u/EthosUnharvestedClay

Hello! I've been trying a range of different teas lately and while I adore lapsang souchong, I find that I don't really enjoy the other varieties of black tea that I've sampled.

Granted, I've only had straight black tea, Earl Grey and puerh (the puerh was by far the nicest), which isn't really a good selection to judge, but I think I prefer teas like lapsang souchong over anything else.

The only one I've really come across that sounds similar is Russian caravan, but I'm terrible with describing tastes/flavours and have no idea if it's actually meant to be like lapsang souchong or not.

Any recommendations would be wonderful! I know there are a ton of black tea varieties out there and I don't want to write all of them off just yet as I feel like that'd be very unfair.

Thanks in advance :)

EDIT: Thank you so much for all the recs! I'll be making a list of them all and looking up which ones I can buy that ship to NZ for those that catch my eye. Really appreciate it!

Hello! My friend got married recently (just a private ceremony, I was told afterwards which I have zero issue with) and I would like to get her a card. I plan on writing it mostly in English, but I want to include a little bit of Spanish because I know that would mean a lot to her.

How would you congratulate a friend (female) on their marriage in a semi-casual way? Something that mentions God would be appreciated too, since she's quite religious, but I don't know if there are any common phrases used that are appropriate.

I'm not sure exactly how regional Latin American Spanish is which is why I specified she's Colombian in the title.

Thanks in advance! :)

I want to have a template with a title property field that automatically fetches said title from the filename.

So, for example, if I have a file named File 1.md, I would like to use something like {{title}} and have it automatically fill the field to also be File 1.md.

https://preview.redd.it/k3982enrnpgh1.png?width=264&format=png&auto=webp&s=189a479f8f9c593fc1d332d7f9c57308f6df2d26

This is currently what I have and it isn't working, but I have no idea what I'm doing. Any help is appreciated!

Tried lapsang souchong that I bought from t leaf T (a New Zealand company) for the first time today. I'm not very familiar with black tea and have only had very cheap teabags before (which I did not like at all) so I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this!

I wasn't sure if I'd like it based on the smokey smell but it didn't taste anything like how it smelt and I'll definitely be ordering more once I've worked my way through the sample pouch I have.

I may be new to tea but I can tell this is some good stuff and I absolutely understand why I've seen such high praise for it! 10/10 do recommend.

No photos because I don't have a proper setup or anything and I honestly forgot to take one, oops.

One of my favourites out of the several samples I bought! (The others being silver needle and kukicha, but honestly none of them were bad)

At the end of Doc's most recent episode he talks about how he's seen people in the subreddit say that new viewers wouldn't enjoy his content and be put off by the complicated redstone.

While I'm sure this is true for some people, as someone who knows absolutely nothing about redstone at all, I find Doc's stuff entertaining! Sure, I don't always understand his complicated farms, but I also don't understand Mumbo when he's talking about redstone, either. To me it's about their personalities and everything else in their videos that I enjoy.

I saw a YouTube commenter make a joke about how Scar's tricked Doc into roleplaying Star Wars with him and I think that's what I like about Doc. He may jokingly complain, but if other people will be happy if he does a certain thing, he'll do it. He engaged in Star Wars stuff with Scar, to the point of having a light saber made for him, and he gave in to the Elsa persona because Doccy saw him as Elsa, and then even wore an Elsa dress to a convention.

He puts a lot of effort into his builds and projects and from my perspective as a fan, he comes across as someone who wants the people around him to be having a good time, hence the kinds of "mini"games he makes as well.

I understand why people may not vibe with his sense of humour or don't have time to watch his longer videos (and I know I won't change anyone's opinion of him), but he's been one of my highlights of season 11 so far and since he mentioned he regularly reads the subreddit, I wanted to say something positive about Doc because imo he deserves more recognition for his videos and his contributions to the server :)

(PS Sorry mods if this somehow isn't allowed! I wanted to make a post given him bringing things up in his latest episode. Feel free to remove if it breaks any rules)

EDIT: Wasn't expecting anyone to pay attention to this post! Glad others feel similar to me, and I do get that Doc is a bit hard to recommend but the example he gave in his video was that the user was asking for Hermits who focused on redstone and hardly anyone recommended him. I can see why that would be a bit frustrating to him when it's his entire Thing! (He didn't come across as whinging about it, just making an observation and was commenting on how he thought people shouldn't be scared to rec his channel. Or at least that's how I took it. I'm not Doc, I could be wrong of course)

I mostly listen to Japanese music, with a bit of Korean, Chinese, Thai and Indonesian here and there. I'm currently trying to organise all the songs I've downloaded over the past 20+ years, which is... about 280,000 -- granted, a lot of those are duplicates, because I've gone and downloaded higher quality versions of things in more recent times, and when I started out, having 128k mp3 files was seen as perfectly fine by the general public.

