I’m not much of a JD fan in general, it’s an OK whiskey but it doesn’t do anything that plenty of other whiskeys don’t do better.

I had a personal boycott of JD going for a few years, my wife and I are both whiskey drinkers and we visited TN for the 2017 eclipse. We decided while we were there we might as well make a detour to the distillery. I’m sure with the eclipse it was probably one of the busiest tourism weeks they’ve had there, so we weren’t surprised to find a long line waiting for us. We made the most of it, it took us about 45 minutes to get to the front of the line, it snaked through a little mini museum, and it gave us some time to decide which tour we wanted to do.

But when we got to the front of the line we were informed that all of the tours we were interested in were sold out, and the only one available was the one that didn’t allow you to try any whiskey at the end.

At no point during the 45 minutes we were standing around did they make any sort of announcement or put a sign up or anything to let us know that the other tours were sold out, if they had we probably would have decided to just go on that tour, but that really pissed us off, so we left.

I decided that I wouldn’t give Jack any of my money after that, not that I was buying a whole lot of it anyway.

A year or two ago they ran an ad campaign with some drag queens. I decided that my personal boycott had gone on long enough and I could reward that little bit of token wokeness, although I have to admit that I still haven’t bought any JD since then.

And like too many other companies it looks like they’ve now rolled back their DEI initiatives, so fuck 'em, back on the boycott list they go.

Now as a whisky drinker in the US, I’m disappointed that there’s going to be tariffs affecting Canadian whisky, I’m a little torn as to whether I should support my favorite Canadian brands or avoid them since the tariffs are going to be funneling money to the trump administration.

I’m certainly going to be cutting back on my American whiskeys and many other American products in protest. I encourage my fellow whiskey drinkers to the north to do the same, you guys make some fine rye, I’ll gladly take some Alberta Premium over almost anything made in the States.

I suspect I’m going to find myself drinking a lot of Scotch, Irish, and Japanese whisk(e)ys for the next few years, but I look forward to the day when I can hopefully enjoy some Canadian rye again without Trump’s tariffs.

You got a typo for mastodon (mastadon)

I don’t really have any input on how it is to self-host, but I’ve been playing around with friendica a bit and I think that has a lot of potential and may be worth mentioning. I think it has a lot of potential as almost a unified fediverse portal in addition to its obvious purpose of being a Facebook alternative, from what I’ve seen it seems to play pretty nicely with a lot of other fediverse services, and also supports RSS feeds

It needs some polishing, I think the default UI is pretty wonky, but there’s a lot of functionality there if you can be bothered to figure it out.