Unsure of the rest of my family but it’s become a running gaga to get my mom the cheesiest custom-printed throw blanket we can think of. This year’s is a horribly cropped screenshot of a text conversation we had a while ago about buying groceries from Dollar General
You can fill an entire wardrobe with kmart clothes for $100, it’s cheaper and more practical than even op shops most of the time. Maybe just don’t buy your shoes from there.
Bottle sauces and seasonings can last a long time, and can dramatically improve the diversity and quality of your home cooking. Basic chicken, rice, and greens can be turned into a dozen different dishes depending upon the sauces.
Avoid subscription services like the plague.
There’s always a few exceptions, but name brands are rarely worth it.
I wouldn’t be the best person to guide someone through it, unfortunately. But you can find a list of add-ons here, and there are almost certainly some quality guides by smarter folks than I to get you started.
Just in case you were being serious about the legality concern though, this may not be something you want to do.
Honestly I have stuff from clearance racks at Gap that have lasted 15 years and cost $3 -$5. Thrift stores have gotten expensive here but the mall clearance rack can still sometimes be a great deal. I didn’t buy clothes this year at all, don’t usually since I have enough to rotate. But when I do eventually, I look for something I can like for a long time.
Also smartwool socks, I thought I was throwing away money because they were so expensive, I got them for running because they are so good and help avoid blisters. I had to replace them last year, looked in my Amazon history and saw they were 11 years old! So I saved money really. Socks that lasted over ten years!
Of course these are all middle-income tricks. When I was very poor - you can live in your car but can’t drive your house, keep the car if you have to choose. Ask for help from people you know - you would help them, right? Roommates, so many roommates. Splitting rent 8 ways makes it affordable.
If you have secure housing but not much else - our neighbor used to bring us fruit & veg he dumpster dived because he knew we were struggling. Look for free healthy food like that to supplement what you buy - some community gardens you can harvest from, that’s how ours works, it’s not a grow your own space, everyone grows for everyone. Some farm coops you can trade time & labor for food. We couldn’t get food stamps because Florida but if you are willing to jump through the hoops that can really help get you through too.
I will start with naltrexone, which can help people who have difficulty regulating their drinking have a more natural and sustainable relationship with alcohol should they choose to not cut it out of their lives entirely.
I consider this the closest thing to a “cure” for drinking problems but it required discipline and it doesn’t prevent actual impairment, only the buzz and liking/compulsion to keep overdoing it that day/session
I want to more rigorously experiment with it and other compulsive things I have challenges with, it seems the opioidergic system mediates liking and the compulsive attachment that flows from that so I’m curious to what extent its effect is extensible to other problematic habits, chemical or otherwise
It was a journey. There were several small things that kept adding up until I couldn’t handle surrounding myself with hypocrites.
Why do Christians get so sad when people die? They act like they’ll never see that person again when their religion says it’ll only be a few years before they’re reunited. Everyone says they believe that, but no one acts like it.
When was the last time the church has been on the forefront of social change, and what was it for? Wasn’t slavery - that’s how Southern Baptists split from Baptists. Wasn’t women getting the right to vote or get divorced… Wasn’t when people were asking for workers rights… Same-sex marriage… You name it. The people claiming to have a direct line to the most potent love in the universe… Kind of suck at spreading the love around.
Mega-churches.
All the pedo scandals and coverups. It’s a feature, not a bug.
Truly horrifying living conditions around the world. There is an amoeba found all over the globe who can eat its way into your eyeball, and then into your brain. Children experience this, and in some places, 30-40% of a population went blind because of it. There is no NEED for this to exist for an all-powerful god, but here they are. If god made nature, they made these amoeba, and I don’t want to associate with someone who created every deadly pathogen to ever exist.
If there is a god, they’re a fucked-up sociopath, not the embodiment of love that I keep being told they are.
Mine was a very similar path to yours. Way too many little observations that alone could have been shrugged off as a rounding error but taken together it was clear that shit wasn’t adding up.
Then I started listening to biblical scholars and now there’s nothing that could convince me otherwise. It’s a collection of human literature. The good and the bad that had come from it is only a reflection of our humanity.
Thrift stores out of season. Look for your winter jacket in June, you’ll get the nicer brands, and most thrift stores will do some kind of rotating discount on certain colored tags. Most ‘dry clean only’ items can indeed be machine washed on gentle.
