Skyforger
7mo ago
The first two are nearly on par, but unfortunately the second one is slightly spoiled by the child’s hand obscuring the superhero’s hand in the picture rather than interacting with it in some interesting way. One of those ways AI can still mess up in a way no decent artist would.
Nice proompt-fu tho!
Skyforger
9mo ago
I got curious about the scent world bc of smell's association with memory and such; got a few samplers from here, where they send you a few mL of a bunch of different scents to try: https://www.theperfumedcourt.com/C
Mostly wear Terre d'Hermes; it's unique without being too unique, and has a fresh woodsy smell that isn't at all 'aqua.' Cool water is great and all, but every damn cologne doesn't need to smell like it.
Special occasions I'll whip out a few things but am partial to Montale Black Aoud. Great middle ground between evoking the middle-eastern style scents while still remaining acceptably in the Western tradition.
Skyforger
10mo ago
Hah, Lapsang Souchong is a flavor blast to be sure! I like it from time to time, but my favorite use for it is actually to steep it in bourbon for a day to get a more complex, smokey Old Fashioned out of it.
No other tea I know of is so deliberately and strongly smoked, but some very rural/single family teas still have a bit of a smokey aroma from having been dried just in the rafters of their family homes, which tend to accumulate smoke from cooking or heating fires.
The specific teas we were drinking are long gone - they were aged Pu'erh teas, which like wine are sold by grove and year, each production being a small and local affair, and many were several decades old at that point. But you can find various ones like them, say, here - https://yunnansourcing.com/collections/aged-raw-pu-erh-tea
I stay stocked up on them, imho it's the most interesting genre of tea out there. Stark and bitter, though! It's an ascetic enjoyment.
Rock Oolong and Dragon Well are two excellent teas that will also reliably give you a tea buzz, but if you're in Japan a high-quality Sencha can do the same. Wouldn't try with Lapsang or Earl grey, you're gonna blast out your taste buds and stomach before you get close.
Skyforger
10mo ago
Haha, I mean. I did choose to play the clarinet in Mid/High School, just to be different, and it was a great choice. There were 12 male trumpets, 11 female flutes, and like 6 other players, so it was a bit unbalanced.
My male friend did flute to be different too, but man did it not work. Skinny tall dude fluttering away in the front row, firmly embedded in a sea of girls tinier and cuter than him. I got to slack off in the middle row with 3 girls, 2 of them among the cutest in the class, and didn't even have to practice hardly at all bc who cares what the clarinets are doing so long as it's in the right key. Too bad I was socially incapable of acting on IOI's; our teacher was often trying to motivate me to practice by telling me how talented I was at pitch and breath control, which works great to impress 14yo band girls I guess.
Of course the real masterclass was the other, naturally social, friend who chose to be the saxophone player. the bastard
Skyforger
10mo ago
I liked it! I can't comment much on the details as I'm unfamiliar with the overall composition, but the execution was top-notch and the music superlatively combined a bucolic vibe with real passion and spikes of power.
I'll add this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=cuOae6-GA-g
I've been really impressed with, of all things, what some Chinese composers are doing in video game sound tracks. This one uses an old German poem about torn-apart lovers to start, then...travels from there. I haven't played this game, but apparently the person you're fighting as this plays is an old friend turned against you by an opposing perspective - perhaps a pro-post-humanist one, judging by the musical themes? Anyways, it stands on its own.
As I read one commenter opine on the Chad Orthodox Chant playlist: 'I salute all my brothers on the final stage of “i listen to any genre of music”'
Skyforger
10mo ago
This reminds me of an experience I had in Western China.
My brother and I had been traveling through random places throughout Yunnan for about a month and found ourselves in the historic district of a city in the low Himalayas. This being the region where tea was first cultivated, we found a tea shop to browse; they had thousands of teas, fresh and aged, fermented, cakes pressed into elaborate shapes hanging from the walls. The owner and his wife were fascinated to see us (blonde, Dutch young men, one of us fluent in Mandarin) and invited us into their living area where we enjoyed drinking many rare and expensive teas with his family late into the evening. They had a tea preparing table carved into an elaborate landscape, the teaset occupying clearings and civilized areas, the runoff water and spent tea rushing down miniature mountain streams.
Now, if you've ever had much truly good tea in a short time, you may know that it can affect you in ways foreign to mere caffeine. https://youtube.com/watch?v=HrLaKX9J8Uo The Cha Zui, tea drunk, is usually a state I perceive as a mild euphoria accompanied by a moderate strengthening of subjective experience and creativity. I use it to read or write a good fantasy.
