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If this is your vibe normally I wouldn’t want to engage and would just post a troll image as well, it’s rancid.

Lemmygrad I can’t comment on. As far as I can tell they basically just talk politics and I’m not interested in microwaving my brain by obsessing about politics online. Haven’t seen them out in any of the threads I’ve been on.

Hexbear I’ve enjoyed honestly. They’ve got nice hobby communities and it’s all I’m here for. Quality of discussion is usually pretty good. My take on people hating Hexbear is people have made their personality getting mad about politics and Hexbear don’t share their views. People screaming “tankie!” just seemed deranged to me, literally who cares what a handful of nerds in the US think of China. Neither of you have any influence on what China does at all.

I think technically it’s just my key ring. It’s loop is just from a charm thing my grandmother gave to me like 20 years ago. The charm was lost a long time ago. Kind of boring though.

My favorite pair of jeans and my favorite jacket are both about 15 years old at this point, heavily worn and patched together many times. Not daily use though obviously. My most comfortable pair of boots are about 10 years old which are closer to daily use.

One of the hard drives in my computer is more than 10 years old but I rarely read/write anything to it anymore. For a long time a lot of bits from it were very old, but I think everything older has been ship of theseus’d now. My mother still uses my handy down 15+ year old MX518 mouse daily though.

The private sector, like corporations? It happens to a degree but you’ll find connections to both intelligence agencies and organized crime pretty quickly. Just look into Coca Cola’s assassinations of union leaders in Colombia if you want an example.

There is a fairly significant amount of planning that goes in to these, but it doesn’t have the “cool” of fiction. Killing in reality is brutish and horrific.

I almost always start digital, either ebook or audiobook then buy a physical copy later if I liked it. It’s just a lot less friction for starting something new, no needing to go out of my way to a library/bookstore or wait for something to be delivered. Sometimes I’ll just take a gamble on something physical if I’m looking for a new travel book or I’m killing time in a library/bookstore though.

I sometimes tell people to try the network troubleshooter if they’re having issues because it’s idiot proof. All it’ll do is occasionally disable and enable a network adapter which can fix some common problems. If you’re even the slightest bit tech savvy though, ignore it.

Startup Repair has been useful when I’ve actually gone to use it, but I can count on one hand how many times I’ve gotten to that point.

Otherwise, no.

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Without RSS I’d stop following the vast majority of online content. I’m not checking all these different websites individually, where their follow options have substantially less functionality.

I currently have 121 feeds. Podcasts, youtube channels, TV show releases, some blogs, a surprising number of reddit searches, etc. I used to have substantially more feeds but I trimmed it heavily a couple of years ago - mostly I stopped follow the news so closely for my sanity.

It might sound kind of overwhelming but I create pretty strict filters so I get maybe a dozen updates on a busy day.

I wish, my iPod gave up the ghost many years ago. When it died - at the time I was way too broke to replace it - my interest in music kind of went with it too. I still listen to music of course, but I’ve never been passionate about it since.

Also, I still sometimes get the feeling like I forgot something when I leave the house because the weight distribution in my pockets isn’t ‘right’ anymore lmao

I have a few chronic illnesses. Individually I think they’re at least easy to explain, if not something people already understand, but trying to communicate the combination is hard.

None of them are usually that bad by themselves. Together the issues compound and make it extremely hard to attribute symptoms to something specific. Like, are the migraines a rare symptom from a condition, a result of them interacting, one of the medications I’m taking or a new issue? I don’t know.

And when you’re vague (as in, don’t pull out your entire medical record and attribute each symptom to a specific condition) or the issues sound too severe for what people already understand, you get some pretty… negative reactions. “My uncle had X and he was fine, you’re milking it for sympathy!” but did he have Y and Z as well? Did he have the same variant of X? Was he actually fine, or did you never really talk to him about it? It’s rarely apples to apples comparing disabilities but that’s how people a primed to react.

I’ve learned to deflect and fall back behind medically privacy in professional settings, but it can be stressful.

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With anything made when 20+ episode season was the norm, I’d recommend just searching for a skip list. I remember the /r/DaystromInstitute skip lists being pretty good: https://old.reddit.com/r/DaystromInstitute/wiki/index#wiki_episode_guides

I’d recommend the same with more modern stuff, because the ratio of good episodes to bad sure as hell hasn’t gotten better despite shorter seasons, but the death of episodic story telling makes it pretty hard to skip episodes.

I technically started with Lemmy pretty early, long before any of the Reddit exit stuff, but it was hyper focused on politics still and I feel like spending that much time talking politics online is extremely unhealthy. I was really only interested in a hobby forum with the Reddit format that didn’t have the suffocating debate bro culture.

I started lurking since the Reddit exit stuff to see if it would grow enough to support other topics. It has, but I’m not certain if I’ll stay. Unsurprisingly an influx in Redditors has made this place culturally a lot more like Reddit, for the worse.

I also dabbled in Mastodon years ago but I’ve never particularly liked the Twitter format so a federated clone didn’t really gel with me.

At least other systems tend to be cheaper and more condensed. The D&D brand tax is real.

I don’t think it’s stupid to have a reaction to stuff that happens online, but the trick is to not get baited into investing even more into whatever it is if there is no likely resolution. It’s kind of vibes based, but sometimes you get someone who you can just tell is a bit unhinged and will never stop posting at you no matter how much they are embarrassing themselves. So I distance myself from whatever it is. Maybe just turn of notifications, other times I need to unbookmark the site to stay away or sometimes I just delete my account and move on entirely.

I’ll also often preemptively disable notifications if I think a take is going to attract weirdos.

bonus points for not answering ‘go outside drink water read a book’ etc etc

I mean I hate to say it but these are still honest, good answers even if you’ve heard them before. Sometimes you just have to touch some grass.

I’ve been using RSS feeds for youtube channels for a few years.

Same. Don’t really follow any kind of content feed if I can’t combine it in my RSS client. I don’t want to check dozens of web pages individually.

D&D. When I got back into it as an adult it was mostly because I could get into it for $0. I was dead broke at the time. I pirated the books downloaded the free basic rules 😉 on my trash find laptop and was good to go.

But man once I had money it turns out I really like collecting books and the D&D ones are not cheap. I do not want to think about how much I’ve spent.