Search results for:

if you can't find a teacher in a convenient part of London, I paid $7 for these online lessons and they've kept me busy daily for the last three months - got me comprehensively hooked right away for less than the price of a single avocado toast.

You don't even need a kit for it, really, you can do pretty much everything on a practice pad/sofa cushions/nearby pets or family members. Might be an option while you figure out your meatspace options? You should start right this very instant IMO because drumming is fucking amazing and you owe this gift to yourself

Bought some sticks yesterday and booked my first lesson for next week totally inspired by this thread probably a mid life crisis and hopefully cheaper than a 911

Enjoy!! Are you doing in-person lessons? I'm not fully vaccinated yet so I don't want to cram myself into a tiny room with a breathing germsack teacher (and I hate video conf), so I've been doing Drumeo instead. I'm sure I'll have a shitload of bad habits I need to fix later 😅

I used to manually pick the little bastards up and dump them in a plastic container filled with soap and boiling water, but it was so much work. Tried nematodes and they made fuck all difference.

Eventually i gave up and stopped planting the kinds of things slugs like to eat. Funny how they never bother with the bindweed, eh.

I was looking at the website for the place in Haggerston the other day - prices looked reasonable! I would not be able to judge the decency of the kits, mind.

I currently have nowhere to keep mine

I got rid of furniture to fit mine in. No regrets. Who needs chairs and tables and family members when you could be making a horrible racket instead?

Funny thing is that I don't really like how compact the Alesis is, and I feel like I want one of those Roland VAD kits instead. OTOH I'm new enough at this that any decision I make at this point will be a rash one so I'm just going to sit with these covetous feelings for a while and see how they develop.

I wouldn't dare to put an acoustic set in this flat, I'm paranoid enough about the e-kit. Neighbours haven't complained yet so it can't be too bad. Or maybe it is, and they're keeping a noise nuisance log that they plan to spring on me unexpectedly! Who knows!

Not my question! I've only been playing for ten weeks and as such I can barely use one bass pedal, let alone two. One day, though.

Here you go, @ltc !

my people! My very very current and active people!

gosh, next you'll be telling me there's a thread for people who ride fixed wheel or single speed bikes. Is there one of those, too? I'm so lonely.

Any drummers on the forum? Any recommendations for a decent double pedal that's not going to cost a million quid? Happy to go second hand.

I'm only a baby drummer so I can't answer your question but I am bumping it in the hope that there will turn out to be a significant secret community of drummers here that will justify us getting our own thread, and then maybe I can stop peering enviously through the window of the guitar thread at all the fretboard fanatics peeping happily and sociably to one another like a tragic musical urchin *mournfulviolins

All the SR games are short-ish so won't take you long to get through them then get cracking on the rest of your pile :D

Dex and State of Mind both look great, haven't heard of them before! Will pick those up myself now, hope I can find the time to play them

I fucking LOVE the Shadowrun trilogy. Love love love love love. It's very not fantasy, and contains no obvious fantasy tropes except for the character types and models themselves, you're not going to go into it all like 'right now i need to find the king of greyfawndr and deliver him the goblet of avantredeth in order to save the life of his lovely daughter cellardor', no no. I'm not a big fantasy fan myself, I can't be doing with all that nonsense, but Shadowrun is great stuff. I can't recommend it highly enough.

Gameplay-wise they're a little dated and clunky (maybe the Switch versions have improved that somewhat) but not to throw-your-computer-in-the-canal level. Story-wise they're chef's-kiss level. I loved those games so much I started playing the actual TTRPG they're based on and now I GM Shadowun on the tabletop for a bunch of nerds. I got WAY into it as a result of the Returns trilogy. The developer had the original writer for the early TTRPG write the stories for them, so it's very story focused over mechanics.

The best one out of the three is Dragonfall, IMO. Dietrich is a top-tier RPG companion <3

I mean, you still might hate it. But if it's anecdotes you want, then that's mine :D I recommend those games to everyone.

I'm afraid I own it now, sorry 😬

however I can confirm that it's an immense amount of fun and if you happen to see another for sale in your budget you should absolutely buy it immediately without any delay or second thought, just smash that "buy" button, because you deserve this kind of happiness.

Sitting here like "when is somebody gonna notice he said that?!"

@youramericanlover @ChainBreaker @hats I know you are, but what am I 😭

I definitely wasn't on that Herne Bay ride, and I also don't remember any biblical floods on any ride - although TBF you're one of the good people on le forum that I've never met, @hoefla so I'm no use here :D I do remember a womens 100 ride with a flooded road that was like a fjord and there was a bridge to cross it with? I'd brought my mate Helen along and she was the only person brave enough to ride through, all the rest of us bottled it and minced over the bridge on foot with our 23c hipster whips. @pootsmanuva was leading that one, I think.

Coincidentally I got an email this very morning about a new bike library that's being crowdfunded locally here in Enfield. Maybe lob a couple of quid their way and find out in person if you live nearby :p

(The page does also give a run-down of how they expect it to work, in broad strokes)

Hah! All I needed was Braker. I could have wept for gratitude on that trip to the Ardennes when he quietly checked in on me, saw I was struggling with the headwind, and just quietly moved into the gap in front so I could draft him and he never ever embarrassed me about it afterwards because he is a TRUE GENT 😭 I mean, I didn't, because I didn't have the energy for gratitude-weeping. But I could have.

