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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Love ballroom dancing, and especially east coast swing is my jam. Unfortunately no regular social dances in my area but I go when there’s one available. It’s really fun and playful, great way to meet new people and good exercise. Equipment cost is basically a pair of shoes. I joke about dressing up in a dress and heels for my workouts.


  • I had a kid three years ago, we decided to get a higher premium health plan that specifically had excellent natal coverage. It’s one of the most expensive plans available to us but we didn’t pay anything for 9 months worth of prenatal visits plus 3 days in the hospital. The coverage statement said that delivery from the hospital was something like $28,000 but the first bill we actually saw that we had to pay was for a hearing test that was only partially covered.





  • Posted most of this in another thread but I’m glad to help share my tricks. I have managed to nearly eliminate Amazon entirely from our lives for the past two years. I usually find things by searching what I want to buy on DuckDuckGo and then adding “-amazon”, “-etsy”, “-walmart”, “-temu” and “-pinterest” as search modifiers.

    A lot of little shops are perfectly legit, but watch out for:

    Things being ridiculous bargains. Small shops will almost always be more expensive due to higher overheads and less bulk

    Too much variety in product (unless they’re a marketplace with 3rd party vendors). A legit shop will have inventory that makes sense together in its theme. If they sell everything from bubblebath to uranium they’re either probably not actually selling it or drop shipping it.

    Pictures that look like they come from lots of different sources, or no consistency in images. If they don’t have their own pictures of products or standards of presentation that’s suspicious

    Some general recs:

    For anything electronic or computer related: B&H Photo or Microcenter

    For music stuff: Sweetwater, but there’s a lot of great small music stores, or you can use a marketplace like Reverb

    For clothes: if you have any clothes you already enjoy, go directly to their brand website. If you don’t, go to local secondhand shops and touch, handle and try on some clothes to see them in person. I’ve discovered some brands I like by finding something in a thrift store that was well made but not my size or preferred color.

    For house repair and DIY stuff: we order from a local building supply store, but there’s also hardwareandtools.com, 1stoplighting, Waysource, Lightbulbs.com, Timothy’s Toolbox etc.

    For food items, local grocery stores often offer online shopping and delivery. If it’s a specialty item or imported the import companies sometimes have their own websites. There’s also Hive or GroveCo for some granola type B Corp goodness

    For tea, coffee and spices, Adagio and its sister websites

    For super fast, need it now shipping, Target has a lot of the same things Amazon does and even does same day delivery for an extra fee for certain items.

    For something hard to find you can’t find another site for, try Ebay.

    I do business with all sorts of independent retailers and have only had good experiences with them. These are sites that I’ve personally bought from but there are a lot of smaller sites just trying to make a place for themselves on the internet





  • Really enjoyed the whole series, and when I heard about the adaptation I was psyched. It’s a very cinematic series that is begging for adaptation. While there’s definitely a lot of deadpan humor in the books, the trailer seems a lot more “whacky” than it should be. Hopefully they’re just playing it up for the trailer. I was also hoping for a more androgynous/NB murderbot but I could be won over. Either way, I’ll definitely be watching


  • I have never been, nor seem to be able to get motion sickness. No seasickness either. I can read books on all sorts of moving vehicles, and I love roller coasters. Whip me around upside down in pitch dark at 60mph and I’ll just call it a good time. My husband says I am squandering my powers because I can play as much of whatever motion intense VR game as I want, but I just end up playing Beat Saber most of the time.



  • Cute idea, but disappointed that it’s just a reskinned car racing game. I read the title and I imagine a “cat scale” racer, running around indoors having to jump sofa arms and climb cat towers or doing an obstacle course in someone’s yard, going under bushes and through kids forts etc. Just realizing now a cat parkour game in the style of Mirror’s Edge would be good silly fun.


  • I have an indoor only cat. I trim his front nails and have trimmed them his whole life. He sits completely passively and doesn’t complain when I clip them. I trim them well away from the quick and only do so when they’ve gotten long enough that he gets caught on things or that I feel them or get scratched when he jumps in or out of my lap. He has no problems with me touching his paws and is very chill.

    I had an indoor only cat who had been declawed by his previous owner. He was extremely on edge about his paws being touched, and growled, hissed and even bit if he thought you were going to try. He went straight to attempting to bite if you tried to touch him in a way he didn’t want to be touched. He was extremely distrustful of all humans and it took me a long time to win him over.

    IMO the difference is obvious and there’s no comparison. Trimming a cat’s nails, if done correctly, causes a cat no real discomfort or lasting trauma. Declawing a cat violates a cat’s trust and causes lifetime behavioral issues and real harm. They are nothing alike.



  • I always enjoy the April Fools efforts from Guild Wars. They’ve done all sorts of things from making all players tiny, giving them bobbleheads, making them go into “airplane mode” (a reference to a t-pose animation glitch but with added “homemade” sound effects) to entire quest lines and even an entirely new game mode inspired by 8 bit platformers that spawned its own festival because it was awesome. This year you can relive some highlights from recent years, but the new addition is being able to open your own Cat Cafe in your homestead.