Passat Headlamp Assembly

Check out 4:30 in this video and see if that looks like what you have. Seems DLR is a self contained assembly that is replaced as a whole unit.

You are truly a person with great taste! 😁

I’ll have to check out Even More News.

Lemon does sound like it’d be a lot of sour in addition to the vinegar itself.

I used powdered ginger and thought fresh grated would be the way to go. I also feel it’d be easier to strain it if the final drink.

Overall I thought it was good though. I gave some to my girlfriend not telling her what it was and she thought it was some vile beer type thing that went bad. 😆

I’d absolutely drink it again though. With some tweaks it’d be really good. I am solidly pro switchel.

I checked out BtB due to constant weird if mouth on Reddit and immediately enjoyed Robert’s personality. There were also a lot of Cody and Paul F. Tompkins episodes at the time, and I was also already a fan of them, so that helped as well.

I so want to like Some More News, but it feels to doomy to me and Cody’s stage persona is a bit much for me, so I enjoy him better as regular Cody on BtB more.

I also feel the more before I was born stuff that BtB usually focuses on us easier for me to deal with as most of the people are long dead and gone, so it feels more like entertainment. For more current things, I try to stick to “legitimate news” instead of things designed more for entertainment. ICHH is an exception because it covers a lot mainstream news wouldn’t touch, and it does it pretty calmly and treats it with seriousness moreso than trying to make it into some kind of bit. Plus they often mention ways to participate or to at least try and help with some of the things. I feel the topics are things important to know, and aren’t just things that make me depressed about the whole world.

Hood Politics with Prop is probably the next one I may allow myself to get into.

Same! I originally just tried to limit myself to BtB, but then I listened to ICHH to learn about the Unicorn Ranch, and I ended up learning about so many other topics. Then I kept seeing interesting CPWDCS, so now I listen to some of those.

They turn out so much great content every week, and ICHH has really helped me to better understand more people and issues than I ever would have been able to on my own.

Reminds me of this short sci fi story I just recently listened to on a podcast.

The Plastic People

That’s the story in text. If you want to hear it read to you, it’s CZM Book Club: The Plastic People by Tobias Buckell out on 23 Dec 2023.

I think I had watched his switchel and shrub videos too!

I want to say it was Alton Brown where I first learned about these. I’ve made shrub a few times and even had it at the local Pennsylvania German heritage fairs.

Since I had the stuff on hand, I quick threw some together, just eyeballing the ingredients. It’s pretty darn good!

Main flavor is obviously molasses, so if you don’t like that, you won’t like switchel. The ginger and vinegar work together very nicely! Both bring a nice zing and brightness to the drink. It contrasts well with the warm and earthy flavor of the molasses.

I put most of it in the fridge for after work as it’s going to be a super hot day again and I didn’t want a vinegar taste in my mouth overpowering my coffee.

If you have the stuff, I absolutely recommend it.

Very true. Any fruit syrup with a vinegar glug would get you there well enough if one wanted to see if they were shrub-folk.

Ooo I need to try making switchel. Just remembered I have molasses sitting around for another item.

You seriously put much thought into this, and I appreciate that.

I was just thinking some shrub syrup fits the bill and is tasty, convenient, and a touch unconventional these days so you can look like a trendsetter.

Your comment seems to fit shrub perfectly.

!superbowl@lemmy.world is still doing ok, though not quite at its peak. I don’t think new subs are going up by much these days. I have seen comments by a few new names, which is very nice to see. Overall comment levels are about the same. Upvotes seem steady, but not as high as they were around the new year. I do think the year end festivities really boosted things though.

I’m happy to be ahead of !opossums@lemmy.world again though (no offense, I love opossums too, but I want to be #1 wild animal sub!) and I look to be top of the 2nd page of communities overall, so even though I’m not doing quite as well as I perhaps feel I should be doing, I feel I can’t complain too much.

I still get a few positive compliments each week and people are sharing their personal stories with owls, which is always nice to hear. As long as I know the content is making people happy, I feel it’s worth the work.

I’ve enjoyed having a few things to share with the !digitalbioacoustics@lemmy.world community. I’ve gotten some great recommended reading materials from that group in return. Maybe I’ll have to look into more collabs and get some cross promotion going.

Yesterday there was another AskLemmy about what was the easiest instrument to learn and I felt like anyone asking that question without already having a clear vision in their head of what they wanted to be playing as far as instruments and music was just going to waste their time and money, but even trying to be very polite I thought it was too negative so I didn’t post it.

I think people think music will be a fun relaxing hobby, but it’s really like training to be an athlete. You won’t get any good unless it’s something you truly want to do because it’s a ton of work and a good instrument is expensive and I feel you should really start by taking lessons so you didn’t waste time on trial and error figuring out what to learn instead of learning how to do it.

Craigslist and eBay are full of gear that was barely touched because music is hard. It can be very rewarding, but you will still hate it at times. I tell my teacher all the time that I hate her 3/4 of the time because she constantly challenges me, but by the end of that week, I’ve put in enough time to master the lesson, and then I’m so happy and feel the rest of the time was worth it. It’s like some people love going to the gym and getting those endorphins or runners getting a runners high. Some people live for that, but for others, it’s just hell.

It sounds like you don’t enjoy the time and money you’ve spent. Just live and learn. Maybe come back to it later in life and see if things change. But don’t force yourself into hating it.

It would seem better to pass the torch than leave things in a state where nobody knows if you’re on vacation or dead or what. I hope he finds someone, the movie category seems like it could be a vibrant one.

I know there’s also a few of them. I have them grouped in a multi community to let me browse them all at once. That’s been a big help for dealing with fragmented fan bases.

