As a warning to anyone reading: don’t start running to lose weight. Running burns calories and can increase your calorie maintenance, but it will also make you very hungry. Weight loss is mainly about CICO, and you can’t really outrun the fork. Since running can be very natural to humans as a form of movement, it also burns very few calories for the effort. I feel like weight training is a more fair calorie spender for the effort.

But running and taking care of myself does make me pick healthier options. Running helps me sleep, so I’m less tired and as a result, less hungry and prone to wanting unhealthy snacks. Fried greasy foods aren’t great fuel for runs, so I’ll naturally pick things like oatmeal, bananas, veggies etc. But be warned, many runners also love a post run beer so YMMV.

Get a Brother. My simple black and white laser printer has very strong “ME PRINT FOR YOU. ME PRINT! ME PRINT ALL PAGE FOR YOU” energy. The only beef we have is when he is all “NO PRINT. FEED ME PAPER” and then when fed he goes back to printing no problem.

It costs a chunk to run, but saves a lot in health bills - even in countries where healthcare is universal. Heart disease is both a killer and something that can incapacitate you, and any potential weight loss benefits aside, running is fantastic for heart health (provided you do it properly and with the approval of your medical professionals). Not to mention it also has focus, mental health, and sleep quality benefits. Plus if you really get into it, you’ll soon be training for some disturbingly long race and be too busy to do much of anything - especially shopping for pointless things you don’t need.

I’d say that most people can get started with decent wicking workout clothes (thrift them if you can and go for gaudy neons if you live in a place that’s dark most of the year), and a pair of decent running shoes on sale. Wireless headphones and a running belt (or just going for pants with zippered pockets to hold your phone) are small upgrades that also make it better if you have a bit of extra budget. Run like this for like a year, and then slowly upgrade with gadgets like running watches, CamelBak backpacks if you start doing long distances and feel like you need it. Also consider investing in slightly better clothing based on what you determine your needs are - colder climate thermals, merino, running shoes for specific pronation, and rolling tools to help you stretch.

Running can be as cheap as less than ~$100 a year or as expensive as you want it to be. It’s cheaper than the gym, CrossFit, at home workout equipment, yoga classes, etc. Not to shit on those things at all, in fact cross training helps you build strength and avoid injury. But nobody should ever feel discouraged by running due to costs, it pays off in spades.

And for new runners, run s l o w. Slower than you want. So slow you feel you’re not doing much and practically walking. Slow and long runs are the ones that make a real difference in building stamina, cardio health, and even decreasing your race times. You’re also less likely to get injured and prematurely get winded by using up all your energy in a sprint. Also, walking is fine. Even experienced runners walk during certain moments - usually for me, I’m doing it to get a burp out or something.

As the daughter of a chef - skip the salt, add a bouillon cube. It’s not authentic but it tastes better and half of the NYC restaurants do it already. The umami from the bouillon cube rounds out the flavour and makes it taste less like a two ingredient poverty food.

A lot of Italian dishes taste kinda unfinished until you add an umami element to them. Thats why I prefer the Croatian version the same dishes. Pasta fagioli is a beany vegetable soup, the Croatians make pasta fažol by adding a bit of pršut (smoked ham) and it completes the flavour and makes it a delicious hearty meal. That’s why Lydia Bastianich has been so successful - she’s been passing the typical Croatian version of meals as “authentic Italian” for decades and people like it because it flat out tastes better.

If you wanna get real advanced find some Vegeta in a European grocery store and start using it to sub salt in most meals. It’s basically just a bunch of herbs, onion and garlic powder, and MSG. Use it as a meat rub, use it when making rice, use it while cooking anything savoury.

Also, don’t make the mistake that smaller parrots mean less commitment. Parrotlets and lovebirds are smart, feisty, bite pretty hard, are extremely loud, and still live like 25 years. Budgies are a bit dumber and nicer, but still live a long ass time. Cockatiels have a very nice personality and are musical, but they have 25 year life spans. Consider any small parrot to be a “25 to life” deal.

Also chances are, your parrot (of any kind) either won’t talk, or won’t shut up about the wrong things. Hope you like hearing the Teams call music at all hours.

Rats carry all the personality of dogs and cats. In theory, you get a pet that you’ll enjoy for 2-3 years. In practice, you’ll be devastated after your intelligent best friends start dying one by one. Most people cope by buying rats constantly.

As cool as Earthships sound, I feel like they aren’t a good fit for all climates. I’m in Canada, and unless you live in BC (and I’m talking Vancouver or the island), your only sustainable building option is straw bale.

Even if I could go further south to a more temperate climate, part of my fear is that anything south will get unbearable soon. Even Europe is going to be hot as hell.

My parents favourite music artists finally popped up on Spotify about 5 years ago. It was a dry run until then - I was PISSED when my brother lost my CD of a band I liked when we went back home on vacation.

