But without them most ecosystems would fail

a minor hiccup, at most. Many ecosystems wouldn’t even notice.

I love how the Streisand Effect works. They just made this app the hottest thing out there.

Yup. Problem is, not too many people can effectively live hundreds of kilometres away from their jobs. And not many people want a 2-4hr daily commute. And anything that has electricity and water to the lot is already being snapped up by “investors” looking to flip the thing for a massive profit.

We have a really big problem with a lack of effective restraints on the asset-owning Parasite Class

Allowing men’s issues to even be addressed risks giving legitimacy to the fact that these issues even exist. And if they exist, men can no longer be that evil monolith that exists only to be torn down and used as the cause for whatever is wrong with the world.

After all, the zero-sum game must be properly reinforced with an appropriate evil that cannot be allowed to have any weaknesses or redeeming attributes.

Undesirable location

In many places, that just doesn’t exist. Places like most of Canada, where people are paying 60-80% of their income just to put a roof over their head. If a place is on the rental market, it will likely have people fighting tooth-and-nail over it even if it’s been condemned and it’s being illegally rented out.

Yeah, my heat exhaustion event was a quarter century ago. It’s just gotten worse and worse over the years.

Ever since I had a heat exhaustion event in my late teens, I have been exceedingly sensitive to heat. Think actively sweating like I’m in a sauna - only in normal office temperatures. I have to shave my head for nearly half the year in order to not look like a drowned rat - and carry a “sweat towel” with me at all times to wipe the dripping sweat off a half dozen times an hour.

My home office is set to between 15℃ and 18℃ because that is the temperature where I feel the same amount of comfort as most other people do between 24℃ and 28℃. Throw a business suit into the mix, and that comfort range drops by 4-6℃.

There are times in the winter where I throw all the office windows open, let the -20℃ air roll in from outside, and actually enjoy wearing long pants and a sweater.

…I live in Canada. Near where it hit 50℃ during the heat dome a few years ago. Climate Change is going to be brutal for me.

With homelessness exploding due to how the asset-owning Parasite Class is jacking rents into the stratosphere, why is any residential property vacant at this time?

Vacant residential properties should be taxed out the nose - well above any rent or price appreciation - until they are occupied by legitimate tenants.

I have a really big thing for 70s PNW homes done really, really well. The vaulted ceilings, open concept main areas with multiple levels, the sunken living rooms, the cedar used everywhere… just leave out the shag carpet and I’ll be A-OK.

Good brutalist architecture can take your breath away. It’s so solid, so permanent, so delightfully uncompromising.

They’re referring to beer that is limited to 3.2% alcohol by volume.

Holy shit, it’s a real thing.

Up here in Canada, you’d have to get a Radler to get anything 4% and under. I don’t think I’ve ever had a normal beer under 5.5%, and some of our beers go clear up to 7-8%. And I’m not even a drinker - I have maybe a single drink a week, and typically go months between drinks.

I mean, sure, you can get the dealcoholized/0.5% stuff, but that’s like sex on a boat.

I have to praise Stephanie Meyer

Except the Twilight series glorified toxic relationships, normalized abuse and underage grooming, and hit an uncomfortable number of red flags in DSM-5.

I never had it done for two main reasons:

1. Actual cutting of the cornea.
2. A cripplingly negative response to anything that surgically impacts my body. Even giving blood triggers an overwhelming need to inject it right back into me.

Knowing what I do about CC and the astronomically high likelihood of global civilizational collapse before mid-century, I should really have something like that done so I can do without glasses if absolutely necessary. Assuming I live that long, that is. Which, judging from the current advanced age of my own parents, is a decent “likely”.

Right? This is an absolutely awesome autocorrect fail.

A mirror of Anna’s Archive.

Information is meant to be free.

…And it’s bound to be stupidly expensive.

Wish I could afford 20 of them, but not without winning the Powerball.

Until the oil pump shaft broke: a 1965 Holder AG3 European vineyard tractor. Centre articulating, 35+ Hp diesel, close to 2 metric tons, and a third the size of a VW Beetle. We used it extensively on our orchards for a good four decades, or just shy of that.

Sucker was stupidly strong for its size, and could out-pull most tractors twice its physical size. Last I was using it for was some pretty extreme landscaping in the front yard. Another story, because it takes some explaining, but yeah.

So apparently the oil pump shaft broke late 2023, and we thought it was just overheating. Nope. Plus, the mechanic also found a rather severe hydraulic leak into the oil system, which was about the only thing that kept the engine from totally seizing.

Unfortunately, we are about three decades too late for most of the required parts. The engine place does a lot of remanufacturing and machining, so I did ask them for their “fuck off” price (gotta have a benchmark in that regard). But they did strongly suggest a Kubota engine as a replacement, primarily because the original oil pump required some pretty unusual maintenance to avoid breaking like it did. Whoops. No-one in my family realized that, least of all my father who had bought the tractor in the 80s.

Another tool is yWriter.

This isn’t a tool for everyone, because it is research-first focused.

What I mean by that is that it’s a little clunky because background/research data is meant to go into it first, and then you are supposed to lean on that content to write your book second.

So for a non-fiction book, you would add all the data and facts and references, for a fiction book you would put in all of the important characters and plot points and things that the characters interact with.

This is so you always have a body of references to work off of so you don’t introduce inconsistencies.

Some people might find this software useful because assembling and fleshing out the underlying data is loads of fun and/or how they prep. Others might need this feature just to keep track of everything that goes into their book, as they might not be able to keep track of things like character quirks very easily in their head.

YMMV.

Do this to note my place, especially when the text is smaller and the lines are long. Makes it so much easier to find the line I left off on if I have to step away, or to find my way back to the next line more easily.

It’s the equivalent of putting my finger or a bookmark down on a page in a novel.

And I self-host precisely because of the money I save using surplussed hardware. I have a symmetrical 1Gb SOHO fibre connection from my ISP, so I can host whatever the hell I want, I just need to stand it up. And a beefy older system with oodles of RAM is perfect for spinning up VMs of various platforms for various tasks. This saves me craploads of money over even a single VM on cloud platforms like Vultr. Plus, even if I were to support a “heavy” service sufficiently in demand to warrant its own iron, it still costs me less than a year’s worth of hosting to obtain a decent platform for that service to run on all by it’s lonesome.

My only cloud costs end up being those services which are distributed for redundancy and geographical distance, such as DNS and caching CDNs.