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For all your owl related needs!

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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • The triviality is what makes me just do it myself. If I’m the one sharing something to a global audience, it makes more sense for me to do it once than to have everyone else go do it if they need to.

    I was talking in another thread today, possibly one in response to this one, or at least one similar, and I basically said I want Lemmy to succeed, and my content is easy to source, but getting regular visitors and commenters is the hard part, so I’m willing to do a little pampering to positively reinforce my “guests,” especially at this stage of the game. It’s just some extra consideration, to show people I’m being thoughtful of them, and to make it feel like a place they can come to get facts without having to google them all the time.

    My big issue with Lemmy at the moment is I think we’re testing what level of civility we’re willing to give to and to tolerate from others, and I don’t see as many commenters being helpful to each other and I feel mods are scared to steer conversations back to more polite conduct due to the overbearing rep of Reddit mods. So I’m just trying to be the example of what I want to see. That’s the real thing I’m looking to provide. The unit conversion is just a slice of that you could say.

    I still have people downvote over nothing or make smartass comments occasionally, but I can’t prevent it all. I’ll do what I can though to make things pleasant and positive for who I can.


  • I make sure to list any weights and measures in both US and metric.

    I also try to include a fair amount of content focused on other parts of the world.

    Lemmy is small enough that even though I’m guessing it is majority US, that it is likely less US-centric than most social media. It’s just good to have some stuff for everyone, and I know I like to learn about things outside my country, so I want non-US focused content myself on a regular basis.




  • Food needs to be traditional as much as it needs to be modern.

    It’s great we are still pushing culinary boundaries, but sometimes you just need a comfort food.

    Traditional dishes remind us of where we’ve come from, either literally reminding us of our homeland if we’ve moved, or reminding us of our ancestors, or figuratively by making us think of our childhoods or of grandma’s famous holiday sides.

    It’s the reason we eat green beans casserole on Thanksgiving, but never any other day of the year, or why we still crave a PBJ or Hot Pocket.






  • Edit: Disregard. Read “crumbed” as “crumbled” and thought OP was referring to ground meat/mince. I still think my reply has some interesting info, so I’ll leave it.

    I couldn’t find any pics of what you’re talking about, so if you have one, I’d be curious to see it.

    From my searching though, I saw that grass fed beef, which would be the “good stuff” has yellow fat instead of white, so when that is minced it will likely coat the meat with that, giving it a slight tint.

    Just a guess, but that’s all I could find.


  • I don’t know if I’ve ever had GF bread, so I had to look up how it’s made. I wondered how the bread would have the proper structure to rise without a gluten matrix, and it seems I was on to something. Reading up on it a bit, gums and starches are used to replace the function of the missing gluten. So while GF bread has no gluten, it’s still made with a gluten replacement, and the same function is required for proper results.

    If we change my qualifier to bread typically having a deliberately developed structural matrix with high elasticity, it covers wheat and GF breads. It still is fairly universal we want chewy breads and non-chewy cakes.



  • As a general rule, I would see in a majority of cases that in a bread, gluten development is encouraged to provide a chewy texture. In a cake, you want to avoid gluten development to have a light and fluffy texture.

    Special bread flours have high gluten content and cake flours have lower gluten for that reason.

    Now we of course do have many exceptions, such as banana bread is low gluten and very sweet, while many biscuit recipes call for cake flour, but no one would call a biscuit a cake. In both those cases, I don’t think you would like a banana bread or biscuit that has the strong gluten structure that a proper baguette has.

    Cakes (especially something like donuts) can be yeast risen, and some breads like matzo or tortillas have no leavening, or breads can use chemical leavening like Irish soda bread.


  • I feel you’re in the right area with what to expect from Frieren, but it should still be different enough it gets you in the feels when it needs to.

    Spy x Family is a ton of fun and is pretty well paced and has a good balance of serious and humor and emotion. All the MCs get pretty even focus as well, no one character dominates the series. You get some B plot stuff with the secondary characters also, so lots of POV. None of the arcs have lasted too long either. Anya is the star though, as far as I’m concerned as she just has so many great comedy moments and is so loveable in a dorky way and is drawn with the greatest expressions.

