c/Superbowl

For all your owl related needs!

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Lemon does sound like it’d be a lot of sour in addition to the vinegar itself.

    I used powdered ginger and thought fresh grated would be the way to go. I also feel it’d be easier to strain it if the final drink.

    Overall I thought it was good though. I gave some to my girlfriend not telling her what it was and she thought it was some vile beer type thing that went bad. 😆

    I’d absolutely drink it again though. With some tweaks it’d be really good. I am solidly pro switchel.


  • I think I had watched his switchel and shrub videos too!

    I want to say it was Alton Brown where I first learned about these. I’ve made shrub a few times and even had it at the local Pennsylvania German heritage fairs.

    Since I had the stuff on hand, I quick threw some together, just eyeballing the ingredients. It’s pretty darn good!

    Main flavor is obviously molasses, so if you don’t like that, you won’t like switchel. The ginger and vinegar work together very nicely! Both bring a nice zing and brightness to the drink. It contrasts well with the warm and earthy flavor of the molasses.

    I put most of it in the fridge for after work as it’s going to be a super hot day again and I didn’t want a vinegar taste in my mouth overpowering my coffee.

    If you have the stuff, I absolutely recommend it.




  • This is the closest answer to what I’d agree with. It’s a shame the other top comment turned into something of a squabble, because I agree with a lot of what was said there as well.

    Investing always comes with some risk. Buying land or a house is typically considered a safe investment in most of the world. But that house/land can undergo a natural disaster and be ruined. Putting money into anything not insured (FDIC in the US, for example) carries a non-zero percentage of risk.

    At what point does that risk cross over into gambling? I’d say when you exceed your personal risk assessment level. I have what is typically considered a higher risk portfolio. I am in my 40’s, 90+ % invested in stocks, with a definite tilt to growth stocks. I have been in that same position since I started investing at 16 in a Roth IRA. I’ve been through a few financial crisis periods and have always held firm to my belief that in my investing timeframe that my strategy is sound. Never sweated it for a second, even when my balance was small, so as it went negative before I could afford to actively contribute much to building my balance. Now I am very solid into 6 figures, and I only earn average for my state, which is 58k, but that is fairly recent.

    To get the type of growth I feel I need with the pay I get, I went in knowing I would have to assume more risk. So I did a lot of work to understand the safest methods to get that growth in exchange for the volatility that can be involved in that investment approach. I was willing to accept that risk, and I stand by it decades later. If I started playing with riskier fund choices, that’d be gambling. Some mega-big growth funds can be very tempting. But the fees for those funds are guaranteed while the gains are not. So chasing an extra 1 or 2% isn’t worth that added risk to me. Things like options and stock shorting I don’t understand well, so I stay away from them since I don’t understand the associated risks. That stuff is gambling, where you can’t count on yourself to have at least a sensible margin of control over what happens.

    If you are new to investing or feel confused, I always suggest the Boglehead’s Guide to Investing. It’s not trying to sell you anything and explains things in pretty easy to digest terms and tells you how to develop a simple investing strategy that you can stick to and be a relatively hands off investor. It used to be free online, but I think that’s caught up in the Hachette vs Internet Archive lawsuit, so you can check out their Getting Started wiki which is an abbreviated version of the book, plus some new and updated stuff.


  • Yesterday there was another AskLemmy about what was the easiest instrument to learn and I felt like anyone asking that question without already having a clear vision in their head of what they wanted to be playing as far as instruments and music was just going to waste their time and money, but even trying to be very polite I thought it was too negative so I didn’t post it.

    I think people think music will be a fun relaxing hobby, but it’s really like training to be an athlete. You won’t get any good unless it’s something you truly want to do because it’s a ton of work and a good instrument is expensive and I feel you should really start by taking lessons so you didn’t waste time on trial and error figuring out what to learn instead of learning how to do it.

    Craigslist and eBay are full of gear that was barely touched because music is hard. It can be very rewarding, but you will still hate it at times. I tell my teacher all the time that I hate her 3/4 of the time because she constantly challenges me, but by the end of that week, I’ve put in enough time to master the lesson, and then I’m so happy and feel the rest of the time was worth it. It’s like some people love going to the gym and getting those endorphins or runners getting a runners high. Some people live for that, but for others, it’s just hell.

    It sounds like you don’t enjoy the time and money you’ve spent. Just live and learn. Maybe come back to it later in life and see if things change. But don’t force yourself into hating it.


