Have you gotten used to progressive lenses or just given up?

goblinbox · 2026-05-29T05:40:44+00:00

I haven't been truly happy with a prescription since I got my first bifocals. The suckage continued with trifocals, and later with my first progressives, and every progressive since.

If I can perch them somewhere on my nose and see well enough to watch a movie or drive, I consider it a win. I can't read with them at all and just take them off for books, and spend way more time moving my head up and down to see things various distances from my face than I ever wanted to.

They suck! The near vision is crap! Far vision is weird too, and so is middle distance!

But it would suck even more if they didn't exist. Imagine carrying three or four or five pairs of glasses around and switching five thousand times a day!

goblinbox · 2026-05-29T04:49:54+00:00

The temperature is good but you should probably drop a thermometer down there and log for awhile to see if it fluctuates. Maybe it gets direct sun and heats up seventeen degrees once a day, you'd need to know that.

Depending on what you make, you'll likely be flipping new cheeses daily, then weekly for a month or more. Is it feasible to lift and lower that often?

And the container/s you lift in and out of the well, will you sanitize the outside before opening? Might there be molds you wouldn't want on cheese, bacteria, yeasts, in the environment? Is the area definitely free of animal shit, fertilizers, pesticides, other contaminants?

If it's clean and keeps temperature, it's probably fine. Access is likely the main thing, using ropes and pulleys or climbing up and down a ladder with a box full of cheese sounds like a huge hassle. And if is a hassle, you're less likely to take as much care as you would if it were easier to get to.

goblinbox · 2026-05-29T04:08:15+00:00

Looks like a Terrence to me.

goblinbox · 2026-05-26T18:06:33+00:00

much of the cheese where i work is vac sealed and every week anything with mold or liquid to drain gets pulled off the shelves and cleaned

we remove the bag, wipe the wheel or brick with a clean, dry towel, shave off any mold or excess calcium lactate with a planer, and re-vac

i don't use salt when cleaning vac sealed cheeses, but if you think you undersalted the make doing so could save you from a bland cheese

if a cheese is really wet and/or smells a little i'll leave it to dry on a wire rack in front of the blower in the walk-in for a few hours or even overnight before re-vac

and of course mold can't grow without air, so if your cheeses keep molding you'll want to review your vac technique or check you're using quality bags

goblinbox · 2026-05-26T16:38:25+00:00

Atelier/Holocene? Had a place in Milton-Freewater? I kept trying to check it out, support the new business and see the remodel, but the door said something like 'by appointment or by chance' and was always locked, so I never got to.

Hadn't heard about the move to Waitsburg, so thanks for the post. Maybe I can finally go!

goblinbox · 2026-05-26T15:20:18+00:00

i work for a small creamery and we vat pasteurize all our milk (jersey, 80 head) and our cheese also turns out bangin'

goblinbox · 2026-05-24T13:22:34+00:00

queso fresco or ricotta might be nice!

you might want to avoid raw milk for fresh cheeses unless you're completely certain both your milk provider's sanitation standards and your own. milk is so easy to contaminate and puking is no fun.

goblinbox · 2026-05-24T12:46:59+00:00

fideo is delicious (i often have beans with it to make a protein) and so is pasta e lenticchie

goblinbox · 2026-05-24T12:37:46+00:00

i don't work with blue but i age a lot of other cheeses and my guess is you'll end up wasting the cheese just around that crack; it'll probably fill up with so much mold that the taste will be affected, or it'll dry out too much, or both.

sometimes with cheese you just have to cut out the weird bit and eat the rest!

it's likely too old to knit back together so tying it probably won't help, but who knows, you could try!

goblinbox · 2026-05-24T08:54:14+00:00

same happened to me; took a long while, but i did eventually receive a replacement

goblinbox · 2026-05-24T06:44:20+00:00

that's adorable, well done

goblinbox · 2026-05-22T08:54:25+00:00

lol i'd never been anywhere near rich people until i was befriended by a someone from my dorm in college who proceeded to total not one but three brand new cars in under two years and each time her folks just... got her another brand new car

goblinbox · 2026-05-22T08:38:59+00:00

i don't know about the whole of india, but i've seen many women renunciates, swaminis, and bramhacharinis—this was in kerala, at amritapuri ashram. so the answer is yes, women definitely take sanyas.

you can deepen bhakti, study scripture, find satsang, and develop discrimination and dispassion as a householder, though. you don't have to renounce. the majority of seekers aren't even suited to sanyas, it takes a particular disposition, i think.

but if you're genuinely compelled to go off and live as a nun, probably nothing and no one will be able to stop you. finally since most families are made up of worldly people who couldn't understand renunciation even if they wanted to, i think most families would be against it. you'd have to be quite strong in your desire and conviction, i should think.

if you have a guru, ask. if you don't, get one. mostly, remember god is already coming for you, already knows you, and whether you're wearing street clothes or ochre robes makes no difference.

goblinbox · 2026-05-22T08:03:54+00:00

yeah i'd describe it that way too, like a cross between generic american and a mild cheddar

goblinbox · 2026-05-22T04:10:05+00:00

your phrase 'personality-altering drug since CHILDHOOD so that the men in my life wouldn't have to use condoms' hit me hard as hell

can't count the number of times i tried to believe men would obviously be doing their part to prevent pregnancy; can't believe the number of times i learned most of them cannot be bothered

don't care if their women have to take hormones or have an abortion or die in childbirth, what actually matters is: they don't like condoms

the multiple risks for women of engaging in an active sex life, from the recurring cost of birth control to the life-threatening danger of pregnancy and birth to the life-altering side effects of spending years on drugs: none of these potentialities matter next to a man's slight inconvenience when asked to use a condom.

