Brazilian music is famous worldwide — from bossa nova, to choro, to samba.

Bossa is cool, choro is amazing, but my favorite things about samba is that despite being "pop music" it still has complex rhythms and harmonies.

My top favorite thing is the prevalence of the 7 stringed guitar and their use of counterpoints (i.e., parallel melodies).

I love how what (I think) started as guitarists just playing harmonies, turned into them improvising bass lines and counterpoints every once in a while, which eventually became them doing MOSTLY counterpoints and bass lines and barely playing the harmony lmao.

These bass lines and counterpoints, from what I understand, are often times arpeggiations of the chords and so forth, but they add such an amazing effect to the music.

Examples:

• This guy solo playing over a recording.
• This solo guitar + singer.
• Most music by Cartola which features the absolute timeless 7 stringed legend Dino. This one is a classic.

I used to own an instant pot. Those are great. I gave it away when I moved and now I just have a regular pressure cooker, which is also really great.

My quickest and easiest, but still yummy thing to make is chickpeas. I soak them overnight. Pick out the ugly ones. Drain the water. Barely cover them with fresh water (since they’ve already soaked, they don’t need tons of water). Then I heat the pot on high until I hear the pressure noise, switch it to low heat, and let it cook for 15-20 minutes. Then I turn off the heat and let the pressure out naturally.

Once they’re done I sometimes just eat a bowl of them with nothing more than olive oil and salt. Yum.

One of my other favorite dishes is a bit more elaborate but still simple and healthy: split pea soup. I don’t soak the peas but I do rinse them. I put them in the pressure cooker with a bay leaf, chopped garlic and onions, diced potatoes and carrots, and I'll cover the whole thing with a decent amount of water. Then, like the chick peas, I’ll let the pressure hiss, then put it on low heat for 15-20 minutes. I let the pressure naturally release.

Sometimes I’ll sautée even more onions and garlic in a separate pan with avocado oil on low heat for a while, until they look like they’re getting caramelized (fucking yum).

When the soup is done, I’ll remove the bay leaf, add the extra onions and garlic (if I did that step), add some salt, then use an immersion blender. It’s SUPER IMPORTANT to remove the bay leaf if you use an immersion blender.

Then when I eat it, I put a decent amount of olive oil and make sure the salt level is tasty. Even better if I have spicy olive oil around :)

Sometimes I’ll run into a baffling issue with a tech product — be it headphones, Google apps like maps or its search features, Apple products, Spotify, other apps, and so on — and when I look for solutions online I sometimes discover this has been an issue for years. Sometimes for many many years.

These tech companies are sometimes ENORMOUS. How is it that these issues persist? Why do some things end up being so inefficient, unintuitive, or clunky? Why do I catch myself saying “oh my dear fucking lord” under my breath so often when I use tech?

Are there no employees who check forums? Does the architecture become so huge and messy that something seemingly simple is actually super hard to fix? Do these companies not have teams that test this stuff?

Why is it so pervasive? And why does some of it seem to be ignored for literal years? Sometimes even a decade!

Is it all due to enshittification? Do they trap us in as users and then stop giving a shit? Or is there more to it than that?

I like seeing a group evolve and form good friendships. I also like sci fi and weirdness. For these reasons, two of my favorite shows are The Expanse and Severance. In both, by the end, I felt like I was “part of the team” in some way.

What are a couple of your favorites? What kind of itch do they scratch?

And by should have I mean "should have" because this kind of thing can be subjective.

I'll start. Senior year of high school I would often skip class to go to the park and smoke weed with my partner (at the time). This park had a lot of birds. The sometimes silly, sometimes strategic, sometimes social and cooperative behavior of the birds blew my 17 year old stoned mind. I remember my partner and I would theorize about what they were doing and thinking. I thought it was super cool. I still think birds are super cool.

Now, many years later, I have a PhD in a behavior adjacent field. I don't study birds specifically or anything like that, but those experiences and curiosities pushed me in this direction.

Maybe it was all inevitable: these are deep interests that would have been pulled out of me in one way or another. The tinder was inside of me and if it wasn't getting stoned at the park as a teenager and watching birds that sparked the flame, something else would have. Who knows.

I know the meme format is kinda wrong. It's also kinda right.