I have four copies of Skyrim and haven’t even played it.
I have seven coffee makers (various sorts, sizes, and materials). I use 3 regularly.
More generally, anything that I use frequently, like tools, I have multiples of because I misplace things a lot. Having multiples means it’s more likely to find things when I need them, without having to hunt them down.
Farrier by trade. See, centipedes have a really amazing trick up our many sleeves, in that we can use one set of limbs to hold ourselves to the underside of the hoof, and the other set to pass a pencil along to trace the outline, making for perfectly fitted shoes every time!
Installing them is obviously a bit more work, but we’ve come up with a nice clamp-style nail driver that also makes use of all the limbs to provide the hinge pressure needed to drive the nail.
For trims, we use a big grinding wheel attached to a centipede-size treadmill for power. Sure it takes a while, but the results are perfectly manicured hooves! So smooth and even!
We haven’t figured out a good method to scrape the hooves, however. We normally have the humans do that, as we scurry around making sure nothing was missed.
I’m pretty broke and have been for most of my life, so I’m pretty willing to be inconvenienced. Only thing I have to my name is a very old house in need of substantial work I can’t afford to do, on a very small town lot, and a car that’s falling apart.
I keep my heat set to 60f/15.6c at most, which is well outside of my comfort zone (I prefer being too warm over too cold). I use heated mattress pads/blankets to make it bearable, as they cost exceptionally little to use round the clock for a month, around a dollar a month vs the several hundred per month my heat goes up when kept to a comfortable temp.
I grow as much of my own food as I can. I know people do the math and determine that home grown somehow costs just as much as store bought, so it’s only good as a hobby, and I genuinely don’t understand that calculation. I compost and mix compost into my garden soil and my food is basically free…? And I recently added a small flock of chickens that eat my plant scraps and food scraps, and their waste is great fertilizer. It’s a nice holistic system. I also have some plants like tomatoes and peppers that grow year-round in hydroponics, the small amount of electric and powder nutrients used to grow them costs far less than the food they produce. I’m working on expanding my hydro options to sell surplus to friends and family.
I use compressed sawdust pellets (like for pellet stoves or horse bedding) as cat litter. It’s basically the same thing as feline pine but it’s $7 for 40lbs, which is enough to completely toss and replace the litter about 10 times per bag, more in summer because I use less (takes longer to dry out so needs to be replaced faster anyway). The litter is compostable, so it goes into a special pile that gets used as yard/flower garden dirt. However this requires that I stir up the litter at least twice a day, to allow the urine to dry properly. Else it just reeks of ammonia.
All food scraps, whether cat food or human food, get saved for something. Scraps my chickens can’t/won’t eat, like raw carrots, onions, garlic, and celery, get turned into broth along with bones. After being turned into broth, the remaining material goes into my worm compost. Anything chivkens can eat, especially cat food my cats don’t eat, gets saved for them. Egg shells get saved (by everyone who gets eggs from me) and used as calcium supplement for them.
If I can build or make something, even poorly, I’ll do that before buying a thing (beer, bread, covey coop, chicken coop, shelves, etc.). If I can repurpose existing tools to do a thing I only need to do once, I probably will even if the task is far more frustrating as a result. I desperately wish we had tool library here so I could just borrow stuff. But no. And on this same sort of trajectory; I’ll do things manually rather than using gas or buying new tools. I inherited a ton of really high quality hand tools from my grandfather, and I use them quite a lot. I also shovel snow by hand rather than putting gas in my snowblower, unless we are expecting a blizzard.
I have more but this is already too long so ima just stop.
I mean I have that option as well, but I don’t use ice, so I don’t waste the freezer space, especially when that freezer space is already consumed by the built-in ice maker that isn’t hooked up to a water line, even tho I could easily feed the RO tank to it.
I do use ice trays for freezing milk before it goes bad, or leftover coffee for making iced coffee, but that’s about it. I have some really nice silicone honeycomb trays that have silicone lids, so perfect for milk and coffee, which typically don’t get used right away.
I never have ice at home. My fridge can do that, but I don’t ever use ice*, and my drinking water is already RO so no need to muck up a very expensive fridge filter every few months for no reason.
* I use ice for making beer, but it’s an entire 5-gallon bucket frozen solid, usually just thrown outside overnight in winter.
They still lock down features, as of like maybe 5 yrs ago. Idk about today specifically but I wouldn’t doubt it, if only because most people don’t realize that it’s locking something the OS can do by default.
For example, if you have a major brand phone (smaller brands that don’t have contracts with phone companies are unlikely to have this issue) with OEM OS, on a plan in which you pay separately for the WiFi hotspot feature, even though it’s built into your operating system, hotspot is locked and you can’t access it.
This is even true if you buy your own device, I discovered, and was very very very angry about. Enough that I switched providers, because fuck that nonsense.
Oh man if I found out my manager had that mentality I’d be second-guessing literally everything they say forever. I would much rather someone say “I don’t know, but that’s a good question. I’ll find out for you” than give me the wrong information confidently.
