Beyond the practical advice in this thread, I’ll add that there have been more times I’ve gone fishing to sit and think in the quiet outside than to actually catch fish. I find it just as fun to wander around the bank of a pond or paddle around a lake or river trying to fish as much as actually fishing.

I grew up with bait casters and cane poles and a family that loved fishing, but now I’m learning how to fly fish and I feel kinda stupid. I’ve always wanted to fly fish and never had access to it, so now I’m basically starting from scratch: new method, new species, new environments.

Here’s my strategy and thoughts on fishing and hobbies in general:

1. Learn how the equipment works. I’ve never used flies or a fly rod before, so I’m taking the time to learn how to use it and understand how it works. I like manuals and books, but others have pointed out that there are a lot of video series out there for fishing.
2. Learn about the fish in my area. I grew up primarily pond and lake fishing on either the bank or by boat for primarily panfish, catfish, crappie, and largemouth bass. While those fish are in my region, I also have access to trout and other species I’m not familiar with. New regions and species also mean new regulations and laws; don’t forget to learn about daily limits or mandatory catch and release. You don’t want to end up accidentally having a protected species in your creel or on your stringer when a game warden stops by.
3. Set reasonable expectations and achievable goals. This isn’t my primary hobby and I don’t have the time to disappear every weekend on fishing trips. It’s going to be a slow process and I’m going to make mistakes. I also don’t expect to catch a fish for a long time. My goal is to learn something new and practice doing it. What’s your reason for fishing?
4. Don’t over indulge on gear. You can drive yourself mad trying to get the best gear, especially the way it is marketed, but I’ve had just as much fun fishing for bream with a cane pole, a box of crickets, and a styrofoam bobber older than I am as I’ve had with a collection of tackle boxes, high-end bait casters and a bass boat. You can catch panfish with stale bread and catfish with hotdogs.
5. Be honest with yourself about your learning style. Some people can teach themselves a new skill, some people need lessons. How much can you teach yourself before you need help, or how much money (for you) is it worth spending to learn how to fish?

Dude also claimed that Adams coined the term grok, which was coined in 1961 by Robert Heinlein when Douglas Adams was 9 years old.

The compliment to the quote above should be “misery loves company.”

There’s a variation of this that I like better: “It’s not your fault but it is your responsibility.”

Framing it this way shifts the tone from passive to active; you have a problem, but you take responsibility. It also helps the responsible party set themself up for correcting the behavior in the future. Saying you’re late because of traffic and accepting the consequences is fine, but recognizing that you need to leave earlier to accommodate traffic is better.

I had a teacher who would ask for an explanation, not an excuse. If the explanation started to place blame on someone or something else, he’d just shake his head and say “no excuses.”

I’d argue that most anti-Semites are probably fine with a Jewish ethnostate if it means no Jews in whatever country they’re from.

The inconsistency lies with their application of who is “ethnic” and needs to “go back where they came from.” They ignore the fact that white people are not indigenous to North America.

Obligatory Sartre quote regarding anti-Semites:

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

Amazing! Thanks for taking the time to share. I figured there was an aesthetic interest in addition to the morbid curiosity.

I went through a phase where I wanted to build a library of weird, bizarre, cult, occult, and outlandish books (which I why I had a copy of Dianetics among other religious texts). I abandoned the idea mostly because I didn’t want to dedicate space to books that I never wanted to read or felt repulsed by reading.

If you like kitschy and bizarre books, I recommend checking out the following (if you haven’t already encountered them before):

• Telecult Power by R. Durbin
• Apocalypse Culture by A. Parfrey

Telecult Power makes me laugh since it’s a how-to for developing telepathy and telekinesis. Apocalypse Culture creeps me out and reading essays from that book is like dropping into a conversation midway while no one cares to explain what’s going on.

Bibleman and A History of Christian Hymnody are wildly different theological materials; what’s the criteria for your collection?

Do you study religions or is the there something else, like an aesthetic thing, that drives your collection?

Also, how much of this have you read and is there any of it that you believe?

Sorry for the barrage of questions, but I find the notion of collecting cult and religious media to be fascinating, especially if it’s for reasons other than faith.

Wow, you might be serious.

I used to keep tabs on the weird religious stuff for fun, but most of it turns my stomach these days to the point that I can’t even laugh at it.

Definitely got super drunk and riffed on Kirk Cameron videos back when he had that Way of the Master series (e.g. the banana video).

