A garlic press. I avoided them for years because of a mixture of guidance saying it’s just as easy to chop it or it tastes worse from a press. I don’t have the tastebuds to notice it being any worse and it’s certainly a lot easier than chopping since you don’t even have to peel it.

Depends where you’re from really, and how thick an accent you have. I spent a weekend decorating my first house accidentally talking in nothing but innuendo until it was pointed out to me that I should never go into a DIY shop, obvious gay that I am, and run around asking for cock.

Got expedition 33 running on the steam deck (with some amount of tweaking to make it run smooth - valve should not be marking that game as verified) and it has absorbed every moment of free time I have. Fully understand the hype now. Apart from that, Outer Wilds had been sitting in my library since the summer sale untouched and I’ve finally gotten into it, and Dispatch was really fun and beautifully animated.

I bought an artificial one second-hand which felt like the most sustainable option - not cutting a tree down every year and not paying for virgin plastic either. Charity shops here are usually filled with pretty nice ones since a lot of people seem to replace their plastic trees far more frequently than they should.

You can use uBlacklist with a list of AI websites to filter out a ton of crap in search results. It’s good for blocking out AI slop websites but probably won’t be too effective for individual YouTube videos.

Same here. There’s a few set hours of the day we have to be there but otherwise so long as you get your 40 hours in over the course of the week you’re alright. In all the office jobs I’ve worked there wasn’t really such a thing as “being late” or even being late back from lunch

I love mine. It’s pretty unobtrusive but there’s a ton of open-source applications available on the store. Probably the most similar to the original Pebble (besides the new pebbles of course) right down to the MIP display. Tried a pinetime but it’s very limited by comparison and an IPS screen on a smartwatch is a terrible idea.

I don’t think this place is big enough yet for my conspiracy theory to make any sense, but if I was the CEO of a company like Reddit and I wanted to prevent users moving to Lemmy I would make a bunch of accounts on here and spark as much drama and infighting as possible. And there’s been so much of it lately, whether it be callout posts on different instances or people concern trolling under posts, that it does feel so inorganic. When you come on here hoping for a better place and you see users writing mini manifestos calling out another user’s character flaws, it is extremely offputting.

I’ve gotten more aggressive with blocks lately. Feels like there’s been a lot more arguing and drama on here lately than usual, and I haven’t been on as much because of it. Blocking at least drowns a lot of that out.

Ours was “{town} Free Wi-Fi” when we lived in the town centre for a while, just to confuse tourists. It was more of a getting stabbed area than a fun SSID name area though.

Bloons TD fits this for me, I play it when I’m too ill to think properly but still need something to pass the time

“We and our 2,565 advertising partners respect your privacy” is always a good laugh before hitting decline on the ones uBlock doesn’t catch automatically

I’m really angry with the British government right now. In some ways they’re worse than the Tories, because at least with them you knew where you stood. With Starmer he keeps trying to outdo the far right, which leads to them adopting even further right policies, and him adopting them and so on. The cracking down on freedom of speech is genuinely scary, whether it be through the online safety act or abusing terrorism legislation to proscribe direct action groups. They need to fix the housing and healthcare crises urgently, but they’re tinkering at the seams while the far right are on the cusp of taking power in 2029.

On the local level, I don’t like our elected assembly much either, and I feel like all they do is pose for photoshoots and blame all their mistakes on the government in London.

Deliveroo in the UK does this, although I don’t think anyone actually calls them ‘riders’ except for the company themselves. It is a weird term to use.

When I was 5, then I seemingly got better as a teenager and didn’t need an inhaler for about ten years. I got covid in my early twenties and got re-diagnosed after it ruined my lungs. And I do mean re-diagnosed, they wouldn’t prescribe me new inhalers from my original diagnosis after ten years of not taking them and I had to get a peak flow prescribed and do the tests over the phone since we couldn’t do it in person thanks to the pandemic.

They are the 6th biggest contributor, and Spain has considered doing similar and they’re one of the big five. It might actually change something since money will matter the most, and enough countries are dropping out that they may not have enough contestants to run the semi-finals. There’s rumours that Italy, Germany, and Britain may withdraw if Israel is kicked out though. Maybe we just won’t have a contest next year, and after the bullshit of the past two years I’m completely fine with that.

They did pay for the “shit your pants” spell, and that does happen shortly after death…so in a roundabout monkey’s paw sort of way I guess that one worked

I think a lot of non-techie people only know signal from the Trump admin using it illegally earlier in the year. In a lot of people’s minds because of that they think Signal = insecure because they don’t get the nuances of why using it in that specific context – on personal phones, using a third party app, with a random journalist in the mix – was bad, but that for most people it’s still one of the best options. WhatsApp on the other hand has a lot of marketing around it and if you didn’t know that Meta is Facebook I think some people wouldn’t even realise who the owners are.

The other controversies involved their therapists being poorly vetted, and when they entered the UK they were called out for poor hiring practices, ignoring safeguarding, things like that. They’d promise people licensed therapists and link them to crystal healers and homeopathists. They’re the Uber of mental health in many ways.

There’s other shitty YouTuber-sponsored companies out there like NordVPN but I don’t unsubscribe from people promoting them because the issues aren’t as well known and the product isn’t targeting someone for something as important as mental health. Every YouTuber knows how bad that company is because they all dropped it for a few years until the controversy died down, and the ones who don’t care about their fans wellbeing picked it up again as soon as they thought they could get away with it. BetterHelp is just an immediate unsubscribe because you don’t get to make a quick buck from fucking with people’s mental health and sending your audience to shitty unvetted digital therapy and leaving them with worse problems in the long run. I remember unsubscribing from Johnny Harris (who has many other problems anyway), Yes Theory, and the one I mentioned above was Connor Franta. That one stung because I really liked him when I was a teenager, he came out around the same time I realised I was gay, and coming back to his channel ten years later to see him promoting this to his young and vulnerable audience knowing that they were feeling especially vulnerable after the election really disgusted me. Like not just to promote it, but to promote it to them as something to help their mental health if they feel scared about their rights being rolled back. Especially with them leaking private data, a trans person in Trump’s America would be in so much danger having that information leaked by this awful company and you’re sending your LGBTQ fans there for therapy?

Anyway sorry, rant over, this company and its shills are one of the things that get me very riled up.

There was a YouTuber I used to respect and looked up to when I was a teenager and I hadn’t checked his channel for years. Last year I looked at one of his videos after the US election and he was using the fact that it’s a dangerous time for queer people as his segue into shilling for BetterHelp. Not a chance any YouTuber is unaware of the issues with it by now, anyone who shills it knows damn well how dangerous that platform is, and I don’t think my opinion of someone has dropped as quickly as that. It’s bad enough to shill that awful company but to exploit your young queer audience’s fears post-election and people’s mental health issues and act like they’re doing them a favour? Absolutely fuck that.