Omg I have been rabidly following Blades of Furry, that comic rules.
One of my boyfriends is really into (and good at) fighting games. I haven't even played one in decades, and when I did it was just to button mash lol. I wanted to play with him so I've been deep diving into those. Now we play Battle Craze together.
I migrated to the flagship PieFed instance a while ago and haven't regretted it at all. This place rocks! I would love it if there was an app though, not a big fan of PWAs lol. If I was smarter, I'd try to make one myself. Very exciting to see more instances popping up!
I could be wrong, but I think it's mostly a matter of familiarity? If a cis person is familiar enough with the trans experience and struggles, they're not gonna say anything that's a problem, because it'll be obvious.
For some reason I'm picturing them all with little Studio Ghibli style faces?
I enjoy the deranged erotica, partially because it's good but also because it makes the toxic alpha male/sigma male dudebro types go "no, not like that!"
I don't run any instances, but that does seem potentially like a pretty neat idea.
I am really curious about the unexpected behaviors of your instance members though! What are they doing, just treating it as a general instance and not really engaging with the local theme?
Mirlo.space is working on federation too. I think they're not as far along in that regard, but further along in terms of being a bandcamp replacement? Last I heard, anyway. I buy stuff from there, payment works.
A lot of public libraries offer access to ReferenceUSA through your library card. I vaguely remember that queries are pretty customizable on there, and exportable to various formats. Despite the generic name, it's specifically for businesses. Would that work?
I can't say that the ability to follow individual people is really something I care about, but coming from Piefed, it does seem to work just fine. So does Peertube and any of the other ones I've bothered to try.
All in all, I think it came out really well! The finished kōji had this incredible, indescribable taste/smell. Maybe kind of, flowers and mangos and peaches? I used it to make a ton of miso.
I used Modernist Pantry kōji kin and organic basmati white rice, and a makeshift immersion circulator/floating water bath incubator thingy. The rice was steamed in unbleached muslin cloth until just a little undercooked, then the same cloth was used to line a metal tray. The rice was spread into hills and valleys, covered with more muslin, then tented with some aluminum foil over the whole thing. The foil was mostly to keep condensation from dripping off the roof of the incubator onto the muslin cloth.
I put it in the incubator with the circulator st to 90 F.I stirred it at 12 hours and again at 24. It got appropriately matted, and for the most part it wasn't too wet. However, there were a few spots where I think it was getting on towards sporulation already, as you can see here:
Could have been some extra humidity collecting in those darker spots? The tinfoil tent kept the incubator condensation from dripping on it, but I guess nothing prevented the tinfoil condensation from dripping lol... Anyway, the entire process seemed to go way faster than all the guides lead me to believe. I broke it all up as best I could and put it back in set at 84 F with the lid open for lower humidity. By 24 hours it was maintaining about 97 F on its own.
One of my boyfriends is heathen, so I dual-color 3d printed him a set of Futhorc/Anglo-Saxon runes. Hopefully they're correct, very much not an expert lol... The Wikipedia page made me a little unsure on which symbols should or should not be included. These are made from PHA (polyhydroxyalkanoates), a new-ish thermoplastic that's naturally produced by a variety of bacteria, and breaks down harmlessly in any biome. Then, they were polished in a vibratory tumbler and anointed in black walnut oil infused with white pine, bog Labrador tea, yaupon, and sweetfern. I posted the files elsewhere if anybody wants to print their own!
I'm a total amateur, but here's what I did:
The temperature in the beans generally kept about 2 degrees less than the chamber. I think we want the early fermentation to happen at 108 F and then cool to 100 F, so I tried to keep adjusting it based on that. Anyway, the result was pretty tasty!! The bacteria seem to take well to black-eyed peas. Might have been a little less stringy than "normal", but still delicious!
This is a little off the beaten track as far as usual foraging posts go, but I had a question. Has anyone tried spinning Eastern Tent Caterpillar webs into a usable thread/yarn? I'm definitely not one of those people who hates them and wants them gone; they're native here and relatively harmless, despite what naysayers would have you believe. However, they sure do make a ton of webs! I'm sure they could probably stand to part with a little here or there right? Like, after they're done with them?
Not sure if it would work, but if it is spinnable, seems like it might be a convenient local source for an ahimsa silk alternative.
My prior Lemmy instance (lemmy.one) is abandoned and slowly losing functionality, and I had to find somewhere new to move, so I figured... why not PieFed? I like if so far! Seems to be playing well with the other thread platforms, hopefully I'm doing it right.
Feel free to post your work if you get back into textiles again!
Ok, take this with a grain of salt because I read about it ages ago in a dubious pop-sci book and my memory is shaky. One time, they tried to gene edit yeast to be able to survive much higher alcohol concentrations. There's lots of good reasons to want to do this... Beer/wine is just about the strongest beverage you can make without distillation of some kind because the yeast dies. Making way higher ethanol yields just from fermentation makes biofuel way more viable. Stuff like that.
EXCEPT... It nearly escaped, and was able to survive on it's own. Yeast is very ubiquitous in nature, so a wild yeast that can tolerate massive ethanol concentrations could conceivably have altered life on earth as we know it.
A cursory internet search isn't turning up anything about this, but I'm pretty sure I read it in the book Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody, if anyone wants to look harder than I did.