What’s something you love, and love describing or explaining to people who are new to that interest, hobby, or activity?
Like many others, I jumped on the sourdough bandwagon in 2020, but fell off sometime during the year after that.
But a friend of mine stuck with it, and expanded into sourdough pizza doughs for NY style or Neapolitan style pizzas in his backyard pizza oven. He had a bunch of us over today, and I don’t think I understood everything he was saying (he was doing 60% hydration for 00 flour, but stuff I didn’t quite catch about when to knead/rest), but I can say that the pizzas he was making were delicious, and he made it seem so effortless to stretch the dough out to around 14 inch (35cm) diameter. And it was kinda infectious to see his enthusiasm for something he’d been churning away at for the last few years, explaining a bunch of things to a bunch of friends gathered around, and just having a great time on a Sunday afternoon.
So a bunch of us are probably gonna try our hands at the same thing, and form a bit of an amateur pizza group, texting our successes and failures to each other.
I got into pizza dough over covid. I currently have three different 00 flours. It’s really fun to try different things though, how long you do each thing, how much of what goes in, pizza stones, baking trays, etc. I’m not at my perfect pizza yet but definitely like what I’m making.
Btw, I use Arch.
It’s not necessarily something that I ‘love explaining to others’. However, academic biblical scholarship has been an interest and endeavor of mine for about thirty years. Luckily and thankfully, I’ve found my self in the center of this unique niche of interested parties with /r/AcademicBiblical and /r/AskBibleScholars.
Think about this for a moment. The biblical texts have had the most influence on western society, and arguably all other societies, for hundreds of years.
Wouldn’t you want to know what these texts are saying?
They aren’t saying what you think they are saying.
If you’ve had no experience with these texts, then you have many years of reading ahead of you.
It is incredibly daunting to know how little most people do not know about this subject. And, at the same time, shape our world based on misinterpretations and/or misunderstandings of this vast library of literature.
Wouldn’t you want to know what these texts are saying?
They aren’t saying what you think they are saying.
Can you give an example? This sounds intriguing.
Over the years we’ve collected our FAQ and our Hall of Fame. Many examples in those.
A Catholic friend of mine studied classics at uni, so learned Greek and Latin, and they’ve been jazzed at how much nuance or alternative interpretations they’ve found when reading the Bible in Koine Greek.
Are you a Christian? I’m guessing probably yeah, but like you say, the biblical texts have had a huge influence on Western society, so understanding them is useful context for anyone. What got you started on this kind of biblical study - most people I know who do this kind of study are in training for an eventual position within their church
It’s kind of wild how much more Dante and Milton seem to have influenced the sort of now fairly standard apocryphal interpretations of the general shape of Abrahamic cosmology than the actual canon. Or like, maybe even Islam, honestly, or like Zoroastrianism. The hellfire and brimstone stuff really seems to come from somewhere else.
Also I’d like to give Christians who gripe about plural they a lesson on the etymology of Elohim.
The hellfire and brimstone stuff really seems to come from somewhere else.
Out of someone’s ass is my guess.
Yeah maybe, but whose ass? Zoroaster’s? Hinduism’s? Ideas that match hell and an evil opponent for a good god are all over the place.
I’m inclined to lean in the direction of some sort of proto-Hindu-Zoroastrian cosmology in the long run. Ahura Mazda looks a lot like the kind of fighty version of YHVH that modern Christians seem to like, with a nice clear villain and a power struggle in place of a confusing omnipotent being with a combative frenemy pushing its boundaries.
But like, maybe by way of some mostly suppressed gnostic tradition that leaks out through late medieval writings? It’s not hard to see the lower emanations in the 2nd and 3rd century gnostic stuff turning into the more kind of blunt angels and devils motif we associate with Christianity. Especially in the context of traditions like Mancheanism popping up around the same time and drawing parallels.
But like really who in America who votes based on the one particular line in Leviticus that they latch onto knows any of that? I’m guessing basically nobody.
Programming! It’s currently a hobby of mine (and has been for over 10 years) that I hope to make into a career of mine. I do some minor scripting and whatnot at work (and thankfully, I get paid at a much higher rate for the time that I’m doing that), but its not the “main” thing I do.
I live in a world of many unanswered questions, full of illogical conclusions and actions. But with programming, it is all about logic - the computer does exactly what you tell it to do, and I find a ton of beauty in that logic and how that logic makes sense to me. It doesn’t always make sense at the first pass, but at the end of the day, its always something that I (or someone above me) told the computer to do incorrectly. There’s always an answer!
Whereas the rest of my life, I hardly ever have the power to get my own answers, and others surely often don’t have an answer for me either.
It’s honestly less about the particular thing than noticing that they’re receptive and actually do want to hear what I have to say. The last thing I want is to just like bore someone with something I find fascinating. I’m sure I end up doing this anyway sometimes, but I try to be aware enough to notice before going full on ramble mode.
People seem suuuper receptive to like counter-cultural and anti-authoritarian ideas and generally to anything that transcends preconception. They like honesty and realness that can exist comfortably without kissing ass or being a jerk. Just like expressing the idea that art and joy can have premacy over toil and misery seems to be sort of a revelation for some people. That you can just like, breathe, and not focus on making sure every little thing is just so.
Also like, music. But none of that is really explaining things to people, it’s just talking through stuff organically and in the process kind of giving them the freedom to realize what they usually already know. Music is a good example of this because most humans understand music quite intimately, they just don’t have the language of music theory to break down what’s going on and discuss it. But even with a little bit of that, you can see them light up with what they already know.
I tend to play information-focused characters on RP servers, and a lot of what I do comes down to spying, questioning, interrogation, and organizing others to collect information. When you ask someone if they saw anything useful, the answer you usually get will be no. If you ask if they can tell you anything about a person, they’ll usually say they didn’t get a very good look.
But if you ask if they had a hat on, they’ll know. If you ask what color their shirt was or if they were wearing a jacket, they’ll know. Same with piercings, tattoos, odd sayings or personal quirks, whether they were smoking, etc. The reality is that people know all kinds of things that they assume aren’t relevant. But if you ask the right questions, you can uncover loads of information.
The same is true of music, of art, of sooo many things. The barrier for entry isn’t that people don’t have the tools, it’s that they don’t recognize the tools they have. If I can point to a tool that’s already in someone’s hand, that feels pretty awesome.
Okay, so maybe this tangent is illustrative in more ways than one.
