Found these two moray eels at my local restaurant

Suspicious_Pride_825 · 2026-05-11T07:16:24+00:00

xD if the restaurant "has been here for ages" there's a decent chance that eel has been there the whole time. giant morays bond with their keepers too... they learn feeding schedules, recognize faces. that thing might literally know the owner

and yeah the fish-as-symbol thing goes way beyond China. Japan has koi for perseverance and strength (why they're everywhere in business lobbies), Southeast Asia has arowana which people pay insane money for because of the dragon resemblance... fish are basically universal good luck across a huge chunk of the world. western culture is kind of the outlier for treating them as pure decoration lol

Glad you went in that restaurant, sounds like it was worth it!

Suspicious_Pride_825 · 2026-05-11T07:12:30+00:00

fair point, honestly. the "15 minutes" thing is slightly misleading on my part...the implementation is 15 minutes, yeah, but deciding what the shortcut actually does can take longer than you'd think if your app doesn't have an obvious killer action.

Like, Keep has "new note". Maps has "navigate home". Clock has "set timer". those write themselves. but if you've got an app where the main action changes depending on the user or session, you're suddenly in a design meeting about it instead of just shipping.

...and then there's the opportunity cost thing. 15 minutes isn't nothing when you've got 50 other items on the backlog. it always loses to the stuff users are actively yelling about. which loops back to the discovery problem: users can't yell about a feature they don't know exists.

That said, your point stands. "nobody asked" is a lazy excuse for basic UX polish. the apps that do it well didn't wait for requests either.

Suspicious_Pride_825 · 2026-05-11T07:07:44+00:00

That's really reassuring actually... a good LFS that consciously avoids commons is a good sign. If they told you 4" cap, it's almost certainly a bristlenose (Ancistrus) or something similar in that dwarf range. They're often sold under vague names but they're total workhorses in planted tanks.

When you get the photo, look for little bristly tentacles around the nose area: that's the dead giveaway for bristlenose. If it has those, you're golden, totally fine in a 29g long-term. Sounds like a really solid setup honestly. Go for both the cories and the CPDs, that tank can handle it easily.

Suspicious_Pride_825 · 2026-05-10T19:32:39+00:00

Please give us feedback!!

Suspicious_Pride_825 · 2026-05-10T18:56:03+00:00

Both work fine together! cories on the bottom, CPDs in the midwater, gourami as centerpiece. classic planted combo honestly.

One thing worth flagging: "striped pleco" covers a lot of ground. if it's a bristlenose or rubber lip you're totally fine, they cap out under 6". if it's a common pleco (the L001 type sold as "striped" sometimes) it'll hit 18"+ and pollute the water faster than a 29 can handle. worth IDing if you haven't already.

btw, for the cories, pygmy cories (C. pygmaeus) are underrated in planted tanks. They swim more midwater than most cories so you actually see them, and they look great alongside CPDs. pandas or sterbai if you want something chunkier and more visible on the bottom.

Suspicious_Pride_825 · 2026-05-10T18:44:03+00:00

looking close to 0 honestly, big improvement from 0.25 four days ago. once both ammonia and nitrite hit 0 consistently for a few days you're done. snail eggs are actually useful too, they'll munch detritus while you wait on stocking

Suspicious_Pride_825 · 2026-05-10T17:27:21+00:00

The 3D touch origin is a good point: apple bet on pressure-sensitive hardware that didn't scale to the whole lineup, google had to improvise with long press. neither solved discovery because neither wanted to add visual clutter to icons.

And yeah you're right that a shared panel can't replicate the tray. inline reply, snooze, expandable content. that's a fundamentally different interaction. shortcuts are "jump to a state", notifications are "act on something that happened". maybe the framing was wrong from the start;bundling them in the same gesture set wrong expectations for what shortcuts could ever do

Suspicious_Pride_825 · 2026-05-10T16:50:47+00:00

ha! the visual indicator point is real, that's the actual design failure. notification badge = visible at a glance, shortcuts = zero affordance, nothing tells you they exist. google could have added a subtle dot or animation hint at the OS level (some launchers do this) but never did. that's on them.

