Is there a particular cut of beef that’s ideal for this?

I agree with both your original comment and the edit, but especially the bit about cast iron. Neglecting mine for an extended period led to uneven patches of seasoning, but when I got round to giving it a proper scrub, it was like hitting a reset button. I’m going to try to be better at basic seasoning/maintenance this time, but the joy of cast iron is knowing that it’s super forgiving if you do mess it up.

Tangential to your edit: I enjoy being able to sharpen knives, but that’s mostly because I’m a nerd who has other tools I need to sharpen anyway, so I already have the stones. Something that I found striking though is that when I was learning how to sharpen knives, I asked if I could practice on various friends’ kitchen knives. Most of them were poor students, so I sharpened many cheap knives, and I was impressed by how well some of the cheaper ones performed compared once they were sharp. They held their edge for surprisingly long too.

I’m quite fond of my Wusthof chef’s knife, which was a bit of an indulgent treat for myself, but I am utterly baffled by the gear acquisition syndrome that so many seem to fall into. It’s not just that prospect of someone who barely cooks buying a $300 knife that perplexes me, but that so many of these people keep acquiring more knives. If they said that collecting knives was just their hobby, and that they were never intending to actually use them, then I’d shrug and say fair enough. That’s pretty rare though — the underlying implication that these people seem to operate under is that the fancy knives make you a better cook (and that the perfect knife will make good cooking into an effortless, joyful endeavour). It’s an odd culture that’s developed.

The thing about labels is that their usage depends on the particular context at time of use. I have a friend who is non binary, for example, but finds herself weary of explaining how someone can be femme presenting, use she/her pronouns, and be non binary. This means that when talking to people who aren’t LGBTQ, she finds “lesbian” is the most effective label to communicate, even though it’s a label she has largely outgrown the truth of. For some people, how they engage with identity labels is quite straightforward, and they present the same labels out to the entire world. For other people, more nuance is needed, and that’s okay too.

That is to say that if you read the above comment and thought “bi but with a type sounds like me, but I don’t want to call myself bi”, that’s fine. Labels like “bi” can help make oneself be more legible to the world at large, but you do not owe the world that. You are allowed to have complexity that doesn’t neatly fit into simple labels, and even if you did strongly identify with a label, you’re not obligated to divulge this freely.

What a cute floof

Oh, I love this one, it’s very silly. I find it oddly grounding when I discover that the cause of a problem was me being silly, because I’m already aware that I am prone to foolish errors (as all humans are); when I discover that an unfathomable computer error is actually my fault, it feels like everything is right with the world

I hadn’t considered this, so thanks for the info

When you get a moment, you could try switching over to the tty again, login to the shell, and then try typing in the command btop (which I think is the Bazzite specific version of the default “top” command, and should be installed by default). Top is basically a task manager, and you can see what programs are running (and taking up resources) right there in the terminal. If your system freezes up, you can often unfreeze it by killing the unresponsive programs. It’s probably useful to familiarise yourself with that interface before you need it.

This isn’t really relevant to your question at all, but you reminded me of a (male) friend who is a gynecologist and married to a woman. I expected that the professional context would nullify any potential arousal towards his patients, but what I was curious about was whether this might bleed over into his personal life — i.e. did he still find his partner’s vulva arousing, or does it put him into doctor-headspace. Apparently his profession causes no problems whatsoever in his sex life, because the compartmentalisation is so strong.

He said that it feels almost like conceptual homonyms. For example, in the sentence “up past the river bank is the bank where I deposited my money”, the word “bank” appears twice but means two very different things. Similarly, a vulva is a vulva no matter the context, but the meaning of it differs so much depending on the context that his brain literally doesn’t parse them as being the same.

Like I say, it’s not related to your question, but I thought you might find it cool nonetheless. I would expect that firefighters would show a similar ability to compartmentalise, but perhaps the high-stress context of smelling human flesh may cause it to work differently.

https://www.codingfont.com/ is a fun, tournament style quiz that compares different monospace fonts. It’s far from comprehensive, but I found it useful to gauge what font features I find stylish and readable

(For the record, my go-to font is Jetbrains Mono)

Echoing Jubilant Jaguar’s sentiment about defaults mattering, I think that sometimes an excess amount of choice can be overwhelming such that a user is less empowered to make choices about things they do care about (Leading to a less steep learning curve). Sensible defaults need not remove anyone’s choice

Adding the solution to your post is a classy move, and I approve

I dual boot Fedora and Arch. Fedora was just a fluke because it seemed like one of the most mainstream distros, and I was a Linux noob.

I liked Arch though because the Arch wiki is so useful for a beginner to learn from, even if you’re not on Arch. At first, Arch seemed too complex and difficult for me, as a beginner, but when I kept finding myself at the Arch wiki when troubleshooting, I realised how powerful good documentation is. I installed Arch with a “fixer-upper” type mindset, with the goal of using the greater power and customisability that Arch offers to build a config/setup that worked for me (learning all the while). It was a good challenge for someone who is mad, but not quite so mad as to dive into Gentoo or Linux From Scratch

Oh, she looks so thin, the poor girl! This image hurts my heart, but I’m glad to hear that she’s doing better

A friend who is (was?) a writer told me that it’s tremendously difficult to find work nowadays as a writer, and so much of what is available is just proof reading and copy editing AI slop. Apparently it’s pretty soul sucking, especially when they’re basically forbidden from doing any significant rewrites or error checking, and they’re expecting to be grateful for the opportunity

Damn, thanks for that link; earlier today I was telling a non techy friend about Unicode quirks earlier and I could vaguely remember that post, but not well enough to remember how to find it. I didn’t try very hard because it wasn’t a big deal, so the serendipity of finding it via your comment was neat.

This is going to be such a ridiculous disaster that it’d be entertaining to watch it go to shit — if it weren’t such a critical system they’re fucking with.

This abortion would have been illegal regardless of who performed the procedure due to Texas’ bans on abortion. In states like Texas, women have died when doctors have been confident of the medical necessity of an abortion, but unclear of their legal clearance. This isn’t a doctors vs midwives issue.

That’s probably who I’m remembering; I recently discovered his work.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. I’m from the UK, and whilst things are less politically dire here than the US, it’s still pretty grim. Both the Conservatives and Labour seem reluctant to actually meaningfully tax the rich, even as the working class (and to a lesser extent, the middle class) are being squeezed by a cost of living crisis and general hopelessness. Parties like Reform are taking the racist “things are bad because we have too many immigrants” and I’ve recently realised that I need to stop resenting people for being taken in by that rhetoric; people are desperate and there aren’t people in the mainstream pushing for alternatives (besides Reform). These people have a lot in common with me, such as recognising that we’re being fucked but the system, but we just disagree on the solution. It’s hard, but ultimately necessary to be able to be in solidarity with people like Reform’ voters

I can’t remember the particular phrase that was used, but I heard an argument recently that we need to be more like politicians going on an interview and ensure that we’re more on message. For example, it’s fairly obvious by now that economically, the problem is wealth inequality, but I see fairly surprisingly few people discussing that.