Mine is mapping. I am a big OpenStreetMap contributor and I have mapped many towns near me that were previously completely unmapped.
My main one is vegan food. Before I had access to a kitchen to make my own food, it used to involve collecting, curating and creating recipes, but has since moved onto creating (and endlessly recreating, adapting and morphing) certain flavour and texture profiles.
The current big one I’ve been very obsessed with making and eating for the last few years, is variations on hoisin mock duck wraps.
The latest iteration is a salad wrap, with leaves of nappa cabbage as the wrap, a layer of vegan garlic mayo with chilli crisp, mock duck, green onion, cucumber, a sprinkle of salt and pepper, hoisin sauce, corriander leaves, and another cabbage leaf to cover/ close the wrap. This probably has the best textures so far and tastes really good!
Making/eating kimchi is a similarly intense interest/obsession. So is hotpot. I fucking love hotpot.
My secondary major interest fluctuates between several different things, but is currently perfume.
I’m very into creating (and endlessly recreating, adapting and morphing) certain scent profiles, and collecting perfumes.
I like to do this through layering different perfumes on my skin and clothes, so I can highlight certain notes/sensory aspects for myself (that may not be apparent on other people’s skin chemistry, so this, like with my other interest, is a very subjective fascination!).
Over the span of three days (between showers) I like to start in one place with my layering combinations and go on scent journeys as the notes morph and fade, and I add to them with other complimentary scents and see how far I can go. Notes linger on clothing longer and differently to how they do on skin, so as I’m layering over several days it builds up in fascinating ways. It’s very interesting to me too finding which layering combinations work one way but not the other.
Lately I’ve enjoyed starting with a base combo of Mauboussin Mauboussin (resinous yet juicy plums and lots of ylang ylang) and Musamam White Intense by Lattafa (juicy spiced oranges and too much ambroxan)- and then taking that in interesting directions as it fades over the day, like layering on more spices and wood notes, and then when that fades, onto various ouds and roses.
Or adding a Stronger With You flanker (sweet and aromatic with chestnuts + individual flanker variations), then when that starts to fade leading it with fragrances full of ginger, vanilla, lactonic nutty notes and patchouli.
Being enveloped in layers of beautiful fragrances is such big sensory good times for me and discovering new combinations is so pleasing.
Also before anyone comes at me for this, I live alone and don’t wear any fragrance when I go outside, so I’m really not hurting anyone with this hobby!
Oh man I’ve recently started getting into fragrances… I’d never realized how complex (and expensive) they can be! I discovered Kayali’s Yum Pistachio Gelato from a makeup youtuber I follow and it’s all been downhill from there. Lately I’ve been layering Ellis Brooklyn’s Super Amber with Phlur’s Heavy Cream, and I keep sneaking little sniffs of myself throughout the day… and sniffing my bra when I take it off for the night… send help!
What are some of your favorite unexpected notes to combine?
Ugh, I know right?! All my spare coin is going towards perfumes!
Yum Pistachio is gorgeous! I love all the dupes of it too, all the Arabic houses are on top form lately.
Your combination of Super Amber and Heavy Cream sounds hella sexy!
Ok, so here’s a REALLY strange but beautiful scent combination I’ve found, let me try and set the scene it makes for you first:
You’re in an coastal pine forest during a lightening storm. It’s night. You can smell the wet earth underfoot and the forest behind you. Just before the rain starts up again, you’re looking out over the sea as it crashes against the cliffside, sea water mists the air and sheets of lightening illuminate the world.
This was from about 5 spritzes of Vanilla Vibes by JHAG (salty non-gourmand vanilla) with a modest spritz of Quorum by Antonio Puig (beast mode aromatic oakmoss) over it. Encre Noir by Lalique could probably be substituted for the Quorum for a similar affect, but you’ll need to spray a lot more of it as Quorum is very, very strong.
The way the sea salty solar notes of Vanila Vibes play against the dank mossy woods and grapefruit of Quorum, it’s so visual for me. And there’s this ozoneic smell they form together that isn’t constant but is electric and kinda how I imagine lightening smells.
Do you have any unexpectedly beautiful scent combinations? Please share if so!
Oh man, you hooked me from
You’re in an coastal pine forest during a lightening storm
and it just got better from there. I’ll have to try this!
I’m still building up my collection, so so far the most interesting I’ve come up with is Super Amber / Heavy Cream. I’ve been ordering a bunch of sample vials of things that sound interesting, trying to pin down what notes I like best and which I don’t. So hopefully soon I can come up with creative combos like yours!
What do you use for the fake duck meat?
I’ve gotten pretty obsessed with making good seitan, but there’s just so many variables. I’m mostly a texture person, and I find that the place where lots of vegan recipes fail is in the texture department. So that’s where my passion for vegan cooking leads me.
The Linda McCartney Vegetarian Shredded Hoisin Duck have been my go to for a while as they’re in most of the big supermarkets here and I can get them delivered to my house.
I like to defrost them and use them ‘raw’ (they’re already fully cooked) because I find the texture gets weird when they’re prepared according to the package instructions.
Any Asian superstore will likely have many varieties of better, and probably cheaper, mock duck though. If I lived near one I would be so fat!
I had a seitan phase a few years back, I got really into finding good spice mixes to include in the dough for maximum ‘meatiness’.
I made and tried to like the ‘lunch meat’ style seitan a few times, but memories of being a kid having to eat actual lunch meat (and how slimy and sometimes gritty from gristle it was) really put me off it.