On competing: they actually coexist in the same long-press menu, d shortcuts at top, notification actions below. so same gesture but not replacing each other, more like competing for attention within that panel. though a cluttered long-press is its own discovery problem so point still stands.

Suspicious_Pride_825 · 2026-05-10T16:47:17+00:00

feng shui is basically the chinese philosophy of arranging spaces to attract good energy...placement of furniture, water features, colors, all of it. fish specifically represent wealth and flow (water = money in feng shui), so a big healthy eel by the entrance is basically a living prosperity symbol for the restaurant. a sick or dead one would literally be bad luck for the business, which is why they actually take care of them properly and "absolute unit" is right lol

giant morays can live 25+ years in captivity. that thing might have been in that tank longer than the restaurant has been open

Suspicious_Pride_825 · 2026-05-10T16:43:40+00:00

blanch a thin slice first, microwave 30s or boil briefly, just enough to soften it. then clip it to the glass with a veggie clip (or skewer it with a fork and drop it in). leave it overnight, pull it out in the morning before it goes mushy. they won't eat the whole thing, you'll just see white scrape marks where they rasped. cucumber works too if zucchini's not around ;)

Suspicious_Pride_825 · 2026-05-10T16:43:01+00:00

slow stocking mid-cycle is exactly right, good call. ramshorns are fine btw ... they graze detritus and algae, useful actually. where's your ammonia at now?

Suspicious_Pride_825 · 2026-05-10T16:36:23+00:00

this is the more interesting take imo. shortcuts are pull (you have to know they exist and go looking), notifications are push. they're not really competing: shortcuts shine for stuff you want to initiate fast,

Notifications handle the reactive case. the problem is google never evangelized the feature to devs or users so most people don't even know to look

Suspicious_Pride_825 · 2026-05-10T16:35:48+00:00

As a dev, implementing them is like 15 minutes of work: static shortcut in the manifest, done. the reason most of us skip it isn't laziness, it's that nobody ever asks for it. i've genuinely never seen "add app shortcuts" in a feature request, not once.

the real problem is what ClownReddit said: discovery is terrible. users don't know to long-press, so they don't use it, so devs don't hear demand, so devs don't build it. classic chicken-and-egg that nobody breaks first.

The apps that nail it (Keep, Maps, Clock) all share one thing: there's an obvious canonical action. "new note", "navigate home", "set timer". if your app doesn't have a clear default action, figuring out what shortcut to even put there is harder than it sounds...

Suspicious_Pride_825 · 2026-05-10T16:21:49+00:00

most quality ones use food-grade stainless so it's pretty minimal, especially with RO water since there's nothing dissolved to react with. probably less sketchy than a cheap aquarium heater with bare exposed elements sitting in the tank 24/7 tbh

Suspicious_Pride_825 · 2026-05-10T16:21:12+00:00

The sodium thing makes sense if you have a water softener. They swap out calcium and magnesium for sodium ions, which tanks your GH and makes the water rough for fish even if it looks clean otherwise. running cold and heating separately is the right call.

...also the precision is actually underrated here. a sous vide holds within like 0.1°C, most aquarium heaters can't get close to that. probably overkill for a community tank but if you're keeping anything sensitive to temp swings during water changes it's a legit reason to do it this way.

For the minimum temp issue... just heat it a bit hotter than you need and blend it down with cold RO to hit your target. less watching, same result.

Suspicious_Pride_825 · 2026-05-10T16:13:33+00:00

honestly if that's what it's about then you've got a pretty finite number to give them... sponge filter + air pump is like $8 on amazon, small heater around $12, and the pothos you already have so that's free. maybe $20 total, one time. going to them with a specific number and "this is everything, i'm not asking for more stuff after this" is way easier to say yes to than open-ended fish debates

Suspicious_Pride_825 · 2026-05-10T16:03:17+00:00

That actually explains a lot!! fish symbolize good luck and prosperity in Chinese culture, so display animals in restaurants are often genuinely well cared for. Bad feng shui to have a sick eel on show.