I already struggle with respecting authority figures who clearly don’t know what they are doing and thus have no actual basis for their authority, so yeah that’d be a ticking time bomb.
Please try to move away from doing that. It’s genuinely not great for your reports, only for you to put in less effort.
Wow is that ever a pointlessly nit-picky challenge of a story from when I was a kid, over 30 years ago………. Almost like memory isn’t perfect or something, omgno!
I don’t know if there were some little lines or something; I remember it being a black screen. But little lines would give the exact same impression of a dead/infected machine so it barely matters outside of pedantry. It didn’t display an interface, that’s the important part. As for the boot up, maybe, but also very possibly not. They had some Monty python suite of software (themes taken to an extreme, very 90s) that may have made the system function differently than you, some random techbro with absolutely zero information about the computer itself, expect. It replaced literally everything with Monty python stuff and was installed from iirc 12 2.5 floppy discs! Did it replace the boot images, causing them to not display properly when booted in the wrong resolution? Maybe, idk. Wouldn’t be surprised. But even if it did go through the boot sequence and then land on a black screen, the result is the same. Non-functional-looking computer, because no interface. As for DOS boot, we never ran dos on it so genuinely don’t know.
The only sign of life we had from it as far as I can recall was when the screensaver would go on after 5 min, it would play the Klingon national anthem, which is a big part of why they assumed virus. It was one that used an escape key to exit because it was interactive. We didn’t know until much later that was what was happening, or that my sibling changed the screensaver and maybe other stuff, which is probably what caused the problem in the first place, but the other software may have covered up those signs you are talking about, or maybe we all just still didn’t know what to do with it with the boot images and stuff showing up, which… idk if you know this, but even today most people don’t know how to troubleshoot or fix their computers, and don’t even know what a BIOS is… My parents were not tech inclined, my sibling and I were around 10-11, and it’s not like they could just look up how to do these things when their computer wasn’t working… which is exactly what my sibling did when they got a computer of their own.
“Instead of getting the tool designed specifically for the thing, just get a different tool that isn’t designed for the thing, and then learn to make really precise difficult cuts!”
I come from a big cheese area, and genuinely, no. A sharper knife isn’t the problem, the surface area of the blade is the problem. Even an oiled ceramic knife doesn’t cut cleanly through many cheeses (ceramic is extremely sharp, oiling is to attempt to prevent buckling and breaking because the cheese sticks to the blade). A wire cheese slicer is consistent, and safe and easy enough for a child to use (I know because that was my first experience with one, around 5-6).
We had a computer sitting for like 3 years in the mid 90s, totally unusable. It was assumed it had some sort of major virus because everything seemed to be working and making the right noises, but no interface. We didn’t have the money for repair services, and nobody knew how to fix stuff yet, so there it sat.
Until one day, when someone hooked the tower up to the monitor for a newer computer, to see if they could figure out why it wasn’t working, or at least reformat the drives and stuff.
Turns out, someone, or some program, messed with the resolution, and set it to something the original monitor couldn’t display, and this was before automatic rollback, so it just didn’t display it. That’s all it was. Unusable for 3 years because we didn’t have another monitor to use to roll back the changes.
It never “just worked”.
Magnetic puzzle blocks. The set I got came with a deck of cards to give you things to build. Makes a great fidget toy, tho the ones I got were a bit noisy.
The early mass-adopted Internet, where every company aimed at kids had a website with free games, where everyone who wanted to share about themselves or their interests did so in their own little corner so you could rabbit-hole your way through the link trees, most stuff was non-monetized or had easy-to-block ads, and no tracking of your behavior was really happening.
That’s the preferred order. It’s much harder to throw a community at a cop.
I get the pleasure of a conversation-ending comeback. I wield it sporadically.
“She died 20 years ago so that’s pretty nasty, but I’m proud of you for admitting your kinks so publicly!”
If they stop and think about it they realize I was young when it happened and it shuts them down HARD. If they don’t, I upped the ante in such a way as to be largely un-toppable.
No avatar because I can’t be bothered. I don’t see them on my app anyway. As far as I can tell, nobody has them.
I was watching some movie, and I was like ooh, centipedes would make good farriers; they can use their body along the hoof to draw a stencil by just passing a pencil along all of its feet!
And that was silly so here we are.
Nothing, and I don’t plan to buy anything except normal stuff through January, either. I’m not doing Xmas this year, so very easy to avoid the spend.
Same in the regions of the US I’ve been to. Usually little cocktail weenies in pastry here, bacon wrapped is just called bacon wrapped, though.
A science book and a plant.
Something really neat that I’ve noticed is that nobody can actually tell if you are making eye contact with them if you never make eye contact with them to begin with, but also aren’t looking around their face or past them.
I watch people’s mouths when they talk (and look random directions when I talk) because it helps me process what they are saying, never eye contact cuz it’s very uncomfortable and that makes processing slower. I’ve asked many people over the years for my own knowledge because I often hear how important eye contact is, but nobody I’ve asked has realized it wasn’t eye contact. At arms length, it’s pretty indistinguishable.
So mask if you want to, but apparently you don’t really have to if you’d rather just be yourself.