D61 [any]

It wouldn’t surprise me one bit, if it turned out that the most common gender ID is actually non-binary.

Like, my spouse and I pretty much consider ourselves “cis” but … but not for any particular reason other than, “well, its good enough to get the point across.” We don’t really “feel” any particularly strong emotions about it.

:Bill-Oreilly-shining:

“Highlander” rules.

There can be ONLY one!

To piggy back on your “bizarre fact”, the same type of iron can be found added to cereal.

I remember several times in school we’d do a science demonstration where we’d smash up Cheerio (or a knock off) brand ceral, mix the powder with water and slowly drag a magnet through the slurry. Every time the magnet would be pulled out of the mix, there’d be more and more tiny iron bits.

I fell away from watching Star Trek many MANY years ago, and am overwhelmed by all the Star Treks to the point that after watching the series with Scott Baccula I checked out.

The Orville, having way less … history… was much easier for me to get in to. Also, I was expecting it to be hot garbage and wound up really REALLY liking it.

Everybody deserves a papa Bortus.

A lack of basic level manuals and work flows for basic job duties.

Holy shit folks, where is my picture book that lets me know how this 15 year old point of sale system out in a rural post office is supposed to do the things that I need it to do?

For me it was “That 70’s Show,” watched the shit outta that.

Nostalgia, when it hits for things that I was never a part of.

Don’t know where you live, but in the USA just about any hardware store will sell EXTERIOR grade door handles for somewhere between 25~50 bucks on the lower budget end. Assuming you’ve got cash or a friend who can loan/give you some money. (Or if there are abandoned buildings nearby… you know… grab a phillips screwdriver and a flat head screwdriver and make magic happen).

Installation is very easy since you’re just changing out door handles. There will be a hex key for changing the handedness of the handles and all the screws should be included along with (typically) easy to understand instructions. Should be two long screws that will hold the inside/outside handles together and (possibly, sometimes things work out and you don’t have to change out the strike plates) two short screws that hold the strike plate to the door and two more to hold the opposite strike plate on the door frame. Just remember to put the keyhole facing outside of your room and the handles oriented so that they are pointing in the correct direction actually shut the door and you’re pretty solid.

(If the door opens in to your room, you can might be able to ignore this next bit.)

If the gap between the door and the door frame is big enough it is possible to use something like a butter knife to work the door catch back into the door if you’re able to pull on the door. Make the gap smaller if you can, layers of elmers/wood glue by itself or layering paper and glue to a proper thickness before gluing it to the door frame.

Also, if you’re still worried about the door being jimmied open this way, always remember, “Lube, lube, lube.” Lube up the door catch with anything you can get that doesn’t turn sticky (you’re probably going to want to wipe off and reapply old stuff on a somewhat regular basis. Petroleum jelly, cheap chapstick, mineral oil, a dab of motor oil or 5-in-1 oil.

If you’ve got some beefier wood working tools accessible, you can put in a dead bolt (but you’re going to have to new holes into interior doors.)

If you’ve got gorrilla/super glue handy you can probably glue the hole shut that works as the “emergency release” for the interior grade lockable door handles.

If you’re just worried about privacy for yourself while you’re in the room, you can buy and install those slide chain things for way cheaper than a new door handle. Downside is, most interior doors are hollow core so there isn’t much for the mounting screws on the door side to sink in to and some hard shoving or kicking can work them loose.

Also, which side of the room are the door’s hinges? Are they inside the room (and protected by the locks/shim/etc when the door is closed) or outside the room? If outside the room and visible when the door is closed, see if you can tap the pins out from below. Older model hinges can have a pin that slides through both sides of the hinge and be knocked out with a screwdriver and hammer (possibly defeating any attempt to jam the door shut or replace the current door handle with a more secure type). Newer model hinges are machined together as a single unit and its either very hard or impossible to hammer the pin out without severely damaging the entire hinge. If you find you can hammer out the pin from the bottom (and there’s no way to pull the pin up from the top) you can try to superglue a small piece of metal on the bottom of the hinge. It won’t stop anybody who really wants to hammer out the pins but it will make it more work.

Yeah, that’s some dodgy behavior (unless you do dodgy things and keep getting caught). You might want to casually look into finding some safer spaces to inhabit.

If I had the money, possibly.

Also, if I had the money to pull up stakes and move all my shit somewhere else I’d probably have the money to bulldoze my current house and build some combination earth ship/survival bunker/hobbit home that could make living with the weather manageable.

Absolutely true.

Its also a bit eye opening to grow up thinking that you’re, “Not rich, but not poor”, and then realizing that, “Nope, I’m poor.” Its a bit of a shock to the system.

Going to be USA centric because I don’t need you doxxing yourself, just giving you ideas of what to look for where ever you happen to be.

