Black Sails is definitely my favourite pre-STS album. Absolutely solid front to back

My go to favourite band is AFI, and they have a great back catalogue to dig into as they’ve been going since the 90s but have changed their style with the times (although always sort of emo/punk adjacent). I flip flop on my favourite album from them, currently I’d say it’s Sing The Sorrow but sometimes it’s Decemberunderground.

My taste changes frequently though, so for something with a completely different style, I find myself constantly returning to Personal Protocol by 8485, a wonderful hyperpop EP with Drum & Bass influences.

I hope you get something out of any of this, and would love to hear what you think!

For real. I’ve been vegetarian for a few years now and of all the things I kind of miss, not once has bacon been even a slight craving. A good kebab on the other hand…

I miss niche communities. I enjoy games like Shadowrun, Blood on the Clocktower and video games where there’s a lot of meta discussion (e.g. Payday 2 back in the day). There are some less specific similar communities on Lemmy, but they just don’t hit the same. When I’m thinking of TTRPGs, I’m thinking gritty cyberpunk with a bucket of D6s, but the rpg communities on here are very D&D and Pathfinder focused.

I know the general response to this is “well you should start the community and generate the content”. But the issue is that, frankly, I’m not interested in that. Before Lemmy, rif was just the app I used to scroll mindlessly when I was bored at work. Lemmy is the replacement to that, even if it’s missing some of the specific content I’d want it to have.

Not OP but I’ve recently made the switch to Proton. You can set up a forward from your old mail provider to Proton, and then it’s just a case of going through things one by one to change them, but all your email will still be in one place. You can also import all your historic email in the background.

I just went through my password manager to identify which services were most important to me to proactively switch them over, which took a couple of hours. Now I just check emails that come in and whether they were sent to my Google address or Proton address, and from ther either switch them or unsubscribe from their mailing list.

So yeah it’s not effortless or anything, but it’s probably not as bad as you’re thinking.

After 6 months of medical related delays, today I have session 0 for a Shadowrun 5e campaign that I’m GMing for and excited to start. We have a few newbies to help get up to speed with the system, but I’m ecstatic to finally have another game going after a few years of absolutely none.

While I agree with a lot of the other comments with the “you learn by doing vibe”, I feel like it’s a bit open ended and it can be a struggle taking the first step.

I started out around 2012 with some “how to do java” tutorials, and through that learned the language agnostic basics of programming (variables, functions, arrays, loops etc). But because I had nothing I wanted to make, I dropped that pretty soon after and didn’t touch anything code related for like 5 years.

I randomly applied for a job that required a whole lot of sql knowledge, got the role (when I probably shouldn’t have in all honesty) and that prior knowledge helped tremendously in getting up to speed with that, I just had to learn the sql specific stuff on the go.

I then wanted to do a Pokemon Romhack, so followed tutorials on YouTube which taught me a bunch of C and git.

So yeah, it wasn’t until I actually needed to use something that I actually learned any languages, and the original language I set out to learn I know absolutely nothing about now, but it did give me the baseline knowledge I needed to pick all the rest up far easier.

Agreed on the vaping. When I went to vaping, I was smoking about 20 a day. There was a short time when I went back to smoking after vaping, and it was around 30 a day at that point, because I was so used to a constant feed of nicotine.

Playing devil’s advocate though, it’s still not a bad thing. If the goal is 0 nicotine, it’s a problem, but if the goal is specifically not smoking then I find it to be one of the easier methods. I always said at the time “we don’t know the long term effects of vaping, but we do know the long term effects of smoking”

Nicotine patches are what finally allowed me to quit. I quit over the course of probably about 5 years, trying all sorts of methods.

I went to vaping, that killed my dependence on the taste of cigarettes by changing the flavours constantly. I went from 12mg liquid to 3mg liquid, but then when I found nicotine salts went back to 10mg but lowered my intake significantly.

After a while, I moved to nicotine pouches, to get rid of the mental requirement to inhale nicotine (and also because I was no longer able to vape indoors). They’re not the nicest things when you’re starting, but they give a full hour of relief and it’s very easy to keep track of how much you’re using compared to vaping. I started on the stronger ones, and got myself to the point where I was having 9mg pouches 2-3 times per day.

Last New Year’s Eve, I broke my leg rushing out of my house. The nurses at the hospital weren’t sure if the pouches were going to be safe before the surgery (it’s different dosage than they’d expect, and it’s synthetic nicotine) so they put me on patches. And I found that they worked perfectly, so after being discharged I followed the process outlined on the box for them - 21mg/day for 2 weeks, 14mg/day for 1 week, 7mg/day for 1 week, although for that last one I stopped after four days, as my partner was going away for a few days and it made sense to get through the worst of the withdrawal when there was nobody around for me to be snappy with.

So yeah, the point of nicotine patches are to quit, but in my experience they were best as a “last step” rather than a 1 fix solution. Quitting an addiction is not easy, and there’s absolutely no shame in taking a long time to do it. In all honesty, if I hadn’t been sent to hospital that night, I’d still be shoving nicotine pouches in my face. At this point I’ve not had any nicotine for 11 weeks, and the cravings stop being so intense, but I do still get them after meals.

At every step in the process, it looked to those around me that whatever I was using was going to be used forever. I didn’t set any lofty goals, I vaped for several years, used the pouches for a full year, and even in my own mentality thought that “if I do this the rest of my life, I’m okay with that”. Usually moving onto the next method was because it was cheaper, not because I wanted to quit. But it’s worked out in the end I guess.

Sorry for rambling, I kinda missed the point of the original post, but I’m hoping this story might help someone if they’re trying to quit or at least help people reframe their idea on what quitting can look like.

This is why I get anxious playing with new groups, especially because if I draw a token that let’s me try something out of left field, I can rarely resist going for it. Thankfully, so far everyone has been really excellent, but it takes me a while to slip in and get comfortable