  • It would seem better to pass the torch than leave things in a state where nobody knows if you’re on vacation or dead or what. I hope he finds someone, the movie category seems like it could be a vibrant one.

    I know there’s also a few of them. I have them grouped in a multi community to let me browse them all at once. That’s been a big help for dealing with fragmented fan bases.


  • I try to put a lot of emphasis on encouraging new posters and commenters. I don’t get why you’d come to the “wild west” of social media to just be solely a lurker. You should want to be an explorer and a settler, forging that new frontier. I won’t hate on the lurkers, they will always be the majority, but why deal with the quirk, less ease of use, and less content to not want to help shape what it becomes?

    I came over intending to lurk, hence my crap username, but what I wanted wasn’t here, but I didnt want to crawl back to Reddit, so I started building, and it’s great. People are friendly, you have less competition for attention, and the userbase is largely supportive of whatever you do because you’re doing something.

    But ultimately, as long as we arent on an extended downswing, we’re doing well. I’ll keep making posts and giving positive feedback, so hopefully it keeps catching new people with the bug to interact.



  • The increase in monthly is just mainly replacing users leaving as the active 6 month seems to be going down the same rate as active monthly is going up. Am I reading that correctly?

    Total users doesn’t concern me too badly, as I’m more happy to see daily post and comment counts going up. I feel activity needs to be our focus rather than headcount. A packed stadium is kinda pointless if nobody is on stage putting on the show! 😁


  • I did see you had Superbowl on your list and I’m always happy to see other people promote it. It’s big enough now that I’ve slowed down promoting it myself so I don’t seem pushy. It’s been a ton of work, but it’s with it to know it makes people a little happier each day.

    News, memes, and tech do seem pretty dominating here, and while it’s nice getting notification of all that stuff in one place, I still prefer to go to actual news sites I trust. If I spend too much time doing it here, I feel I read more comments than actual articles, and half the comments seem to be made before actually reading the article, so it’s easy to get misinformed or biased opinions rather than facts

    I’ve not sought out any direct help for a few reasons. The primary reason is my content is all stuff that I like. It’s a labor of love and not a job. I share what I do because I like it and I think you might like it too. If I asked someone to help me out, I’d feel like they’re working for me and trying to post what I’d want, but what they’d want. Bigger projects like the long articles and Owl of the Year are also my personal vision, and honestly, I want those done exactly my way, so again, I don’t want to make someone else carry out my vision and be frustrated if they can’t do that

    Also, I feel the people that create the communities should be more active in their actual management. I didn’t start Superbowl, so I’m just a guest. I share my stuff and try to make it a better place, and that’s the end of my role. Earlier on, I thought it might be better to join with Birding or some other community, or maybe instead start a Raptors community where I could also do hawks, eagles, vultures, etc. Superbowl had a good bit of Reddit momentum, which I believe helped make things self-sustaining faster than for some other communities. I think combining small groups would be the way to go for a lot of things, but that isn’t my call.

    Ultimately for growth though, it can’t be a daily responsibility for anyone. Maybe if you had a group of 5-10 people that can post daily, like those big politics, news, tech groups do, but most communities would be better served by 30 people posting 1 things a month than 1 person posting 30 things a month. It makes it diverse, and that will pull in more people as the flavor of the group will be less one note, and losing one or 2 people doesn’t hurt the group as much.

    As much as you like my content, their might be some that like different things than me. Like I don’t enjoy many of the really small owls as much. When I do post them, many love them, but I don’t post them much because they don’t interest me. If someone that did love them shared them passionately, that would invigorate that group more than I could. Also, if you didn’t like my writing style or if I just write too much or too little, a handful of people writing in their own voice would be great.

    I do think some instances have communities to try and get inactive communities into new hands, but if they’re dead, they’re probably not big enough to be self-sustaining. I see you post to a few music communities, but it would probably be easier and reach more eyes if they were under a broader scope than synthwave and gothic industrial. People on here seem to have great interest in music discovery in a way that humans can do that algorithms can’t. Perhaps having a broader scope where you can say, hey if you like “popular song x” you should check out “under the radar song y” that might get more attention. I’m into music creation and synths more than most random people, and I couldn’t tell you what electronic music is in what genre, so my chance of stumbling on one of those posts is small at this point even though I’m much closer to your audience. But the principals of being defederated from other groups seems to fly in the face of people seeing they’re not getting traffic, reaching out to each other, and merging control of their communities.