If you’ve got solid internet access and enough work/life stability that you can start doing research into any government assistance programs and community groups that help navigate the processes that are in the area.

I live in the USA, and my partner and I finally got poor enough that we could get enrolled in Medicaid (Medicare is for the old folks). Partner found that the Medicaid would pay for a pretty serious surgery they’d kinda been needing for years (the final price that the government paid was a bit more than $30,000).

Back when I spent more time in Reddit, there was a post on in r/AntiWork about some USA government assistance in paying for internet (and possibly a cheap smart phone). I looked into it, found we qualified, and the process wasn’t too hard to navigate on my own.

There is a program called LIHEAP (i think that’s the name) that is assistance in paying for energy bills. We didn’t qualify for it last year when I looked into it but my good paying job last year was temporary and now I’m in a job making about 600~800 less as a part-time but permanent employee. I should probably find the website and see if we’re poor(er) enough to qualify for some help paying for electric bills.

Food stamps (WIC, SNAP) for assistance buying groceries. This one can get weird as they tend to be run state by state in the USA and the requirements can often times be super shitty. If you’ve got a stable job, even if its shitty, that might make things easier.

Look around for local food pantries and see how they work. Don’t be surprised if they’re run by churches and you’ve got to sit through a sermon before you get a bag of groceries. You might get lucky and the pantry is funded by a grant and needs part time workers they will be willing to kick a bit of paid work you’re way (assuming you have the time).

Its desperation money, but there is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk program. Piecemeal work online or doing survey’s for a few cents a pop. It can help buy a tank of gas or replace a cheap busted cell phone but I’ve never made much more than that when I spent a whole lot of time on it. When my anxiety about money gets really bad and I need to put the energy somewhere I’ll fire up my account. I’m pretty sure this has an international reach so it won’t be geo blocked. FYI, it doesn’t play will with VPN’s.

I’ve tried a few “do consumer survey’s online for money” websites and the only one that I ever had any “success” with was called InboxDollars. And by success, I mean that a few times over the years, I could spend many hours during a month and scrape together about 30$. Though I think its a USA based company and its geo locked. FYI, it doesn’t play well with VPN’s.

During the pandemic in the USA, i spent most of the time without work of my own (I live on a working farm with my spouse so one of us had an income) and spent about 18 months out the first three years of the COVID pandemic selling blood plasma. If you’ve got two days a week that you can spend hooked up to a machine that drains your blood, separates it, and pumps in back into you (and leaves you feeling pretty crappy for the rest of the day) and can handle lying pretty still with a huge needle in your arm, the pay was kinda okay. I’d get kicked in the summer months when it got too hot for my body to recover well enough between visits but I also have to do outside farm work that you might not need to do. If you do this regularly, it does leave some pretty gnarly scars in your elbow pits, which can lead to some amusingly random conversations with strangers in public.

In the USA, its seems like the US Post Office doesn’t like to post their open jobs outside of their internal job posting database. Though it seems like USPS jobs are either “work crazy hours, where ever we tell you” or “barely work any hours”.

I spent about a year and a half working at a University museum as a museum curation lab technician, no experience needed, didn’t have to be a student or plan on going into the field. Which, maybe it was just me being lucky, but it was a pretty sweet job. Flexible hours, chill work environment, chill coworkers, surprisingly decent pay, got to play with old arrow heads and spear points and pottery sherds and sort through boxes and do paperwork about what was in them… the two negatives were that in my case what I found was a temp job and I spent an whole lot of time alone without human interaction (which I’m super cool with, but not everybody else is). This is another one of those things that probably won’t be posted on public job search websites so you’re going to have to dig around local university/colleges with museum collections and find their internal job posting site.

So yeah, I know in my mind taking advantage of assistance programs feels “wrong” but I’ve had to start getting over it and the things that I’ve managed to figure out how to apply to and qualify for have definitely been worth it.

Waffles are king, pancakes are solid, French toast is kinda tricksy.

One of these days I’mma buy a cast iron waffle maker cause all the electric ones I’ve tried ate shit after a few months of regular use.

Now pancakes are solid as they’re easy to make and it only takes a bit of practice to cook them right.

Pancake Pro-Tip: If you wanna make a home made hot pocket, make a pancake batter recipe with a bit less liquid and a bit more flour to thicken it up (if you’ve got the time, cool the mix down in a fridge for a while to help with thickening). Cook up the pocket’s guts and set to the side, pour some batter on the skillet and let it cook long enough to get some bubbles in the center (lets you know that the bottom should be cooked well enough), spoon some guts into the center, and then ladle on some more batter over the top to cover the guts. By then, the bottom should be well set and you can flip it over without too much trouble.

French Toast… gotta have the cheapest whitest bread around or really crusty french bread. The dense loaves of like, multi grain style bread, never seem to soak up the egg mixture enough to really be satisfying.