    For me the cute girls doing cute things are sweet peaceful stories I can relax to, watch them do hobbies (bonus points if they actually teach me stuff about those hobbies), and give me some insight into female situations and how they (may) act when men aren’t around. Asobi Asobase is supposed to be about a games club, but they rarely do any actual games and just chill or harass each other with lots of funny gags thrown in. Days at the Breakwater is about a fishing club. Do It Yourself! was fun, as that was a crafting club, but it started with the MC having her best friend not wanting to be her friend anymore, and we learn through the series about their relationship and what the problem was and how it resolves with some fun crafty stuff (and a very cute woodpecker!) along the way. I can get why there are people that watch them for ulterior resaons, but it seems kinda pointless as there are plenty of shows that provide that much more readily. I was so disappointed Farming Life in Another World went that way! The world was so beautiful, and the variety of female characters were so loveable and interesting (and the giant killer spider that only ate potatoes was so sweet!), but it turned into more about breeding with the natives like OG Captain Kirk than a show about farming that I was really hoping for. All the characters kicked so much ass, but were reduced to implied breeding material.

    I don’t think I’ve heard of the Bechdel Test before, and it’s sad that has to be a thing! I’m male, but was primarily raised by both my grandmothers, so I appreciate stronger, more independent and assertive female characters. It’s one thing that I’ve really loved about One Piece. I had expected it to be more shonen-tropey, but there are so many kick ass characters of all kinds. Being female, small, old, or fat don’t have any bearing on how the characters are written. The author has talked about why should any of that influence how cool of a character they can be? It’s nice as a now older and rounder person that is still an anime/manga fan to see people still not being reduced to gag characters. Some of the smartest and strongest characters have been women and old people. It is a shame noticing when they female characters are written as things just to move story lines along or for fanservice alone. I’m not against fanservice at all, but I don’t want things that are just strictly that. I checked out Nagatoro after hearing how bad it was in that regard, but I honestly enjoy it and see it as an innocent coming of age story. They’re being more shy and awkward than they are being sexy. I only watched the first season, and while the POV is from the male MC, much of the focus seems to be the personalities of the female characters, obviously mainly Nagatoro, but from the beginning we see that she mainly just enjoys making the MC feel uncomfortable, and whenever she takes something a bit too far or things get too real, she gets embarrassed and we get a glimpse at the real Nagatoro who seems to be a very polite and caring person. It’d be easy to watch it as a pervy show if that was one’s desire, but I feel they’d be missing on on some great narrative elements by doing so. But I enjoy getting all the characters personalities flesh out in stories. The world just feel so one dimensional if you aren’t fairly exploring all the characters evenly.

    Doing the reading yesterday about otome games, it did seem like many people play through to get all the endings. I guess that makes sense, as if you only had one or 2 characters you really liked, it would be too straightforward to play through. The more characters you get invested in, the more compelling it would be. It probably doesn’t help that the male version of dating sims gets catagorized as something for creepy guys to play, or that’s how it seems to me at least. It’s never the character the viewer would want to be in a show for example that is the one playing them. Hearing it described more as a graphic novel makes things make a bit more sense though. It sounds like a choose your adventure book, with the same replay value, and likely higher quality storytelling. From watching My Next Life as a Villainess, I did enjoy the characters’ personalities overall, and I liked their art style. It does feel a bit unusual to me to basically see a reverse harem though, where the male and female characters all had love interest in the female MC. Being unfamiliar with a bunch of the love/romance genres gets me a bit confused as to what is meant to be for a more general audience and what is for more…uhh…specific tastes shall we say.

    For a game more revolving around relationships with some consequences, have you played Life is Strange? I only played the first one, but you can definitely be the friendly peacemaker or be rude and blow people off, leading to different consequences. There are only 2 actual endings, but the journey can be pretty different depending on how you play it, especially if you notice finer details in the backgrounds and conversations. It usually goes on sale pretty cheap. Largely female characters too.

    I think a Mean Girls type game could be fun. It’s like GTA type games don’t make you a hardcore criminal, I think a bad girl game could be a healthy way to work through some of those pent up feelings people get and the desire to get back at people that where bad to you. Paths to either making eventual peace or viciously dominating the social circles could be in the same game for people that eant either type of resolution. It probably just gets lost in the “girls dont play games” stereotype, which is unfortunate.


