I grew up and found better uses of my time as well as my taste in entrertainment changing. Anime tends to be geared towards teenagers and young adults especially the shounen and school life stuff. When I was 14 I thought dudes with big swords and shooting fantasy magic out your asshole in big impressive sakuga battles was cool and interesting and didn’t give a shit if the characters were one dimensional pieces of cardboard. Now it’s still is cool but less so, and I notice the poorly thought out YA novel tier narrative much more. Turns out being a good manga artist and being a good narrative author are two different skill sets.

Headon blood rites, you would think the big titty orc girl protagonist FPS would be enough to overcome any gameplay issues but no as it turns out I just really HATE hexen inspired games that make you run around in circles constantly searching for hard to find keys and shit to progress the map. I could just barely tolerate that stuff in the OG DOOM games but the hexen likes take the sisyphisus’s maze bullshit and make a whole genre out of it. No thanks, I prefer games that respect my time with proper signposting and much fewer bullshit key hunts.

Overload, some of the old FPS fans talk about a game called ‘Decent’ and how it was actually this underrated gem of a series that offered a novel 6 degrees of movement. So the devs who made that game came back a decade later and put the 6 degrees of freedom in a modern fps game. I gave it about 5 minutes before I was motion sick and ready to go back to my safe and familiar 4 degrees of movement.

Sometimes you gotta pay to figure out what you dont like.

So here’s some things to think about that may help you out.

The biggest thing you can do to help yourself financially is to cut down on expenses and work your way out of any debts you have.

Take a look at your bank account activity and just write down how much percentage of your monthly income is going where. If you have monthly entertainment subscriptions like Netflix or patreons multiply that sub cost by twelve and ask yourself if its worth paying $ each year. Cut down on your spending as much as possible dont buy anything unless you really need it.

What I’m going to say next is going to be controversial especially among the lemmy crowd, but its a way to financial freedom you might not have considered.

Your biggest expense is almost certainly rent to your appartment. Take a look at how much money your paying to your landlord each month, and ask yourself how your financial life would look if you instead poketed that money and paid yourself the “rent”. If you were your own landlord.

The secret is, your car can be a home that you own. Yes you heard me right, I’m suggesting that you move out of your apartment into your car while still working and pay yourself all that rent money, use it towards working off any debts you may have and pay off the car loan. After all your debts are paid and you own your car you build up a emergency fund nest egg of 3-6k and set it aside. After that you are financially free compared to most people living paycheck to paycheck in their appartments and the world is your oyster. You can upgrade your car to something a little more spacious and or travel your country sight seeing, working seasonal jobs , doing a little soul searching.

The sad reality is that many people every day especially the elderly living on meager SS are forced to choose between paying rent or not starving to death that month. Inevitably they choose the latter and are forcibly lead down that path of living in their car with no choice in the matter and little time to physically or psychologically prepare after the eviction.

Yet they manage to find the mental strength to endure, adapt, and thrive. I invite you to check out the YouTube channel cheaprvliving hosted by Bob wells. He does interviews with vandwellers who are more often than not older people fallen on hard times and shares their stories and builds. As well as practical guides to everything you want to know like how to take baths, use the bathroom, keep yourself warm, generate power for basic appliances and AC. Some of his older videos that share his personal story are very inspirational I like his quote videos too.

Of course this option has its own cost. One for sure is comfort, especially starting out. Its such a radical change in lifestyle that requires adaptation and an open mind.

If you have a family or even a partner that makes it a lot tougher than if its just you.

How much would you sacrifice for financial freedom, to not live paycheck to paycheck, to have money no longer be such a huge master of your life? do you think convinence and luxury are a price you could pay for that kind of freedom?

My final suggestion is this: an attitude change. Reading your post I get a serious “cant, won’t, dont know how” self pitying vibe. Its never too late to learn something new, or to go back to school, or develop a trade skill. The barrier to those things is usually a lack of motivation and purpose in life. If you dont know what your living for or why your doing it, that’s the core problem. All that other stuff is symptoms. And there is no silver bullet cure all suggestion to finding your own meaning in life that’s something you have to reflect on and think about. Anyways hope this gave you some food for thought.

USBC-PD and the rise of energy efficient dc appliances. the ability to to toss out ac power bricks and power most of my DC appliances with an electrical grid I wired together with solar panels and batteries. The sun powers most of my convinence and luxuries without burning fossil fuels.

24" TV, desktop vaporizer, video game console, laptop, and led lamp are all run from my offgrid dc electrical system and can use under 50 watts when all are on at once. I can process a load of laundry with a travel sized washer and spin dryer combo. I can brew a cup of coffee, I can get running water with a usb pump/shower head, I can run a small fridge, run a fan, I have a usb electric blanket/ heated jacket poncho that will sip on 10 watts of power and keep me warm on cold nights. If thats not enough I can get a jacket or blanket that runs on dewalt power tool batteries. Even charge a small electric bike.

