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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 17th, 2023

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  • Another Swede here.

    This is all true, though I don’t have personal experience with going out to the bars.

    I thought I’d add some personal details and forgotten details:

    1. Personal - The Christmas baking: Every year in late november to early december, our family gathers to make almond mussels, hard cakes eaten with jam and cream, we use a recipe that is more than a century old and make the almond dough/paste from scratch.
    2. National - Christmas Donald: every Christmas eve, the entire nation gathers infront of the TV, tuning into the national broadcaster to watch Donald Duck celebrating Christmas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_All_of_Us_to_All_of_You
    3. Personal - Decorating the tree: My family has allways had this tradition to only bring the Christmas tree inside on the night before Christmas eve as the Christmas ham is cooking, I have heard that this is common, but I don’t know if it is accurate to call it a national tradition… Anyway, we decorate with baubles, lights and other stuff like that, but absolutely no tinsel nor coloured lights, however we do put small baskets with chocolates in them hanging on the branches. An interesting thing is that we in our family has never used glass baubles, that was a rational decision by my mom, she decided on using plastic decorations to avoid us kids getting hurt if we broke one, so when we drop a bauble they just bounce a bit, snd I was really surprised when a bauble dropped and my grandparents house and didn’t bounce…
    4. National - Dad going out to buy the paper on Christmas eve, classic story to hide who is playing santa, though personally I found the story told at my grandparents house to be smarter… There would be an uncle looking at his watch and exclaiming that he needed to meet up santa and watch his raindeers, perfectly logical, there was a field a block away and it made sense to have santa land there, and obviously you need someone to watch the deers! Perfectly logical!
    5. National - Lye treated cod, melted butter and mustard sauce is a great Christmas meal: every Christmas plenty of Swedes put lutfisk on their Christmas table, it is cod with very little taste and the texture of jelly, eaten with potatoes, melted butter and mustard sauce, the sauce is required, and makes the dish excellent! Dad usually makes the sauce from scratch every Christmas eve just before supper.
    6. National - the upside down V lights in the window: Sweden at Christmas is VERY dark, snd a tradition is to put pyramid shaped electric candle holders in the windows at first Advent and keep them up until late Jan / early Feb, this is a Christmas decoration, not a political protest as was suggested by a Frenchman my dad worked with at one time.











  • Like everything in life, most dangers is a matter of quantity.

    Listening to music with headphones is a fantastic way to enjoy music, as long as you are reasonable, it is fine to listen to music loud enough to drown out other sounds for periods.

    Back in 2022, I got double flat feet, double heel spurs and a bad knee at the same time, walking was agony at the end of the day, so when I had to walk home from the bus stop, I put on some quite loud Sabaton in my headphones, used that to gather strength to move, usually ending up crying hard as I dragged myself up the path to my apartment building.

    I still hear ok, sure, I have a bit of bad hearing, but that was something I had found out a decade before.

    You won’t go deaf just by listening to music in headphones, they are an important tool in several sectors, especially in music, every live performance artist is wearing in ear monitors these days, they are special headphones that allow the artist to not only hear the other performers and instruments, but also protect their hearing from the extremely loud speakers and crowds at a live event.

    Then you have the people working post production, they all wear headphones all day, you have radio DJs, they also wear headphones all day, pilots, air traffic controllers, police, security guards, and similar professions also often wear head phones constantly.

    What you are being told about headphones is just fearmongering, but built on a small kernel of truth, loud sounds can and will damage your ears, but that goes for all loud noise, not just headphones.






  • I disagree.

    Most doomsday preppers won’t really be prepared for a complete fall of society.

    Most that I have seen ignore the need for cooperation snd focus on their own individual survival.

    That is short term thinking.

    Data hoarders are more like private libraries, they can for a long time distribute knowledge and media helping society as a whole.

    A doomsday prepper like that, would focus on creating caches of standardized tools, I mean stuff like shovels, hammers, nails, screws, screwdrivers, files, plows, hoes, drills, saws, shoes, and more, so that they could organize a group of people to build a community.

    Most preppers seem to just focus on their own survival in the short term, one of the dumbest things I have seen is the “doomsday vehicle” thing, that is just stupid. Get a simple, reliable car, put it in a garage, take it out once every other week for a good drive to keep it fresh, and leave it, that will do far better than any insane custom doomsday car.