I’ve seen some that claim to be low sugar, but still have a lot of carbs. For a keto diet. Protein content would not be relevant, moreso the lack of carbs.

I have not checked recently, but the last time I was keto pea protein was a very expensive option. I forgot to mention in my first comment but I have found a more reasonably priced brand of low-carb whey protein.

Also I’ve found that I generally don’t like substitutions. Trying to find a food that is similar to bread or rice really just makes me want bread or rice more. The most successful part of dieting for me is to change my mentality from “living to eat” to “eating to live” anyways. So ideally I would like eggs for breakfast (tons of different ways to prepare them), chicken breast and vegetables for lunch (tons of options here too as long as you avoid high-carb sauces or vegetables), and a protein smoothie for dinner (low-sugar Orange Juice, vanilla protein powder, peanut butter, and ice).

I have successfully started again, but I’ve had to use pork and beef instead of chicken. Which is less healthy and more expensive. Fish is also an option, though not being near a coast makes that expensive too. I’m fortunate enough to be able to afford an increased grocery bill without too much hardship, but it’s a conscious choice to cut back on saving up for big things like our next car or home improvement projects.

It has certainly been annoying, the shortage perhaps more than the price.

My wife and I were keto before the pandemic. Years of struggling just to be less overweight, and all of a sudden with keto we just dropped pounds easily. She has epilepsy too, so animal protein is a key piece of her nutrition. We were actually able to continue through the pandemic at first, but eventually a combination of outbreaks at meat packing plants, the bird flu, and of course the collusion of the major agricultural corporations, meant that we stopped because it was just too expensive. Even our protein powder went from ~$30 for a 10lb package to now $85 for a 3.4lb package.

So we stopped and gained weight. I tried to get us to start again later, but my wife had a hard time sticking to it and kept on buying more bread and rice. We finally managed to make the switch in December. I entered ketosis, started dropping weight, and was really the best I felt in years… Then we got influenza type A. I tried to stay keto through it but eventually had to stop (could not find any keto cough drops).

Okay so that’s all done and finally we can get back on keto. Go to buy some chicken and eggs and… Out of stock everywhere. And since then when it is in stock it’s even more expensive than before.

At this point we’ve already seen the mega food corporations get slaps on the wrist for colluding on reducing supplies and hiking prices for profit- we usually find out a few years after the fact and the news usually gets buried. If only there were a way to truly hold the CEO’s and board members of those companies accountable.

Not as much as Loops probably.

I’ve seen people ask why the Fetaverse has nothing to do with cheese

Evidence of significantly rigged elections would certainly be a cause for some significant action and demands for a new election.

But I’m not talking about one-off reports of someone using their dead mother’s info to cast an illegal second vote. Even a rogue election official tossing a couple dozen ballots doesn’t really move the needle. We would need to see evidence of millions, or even tens of millions, of votes being impacted for that.

And I can’t really say for sure whether that did or did not happen. But there’s not enough evidence to action.

Instead, I look around at my neighbors, even in a blue city, and see tons of Trump signs on lawns, stickers slapped on cars, people wearing hats and T-shirts. That’s not enough evidence for me to definitely say there was NOT fraud, or even to confirm that Trump’s win is legitimate. But it does affirm that there are real-life people who have fallen for the propaganda. These aren’t just Russian spies trolling on the Internet or bots running on Musk’s servers to artificially update posts. These are real people who have chosen hatred.

Nearly 78 million people voted for this, and another 90 million stayed home and said they didn’t care.

The whole point of democracy is to allow everyone to express their opinions through votes instead of violence. So either the election was rigged or the country wanted fascism.

Junior year of high school, I was starting to get myself together and start interacting with girls in my class. Ended up becoming good friends with one who ended up being single a couple months before prom.

So I ask her to prom and she says “yes”. I buy the tickets for both of us (a couple hundred bucks- good thing I had a job). She bought a dress and I rented a matching tux. My plan was to ask her to start dating AT prom.

But in the time between me asking her to prom and the actual prom, some underclassman just asked her out on a date. And she said “yes” to that too. And they started dating and were BF and GF. At this point where I’ve dropped a ton of money on this prom, made plans with her friends and all their BF’s, etc.

I stand my ground. Prom happens and we have a decent time- her BF does not go. He joins us at a restaurant afterwards and it’s an incredibly awkward night.

That summer the two of them broke up and I asked her out. We dated through senior year, went to different colleges and broke up halfway through our freshman years. She had tons of guy friends who were clearly trying to date her that she always humored. She claimed they were just friends (a lot of them were ex’s) but she clearly loved the attention they, and I, gave her trying to compete for her. I’m not the jealous type but that was exhausting. In retrospect her dating another guy while in the month leading up to that prom was a huge red flag and I should have ran then.

Depends on the home. Different places I’ve lived in have different needs.

