Snow skiing. After about the 50th time falling over I said “I’m not enjoying this at all,” took off my skis, and enjoyed the rest of the day not falling over.
30 minutes ago I tried some Goody’s for my headache. It tastes like death and didn’t even help the headache.
Eat squid jerky. One of the worst things I’ve ever put in my mouth.
A couple years ago I was out hunting with a friend and we saw a porcupine. My dad had always told me they were delicious and it was in season so I took my shot. Once we had the meat I thought I would take the hide home and harvest the quills.
Good. Lord. Porcupines are filthy creatures. I had a Rubbermaid full of soapy water and I was pulling the quills and guard hairs out and then trying to wash them free of literal shit.
But basically all I was doing was shit-needle acupuncture all over my hands. I was sure I was gonna end up with some sort of porcupine aids or something.
I spent a good 3-4 hours trying to clean the largest of the quills and guard hairs, and then I said fuck it. Took my fistfull of “clean” quills and put the rest in a few old paper bags and into the green bin.
I found quills in my clothes almost a year later. While visiting a friends house in jeans I had NOT been wearing, while out ice fishing (in the bibs I wore), in my sock one day.
I’m sure there aren’t that many people on here that have been considering taking a porcupine and trying to weave/craft with its quills. But please, don’t do it.
But was the porcupine delicious?
Very sadly, it was not. I’m not sure if it was my fault, the prep or what. I do eat all sorts of wild game that I’ve hunted or salvaged. I love squirrel and pigeon, I’ve eaten road kill deer, bear, moose, goose… Cotton tail and snowshoe hare… Wild Turkey… Basically if it’s made of meat I’ll give it a go. Still waiting to try raccoon and beaver, which I do wonder if they won’t share some similarities…
But I found it very unpleasant. Raw the meat was so… gelatinous? Delicate? Like pressing with a finger would leave a sad dent. It spread out on the cutting board like gravity was too much for it.
We did it as taco meat so I just threw it in the instant pot with onions and maybe some chili spices I can’t recall… it had that skunky gameyness that I’ve started to associate with older animals and poorly handled meat. She may have been a great Grammama but the meat was well cared for and eaten fresh.
We shredded and ate it on tortillas with onions and homemade salsas. My sister and brother in law didn’t mind it and my partner said it was ok but I’ve sworn them off for now. They are very charming creatures so it’s not all bad.
I had porcupine when I was a kid. I found it gross, the meat smells gross and it’s super gamey. Was cooked by my grandparents who are native and hunted all their lives so it wasn’t cooked wrong or not cleaned, I just thought it was gross.
Unrelated but moose meat is the best meat in existence IMO. I could eat that every day for the rest of my life and die with a smile on my face.
Moose meat is so good. I’ve had a few supplies over the years. A neighbour got a roadkill once, and a friend’s dad hunted one, but he doesn’t hunt anymore.
I’d love to go get a moose, but I don’t have anyone in my social circles who hunt, and you basically have to have a party to hunt moose in Ontario.
I gotta say I love deer and moose, but black bear is surprisingly good. I smoked some honey black bear hams from my last bear and ma.gawd. Only downside to bear is it’s like pork, can’t have it rare.
I need to go right now and wash the few quills I received from a porcupine zoo experience. They keep quills that are shed and hand a few out to folks. Poop acupuncture, omg. Since you appear to have survived, your poop antibodies must be off the charts now. 😅
I’m basically invisible.
I should have just gone to your zoo… I ended up with maybe 40 quills or something, my friends collection from pulling them out of her horse and dog is bigger…
Technically, I guess this was twice, but <HankHill>the mari-hwanas</HankHill>.
Smoked a little in a perfectly lovely part of Amsterdam with my wife, who importantly is NOT a chronic overthinker who was raised by uptight Southern-fried Mormons, but I just immediately got paranoid and was obsessed with the likelihood that two random Dutch guys were staring at me and planning something bad. The fact that ten years later I still think it was possible they were eyeing us, while she is completely dismissive, tells me I do not need to be smoking pot.
Also tried some edibles in the hotel room, but that just made me sleepy with nothing particularly fun happening, though admittedly nothing bad happened either. Very “Meh.”
Whippets. I had this awful sensation of being frozen in a horrible moment of eternity while my friends looked on in amusement, not realizing I was experiencing timeless hell.