Ahh, this is a lovely thread. Loads of people here I think warm fuzzy thoughts about all the time, and it's weird to think that you all had such a huge impact on me when I was only actively riding for about three years. But in that time, it was lovely.

@youramericanlover always had a smile and a massive hooning whipskid. @almac68 and @Bernie as a crack team of ride organisers who were always so supportive and made me feel welcome when I definitely didn't belong on the kinds of rides we were doing. @esstee always just the right mix of soundness and cynicism. @branwen has always been there for a chat, and was one of the people who helped keep me from going fucking insane during a major health crisis. @OneLessCardigan is one of the kindest people I know, and I want to be like him when I grow up. @Dammit and @TW both also just hugely generous people, in both practical and generosity of spirit terms. @BareNecessities has gone from being shy-and-retiring out-of-towner to, like, the well-deserved king of the fucking forest, heh. @TheorySwine probably doesn't even remember me but he put up with some right shit from me because he made me feel so comfortable being ostentatiously rude to him (this is a compliment). I won't tag him, obviously, but our lad from Wigan as well - extravagantly insulting. If I can't be OLC when I grow up, maybe I'll try to be Will instead.

Forum ladies like @hats and @KT_Bee and @cafewanda and @mands and @Doctor_Cake gave me a sense of community with other women, which might sound like a small thing but given how blokey the forum is, and cycling more generally, it was really helpful for me to have them around me.

So, so many people. People I haven't mentioned, people I met on rides whose names I didn't even know, people I've never met but have a gigantic wellspring of respect for. Obviously the big joke is the internet's friendliest bike forum, but for real - people here have had an outsize impact on me in only a short space of time, because I was longer out of the forum than in. I saw a thread somebody had bumped today with a post in it from from TWELVE YEARS AGO. Where the fuck did all that time go?

Yeah, the ME patient community predicted long covid right at the start of the pandemic, long before anyone else started talking about it. It's always been known for having wildly hetereogenous triggers, which seems to be one of the reasons its been hard to study (well, that and the near-total lack of will to take it seriously). I don't think it's a stretch that similarities in the underlying pathophysiology will be identified in LC and ME.

I do sympathise with the anxiety that all these people coming down with LC and getting in the news takes away from existing ME cases, but TBH I get much, much angrier when I read news reports or studies that act like LC is some brand new thing with no similiarities to anything that's ever existed in medicine before. That's a big worry for me - that people will decide LC is the "real" condition and just continue to ignore existing ME patients. IMO it's better for people with both to try to make sure nobody gets to (continue to) pretend that the ME cohort is irrelevant/imaginary.

IMO the social attitudes will only meaningfully change when there's some kind of viable treatment. If you come down with something like long covid (or ME), then you're sort of breaking this unspoken social contract that says that illness is a temporary thing, and that you'll automatically get better. If you're in this group of people that don't get better, then, well, fuck, what's wrong with you? Why aren't you fighting it? Don't you WANT to get better? Why aren't you trying harder to beat it?

People IME don't like to think too much about folks who get sick and who just kind of... keep... being sick, especially to the immenese degree of sickness involved in LC and the like. It's shit and it's ableist AF, but at the same time it's quite predictable in terms of how people in the main react to these situations. If a treatment is found, there'll be a collective social amnesia where everyone will instantly forget everything they ever believed about "yuppie flu" or whatever, because now it's a thing with a clear resolution, and these sick people can go ahead and stop doing the thing.

Grim. I really hope this thing is solved. I guess the good news (such as it is) is that there's so many people now with LC that it's getting a lot harder to ignore research-wise, and a lot of excellent work had been done right before the pandemic hit to loosen the hold of "oh they're just a bit tired, tell them to go out for a jog and think happy thoughts" shite that's been the mainstay of post-viral syndrome treatment up until now.

Who knows, but... I'm cautiously optimistic that some kind of treatment will be found. Just hope it happens before people pour decades of their lives down this particular hole.

Oh yeah, totally get the lack of medical support. I have ME (in case anyone was wondering why I don't seem to be around much anymore! This is why!), so am well-versed in the shitshow that is trying to get any kind of medical help for this kind of thing. If ME had been taken seriously at scale at any point in the last thirty fucking years, I don't think people with long covid would be in the situation that they're in now.

"Support" in this context I suppose is "finding competent and sympathetic people in the medical profession and benefits bureaucracy", which I know is a tall order, but I'm told they exist even though I am yet to meet any myself. But I hope your wife finds some of them.

Sorry, that came out WAY more bitter sounding than I intended going into this post, grimacing face emoji, fuck chronic illness and fuck covid innit

Holy fuck, that's awful. The stress that she'll be under right now will be making matters ten times worse. I hope she manages to get appropriate support at the right time.

Always surprises me that so few people think about long COVID, but I guess most people just don't take post-viral sequelae seriously or even realise that it happens/how life-changing they can be until it happens to them or someone close to them (and even then, it seems to be 50/50). It ain't minor.

One for the No Mow May crowd: https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/v6talm/neighbour_cut_my_grass_out_of_jealousy_are_there/

wac

That's what I thought the post was about before I read AlexD's comment to go with the pic!

Haha! Oh no! Oh bless him, that's simultaneously a bit sad but also fucking hilarious. True dedication to the art.

Nice to hear Lynchman's been doing well these past few years