happybadger [he/him]

Working class employee of the Sashatown Central News Agency, the official news service of the DPRS Ministry of State Security. Your #1 trusted source for patriotic facts.

  • 911 Posts
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Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: October 7th, 2020

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  • If you can align one of your trails with entering James Peak Wilderness to the south, the best fungi foraging I’ve found in the region takes place from July to September on this trail: https://www.hikingproject.com/trail/7007306/rogers-pass . Behind Nederland the Moffat Portal trailhead has good car camping leading to it, and there are some absolutely amazing alpine camping sites near the lakes at the top. That river flowing below them has lots of chanterelles and porcinis between it and the trail while the lakes have trout and are surrounded by whortleberries. It’s the best non-RMNP hike in the region in my opinion.










  • Lion’s mane is delicious. It’s mainly used as a lobster/crab cake substitute because it has a similar consistency and taste. Just soak it to remove nesting bugs and slice off any dirty parts. Then cut it into thin slices and put them in a dry pan over medium heat. You need to cook the water out so they soak up oil, so I cook them on their own for 3-5 minutes. When they’ve shrunk but not burned, I use olive oil/sea salt/black pepper/garlic/onion and cook them for another 5~ minutes until browned. They pair great with white sauce pasta, rice, stir fry, and tofu dishes.

    I wish I had deciduous forests around here for them. They’re probably the easiest to spot and ID of all of those.





  • Depending on what you have near you, there are a few safe species that are as good as they are easy to distinguish:

    Pleurotus sp. - Oysters, growing on trees or deadwood. Very distinct shape.

    Cantharellus sp. - Chanterelles, growing on the forest floor in open spaces. Very distinct shape and colour.

    Hericium sp. - Lion’s mane, growing on trees or deadwood. Very distinct shape.

    Morchella sp. - Morels, growing on the ground. They have closer lookalikes than the above genera but can still be distinguished pretty easily from those and look like nothing else.

    Boletus edulis - The trickiest of this list, growing on the ground next to spruce/fir/pine trees. The genus is super easy to distinguish but identifying the species within that requires cutting it open.

    I’d never pick anything generic-looking like a little brown/white mushroom. Those are where you really risk being poisoned. With these you’d want a field guide to positively ID them but you get good at that fast. There’s probably a mycology club in your area which organises regular foraging trips with experts and I highly recommend doing those. The Colorado Mycological Society is a huge resource here.










  • Cairns are a really mixed bag in the Rockies. Alpine ecosystems can take decades or even centuries to regenerate. Having a cairn on a poorly marked trail can be really helpful and is more naturalistic than signage while offloading the burden of the rangers to maintain those signs. Where it’s used to mark a specific established path, a cairn is good. Most cairns up there don’t though. People go off-trail to collect rocks that are established crevice habitat, then put them in an ornamental cairn for a photo. Others take more rocks and add to it, each one furthering the ecological degradation. People who do follow cairns as trail markers are then incentivised to go off-trail which can compound the damage or risk their injury.

    I dismantle any I see that aren’t for pathfinding.





  • High-End Estimate: One report indicates a 1-minute, 30 fps AI-generated video could require over 25 kWh of power, which is comparable to the average daily energy consumption of an entire house.

    Most of their videos are one minute shorts of AI animals being cleaned or rescued from the mouths of other animals by men in hazmat suits. It’s so weirdly fetishistic and everyone of them is potentially a household’s daily power use.