The bat is definitely cute!

I enjoy that I can no longer tell if you are serious or not!

What a country! 😂

I had heard the kiwi stuff, but you had me second guessing myself!

I did look up the island names since I had never heard Aotearoa before, and a few of the blurbs say there are a few hundred actual islands that make up New Zealand, but it seems nobody can agree on an actual number because they all have a different estimate.

Lol, you two have me picturing literally just 3 bats in the whole country and the middle one being upset he isn’t biggest or smallest and is plotting to take one of the other 2 out.

Thank you! Those are some pretty significant facts. I’ve got much to learn about things over there!

Thank you for all that! As I said, we don’t seem to get taught much about that part of the world. LotR is probably the only NZ thing I can recall of the top of my head, which is pretty embarrassing.

The only one I know off the top of my head is the coelacanth that I was thrilled to get to see a preserved one at the Smithsonian.

Here’s some more examples

There’s some more I found. The bird in this article is the prettiest of the list. The others may be a bit underwhelming.

I’m from the US, and usually all we hear about Australia and New Zealand is of the scary, deadly animals. I’ve been happy to see so many articles on Lemmy about all the work they are doing on endangered animals like this bird and the bandicoots.

I’m also surprised that so many of these programs seem to involve indigenous people. I don’t know much about that part of the world, but I wish we would involve our native people in things like this. It feels we still keep ourselves cut off from each other. It makes all these feel good animal stories into feel good people stories.

That’s horrible! What a shame. At least they owned up to doing it, but that had to be devastating to anyone in the recovery effort.

I’m gonna agree with the other comments so far. They’re just healthier things to distract you than you’d get with drugs or alcohol or self abuse. I’m going through a rough patch right now that is a little worse than my meds can level out for me. I’m going over to someone’s house today and I’m looking forward to playing with their puppies. I’m expecting that will relax me for a bit, but tomorrow my situation isn’t really changed. But it gets me through one day.

Bio Char vs Charcoal: 6 Key Differences

Similar, but more refined process to achieve specific characteristics in the end product, like oil>kerosene>diesel>gasoline.

This article hints at a lot of interesting things, but doesn’t really go into any of them. I’ve learned a lot trying to answer the comments here.

That’s just because right now used coffee is trash and sand isn’t. If you remember back when bio diesel started getting popular, all of a sudden people were stealing fryer oil from restaurants. If you see a smelly looking black dumpster behind a restaurant, that is the used fry oil.

I wish they had a bit about that in the article itself, but they did link another article about biochar creation and its byproducts. I linked it in another comment here.

I feel there’s a lot of assumptions here that no one actually reads articles.

Nice work. I tried to thumbs down it, but it wanted a log in.

It’s a shame someone can read articles from decent sources and still be so ignorant.

The article they link about pyrolysis is worth a read too. The main source of CO2 emissions from cement production is cooking down limestone into lime IIRC. I was curious how much energy is used to turn the biomass into the end product and what waste is generated. It’s a bit too detailed for me to understand, but the process ends up with 15-25% biochar (the stuff they’re promoting in this article), some potentially useful byproducts, and some regular combustion pollution.

I’m glad to see research into this. Sand for concrete is a specific type of sand (nice and bumpy so it likes to lock together like a jigsaw puzzle) and people get killed by what are basically sand cartels. This was the “legitimate” mob business in the last season of Barry.

Portland cement is about 2/5 sand, so we’ll need to start drinking more coffee! I was glad to see they’re testing other organic matter since coffee is very susceptible to climate change, ironically caused in a large part by cement production. Unless you believe the reader comment on the article begging people to realize climate change is a hoax…

I did end up getting the Verselab today. I was able to make a few decent loops in the store right away, and the sounds are even better in person. Spent the rest of the night figuring out how to automate between loops to make an actual songs with verse, chorus, etc. and checking out the sound packs. For not knowing what the heck I’m doing it’s been a ton of fun.

I liked finding the old hip hop noises, the synth string ensemble noises from Planet Rock, a things that sounded like the Darude Sandstorm song, and a bunch of other familiar stuff.

The loops I made were all over the place. Some haunted house type thing, some hip hop/trap thing, some juggalo sounding beat with a creepy laugh, one with a middle eastern vibe, and some sad country fiddle jam. It’s got so much to learn, but it’s been a ton of fun and you can do any kind of music.

Got to check out the Minilogue at the store too. The sampler is way more limited, not sure I like the slim keys, and way more difficult to get pleasant sounds out of without just sticking to presets. The presets did sound great though, and if I actually knew how to play keys better and knew more theory, I’m sure it would be awesome. If I had gotten that, is probably just screw around making noise and not learn anything.

Found a localish floor model for sale. After watching a ton of videos on this thing, it sounds great and seems to do wayyyy more than I would have thought for what it costs. The work flow seems much like working with my multifx, and I can plug in my guitar or bass or mic my nylon string guitar. The vocal effects may or may not be a bonus, I’ve never tried to record my singing before.

My amp has RCA in and a blend knob for hooking up a phone or mp3 player, so it looks like I don’t need a mixer either. All the input/output options seem great.

I can kinda see why this thing wasn’t a success at launch, but it feels firmware and the optional app have fixed most of the complaints. I’m really surprised this thing is so cheap! Major thanks again for showing me this was a thing!

I think the DAWless route seems more appealing for me. Getting up and running quickly sounds good, and will let me get back on the Rhodes. Learning keys is my main priority still, I have been learning so much.

The Digitakt seems awesome, but the sound always seems cold to me. May just be YouTube though. The Polyend seems really nice though.

I found a demo unit of the Verselab mentioned in another response for sale near me in going to check out this weekend, but if that doesn’t work out, I may have to get the Polyend. The Roland work flow looked a bit more natural to me.

My friend claims to know a bit about Reaper. I may let him tend to the tedious bits and teach me some if I start to come up with any decent music.

Thanks for the help!

That’s where most of the frustration comes in, since synth gear all looks to work so differently. I can walk up to any guitar, bass, drum set, or amp and have a pretty good idea how it works.

I looked on Korg and Arturia’s dealer locators since they seem to have lots of entry level gear, but they really don’t show much nearby other than listing every Guitar Center in a 100 mile radius.

I did hit up Reddit and search the cities near me, and while the city nearest me seemed to have some decent shops, it looks like 2 hours away there is a big new and vintage store that a bunch of people have said they’ve spent 3-4 hours there trying all sorts of things. It’s a father and son shop and they seen to like to talk gear and let you demo whatever. But sure if it will narrow it expand my options, but it does seem to best place to get my hands on things all in one place.