ohai, a fellow bacon maker!

i make 3 sides at a time and freeze the lot in vacuum sealed bags, about a pound or pound and a half in each. i leave them unsliced and cut what i need as i need it, resealing the vacuum bag each time.

my recipe is:

per pork belly:

• 186g brown sugar
• 9g black pepper
• 78g kosher salt
• 16g apple spice rub
• 32g curing salt

getting even slices is a pain so i actually cut the belly in half length wise prior to curing for a week. i find it much easier to get uniform, super thick cut slices that way. 3 sides is enough to get my and my extended family’s households through most of a year!

this is the last batch i made, before settling on cutting it in half down the middle. applewood smoked

Sure, if that makes sense for you go for it. To me, 60$ a year is a single pizza delivery, so it seems foolish for me to worry too much about it when it’s something I need consistent use of throughout the day, every day. I find a good search engine way more essential than a tv streaming service, so it really is a no brainer for me.

They were working toward adding some billing flavors like that but it’s unclear if it was like a prepaid cellphone or just a “for a sub you get X minutes a month” kinda deal (continuing the analogy). I’m grandfathered into the infinite searches that I’ve never used all that much of so I haven’t really paid any serious attention to it, just kinda peripherally somewhat-aware :)

I don’t think you can have a search engine that indexes the entire internet without monetization some direction: either as a set of eyeballs for an advertisement engine masquerading as a web search index, or as a subscriber. So, don’t be surprised they ask for money dollars! It’s ok if the maths don’t add up for you, though. For me, it’s nice being able to pay for something I use and know that that is the explicit relationship we have. I get pissy when it’s suggested as free but the cost is my attention, but maybe you don’t work that way and that’s ok too :D

Big fan of Kagi, though Bing chat is unironically very good for most of my needs.

Google has been worse than Bing for most of the last two years, but Kagi was working better for me than either for the last year. Bing chat is a whole different animal, though.

A few years ago it turned out a very promising python documentation library was using another library for a core aspect of the docstring comment parsing subsystem. I don’t remember the names of either of these two, but as it turns out, the person who wrote the docstring comment parsing subsystem was someone who liked using the Nazi-Facing-Swastika as his repeating background image on his site and as textual glyphs to denote things like list items. He claimed it was everyone being too stupid to know he was using it in an eastern context, but he had an email like firstname_lastname88@gmail or whatever.

The point I made then is that even if FirstName LastName was running into a culture-shock situation, and even if they just happened to like the number 88 - or maybe they were born in 88 - there was simply no way I wanted to tie myself or my employer to that person. Nobody is going to extend any grace.

I guess I don’t even think that is necessarily a bad thing. Why should people stanning genocidal authoritarian regimes be extended grace? Is it only okay if they can give us something, like a nazi scientist building space rockets? Is it simply because they gave you something you can’t get anywhere else without paying more than you’d want to? I actually don’t have an answer for this. I felt fine telling PossibleNazi88 No, and AccidentallyLinkedCompositionalLibraryAuthor Sorry, I'll pass, and in large part that is because Sphinx does exist and I can use it, even if I’d prefer not to. But what if this library were the only one? Would I just hold my nose and use it anyway?

Same with Lemmy - can I get it in a different package? A similar fediverse community package, without the gross genocide cooties all over it? This is a practical question; maybe this is reason enough to want to host a kbin instance over lemmy, eventually.

But philosophically: What if the next fediverse community package is from a Patriotic American, who has no problem with all the first peoples genocides and chattel slavery history because they believe in America so much that it’s an intrinsic part of their identity?

It sucks because I want to make everything better, and I believe that to be true of Beehaw administration for sure as well, but navigating this shit is hard and even if you’re principled you’re probably only principled insofar as you’re aware.

Conversely, doing the thing you know to be wrong just because the alternative is hard and maybe impossible isn’t good either. But maybe you can use the genocide-fan’s product to do more good than harm? But now you’re back to nazi scientists making moon rockets, and nobody is happy.

I guess I’m just rambling while I admire the problem.

It feels so surreal to watch this train wreck in real time. This is a chief executive officer?

I guess the other option is only half-murder all the trans people, but yeah; these compromise-always people need to take a second and actually THINK about what they’re asking us to compromise on. They sound incredibly foolish and disconnected.

Hi! I’m 40m with:

• Major depressive disorder, recurrent, in partial remission
• Post-traumatic stress disorder, chronic
• Autistic disorder

The first one I’ve known about and fought, to varying degrees of success, throughout most of adulthood. Sometimes I’m fine; content, motivated, unmedicated, truckin’ along living my best life, and other times I need to ask for help. Luckily my depressive disorder manifests as a lack of executive function and disinterest in everything, so I haven’t had any struggles with self harm or ideation.

The last few years of therapy - I thought primarily only for depression - have made me realize just how much PTSD I had from growing up. I had an awful home life as a child with two parents in way over their head, way too young, and without any good healthy coping strategies of their own. I learned to survive by:

• be afraid of everything all the time
• never ask for help
• never indicate blame
• never suggest any failings in anyone other than self
• make everyone laugh as much as possible; if they think you’re funny, they are less likely to hurt you when they’re angry
• be aware of every movement and emotion people are feeling at all times, no matter what
• be afraid. don’t forget that part.
• oh, and it’s vitally important you never, ever let people know you’re afraid, because that makes them feel bad and they’ll react by justifying your fear

So when I found out I was a high functioning autistic - it finally made everything I was feeling and trying to do throughout my entire life snap into place. I must have known that at some level I had to work 10x harder than someone without my challenges to read people. It was critical that I read people correctly at all times, and any failure could end in disaster. I was exhausted all the time around other people, because I had to be at the absolute top of my game, all of the time, or else. I use italics there because the reality is that was only true for a very small subset of two people, but what you know cerebrally and what you know in your lizard brain are two very different things.

I’ll be untangling this mess for the foreseeable future, but I’m finally starting to extend myself grace and dabbling in some exposure therapy; simple things like “I’m sorry, this isn’t what I ordered” are now possible, albeit hard.

My own experience in life makes it reek a lot like mental health issues in those who are antinatalists.

I mean, is that not a good enough reason not to have kids?

Assertions I’d like to make, in no specific order:

• Yes, my retirement might not even happen because of falling birthrates.
• We live in a world of finite resources and an imperfect method of distributing them.
• It’s only going to get worse, especially with climate change.
• If we don’t have a population contraction voluntarily now, eventually we’re going to have one involuntarily later, as people turn to force.
• Wars over constrained resources are an end in and of themselves. It doesn’t even matter if you gain control of other resources; if you win, you get more resources to buy your people a little more time. If you lose, you got rid of a lot of people who need and want things.

These problems are all solvable. These problems are also not plausibly going to be solved, as those who have will do their level best to turn away from those who have not. We have literal centuries of evidence neatly showcasing just how selfish our systems are, and how resilient to change they are.

You can absolutely have as many kids as you want. I personally think it’s myopic, as you’re forcing someone else to deal with these problems and you didn’t even give them an option - and by the time they’re old enough to understand the magnitude of the problem, they’re in too deep to get out. It just screams of selfishness and duplicity to me. But, I mean, I’m still friends with omnivores - hell, I’m one myself - being selfish and inconsistent is kinda fundamentally what humans are, so it’s not like my shit doesn’t stink too.

Edit: I should also note that the one reason I allow myself to eat animal products is because I’ve said “well, I’m not having kids, so I’m just a temporary problem, not an ongoing one”