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(or any streaming service)

Streaming services suck, and are not designed so that artists can make any money. Bandcamp on the otherhand only makes money when their artists make money, so they always are incentivized to help artists make money. The common trend with tech giants is to undersell competitors and move in as a monopoly. Making profits in the beginning is not the objective, but rather to push out competition by offering a service which seems too good to be true. This has been the story with Netflix, Uber, Amazon, and Spotify. Drive out competition by undercutting everyone, avoid paying laborers fairly, and then slowly increase the price for the consumer while continuining to buy off competition. Artists are caught in the crossfire of this and their needs are never considered.

Using GitHub and Jekyll, one can write, edit, and upload posts to their blog/site using their phone.
Unlike content management systems like WordPress or Squarespace, Jekyll provides you with all of your site’s code/text in an easy-to-access format using markdown files and plain HTML. Websites made with Jekyll can easily and freely be hosted with GitHub.

When running a TTRPG, player inaction can be confusing and even frustrating for game masters.
You can feel like it takes away from the momentum and fun of the game. After all, these games are about players doing things and GMs narrating the consequences that follow. It’s crucial for players and GMs to remember that even inaction is a choice.

Making yogurt is actually easy, and can be an anti-capitalist action.

Making yogurt from scratch like making most things from scratch is significantly cheaper. A 32 ounce jar of yogurt costs 4-8 dollars. A 128 ounce (1 gallon) jug of milk costs about the same (4-8 dollars). By this math, making your own yogurt only costs about a fourth of what it would cost to buy it. This means not only are you saving money, but you’re giving less money to corporations. The less money we spend, the less money billionaires have.

Our world faces huge issues like environmental collapse, governments perpetuating genocide, extreme wealth inequality, corporate greed.

The list of huge problems quickly feels insurmountable, but there is hope. These problems do have solutions. Often the solutions feel completely inaccessible, unclear, or abstract though. Robin Greenfield, an activist, successfully grew and foraged all of his own food for a year. This could be a blueprint or at least a glimpse of the solution.

The internet, once an exciting, new tool for human connection, is now seen as a problem in many people’s personal lives.

Books like Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism becoming a New York Times bestseller, and reddits like r/nosurf cropping up with almost 250,000 users, show that people have come to see the technologies of the internet as a double edged sword. Much of this, I think can be attributed to the centralization of the internet. Four out of five of the most visited websites in the past month, August of 2024, were social media sites or content silos, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and X.com.

Cognitive Behavior Therapy is a popular form of therapy which focuses on the ways in which our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors are interconnected.

Cognitive Restructuring is a flexible, CBT related tool which has been found to be useful by many individuals and CBT professionals. This tool is used to identify and change or reframe the thoughts which are contributing to emotional or behavioral issues.

First of all, if you’re reading this and you’re not familiar with either of these things, why are you reading this?

No, seriously, email me and tell me. Just in case that is you though, Cairn is a rules light fantasy tabletop role playing game (TTRPG). An open table is kind of like a pickup game of basketball. Different players might show up each week, and it’s open to anyone each week. Cairn is a really good fit for this style of table because the rules are so easy to pickup and can be explained on the fly. Characters can be easily and quickly generated at the start of the session or even in the middle of a session.

Learning a language takes a long time.

It’s common for people to spend several years learning a language and even then not reach a high level of fluency. According to Dreaming Spanish for speakers of European languages, it takes about 1,500 hours to reach native like fluency in Spanish. That’s obviously a long time. Even if you were totally consistent with getting one hour of comprehensible input a day it would still take over four years to reach. That’s not that bad though considering that so many people never reach native like fluency in their target languages.

Doing nothing even just for ten minutes is painful.

I remember doing a lot of nothing as a kid. As an adult I rarely do this. If you want to try this go ahead. Sit down anywhere in your house. Set a timer for ten minutes. Then do nothing. Don’t read text messages on your phone or watch the clock go down. You can think obviously, and pet your cat if you have one. That’s it though.