    But I think that’s necessary. Just about all of us probably stumbled upon an already established and powerful state of Reddit, where we didnt need to put in as much work to get eyes. We could jump in a sub with thousands or millions of eyes already on it. We don’t have that power here yet. But we’re also small enough but large enough you can get a following relatively quick if you do put in the work.

    This is getting long, and I’ve probably given you a bit to think about, so I’ll leave it here for now. It’s given me some things to think about too but having to type out my thoughts. We all want Lemmy to be big and great, but it’s gotta occur naturally. We can’t force it. We’ve got to look and experiment and see what works and what doesn’t. Evolution doesn’t happen in one generation, it takes many trials and errors. We’ve just got to keep at making this place the best we can and the rest will follow when it’s time.



  • I was thinking about this last night. I would never have bothered to make this much content for a place like Reddit or Facebook as there is just too much attention on other things. Over the last year I’ve spent who knows how much time making, finding, and editing content on here and engaging people to try to keep their attention. It’s nice in that I feel heard, but it’s also such a small crowd, I notice when people show up and start participating, but also when they stop participating. I’ve built a pretty big following for Lemmy. I’m currently juuuuust not making the first page of biggest communities, but I feel I’m doing well for a niche community here. But the given number of regular commentors I get feels like it hasn’t increased over the last 9 months. As soon as I get new people that comment and participate, the same number drop off. It just feels like I’m not getting anywhere, and it makes me question this as a platform. I’ve got about a half dozen people I’d call regulars, and new people pop in and out, but if I stop to think about the effort in, I wonder how much minimum user feedback I can get by with to do this another whole year.

    My current goal is to make it to December and do the Superbowl Owl of the Year Tournament again. That was a huge boost to the community for those few weeks, but that was a toooon of effort to do by myself. Thankfully someone usually chimes in with some positivity and has a very enthusiastic response to something I’ve shared that can boost my morale, but it really is tough to keep putting work into what many times feels like a void. I always make sure to thank commentors for saying nice things or just participating, because I wouldn’t keep doing this without them. I always tell anyone who listens the commentors are just as important as the posters because you won’t have one without the other.

    I hope for great success for everyone on Lemmy as a platform, but we all need to always try to be more active than we are if that’s going to happen. Just post a “I really enjoyed this! Thanks so much for sharing!” once every day or so if you don’t feel you have anything topical to add to a post you enjoyed. I know it means a lot to me to see that on my work, and I’m sure it does to most posters. Even when I just share a picture, I may have spent an hour scrolling to find you that pic, verify it’s not AI or stolen, and find a little fact or something to add to the post, It’s a really quick and easy way to do a nice thing to show someone that made something for your enjoyment that it reached someone.


  • Right?! I saw new Doom on here which I haven’t played, but the lack of people listing Doom 1 and 2 on here is pretty surprising, esp as the Lemmy crowd seems to skew older.

    I took a minute to pick between 1 and 2, but 2 felt bigger and I felt I spent more time with it, at least unmodded.

    Oh shoot, I forgot the original Deus Ex too! I don’t know if I saw that on here anywhere either. Just too much gold for only 10 picks. I was sad I had to bump off American Magee’s Alice as well.



  • I’m a pretty casual gamer, so I’ve pretty much only played the “hits” a few years after they’ve been out.

    These are the ones I remember feeling the most groundbreaking and spending the most time with over the years.

    • Doom 2
    • GTA San Andreas
    • Yakuza 0
    • Last of Us
    • Zelda: Link to the Past
    • Duke Nukem 3D
    • Carmageddon 2
    • Eternal Darkness
    • Red Dead 2
    • Metal Gear

    I got a good laugh out of the other post that is all the Yakuza games, because that’s how I spent a ton of my Covid work from home time playing them on the cheap. They had the fun of the GTA games, but I never like the main characters were bad people, so Yakuza gave me the games I’ve wanted through all the GTA years and then some.




  • I do hope we would do positive things should we gain the ability to talk with animals. I’ve watched a bit about Koko and the other gorillas that learned sign language and it’s very amazing stuff. It seems to get treated as a novelty though.

    I don’t know if we can really even assume what another race would do with us. If they’re millennia ahead of us, they could probably trick us like when somebody pretends to toss something to a dog. We could luck out and be overall more advanced than them ala The Road Not Taken.

    It’s easy to see most any animal as an individual if you spend any time with them, yet we still spend most of our coexistence with them treating them as NPCs. I don’t know what it would take to win us over as a whole, and I guess that thought just makes me a bit sad.