Driving 233 km/h. Fun to see it was possible, way too risky.
A while back I met a guy on a ride-share app that would drive 200 km/h+ whenever possible. Always tried to book him when he was availible.
i went to subway recently… the sandwich place. holy hell what a pile of expensive dogshit.
Maybe next time try the expensive tuna instead of dogshit.
When you could get $5 foot longs it was worth it. But sammiches are like $15 now.
And then I read once there is so much sugar in the bread that in Europe it would be considered cake.
Recently? I got graston done on my knees (https://painhero.ca/blog/the-graston-technique-what-is-it-and-how-effective-is-it)
Might work well for some, but I could barely walk for a week.
So, what? Are they just crushing your muscle fibers with meat tenderizers and hoping it heals back better? That looks… unsettling.
I mean, kind of. It’s meant to break up scar tissue and adhesions.
Paid extra in a movie. Worst $80 I’ve ever earned.
Funny how being an unpaid extra is a totally different experience. It was a giant party. I was in the crowd at the Steelers stadium when Bane blew up the field in Dark Knight Rises. We had to crouch down behind seats and look terrified. We couldn’t fucking understand anything of what Bane was saying, but assumed it would be fixed in post. Haha, no it wasn’t.
We had swag bags. They brought out 3 Tumblers to amuse us. Most Steelers players were there, Tom Hardy ofc (who didn’t even look like himself he was so jacked for that role). We got to hear what it sounds like when that 1 of 4 in existence IMAX camera broke. They fed us lots of Popsicles because it was 90-something degrees in July and they were filming a winter scene and wanted us to be wearing cold weather gear. It was a fun day. 10/10 worth the drive up from DC to go do that.
Story time?
The story is it was extremely boring. Hearing two or three people say the same thing over and over for hours, no breaks, no food. A ten-hour day and we didn’t even make minimum wage.
I did get within groping distance of both Gwenyth Paltrow and Jake Gyllenhaal, though.
No, it was called, “Extra Facial”.
Trust a christian.
Imagine being taught that when you think, that voice in your head is god speaking. Now understand that ANYTHING god says or does is righteous…never trust a christian indeed. Its literally induced schizophrenia and narcissism.
You guys were taught that it was god?? I was taught it was always satan or some lesser demon lying to me.
Remember when they crucified their own lord and savor. Honestly this one is kinda on you bro.
Tbf he was crucified by romans of unspecified religion. Also he got better.
hydro massage. one of the worst physical sensations I’ve ever experienced. imagine being poked by an annoying toddler through a canvas tarp 100 times a second and also the tarp is warm and there are LOUD water sounds and your skin starts itching and just NOOOOOOPE
I’ll stick with the regular massage chairs and actual massage therapy!
I tried to watch an episode of The Big Bang Theory once 🤢
The laugh track.
It ruins so. Many. Shows.
I mean … maybe I’m wrong here. But if you wrote actual funny things, I’d laugh. Idk. I’m probably wrong.
Oddly, though, you can’t just cut it out from shows that have it, especially if they actually film in front of a live audience, though even those with canned laughter are playing in the same sandbox. The pacing and the vibe gets completely thrown off because the writers and actors have to account for the laughs, and it becomes eerie without them. It’s a different style of making TV that’s seeking a different type of reaction from the TV audience, and has different limitations. Understanding that can let you enjoy the best examples of the form (admittedly almost all 20 years old or more). Stock characters slinging zingers and potentially doing pratfalls can be amusing (though the form has a direct lineage to radio shows so it tends to be light but verbal – the physicality is a huge part of what made I Love Lucy groundbreaking), but it doesn’t shine when trying to do cringe, nuance, dramedy, or densely packed humor.
This is not to say that you should watch The Big Bang Theory. You should not. It’s awful. The easy tropes and low cost of production (other than stars’ salaries if a show takes off) means that so much garbage has been done in this format, I daresay higher than single-camera “movie style” shows. It’s just that it’s not quite so simple as “write more funnier.”
IMO, it’s almost like telling a musical theater writing team that their play would be better if the characters weren’t constantly breaking into song. For the record, my instincts and tastes leave me sympathetic to that last point, so I just don’t watch many musicals, live or recorded. It’s not that they’re bad; the appeal is just lost on me. Same with multi-cam sitcoms with laugh-tracks.