I can do all of this with a cheap power station and 200w of solar. Just about the only modern convinences that are still hard to do on a 200w dc system is air conditioning(sadly seeming to be more a survival requirement in the coming years during summer) and cooking appliances. In those cases a tank of propane and dual fuel generator are great backup options especially if you can’t afford more solar and batteries to run a 1000+ watt appliance. Fortunately most 5000btu window units only consume 400-600 watts after startup surge or with soft starter so you dont need that much solar and batteries if you have a small space to be conditioned.

All of these things either weren’t possible or gave our ancestors a laborious manual workload 100 years ago. Most of these things required an industrial sized machine and or massive amounts of wattage 50 years ago. Now this is all possible with cheap affordable technological magic that sips power. Solar panels are getting cheaper and more efficent, and so is most consumer technology that power our lives. Its a shame that our generation and future generations will have to pay for the sins of our fossil fuel burning fathers but I am confident that more and more people will be moving towards more sustainable options especially as their homes/enviroments burn down from the ever increasing dry droughts and they are forced into being nomadic vandwellers.

Yes it is absolutely possible to get similar results with searxng to start page, in fact some instances allow you to aggregate startpage results directly.

I found https://priv.au/ as an example of an instance that can directly aggregate startpage.

So the trick to the instance weirdness going on is that each instance has its own set of default engines set to aggregate from. For example one searxng instance may want to only aggregate google and bing, while another may want to aggregate only independent search engines that don’t use google or bing such as YaCy and Qwant. I’ve visited some instances that give like 2 results because they only aggregate Wikipedia by default lol.

Each result searxng/searxng gives you will show which engine it aggregated that result from, its in the bottom right corner of each result in small text try to look for them to better understand the sources the instance is pulling from.

Here’s what you can do about that: The secret to overcoming this and dialing in the search results you want is to realize you can actually configure each searxng instance to aggregate the engines you want while disabling the default ones you don’t. All searxng/searxng instances have a preferences menu usually a gear icon in the top right corner. Or you can go to searxng-example.com/preferences . Once in preferences go to the ‘engines’ section from there you can tick the engines you want to use.

Some instances save your settings as cookies, some instances save your settings as a sub URL for that instance. The priv.au instance I mentioned saves your settings as cookies.

The best way to use searx is to play with different instances, find one that works pretty well by default then fine tune it. Hope this helps.

Not at all, I am what I am and say what I think. I’m not afraid of my ideas being sifted and correlated with my IRL person. There’s nothing about me being revealed on Lemmy that my government hasn’t already known about for decades. I try not to doxx myself but that’s about it.

Just get the biggest computer monitor you can afford

The real question is if he’s smoking a cig or a joint

Am I the only one kind of relieved when I loose digital files in a drive failure? Its kind of like a chance to start fresh. Yes I liked having pictures of my dead pets and relatives from 10 years ago but I wasn’t going to ever look at them again. I have my memories and that’s enough. Yes I liked having a copy of all the shows I ever enjoyed but I lost interest in half of them over the years and was likely never going to rewatch them locally or not.

There’s a time and a place for all things, digital files are no exception. When the time has passed long ago and the place no longer exist as it once did, its time to let go

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I assume the center where all lines intersect is the earth, the dot-dash patterns are each pulsars particular signature patterns, and the length of the lines is the relative distance from earth perhaps in Astronomical Units

I do my best to minimize micro plastics but also try not to worry about things I can’t control. That cat is already out of the bag, micro plastics are inescapable. The silver lining this study show that they aren’t that dangerous and its relatively easy for the body to get rid of them over the course of a month. While obviously its hard to say about long term toxicity it seems that life is at least generally resilient to it.

If I may add one personal anecdote. My parents were born in the 60s and 70s. They chain smoked cigarettes for many decades before their health finally caught up with them. Yet somehow they resisted the numerous toxins and carcinogens and tar they exposed themselves too every moment of the day. Maybe they are just really lucky but also maybe living things that got this far in the evolutionary tree already have expetience in biologically adapting to survive. Our cells aren’t such easy pushovers to die over any and every little changes in the environment or new chemical players introducing themselves in the game of life.

I think vr is cool but it would definitely be a novelty thing that would be played with for a while then put away and rarely touched again.

I wonder how many occulus rifts are collecting dust right now

Just a friendly reminder that mineclone2 exist.

Tire dust? Tires are generaly made from a kind of rubber, not plastic. A great majority of micro plastics that end up in enviroment and in your body are shed from plastic fabrics. If you’re really worried about limiting plastic consumption check your clothing tags for polyester and nylon. Return to cotton, hemp, and linen.

I loved adult swim flash games in the 2000s would have definitely cared about this a lot more if flash wasn’t already dead and they weren’t preserved on internet archive and flashpoint

We as in you and me? Try our best to reduce waste, things that contribute to carbon emission, and plant some crops that put nutrients back in the soil. Donate some money to charities and institutions that further environments science research.

We as a country and international effort? Long term policy changes like carbon taxes. The 1%s and politically well connected finally being personally inconvinenced by climate change. About when the sea water rises to destroy their private villas and beach getaways is when some real progress will start to get made. 3rd world countries will hopefully transition from burning fossil fuel to cleaner energy

Modern problems require macgyver solutions

Theres a lot of smart financially minded people in these comments. any advice for how someone can get started with the market, and investments in general?

This was a very informative read I understand things better now. Thanks!