Fuck that, I like you.

Technically none, but my partner pays for Spotify and I’m on a shared YouTube Premium plan. I used to have 5-6 subscriptions and cut them off in January 2022. No regrets! Even buying an old machine second hand, an external storage, and a VPN still costs way less than my many subscriptions. It’ll be hard to give up Spotify… Too convenient.

Disagree. Celsius is super helpful for determining if it’s gonna snow or not, a key weather thing where I live. Humid and cold and below 0? Snow. Humid and cold and above 0? Rain or freezing rain.

Also helps with plants. Below 0? Frost.

I’d argue you can’t get more intuitive than 0 is cold, below 0 is very cold. Celsius also plays nice with round numbers, every 5 or 10 degrees is a change in feeling. 0 is cold, 5 out is cooler, 10 out is cool, 15 is moderate, 20 is comfortable, 25 is room and warm, 30 is hot, 35+ is very hot. Every ten degrees we’re doing big changes. 0 is frozen, 10 is cool, 20 is comfortable, 30 is hot. 32 being frozen doesn’t feel as intuitive.

Humans weren’t ready for easily accessible sucrose, let alone an easily manipulated reality. My parents can’t tell the difference between Facebook rumors and reality. My siblings can’t tell the difference between YouTube conspiracies and reality. And I’m this boat, letting myself get personally affected by text on some website. We’re in over out heads.

One of my Linux people left Odysee recently. Can you guess why? He got sick of all the Nazi shit.

Reminds me of leaving my ex. Went from “baby I love you, don’t leave 🥺” to “fuck you, you’re nothing without me, you’re a crazy bitch” in the span of minutes.

Cool! I’ll probably go down that route then when it’s ready.

That looks neat! I’ll look into it. How does it work, do you run Docker in it? I really have no clue what I’m doing.

I’ve got the domains already - I have a bad habit of buying domains that I never use. It’s really the server part that gets me nervous. I’m not good at that stuff yet, and it’s not really intuitive for me to learn. I know for Mastodon, they have some cloud based servers that they recommend, but Lemmy’s instructions are kinda lacking detail for a newbie like me - and at this time, there’s not really up-to-date YT videos showing you how to do it.

I know that being part of a server seems like a natural fit for someone like me who is totally lost with these things, but it’s kinda frustrating that most larger instances have a ton of rules. I think the one I’m on has rules about lewd content, which is fine, but I feel like one of my comments got blocked from submission when I wrote about how Reddit’s downfall will be similar to Tumblr’s due to their likely eventual banning of that type of content. Maybe some of the words I used were triggering the auto filter or something? But either way, I didn’t like that feeling of censorship.

At this point I’m considering it. I wonder how much it costs.

Yeah, I guess it would put the pressure on instances to individually ban someone from participating in certain communities, but we’d have no real way to fully ban a person who is posting illegal things. But that’s kinda true if someone makes their own instance now and begins posting illegal stuff - I assume other instances have to ban that person anyway.

I mean it would still be decentralized in most ways that matter. Nobody would own the hosting of instances except the small groups or individuals that do, so if a surpressive party ever tried to control the narrative on a large instance with multiple communities, users could just focus on other instances that aren’t like that. Likewise, it would greatly simplify the moderation needs of other instances (in some ways) - instances would focus on blocking harmful users, but they wouldn’t have to worry about potentially replicating content from harmful instances. Sign up is also simplified, preventing the “where do I go” confusion.

It could also marry the different fediverse hangouts in different ways. Think about YouTube - they have a place for the main feed, they have a place for shorts, and those two places don’t even really give the same vibe. A good fediverse app could have different views between Mastodon, Lemmy, Tumblr (they’re either federated or plan to be), etc but one account that has a single access point for all of those. Sliding between the views gives you something like Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, Instagram, etc. Instead of 12 handles, YouTubers give 1.

There are pitfalls - who owns the big account instance? What if the owners of it somehow abuse their power over the community, can we create another account instance and link it up, good as new? How hard is it to screen individual users from the perspective of an individual instance owner or group? Do we want to have our activity linked across multiple different places on the internet - after all, Mastodon is more real identity meaning, but Lemmy is more anonymous like Reddit. Who funds the mega instance? Is there incentive to pay for smaller instances if they don’t hold your account as well? Will the big instances just… Own all the data eventually anyway (this could happen even without one login)?

I think the only way it could work is from some strange non profit Wikipedia type setup where it’s completely FOSS and nobody can ever have ownership to monetize or exploit the user base. Thing is, I’m not a tech person at all. I see shit like Linux as an absolute miracle and completely fail to understand how that even works (people collaborating on a project that’s totally free in most cases). I’m just kinda shooting the breeze and trying to think of how things could work possibly, but these ideas are probably bad for reasons I didn’t even realize.