I’ve never owned a car personally with less than about 150,000 miles on it

My parents did get a brand new Kia sportage during cash for clunkers so pretty close to 0 miles on it

After that, the runner up is my dad’s truck. It’s a '93 forD ranger, and it just hit 100k within the last year (I’m proud to say I was driving when it happened)

He’s the third owner, my grandfather had it until he lost his license and he basically never went anywhere, and I have no idea who had it before him.

For a lot of the time after that my dad also worked less than a mile from home and other than that my mom does most of their driving. They also had 3 cars for much of that time so that further cut into how much use the truck got.

Edit: did a dumb, read this as lowest for some reason

I’m currently somewhere around 220,000 on my '07 4runner, and I believe that’s about the highest I’ve had.

Its Tuesday night (or technically very early Wednesday morning) as I write this

For me it’s basically sunday, I was off yesterday and today.

So for the guy who works my opposite shift, its currently Friday. He’ll be getting off in a couple hours and then he’ll enjoy his weekend when he wakes up on Wednesday and Thursday.

My area isn’t the hottest, but it does usually get up to about 100F for a day or two most years, and in the summer temps are in the 80s or 90s during the day pretty consistently, and it can be humid.

I have a mostly finished basement, I’ll spend a lot of time down there over the summer, it stays pretty consistently cool.

I’m lucky that I work night shift, so it’s easier for me to do stuff in the evenings or early morning before it gets too hot.

There’s a saying that there’s no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate gear. I usually joke that in the summer that means air conditioning.

But if you don’t have a/c, opening your windows and getting some fans going can really go a long way to keeping your house cool.

Limit your time outside, find somewhere to sit down in the shade and take a break if you need to.

Dress appropriately for the weather, lightweight, light colored, breathable clothing, linen is great if you can find it. Maybe consider wearing a wide-brimmed hat to keep the sun off your face and neck when you go outside.

Drink lots of water, find some cool foods to eat, watermelon, cold soba, ice cream etc.

That same week

I happened to be out in the middle of nowhere on a backpacking trip when both of them died, and along the way we ran into a couple other groups who had started their treks more recently, and they dropped the news of those two deaths on us, so I think that was the first thing each of of us asked our families about when we got back to civilization and got a cell signal

We were also a little relieved that the H1N1 swine flu hadn’t killed everyone while we were gone.

Lemmy (and other fediverse services) users are mostly here because we have some strong opinions about mainstream social media, and those opinions are tied closely to politics these days.

If we didn’t, we’d probably be on Reddit, xitter, Facebook, etc. instead.

And if you get a bunch of people with strong opinions about something together, there’s a good chance the conversation is going to go in that direction sooner or later.

And like others have said, everything is politics, basically every aspect of life can be tied to politics in some way.

And there is a lot of political stuff going on all around the world that everyone really should be concerned about and following, and there’s a lot to discuss about it.

And I get it, it can be exhausting. I definitely wish I lived in a world where I didn’t have to pay as much attention to politics as I do.

The best thing you can do is to be active in communities you want to see have more activity. If no one’s posting the kind of “non-political” content you want to see, be the person posting it, if you build it they will come. Be the change you want to see.

In general, all Lemmy servers have the same content as every other one because they’re federated. There are some cases where instances have defederated from each other, and admins have done bans and such that I think may change what content is available to you

Also you’re on .ml, which is a pretty explicitly political instance. I don’t know all the technical details but I’m also under the impression that the mods and admins there are pretty quick to bring their ban-hammer down hard on people who disagree with them, so that could potentially be having some effect of what you’re able to see, though things are certainly looking pretty political from over here on .world too.

Different steaks for different purposes

If you’re just gonna plop a slab of meat on a plate with some potatoes and such, I’ll go ribeye any day of the week (although there are other cuts I may actually prefer truth be told)

But if I’m making maybe tacos or something, I’d probably go for the sirloin

Probably the coolest thing since I started learning it is some of the weird places it turns up

If you read the comic series Saga, the “blue” language is Esperanto

It shows up in the background of some movies and such as a generic “foreign” language

The watch brand Movado is an Esperanto word (movement)

I’ve never dived too deep into in, but I know there has been some research into native Esperanto speakers (denaskuloj) because that’s a thing that exists

Basically none. A couple friends have learned a little bit with me, and I’ve sought out a couple Esperanto books, podcasts, etc.

But otherwise I can’t say that I’ve ever randomly run into another esperantist I could talk to, and I’m not the type of person who seeks out clubs and conventions or making friends with strangers online.

But it’s an easy language to learn, and I feel like it’s taught me how to learn a language, and I think that I’ll be better prepared if I ever decide to try picking up another language somewhere down the line.