I stopped watching TV when my favourite channel lost access to several shows and turned into a TBBT re-run channel. Four. Fucking. Episodes. Every day. The series looped about once every two months.
Had a wedding.
Rookie mistake… Hopefully you’re fully recovered, as I am…
Tried snowboarding, never again.
Turns out, your legs need to be really strong, or you’ll have your hands on the ground too often. If that happens like every minute, your shoulders are not going to be pleased with that. I have a feeling that this short experiment may have caused some minor damage my physiotherapist was unable to detect.
I never understood that. When snowboarding, you can just rotate to brake, and then you can just sit to take a break if you want. Heck, you can even do the leaf down a whole slope, easily and safely, and it’s still kind of fun.
Meanwhile, skiing requires superhuman leg strength, even if you just want to go slowly, and will twist your legs in gruesome ways when you fall.
If skiing takes a lot of physical work, that’s a sign that your stance is off. You can ski almost anywhere just by shifting your body weight from one foot to the other. Back when I was a ski instructor, my old boss (a ski instructor of multiple decades) used to say that skiing is a “skeletal” sport, not a “muscular”. If you’re working hard it’s likely because there’s something wrong with your stance and you’re subconsciously using your muscles to compensate. The most common specific example of this I saw in my lessons (and had a habit of myself which I’ve been working on for years) was skier’s quads burning out, because they were leaning back (consciously or not), because they lacked confidence (consciously or not).
I’ve come to learn that this advice applies to any physical activity. You can tell a master by their economy of movement, whether it’s snow sports, playing an instrument, martial arts, or tossing haybails. Use weight and momentum, don’t fight it.
My main issue is that the beginner’s stance they teach you is trying to maintain a pie shape to reduce your speed as you go down. The problem is that the skis want to either be parallel, either go fully horizontal. It takes a ton of effort to resist the skis’ tendency to align themselves that way, and the consequences for failure are dramatic.
There’s assuredly a way to make it easier, but with the trauma I have, I’m not sure I’ll want to give it another try.
Ah yeah, the pizza. Those should only be relied on to stop you on bunny hills and in lift lines. Your intuition is right that there’s a limit to how effective those can be.
Ironically though, the “way to make it easier” is the same technique that snowboarders have little choice but to learn from the start: turn until you’re going across the hill instead of down, because like snowboards, skis only tend to slide down when they point down. Then you make "S"s down the hill to maintain the speed you want, shallow “S” for speed, wide, traversing “S” to stay slow. You can commit to hold a turn until you’re completely sideways and come to complete stop, whether you’re pizzaing or not. No competent instructor would let let their students off the bunny hill until they can turn well enough to control their speed, so I’m really sorry that you found yourself in a situation where you had no control.
with the trauma I have, I’m not sure I’ll want to give it another try.
I don’t blame you for not wanting to try again, and I don’t mean to push you to because there’s millions of ways to entertain yourself on this big blue rock. For what it’s worth though, I’ve taught dozens of “first time” lessons where it wasn’t actually their first time, they confessed to me before we started that they tried skiing once years prior, had a bad experience, and only after years and years were convinced by someone they trusted to give it another shot. I’m proud to say that every single one of these students had changed their mind by the end of the lesson. So if you find a good, psia certified instructor and go one-on-one or in a small group, I bet that you’d have better luck. I promise, once it clicks for you that turning=control, the mountain just opens up.
My instructor told me that if you just relax, you won’t be in control any more, and the board will just slide somewhere. Instead, you need to actively push one of the edges down into the snow. That sort of board rotation requires good balance and strength. If you’re not up for it, you’ll end up loosing your balance, and sort of “falling” gently. No speed required. You can do these gentle falls, you you’ll feel nothing. It’s just that next morning, you’ll suddenly realized how much stress yesterday actually put on your shoulders.
Turns out, you should never go snowboarding unless you’re already able to stand on your heels and/or toes for an extended period of time. That sort of balancing, endurance and strength is absolutely crucial.
Huh. I never had an instructor. But yeah to me standing on my toes or heels for a while isn’t all that hard to me, even though I’m not in good shape. I guess that makes one (1) part of me that’s not critically weak.
Yes you can, however it takes a few trips (at least for me) to learn to do that without falling. In the process you will fall a lot and hurt yourself a lot.
I agree! Snowboarding is a physically intensive young person sport
