As others have said, i don’t think there’s a single ‘real’ you behind some mask. But I do think that that being around some people or in some situations requires a lot of conscious effort to make things work. And on the other side, there are people who make us feel safe, or bring the best out of us, or just inspire us to have fun.

When I’m around good friends and loved ones, i experience being free, liberated and my best and happiest self. But with everyone I’m still filtering, adapting and finding common ground with them. There’s stuff I’ll talk about with one friend that I wouldn’t mention to another. There’s jokes I might make in one place but not in another. But I don’t feel I’m masking, it just isn’t possible to be everything all the time.

Leonard Cohen

Yup, blocked.

If you’re just under your calorie target, you can add high calorie snacks or toppings to gain weight. Do you like nuts and seeds? Avacados? Olive oil? Cheese?

You can buy or make lots of nice high fat nut snacks, roast them with your favourite spices if you like flavour or just a little salt if you prefer blander stuff. Snack on them throughout the day, and schedule times to have a portion of you’re not naturally a snacker. Sprinkle them over salads or rice bowls or whatever.

Dip nice bread in olive oil and vinegar (with some zatar or other spice mixes if your like). Shallow fry things in olive oil - take slices of nutrious but calorie light vegetables, dip in a simple tempura batter of cornflour and water, then fry in olive oil. Crispy, fresh, delicious and lots of calories.

So you eat desert? Start having nice fruit with heavy cream poured over the top. Use cream in sauces or add to mashed potatoes, vegetable gratins, etc.

All advice is good advice in a certain situation. “Trust your gut”/“be skeptical”, “be careful”/“go for it!” all of these can be good or terrible advice for different people at different times.

The problem with “just do it” is it’s often literally the first thing that everyone tries. If I want to do my homework or cook a healthy meal, it’d be pretty weird if I started off by trying to not do it. So, often when it’s given as advice it feels very insulting, because it feels like your being literally told “have you considered doing the thing your trying to do?”

It can be shorthand for much better advice - “don’t think about the consequences or costs, just focus on this moment and the first step you need to take” or whatever, but when delivered to someone who is literally struggling to do something it often adds nothing. “be careful” is good advice if someone’s carelessly approaching a dangerous, delicate task, but is shitty, vacuous advice if someone is already being very careful. So telling someone to “just do it” suggests you think that they weren’t previously attempting to do it, and that can give offense.

Thanks for the recipe! those waffles look quite similar to how I make them, but with buttermilk instead of normal milk.

The chicken looks basically the same, I always do a buttermilk marinade. Obviously, friend chicken shouldn’t be dry it should be juicy and moist on the inside, and crispy on the outside. But the outer crispness is going to be a bit on the dry side, fatty and rich, but crunchy. The fact that people often have fried chicken with sauce or dip suggests it’s partially on the ‘dry’ end of spectrum.

That’s an intresting take! Maybe the contrasting flavor is more noticeable when the textures are kinda similar? Thanks!

If anyone has any good recommendation for soul food places in celtic France, let me know!!

Do you mean the waffles are spiced too? That’s interesting!

Is that dark gravy in the meat juice + stock + flour sense or that crazy white paste from “biscuits” & “gravy”? Some sort of sauce makes sense, because I’m concerned it’s all a bit dry…

That’s the thing, they don’t seem opposite enough to me. Iove salty sweet: salty caramel, bacon and cheddar on pancakes, I even dip chocolat chip cookies in hummus if I’m in the mood.

The texture of the waffles (crisp on the outside, fluffy in the middle) seems not that far away from the chicken (crispy / crunchy on the outside, juicy in the middle). Both are fatty, but also dryish - obviously still moist, but dry in a crispy way. I could imagine having chicken curry on waffles, the saucy texture would be a nice contrast, but fried chicken…

I guess I’ll just have to try it!

Yeah, that’s why I’m trying to learn what the appeal is. If it’s good, I want to try making it, but I can make decent chicken and good waffles, and I really can’t imagine eating the together. So maybe the waffles need to be a bit different? Or something?

Intriguing… Can you expand on what was good? Or how it was different from what you expected?

I assume it works, otherwise it wouldn’t be a thing! Just trying to understand how… Are the waffles the same texture as Belgian style waffles? Or more like a potato waffle? Were they sweet? Did it have a sauce?

If I can figure out what’s meant to be good about it, I can try making my own!

What’s good about zulip? It’s not one I’m familiar with.

We are considering a seperate play by post game using some of the forums and sites set up for that. But having a voice and video chat with friends, with easy options for adding dice and game management bots is appealing.

I bought foundry but never had time to get the hang of it, and in the end we preferred minimal vtt, just chat and a dice / auto bot. But maybe some day I’ll get into it! Defintely vastly better than roll20

Hah, that’s fine, because it would be for our group activity they’d be fine with making accounts. I never used discord to chat with people outside my small group of irl friends.

I just looked at the top 10 posts for the last month, and 10 newest posts, and they’re really not that negative. I’d say it’s a third quite positive, a third fediverse / tech, and a third quite negative.

But humans perceive negative information much more strongly (at least according to some studies) so even though they’re evenly split, the negative ones might stand out and be more salient. This month’s top ten included “Why does it feel like evil is winning in the world?” (negative) versus "what’s your favourite local dish from your part of the world? (positive). The positive one could feel small and trivial while the negative one feels big, serious and apocalyptic - so of course it stands out more.

As well as salience, people are more likely to post about a problem than a solution (it is asklemmy after all), so it’s really going to be problems, big and small, or fun / silly questions like the local food one. Even more neutral questions about advice are often revolving around a negative problem. I’ve just posted asking about good alternatives to discord (fairly neutral I think?) and I’m hoping for positive “this other thing is great!” responses, but I’m kinda asking because I’m sick of enshitification (which is negative).

The other possibility is that the new and top rankings are not representative. Perhaps posts are mostly mixed but the ones that get popular are more negative, but the occasional popular poistive one is such a pleasant surprise that it ends up making it to the top ten.

Interesting! How do you tie it the right way?

Defintely. But it’s not so much I feel morally bad, I just hate reddit so I don’t enjoy using it. I guess I was hidden from the worst of it by using boost, but now when I want to use reddit briefly (to ask some niche question that I won’t get a lot of responses on lemmy) I use the website and the experience is so unpleasant. There’s now all these awful gamification popups, “Keep your 1/300 streak going!” bullshit.