Dave Lucey

paul wheaton wrote:What is the opposite of sleaze?

Decency?  Integrity?  Wholesome?  Silly fun?



Ten years ago I wrote about spoon theory.  In that is the idea that you would lose spoons with yucky things and gain spoons with lovely things.  

I want to bring the idea of spoons into this stuff about sleaze and anti-sleaze.  Spoons is good because you can guage how big or small something is by the number of spoons.  Little things take (or give) one or two spoons.  Big things take (or give) dozens of spoons.  And there is the idea of things which give you spoons.  So it isn't all negative.  

Plus, the idea of spoons is about the feels of one person.  I want to talk about "the cure" for sleaze.  Or maybe "a cure" or a list of things that will cure ...    I want to heal a person suffering from the sleaze dropped on them.   The spoon stuff is about the suffering of one person, and includes a metric for how to resolve that suffering.  



If the average person gains 50 spoons a day, but is losing 40 spoons a day to sleaze, they might not care.  Health issues might take 40.  Struggles with day to day stuff that is not sleaze might take 40.  Once you hit zero, the day becomes mighty dark - and now spoon math is critical, and sleaze is less acceptable.



I want to hyper-focus this thread, for now, on sleaze and what might be "anti-sleaze".  What are things that a person can do, for themselves, to add spoons.  Later, I want to expand this a little to talk about choice we make for ourselves that removes spoons, and then how we can do remarkably similar choices, but add spoons.

I think there are a lot of good ideas in this thread, and it's something that I've spent a lot of time noodling on in the past few years.  

At it's base-level I think it is the things that grind me down (sleeze) vs build me up, give me energy, and motivation (anti-sleeze).  This is more than activities, it's all the various foci of attention.  Reading about people doing cool things here can give me a spoon, just as reading or receiving icky news can take a spoon.  It's driven me to become a firm defender of my attention (I had a bit of a rant on that in this JOMO post).

Making a wooden spoon and using it was a great example.  You are 'fed' when you make the spoon, and you're 'fed again' when you use the spoon.  It's like a passive anti-sleeze stream.  "Treating things like art" has a lot wrapped up in it.  It is creating, surely, but it is also limiting the burden of expectation in the outcome.  "I'm gonna try to make a thing", but if it's imperfect 'ok, will the spoon hold soup?'  Probably.  That anxiety of 'is it good enough' is itself a burden.  That's why 'treating things like art' is so powerful.  It's the act of creating that matters, not the burden of expectation in the outcome.  Then I'm fed even more when I make additional spoons and they improve.

When it comes to an art approach, "The end does not justify the means" because "there are ONLY means", the end isn't really the point.  It is the act of doing that feeds us.  

S Smithsson wrote:

John Valdes wrote:It looks clean and clear, links work, doesn't feel gimmicky or icky in any way.  The only thing that bugged me was the duplicate (sometimes 2 or 3 per page) menu bar [What's pie | Pie perks | Find my pie], and how it bounces you all around.

FWIW on iphone running ios 26.2.1 i only see the "whats pie... toolbar" three times, looks like a section header. The whole thing appears as one page.

Sandy

It's been a few days, and likely some revs since then, but I'm not seeing that at all.

I checked on a mac running Tahoe, 26.3.1(a) on Firefox and Chrome, as well as on an iPhone14 running 26.3.1(a) in Safari, Firefox, Chrome, and Brave (latest).
The 'What's PIE' and 'PIE Perks' being in-page anchors threw me for a second, thinking I was seeing what Sandy say, but once I understood what was up I had a bit of a facepalm moment.

I like the updated layout to make the 'subscription' bits clearer, thank you.

All in all it looks very clean across browsers I used and the buttons all go good places.  A very low ick-factor indeed.

Cheers,
Dave

Agreed, prickly pear (both fruit and pads) are fantastic!  I grew up harvesting them in the southwestern US.  The fruits are incredibly seedy, but very tasty.  I find that the flavors vary from year to year on a plant.  I've assumed that it just varied by weather, but never did any digging.

You're right, they don't want to hear it, but it's been my experience as well.

The other question is how to get well suited breeds when they're picking them out at the local feed store.  Most folks aren't digging to find breeders.  Trying to convince feed stores to carry climate suited breeds is a tougher slog than seems sensible.  Building relationships with their buyers is where it's at but it's balanced against the FOMO of lost sales for not carrying, 'nothing but the hits'.

