Since I haven’t seen it mentioned, I will point out that smoking was extremely common and everything vaguely smelled of cigerettes until public smoking bans started coming into effect in different areas.

I grew up at the tail end of this period and have a core memory of going to a restaurant in an area that hadn’t yet fully banned public smoking. The hostess of course asks if you want to be seated in the smoking or non-smoking section, and in the non-smoking section everything still vaguely reeked of cigarettes. Then to go to the bathroom you walk through the smoking section which reeks even more of cigerettes (the sections are just different sides of the restaurant with standard restaurant dividers that are only chest height and intended mostly as sound blocks) and just everything had some amount of cigerette smell to it

This is exactly what I did on a 22 hour train ride. My friends could see where the train was, it didn’t cost me any money because it was just using me existing phone and data plan, and it automatically shut off after a set number of hours so there’s no forgetting to turn it off.

Actually any kind of road trip my wife and I like to do this with our friends because it’s fun following the other person’s progress while they do something cool!

The modified truck drivers (nobody rolls coal locally to me anymore but plenty keep putting in lift kits and even more oversized tires than stock) always start moaning when gas prices go over $4/gallon, in part because they can no longer fully fill their tank in one transaction at many gas station (most stop after $100) and that’s also the point where the dealerships start advertising their vehicles with better fuel economy rather than the oversized gas guzzling trucks and SUVs

$4/gallon is really the magical point where change starts to happen, and most of America is not far from that right now. I’m hopeful that it does get up to $5 or so for a while because that might cause some meaningful change for the better

I think the lens or camera angle is wonky because in addition to the entire image looking flattened, it does looks slightly lower than I’d expect, but I don’t know how much of that is that I see so many trucks with lift kits installed on a daily basis, if thats because the camera is mounted higher than I’d be seated in my car or on my bike, of if it’s just it looks off in a photo but it’s actually bog standard

I feel like guys have begun to level up their game and they now dress nice, shower and take good photos so you cant get ahead just by doing the basics anymore.

From what I’ve seen of my single friends online dating experience that hasn’t caught on yet here. Still like 60% fish pics, 25% truck pics and 5% actually decent photos

I live in a small town so I’m sorry to say, that is exactly how big pickup trucks are now. What isn’t clear from the angle of that photo is the bed is most likely less than 6 feet long, meaning it can fit less in the bed than a minivan with only rearmost row folded down.

The best part is, in rural America there’s folks who look at that stock truck, say it isn’t big enough and get a lift kit and extra large tires installed so it rides 2 feet off the ground and the wheels extend multiple inches past the fenders (sometimes they’re further out than the mirrors even) and the illegality of such mods on public roads goes entirely unenforced. Oh and those are the folks who don’t also make their trucks roll coal

It’s really incredible how I can no longer tell what’s satire and what’s very real opinions and ideas being shared seriously

The Lutheran Church my kids cub scout pack meets in is really built more like a school or community center than a church. It’s got the school hallway vibe in the Sunday School area (just with small classrooms appropriate for up to about 8 students each) and the gym/stage area has strong community center vibes

It’s a lot like the example picture just without the foux stained glass or lounge stage lighting

It’s fun until it’s over. Then, poop. I mean, u can rinse your butthole out before you do stuff, but kinda takes the fun out of it.

Condoms help a ton with this! Like yeah still poop but it’s literally on the spent thing you’re already throwing away so just roll that shiz up and toss it!

Generally news orgs and the like who have a real reason to receive a thumbdrive with important docs from random people will have a method of mitigating the risk. For example, a former client who was a tax preparer had a dedicated laptop which was firewalled off from the network and could only access a document web portal to upload files from the flash drive as their mitigation strategy

So far the only restaurant I’ve been to that does this was a small one in the center of Naples Italy (they also had absolutely fantastic food!) and it worked out because I could translate the webpage to english (it also was kinda inconvenient because most menu items did not have pictures nor descriptions, so when I ordered some chicken it came breaded which I didn’t expect and wasn’t hoping for, but was still fantastic)

Which is funny because the quality you want for print is usually like ~75dpi whereas web viewing you want more like ~300dpi so if anything the print version of the menu should be smaller

I learned this when I went hard into biking, I initially was trying to go for a ride every day but once I got to riding 20-40 minutes at a time the physical stress on my body of not taking rest days was starting to be felt so I started taking rest days. Now I’ll try to do one day of no riding immediately after a 20 mile ride, then one to two days of really light riding (only 4-6 miles) before even considering another long and hard ride. So far my record is 75 miles in a week!

For me the caffeine addiction was a big part of it and I couldn’t kick both the caffeine and sugar at the same time

I never was a soda drinker but I did pick up a nasty caffeine addition via overdrinking coffee when I was a young adult that I spent several years architecting my quit.

