“half-chewed thoughts” ooooh another delightful turn of phrase I’m adding to my armoury collection.

You haven’t been to enough regions of England mate. I’m only slightly joking when I say it can get bad. Not “it’s a difficult to understand dialect” but “how the hell did you even make it through the state school system?” bad. Genuinely some of the first generation immigrants speak better English than some of the locals.

Source: grew up in one of these regions.

I can’t comment for the whole Anglosphere and I certainly won’t comment on NI, Wales, and Scotland, but for England:

Pick any point on the map and move in any direction. As you move, if the average wage increases, English proficiency increases and vice versa.

I’d say at the lowest level equivalent is France and the highest level equivalent is Denmark.

I love Hobbes

Why do I get the feeling this kind of logic is used by modern day economists to justify inflation?

Usually in the form of asking questions:

1. “Does this task take 5 minutes to do and do you have 5 minutes to spare?”

If the answer is yes, then just do it. It has helped me keep things tidy a bit better rather than spending a full day cleaning up everything. Now, if tasks get left, rather than a full day cleaning & tidying it’s only an hour or so.

My space being tidier has brought me some much needed stress relief.

2. “Do you need this item right now? Can it wait until the end of the month when you get paid?”

Struggling with impulse purchases so this question has helped me stop spending as recklessly though I do relapse sometimes but nowhere near as bad as I was.

3. “Got paid? Great! Have you money-potted your paycheck?”

Further aiding my financial responsibility efforts, every time I get paid I use my bank’s money-pot feature to portion it out to make sure rent, bills, phone, food, transport, subscriptions, activities, etc. are budgeted appropriately. The rest is stuffed into savings to resist the temptation to spend it.

4. “What would a healthy and active person do?”

To lose weight and improve my fitness, everytime I want to get something unhealthy for lunch or dinner I ask “would someone who’s trying to lose weight eat that?” or “would a healthy person chose that fizzy drink or have water instead?”. On my way home from work I go to the gym and on the days when I don’t feel like it I ask “Would someone who’s active skip going to the gym? Sure they would if they’re feeling unwell and sick, are you feeling ill and sick? Ok you’re tired, but can you at least do 5 minutes on the treadmill?” because I don’t want to be breaking that habit that has been going really well for the last 8 months.

Honestly at the moment my life has been a bit of a rollercoaster so I’ve not been asking myself these questions and been slipping on the good habits recently, speaking of which…

5. “Did you keep the habits up? No, that’s ok you stumbled a bit there. Now what small changes can you make to make the good ones easier to do and the bad ones harder to do?”

At the end of the day, I’ll take the path of least resistance so I’ve got to make sure that path is the one that will lead me to the outcomes I want. I’ll be having a think about these this weekend because I am determined to get back on track, so I’m going to sit myself down and work through it like a friend would.

Which leads me to the final question:

6. “Would a friend talk/act that way to you?”

I struggle with self-confidence, self-esteem, and self-worth. Some days I really feel like I just have no value and the self-loathing is immense so when I get overly critical and verbally/physically beat myself up I try to hold onto a moment of calm and ask that question to myself. I don’t need to answer it because I know the answer and just need a moment to just breathe and chill to try and break the negative thought spiral.

Even though we call bread rolls something different, I think we can both agree: London’s shite.

Ay! Lancashire finally gets acknowledged in a meme! Suck it Yorkshire, we got one now!

Excellent, thank you! I just had a quick flick through and found several that I love so I’ll be saving them for when I next do some interior decorating when I get my own place, that Solar Butterfly will definitely be going where my houseplants will live 😊

This is really cool, a mixture of steampunk autometa and solarpunk vibes. Excellent work OP, do you do prints?

(quickly hides cape and twirly mustache)

I have no idea what you’re talking about officer

Well is this about permanent magnets loosing their functionality or the whole concept of magnetism just vanishing?

One puts us back to a steampunk technological ceiling the other means the universe pops out of existence; electricity, magnetism, and light are closely linked so removing one is likely to just break reality.

As en electronics engineer I’m going to “Yes But…” this and say that the lower the voltage/current you’re trying to manipulate the more concentration it requires to do it without over-voltaging the components you’re trying to manipulate and frying the circuitry.

So whilst this would be possible you’d have to:

1. Hold all the cores, ALU, etc. in the CPU at the current state that they’re in

2. Then spend time flipping the bits (not one at a time but like a whole 32 bit number) required to represent your instructions.

With enough practice and meditation you get a “feel” for the instructions and can do this but it takes time. I think this is fair as once you’ve learnt a CPU architecture most of the machine instructions are the same and it’s just a matter of getting them to run in the right order.

This way you don’t start out overpowered and there’s a high skill ceiling.

(I may or may not be writing a book around this already and have thought about it a lot haha)

Rather than listing all of the ways modern life and society would collapse it’d be easier to just say this:

Your ability to understand the world would in an instant be limited to the people that immediately surround you and you’d better quickly think of a way to find a clean water source, some land, grab an “Agriculture for Dummies” book, and some form of weapon to defend your new homestead with your new tribe.

Technopathy. Being able to sense and manipulate electronics/electricity flows to “hack” computers and less smart hardware by waving my hands and “wishing” the outcome I wanted would make my life so much easier.

I could charge a good rate for my ability and my learnt knowledge as well take down huge tech companies.

THANK YOU! I’m slowly getting a widow’s peak and desperately want the full Riker beard before I lose my hairline. I’ll see if can get some of that stuff!

Oh that sounds so much better, saying females makes you sound like a Ferengi but saying females makes you sound like Antonio Banderas, and I know which I’d prefer.

Does the Alucard at least say “Bitches love cannons”?

Honestly, pass me a shovel, we’re gonna make lending money to this bastard the most profitable decision she ever made!