In context that makes a ton of sense for why you don’t want to go to concerts anymore! Burnout is a bitch! But there’s something beautiful about once you’re past the burnout and try the thing again, where it’s been long enough it’s like trying it again for the first time except with the knowledge of what to expect and how to best enjoy it already there.

Rock on and enjoy yourself! 🤘

The worst part is those single use batteries usually contain a rechargable batter but no circuitry to recharge it. Shit needs to be regulated out of existence!

I try to avoid the keyboard mash sellers on Amazon but for some products it’s pretty much impossible to find anything else.

Oddly enough the keyboard mash sellers can be great value depending on the item you’re ordering. Basically any kind of components or anything that would realistically be purchased by another factory in China has a pretty decent chance of being good enough quality. Hand tools or individual components for making stuff for example are pretty safe bets

At that point you’re already putting in more work than a standard drop coffee maker would take! You literally put a filter in, pour grounds in and hit brew.

Optionally you can get a reusable filter and rinse it after each pot of coffee

Honestly even at the current going rates of $50-100 a ticket going to some good concerts is still a blast and still worth it. Also usually there’s going to be at least one opener and depending on the show they might have 2-3 bands performing. Personally I’m happy if I get to do 1-3 big concerts a year, and that’s really not that much to budget for even at $100/ticket, and some bands are freaking incredible to see live.

Also worth poking around to see if there’s any free/cheap music events near you or comparing with the cost of tickets to a music festival if you really want to be cheap/picky. There’s a couple of free music events I try to go to every year at nearish cities to me and it’s literally free entry and they’ll have a full lineup of bands for the full weekend. I’ve seen Bobaflex, Powerman5000, The Haunt, Black Stone Cherry, Taproot, Red Jumpsuit Apperatus, Fastball, Fozzy etc. all at these free music festivals

Yup many manufactures stopped making anything other than trucks and SUVs in the US, and if that doesn’t make it enough of a challenge, many buyers (especially locally to me) prefer larger vehicles so I have fewer used options to choose from (and I’m too cheap to buy a new car)

P*rn premium subscriptions

If you can afford to pay for the content you consume it’s generally better to pay for it, especially with regards to the porn industry which takes every scummy practice of traditional media and is 10x worse because it’s not really happening in the open

any printed magazine

For some hobbies printed magazines are still the Pinnacle of media related to the hobby, so as long as the media company behind the magazine hasn’t changed hands and significantly degraded quality (looking at you Kalmbach publishing!) paying for a magazine so you get something fun to look at in the mail each month/quarter/whatever can be quite enjoyable

As a fan of sedans and hatchbacks…car shopping is very interesting right now

I like when it becomes “on the other other other hand…” Like you’re a member of the Jatravartids who had 50 arms and are the only race in history to have invented the aerosol deodorant before the wheel.

2 big reasons for that:

1. Fits better between studs as the other commenter stated
2. Easier and cleaner to route the 2 power phases. US plugs are famously ~120V but what many don’t realize is that’s a single phase of 120V, and there’s two phases that go into the breaker box. By combining the +120VAC and -120VAC phases you get a full 240VAC for higher power appliances like stoves, dryers, heat pumps and electric vehicles.

I’ve known a few midwesterners like that, they likely grew up on “natural flavor” and never add anything to their food and eat the blandest possible interpretations of real foods, and since their taste buds aren’t used to any real flavor anything cooked with flavor is extreme to them

I had to get a new roof and siding due to hail damage. I got a blue metal roof with white trim and sage green vinyl siding. I took a bit of a risk and depending on how cloudy it is the blue roof reflects too much blue and the too colors start clashing instead of complimenting. But most importantly it’s not boring! Also it’ll look really good as the vinyl starts fading

How surprising that’s my birthday too!

On a PC that isn’t so hard to do. The problem though is that online services will start requiring the os level check

Easy peasy, the browser checks the OS them reports it to the website

I feel like Civ always punished you too much for being too successful in repelling another civ’s attacks. Like, what do you mean they can take a couple of cities but when I do it it sours my relations with every single civilization on the map? Always pushes me to a domination victory when that happens. Sometimes I can manage it without gaining too much of a warmonger reputation, but it’s too much of a balancing act

ETS2 is getting a bus expansion too so you can drive buses instead of trucks of you prefer. The American counterpart ATS (same game engine, same studio and updated in lockstep with ETS2) is similarly getting a road trip expansion, where you can drive many classic American cars on a road trip.

Honestly I highly recommend the games because they’re incredibly chill driving simulators

I was going to say similar. Gonna start laying track on my new micro model railroad this evening.

I acquired some German models by pure happenstance but they’re in a different scale from all of my other stuff so I need to build a small home for them. I’ve got a track plan for a basic little 1x4 foot micro layout and just got the last few pieces of track that I needed

So they have found ways to travel that we are not aware of, perhaps light speed travel or possibly wormholes, teleportation, who knows.

I think you’re missing that you’re hand waving away literally the laws of physics. Light speed travel runs into a relativity problem (and relativity is so well understood at this point your phone’s GPS receiver will make adjustments to the GPS data it receives because the exactness of the data actually exposes some relativistic differences between the satellites and the ground) which I’ve already described (a few years of near-light speed travel is thousands of years on the ground)

The light speed barrier appears to be entirely unbreakable. Conservation of energy is proven in transportation and the energy sector constantly and is why near-light speed travel is highly unlikely is the amount of energy required to propel a vehicle to such speeds is absolutely immensely impossibly big, and therefore breaking the light speed barrier if it is even possible would require orders of magnitude more energy.

Oh and Wormholes and teleportation are literally pure fiction

I guess the reason people think so different about this is that they assume that aliens would travel with only human knowledge of space travel

No no. It’s because we assume aliens would be bound to the same physics as the rest of the universe is

If they are here, they have had space travel for at least thousands of years, probably much more

That is how long they would need to travel to get here from any other solar system. If aliens are coming it ain’t going to be a couple of little green men in a saucer the size of a truck, it’s going to be a generation ship, a cryoship or entirely robotic, and the current alien mythos really doesn’t fit that.

Circling back to the core claim that aliens have been visiting the earth and may or may not be abducting random farmers and probing them, the entire alien mythos is easily explained with previously-classified aircraft that were being built by the US during the cold war, drugs and mental illness, and largely doesn’t exist before the 1950s. If you read some of the very first reports of UFOs before the mythos really received much media attention they entirely don’t match the now classic imagery of little green men with giant bug-like eyes flying a circular ship, because these people didn’t already have that imagery to apply to whatever weather balloon or classified aircraft they happened to get a glance of.

There’s definitely benefit in going further up market (the $600 range tends to be where diminishing returns really kick in, where the differences between a $300 phone and a $600 phone are pretty obvious, the $600 and the $1000 phone are much harder to spot the differences) and if you buy a used generation or two old device you can really save some cash. My wife and I both got Pixel 7s last year for about $250 a pop, and they’ve still got several years of updates left on them

I’ve totaled 3 cars in the last 5 years (one deer on a blind curve on a county highway, 2 from hail) and the only change is this year they raised my deductible by $500…which given my only claims have been total losses I’m not sure how that really lowers their risk but I’ll take it