I spent about 2 years reducing how much coffee I drank each day until I was down to about 8oz of coffee a day, then I got a nasty stomach bug and went 3 days without drinking coffee because I wasn’t confident I could keep water down, and on the 4th day I decided “I’m already 3 days into quitting, so I’m already halfway through the week that the internet says it takes, so let’s just power through the last 4 days” it took more like 2-3 weeks to fully feel like I’d kicked the habit (and some of that time might have simply been relearning how to wake up in the morning rather than actual withdrawal symptoms)

Now I only drink really good coffees on rare occasions as a treat and struggle to drink more than a couple of ounces, but most importantly, I can get up, take a big gulp of water and get on with my day without having to spend 10 minutes with the coffee maker each morning (which with the amount of chaos kids introduce into just getting out the door in the morning is a ton of time saved and added flexibility!)

When I was reducing my coffee intake with the intent to quit one of the things I’d do is put a nice bottle of ice cold water right next to the coffee mug. Every time I’d go to reach for the coffee, I’d first redirect my hand to the water and drink that, then if I still really needed that coffee then I’d drink it.

This method alone was extremely effective at reducing my coffee intake, and I went from about 24oz of coffee a day down to about 8-10oz per day just with doing this. I also had the added bonus of drinking less sugary creamer and therefore getting my body used to a lot less sugar, so when I quit coffee completely I was already so used to water and drank so little sugar I basically switched to only drinking water

The important part is ice cold water. That sensational shock of the ice cold water makes it an easier transition

So I’ve had two things that kinda go hand in hand that have really made a big improvement in my quality of life:

1. I started working out. During the pandemic lockdowns I picked up a basic fitness routine called Hybrid Calisthenics (they no longer list the basic 5 day routine I was doing but still brilliant explainers on that site for starting a new routine!), and went from struggling to lift 50lbs to being able to perform my first pullups ever. I changed jobs and lost my time for workouts but then I went and took my old bike for a tuneup to start riding it again with the goal of biking my kids to/from school and immediately realized how out of shape I was, so that became my new goal (and I rapidly fell in love with cycling) then I saw an ad for a 4th of July 5k and went “oh that’s like a quarter of how far I ride my bike I should totally do that!” And now I run 5ks too! The old me could never do that and would never have dreamed of doing any of these things but now I have races to look forwards to!

2. I’ve started a long term process of reducing my screen time. I’ve noticed how no matter what I’m doing with screens it just isn’t making me happy and everything off screen gets neglected. So I’ve started focusing more on trying to pick up more hobbies to do with my hands. I’ve started building a model railroad, I’ve been reading a ton of books (I think about a couple dozen books or more in just the last 12 months) and not spending as much time soaking in news and doomer takes on the internet has greatly helped me be a much happier and more realistic person. This one’s an ongoing struggle though. The screens are right there and offer so much momentary entertainment (such is why I’m typing this right now) and doing stuff like drawing is really hard as my hands struggle to draw what I have in my head since I haven’t really drawn in a long time. My ultimate goal is a healthy balance of screen and non-screen time during my free time

Oh and a bonus item that I didn’t even think of initially: going back to college. A few years ago I decided to go back to college at the worst possible time. I had a baby on the way and was working full time, but I made it work. Even when my wife had to quit her job and I was the sole income while going to school full time, I threw all of my irons into the fire, pumped the bellows as hard as they’d go and worked myself to the brink of burnout and got a degree, immediately landed a job paying twice what I was making before with way better benefits and coworkers, a super chill work environment and through an insane series of events I now only work about 30 hours a week fully remotely and make enough money that not only can my wife be a stay at home mom but I could afford to go on my first international trip last month and have 2 more (much smaller in scope!) trips planned for this year still. I seriously never thought I’d be able to realistically afford intercontinental travel before, and now it might well be a thing we do every year or two!

Internal combustion engine cars don’t consume gas at a constant rate. You can think of it like as you press the gas pedal you’re making the fireman on a steam engine shovel more coal into the fire. The harder you press on the pedal the faster the fireman is grabbing shovelfuls of coal and tossing it into the fire, and the harder that engine has to work. The more the car can just coast with just a tiny bit of fuel tossed in to maintain speed, the less fuel goes into the fire.

A relaxed driving style where you slowly accelerate, brake gently, and don’t speed/change lanes a lot means a lot less time pressing hard on the gas pedal and a lot less time burning lots of fuel. Also gentler braking will mean less wear on your brakes and tires so they may last a bit longer (tires and brakes are wear items that need to be replaced regularly, but the frequency is impacted by your driving style)

Such a relaxed driving style is also much safer because it gives you and other drivers more time to react and it’s more predictable to all road users

I realized recently I do envelope budgeting except by flinging money between different bank accounts instead of any normal and sane method of doing so. On the upside, I have enough money earmarked for computer upgrades to upgrade every computer in my house, but none of them really need it and I don’t want to pay AI bubble prices so I’m just letting that cash stack grow for now

Unfortunately in the US it’s “fuck you, you can’t make me.

A surprising amount of that is literally just asshats banking on nobody telling them to cut it out, because there is also very much a culture of just quietly being upset by the bad behavior then later posting loudly on a local public Facebook group instead of just walking up and asking them to turn the music down/pick up the trash/not set off fireworks in the middle of the airshow (a real world example where I spoke out on and the person immediately backed off and stopped setting off the fireworks)

Sounds to me like a legal workaround is to have an invite-only barbecue then have a stack of invites and write them out as people come up. “Its not public, its invite only! Why yes I’d be happy to give you an invitation!”