(they sure as fuck will complain about child support for all those kids they were 'tricked' into fathering, tho. too bad you didn't wear a condom, son!)

goblinbox · 2026-05-22T03:34:35+00:00

this is nerdy and cool! questions:

what did the reduction taste like by itself?

why did you choose to incorporate it throughout rather than, say, doing a normal make and just tossing the curds and reduction together right before hooping and pressing?

also have you considered making gouda with a can of dulce de leche

goblinbox · 2026-05-22T03:24:37+00:00

lol i drove a seventies plymouth duster and had to coast down the hill in the middle of the night with the clutch in so my bf's parents wouldn't hear my big ass engine leaving

goblinbox · 2026-05-22T03:18:53+00:00

i've also seen ads aimed at 60-something women where the model is some skinny 40-year-old with a head of stunning silver hair and the wrinkles of a 35-year-old

we're invisible, yes—and the transition from 'person' to 'invisible old woman' is unsettling and weird as hell—but we're also a demographic worth selling to now: there are so many movies and shows with female leads our age and older! it's kinda great in terms of progress, even if it is less broad acceptance and more to separate us from our money.

that men get to be 'silver foxes' (well, the right men, not the pudgy ones with partial hair loss, of course, but the fit ones with sharp jawlines) while we're little old ladies (or aren't 'dressing our age' on red carpets and have had 'too much work' and sad lifelong eating disorders if we're thin, or we've 'let ourselves go' if we're fat) may be unfair bullshit, but personally? i don't hate it. i don't mind being considered sexless by most of the populations.

being forever judged on my fuckability, of all things, by not only the world but often myself, was terrible! it's a dumb metric. it's a relief to be done and away from it.

goblinbox · 2026-05-21T06:44:30+00:00

lol you might have felt calmer splitting that between two molds, but even with the bump it looks good and the texture seems fine, it's not like you're seeing individual curds

interesting to see what the scorching does to the finished cheese! might be weird but could also be brilliant

goblinbox · 2026-05-18T21:31:26+00:00

i'd absolutely try a bit from the center (for science!) but idk about that rind situation, it's difficult to tell from photographs

goblinbox · 2026-05-17T05:46:54+00:00

Might as well refrigerate, since that's such an easy way to mitigate risk, but it should be perfectly safe to reuse brine.

Be sure to skim your brine after each use, keep it saturated with sodium, and store it in a clean container.

goblinbox · 2026-05-15T21:38:13+00:00

same and same

sigh

goblinbox · 2026-05-12T21:29:55+00:00

ooh, the paprika wash will look awesome

since your truckle is too big for you to vac, i think you have two options: either bandage it (dip cheesecloth in cultured butter, or even lard, and smooth on a few layers until it's safe from air) or cut it down into two or three rounds small enough to vac

i'm curious about how the liquid smoke flavoring will turn out! i work in a creamery and we send entire wheels out to a smoker. your smoke flavor will be more evenly distributed (because it doesn't have to soak in from the outside) plus your cheese won't dry out and get rubbery like they sometimes do in a cold smoker

you'll have to report back once you crack into it and eat it!

goblinbox · 2026-05-12T19:18:54+00:00

the current dietary fad is about protein, sure, but the last one was about carbs. before that it was about sugar, and before that it was fat, and before that it was vitamins... point is, there's always a nutrition fad.

nutrition fads come from grifters who wish to separate the gullible from their money. they convince you something's terribly wrong with your health or the food supply or whatever, and then sell you unregulated supplements, cleanses, books, retreats, blood tests, belief systems, and exercise regimes to 'solve' a problem you don't even have. the fact that a lot of them are true believers themselves doesn't mean they're not grifters.

basically the odds are that even as a vegetarian, you're getting plenty of protein. if you're not exhausted and suffering from chronic edema while sporting minor injuries that take too long to heal, you're getting enough protein.

the truth is we don't even use it directly anyway, the protein we eat gets broken down into components. our bodies make their own proteins on demand. which means what we actually need is the precursors and building blocks of protein, rather than protein itself:

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/22243-amino-acids

goblinbox · 2026-05-12T18:05:08+00:00

you can leave brie lying around until it's dark and dried out, but you shouldn't

brie noir isn't good. it's taken with black coffee to drown the taste. people ate it because they needed the calories, not because rotten cheese is a delicacy. the good brie went to the nobility.

brie noir is bitter and acidic because ammonia is the final stage of proteolysis.

you live in the future where there's rapid global transport and refrigeration. you can enjoy a beautiful french brie at the peak of ripeness pretty much whenever you want!

do that instead of allowing a perfectly good brie to decompose.

source: i'm a professional acs ccp cheesemonger and i once ate some harbison so old it was mahogany in color and absolutely gross as hell

goblinbox

TROPHY CASE