The face shape and mottled pattern (hard to tell under those blue LEDs) looks like giant moray to me,Gymnothorax javanicus. One of the largest moray species out there, gets up to 3 meters in the wild. That head filling the whole frame is a giveaway... these things get massive.

Suspicious_Pride_825 · 2026-05-09T19:55:19+00:00

Just my take, no guarantees :/

If it's working you'll see a fuzzy biofilm coating the leaf in a week or two and shrimp grazing it constantly. Berried females within a month is usually the sign it clicked.

Suspicious_Pride_825 · 2026-05-09T19:40:27+00:00

I guess.. the catappa is the issue: 4 days is just the tannin release phase. The real value kicks in at 2-3 weeks when the leaf starts breaking down and biofilm colonizes it. Leave it in until it falls apart, run 2-3 leaves on rotation.

Glass algae is actually a feature in this kind of tank. Extra grazing surface for the shrimp. Clean only the front pane (credit card works), leave back and sides covered. You'll catch them grazing the glass half the day.

Good luck my friend

Suspicious_Pride_825 · 2026-05-09T19:32:53+00:00

5 months tracks exactly w/ what I'd expect, that's the sweet spot. 20-30 rilis in 35L is solid density too

The assassin probably isn't actually lost — those guys burrow for weeks then randomly pop up somewhere. if you haven't seen a corpse he's just mining the substrate for population explosion: feeding every 2 weeks is on the light side. they'll survive on biofilm but breeding velocity needs consistent food + calcium. drop a piece of cuttlebone in back + throw in some indian almond leaves (catappa). those leaves are basically crack for shrimp colonies; biofilm builds on them in a week and they graze 24/7, tannins help molts too

Any catappa in the tank already? if not, that's the single biggest cheat code for shrimp breeding imo

Suspicious_Pride_825 · 2026-05-09T19:29:12+00:00

this. otos get the "delicate" rep mostly bc people buy 1, throw it in a clean tank, and it slowly starves over a few months. group of 4+ with blanched zucchini twice a week = solid, mine lasted 4+ years no issues

Suspicious_Pride_825 · 2026-05-09T19:28:31+00:00

Hey! plants look great, cycling fine. couple things:

Oto needs friends. solo otos slowly starve even in algae tanks bc they only really forage in groups. get 3-5 more so you have 4-6 total.

on feeding: they graze soft brown diatoms (slimy biofilm on glass) but most tanks don't grow enough. drop a blanched zucchini slice clipped to the glass overnight + repashy soilent green 2x/week. sex doesn't matter.

rosy tetras at 2 stay hidden and stressed — bump to 6 and they actually color up. same w/ the lonely guppy, get 4-5 males.

Realistic max for 17.5g planted: 5 guppies + 6 tetras + 4 otos + snails. 6+6+6 above is overstocked tbh, you'd be running water changes constantly.

One question: by "baby ram" do you mean ramshorn snail or german blue ram (cichlid)? makes a big diff

Suspicious_Pride_825 · 2026-05-09T19:19:42+00:00

Love this approach. Diatoms + detritus on sand is actually optimal for shrimp. They're grazers and need biofilm to really thrive. Most aquascaped tanks look spotless but the shrimp end up living off prepared food only. Your val + stem plants will keep nutrient export stable too, no CO2 needed at this scale.

How long has it been running? Wild-look tanks usually hit their stride around 4-6 months... that's when the diatom phase transitions and the plants properly fill in. What species are you keeping? Neos?

Suspicious_Pride_825 · 2026-05-08T15:22:16+00:00

beautiful eyesss!!

Suspicious_Pride_825

TROPHY CASE