And while I’m not holding my breath, I like the idea of an international auxiliary language, and while there’s some valid criticism of Esperanto for that purpose (like that it’s too eurocentric) it’s probably about the best option that we have right now since it already exists, there’s people who actually speak it and it doesn’t have all of the weird grammar rules and such that natural languages all tend to have.

I believe in esperanto it should be

bonvolu stakigi la seĝojn ĉe la fino de la tago

Literally translates to something like

“Please make stacked the chairs at the end of the day”

The measure of a good story isn’t in a brief description of the premise, but in the actual telling of that story. A good writer could take something mundane like putting on your socks and make a funny, interesting, or thought-provoking read out of it, and a poor writer could make the most absolutely amazing thing imaginable a slog to get through.

I see nothing glaringly wrong with the premise of your story, but it’s all of the other details you don’t want to give away and how you tell the storf that would determine whether it’s a good story or not.

So the question really is how are you as a writer?

I’m pretty sure this is at least the second time I’ve seen you asking this question somewhere on Lemmy, so at the very least you don’t seem to have a lot of confidence in your own writing abilities.

And maybe that’s warranted, maybe it’s not. I haven’t read any of your writing to be able to say, and even if I had, just because I do or do not personally like it doesn’t mean that it’s objectively bad or good, it’s a matter of taste.

Start writing. Share some of what you’ve written with others and solicit criticism. Take that criticism into consideration and write some more. Lather, rinse, and repeat until the people you’re writing for (maybe it’s others, maybe it’s just yourself) are happy with what you’ve made.

The first things you write, in all honesty, probably won’t be good. As a talking dog on a children’s cartoon once told me “sucking at something is the first step towards being sort of good at something” you gotta start somewhere, and unless you’re a rare generational talent who’s naturally gifted at writing, you’re not gonna be starting from the top.

Scrolling through your history I see a lot of “do rich people do X” kind of questions. And I feel like that’s sort of your way of doing research into this project.

And that’s good, the best stories have some aspect to them that’s grounded, that feels familiar to them in some way, that things actually could play out in real life the way it does the pages.

But remember, this is your world, your character, your story, you make the rules and while it’s good to keep things grounded in reality, it’s also good to ask “what if?” Even if there had never been a biracial drug-addicted rich-kid street-racer (based on some of the things you’ve asked) in all of recorded history, it’s your prerogative to write a book based on the concept of “but what if there was?”

A lot of your questions also make me think that you’re pretty young, or at least just don’t have a whole lot of worldly experience for one reason or another. That’s not a knock against you, that just means that you’re at a great point in your life to start building knowledge and experience about the things you want to write about. Don’t rely on Lemmy to spoon-feed you those answers go out and find them for yourself.

Read. Read absolutely everything you can stomach. Reading is probably the most absolutely important thing to learn how to write, how can you hope to write well if you don’t know what good writing looks like? Read fiction, read nonfiction, read news articles, stories, biographies, memoirs, comics, short stories, epic novels and multi-part series, read analysis and criticisms of other writing, read theory on how to write, read new works and the classics, read about philosophy, psychology, sociology, science, art, math, etc.

And think about what you want your own writing to be like, and what worked and didn’t work and why in all those things you read.

And don’t limit yourself to reading. There are stories all around us- on tv, movies, all over the internet in various forms, and most importantly real life, go do things and talk to people as much as you are able. Experience as much as you can, and think about how it all makes you feel and how you’d write about it. Talk to people who have used drugs, maybe see if there’s some kind of volunteer opportunity at a rehab clinic near you. Go to a racetrack, maybe work on your own car. Good luck finding an in to get direct access to the mega-rich, but there’s no reason you can’t try, sometimes you might be amazed at what’s possible if you just ask- there’s only about 6 or 7 degrees of separation between you and almost anyone else in the world, the odds are pretty good that you know a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who knows exactly the kind of person you want to talk to if you just care enough to chase down those connections.

Learn about black culture. Learn about Japanese culture. Learn about the experiences of biracial people. Learn about the lives of people around those people. Learn from their own perspectives and from the perspectives of outsiders looking in. Learn about the rich, learn about the poor, and all of the complex interactions between all of these different groups of people and when, where, and how they all intersect.

And again, just write. The only way to learn if a story is any good is to actually tell it.

I think it’s coming sooner than a lot of people think.

We may even hit it within a year or so if we count the Steam machine and how that launch goes

Less and less people even have a home desktop these days. It’s basically gamers, programmers/IT/etc. types, and old people who refuse to learn how to use a smartphone.

