1: Put a set amount of your paycheck by percentage into a savings account before you ever see it.

Aim for at least 10%, but if that’s too much because our economy is fucked, do 1% of your take home pay. You make $500 a month, you put $5 a fucking month into a savings account.

If you can’t do that out of your paycheck, find a way to take on an odd job to make up that difference.

It’s stupid. It’s tiny. It feels pointless.

It’s incredibly important.

2: Learn how to live below your means. I don’t care if you’re a crypto millionaire or a homeless person living on the street, you have to find a way to live off of less than what you have and take the excess that you generate and put it into savings or investments of some type, something that can support you when shit gets bad bad.

3: When you find yourself with extra time, don’t just sit around and binge watch TV or doom scroll.

Definitely get your binge watching and doom scrolling in at appropriate times, but if you find yourself with two or three hours with nothing to do, call up a friend and go try to hang out with them.

In your 20s, friends are popping out of the woodwork for you.

But only the ones that you cultivate and continuously put just a tiny little drop of effort into will still be there when you are 50 or 60.

And it’s a lot of fun to hang out with your friends. It’s far more rewarding than any doom-scrolling you will ever do.

If you find yourself without friends, for whatever reason, try to find something new to do that takes place in a specific location on a regular schedule.

Nothing makes friends faster than repeated interaction over a period of time.

Good idea would be to create a version of yourself in your head with a set date five years from now.

Write down what they have achieved and what they have going for them.

Compare yourself to that as you approach that five-year date.

My stepdad once made coleslaw that smelled like burnt rubber. Me and my siblings told him that we would not eat the coleslaw, it would taste like burnt rubber. And he tried to convince us that since we had never eaten burnt rubber before in the past, that we couldn’t possibly know what burnt rubber tastes like, and therefore we should eat the coleslaw.

It turned into an hours-long argument about how you don’t have to actually eat burnt rubber in order to know what burnt rubber smells like, and that there’s no good reason for coleslaw to smell like burnt rubber.

In the end, me and my siblings won, and we did not eat the coleslaw, but I don’t understand how you can cook coleslaw… no, wait, you don’t even cook coleslaw!

I don’t know how you can prepare coleslaw so poorly as to have it smell like burnt rubber, and I don’t know how you can be so married to your burnt rubber coleslaw that you would attempt to force children to eat it, regardless of the fact that it smells like burnt fucking rubber.

advertising and privacy

Some people think it’s great that the ads that are following them around all of the time from device to device and always knows exactly what they want before they do is a nice thing.

But advertisers sometimes know more about you than you do, and that is disturbing, and they are monetizing them every facet of your life.

Even if you can only block 20 to 50% of the ads, you are doing yourself a great service.

Even more so if you can poison them somehow.

The less accurate information global corporations have about you, the better it will be for you.

Yeah, the ideal of the internet was that, ultimately, we would all have our own little box in our house that we would post our stuff to, and our friends would read it and see it, and maybe a few passers by on the internet would observe it, and that would be a way of journaling our lives and sharing them with each other.

Instead of being a global hearth, it has become a global marketplace, a battleground for power in the form of advertising revenue, sales revenue, and tracking every bit of data they can possibly get from you.

This is so that, 1, they can sell more things to you, and 2, so they can sell that information to other people who, like themselves, do not have your best interest in mind and do not care one fuck about you.

My childhood friend was like that. His name was Tim. Everyone liked him. He was loud, he was brash. He was a bigger guy. He was not very attractive, but he had charismatic personality, and people were drawn to him.

And he was such a douchebag.

I haven’t talked to him in, like, a decade. But last I heard, he was still just douchebagging it up everywhere. No job broke as shit. People still coming over to his house to smoke weed and watch tv even though they’re in their freakin’ 30s and 40s and shit.

I just tell them I run a private cloud. It’s so much easier because they understand in general “cloud equals internet”

I am well aware of the consequences of my decision, lol.

It’s a small price to pay.

I would go into red dwarf and age at the normal speed and then go to the backwards time dimension and grow younger. I like pop out 10 years younger, 10 years from now and just really annoy the shit out of everybody.

Small bird or larger

I just used the cheap peppermint star candies that are like 2 for $2.99 now

A trick I was taught very young was to suck on a mint candy, and then when you actually have your test, to also bring a mint candy with you.

The story I was told is that mint causes the blood vessels in your face and head to dilate, so your brain gets a little more oxygen.

Then the olfactory and taste sensation being the same from when you were studying to when you were actually being tested on the topic can help your brain remember the information and recall it when it’s needed.

I cannot prove that this has worked, but for me at least I’ve always been extremely good at tests doing this and maybe that had some part in it.

Reaching out from time to time, initiating conversation, sending a random stupid meme, something, anything to just keep communication and contact functioning.

I don’t use it at all directly, but occasionally an answer generated on Reddit will pop up on a search I’m doing on a different site

I block communities and bots and obvious trolls.

My feed is perfectly fine without them. And the communities I block are the ones that I don’t want to see or know anything about like fucking politics and news.

deleted by creator

I would say that there’s enough doubt about the situation that if I were on the jury, I don’t think I could in good conscience find him guilty.

That being said, if the actual trial brought out really good evidence, we’ll see how it goes, but from what I’ve seen on the news? No.

I made the decision that I was going to quit smoking, and at the time my favorite thing to do was playing guitar.

So I told myself that until I had not smoked a cigarette for an entire year, I would not play guitar again.

And I kept that promise, even though my asshole brain kept giving me dreams like:

I was at a bar with some friends, and we were all playing pool. One of my friends that smoked still hands me her cigarette and says, “Hey, I know you don’t smoke. Hold this for a moment. I’ve got to go to the ladies room.”

So I’m holding the cigarette, and then my other friends are like, “Dude, it’s your shot.”

So I needed both of my hands.

I put the cigarette in my mouth and I take the shot, and when I’m taking the shot I inhaled the cigarette, only for a nanosecond later to realize what I had just done.

I got to spend the rest of my dream freaking out about the fact that I had just wasted months and months and months of not getting to play the guitar, all for one tiny little accidental second.

I would wake up in a cold sweat of misery and so fucking grateful that it had been a dream.

But I made it the full year without smoking and without playing guitar, and when I finally picked up a guitar again, I had somehow auto-magically learned the ability to sing and play guitar at the same time, which is something I could not do the year prior.

You have it backwards.

My moral compass defines my politics.

If you, as a politician, work to provide for the needy, to uplift the wanting, to open doors for people who could not open themselves, to put the good of society above the immediate gains of you or your close companions, then you are likely the person I am going to vote for.

If you, as a politician, use your insider knowledge to profit yourself or your friends, if you work to close doors for people, to put down the needy, to cast aspersions and hate towards the people you deem inferior to yourself; if you have broad swaths of people that you deem inferior to yourself, then I don’t care if you’re a Democrat or a Republican or a literal angel descended from the heavens, I’m not gonna vote for you.

Yeah, he was pro-vaccine.

He believed in medicine, he just hated any politician that wasn’t Donald Trump, and believed the news when they said that it’s just a cold.