Benjamin Dinkel wrote:Hey Dave,
what is it that you're trying to learn?
There's a lot of different "masonry" style heating systems in the world. The goal always being to extract most of the heat from the exhaust gases.
To me the RMH is just the modern, more low tech take on that. The key being a complete combustion and a later heat extraction.
A lot of contraptions and inventions I see don't have that in mind and extract heat from incomplete combustion, which leads to creosote and potential disaster.

In many ways it's exploratory.  Not knowing them, I'm wondering if there is anything novel (to me) that they're doing.  A RMH is freaky efficient, but I'm always curious about angles for improvements.

My other thought is one of adoption.  If these models have some level of adoption and acceptance, is there something to be learned there.  In this case, my guess is around cultural heritage and beauty, but it is still another angle to consider.

Yeah, they would be expensive to buy, but I'm wondering if there is anything to be learned from them.  It sounds like Peter van den Berg knew about them with that shorty core.  Thanks!  It never came up when I searched for 'kakelugn' or 'swedish tile stove'.

I still want to go see the ones in Minneapolis...I wonder if they'll let me root around inside of one. :D

While we all love Rocket Mass Heaters, I've stumbled across another type of mass heater that I've not seen here before.  A Swedish Tile Stove or Kakelugn, designed in the 1700s to address a wood shortage.  I saw no references to it here, so I figured I'd start a topic to see if anyone has any experience with them.

It's entirely vertical, but shifts the exhaust smoke back and forth in baffles to increase the time it spent in the mass.  Exhaust temperatures were apparently 200-300 degrees F (about 100-150 C).  

A Youtube Introduction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHEmeydLTls&t=61s

A few blog posts about them:
https://asimn.org/turnblad-mansion-collections/what-is-a-kakelugn/
https://www.style-files.com/2016/03/11/the-story-behind-the-traditional-swedish-tile-stove/
https://www.houseandgarden.co.uk/article/swedish-tiled-stoves

I'm seriously considering a trip to Minneapolis to check out the American Swedish Institute's collection of eleven kakelugn.

Has anyone had any experience with a Swedish Tile Stove?

Cheers,
Dave

Everything looked and worked fine for me, and the interface is clean.  

The only user-flow thing I could see is with the recurring button defaulting to on, you'll get an increase in support requests when folks buy a whole pie or 12 whole pies and accidentally set it to recurring.  If there is a way to get the paypal page to acknowledge that it is recurring, it would catch some amount of the accidents.

Thanks all for your input...I agree that it sounds like a homeopathic dose at 2T/5L, that was part of what piqued my curiosity and skepticism on this.

I also do baiting, but I use alfalfa leaves in pans overnight with the mists to moisten them into a paste.  The slugs just stay in there munching away until morning, then I release my ducks onto the pans.  There are a few places that I'd rather not turn my ducks onto though.

I'll give this a try on a couple of target plants and see if there is any sort of effect.  Watch this space. :D

I just need to say...there should be a 'Varmints' forum.

Has anyone had experience with 'Garlic Water' to deter slugs?  I have not.  I just heard about it and couldn't find anything on permies...so time for a new thread. :D

I'm in the Western Washington, where the slugs outnumber the people about 1000:1.  I generally solve the problem with some alfalfa to bait them and ducks to eat them, but there are some spots that this just doesn't work for.

So, listening to Gardeners' Question Time I came across an organic Hosta grower in England that swears by the garlic water.  They spray it on the soil around their in-ground hostas weekly from April to October and the panel there insisted that they didn't see signs of slug damage anywhere in the operation.  Once I was in front of a computer, this is the recipe I found, and it lines up to what they described.

Basic recipe:
-  Boil 2 bulbs of garlic in 2L of water, until soft.
-  Mash garlic to get all the goodies out, then strain out the paper
- That's it.  Let it cool and your concentrate is done.  Store it in the fridge

To use:
- Dilute by using 2 tablespoons per 5L of water.
- Put in your watering can or sprayer
- Sprinkle over the soil in the affected area weekly
- Use more during wet weather

So, the questions:
1. Have any of you done this?...Did you have any luck?
2. Can you think of any detrimental effect to this?  I sure can't.
3. Any clue on what the mechanism of action is?  Are slugs just vampires and hate garlic?