For dust in particular, you should consider sources of dust and airflow.

I grew up in a house with central air conditioning, so that system had a filter that needed to be replaced periodically. You can buy a variety of different filters- coarser filters last longer but let small particles through, while finer filters need to be changed more often but get the air cleaner.

I now live in a much older house that does not have central air (radiator heat, window units for AC). My wife also likes fan noise to sleep, so we bought an air purifier that we generally leave running in the bedroom and I change that filter periodically. Our basement gets bad dust because it’s unfinished with a concrete floor and rafter ceiling, and the litter boxes are down there, so we got another filter that stays on there.

Porous and soft surfaces hang on to dust. Carpets, rugs, tapestries, upholstered furniture, piles of clothes or bedding. Putting your clothes away in a closet or dresser helps. Storing extra bedding in a cabinet or closet helps. Vacuum the carpets and rugs. Don’t let dirty laundry pile up. Wash bedding regularly (every week or two). A lot of couches have removable, washable covers that are nice to wash like once a year.

Hard surfaces are easier to clean. If you put those clothes in a dresser, wipe the top of it off with a damp cloth every now and then. A broom can help with floors a bit, but wet dusting with something like a Swiffer is better. If you have rugs you can take them outside and beat them., although vacuuming is often easier. If you have carpets… You’re really screwed unless you get a vacuum.

The hardest part is decorations. Frames hanging on walls are just a pain because you simply have to wipe them down. Knick knacks on open shelves are terrible because you’ve got to pick up the thing, wipe it off, and wipe off the spot under it. Glass display cabinets are much easier to keep clean because dust will almost never get inside. As long as you keep the horizontal surface clear it’s just an easy flat thing to wipe off. Vertical glass panes will need the occasional wipe, but not as frequently and it’s still way easier than all the books and crannies of a figure or crystal or trophy or whatever else you’ve got on display.

As for prevention, I brush my hair in one particular spot in my bedroom and clean the brush out after each time. Shower regularly. Stay on top of laundry. The idea is to get skin and hair disposed of, and doing so with water tends to prevent it from getting into the air and settling as dust. Trim your nails somewhere so they will be disposed of properly. Brush your pets.

If you don’t want people fucking in your property, don’t rent out your property. Seems pretty simple to me.

I’m torn because I think it’s going to be very different in a lot of different places, and I’m trying to account for my own US-centric biases.

Ukraine and Palestine are pretty much completely hosed. Heck, you could probably add other countries like Georgia to that list. NATO may dissolve.

Climate change is going to get worse. We went from “we have to stop now before we reach the point of no return” to “we really need to do what we can to mitigate how hard it it’s”. The US is now re-opening the floodgates for fossil fuels and rolling back environmental regulations.

People will be persecuted. Police departments in the US will continue to militarize. I expect more riots similar to the BLM ones. Race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, political affiliations, the works. Best-caae scenario is probably class-based riots at this point.

Billionaires will become trillionaires. Wages stay the same. I expect prices to go down at first with the influx of fossil fuels. The GOP will probably pass some tax cuts similar to 2017- temporarily give each individual a reduction of ~$200 per year for a few years while giving corporations billions in permanent cuts. But the prices will rise eventually.

There will be bright spots. Weird pockets of normalcy. The Nordic countries might be alright if Russia and Climate Change aren’t too aggressive. China will be its own separate case- you’ll still have the ongoing authoritarianjsm and genocide, but it’ll be a bright and sunny solar punk version. I’m betting huge chunks of rural America will go unchanged- poor, straight, white Christians will remain poror, straight, white Christians. Those well-off enough to have their McMansions in the woods a couple hours drive away from the cities will probably stay the same.

Maybe California or other blue states are able to hold off the feds and other external forces enough to keep a semblance of the Old World?

Personally, I expect everything around me to just go downhill. Public infrastructure goes unmaintained. The occasional water boil advisory becomes more and more common over a couple years until it becomes a habit to boil water without checking. Certain websites become inaccessible, then ISP’s roll out bandwidth caps and up prices. Electrical outages become more common- maybe even scheduled rolling blackouts. You’ll need to factor poorly maintained roads when deciding what car to purchase.

Weird stuff is going to be cheap and available. There’s still going to be new smartphones every year or two for a while. The PS6, the Switch 2, maybe a new Xbox all drop. Professional sports keep going just like theh mostly did during the pandemic. You can already buy a huge 4k smart TV for less than a month of groceries for 2 people, or less than a month’s rent for a 1-bedroom apartment most places. The TV’s will get cheaper while the rent and food gets more expensive. The streaming services will re-consilidate into one or two companies, force ads for everyone, raise their prices, reduce their libraries, and basically become exactly what cable used to be.

Gonna be weird.

This looks like an ad for Pyre by SuperGiant Games if it came out in the early 2000’s.