  • I have a multi-community set up with a few of the anime communities since they were a little sparse until recently. I don’t comment too much there, as there I’m mostly a couple seasons behind and don’t want spoilers, I mainly go to see series announcements.

    I have a pretty wide range of shows I watch. I’m watching Frieren right now. Recently finished up with Ancient Magus Bride. Steins’ Gate might be my favorite more serious series, and Gintama is probably my favorite comedy. I haven’t watched much romance, but I really loved Fruits Basket and I recently read Insomniacs After School. Summertime Render was a good supernatural thriller. Golden Kamuy was a great historical fiction. Spy x Family has been very enjoyable, and I’m really enjoying the current arc in the manga about the lost love story between the school teachers at the beginning days of the war. I like the cute girls doing cute stuff stories like Yuru Camp, Super Cub, and Dairy of Our Days at the Breakwater.

    I’ll have to check out some of your recommendations, even if only to get a better idea of otome. Romancing men is not of particular interest, but you’ve got me intrigued on these storylines now. I do like the social interaction and relationship building parts of Persona more than most of the dungeon crawling, so it may be interesting to me to watch one of the series you mentioned.

    This is the stuff I come here for. There’s a lot of crap to wade through, even as small as Lemmy still is, but I like how someone like you has the space here to grab my intention and spread your enthusiasm for something I thought was definitely not for me. I know people have said similar to me too when I share things. I never intended to be a regular poster here, but it’s much more early internet community here where we can get to know each other better than on something huge like Reddit.

    I am tempted by kbin and mastodon, as I’d like to be able to follow people too. I’d definitely follow you and a few of my regular commenters. The Fediverse has its own issues, but I think it’s the best thing we’ve got right now.


  • I do comment on the politics threads a bit, but I try to limit it to providing sources of facts with a taste of opinion mixed in. I feel like I agree with even less of the Lemmy politics than with Reddit, so I’ll skim way more posts than I’ll interact with. Also, even with the owl stuff, there’s political crossover, where I get a bit angrier about loopholes in laws that destroy ecosystems and inaction to saving endangered animals.

    I’m a huge profile stalker! 😁 If it’s someone being potentially trolly, I’ll see if I want to respond to what they’re saying if they may just be uninformed. If it’s someone I like, I get curious what other things they’re interested in. I search for mentions of my sub and see who’s talking about it. I check on people that stopped commenting regularly just to see if they’re still on here. There’s just too much data to not poke through it.

    I ended up getting in a weird nerdy discussion about slasher movie lore yesterday that ended up being a lot of fun. I like browsing All for things like that.

    OMG I just read the plotline from Hatoful Boyfriend. That is crazy, especially the BBL part! From the description of the gameplay, it reminds me of the Persona series, just without the dungeon battles.

    My only knowledge of otome is seeing it referenced in anime. My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! is the only one I’ve watched and read the manga, and I’ve seen the male dating sims referenced in other ones. I never knew the plotlines really went that deep though.


  • Your document had a lot of great stuff in it I didn’t know!

    If no mortality occurred, one pair of rabbits and their offspring could give rise to 5 million rabbits over a 5-year period.

    That’s a lot of buns!

    They will also, if necessary, eat moth pupae and carrion.

    Moth pupae seems oddly specific. I wonder what are the circumstances for them eating bugs or carrion.

    Rabbits deposit about 250 to 500 green or brown fecal pellets per day

    I had a rabbit once, and it did make a lot of those things. I never thought anyone would have to sit there and chart them, but I suppose that’s important to know for someone. The lab intern must have gotten that responsibility…

    I don’t know much about otome games beyond the basics of what they are. All the kbin links just took me to error pages, but they do look to have crossed over to Beehaw. Reading some of these plot points with no context can be very interesting though! 😆

    I’ll have to check out those other communities you’ve mentioned. I do end up with other things to talk about and don’t always know where to take those conversations.

    I debate if I should post other, non-owl stuff under a different name, as I somewhat feel I don’t want to risk compromising the group if people don’t like other things I talk about, but that gets to be too much like this being a job, and I don’t think I’d like that. That’s also why I don’t just mod my own sub. I didn’t come here to work, I came here to nerd out.