I used to have a copy of Dianetics that you would have thoroughly enjoyed.

You should try to acquire a copy of a Mormon seminary textbooks. There should be a series of four of them: Old Testament, New Testament, Book of Mormon, and Doctrine and Covenants/Church History (this is one is a gold mine). The Mormons apparently make them available as PDFs for the current versions, but the older ones are sure to be better.

I’ve got you tagged now as “collects weird religious stuff”. Congrats.

You want me to send you free copies of the Book of Mormon and the Watchtower, too?

I consider it a civic duty to collect these whenever I find them and throw them in the trash.

The honest answer is this: Salami (sliced salami), pepperoni (sliced spicy salami), and sausage (pre-cooked fennel-flavored uncased/crumbled pork sausage).

In the US, “sausage” tends to generically refer to uncured, fresh, or raw sausages, often really meaning “ground meat mixed with herbs and spices sometimes in a tube or casing (but not always).”

So let’s give this asshole the benefit of doubt for a moment and see where this goes.

Let’s say an environmental toxin is found to be linked to autism. Great, what’s next? Will the EPA be allowed to regulate the industries that produce or use it? Will other agencies be allowed to make policy banning its use? Will there be fines and punishment for those who knowingly introduced these chemicals into the world? No? Great! We now know what causes autism but we’re powerless to stop it.

Thought experiment concluded.

RFK Jr. is the kind of person who starts off saying something reasonable like we need to focus on the foods and chemicals we allow into our bodies and then, surprise non sequitur, drinking water from the sewer is guaranteed to increase your body’s natural immunity to dysentery.

Ten years ago two-day shipping meant two days from order to delivery. It now means two-day delivery once shipped in one to five business days. Most prime eligible purchases now just mean “free shipping.”

I got attached to Prime as a student where two-day shipping and a $50 annual student subscription made it a useful service. There are Prime features on parts of the Amazon website I couldn’t find my way back to the same way twice. The site is riddled with dark patterns from customer service to Prime video.

I haven’t been able to transition my household fully off Amazon, but I have switched to alibris.com as an alternative storefront for books and other media. Used sellers like thriftbooks, half-price books, and goodwill are all Amazon booksellers on alibris for the same price. They’re all shipping via media mail anyway, so Prime is useless on both sites.

You just need an algal symbiote.

Nothing is lost when these databases are deleted from the consortium; this is effectively a cancellation of a subscription from Ebsco. What is being lost is free access to the materials collected in these databases through the Magnolia library system.

Library databases are typically subscription packages containing some combination of full-text content, indexes, or abstracts; the content is usually collected from academic publishers (some of the titles in these databases are published by groups like Johns Hopkins Univeristy Press or Taylor & Francis).

Looks like some of the titles in the Race Relations database titles are part of Academic Search Premier (which Ole Miss subscribes to, which doesn’t help anyone who isn’t a student there).

That said, those subscriptions are expensive and almost impossible to gain access to outside of a library system or research organization… which makes this an asshole move by the state legislature.

Edit: The databases in question are here:

• https://www.ebsco.com/products/research-databases/gender-studies-database
• https://www.ebsco.com/products/research-databases/race-relations-abstracts

It’s like a fuchikoma/tachikoma from Ghost in the Shell.

How did TRHPS experience become what we know it as today?

Imagine hearing about TRHPS in 1976 or 1977 and going to see it and experiencing it especially without knowing fully what you were walking into?

What is different about the emergence of participatory memes for Minecraft vs. the established memes for TRHPS? The quickness of the behavior? The documentation of it? The fact that it’s new for us now and not something we inherited?

Quite Frankenfurtively, I’d rather be in the theater with a bunch of people enjoying it as opposed to people sitting there rigidly watching what amounts to be a very silly movie.

And besides, if people are so upset, ask for a refund or comp ticket and leave the theater. The same raucous behavior happened every Friday night when a horror film was screening back in my day.

There are a lot of complicated reasons why high tariff are a global problem in a global economy, but simply put:

1. High tariffs raise prices
2. High prices reduce sales
3. Fewer sales reduces profit

Reduced profit for a single company or industry isn’t usually detrimental to a national or global economy. But when an entire country’s economy is hit with reduced profits across every industry, then it creates a problem.

So in summary, Americans are going to get fucked directly, “foreign countries” are going to get fucked indirectly.

Yep. Apollo shutting down is why I created an account, deleted all my content and my Reddit account once things started getting really fucky.