Had it about an hour ago: a sort of one-pot pasta and lentil stew thingy, made in our slow cooker. I wouldn’t call it it a particular favourite of mine, but it has the advantage of being dead easy and surprisingly substantial.

Thanks for the update and for the work in building the new instance!

I’ll be keeping my eyes open for further news.

Jona Lewie - Stop The Cavalry. Apparently not originally intended as a Christmas song anyway.

With us, anything that is/would be smelly goes in some kind of container.

Cleaning - I would say once every 3-4 months or so in normal circumstances. Quite possibly longer.

I am not a dog lover. I find them needy, melodramatic and hierarchical: some of the features that I try to avoid in humans.

I work in an office around one day a week which often has more dogs than humans - since one of the regular staff has two dogs. In general, however, they aren’t much of a problem. One frequently nudges people’s elbows to get attention and howls whenever a phone rings. Another gets in the way of the door an awful lot - resulting in the owner installing a child gate at an inner doorway, and another has been traumatised in the past and needs to be taken out whenever a fire alarm test is due. However, this is not more that the needs and quirks of other people, really, and is fairly easy to work around.

I am glad that I do not have to work in that office all the time, but overall it is not a big deal.

Slashdot -> Digg -> Reddit -> Lemmy. I used to spend lot of time on TheEnvironmentSite.org some time before Slashdot, but I cant recall whether anything else came in between those two.

Relay (Pro) when using my phone although most of the time I was using RES on a laptop.

You say that you found out that lemmy.world had disabled downvotes. Where did you you find that out? I’d certainly seen nothing myself here - I know that some instances have - and can certainly see and use the downvote arrows.

I’m on lemmy.world. This thread is on lemmy.world I have just downvoted you successfully as far as I can see.

The issue with being poor is that you don’t get to save a lot - if any - whilst you are paying for rent and the basics. That is a large part of the reason that the housing co-op that I mentioned has housed so few after so long.

Yes, in the right conditions it will work, but there are a lot of situations that don’t leave people with access to those conditions.

My initial thoughts would be that the priority for most poor people is housing, followed by food and keeping the lights on.

My experience of mutual aid groups is primarily in the form of local exchange trading schemes (LETS), which typically provide services such as cake making, aromatherapy sessions, bicycle repair and maybe garden maintenance etc.

So although you may be able to deal with the food side of things through that to some extent, there really aren’t many landlords who will take rent in the form of aromatherapy and almost no utility suppliers will accept payment in bicycle repairs.

I have known a group to establish a housing co-op, which is great and all, but that, after around a decade, has housed around 8 people in total, which leaves a very long way to go.

Overall, I am in favour of the idea, but it is easy to see the issues that leave most people stuck in some job that actually pays the rent.

I spent some time when most of what I was doing was leading volunteer groups and giving talks and tours etc, some years as the only permanent resident on what was effectively an island and quite a range in between. It would depend entirely on where you are, I think.

Either way, I had no regrets and wished I had made the change some time earlier.

When I left IT and changed careers, I became a tree surgeon for a while and then a wildlife ranger, which I stuck with for 20-odd years.

It has to be said that you need a particular motivation to work as a ranger though - at least in the UK. You certainly don’t get into it for the money.

Not upside down - this is a juvenile, and they have these markings. Females may retain them, but adult males will lose the darker markings.

Slow worms are legless lizards rather than snakes. They have eyelids, unlike snakes, for example.

Bafflegab’s Baker’s End series and Radio Static’s Minister of Chance are two excellent Doctor Who adjacent shows. The BBC podcast The Whisperer in Darkness is a great Lovecraft adaptation.

There isn’t a lot of today left here in the UK, but I’ll be getting bed early and listening to an audio drama shortly.

Tomorrow, I have some shelves to put up, and there may be some clearing up in the garden after the winds today.

From an outsider’s perspective it would be the places that I work - which I am not going to reveal in any detail to avoid doxing myself, but include nationally and internationally important historical and archaeological sites.

From my perspective, although they are certainly interesting and I love working at them, it doesn’t play a particularly prominent role in what I do day-to-day, so it would be the wide range of problem solving involved: I lead a team dealing with maintenance, compliance and health & safety for a national charity.

Most recently finished: The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher - an enjoyable, but not exceptional, folk horror.

Currently in the middle of: Finnegans Wake, Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky, Flashman and Madison’s War by Robert Brightwell, and a collection of Para Handy tales by Neil Munro.

It was when the third or fourth thing ended up persistently broken after an update and the whole system became too much of a pain to use. I honestly don’t recall if it was XP or Win 7.

I had used a couple of Linux flavours before for a short periods and originally planned to dual boot, but this time, just never got around to putting a new Win partition on and found that I had no need for it anyway.

Total drive space is probably something like 40 to 50 TB.

Around three quarters of that is in use, mostly my Plex libraries: film, TV, music, spoken word.