Welp, that’s gonna be fun for NORAD… not to mention put a bit of a dent in the ‘Golden Dome’… concept of a concept of a plan…

One particular thing that helped me with ‘eliminating’ snacks:

Replace things like potato chips… with trail mix.

You can usually get a fairly decent sized bag, you can probably pick from a few different mixes of varying kinds of nuts, dried fruit, m&ms or some tiny treat mixed in.

Of course, if you have nut allergies… sorry you’re SoL for this one, but if not:

Its a crunchy, salty snack, and you can get a whole lot more full feeling, satiated… from a lot less of a portion of a bag… its just literally more dense, and has protein and other good stuff that isn’t in chips or cheetos or what not, at all.

I will get a 40z mix bag and either have a handful or two or three, and an apple, as a small snack… or maybe along with some other meal I’d normally have chips with.

And that 40z bag tends to last me roughly 3 weeks.

Way, way, way more cost effective than the cost of eating chips in that way… chips are just stupidly expensive now, and are quite unhealthy to eat regularly.

…

But yeah, if you can turn a ‘snack’ from basically junk food or candy or mini cakes of some kind… into something like trail mix and fresh fruit?

Way healthier for you, and probably works out to costing about as much or potentially less, especially if you can acclimate your ‘sugar’ desire back to some kind of fruit that is not seasonal, not stupid expensive.

…

Also, make a big ass salad with some kind of meat, maybe some shredded cheese (buy a block and a cheese grater, pre sliced or shredded cheese is way more expensive per volume)… but no high calorie dressing… into a normal just ‘whole meal’.

(This is also a good idea in tandem with eating more nuts: you’re gonna want more fiber or you’re gonna be shitting constipated bricks if you’re older than about 30, rofl)

Vinegrettes tend to be lower calorie, but you have to do some investigation, a lot of them are also as bad as ranch or blue cheese or whatnot.

…

Beyond that: Get a rice cooker and / or crockpot, and either keep some kind of stew always going, or learn how to cook rice properly, and make soups/stews with veggies, seasoning, beans or meat … a whole category of things you know how to cook well.

Personally, properly making rice still eludes me, but I am learning… crockpot with just some chopped up veggies, potatoes, and either meat or beans is… easier for my culinarily disinclined white ass, lol.

You can also get various broths and soup stocks to basically turn making decent stews into easy mode, they’re fairly cheap by volume, and you often don’t need as much as you might think you would.

Well, according to these industry-funded/conducted research papers, it works quite well, quite often!

Just as your current local or national politician who used to work for us, is being funded by us, and will go back to working for us if they lose their next election!

1: How is talking about weird quirks of English vocabulary that differ regionally and among different groups of people… off topic?

2: Many people online pronounce ‘loli’ with all kinds of different pronounciations of the ‘o’… at least in part because there is much regional variation in the US as to how all vowels are pronounced in just all words.

Some pronounce it with the same sound as ‘low’, the long o. Other pronounce it as ‘lawl’, others pronounce it as ‘lahl’, the way uh… Data’s sort of android adopted daughter’s name is pronounced in TNG.

I have heard Brits, Aussies and Kiwis pronounce ‘loli’ with all kinds of vowel sound variations as well.

Pronouncing it the same as in ‘lolipop’ is a very common pronounciation, amongst many different regional English dialects.

Yep.

The contentious but somewhat agreed upon story of how this happened is roughly: US troops discover ‘fries’ in restaurants in Belgium, after WW1, but in an area of Belgium with mostly French speakers.

Americans appreciate alliteration, and don’t care so much for actual accuracy, so… ‘French Fries’.

Yes, ours are all limp.

… Are you aware that ‘loli’, pronounced the same as ‘lollie’… is art (usually drawn) that depicts sexualized or nude children, and … fans of, or viewers of loli… are called lolis?

I am reasonably confident this is widespread internet terminology across the entire English speaking internet at this point, but you being Australian and… possibly not being aware of this… makes me question that assumption somewhat.

That or perhaps you’re older than me?

… Uh, anyway, in America we have ‘fries’ or ‘french fries’, but seemingly every other English speaking country calls them ‘chips’.

Which is confusing to the hungry, overweight, American brain, because what we call chips, ya’ll tend to call ‘crisps’.

But at the same time, we can’t even agree on whether or not a sugary, carbonated beverage is called soda, pop, or just coke, used to refer to all soft drinks, not just coca cola.

yep, its new, additonal meaning is roughly equivalent to ‘no safeguards’ ‘training wheels off’ ‘straight into the deep end’ ‘balls to the wall’ ‘EXTREME’ … yeah, doing something in a very ‘hardcore’ way that is much more likely to result in tragedy or pain or destruction if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing, because the otherwise normal or helpful safety/protection mechanisms aren’t present.

my head canon:

Brih-ish.

