i bought a kombucha "mother bacteria" for 5 euros, and might have accidentally killed it on my first try. the instructions made it sound like you put it in hot (not boiling) tea, in fact you're only supposed to put it in room-temperature tea because heat kills it. it was a sort of pale yellow before and just a few hours after putting it in, it turned completely brown. i'm supposed to wait a week and see what happens. i don't want to have to buy another one...

speaking of that, i tried researching the health benefits of both kombucha and naturally-carbonated water ("mineral water" i think?). apparently no one's studied them. you get threads full of people talking about it helped them, "kombucha and flax seeds cured my dad's cancer in a week", "kombucha cured my dog of mange", "my periods aren't painful anymore" - this is natural because all it is tons of nutrients - but NO scientists are studying this stuff because "it's not factory-made so the product doesn't have the exact same contents each time". then you have quack scientists and propaganda websites claiming stuff like you shouldn't drink kombucha or mineral water because the carbonation will rot your teeth, when all the other studies say "no, it's only sugar that rots your teeth, carbonated drinks without sweeteners don't affect your teeth".

almost done watching hunter x hunter (2011 ver) on animelon. it's better than i expected, and certainly surprizing, but still not really a series i'd recommend to people. oh yeah and it's gay. gay in the way where from day one this one character's only been focused on the other, to the point where he can't remember the guy's friends' names that he hung out with and almost died with for over a month, and then in an omake they kiss. i'm slowly learning to recognize a lot of vocabulary from it but i sure wish it went faster, part of it is just that the pop-up dictionary is the same as jisho.org which is well-known for being a horrible dictionary with wrong/confusing definitions.