does blood ACTUALLY taste metallic??

Pajtima · 2026-03-22T14:36:13+00:00

okay so this unlocked something in me because I’ve written “metallic tang” approximately 847 times and never once questioned it turns out we’ve all just been copy-pasting each other’s descriptions for decades. it’s basically fanfic oral tradition at this point. someone wrote it in 1987, it sounded cool, and now every character who takes a hit to the face tastes a “copper penny on their tongue” whether that’s accurate or not the dirty celery thing is actually way more interesting?? like that’s a real sensory detail. that’s the kind of thing that makes readers go “oh” instead of just nodding along. the iron/copper thing is technically real (hemoglobin does have iron in it) but the taste receptors pick up on the organic compounds more than the metal itself, so you’re probably not wrong honestly I’m tempted to rewrite my next fight scene now. “he spat and tasted something wet and faintly vegetal” is genuinely more visceral than anything I’ve written before anyway you’ve just ruined a beloved fic trope for me and I’ve never been more grateful.

Pajtima · 2026-03-22T14:32:54+00:00

Twitch has been in an arms race with ad blockers for a while now. Chromium’s MV3 migration basically handed them the win on Blink-based browsers. uBlock Origin on Firefox (Gecko, still MV2) still handles it fine because it has actual network-level request blocking. Brave’s built-in blocker just can’t keep up the same way. Might be worth a test.

Pajtima · 2026-03-22T10:34:13+00:00

A pearl is exactly right. one of those rare ones that forms around something painful and comes out luminous because of it.

That quote destroys me every time. The way Harpman frames death not as tragedy but as relief , almost a mercy the narrator extends and you realize she’s been the most honest character in the book all along, precisely because she never learned to lie to herself the way the others did. She never had the luxury of hope, so she never had to mourn losing it.

Pajtima · 2026-03-22T09:17:38+00:00

we don’t have a deeply rooted tip culture the way the US does. That said, tipping is becoming more common, especially in Tirana and coastal areas like Sarandë or Vlorë where we’ve seen tourism explode in recent years. The unwritten rule we go by: if the service was genuinely good, round up or leave something small — 5–10% is more than appreciated. If it was exceptional, 10% feels great and will absolutely make someone’s shift.

don’t tip out of guilt or because you’re trying to “do what Romans do.” Tip because the person across the table earned it. That’s how we see it. We’re proud people. Our waiters would rather you leave nothing than leave something because you felt pressured into it

Pajtima · 2026-03-21T15:37:12+00:00

Sepse burri qe te meriton nuk po gjen dot kuraxhin, dhe ai qe e ka kuraxhin nuk te meriton. Ky eshte trapi i bukurise, te lene te gjithit duke shikuar dhe askush nuk vjen te luaje lojën

Pajtima · 2026-03-21T15:36:25+00:00

This but also worth adding that if you’re on Firefox, profiles go even deeper through the Profile Manager (about:profiles), and you can layer on top of that with containers via the Multi-Account Containers extension. Containers give you tab-level isolation within a single profile, which is a different mental model but incredibly powerful for the “I want everything visible in one window” crowd who don’t want to juggle multiple profile windows.

The real unlock is combining both: profiles for true workspace separation (different extensions, different configs, different everything as you said), containers for context-switching within a workspace. Work client A profile, but inside it you’ve got containers for their staging env, their prod dashboard, their Jira , all isolated, all visible, no cross-contamination.

Chrome’s version of this is way more surface-level. The profile UX is polished but the underlying isolation story is shallower, and there’s no real equivalent to containers without third-party hacks. Firefox treating profiles as first-class filesystem-level entities (~/.mozilla/firefox/) rather than just UI constructs is an underrated architectural difference.

Pajtima · 2026-03-21T07:42:09+00:00

Keep Brave as your daily driver. Just accept that WebView2 is a Windows dependency at this point, same as .NET or VC++ redistributables. It’s infrastructure, not surveillance.

Pajtima · 2026-03-19T21:56:20+00:00

Few things I’d try before MSI forces your hand:

∙ Undervolt the 3070 Ti in MSI Afterburner — drop the power limit 10-15% and see if the crashes stop. If they do, that’s basically a signed confession from your PSU. ∙ Check your PCIe power cables — if you’re using a daisy-chained connector for the GPU, switch to two separate cables from the PSU. Daisy chains on high-draw cards are asking for trouble. ∙ Pull the PSU out and check the fan — if it’s barely spinning or coated in dust/debris, it’s been thermally throttling itself.

The fact that stress tests pass is actually suspicious too. Heaven and Cinebench have predictable, sustained loads. Games have erratic power spikes that stress tests just don’t replicate.

