I used to think this sucked.

My life has been chock full of switchbacks. But I think that’s ok now.

Running straight to the top is nearly impossible for anyone, and certainly will burn through all your energy super quick if you happen to manage it. Yes there’s a gondola for wealthy people, but there’s no personal gratification from taking the easy way, and everyone else thinks they suck for literally hanging over us and not helping any of us climb faster, instead throwing rocks at us to slow us down.

But the thing about taking the hike, even with all the switchbacks, is that… there’s a lot of really cool stuff on that hike, no matter which path you start from or which mountain you are climbing. Those amazing things are mostly nestled where your path whips you back around. You won’t experience any of those things if you go straight to the top. And where’s the satisfaction in that?

Besides that, it turns out the top isn’t always the best place to be anyway. You get sunburn up there, there’s not a lot of room, and the air is thin. Once you make it up there you spend all your time trying not to fall down or get hurt, and maybe even building a rickety tower to go even higher, making the problem even worse.

I’ve made it what appears to me to be about halfway up, a nice stable spot with big open inviting areas and a view of the rocky expanse I’ve already crossed, and I really like it here. It may only be 1/8 the way up in reality, but I think I’m done with my hike for a while. It’s not the goal I’m “supposed” to be aiming for but this place makes me happier than continuing to work toward someone else’s goal. Toward the top of a mountain I’ll never crest because I started too far away.

And this is why all my furniture has moisture-proof barrier layers. (Actually cat vomit, but same difference)

They are cheap and look fairly nice these days (or are fully hidden as the case with mattress covers), and they save so so much money on replacing or cleaning large soft objects.

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I got moved to a new school every year from 5-12th grade. I never had friends to even invite to my birthday. I tried a few times when I was younger and it was wildly depressing. I learned fast to keep to myself, talk to nobody, and expect nothing from “big days”.

We’d do small family birthday stuff but even that was awful. My mother liked to get the shitty cheap knock-off version of whatever you asked for even if the original thing was already cheap… or in my case she’d buy me clothes (from goodwill) that were absolutely hideous, the sort of thing my sister would wear to be the center of attention but which I wouldn’t have touched… so I really never even had any gifts to look forward to…

In my early 20s I figured I’d try again. Birthday 21 rolls around, the one everyone wants to celebrate with you… and… two friends and two family members came out of the dozens of people I invited. Nope, never doing that again.

Now at best I’ll go sit somewhere that I drink for free with one other person at most. Just give me the free alcohol, don’t try to get me to be all chummy with the other birthday people. I’ll just leave.

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We were supposed to get another ~100 years out of that meme. Thanks, Trump.

That’s neat! I love the building of new skills! They are great for your brain. Like brushing your teeth with your non-dominant hand to build new neural connections.

It’s never too late to start reshaping your brain so I’m pumped you are doing that, it sounds fun!

Do you plan to use that skill for anything, or just for funsies?

Neat!

So what do you eventually hope to do with this? Is it meant to be a resource for yourself, for others?

Or I guess you say toy demo and idk what that is but it might already answer my question.

In honest fairness I love those silly little digging games :) good choice!

Neat I’ll take a look at those links, thanks :)

I wonder if this is a “Star Trek is a conservative show” sort of thing. Like he’s genuinely not smart enough to actually understand what is right in front of him.

I mean it probably isn’t, but it also wouldn’t surprise me to find out that the whole deeper meaning of the entire thing was entirely lost on such a shallow excuse for a human.

Honestly that’s basically all I ever wanted when I’d ask my ex to come cook with me…

I then started saying “can you just come hang out with me at least? You don’t have to do anything, just hang out. I don’t even like cooking and doing it by myself while you watch TV isn’t really fun to me…”

Ex for a reason, but that’s all I ever wanted as well. Cooking used to be a social activity. It still should be.

So this is basically all a learning exercise? You say test game so I’m sort of assuming that’s what you mean?

What’s been the hardest part of this project so far?

I watched someone code a guitar hero clone using a guitar as input, and that’s genuinely the extent of my knowledge of gave development :p so I’m genuinely thrilled to learn more if you want to share it :)

Oh nice you are semi-local! Small world (I’m in the Green Bay Area). I figured with the crap growing season (and that most of my tiny town yard is a chicken run) indoor hydro would be a better bet. It also grows up to 30% faster and bigger than similar conditions in dirt, which I’m all for.

I feel like Milwaukee is where I saw those huge pink grow operations, but it might have been Madison. From the highway they are just big pink glowing building-shaped blobs that confuse the hell out of people. I enjoy knowing those are around, producing fresh food all year.

Interesting that you say it lasts longer; I’ve noticed in the last handful of years that most fresh foods spoil super quickly… it’s been a real disappointment… I’m not sure if it’s from being shipped or if they treat it with something or what, but yeah I def. Don’t blame you on that, especially for something that only lasts a week tops anyway.

Probably. Her standards weren’t that high; I’ve met my dad.

Which is reasonable from what my mom told me. She agreed those were the best.

That sounds neat and rewarding!

Is this the sort of thing that the further you get the easier it will be to add these new features at an increased pace, or is that more just an arbitrary goal you feel you should be able to meet for whatever reason?

