Something I like about cooking as a hobby is that it is both practical, and low stakes. You can try a new recipe that sounds good and when it's done you can eat it. I was going to have to eat something anyway, so having something to eat is a good outcome. But I'm also food-secure enough that if it all goes terribly wrong, there's always pizza or pb&j as an option. "we can always order pizza!" has even become a mantra in the house when we're trying something new. We haven't actually needed to exercise the option recently, but it gives us a comforting reassurance when trying something new. It's only an experiment if there's a chance it could fail.
Poorly Organized Thoughts On: Audio quality Sometimes people will say something like "I'm an audiophile." They don't say it to me, because I don't talk to people, but they're probably saying it to someone. I once stumbled into the part of youtube for audiophiles and they had a clear surplus of both graphs an opinions. I think my favorite video in my brief journey to that world was called something like "the objective reason these types of headphones are better than those." The host started off by spending five minutes explaining that he really did mean Objective when he put that in the title, and that if you came in here just to leave a comment saying "that's just like your opinion man" or "I think you mean subjective" you should bounce right now. I was amused by how defensive this dude was, and it was clearly the result of previous drama in the audiophile community.
I don't remember all the details about why they were better, because he used a lot of hobbyist terminology that is impenetrable to a casual observer like myself. I took most of a couple videos to even realize that IEM wasn't a brand, but stood for In Ear Monitoe, which is a very fancy and specific name for what is commonly known as the earbud.
Of course if I were to say that to someone making these videos, I would be due for an explanation about why earbud is an insufficient term, and how IEMs actually are not just a better name, but an important subset of the something something and the technology something something which makes all the difference. And they would be right! I am not even mad about it, I do not have the depth of knolwdge in this topic to understand or care*, but I'm glad they do.
*instead my brain has spent space on understanding the difference between a minor action and a bonus action in dungeons and dragons. Two things from different editions that seem like the same thing, but aren't. For reasons.
I like it when people are passionate about their hobby, and they get to learn deeply about something that relatively few others understand. But even after my journey into youtube corners I didn't expect, I will not be an audiophile any time soon. The first thing I noticed in my journey was that nobody talked about what they were actually listening to after spending years and hundreds of dollars finding the perfect audio equipment. There's a running Joke on Linus Tech Tips where they always play Crab Rave to test the speakers of whatever new tech they're playing. And on the one hand, while it's a silly test, mostly to play a video of crabs dancing, on the other hand it creates a sense of continuity and a baseline of what to expect. The audio guys I was watching were so deep in the hobby that they didn't need to actually listen to music or whatever in their testing or discussions.
But I'm never going to be an audio phile because good enough is good enough for my ears. I bought some wireless* headphones from meh.com 4 or 5 years ago and they're good enough. I can hear what's being said on tv without turning on subtitles and the rare times I listen to music through them it's stuff like They Might be Giants, a band who through most of their 30+ year career has continued to regularly released new music over the phone. Meaning you were limited to the quality of your phone's speaker and the infrastructure of the phone lines.
Could my audio experience be better? Yeah, but I don't need it to be.
Stuff I'm Watching: The Bear came back this week. this is my first new season since discovering the show last year, and I'm doing my best to space my viewing out. Both because I hate the binge release model anyway, but also because the show is a work of art and I want to savor it. There was a moment in the first episode of the newest season where I went "Oh, this is what we're doing" and I was once again blown away by the creative risks this show is willing to take to tell a good story and be the best TV show it can be. I struggle to recommend things without tautologically saying "if you like the sort of thing this is, you'll like it," but i do honestly think The Bear is the best thing being made in television right now. The Lair of the White Worm is a 1988 movie with Peter Capaldi and Hugh Grant as they are menace by the followers of an ancient snake god in rural England. It's loosely based on the novel of the same name by Bram Stoker, but it never occurred to me that Stoker wrote other novels, so when I saw "Based on the novel by Bram Stoker" I thought they meant Dracula ans spent a good portion of the movie confused. But my confusion aside, I really enjoyed how bonkers this one gets with weird mythology, bonkers dream sequences and Peter Capaldi eating worms and playing the bagpipes (not at the same time.) Check it out if you like weird.
Also: Watch this space. I'm going to try something I haven't done in a long time next week in an effort to get back to a daily writing routine. Long-time readers might know what to expect.