British.

Br*tish.

‘*’ thus indicates the ‘ih’ sound, and nullification of the next immediately following consonant.

cough

not the only thing that’s on point

quickly eyes the angular monoboob, then looks away

Microplastics in your blood?

Pff. AMATEUR!

Serve me that shit on a platter, a la carte, bespoke cuisine!

That and Nvidia blindsiding them with ‘cool engine you’ve been working on for a decade there… you have one year to jam realtime raytracing into it.’

In case ya’ll don’t know about Heinrich Schliemann…

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/the-many-myths-of-the-man-who-discoveredand-nearly-destroyedtroy-180980102/

Now you do.

He fucking dynamited what quite likely is the actual location of ancient Troy…in the early days, the field of archaelogy had a number of basically wealthy idiot assholes who fancied themselves as ‘great men’, who went around doing nonsense like this, and of course just actually stealing the artefacts and taking them back to museums in their home countries.

Schliemann obliterated the potential Troy site so thoroughly that archaeologists spent over 100 years looking at other potential sites… only to largely (not entirely, but largely) come to the conclusion that Schiemann’s Troy site probably is the actual correct site…

… But he fucking blew it up.

Ah, this one was fairly recent, and I have more recently been diagnosed with ©PTSD from… how often insane shit like that has happened to me.

But, typing it out is… better than just stuffing it down… 6 months ago, typing out a similar story would have filled me with rage, all muscles clenching… this time I only grit my teeth once.

Progress.

… I appreciate the condolences though.

… Spent a long, long time being gaslit, its … helpful for me to type it out, and not be blamed for it.

You know, I hadn’t seen that sketch before…

… but another thing that my idiot brother did, which was actually the final straw between me and my entire family:

My doctors, over the year prior, with me seeing them fairly frequently, running a good deal of blood work tests on me … well they decided to change up my medication somewhat, take me off of one drug, replace it with another…

… because that drug they were taking me off of was causing me to … not quite develop actual diabetes, but develop many signs of pre-diabetes… and they had figured out a way to switch me over to a set of drugs where that would not be a problem.

My brother interpreted this as me making up all of what I just said whole cloth, as if i was delusional and insane, despite me literally showing him the blood test results, annotated by the metabolic expert, and the new medication plan from other doctors.

So we got into an argument, the next day my entire immediate family has decided that I need to be institutionalized, in a mental asylum in the middle of fucking nowhere, fuck my career I guess? I was making almost twice as much as my brother and probably more than my dad at the time.

I just moved out while my brother was at work, never looked back.

Shame microcenter doesn’t ship GPUs, they’re only reservable for in-store pickup.

I was gonna say, my head canon seems to either recall or have invented the idea that the dad was some kind of CFO or accountant… but I don’t know if that idea has any actual evidenced merit from the movies, been a long time since I’ve seen em.

Former V Dash MSFT contractor here, multiple ‘tours of duty’, worked as a Executive Level Data Analyst for a different Fortune 500 company, later Co Lead of the whole Data Team for a massive nonprofit:

I am now an Anarchist, rofl.

That nonprofit I used to work for?

Well, after the last couple of months under Trump, something like half of their funding no longer exists, and it is now illegal to exist while being homeless, and with the incoming cuts from the ‘big beautiful bill’, we are gonna go from about 4-5 million homeless Americans to something closer to 20 million.

EDIT: 99% sure there is no more funding nor mandate for the PIT, Point In Time, count aimed at estimating the number of homeless in America … yeah that just won’t be reported anymore.

The PIT count itself was a methodological mess… by the last data that I had at that non profit, if you try to match the statistical profile of people asking us for help, vs the statistical profile of people the PIT count…actually counts?

Yeah, you need to multiply the PIT official number by somewhere between 3 and 5.

Its very hard to get a ‘representative sample’ of people are are often mobile, in hiding, or have no reliable way of being contacted, not to mention the PIT is just farmed out to non profits all around the country, who all have their own methodology as to who even counts as homeless… and then that all gets amalgamated with a lot of sighs and handwaving.

Even before Trump admin V2… Covid broke our data patterns. Before Covid, there was significant seasonality to our total requests for housing or assistance.

A year or two into Covid? Almost no more seasonality at all, just exponentially growing demand quarter after quarter.

The Trump admin / Republicans cutting Medicare and such, combined with their other policies, is going to create an American Holodomor, millions to ten + million Americans starving to death in the streets.

I still got a ways to go, but ah yep, nothing like singing to lift your spirits and also diaphragm muscles lol.