Sure! Sorry for the copious text incoming; I love talking about this stuff, so thanks for asking! <3

My goal is to produce enough fresh food to mostly sustain myself (I’ll need to buy rice and flour and stuff but fresh produce will be covered anyway, and that’s what’s expensive), and enough surplus to preserve (tomato sauces, canned and dried foods, and the like) and/or sell cheap to friends and family, most of whom aren’t well off so I’m trying to be a cheap support for everyone who needs it. I’m disabled so holding down a regular job is a bit of a challenge that I’ve never been successful with, and with how everything in the world is going, it’s the most stable thing I could come up with for all of us to benefit. If I end up with enough surplus, I’ll probably start selling to strangers for a higher markup via farmers markets, but the goal isn’t money, it’s stability. As long as I can bring in a few hundred a month, I am stable enough, and I have a half dozen chickens and a dozen quail, so that helps the financial side of things until everything else takes off.

It’s going to be taking over my entire basement, which is probably about 600sqft, maybe less cuz there’s a crawl space in the front half… idk. My house is 140 years old (bought cheap on foreclosure over a decade back and now can’t move because everything is -so expensive-), and the foundation leaks in a way I can’t fix without dropping tens of thousands (built into limestone), which isn’t remotely in my budget. So rather than fight the water infiltration, I’ve decided to embrace it. Tile the floor with a slope to the sum pump drain so that if I spill water from the hydro, no big deal. The ceiling is low and there’s pipes and ducts running under it so the space isn’t particularly useful anyway other than storage.

The hydro itself is mostly deep water culture (DWC); 5 gallon buckets with single larger plants and an air pump to agitate the nutrient water. Mostly tomatoes and peppers in the DWC at the moment. I’ll be adding some 55gallon aquariums I got free for aquaponics (beans and leaf greens on top, probably arrowhead tubers inside) and to raise guppies (to feed turtle, and dry for cats and chickens to snack on). I use LED lights for the whole thing both to reduce heat and to save electric, though most of them aren’t set up yet since the room is being renovated. It’s a mix of specialty lights made for growing and just standard LED bulbs I got from the hardware store for $2.50/ea (both work fine, don’t need fancy; I’ve done hydro for years with standard LED bulbs). I only bought the specialty lights for the small profile - they are 4-foot strip lights for the short plant shelves and seedling station, as well as some compact fixtures I am presently using in the grow tent because there’s not enough headroom for full bulbs in a ballast.

I’m also playing around with soil-less media (coco coir and puffed clay balls in this case), mostly herbs so far, but also some strawberries and lentils and stuff, just to see what they do. My ultra-compact root crop bucket test is also being done with coir, and so far the radishes I’m growing look great! (If that plan works well enough I’ll be posting instructions probs on slrpnk, but it’s still in testing for another month or so). After radishes I’m going to test various other single-root crops (turnips, beets, carrots, etc). I already know onions work because that’s where I got the idea; the test is sort of to see if leaves cause shading problems, and what the ideal density/configuration is if yes.

So far I have 5 varieties of tomatoes that should start flowering soon, 4 kinds of beans some of which are already producing, a pea plant, (haven’t fully committed to those cuz I have nowhere to put them yet, but I want pea pods, so I have one plant in my kitchen window), red and green lentils, mung beans whatever those are, 3 kinds of sweet peppers, 3 kinds of mild spicy peppers (friend grows reapers and ghost and all the hot stuff so I’m not going to), two types of mushrooms growing in shredded cardboard (shiitake was just a curiosity test but it seems to be growing fine alongside the blue oysters, so win!), two kinds of strawberry (one is an ever-bearing, neither are growing well), some chocolate mint, the radish bucket, and potatoes in a tote. I have about $200 worth of various seeds that I’ll be adding as other things get established, and as I figure out the best way to grow them. It seems to work better for me to start just a few new plants at a time, wait for them to be enveloped into my routine and put into their forever setup, and then move on to new ones after a week or two.

I would love to try growing some melons or squash, but those have to be hand pollinated and the last time I tried they did not do well, so we’ll see.

I also have a worm compost that I’ve set up recently that I plan to use for compost tea to fertilize all the coir-grown plants (and maybe replace the powder nutrients if possible down the line). I’m trying to be as no-waste-no-purchase as possible (the chickens are very helpful with that!!).

Sounds like the conditions that allow for this are pretty specific, and while you could harvest this, it would likely decimate the population.

Could it be artificially recreated? Probably, but at that point it’s looped back around to being non-viable.

I hate bright screens. On my phone I used the accessibility options to set up a trigger to reduce white point, turned it down decently far, and it’s easily the best QoL adaptation I’ve ever made re: screens.

Only downside is it’s very difficult to tell what is in darker pictures. But because it’s on a trigger I can toggle it on and off very very easily.

I genuinely wish I could do the same thing with my tv with just a simple trigger… I know I can alter the brightness and contrast and stuff but I’d have to mess with so many options, spread across so many sub-menus (fuck you, googletv OS, you suck super hard. Whyyyyyyyyyyy are there multiple settings menus???), to get it anywhere near what I want that it’s not really worth doing (I just crash it down to zero brightness, it’s adequate, I guess, but it’s no white point reduction…)

If you don’t get the magnet variety, there’s almost zero risk of failure. Even the magnet variety is only going to stop being magnetic (if it falls off or the magnetism wears out).

I have a mechanical egg timer I’ve had for probably 35 years (mom got it when I was a kid and I inherited it). Super basic. Only way I expect it to fail is if I drop it, because the plastic is almost certainly brittle by now.

They are freakin wonderful little things.