Now. Trying to find those duplicates is a nightmare with Japanese music, because some things you download are tagged with Romanised tags, while others keep the original Japanese tags. Sometimes it's a mix of both and sometimes the Romanised tags are completely wrong. Sometimes things aren't tagged at all, although this happens regardless of language.

And sometimes, the encoding gets messed up and displays gibberish instead of Japanese. With some songs it persists across music players but with others it doesn't (as in, it'll display fine in Music Player A but be gibberish in Music Player B). Which isn't an issue with the music player not displaying Japanese itself, as I have fonts installed and always change the software's font to match if I need to (because otherwise it sometimes displays as Chinese characters instead, which are different in a subtle but noticeable way to the point that it's annoying to me).

The other issue is that I like listening to pretty unknown Japanese artists, or anime songs where the tags are all over the place, and this means that quite a bit of my library isn't on Discogs of MusicBrainz for me to cross-reference. What I have to do quite a bit is go to the site I downloaded it from, find my download history, search for whatever little info I have (album title or artist name usually) and then look up the artist in Japanese. With luck they have a Japanese Wikipedia article I can find the Japanese album title on, and sometimes the album does have its own page. But I've had some trouble with the most obscure stuff. I'm very lucky that I know enough Japanese to navigate this, otherwise I would've given up and left things as-is... but I can't do that lol, I need things to be tagged properly.

Also, because I have a laptop that isn't very powerful, I'm having to listen to things bit by bit. Currently I have 72,000 songs logged in my music player, with the others on an external harddrive. Which means I'm probably missing a bunch of duplicate files and will listen to some songs twice without realising it.

My current plan is to delete songs I don't like (look, you have to make sacrifices when external harddrives are overpriced) and keep the ones I do like but move them to a different folder where I know I've listened to them (they still maintain their Album Artist/Album folder structure, at least).

I'll get there at some point, but I'm annoyed that I can't properly optimise my time listening to music because I can't easily locate duplicates. And then if I spend my time looking for duplicates I can't spend it listening to music (my brain isn't good at multitasking)...

Ah well. Part of it's still fun, because organisation is fun to me in general. I just wish trying to have Japanese music tagged correctly and uniformly wasn't such a pain!

(PS Hopefully this kind of rant is okay on this sub, I lurk here but felt tempted to ramble a bit about it. I'm sure someone out there has had a similar experience, even if it's not with Japanese music specifically)

Hello! I've been lurking for a while and this subreddit is making me keen to try more teas. The problem is that I'm very sensitive to caffeine and I need to be careful with it.

I love houjicha, and I know it's one of the least caffeinated teas out there, but what others do people recommend? I've mostly tried green teas over the years, as well as barley tea (which wasn't to my liking) and some tisanes (peppermint is my current favourite but I've found a really nice lemon balm & lavender one recently too).

I'm open to trying anything, including more tisanes. As long as it has no or little caffeine I'm good 🙂 I'm a complete noob so any info is appreciated as well.

(I plan on buying a proper tea infuser soon. We have a small one that does its job (I've tried it on loose leaf rose hip & hibiscus tea and it was definitely strong enough in terms of flavour) but I've read it's better to have something bigger/wider. For the most part I use tea bags but I find loose leaf fascinating and am not opposed to that!)

Thanks in advance for any ideas! I wish I could be more adventurous but oh well, at least I can still enjoy tisanes and low caffeine teas if nothing else so I can't really complain.

Lately I've started joining more animal subreddits. I tend to stay away from the main ones and I don't look at anything cat related because the RIP posts upset me too much.

But the ones of slightly more niche animals (ie ones that aren't cats or dogs) have been amazing. As someone who lives in a country that doesn't really allow exotic pets I've been having a lot of fun admiring cute/cool animals from around the world 🥰

This isn't an exhaustive list, but these are some of the highlights:

• r/RATS
• r/snails
• r/snakes and r/ballpython
• r/Cows
• r/jumpingspiders (yes I'm serious, they're super cute)
• r/sheep
• r/birding
• r/NewZealandWildlife (local wildlife shoutout)
• r/Rabbits
• r/stupiddovenests

Much better than being bombarded with politics and infighting! Obviously there are still posts about animal death on most of these but I still really enjoy learning about all of these different animals and the love people have for them.

I don't have a lot of the common issues like low calcium or hearing loss. But that's compensated with having a complex heart condition that's so rare it's never listed on any basic symptom list and I've only ever seen it in full lists of the ~200 possible symptoms. Also, ironically, I have super sensitive hearing.

I was the first person to be diagnosed with 22q (Deletion) in my country in the mid 90s, back when it was called VCFS. My parents had to fight the geneticist for the test. A few years ago I decided I should get the newer test done just to confirm things and yep I definitely have the standard microdeletion.

