Calm down Don Corneo.

In far-flung new-build land, you might have to drive into my neighborhood to access any of those. And don’t bother taking the bus, because there are probably no bus routes either.

That was actually a positive to me, I had it built in a semi-rural ex-urb. Nearest city is about 30 miles away.

Can’t speak for the quality of the build, other than it’s been four years, and the only issues are ones I expected (the floating floor is cheap and I’ll have to replace it in the next few years, and the exterior stain is peeling on trim bits and needs a touch up due to Colorado sun and weather extremes).

A 50 year mortgage is just renting with extra steps and additional responsibility.

Working on this now. Not sure if I’ll make early retirement, but I plan to have my house paid off inside the next 2-3 years. I’m in my early 40s, and the house is my last debt. Everything else is paid off other than monthly revolving spend. And the house is a new build, was constructed in 2021, so shouldn’t have any major issues for quite some years. Also have a fully paid off solar and battery setup to keep electric costs low (I pretty much just pay the grid tie connection fee monthly, no usage billing).

Hoping I’ll be able to retire by 55 since I’m tired of the grind, but if it doesn’t happen, it won’t be the end of the world.

I honestly don’t understand what you’re talking about or inferring from my comment, but it sounds pretty cynical the way you describe it.

Edit - would you mind clarifying? I’m assuming I’m misunderstanding, as again, I don’t really know what you’re talking about with Christianity, rational economic theory, and Margaret Thatcher here. I’m not a Christian, nor am I British. And until I looked it up just now, I’d never even heard of rational economic theory. Not sure how it relates here.

Regarding the “reddit tier” advice on cutting people off… This is my personal lived experience. I’ll just say sometimes you’re better off without some people in your life. If you want details I’ll be happy to share, but it’s off topic to the post thread. Suffice to say, sometimes there are people who are only a net negative on you, socially, personally, mentally, and emotionally. Associating with terrible people leads to bad results.

For me the most important factor is partnership. My wife and I split up our responsibilities equitably and we each play our roles well. We’re also flexible enough to cover and support each other when needed. If you can’t do that for each other you don’t have a partnership.

This is a big one. Like… I can cook, but I hate doing it. My wife went to culinary school in her youth and enjoys it. So she does nearly all the cooking, and I generally take care of dishes and laundry. She does the periodic sweeping, and I’m more inclined to mop and/or vacuum, take out trash, and general maintenance stuff. I handle our finances for the most part, but I don’t keep up on news and info well. She has time to keep up on financial, political, and tech sector news and keeps me informed on anything important so I’m aware of things going on that could potentially affect us financially. We’ve got a balance of chores that works for us, and doesn’t leave either of us annoyed or exhausted.

I’m in my 40s. I don’t have any kids, but am married nearly 20 years, home and property owner, bills, the household handyman “fixer,” managing health conditions, etc.

1. Find work you enjoy. I know that’s easier said than done, but you spend much of your waking hours at work, and it bleeds into everything. Find a way to make it suck less. A bad job will suck the life out of you.

2. Find hobbies you enjoy. Preferably more than one, you can burn out on things you enjoy as much as you can with work.

3. Cut off negative people. Social connections are important, but be wary of social vampires, people who leave you exhausted and stressed. Cut them off, even if they’re your own family. If that’s not possible, keep as low contact as possible, put them on an information diet, and gray rock them.

4. Make time to connect with your spouse. Cuddle in bed, talk about your day. Hug. Engage.

5. Make time for exercise. Don’t say there’s no time. Don’t make excuses. Get it done. It’s one of the most important things you’ll do for your physical and mental well being, and should improve your energy levels over time.

6. If at all possible, contribute to causes that matter to you. If you have the funds, maybe donate to your local food bank, homeless shelter, animal shelter, or maybe volunteer if you don’t have funds. It can help a lot to feel like your contributing meaningfully to society and your community, and jobs may pay the bills, but don’t always provide that sense of meaning and contribution.

7. Practice gratitude. Spend some time thinking of the things you appreciate and are grateful for, the good things, even just small stuff.

None of this advice is particularly specific, but it’s mostly worked for me. Dunno what else I can suggest. You sound stressed and possibly burned out, so take some time to find your stressors that are triggering this feeling of being overwhelmed and “over it” and try to focus on the good and meaningful things.

I use utterly unique and very long passphrases for the most important stuff (banking, mortgage servicing, email, etc.), 2FA for those and most other things, and just throwaway crap passwords for things I don’t care about (web forums and most everything else).

Basic headset would be good for sim racing.

Not sure about the TV show but I’m pretty sure the comic spans over 100 years.

I posted this on your other thread in the rant community, but will add it again here in case others might be interested in some of the books:

———

Consider more mature / adult oriented series, and literature. Marvel and DC will always appeal to the status quo.

Try Image comics. Spawn started adult and things go on from there. Tons of shit goes down including the end and rebirth of the world. Savage Dragon has run on so long that characters who weren’t even born when the series started are grown adults with kids, and the main character is literally dead (not comic book dead, just dead and gone).

In books there’s stuff like Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman, Murs Lafferty’s Playing For Keeps, Paul Tobin’s Prepare to Die! (a somewhat vulgar example at times but also hilarious, the hero’s power is to take a year off someone’s life by punching them. Most villains just surrender when he shows up, and rarely want to fight him twice).

Also good is Marion G. Harmon’s Wearing the Cape series, wherein time passes, crazy shit goes down, heroes get hurt, die, retire, etc. Starts with the main character at 17 I think, but as of the current book she’s well into her 20s and married. This one is a mix of junior and adult capes, where superheroes are state and government sponsored as a legal requirement.

Fuckers.

Phrasing.

It’s not necessarily about the devices. Kobo books are very easy to remove DRM from, and don’t require owning a physical Kobo device or their app to do so. All it requires is two Calibre plugins. And EPUB is not a proprietary format, unlike AZW3 and KFX.

Also, I might be wrong, but it seems Kobo has a lot more DRM free books in general, compared to Amazon.

Kindle has always required either the Kindle app or an actual physical Kindle to de-DRM.

Might be too late. Winterbreak hasn’t worked since 5.18.1 and the latest firmware is 5.18.5. If you’ve been updating your firmware normally, jailbreak has been unviable since around April or May, at least for the 11th and 12th gen devices.

To be fair, if you OCR the pages via camera, you haven’t actually circumvented DRM. That means it’s a completely legal backup, as the DRM on the original file was untouched and unaltered. This definitely does fall under fair use.

Not entirely true. E-ink is trademarked by the e-ink company, sole manufacturer of e-ink displays.

https://trademarks.justia.com/788/55/e-78855402.html

That part isn’t Amazon-related.

Amazon is full of shit. EPUBs only work by using send-to-Kindle which converts it to a file that works (either AZW3 or KFX. Despite the misinformation, EPUBs do not work on Kindle, except if you jailbreak, as you can then use KOReader to read them natively.

That last point is salient, as it means the hardware supports the format just fine. Amazon intentionally does not directly support EPUBs in their software.

Eww gross.

The cultists will follow his demands and anyone sane will cast a vote elsewhere. I don’t see how this changes that.