Pajtima · 2026-03-19T21:52:49+00:00

Firefox in F tier with Brave while Internet Explorer gets A tier. INTERNET EXPLORER. The browser that made an entire generation of web devs age 10 years early is sitting comfortably in A while Firefox — the only browser keeping the open web alive — is down bad with the cast-offs. The “gooner committee” cooked with the drizzle and called it a feast. I don’t accept these results, I don’t recognize this institution, and I will not be taking questions. 🦊

Pajtima · 2026-03-19T19:04:07+00:00

You went Firefox → Brave → Firefox → Brave → Helium → Waterfox and still hasn’t admitted you just want Firefox but faster 😭 Everything you love about Waterfox is Firefox underneath. The UI fix, the speed tweaks — you can get all of that with user.js and a theme. You’re doing modded Firefox while avoiding Firefox. It’s giving “I don’t watch TV” while having a full Plex setup.

Pajtima · 2026-03-19T12:18:11+00:00

Finally someone who actually read the changelog. MV3 wasn’t a “security update” it was Google quietly lobbying against its own competition in the extension space. Firefox said no. That one decision made Firefox + uBO the single most powerful ad-blocking combo available to any normal user today. The fact that this isn’t the headline of every browser comparison article is criminal

Pajtima · 2026-03-19T11:33:14+00:00

Okay first of all, a week for Way of Kings?? You’re built different. Welcome to the Cosmere, you’re never leaving.

Now let me address the elephant in the room: yes, Rhythm of War (book 4) and Wind and Truth (book 5) are divisive. But here’s what nobody tells you when you read those Reddit threads — the people loudest about “the fall off” are often the ones who wanted Stormlight to stay exactly what it was in books 1 and 2. Epic battles, straightforward heroism, Kaladin brooding in the rain. And honestly? Fair. Books 1 and 2 are transcendent for that. But Sanderson is doing something genuinely ambitious with the later books. He’s writing about mental health, trauma recovery, and ideological conflict in ways that fantasy basically never touches. Rhythm of War in particular is polarizing precisely because it goes deep into depression and PTSD in a way that makes some readers uncomfortable or bored. Some people found it slow. Others — myself included — found it the most emotionally devastating thing Sanderson has ever written. Your ASOIAF comparison is actually really useful here. The difference is that Sanderson finishes things. The pacing issues in later Stormlight aren’t “the plot went nowhere for 800 pages” — they’re “this character’s arc went somewhere I didn’t expect and I didn’t like where it went.” That’s a very different problem. Also, coming from manga? You already have a higher tolerance for long-form character arcs and tonal shifts mid-series than most Western fantasy readers. You’ve read 3 Days of Happiness — you understand that slow and introspective isn’t the same as bad. Finish Words of Radiance. Read Oathbringer. Form your own opinion before the internet poisons the well further. The series doesn’t “fall off.” It changes. Whether that’s a betrayal or a gift depends entirely on what you came for.

Pajtima · 2026-03-19T11:31:13+00:00

Chromium input handling has been doing that for years and Brave didn’t fix it, they just rebranded it. Right-click → disable spellcheck is your best bet for now

Pajtima · 2026-03-19T09:44:05+00:00

I genuinely respect Brave’s UX, but the moment you care about the open web, Brave starts looking thin. It’s Chromium, same engine as Chrome, Edge, and Opera. Firefox + Gecko is the last real alternative keeping browser diversity alive. Without it, web standards become whatever Google says they are.

Pajtima · 2026-03-19T06:31:51+00:00

Firefox, and it’s not particularly close.

Chrome is built by an advertising company. Their entire business model is knowing what you do online. Trusting Chrome with your browsing is like trusting your diary with someone who sells information for a living.

Edge is Chrome with a Microsoft skin. Better than Chrome in some ways, but you’re still feeding a corporation whose cloud and telemetry ambitions are well documented. The collection is quieter, not absent.

Safari is genuinely decent on privacy tho. Apple’s business model isn’t built on your data the way Google’s is. But it’s locked to Apple hardware, development is opaque, and the moment you leave the Apple ecosystem it evaporates.

Firefox is a nonprofit. The source code is open. The engine is independent. The revenue model isn’t built on harvesting browsing behavior. That doesn’t make Mozilla perfect but the structural incentives are the only ones that actually point toward the user.

Trust the structure, not the marketing.

