some other event they were DJing the next night which turned out to be at a gay bath house.
The gay bath house was doing this gender fuck party thing (the first time) and we ended up meeting her and this enby performance artist who did this wild strip tease thing with dick nipples and milk. But not before we had some really eclectic and weird experiences such as the one point where I was giving my girlfriend a lap dance and she grabbed my hair and started choking me. Apparently this was because the gay dude who was sitting there was giving her some intense eye contact while masturbating and she wanted to attempt to fuck with him by playing with me and her gf who was right next to her while returning said eye contact. Anyhow, not much long after the performance we ended up back in the performance artists room doing ketamine and at some point during the night it was just like 7 trans girls including the DJ doing g and ketamine on a bed while the trans dudes are banging cis dudes in the corner... at one point the trans dudes just like started climbing into the rafters and one cis dude followed and there was like some sort of massage going on like in the rafters of a bath house on-top of this weird pillar of bodies that had all climbed to different heights to check out what was going on or just.. because?
It was by far just like more disorienting and surreal than anything but def a good time. Oh and then we decided to boof 2c-b on Monday for some reason back at the girlfriend's place. That part was pretty chill and way more normal (outside of boofing) than the rest.
lol that sounds crazy, ha I thought I had a crazy weekend doing blow every day all day.
That's nostalgic for me, but now I know I'm too old because I had to look up both a word and a drug nickname.
I'm guessing boof and g, was I close?
Boof (in my day, it was different slang) and 2c-b. Nice to see that PIHKAL remains a viable source of new and exciting ways to achieve liftoff.
TIHKAL as well
bless shulgin
Yesterday is still weekend, right? Right? (I'm a free lance. What is a Wednesday?)
For the last couple of days I've leant heavily into modding. To that end, I created a GitHub repo outlining my plans for the mod. I'm not one to make empty promises – or many promises at all until the thing itself is complete – but given that I'm absolutely confident in being able to close the roadmap, it's there in the open.
This would also be an excellent excuse for me to lead a Git-based project the way it's meant to be led: by applying incremental documented changes until the project is ready for another release.
I've also been breaking my depression streak on Sunday with a minor design side project. I'm using HTML, CSS, and a little JS to make a set of 2D cards stack into a sparse deck, so that (should this be a real project) one could still select a card from the deck – say, to play it on the virtual battlefield. It reminded me that I really, really like making cool stuff done. This little project isn't phenomenal, or ground-breaking, or able to supply me with cash for the rest of the year – but it's neat, experimental, and base-level cool.
Spouse and I drove out to the nearest big city for a couple of days of house components shopping. We got tired of browsing for furniture without being able to sit in anything, and tile colors just don't show well on a screen.
In case you weren't aware, it's possible to burn out neurons with cognitive overload from trying to choose backsplash tile. It's both a symptom of end-stage capitalism and excessive bourgeois taste that we must have looked at 1,000+ varieties of ceramic, porcelain, stone, metal, and glass tile in the space of 4 hours and three stops... I think my eyes came close to literally glazing over.
The only sovereign remedy for this is beer, and we were fortunate to find the most amazing place in a city well-known for the quality of its products. The food was terrific (real poutine!). Every beer among two sets of four-beer tasting samples was something which we both would happily drink again. That's never yet happened elsewhere.
So, sadder but wiser, and with two ergonomic chairs for our efforts, we're back home again.
I bought six Gold Dollar straight razors. I want to learn to hone razors, so I'm going to get them all in shave-ready shape, and send one to my dad. I managed to get four of them for $4 a piece, and spent a bit more on two on Amazon as controls.
Where did you get such a crazy deal? I’ve been thinking of moving from safety to straight, but I just haven’t taken the plunge.
Here's the Ebay listing
The same on Amazon, Gold Dollar 66. Here's more expensive Gold Dollar.
I'd even call the $9 on Amazon for the 66 worth it for the steel alone, assuming it's the right product. I'll find out shortly.
holy smokes. That's awesome! If it isn't great for shaving, I can still use it for my intense gang fights. :)
Thanks for this! I ordered the ebay one.
Good luck. If I get mine first, I'll message you and let you know what to expect.
I got an edge on the Amazon ones and had a great shave. If you don't have any stones, this was the set I used, but you could also get cheaper stones of the same grits (220/1k and 4k/8k) pretty cheap if you shop around, then just pay full price (~$30) for a Norton lapper to make sure you can level your stones. Unfortunately they'll be the expensive part.
I’ve got a decent stone — it’ll be the true test of my sharpening skill. I might teat it on my calf or something that isn’t my face (I’d hate to jeopardize my potential runway career.)
We hosted a Mardi gras party at our house! It was a lot of fun and everyone has a good time. I got blackout drunk it turns out though. But im okay!
So this weekend I was going to try to make substantial progress on reducing my computer footprint. Didn't make much progress since the other project took more time, but was totally worth it.
We planted our first round of seeds for our garden for the upcoming season. A proper indoor greenhouse was setup consisting of an IKEA shelf+cover, some full spectrum lights, and some heat pads. We had problems last year starting from seed, and this should solve most of the issues. Total cost was just shy of $100, and if it works well it could be slightly modified to facilitate growing warm weather crops indoors year-round. Added bonus, because it was cheaper to buy 6 lights in a pack than 3 individually, we can double our capacity later for ~$30 more.