This time was different.
As we left, red lanterns burned high over cobblestone streets and lit the edges of golden carved eaves above us. We stopped for a quick drink at a basic bar; everything was delightful and dreamlike, time seemed utterly meaningless; it was just now, light, color, sway, peace. We returned to our lodgings and I sat on the bed, suddenly caught in an urge to meditate, and the elaborately carved lantern above my bed exploded into ten thousand sides and facets, each with a divine message, purpose, meaning that I seemed to plumb without end. After, I simply felt content with it all and fell asleep.
Still the most vivid ecstatic experience I've ever had. Perhaps all the new experiences of travel can leave us susceptible to such things? Or perhaps I've just never had that many decades-old teas over the course of a few hours before.
Funnily enough, a few days later we found ourselves in the home of some old crone trying to sell us some wild marijuana she had harvested from the mountainside, but that's another story.
Skyforger
10mo ago
I think it's pretty possible there's a feedback loop, or several, going on here. First, it does feel more masculine to be making loud, blasting, boisterous noises and more feminine to be making small, high-pitched, well-controlled ones.1 As such, more men choose brass and drums and more women choose flutes and harps. Then that becomes a stereotype - 'only girls play flutes, loser!' - that reinforces itself in a feedback loop of its own.
- Going one step deeper, what feels masculine or feminine does indeed change culturally a bit, but some basic outlines seem to hold pretty constant.
Skyforger
11mo ago
Though it's true that, as others point out below, that the alcohol component of digestifs can make you feel better, I think there may be more to it than that. Most of them include quite a few botanicals, especially bitter botanicals, that could plausibly have some mild therapeutic benefit. Additionally bitter tastes on their own are possibly able to stimulate liver activity, as bitter compounds in nature are often toxic ones!
There are tons of companies out there that sell bitter extracts for digestion that, though often in an alcohol solution, don't give any appreciable amount of alcohol per dose. Random top search result: https://digestivereviews.com/br/c-bitters/
Mostly-negative article that nonetheless gives a medical patina to effects they may have: https://health.clevelandclinic.org/digestive-bitters/
Also, I've been on a booze-free kick recently and really love bitter drinks and aperitifs, so I've been drinking a zero-proof version, and for what it's worth it does seem to still help digestion a bit.
Overall it doesn't seem implausible to me that the human digestive system is 'supposed' to have some bitter compounds run through it, since it's only pretty recently that we've so decisively removed bitterness from our diet. And America is a bit of an outlier here as this post demonstrates; bitter drinks are popular in europe, as are foods like raddiccio and endive, and in Asia you have things like bitter melon. It was only quite recently that Dutch botanists bred our brussels sprouts to lack the bitterness they once had. https://www.myrecipes.com/ingredients/why-brussels-sprouts-are-less-bitter
Just like we removed the microorganisms from our environment to the point where our immune systems may become miscalibrated, seeing threats where there *should be *some but are none and attacking healthy tissues, maybe we removed bitterness from our diet that our livers think should be there and they end up understimulated?
ESWT started as a way to shatter kidney stones, but really cool regenerative effects were noticed as a side effect. The inter and extracellular microtrauma it causes seems to be very minimally damaging, but nonetheless elicit an outsized and broad-spectrum healing effect on the area. It's been really cool seeing what we can do with it! Lots of irrecaletrant issues just...gone. But the therapy fits poorly into the pharma ---> surgery model we typically see at least here in the States, so yeah, most doctors haven't heard of it and it's hard to find.
Unfortunately I tend to only see canine patients that have undergone unsuccessful surgeries, or whose owners are trying to avoid surgery in the first place, so I can't offer much insight past what you could easily find yourself via Google. At nine years you could certainly get a few more years with your dog, but that is getting a bit on for a larger breed. I think the least invasive therapy where they hew off the acetabulum and just kinda hope the joint re-forms would be the route most taken there, and it can reduce pain a lot in some cases even if it doesn't restore full function. Recovery is rough though, they need to be on painkillers and you need to keep them moving even if it hurts them :( If it were my dog and I had the ability I might give it a try though, Shepherds can live to 12 easy.
Sorry I can't be of more help here.
Edit to add - veterinary ESWT is currently most commonly performed on horses; it's possible you could find an equine vet who does it that would be willing to work on dogs.
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