Silvally

I relate to this a lot.

I entered this thread expecting a lot of pushback and am relieved to hear a lot of people share my experiences.

I will reiterate what a lot of other people have said here: we must take care not to misdirect our anger towards dogs when in reality it’s the owners at fault. But it’s also perfectly okay to not like dogs or want to be around them in my opinion.

I personally don’t think it’s fair to hate any animal, including dogs. But I do think it’s fair to expect that dogs owned by people are trained and under control, especially when off of private property.

To add to this conversation, something that often gets my blood boiling is when on walks in nature reserves and seeing dogs off of leashes in areas marked as requiring dogs to be on leashes, or worse dogs off of leashes in areas where there are not meant to be any dogs at all.

Many of these areas are sensitive wildlife areas. Usually for me as a birdwatcher, these are areas with ground-nesting birds. It’s horrifying the amount of nests, eggs, and chicks of endangered or otherwise threatened species that get destroyed by dogs off of leashes.

Also, the people who don’t pick up their dogs poo. Or bag it up and then throw that bag on the ground/into a nearby bush??

Edit: Grammar

The two beers I’ve tried which I actively liked and would drink again were Schofferhofer and Doom Bar. Just had a quick look at their ingredients to see if they contain a lower amount of malted barley.

Doom Bar describes itself as having a “lightly roasted malt taste with succulent dried fruit” whilst Schofferhofer I struggled to find info for but I remember it being more sweet and fruity too.

In the future I’ll keep an eye out for beers that describe themselves as being lightly/subtlety malty maybe I’ll be able to find some more beers I like :D

A bunch of my friends at university, including my now fiancee, frequent craft beer pubs. Apparently craft beer tastes better than the big-brand lagers and beers.

Over time I’ve probably tried tens if not over a hundred different beers. But to me they all taste the same. To me they all taste overwhelmingly like straw which I assume is actually the hops.

My fiancee likes the taste of beer so much he drinks non-alcoholic beer on occasion. He also drinks black tea and coffee which makes me think maybe he tolerates/enjoys bitter tastes more than me.

There is certainly an argument that can be made that this is a toxic masculinity thing. I don’t associate with people who are extremely self-conscious about their masculinity so I can confirm this certainly wasn’t the case for my group of friends. They just genuinely like the taste and the vibe of craft beer pubs.

Good on you for taking the steps to try and remove the sources of your anxiety from your life. Social media is certainly addicting and it’s a hard cycle to break free from.

I’ve been slowly deleting my social media and other internet accounts for a few years now. Facebook was the first to go probably half a decade ago now. I bailed Twitter around a year before Musk took over. I stopped using my Twitch account but I still need to delete it. I am in the process of weaning myself off of YouTube.

I started this process mostly due to privacy concerns and me feeling out of control of my personal information. Algorithms served to further push me away because I struggle not to engage with depressing topics which results in controversial and depressing content being pushed on me by the algorithm which severely affected my mental health. The final straw is all these platforms becoming almost completely unusable due to their need to feed the illusion of constantly growing profits by adding unnecessary new features that bloat the platform, adding ever more intrusive adverts, and locking features behind paid subscriptions.

These days I only use Mastodon and Lemmy. I also have a subscription to Nebula through CuriosityStream which has been scratching my YouTube itch so I’m aiming to delete my Google account completely soon. I also use Discord, just for keeping in contact with friends, but ultimately I’d like to bail from that platform too.

Ultimately this decision has freed up a lot more personal time for myself to pursue my existing hobbies and new ones. Overall I am much happier.