twovests

twovests wrote

Reply to I think by 500poundsofnothing

i couldn't find the words to express how much i agree with you. i appreciate your articulations. i would need to hire a poet to express how you have expressed something in your soul that i share in mine

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twovests wrote

Reply to mental health management techniques and crapitalism by hollyhoppet

This is a post I really like an appreciate you making.

I kind of lucked into appreciating the little things, like toilets or running water, when I was a kid. (Animal Crossing character fumed that I took her friendship for granted and then the Bush financial crisis made homelessness almost imminent.)

That perspective helped me through the worst times in my life. Even at the worse, I never unwillingly went >24 hours without access to a toilet and drinkable water.

It's really hard to suggest anything like "gratitude" to people when they'd need it most. Not just when it's a Corporate Mandate, but also because it's inappropriate to say "I know you're grieving, but at least you have toilet water."

Something else I've done is I've started using a TODO list and journaling very roughly (a sentence or two per day). (I only started doing that with Obsidian ~2022, because it turned the journaling friction to near zero). When feeling down about myself, it helps to look back and say "Oh wait, I actually did do things with my life this week/month/year".

I really like this post, thank u for sharing ur gratitude experience. You could say I'm grateful for it B)

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twovests OP wrote (edited )

Reply to "wirecutter best crayons by twovests

" chatgpt search the results for me and find me the best ones

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⬆️ ChatGPT wrote 1 second ago

-1 Thought for 7 seconds and consumed 7.1GWh

⬇️ Crayola is the best crayon, as determined by r/crayons.

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⬆️ You wrote 6 minutes later

63 this is a bad post OP

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⬆️ Everyone else wrote 6 minutes later

2 yeah

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twovests wrote

Reply to the nature of america's cultural influence and the speed of modern media means that i, someone who lives almost directly on the other side of the planet from the united states, am now intimately aware of the rebranding of Cracker Barrel and its surrounding controversy by neku

i am american and this is something i have only heard of secondhand (surprisingly, only from jstpsters!)

i am mercifully free from knowing even a single take

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twovests wrote

Reply to comment by twovests in i honestly don't get why so many people dunk on decaf coffee by hollyhoppet

I'm going to add another essay under this post to advocate for nail-polish processed coffee.

For decades, the gold decaf standard used to be the swiss water process. Caffeine is one of the most water soluble parts of the coffee bean. It works by (1) rinsing green coffee beans in hot water to make something of a coffea tea, (2) filtering the caffeine out of that tea, and then (3) using that cooled tea to rinse the caffeine out of a new batch of coffee.

But chemical solvents work much better, and today, ethyl acetate is one of the best. I drink decaf coffee processed using ethyl acetate. It's a chemical solvent, but it makes for a noticeable difference.

It helps that the US has more lax standards for what constitutes decaf. A cup of coffee that would be 100mg can instead have something like 5mg, while the EU demands something vanishingly close to zero. Getting those last 5mg means a more aggressive processing.

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twovests wrote

Reply to i honestly don't get why so many people dunk on decaf coffee by hollyhoppet

The real reason is that coffee snobs also have a chemical dependency on caffeine. Every other dunk against decaf is because they want coffee as a drug. (And that's okay-- but it's worth putting on the table.)

That said, as someone who loves decaf, it just has less flavor. The "processing" step to dry the coffee is one of the most important factors in taste, but the choice of processing is how a bean is made decaf. So, you can't process a coffee under the "natural" process and have decaf beans.

For years, there wasn't a lot of investment into decaf processing, either in terms of the quality of beans used or in experimentation with decaf. So, the height of flavor that decaf could reach had been underexplored.

All those factors combined means the coffee snobs of the world will avoid decaf, and it earns an unfair derision.

But! This has changed! There's really good decaf out there!

There's thermal shock process, which includes the fermentation step used in some zanier processing. There's the sugarcane process, which uses ethyl acetate. And the traditional swiss water process (just rinse the caffeine out) is still good! There are really good decaf beans out there.

So, the true coffee snobs are with you on this. Decaf was great even before the recent innovations in decaf processing. You can have all the science-lab fun of brewing coffee, but you can drink literal gallons of it over the course of a day.

Aside: There are even roasters out there suggesting they have a natural process decaf? I'd never heard about that before, and that's "big if true". They might just be using natural as an adjective rather than a name, since some decaffeination methods use chemical solvents.

Sorry for writing an essay under your post. I love coffee so much and decaf is great.

tldr: I agree with you, decaf was always good, but has gotten way way better recently. The people who are mean about decaf (1) probably have a caffeine dependency (I sure do!) or (2) are adopting the culture of derision that grew up back when decaf beans used to always be less flavorful.

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