A decent amount of those techy types are either already using Linux, or at least have some familiarity with it from working on servers and such, and it’s only a matter of time before a lot of them switch out of frustration with Microsoft’s enshitification

Gamers are already moving in pretty great numbers, valve has made it so that most games can now run fine on Linux which kept a lot of people from switching previously, and the steam deck has made a lot of people curious about it. And there’s a lot of people who have perfectly serviceable rigs that they can’t “upgrade” to windows 11 now that they won’t be getting regular security updates for 10, and with the price of RAM now, they may not want to invest in hardware upgrades and may turn to Linux to at least squeeze a couple more years out of their system.

And as far as the old luddites go, most of them could probably use Linux just fine. They’re not doing anything besides browsing the web checking their email, and using basic office programs anyway.

I recently switched my parents over to Linux Mint because their computer was just too bogged down with windows 11 bullshit and everything was going at a crawl. They’ve been on it for about a month now and it’s been smooth-sailing.

And I think as more of us gamers and tech nerds get more familiar and comfortable with Linux, more people are going to do the same thing. For those of us who have made the switch ourselves and play tech support for our parents and grandparents, the next time they call you up to come take a look at their computer, bring a Linux flash drive and boot that up for them. Tell them to play around with it a bit to see if they can live with it (I left my flash drive plugged into their computer for about a week for them to play around with it before I installed it for them) show them that libre office is basically the same as Microsoft office, install whatever web browser they’re used to, make sure their printer is working, etc.

And eventually, maybe they’ll even tell their old people friends about it. I can definitely see one of my mom’s friends complaining about how slow their computer is, and my mom saying “well my son put this Linux stuff on our computer, and it sped everything right up” and then boom you got old people getting curious about it too.

I think this is a case where trying to actually research a product may be more trouble than it’s worth, and you’d probably be better served by just walking into your local sporting goods store and grabbing the cheapest game camera they have on the shelf is.

I imagine there’s not going to be a ton of ambient light available in a nest box, so you’re probably going to be relying on night vision, so picture quality is probably going to be kind of shit no matter what, and since it sounds like you pretty much just need to see when a chicken goes into the box, no sense spending money for higher quality cameras.

These cameras are meant to be left outside exposed to the elements strapped to a tree or whatever, inside a nest box is more protected so IP rating and such isn’t going to be much of a concern.

I think whatever you can grab off the shelf will do the job fine.

No one is arming

This is anecdotal, but I’m basically what passes for being the “gun guy” among my mostly very liberal friends

Basically my qualifications are that I went shooting when I was in boy scouts, have a few friends who own guns and have gone shooting with them, and have a lot of outdoorsy hobbies that have overlap with hunters and such (my own attempts at hunting have been with a bow, and I wasn’t very successful,) and generally have a casual interest in guns, but don’t really have money to throw at them, I have plenty of other hobbies and things I’m worried about and guns are near the bottom of my priority list.

Which isn’t all that much, but it’s a lot more firearms experience than most of them have. And they also know I’m someone who will do some research and not just make stupid recommendations.

But a good handful of those people have been asking me about guns because they’ve been thinking about buying one themselves. And some of these same people were, at one point, fervently anti-gun.

And those who already have guns have been going to the range more, trying to stockpile a little extra ammo, maybe acquiring some new guns, getting a carry permit when they never felt the need to and we’re content to leave their guns at home in a safe before, etc.

They’re not out there talking about it, spreading it all over social media, posting pictures of their guns or at the range. Some of them, I think, are a little ashamed of it, others just (probably justifiably) think it’s not wise to spread that knowledge that they have them.

So there is arming happening, I don’t think it’s on a massive scale but I do think it’s happening, but you probably won’t hear much about it unless you’re someone those people have already decided that you’re a safe person to discuss guns with.

And I don’t think it’s specifically building up to any sort of an armed revolution or anything. I think it’s mostly people wanting to be prepared to defend themselves if/when things get bad. I think we’re a long way off from liberals wanting to take to the streets, pull a Jan 6, or even show up to protests armed in any significant numbers. The overwhelming sentiment I’ve gotten from most of my liberal gun owner friends is that they really don’t want to be the ones who take the first shot.

There’s a number of ways to get non-steam games to run through proton or other compatibility tools.

I’m not the expert on that matter because basically everything I play is on steam, but off the top of my head Lutris comes to mind

As far as mods, I’m not a huge modder, so again I’m probably the wrong person, but the handful of mods I do use (mostly some basic quality of life/bug-fix things) I’ve been able to get running on Linux without too much drama. No, there’s not currently a nifty tool like Vortex to automate it for you and you have to manually copy files to the right place and such, but most mods tell you that information, so all you need to do is get used to the folders you’re looking for living in a slightly different place than they did on windows. YMMV if you use more complicated mods than I do of course.