This isn’t censoring culture. This is a streaming platform focusing on streaming and giving up on trying to be more than that.

The communities still exist and will find a new platform. Just over a year ago there was a sizeable chunk of Redditors that came to Lemmy. It’s happened time after time when a platform goes down. Communities are much more than just the platform they are on.

And… Why is that?

Anime can be found on tons of streaming services that don’t have comments, like Netflix.

Anime in particular is pretty famous for having its own communities and niche spaces on the internet. If anything, Crunchyroll’s comments section seems to me like it’s unnecessarily fracturing those communities based on who watches on Crunchyroll vs other methods.

There are costs to maintain and moderate communities. It seems to me like that’s adding a good bit of cost to Crunchyroll’s business model in exchange a vlrelatively small value provided to a small percentage of their customers. Whereas with dedicated social media platforms, the business model revolves around and only attracts individuals who highly valued that community. With a smaller community like that, it’s easier to rely on volunteer mods (like most of Lemmy) or a bit of ad revenue.

Good. Not every website needs to be a social media platform too. There’s already plenty of communities on the Internet to discuss anime.

Lemmy simply hasn’t been enough content. I still use Lemmy (obviously, I’m here) but I also supplement with other places.

For example, I used to enjoy the sub for one of my favorite sports teams. A lot of posts tended to be articles from the same handful of news outlets. Now instead of reading through Reddit I just have that website up and routinely check for new articles.

I use the Google News app occasionally. It usually sucks.

I also use Instagram a lot more. I only reluctantly downloaded it and created an account because my wife and a few friends wanted to send me things. Then I used it more when my band released an EP as a way to promote that. For pure entertainment rather than informational purposes, I usually go to Lemmy first and exhaust what is good quickly, then go to Instagram after.

I know it sucks. I don’t like having an app from Meta on my phone. I know it can become an unhealthy habit. But I also drink and eat junk food, so there you go.

Pokemon Sword and Shield.

Rose is trying to move the country off of fossil fuels and onto sustainable green energy. Somehow Gamefreak manages to portray this as being a terrorist and extremist. How dare he try to move Galar away from coal?

I’ve been meaning to re-watch Korra, but I remember even the first time I watched it being a bit disappointed in the “enlightened centrism” where they are trying to paint every conflict as pacifists vs extremists.

I think it’s similar to looking at BioShock 1 and BioShock Infinite. There’s a lot of writers out there who just use politics and ideology as a setting for the conflict rather than actually being central to their message. It’s simply a solid formula to make a villain: take any sort of stance and push it to violent extremes. Comstock is a religious zealot, Andrew Ryan I don’t think ever even mentions spirituality if I remember. Ken Levine’s message in the two games is not about religion, but extremes.

There are benefits. It makes the villains more nuanced and relatable. It gives the protagonist room for doubt and allows for some of the “good” guys to take on antagonistic roles. But Korra also ends up supporting an oppressive regime, and Booker DeWitt gets shoehorned into fights against the people rebelling against his enemy because… Reasons?

Any word on a Citra replacement? I remember a while back I tried to look for an alternative just for compatibility for certain games and I couldn’t find much. It seemed like Citra was the only good option for actually playing games. When you add in that the 3DS is no longer sold or supported, plus the hardware gimmicks that led to most games being exclusive to that platform, and also the sheer discomfort my adult hands experience trying to hold such a small device, I’d really much rather play those games on the Deck or with a controller.

The Switch is still young. It’s Nintendo’s active console so they’re dedicating more security and legal resources to protecting it, but I’m sure that will be reduced after the Switch 2 launches. RyuJinx is still a solid option, and when you add these various forks I’m sure emulation will be in a good spot in time.

Also good stuff!

For #2, one piece I forgot to bring up is the urgency. One of the reasons I advocate for having a small collection of basic, cheap tools is that there’s some cases where you don’t have time to get to the hardware store or wait for a delivery. Sometimes you need a wrench NOW to fix a leak. Or there’s a foot of snow on the ground, the roads aren’t allowed, and something goes wrong with your heat or the pipes are in danger of freezing. Or there was the time I had scheduled my new over to be installed and the old one disposed of: I was responsible for disconnecting the gas from the old oven, but didn’t realize until about an hour before that I would need not one but two adjustable wrenches to disconnect it and had to make a mad dash to get another one. I’ve also had enough issues with toilets that I keep at least one flush/fill valve set and a sealing ring on hand (maybe I need to get a water filtering/conditioning system to go easier on my hardware?). Having a way to move water (either a cheap hand pump or the ability to use a shop vac) can also be critical.

A couple other things I keep in mind with tools are:

How often am I going to use it? A lot of experts giving advice, advocating for expensive tools, are craftspeople who use those tools every day. If I only need that adjustable wrench once a year, the $2 one from Harbor Freight is fine.

