u/Cymbal_Monkey

This is maybe old news but I don't think it was well publicized. For the uninitiated, Henry Darger was a janitor who grew up in an institution for "feeble minded children", but in his adult life he quietly produced a vast, sprawling epic novel, over 15,000 pages long, and many vast accompanying paintings. These works were only discovered shortly before his death, when he moved from his small apartment into a charity nursing home.

I've been interested in Darger's work for a long time but the majority of his novel has been inaccessible until relatively recently.

I'm not some "america bad" guy the likes of which /r/iamveryculinary makes fun of. I've been an American beer, wine, cheese, etc defender for a long time. A big believer that there're artisans making high quality products in this country, and you need only look for them.

I live in the biggest apple growing region in the US, and I cannot for love nor money find a decent domestic cider.

So I went to university in South West England, and there I developed a taste for that fragrant, brute dry, funky cider. Proper scrumpy on a hot day is to die for. I've found great cider in France as well.

When I would walk into a Devonshire pub, I'd ask for medium dry cider. When I look for cider here, I ask for "exceptionally dry", and it's still very medium for the most part. I have found some "hyperdrys" which are actually medium dry, but they lack that funk, and complex aroma. It's just very flat, somewhat sour, and lacking in that brute like aroma and depth.

Is this a process issue? Can we not grow the right apples here? I'd kill for a good American cider because I'm tired of paying 9 bucks a bottle for imported Aspall.

I notice this in media I watch (most recently Parks and Rec, I know I'm late to the party) and people I know who are having kids.

I don't think I've ever honestly heard people discuss having children in a way that frames the *actual human being that is going to get thrust into the world* as a significant stakeholder in the decision to reproduce. It's always about the parents desire to raise something, to feel a connection to their parents by becoming parents themselves, to fulfill a perceived expectation.

It's just so strange to me that the being most profoundly affected by the choice to reproduce, the actual person who will have to live and struggle and strive and live and die for 80 odd years is always an afterthought.

It's often bemoaned that relatively few rapists actually get convinced, it's a constant gripe and a top line feminist issue.

Yet for all of the frustration, I see relatively little in terms of realistic policy suggestions for how a better legal framework to tackle this could be created. Sometimes it feels like the options are either put our hands up and say there's no great way to actually handle crimes when the only real deciding factor is whose word you believe, or just do away with presumption of innocence.

It's easy to look at this dichotomy and just feel hopeless and nihilistic about the whole thing, but maybe actual legal minds are developing real policy ideas?

I'm not against RNG maps and things like that, but the Rougelikes I've played have always left me sour.

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I'll use Hades as my primary example, which I enjoyed at first and got more and more annoyed with as I began to understand the boon synergies and appreciate just how dramatically the god-draws impacted my runs. I would start suiciding just to get a reroll when I realized I'd drawn a bad set of gods. I also quickly grew sick of what felt like minimal actual variance in maps and enemies.

Nothing frustrates me faster in a game than feeling like my success or failure is almost completely dependent on dice rolls.

My best friend is currently dating a very bisexual (cis)woman who has a long history of collecting trans girls. She's made a lot of really creepy comments about trans girls and I have zero hesitation in calling her a chaser. She very clearly sees trans girls as playthings.

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My best friend has very low self esteem and is very clearly absolutely whipped by this woman. She got him involved in her broader polycule of mostly trans girls, a couple of which shamed and humiliated him for "not cracking yet". He actually did put his foot down here and say those comments were not cool and distanced himself from these women.

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Because of his girlfriend's pressure, he did reconcile with the people who were humiliating him for not transitioning, meaning he's back in the pressurecooker with them. This girlfriend also keeps using female pronouns (he has not asked for this and while he doesn't object he says it makes him feel a little weird because he's not asked for this), telling him he "fucks like a trans girl", and generally just keeps trying to push him in that direction. I believe she does so because she's into the idea of him being trans.

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Now where this gets complicated is... What if he is? He might be. I don't think he is but I can't rule that out. But clearly he's also got pressure to become trans from multiple directions, most notably a woman who he'd clearly basically do anything for. This is so difficult to navigate. I don't want to sit idly by while he destroys himself to become what his girlfriend wants, but I also want to be supportive if this is coming from an authentic place.

Hes a rich TV star and has lots of money and never needs to work again and does lots of drugs and drink what reason does he have to be sad ??

I go into a Dell dock with my g502 and keyboard dongles plugged in. Zero issue with my keyboard but the mouse is dead. I've confirmed the mouse works with my PC, plugged into the same dock. Any fixes?

I've seen loads of spice racks but they're invariably way too small. Those tiny supermarket vials are impractical when you go through cumin and coriander in the quantities that I do. I buy those things by the pound! But there's others like fenugreek, white pepper, or korarima that I go through much more slowly, so the solution is obviously a mix of sizes. I'd like things that are stackable, easy to get a spoon into, and air and light resistant, so probably tins of some sort.

I'm curious what folks are using around here, I'm sure there's people who are hardcore about organization and I aspire to be someday.

My old Isomac Tea, which has given about 25 years good service, has a cracked heat exchanger, and I can't find a replacement part.

I am handy and love a project, and a Gaggimate or Gagguino seem like very tempting roads to go down. My hesitation is that I mostly make cappuccinos, and the single boiler system seems like a pain after I've gotten so used to a heat exchanger. I'm not making a lot of back to back coffees, but being able to pull a shot and then get right into steaming is nice.

I also wish it had a rotary pump so it wasn't so damn loud.

The Gaggimate seems like a budget way to get a lot of high end features and I love that spares are so easily had, but it also feels like it locks me into some annoying compromises like the vibe pump and single boiler.