Texture wise with seitan, I liked gently beating the kneaded dough flat with the end of a rolling pin, and then tightly rolling and coiling it up, wrapping it tightly to steam, and then shredding it and adding bite sized bits to hotpot.
What’s your current favourite seitan recipe? What texture do you like your seitan?
Dang, there’s a couple of Asian grocery stores near me, but I’ve never thought to look for mock duck. Usually I’m just loading up on gochujang.
For seitan, I am pretty much stuck making loaves of the deli meat style “ham” or “Turkey” although I find they both taste about the same. The recipe I based them on is from 86 meats(or something like that), and it uses extra form tofu as the moisture. I’ve tried with just VWG and water/broth, but I never liked the texture when I do that. I’m really wanting to try using beans/lentils instead of tofu, but I’ve been risk adverse now that I’ve got a recipe I like.
In my pre-vegan life I was pretty into making pizza, so I obsessed over hydration levels, proofing time, baking temp, and all those other minor details of making good bread. I see seitan as bread-adjacent, so I think there’s a lot of overlap in cooking bread and seitan. My plan in the coming year is to start tweaking the hydration level, and switching up the additives to see if I can’t find a method that really resonates.
I also think there’s some room for exploring the cook method. Lots of recipes say “simmer DO NOT BOIL”, so you know they’re looking for a specific temp. I’m wondering if it would be easier to achieve with a Sous vide? But other recipes swear by the steam method. Steam is going to be WAY hotter than simmering, so that’s a huge difference in method right away. I tend to favor the oven bake to get a nicer looking “crust”. But I bake at 350F, which is hotter than steam? But less intense heat transfer. I also ALWAYS temp the loaf before taking it out. 190f internal temp (just like a good loaf of bread). The shape and size of the loaf really can mess with your cook time, so I’ve found it best to just temp it with a “meat” thermometer.
Anyway, shame there’s not a c/seitan community on Lemmy yet. I don’t have enough content to run such a place, but I’d be happy to contribute to the discussion.
This week? AuDHD doesn’t let me have one for long.
I am a spring of knowledge about all of the domestic Real Housewives franchises (though I did just pick up Dubai recently).
I know all the lore behind all their relationships/alliances/enemies and off season shenanigans.
Its legitimately stupid how much I can talk about rich women who flaunt their wealth and then do trashy shit like throw wine in one another’s faces or flip tables (or scam the elderly out of their retirement funds to fund their own lifestyle).
Game preservation. I got into it last fall when I learned about OpenGOAL for the Jak and Daxter games. I grew up with those games and were some of my favorites from that generation.
I then learned how easy it was to rip PS1 through 3 games and how simple it is to set up the emulators for each console. I have a sizable collection of games for those generations, so I started ripping.
I then remembered watching LTT’s video about how to jailbreak the Switch. I bought a used Switch from a friend pre-pandemic, but never played the games because I never cared for playing on the Switch itself. So I checked if mine was old enough to jailbreak (Nintendo patched the exploit out of the Switch about a year after it released) and, lo and behold, it was.
It wasn’t easy jailbreaking it. It took several hours over 3 days to do it; I would make some progress, then hit a roadblock I couldn’t figure out, so I’d stop and come back the next day. I’d get a little further, hit another roadblock, and repeat. Once I managed that, I ripped my (small) collection of Switch games and played them on Ryujinx. Now that I could finally play them on my laptop whenever I wanted, I actually had a desire to play them and managed to get through BotW in January.
Then I figured out how to jailbreak my Wii (which is pretty easy, I recommend everyone do it to theirs), so I could rip those games. It can also rip GC games, so I didn’t need to find and jailbreak one of those to do it.
When I learned of shadPS4 this summer and the progress it was making toward playing Bloodborne, I spent $400 on ebay to get a gold PS4 with firmware 9.0 so I could jailbreak it and start dumping PS4 games.
At that point I saw how much space all of the games I ripped took up on my laptop, so I bought a NAS from a friend who was upgrading theirs and set it up with two 8TB hard drives in RAID 1 and stored all my games on there. It’s currently about 60%+ full.
Over Halloween I went to a used game store and saw they were selling a Wii U for $160. I bought it and jailbroke that as well and started ripping those games.
I bought an OG Xbox to jailbreak, but I need to open it up to replace the clock capacitor first. Otherwise it could leak and my effort would be for nothing. I just haven’t got around to it yet.
I realized this was a passion of mine when I accidentally borked my PS4 and it would only boot into safe mode. I was 100% willing to completely wipe it and start the jailbreak from scratch so I could keep doing it.
All told, I’ve ripped about 400+ nearly 600 games (I finally counted) in the past 15 months, spent dozens of hours ripping them, and have zero intention of stopping. I only think about how I can keep expanding my collection. Right now my next consoles will be the 360, PSP, and Vita.
Edit: rephrasing and adding a little more info
I wish my switch’s screws weren’t stripped to hell so I could do this too
Do you have any kind of backups in place? I ask becuase raid 0 means if either of your disks fail you lose everything. Just wanted to make sure you’re aware!
Woops, I meant RAID 1. I’ll go fix that in my post. But I do have an external 4TB SSD with all my games except for the PS4 games since they’re so large. It has about 750 GB of space remaining on it.
I also backed up my games on a friend’s NAS in a separate location.
I also purchased a small rack server that can hold 4 hard drives. I want to buy a few 8 TB drives and set up Gamevault on it to better manage my few hundred games in my collection.
Mine is Free software. If I can avoid it, then I avoid nonfree software. This brings me a lot of problems but also a lot of joy.