Preserved and frozen meats and fish can be made into fantastic recipes. We do salsa chicken straight from frozen in the instant pot, and I make a killer pasta with tinned sardines and breadcrumbs. The benefit of these is that you can buy them on sale and don’t have to worry about cooking them quickly to avoid spoiling.
Drugstore makeup can be just as good as expensive stuff. Aldi moisturizers are incredible and $4 a pot. I splash out on super expensive shampoo and conditioner, so I don’t have reccs there, but my husband swears by Aldi’s black and white bottle stuff.
And this tip is a little wild, but learning to forage can be immense. There is so much free edible food around you, from flowers and leaves that make delicious tea (passiflora flowers), weeds that can substitute salad greens (lambs quarters, kudzu, and wood sorrel), to absolutely delicious fruit that you couldn’t even buy if you wanted to (pawpaws!). Use the golden rules of having three different ways to identify it (three sources, don’t just use photo ID apps, learn the description, not just the visuals) and also know the sickly lookalikes, and never forage for carrots or parsley.
You can straight up live off oyster mushrooms for like 2-3 months in a cold season. And the mighty little “potato bean” Apios americana, grows in almost every slightly moist disturbed area and is much more nutritious than potatoes. (Louisiana)
As a user of this whose primary problem is frequent waking at night rather than falling asleep, I don't find it that helpful. It does help falling asleep, but it doesn't help one stay asleep.
I've spoken with my sleep doctor about this and apparently basically the only thing that's good for helping somebody stay asleep as opposed to fall asleep is a common date rape drug so it's not commonly prescribed.
It really is too bad people misuse it like that. I’ve heard the sleep is insanely deep and refreshing and its a damn shame you’re automatically sketch if you want that for your own benefit
I wish I could get diagnosed with narcolepsy so I could have it for that purpose, but it also sounds like an enormous bureaucratic headache and I also wouldn’t want someone to be able to take advantage of that knowledge/the rarity with which its prescribed to get you sucked into some bullshit sitch.
Lostprophets were one of my favourite band during my formative years, and I still love the music, but any time I hear it now I can’t get past the fact that the singer was a literal baby rapist.
Im a firm believer you can like the art and not the artist but if i had to pick it would be the wizard of oz. Honestly what the director did to the actors/actresses on wizard of oz really zaps the magic out of the movie for me.
I don’t need to know which is which, they’re more or less sorted by recency. So I go through the most recent tabs and get the info I need or do the task associated, then close them, until I get back to the previous task or subject.
Sometimes I get interrupted with a new thing to look up or do, and more tabs get made and the cycle begins anew, regardless of how many already exist.
Some projects last days or weeks, and tabs related to them end up being longer-lived. If I get on one of those tabs and don’t want to work on the project right then, I’ll continue going back (leftwards) til I find something I can do or read in the time I have available. So I definitely have tabs that have been open for months but I do need to get to eventually.
Also, sometimes when I need to look at something I know I have (or had) open in a tab, I’ll just search for it (literally, i.e. Google) again in a new tab and handle it there. Then if I do come across the old tab, it gets closed quickly.
I’m “done” when I’m back at my inbox or calendar (first or 2nd tabs, pinned). This rarely happens and when it does I’m sure there is a something in my email or a new ticket in JIRA for me to start on…
So overall it’s not about knowing what’s in each tab, but having a system to navigate them that works for you.
I’m not too happy about them either. To some extent I think I avoid organizing them because leaving them as tabs makes them more “pressing” for me to some day get to reading. I’m like a failed data hoarder/archivist.
The way people use tabs is bizarre to me. My ex would have so many open that it was really difficult to navigate between them. Seems like a better idea to use features like bookmarks or reading list.
I do programming and I need access to project management sites, communication sites, documetations (language and library) and tools sites opened.
When I am researching the topics I am not very familiar I usually read 4 or 5 sources. So in the middle of developing a feature I have at least tens of tabs.
When it combined with home lab servers, entainments, side readings and related readings I usually tends to end up with hundreds.
I used to have 20-30 open at a time when I was doing the same things, but I can't imagine building up to hundreds. Maybe I'd leave them open for the next day, but generally I try to stay more organized than that. When you have hundreds of tabs open you can't even see the titles so I find it a lot more difficult to navigate between them.
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