Thoughts? Alternatives? Suggestions? I put 2k because I'm not really sure where the sweet spot is, but I'd like to keep the spend down. I love how much machine you get hack into a Gaggia for under 1k, but I'd be willing to go over that if the value proposition feels right.

This was my first Octavia Butler exposure, and I'm posting this in the hope that someone has a dramatically different read on this series than I did, but the way I read it, found the series shockingly repugnant. So if you love this series, and think I've absolutely missed the core themes at play here, please let me know, because I would *love* a totally different perspective on this series.

First the good:

Butler has a real talent for dialogue. Her writing is dialogue heavy and I always enjoy this kind of storytelling, and her dialogue really hits for me. The characters feel alive and full of personality.

This book as some of my favorite aliens. I love creative aliens and Butler knocks it out of the park with the Oankali. They really feel alien, from their unique reproductive methods to their strange but robust systems of ethics. 9/10 aliens.

Now the bad:

The bad is literally all of the thematic content of the books.

When I finished part 1, I felt a little conflicted about it. The aliens are not... malicious, but they do completely strip humanity of autonomy, and many humans are understandably angry about this. The whole thing has a very "white-man's burden" sorta feel to it, the aliens see themselves as saving humanity from itself, and that the protestations of humanity are basically the irrational screams of violent apes being dragged out of the darkness by saviors they're too small minded to understand. What rubbed me the wrong way by the end of Dawn is that Butler doesn't seem to push back on this at all. She presents humans as the violent, irrational, cruel, monsters the Oankali see them as. I kept waiting for the "yes, humanity has these deeply embedded problems but there's something beautiful here that is worth preserving", but that never comes. There is nothing beautiful worth preserving, humans resisting the Oankali are primitive morons.

But hey I solder on into book 2, "Adulthood Rites", thinking maybe she'll push back on the Oankali's interpretation of humanity a little bit, and show that for all their brilliance, advanced technology, and wisdom, there's something about humanity that they can't see or understand that they're going to destroy forever. Instead we get a story about a young Oankali/Human hybrid who is permanently compromised after being kidnapped by a resistor village and raised among humans who becomes a sympathizer for some reason. He then pleads with the other Oankali to create a colony on Mars for purebred humans to have another go at not wiping themselves out. The other Oankali agree to this but tell our protagonist that this is cruelty, because it's inevitable that the Mars colony will wipe itself out again because of the fundamental nature of humanity. We're given absolutely no reason to believe they're not 100% correct in their assessment. I can't help think about the North American reservation system, where the natives are forced off their land to barren chunks of the continent, but Adulthood Rites absolutely sides with colonial forces here and basically says "wow shit's really going to suck for those who don't assimilate and have to go live Mars. They're going to fail because they're such savages, honestly would be kinder to just kill them."

Then we get to the last book, Imago, which I am *so desperate" to see some kind of shift in tone on, some kind of pushback on the Oankali. Instead we get a couple Oankali/human hybrids who are physically dependent on human mates for survival and use custom crafted pheromone to make humans fall in love with them and break down the resistance of the last stronghold of un-modified humans on earth so they can be create a new community for the next population of hybrids. This is treated as a good and optimistic thing.

So I went into this specifically because I was reading a lot of scifi written by white men, and Butler is one of the genre titans, so I thought "I really should read some Butler for a fresh perspective."

I was just shocked to find a trilogy of colonialism apologetics. I thought at first she was just failing to really sell the idea that humanity un-changed by aliens was worth perserving, like she thought that idea was just didn't need defending at all while also painting a picture of humanity so bleak and depraved that she seemed to be fighting against her own themes. As the series went on, I stopped thinking she did think that this was worth perserving, that actually she really did think that the only hope for societies would be to be forcibly dragged into enlightenment by more powerful and advanced outsiders.

My wife is almost certainly going to have to move away, and there's no geopolitical reasons I can't go with her. We live in Seattle, she'd move to the midwest. I could probably get a job in the midwest.

Edit for additional context: She's just gotten an amazing job offer out there, and she absolutely hates her current job and hasn't been able to find anything in our area after job hunting pretty hard for about a year now. She'll never get a raise and she's deeply unhappy where she's at, the job in the midwest would be a huge raise and hopefully for her a job she actually enjoys and has some upward mobility in.

But what doesn't exist in the midwest is rock climbing. Rock climbing is literally the reason I moved to the PNW. It's the reason I'm no longer obese. It's the thing that inspires me to eat well, work out, earn a living. I spent almost every weekend on the rocks except in the winter when it's too wet. Then I go snowboarding, which also doesn't exist in the Midwest.

Going with her means I lose the thing that keeps me in shape, and keeps my mental health up.

Not going with her means I don't get to spend my days with her, hardly ever get to touch her (we're both extremely tactile), and have no sex life.

Both of these options are just awful. Either I lose the love of my life or I lose my love *for* life itself.

Is there a way to make long distance not completely awful? Is there a version of this that isn't so bleak? I feel like my life finally became tolerable about four years ago and now I'm going to get half of that formula torn away.

I'm handy with tools and soldering irons and this won't be my first time working on speakers, but I've never done car audio or whole system design before.

I am shocked by how marginal the ioniq 5's sound system is. Honestly the 2007 JBLs in my old Prius sound leages better. I'm ready to get in there and start swapping parts.

I'm interested in a fairy flat, hifi sound. Subbass is nice, but I'm not dedicating a bunch of cargo space to a huge sub cabinet. I want quality, clarity, and resolution at moderate volumes. No bone rattling systems needed here.

Can anyone help point me in the right direction here?