I try to put a lot of emphasis on encouraging new posters and commenters. I don’t get why you’d come to the “wild west” of social media to just be solely a lurker. You should want to be an explorer and a settler, forging that new frontier. I won’t hate on the lurkers, they will always be the majority, but why deal with the quirk, less ease of use, and less content to not want to help shape what it becomes?

I came over intending to lurk, hence my crap username, but what I wanted wasn’t here, but I didnt want to crawl back to Reddit, so I started building, and it’s great. People are friendly, you have less competition for attention, and the userbase is largely supportive of whatever you do because you’re doing something.

But ultimately, as long as we arent on an extended downswing, we’re doing well. I’ll keep making posts and giving positive feedback, so hopefully it keeps catching new people with the bug to interact.

My pleasure. I’m always willing to lend another perspective to things.

The increase in monthly is just mainly replacing users leaving as the active 6 month seems to be going down the same rate as active monthly is going up. Am I reading that correctly?

Total users doesn’t concern me too badly, as I’m more happy to see daily post and comment counts going up. I feel activity needs to be our focus rather than headcount. A packed stadium is kinda pointless if nobody is on stage putting on the show! 😁

About an hour a day browsing, and another 1+ hour working on content and replying to people.

Somedays I feel bad spending my time here just working on my own stuff and not getting to enjoy what you all are doing!

I did see you had Superbowl on your list and I’m always happy to see other people promote it. It’s big enough now that I’ve slowed down promoting it myself so I don’t seem pushy. It’s been a ton of work, but it’s with it to know it makes people a little happier each day.

News, memes, and tech do seem pretty dominating here, and while it’s nice getting notification of all that stuff in one place, I still prefer to go to actual news sites I trust. If I spend too much time doing it here, I feel I read more comments than actual articles, and half the comments seem to be made before actually reading the article, so it’s easy to get misinformed or biased opinions rather than facts

I’ve not sought out any direct help for a few reasons. The primary reason is my content is all stuff that I like. It’s a labor of love and not a job. I share what I do because I like it and I think you might like it too. If I asked someone to help me out, I’d feel like they’re working for me and trying to post what I’d want, but what they’d want. Bigger projects like the long articles and Owl of the Year are also my personal vision, and honestly, I want those done exactly my way, so again, I don’t want to make someone else carry out my vision and be frustrated if they can’t do that

Also, I feel the people that create the communities should be more active in their actual management. I didn’t start Superbowl, so I’m just a guest. I share my stuff and try to make it a better place, and that’s the end of my role. Earlier on, I thought it might be better to join with Birding or some other community, or maybe instead start a Raptors community where I could also do hawks, eagles, vultures, etc. Superbowl had a good bit of Reddit momentum, which I believe helped make things self-sustaining faster than for some other communities. I think combining small groups would be the way to go for a lot of things, but that isn’t my call.

Ultimately for growth though, it can’t be a daily responsibility for anyone. Maybe if you had a group of 5-10 people that can post daily, like those big politics, news, tech groups do, but most communities would be better served by 30 people posting 1 things a month than 1 person posting 30 things a month. It makes it diverse, and that will pull in more people as the flavor of the group will be less one note, and losing one or 2 people doesn’t hurt the group as much.

As much as you like my content, their might be some that like different things than me. Like I don’t enjoy many of the really small owls as much. When I do post them, many love them, but I don’t post them much because they don’t interest me. If someone that did love them shared them passionately, that would invigorate that group more than I could. Also, if you didn’t like my writing style or if I just write too much or too little, a handful of people writing in their own voice would be great.

I do think some instances have communities to try and get inactive communities into new hands, but if they’re dead, they’re probably not big enough to be self-sustaining. I see you post to a few music communities, but it would probably be easier and reach more eyes if they were under a broader scope than synthwave and gothic industrial. People on here seem to have great interest in music discovery in a way that humans can do that algorithms can’t. Perhaps having a broader scope where you can say, hey if you like “popular song x” you should check out “under the radar song y” that might get more attention. I’m into music creation and synths more than most random people, and I couldn’t tell you what electronic music is in what genre, so my chance of stumbling on one of those posts is small at this point even though I’m much closer to your audience. But the principals of being defederated from other groups seems to fly in the face of people seeing they’re not getting traffic, reaching out to each other, and merging control of their communities.

But I think that’s necessary. Just about all of us probably stumbled upon an already established and powerful state of Reddit, where we didnt need to put in as much work to get eyes. We could jump in a sub with thousands or millions of eyes already on it. We don’t have that power here yet. But we’re also small enough but large enough you can get a following relatively quick if you do put in the work.

This is getting long, and I’ve probably given you a bit to think about, so I’ll leave it here for now. It’s given me some things to think about too but having to type out my thoughts. We all want Lemmy to be big and great, but it’s gotta occur naturally. We can’t force it. We’ve got to look and experiment and see what works and what doesn’t. Evolution doesn’t happen in one generation, it takes many trials and errors. We’ve just got to keep at making this place the best we can and the rest will follow when it’s time.

I’m hearing from so many new people today! I knew there had to be more of you out there!

Always feel free to chime in with a question, comment, or request.

Glad to hear it! It’s fun always finding new things to share.

I try not to spam myself nowadays, but !superbowl@lemmy.world has great photos, of course, but I also have a good bit of educational and scientific content and places you can go visit in person.

I post daily, so if you have even a remote interest in beautiful killer birds, give it a look. I just did another ELI5 research paper write up today, and with 250 types of owls, I can guarantee you stuff you’ve never seen before!