And specialized tools are different. It’s hard to even try to buy them in advance because you don’t know they exist until something comes up. When I looked into converting my home’s landline phone network into Internet, I had to get a crimping tool. I noticed the old window AC units has a bunch of bent fins, and research led me to special combs for straightening them.

1. This is one of the few things YouTube is still good for. The channel This Old House is usually a good resource for a lot of projects, but you can find tons of other channels that have good info. Some creators are contractors, so their focus will be on doing things efficiently at scale and might not be as relevant to you, but there’s still good information to be found.

2. One of the lessons I learned getting an Accounting degree is that everything around you is constantly degrading. Every object has a limited number of uses, and we can only take guesses at what that number will be. Every time you open or close a door, you are putting wear on the wood of the door and frame, the hinges, and the latching mechanism. Every time you open or close a tap you are putting wear on a valve. Every rain drop that hits the roof is trying to erode your shingles, work it’s way into the sealant around fasteners, damage your gutters and downspouts, and erode your land and foundation. So try to be gentle on what you can and keep up on preventative maintenance when you can.

To start off with, you take care of emergencies. Things that will cascade into more damage to your property or health if not addressed. Sewer line backing up and flooding your basement? Emergency. Water leaks in the roof? Emergency. Hot Water tank leaking? Well, the leak is an emergency, but a lack of hot water probably isn’t. If you’re strapped for cash, you should be able to turn some valves to disconnect it and live with cold water until you can afford to fix it properly. But if you’re somewhere cold in winter, that could put those pipes in danger of freezing. (In case you couldn’t tell, water causes trouble everywhere it goes)

Without knowing the details of your financial situation, I’m going to assume you’re like most new homeowners. Young, probably just starting to get financially established enough to break the rent cycle. Maybe some other car or student loan debt you’re trying to pay off. Expecting to advance your career and make more money in the coming years. Assuming your income keeps up with inflation and your interest rate on your mortgage is fixed, from now on your housing costs as a percentage of your income will most likely go down.

So you’ll probably have to put things off for the first few years. You’ll need a couple of years with mild and extreme summers and winters to get a feel for how much your utilities cost. Try to keep an emergency fund (credit cards can work in a pinch, but they cost you long-term). Some problems might need temporary, cheap solutions. The general financial wisdom most old people gave me was “buy cheap, but twice”, but sometimes you just need to “waste” $50 on something janky to last a couple years until you can afford the $5,000 proper renovation. You’ll slowly transition from being reactive to proactive over time. First set aside money for an emergency fund. Once you have a couple grand, start setting aside some for cosmetic stuff like flooring and paint (it’s less important objectively, but living in a house with peeling paint and stained carpet can be bad for your mental health). You probably want ~$10k in an emergency fund eventually (in today’s dollars), but don’t feel too much pressure to get there immediately. And don’t be afraid to use that money for emergencies either: that’s what it’s for.

Identify any big, expensive, non-urgent projects: how much will the cost and when will they become urgent? You’ll need a roof every 25-50 years depending on the kind of roof and where you live. In today’s dollars in the US you’re looking at the ballpark of $10-$20k. You will probably be able to finance part of it if you need to.

3. You can’t control what the previous owner did or did not do, the corners that a builder cut, or the flaws in the architect’s designs. If there’s something serious that was legally required to be disclosed to you and was not, you could consult a lawyer to see if you have any recourse against the seller.

You are going to be making a lot of your own repairs and decisions restricted by your budget, equipment, and skills. 10 years from now you might find you’re cursing your past self just as much as you’re cursing the previous owner now. Either way, there isn’t much to be gained from getting upset over what ‘the last guy’ did. All you can do is try to be nicer to ‘the next guy’, who may or may not be you.

4. Just some general advice. You’ll probably hear other advice recommending that you do not buy cheap tools, but to wait and buy nice, expensive tools as you find you need them. I strongly disagree. If you don’t already have screwdrivers, wrenches, sockets, a measuring tape, hammer, etc those cheap kits can be great. Sometimes it’s nice to have tools you don’t care about for dirty jobs or loaning to a neighbor. I don’t want to use the same screwdriver I would use on my guitar or computer on a sewage pipe or my car, for example.

Also keep records. Put together a binder with receipts, warranty cards, etc. If something has a 30 year warranty you need a good resource for how to claim that 25 years from now. And it’s a great thing to hand off to the next owner. What year was this roof installed? What was the hex code and brand of paint on the trim in the living room? Is there lead paint that is currently sealed behind newer paint? Did you upgrade the Ethernet to cat6? Does the basement flood once every 200 years, once every 20 years, or once every 2 years? Think of all the stuff you wish the previous owner would have told you and start writing it down for the next person. A house shoukd last a few hundred years, and I would argue that the quality of records should be a factor in buying/selling.