For starters, I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone say “anonym” in that sort of context before, so if that’s something you say regularly, change that habit, either leave it at “anon” or fully write out “anonymous”

And I’m not saying that to be a dick, I’m illustrating a point, if you have a unique style of writing, that’s something that can be used to fingerprint you. That’s how the Unabomber got caught after all- someone noticed that in his manifesto that he said “you can’t eat your cake and have it too” instead of the more common “you can’t have your cake and eat it too” and said “hey, that sounds like Ted.”

A while back there was a post on one of the food communities here where someone made a post about the “salmond” they cooked, and I immediately thought “is this the same guy who misspelled ‘salmon’ that same way like a week ago” and sure enough it was. Those stupid little things can stick out to people.

And if you carry those quirks around to different websites, it’s possible for people to connect the dots if they really want to. Search around for different accounts across different websites that say “anonym” and they might be able to piece together a profile on you.

Hypothetically, let’s say maybe somewhere on Lemmy you say that you’re a fan of the Chicago Bulls, and on xitter under a different username you mention that you grew up in New Jersey, but both accounts have used the word “anonym” and they figure they might be the same person. Then on still another site with a different name where you’ve also said it, you mention that you were in marching band and went to Catholic school.

So now the profile is for bulls fans from New Jersey, who went to Catholic school and were in marching band. That is fairly specific. That might have narrowed down who you are to just a few hundred, or maybe even dozens of people.

So the most important lesson is to just be really aware of what information you’re willingly putting out there about yourself and think about how it could potentially be used to identify you. It doesn’t matter if you’re on Tor and a VPN and all of the other technical measures you can take, because you’re still just putting information about yourself out there.

Possibly the best thing you can do is to not to log ino post, comment like, subscribe, or otherwise interact with anything if it can be at all avoided.

For most people, most of the time, that’s of course way overkill, I’m here writing this comment after all, and I’m sure there’s plenty of information about myself on this account for some to build a pretty good profile about me if they really wanted to.

So really you need to consider why you want to be anonymous, and just how much you’re willing to sacrifice your online experience to meet that goal.

Could always fly the Verda Stelo as long as you’re ok with the possibility of someone trying to speak to you in esperanto because of it

By most measures, I’m a pretty stereotypically “manly” guy, and you can say pretty much the same thing about most of my male friends.

I’ve never really felt as though a woman being present in any way impeded anything we were doing. If anything it improved things in a “the more the merrier” kind of way. As long as they’re ok with the cigar smoke, fart jokes, having to pee outside, etc. anyone is welcome to participate in our bullshit.

But I do feel like we can get in the way of women bonding and venting it the ways they need and want to. The old “it’s not about the nail” kind of thing.

And of course, there’s a whole lot of guys who are just dangerous toxic assholes who probably shouldn’t be allowed to be around women in general, but trying to figure out which ones can and can’t be trusted is a tall order and it’s a lot easier to just say “women only.”

So I don’t really see much point in men-only spaces, but I do see it for women-only spaces.

There’s some exceptions, sure, like men who have certain kinds of trauma that involve women may need some safe places to work that out. And it’s not that women can’t also be dangerous, toxic assholes, but in terms of numbers, severity, and actual risk, things are kind of on a different level than with men, so it’s easier to deal with that on a case-by-case basis.

I don’t really cross dress, but I have a pair of heels kicking around for a Halloween costume (Monty Python Lumberjack) and I occasionally trot that costume back out.

I basically went to payless (back when that existed, I guess the modern equivalent in probably mystery Amazon brand shoes) and found a pair that more-or-less fit. Staff was actually pretty helpful, apparently around October a lot of guys wandered into payless looking for heels for a Halloween costume. They pointed me right to where the biggest heels could be found.

I think getting a cheap pair was the right move, because they pretty quickly stretched out to better accommodate my feet. I have fairly wide feet even by male standards, and actually found them to be reasonably comfortable all things considered after they broke in (which didn’t take long, those shoes definitely weren’t designed for the stresses of a 200-whatever pound man moshing in them at a Halloween concert)

The harder part was trying to find a bra that even remotely fit my frame.

You know, it’s now occuring to me that I have absolutely no clue what Roblox actually is. It’s been around forever, I’ve been seeing gift cards for it in stores for I’m pretty sure well over a decade, I hear lots of talk about all of the dangers and how addictive it is for kids, etc.

But I haven’t the foggiest idea what the game is actually like. To the best of my knowledge I don’t think I’ve ever even seen a single screenshot of it, at least not one that was clearly labeled as being from Roblox.

And while I’m a childfree curmudgeon in my 30s, I do have a few friends with kids that I see with some regularity, and I’ve never heard any of them mention Roblox even in passing.

I feel like I’m in a really weird bubble of roblox-ignorance, I’m not exactly mad about it, but it feels weird that for as big as Roblox is supposed to be that I’ve never seen anyone talk about the actual game, just how big of a problem it is.