I’ve wanted to visit Italy for about 20 years now. Maybe some day. There’s always some other need for the money and time.

When I go outside in a place that has plants I try to ID at least one that I don’t know. When I get a positive ID on it, I’ll look it up and sometimes it will have edible or medicinal properties.

Oh man I got to enjoy a chicken of the woods mushroom for the first time last year and it was amazing. We enjoyed sumac tea all summer and have a bounty of hickory nuts this fall. I made wild riverbank grape jelly from grapes harvested from my mom’s backyard. Definitely need to be careful with ID’ing and never picking something you’re not 100% sure of but it’s liberating and satisfying.

Pilling a cat is a skill but one worth learning. I had two elderly cats who each needed pills and both hated it in their foods. I hold the kitty in my lap, pull back their head and poke a finger between their front teeth and release the pill down their throat. Then stroke the throat gently and release, and give them a high value treat right away. First time is rough but it gets better and becomes routine for everybody. If the cost ends up being a big difference it’s something to consider

Try Debian based Linux Mint with the KDE plasma desktop environment. Linux has its issues but they’re honest issues. Linux has hiccups because a bunch of volunteers are trying to build an airplane while flying it, while Windows has a bunch of C suite goons purposely creating a hostile user environment to monetize you for every red cent.

I think when people talk about “falling behind” they’re actually talking about missing out on the initial gold rush of novel uses, quick cash grabs, and straight up scams that a lot of people are making short term money on.

If Narnia is real, the most important thing for all people is owning a wardrobe and keeping the hinges on it.

We live pretty frugally in comparison to our peers. Less than $30 a month in subscriptions, our utility bills are low, we eat out maybe once a month and every other meal is made at home. We thrift and get just about everything we can second hand from yard sales or friends. It used to be that we were putting aside money, now there’s less extra. We’re getting ready for worse, and planting fruit trees, learning gardening and canning, and reaching out to our neighbors.

Been daydreaming about a city builder sim that realistically characterizes cars. No “magic parking”, no perfect drivers, with pollution mapping, traffic deaths, an average commute time per citizen as a statistic, that kind of thing.

I imagine it starting out exactly like Cities: Skylines, where you start building out your town with commercial and industrial and residential zones. As you lay out roads and utilities, the citizens keep demanding more parking and bigger roads. If you build them, your town becomes mostly parking lots and huge, dangerous roads. People complain about living near pollution, loud car noises, traffic deaths and commute times. Your town would have negative income from all of the building and maintenance costs and constantly be needing to be bailed out due to how expensive it all is.

The trick, then, would be not to listen to the complaints from car drivers. The only way to build your town where the budget is balanced properly is to increase density, utilize mixed use areas, and to build as few large roads and utility corridors as possible. The game wouldn’t tell you this outright, it would simply give you realistic price tags and maintenance costs compared to people moved and let the player problem solve and optimize.

There would be a robust palette of micromobility options, public transit, greenways and parks and pedestrian areas. Car access would be optional for building placement and based more on emergency vehicles or services. You could design your own streets with your desired configuration of bike paths, street cars, pedestrian walkways and green spaces and save templates to use elsewhere.

There would be lots of beautiful middle density building models, parks, and plazas, and a mode where you could rehabilitate an already developed car centric city.

If someone made this game I would be so happy and play it all the time, making a perfect transit utopia

Friendly reminder that a common propaganda tactic is to discourage your opposition from voting

Cilantro, with the soapy gene. It tastes like soap, but eh, I kind of like it.

I keep coming back to it and catching more references and recurring characters. It’s very rewatchable!

I think as far as shows that I love and come back to, and that I keep thinking of and want to own on physical media:

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
She-Ra: Princesses of Power
The Good Place
The Addams Family (the black and white one)
Parks & Recreation
Star Trek TNG, Lower Decks, and Deep Space 9

Strawberries are fantastic. I planted some last year and was really bummed that I didn’t get to eat a single one. Then this summer, we had wild strawberries ALL over thanks to the greedy critters pooping seeds all over. This year I finally got a handful of delicious, perfectly ripe berries and the critters ate the wild ones. Perennial, self-propagating, and delicious. What else could you want?

The way our urban design influences society and community, and how the loss of third spaces and the dominance of cars in Western society has led to the loneliness epidemic and influence bubbles. I would talk about the movement to reclaim main street and encourage “traditional development”, and how that leads to the micro-encounters that help people feel like they belong somewhere. How parks, plazas and pedestrian areas create third places where people can casually encounter diverse individuals and create friends and community connections. Also with a hearty side about public transportation and how efficient it is, and what a better neighbor a tram rail is than a road of similar passenger load. This speech is pretty much 30 seconds away from coming out of me during any conversation anyway and it’s a conscious effort to stop myself. Would be nice to let it out.

The books in that series all seemed to follow the same pattern of something weird, interesting and mysterious happening, having no idea what was going on, spending the whole book getting a slightly better picture of it only for something else totally incomprehensible to happen and the cycle started again. I wanted to like it but I got sick of the antics. Really interesting world though

Who says a collection has to be material or unused?

Pretty clothes, hats, jewelry, crystals and cool rocks, musical instruments, board games, video games, antique wooden puzzles, books, ice cream recipes, crafting supplies and good fabrics, vintage kitchen equipment and appliances, solid wood furniture, projects, skills, hobbies… everything is interesting and my house is a glorious mess full of fascinating things.

Depends on where you are. Where I am, we have little farm shops and bakeries that sell frozen pies that are the real deal. Unfortunately that’s very dependent on location but might be worth a look.