  • I really got started here by posting the few owl pics from my travels that I had, but that wasn’t too many. I didn’t want to let the community die down again though.

    A lot of my interactions with owl have been by visiting wildlife rehabbers, as owls are typically very illegal to own or display without proper licensing. I wanted everyone else to have a chance to see an owl, so each day I looked at the licensing information for each state and found a rehabber to highlight, one open to the public at least a few days a year if possible, and featured one of their rescues that people could go see. I had a few people that had visited some of these places chime in, and a few learned there was a place near them where they could actually see an owl, and one person even signed up to work as a volunteer at one of the places I showed them.

    That all got me a lot of sources to pull new info from. They all share great photos, rescue stories, medical and rehab procedures, near behavioral stories, and so on. Whenever I learned something, I just shared it with the group. It made me curious about new things, so I went and read up on them. People asked questions in the comments, and I needed to learn answers to not leave them hanging. That got me curious about even more technical things, so I got into the scientific research papers.

    I’ve heard before that if you want to become an expert in something, just go around acting like you’re the expert. People will come to you with things and you’re going to want to answer them so you don’t look like some dope. But then after you answer them, that knowledge is yours forever. After more and more rounds of this, it starts to be more than an act.

    It helps that I love reading and research and that I value teaching. Knowledge is one of the most important things anyone can be given, so I’ve worked hard to learn how to explain things and to not make other people feel dumb for not knowing things. As I make myself smarter, that opens the door for me to pass new knowledge down as I become able to explain it to my audience. The primary audience for my stuff is me. No one pays me to do this, so I’m not burning myself out learning whatever. I learn what I want to learn, and as it amazes me, I share with you all, so I could do this forever.

    It’s fun for me, and I want it to be fun for you all. I try to make it so you can just look at pictures and be happy, or you can go to these places in person, you can sponsor your local rescue, or you can learn so many facts you want to be a volunteer or researcher or rehabber yourself. We all start somewhere. A few years ago, I never paid owls much mind. Now I know all kinds of anatomy and body functions and find them to be absolutely fascinating and diverse animals. We all just need that spark of curiosity.

    Here is a free research paper PDF I found you may like.

    It focuses on pet rabbits specifically. I wanted this one I saw on how interacting with owners affects rabbit welfare, but I couldn’t find a free copy. This one though has handling instructions, dietary guidance, medical examinations, anatomy, medical conditions, and housing requirements. There are technical terms, but the simplest way to approach it is to read a paragraph or section, google the terms you dont know, and then make a post explaining what you read while pretending you’re teaching it to some junior high kids. If you can do that, you have a good post that should teach people something new and interesting, because you found it new and interesting, and it’s something they probably don’t know because you didn’t know it, and you’ve spent more time on rabbits than most people will have spent on them. By aiming at a junior high-ish level, you’re speaking them them pretty much as you would to an adult, but being mindful to not use all these big words you just learned without explaining them. If you write stuff they don’t understand, they won’t read it. But if you share your delight at learning new things, they will catch that excitement too. Not always, but enough.

    The end of research papers always site sources as well. This one has over 40 references, and you can google them and some you will find free to read. Keep following the references and you’ll never run out of content.

    That’s my process that works for me. If you like it, steal the whole thing or any parts you think would be helpful. Everyone should always be learning, no matter what subject, and I like encouraging that.

    This is too long so I’m stopping now. 😅

    I’m always around, or check in on !fedigrow@lemm.ee where other creators hang out and discuss growing Lemmy and our communities for advice.


  • It’s fun to get a deeper dive into things more than just basic facts.

    The lead scientist that discovered owls can hunt using only their ears later went on to do more groundbreaking research on whale communication. It was interesting to learn about the test enclosures and the methods used to see how much vision vs hearing played into hunting. There were also some great stories about how training owls is as much fun as training cats.

    I’ve also read some papers on how other birds of prey hunt. They analyzed different vectors of attack and studied where the birds focus their eyes when they are attacking.

    Just lots of insights on anatomy and behavior in general like how they time extending their talons and the orientations of the toes to maximize catching prey.

    Even egg laying and hatching or growing feathers are all complex and amazing processes, and it’s a miracle all these things evolved to work the way they do.

    The amount I’ve learned about owls this past year is crazy, and I still come upon new things all the time.