Good advice, thank you!

Nice! Definitely warmer than my zone, though, so you probably don’t have much in the way of wintering advice. Northern Maypop is supposed to be cold hardy enough for at least zone 7, though, so I’m hoping I can get it overwintered in zone 6.

Ooh, how has your Maypop growing experience been, and do you mind specifying your growing zone? I just finally bought some Northern Maypop seeds that came back in stock and I’m really excited for them next year.

Oh yeah, you can use them for increasing the output per-rune for runecrafting, for increasing the yield of harvests when farming, and for enhancing potions when potion crafting. I like it for runecrafting because it seriously reduces the time it takes to meet guild and quest quotas, and I haven’t done tests on this to confirm, but farming says you get XP per crop and I believe that makes it an XP multiplier when harvesting crops. Plus farming dailies can get you a lot of XP, and you can contribute to those from inventory, so having a larger stockpile of crops helps a lot. I’ve prestiged Farming twice and timing it right with guild dailies can launch you from one to like level fifty in a single batch of dailies.

Ugh, I had suspected it might be vibe coded, but was living in denial. That is a bummer. I have much the same hopes; I don’t super care about balance for an idle single-player game, because I just like numbers go up, and I do actually use firemaking a fair amount because ashes are good for farming and runecrafting, but in general I agree with you.

You would think so, and yet I have known multiple grown men who did this.

Majestic! Now just make sure that everyone who helps out in your garden understands that these caterpillars are supposed to be there. You would be astonished the number of people I have encountered who have planted milkweed for monarch butterflies and then picked off all the caterpillars who were “ruining” the milkweed.

Any genres in mind? Shattered Pixel Dungeon is a pretty fun one, IMO. I like Idle Fantasy for its vaguely RuneScape feel (though it’s largely text-based, so don’t expect much graphics) while letting you queue actions up for hours of letting the game run idly. 2048 is classic. Luanti (similar to Minecraft) is available on mobile but such a huge battery drain I haven’t played it much TBH. And UnCiv will let you play a game similar to Civilization. I have all those on e/OS (de-Googled Android fork) and as I recall they are all open-source and ad free.

I feel like I link this video at any opportunity, but Climate Town does have a really good explainer video on the entire mess with the Colorado River basin here, including the incentives behind growing alfalfa. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XusyNT_k-1c

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Shout out to the one bell pepper like

I have you tagged as “researches before blindly commenting”, thank you for staying true to that and the information.

I am extremely flattered by this; thank you so much. You’ve made my day here.

To be clear: I am a vegan and think it’s a great choice to make for both the environment and moral reasons if you have the ability to do it. I don’t really proselytize about it, but it makes me very happy when people choose to go vegan. I absolutely do think the huge environmental impacts of animal agriculture, especially industrialized cow consumption, are things that should concern people and see real pushback on a major scale.

But this feels like a really cherry-picked ‘whataboutism’ graph and that raises my hackles. In the first place, this focuses on one very specific metric (water consumption) without considering the major other negative impacts of data centers like electricity rates, infrasound noise pollution of surrounding communities, and so on. Other people have also pointed out that this ignores things like the amount of water used in chip manufacturing. Recycling water for data center cooling makes data centers use less water, but, in a cruel twist, also concentrates pollutants already found in the groundwater, which means that the water that does get returned to the environment now has a higher concentration of pollutants.(And yes, in some cosmic irony, agriculture including animal agriculture was involved in releasing those pollutants in the first place). Meta had an incident where data center construction released bacteria-contaminated water into the environment.

And yes, of course, animal agriculture and in particular cow consumption have so many more negative environmental impacts than just water usage, too. I am vegan. I actively condemn this shit. But in general, I have seen this argument used in a lot of “whataboutism” whose primary point appears to be, “this new unnecessary thing we’re pushing may cause a lot of bad things, but if you look at these cherry-picked metrics, it’s not as bad as this other thing that you already consume, so you might as well let us do whatever we want, too.” “You are in blood stepped in so far that, should you wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er, so build those data centers” is not a good argument.

I think you posted this to the wrong comm (IIRC you also frequent the opossums community, so easy mistake), but nevertheless, adorable.

You raise an interesting point. I tend to think of campaigns like this as kind of worthless because they don’t feel like they’re going to persuade anyone vs. ads that I would personally consider more persuasive, but you’re not wrong that this sort of thing is getting a million more views on the internet than something that might be more individually persuasive but only reach like 20 people. I guess that’s why they do it.

Speaking as a vegan who has gotten legitimately emotional before because I love lobsters as creatures and they deserve better: who the fuck thought this was a good idea. Who thought this was going to tug at heartstrings instead of loins. Who thought this was going to unlock compassion instead of new fetishes. Who thought people weren’t going to want to fuck the lobster.

PETA’s marketing campaigns fucking baffle me.

Happy birthday! I remember turning 25 and feeling so old. Now I’m in my thirties and it rules. Well, the world sucks, but on a personal level, don’t sweat it. You’ve got plenty to enjoy now and plenty to look forward to.

Wow, this is almost impressively wrong, actually. It got the correct color and location for the Ivory Coast/Côte d’Ivoire, but then pointed the label to… I believe that’s Mozambique? A bit hard to tell quite if it’s in Mozambique or Tanzania, but the image also seems to have listed Mozambique but then pointed to (with a color coding match) somewhere in Ethiopia. Then again, this map seems to have gotten a good chunk of Niger in with Nigeria, so maybe it is actually in Tanzania. Malawi seems to be placed closer to Zimbabwe or Botswana, but that spot is actually color coded to match Cameroon, which appears in the label list but is not highlighted anywhere on this map.

And even if you don’t know anything about African geography, the simple fact that there’s a floating entry at the end of the list with no match, a line pointing from the Ivory Coast with no label, and several color coding/color the country is highlighted in mismatches should have been a glaring red flag that this was slop to anyone paying any attention.

Thirded. I have only used my toaster oven/air fryer combo, so I don’t have a pure air fryer to compare it with, but this thing has been with me since before the pandemic and I love it. I use it all the time, whether for air fried stuff (French fries, my beloved), for small scale baking that I don’t want to heat up the whole oven for, or just for actually toasting bread (I don’t even have a toaster.) And it’s all stainless steel wires and pans, so there’s no PFAS. Highly recommend.

I’ve got a volunteer strawberry plant exactly like this that just popped up in one of my pots. Really tasty little berries, too; I thought at first I had somehow ended up with an alpine strawberry, but I believe it’s just a wild strawberry (as opposed to flavorless mock strawberries sometimes mistakenly called wild strawberries.) Been bearing fruit continuously for a few months, too. Currently trying to get some seeds to grow hydroponically, because I could go for this year round.

Edit: in researching, it seems like alpine strawberries may just be wild woodland strawberries in a fancier hat, so there may not be an appreciable distinction.