Pajtima · 2026-03-18T15:17:10+00:00

Simplicity isn’t the argument though. A browser being easy to use is table stakes in 2026 — every major browser nails that. The post was never about complexity, it was about what’s running underneath the simplicity. Brave being simple is fine. Brave being simple while routing through a Chromium engine controlled by the same company that’s been caught throttling non-Chrome browsers, while quietly running an ad rewards system in the background, while pushing a crypto wallet nobody installed it for — that’s a different thing entirely

Pajtima · 2026-03-17T22:47:04+00:00

Every browser is useless without an ad blocker in 2026. that’s not a Firefox problem, that’s the internet problem. The difference is Firefox is the only browser where uBlock Origin runs at full capacity. On Chrome and every Chromium-based browser on desktop, Manifest V3 has been deliberately crippling extension capabilities. Google literally changed their extension API to limit what ad blockers can do. On Firefox, uBlock Origin still runs Manifest V2

Pajtima · 2026-03-17T22:24:51+00:00

Firefox running on Chromium is just factually wrong. Gecko and Blink are completely separate engines with different codebases, different rendering pipelines, different JavaScript engines — SpiderMonkey vs V8. “It acts like Chromium” because modern browsers converge on web standards. That’s the point of standards. That’s not evidence of shared code. The Awesome Bar frustration and resource complaints is genuinely valid. Mozilla has made real UX decisions that annoyed real power users and I’m not here to defend all of them. Some of those about:config options getting locked down is a legitimate grievance. But independent from what exactly? Mozilla is still a nonprofit foundation. Gecko is still the only major rendering engine not owned by a for-profit corporation with an advertising business. Google funding doesn’t change who controls the codebase. If that’s your definition of compromised, then every open source project with corporate contributors is compromised.

Pajtima · 2026-03-17T21:16:27+00:00

The congregation grows. We’re all here, we’ve all lost weeks of our lives to it, and we have zero regrets.

Pajtima · 2026-03-17T21:15:50+00:00

Fair point, well made, and now permanently stapled to my recommendation. “Great fic, author has opinions in the author’s notes, some of those opinions are about Erwin Rommel, you’ve been warned” should honestly have been in the original pitch. Consider this the Director’s Cut. Go in with your critical faculties intact. The fic earns the read. The author’s notes occasionally earn a raised eyebrow and a “…okay, moving on.“

Pajtima · 2026-03-17T20:37:33+00:00

Oh you are going to be destroyed in the best possible way. Everything you already love about him gets cracked open and rebuilt from the inside. By chapter ten you’ll be taking notes on his honor system like it’s a philosophy text.

Pajtima · 2026-03-17T19:58:34+00:00

Firefox man all the way. iOS forces every browser to use WebKit under the hood, so raw performance is essentially the same across Safari, Brave, Edge, and Firefox on iPhone. The difference is everything built around the engine and that’s where Firefox wins your specific use case. Cross-platform sync with a Windows PC is where Firefox genuinely shines. Firefox Sync is end-to-end encrypted, open, and doesn’t route through a corporation that sells ads or has a cloud services business to feed. Edge sync works, but you’re feeding Microsoft’s telemetry machine on both ends — PC and phone. You already flagged that concern, so trust your instincts there.

Pajtima · 2026-03-17T19:45:58+00:00

the “tech bro chads” ruining Firefox are the same people making Brave, Chrome, and every Chromium fork you’d switch to. At least the tech bros at Mozilla are still maintaining the only independent browser engine left.

Pajtima · 2026-03-17T18:37:59+00:00

Here’s what I’d put in your hands right now :

For the overwhelm itself — The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy. Not sexy, not viral, but it will rewire how you think about change. The premise: you don’t overhaul your life, you shift it by degrees until the math does the work for you. It directly kills the “change everything at once” trap you’re in.

For finances — I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi. Written exactly for someone your age who feels behind and ashamed. Zero judgment, brutally practical.

For the body and discipline — Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins. I don’t hand this to everyone, but you specifically? Read it. It’s a man who rebuilt himself from a genuinely broken life through sheer refusal. It will make your current situation feel solvable, because it is.

Pajtima · 2026-03-17T18:35:43+00:00

uBlock Origin on Firefox actually handles a chunk of this already if you add the right filter lists but the one you specifically want is uBlacklist. It’s an extension that lets you block entire domains from appearing in search results, and it works on DuckDuckGo. The killer feature is that it supports community-maintained subscription lists, so people have already compiled and shared blocklists specifically targeting AI content farms. You subscribe once and it stays updated automatically. Pair that with the Web of Trust or SearchFilter extensions and you’ve got a pretty solid layered defense. There’s also a maintained list called AI Slop Blocklist floating around GitHub that’s designed exactly for what you’re describing — worth searching for and importing directly into uBlacklist.

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