My entire life has been dealing with medical issues. For a long time it was my heart -- I've had two open heart surgeries, the last when I was 12. I had surgery to repair severe scoliosis when I was 14.

I've also dealt with autism, GERD, insomnia, iron deficiency, depression, sensory issues, suspected IBS, and a whole lot of other things. Including people not taking my health issues seriously.

Nobody understands this syndrome or how it works. Research is very new and back when I was diagnosed it was hard for my parents to find information on it. Nowadays there are multiple organisations devoted to the syndrome.

However, in recent years, I've finally gotten a lot of my bigger health issues sorted out. Turns out most of my problems with fatigue and discomfort, along with brain fog and shortness of breath, were because of the low iron levels. Which I've had my entire life. But a doctor finally suggested that I get an iron infusion and it's worked wonders. Six months later I can actually DO THINGS. Life doesn't feel nearly as overwhelming anymore. I don't get achy just sitting on the sofa for more than 30 minutes. No, the shortness of breath wasn't my heart condition or compromised lungs. It was the goddamn iron.

And my chronic insomnia was fixed by another doctor suggesting medication that actually worked for me. Everyone's been scared to put me on sleeping pills because of my heart but I really should've been on these forever ago.

For a long time I hated living and found getting through the day to be exhausting at the best of times. School got so bad that I quit in my last year.

I'm in my early 30s now. For the first time in my life, I can say that my health is stable. I haven't magically been fixed or anything and things are still hard at times. I'm still physically disabled. I'm still autistic and I still struggle with depression. But I'm able to help around the house now. I can take care of myself a bit more.

All of this to say: For anyone struggling to navigate this syndrome, whether you also have it, or you know someone who does, or you're a family member... Please don't give up. It's hard. Some people have it a lot worse than I do. In many ways, I got lucky, but in others, not so much.

People don't know what medical advice to give because everyone's different. Nobody really knows how this syndrome works, despite our understanding of it on a genetic level. Society has no idea what to do with those of us who have complex medical conditions.

But it's SO much better for us than it was when I was diagnosed 30 years ago. Long-term research actually exists. Studies are being done. There's (in some places) better access to healthcare and more knowledge about what medications work.

A few days after I was born, a doctor realised I had a heart condition. After it was diagnosed, my parents were given grief therapy as the experts in my country thought I would live for only a year. Then once I got past that year and had a thoracotomy at the age of 2, their estimate became 10 years.

Once I reached 10, they didn't know any more. The heart surgery I had when I was 5 was extremely risky. Over 50% mortality rate. The repairs I had done when I was 12 were significantly less risky, but still a major risk and I still could've died.

Here I am, 20 years later, and my heart is doing perfectly fine (well, as fine as it'll ever be). My cardiologists have no idea how I've made it 20 years without needing more repair work, but I have. And it's still holding up.

If I'm still around, despite all the setbacks in my life, then that says something. The world may be scary right now (trust me, I'm unsettled by everything going on too), but in my opinion we're all alive because we're too stubborn to let the universe rob us of our existence. So keep on being stubborn and keep on living.

I'm positive that one day, there will be more knowledge about 22q and similar syndromes. And I am determined to be around for that future.

Please love yourselves. Please enjoy the things in life that make you happy as much as you can. Please take care of your health where that's possible. It's okay to struggle. It's okay to resent being born with this stupid syndrome. You don't have to be proud of it or want to show it off -- just know that it doesn't make you any less of a person. It makes you you.

I may not be able to help most of you out there. But I hope that, by talking about my own experience, I can reassure somebody that things can get better. It's taken me 32 years to get to this point, so it doesn't happen overnight. But it's possible, and I want people to know that.

I wish everyone reading this peace, safety, good health and happiness <3

This year I've decided to be more visible in little ways (having badges on my purse and wearing a bracelet etc of my identities) and I also wanted to make the effort to go to my smallish town's Pride event.

I've never been to one before. It was really reassuring seeing just how diverse this place is. This town has a reputation for being very redneck and very conservative so it's good knowing that I'm not the only person here who thinks others shouldn't be judged for their identity.

I bought a few things, like stickers, a couple more badges, some jellybeans in the asexual flag colours (they're delicious btw), an earwarmer bandana thing, and a couple of other knickknacks.

Someone was there with art deco stuff doing bedazzling and braided my hair and put some little gem stickers in it which was fun.

They had a ton of booths and lots of different things for sale so it was good seeing the variety. I'd say there were a couple of hundred people there and I went early on.

I dragged my mum along (she's an ally but wouldn't go to something like this by herself) and she said she enjoyed it too.

I'm glad I made the effort and I'll definitely try and go again next year! I wish I could handle the bigger events and parades and such but this is as much as I can cope with. Still, it's a lot of fun and I'm pleased that I was able to support local LGBTQ+ vendors and interact with people who are under the same wonderful umbrella as me <3