Pickles. They were too strong and sour for me. Now I love 'em.

I’ve started baking bread this year and it’s been fun.

The “hardest” part is deciding to make the dough at night before I go to bed so it can ferment overnight. But the next day, all I need to do is throw it in the oven for 45 minutes and bam, fresh bread.

I’m struggling to get the crust right, though. It tends to come out very chewy rather than crispy

That’s so neat; I’d never noticed that before. And the walls closing in on the stage adaptation is really clever

“12 Angry Men” (1957) is a personal favorite that I recommend to pretty much everyone. Great messages about questioning assumptions, challenging biases, understanding the limitations of evidence, acknowledging imperfections in the justice system, and the consequences thereof.

The movie is also cinematically interesting to me because it feels “small”. The entire movie just about takes place in one room, and the events of the film transpire over the course of one afternoon.

If you hadn’t specified “and other footware”, I would’ve found myself in “Eric and The Dread Gazebo” territory.

I found almond milk to be a great substitute a couple of years ago when I was dieting. Particularly the ‘unsweetened, vanilla’ variety from Almond Breeze.

As an added bonus, it also has a much longer shelf life than regular milk.

As others have pointed out, there’s a lot to hate about ads since the industry is routinely dishonest, insulting, obnoxious, deceptive, intrusive, and all manner of unpleasant. I’ve been adblocking religiously for most of my life for these reasons.

So I think a more interesting question might be the other way around: “What do you like about commercials?”

The only commercials I’ve ever liked are the ones for local small businesses. The ones with a nonexistent production budget that aren’t beating the viewer over the head with blatant lies or dishonest sales tactics.

Adult Swim used to have faux-ad bumpers for the fictional business “Strickland Propane” from King of the Hill, featuring the honest-to-a-fault character Hank Hill as the spokesman, which I felt captured that vibe well.

Rhett and Link also made a funny homage to these kinds of commercials in this classic skit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnOyMSEWNTs

Overall I think this is well written. I agree with @poVoq@slrpnk.net that the section on picking an instance could be improved, since which instance one picks can be rather important, since federation/defederation is dictated by individual instances.

And a minor typo I noticed:

leaving Mastodon out to try

I assume that should be “out to dry”.

I don’t watch a lot of creepy/spooky stuff, so my recommendations come from a fairly limited breadth. That said, I recommend a few things that many might lump under “kid movies” (I prefer the more accurate label “family entertainment”) since they tend to be perilous and unsettling without being outright violent, gory, or generally miserable.

Coraline (2009) - A young girl, dissatisfied with her home life after moving to a new town, stumbles upon a dark, parallel world. Therein, she finds solace in a parallel version of her mother who is not what she seems.

Paranorman (2012) - A young boy who can speak with the dead learns that a witch who was executed by the townspeople hundreds of years ago will soon return to seek vengeance upon them.

Over the Garden Wall (2014) - A mini-series focusing on two brothers who find themselves inexplicably lost in a forest teeming with fell beasts, witches, undead, and unlikely allies. I watch this one every year around this time. Cozy yet spooky at the same time.

Thanks a lot! I’ll look into the upgrades you mentioned and try my luck. Here’s hoping I can get it back up and running without too much work

Thanks a bunch; I’ll check out the PEI coated build plate.

I’ve contemplated getting the BLTouch probe for auto-leveling, but I don’t think bed leveling is the root of the issue; I’ve leveled the darn thing about a thousand times by now

Agreed on the Ender 3’s needing some tinkering. My wife got me the Ender 3 V2 a couple of years ago for Christmas and I like it a lot, but I spend more time troubleshooting it than actually printing stuff.

I like to tinker, but the Ender 3 V2 takes advantage of that fact.

Any recommendations on part upgrades? I’ve upgraded the nozzle and the extruder on mine (the stock, plastic extruder cracked badly last year and I replaced it with a full metal one), but it is still very unreliable. Prints are always failing due to adhesion issues even if I use aftermarket adhesives like MagiGoo on the build plate.

Guy seems like he has a bit of a chip on his shoulder (or maybe his character does?), but hey, congrats on the weight loss. That’s a hell of a transformation.

I happened across a thread on Lemmy recently that discussed the usefulness of certain extensions, and this “Don’t Bother” section of the Arkenfox wiki was linked:

https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/4.1-Extensions#-dont-bother

A lot of conventionally useful extensions like Privacy Badger, HTTPS Everywhere, Decentraleyes/LocalCDN, etc are apparently not necessary (at least in Firefox) if you have certain browser preferences selected, like Strict Mode/Total Cookie Protection.

I felt outdated cause I still run Privacy Badger and Decentraleyes in my Firefox environments, but it was nice to see that a lot of these “extra” features that used to require extensions are now options built into the browser (or Firefox, at least).

let’s be real, youtube is a big waste of time

I see people say this a lot, especially on the fediverse, and it makes me wonder why people think youtube is a “waste of time” when youtube’s uses are what the user makes of it.

I primarily use youtube for learning things. There are so many thousands of hours of useful, educational content on youtube that I find the suggestion that the entire platform is useless clickbait to be reductive and disingenuous.

Sure, there are channels I watch for typical mind-numbing content like Let’s Plays and such, but I wouldn’t suggest that youtube is wholly a waste of time just because there’s plenty of mindless content on it.

Just like Reddit or Lemmy, I can create an account and subscribe to a bunch of dumb shitposting communities, but I can also subscribe to a bunch of interesting hobbyist/intrigue communities.

Lots of people work on weekends.