I built a gaming PC this week. Took me two evenings, including the time needed to troubleshoot some issues with booting it for the first time, and installing the OS.

Having never done it before, I was pleasantly surprised with how straightforward it was.

It is a birthday gift for my fiancée.

I am like you, I often don't really want to do anything for my birthday. It actually makes me dislike my birthday somewhat, because it feels like a waste of the special occasion to not do anything.

Last year I went to a spa for a few days with my fiancée for my birthday. That ended up being a good birthday.

15 years is barely any time at all. We're talking about a totally new, unprecedented concept of money, in a world where most people have never considered why money even exists in the first place.

I don't really know yet. I'm at the age where I'm thinking about having children, and I suppose they will be my legacy. I want to raise them to be better, happier, more successful than me (I think that's the ultimate goal with children, to shape them into better people than you are yourself).

That's what I'll leave behind: people who are better than me, and who hopefully want to have children of their own who are in turn raised to be better still.

here's a picture of my bonsai as promised: it hasn't grown much over winter, but it will certainly need pruning within the next few weeks.

Definitely get a kick out of replaying Cyberpunk 2077. Have to give it a few months between replays, but there are a lot of builds and so many ways to approach the missions that it always feels new.

On my third playthrough I found, totally by accident, a whole new section of a mission that I'd never seen before, and completing it made a major change to one of the storylines.

I will take a picture of it when I get home

My other half takes the lead on our garden. She has a small herb garden in our kitchen, and has some seedlings for vegetables that will soon be planted outside. This year she has also started taking an interest in growing flowers to try and help our local insect populations.

I help out, and I like growing gourmet mushrooms. Last year I grew three varieties of oyster mushrooms in our second bedroom. This year I want to try growing shiitake and lions mane as well.

We have several indoor plants too. A big Amaryllis which has been going strong since Christmas, and I have a small bonsai that I tend to. Several cacti and succulents too.

while the potential social utility of religion might not depend on it's "truthfulness", the actual ability of religion to provide benefits to society does depend on it's "perceived truthfulness" to some degree.

taking myself as an example, I'm not religious, never have been. in fact, I'm fairly convinced that it's all just mythology. no matter how good of a case you could make for the social utility of a religion, it's unlikely to convince me that the religion is actually true. that limits the social utility of the religion because at least one member of the society has a high barrier to adopt it as a personal moral guide or philosophy.

in this regard, the social utility of religion does depend on it's truthfulness (or at least, on its ability to appear truthful). an untruthful religion is necessarily fragile in its capacity to permeate a society homogenously and persistently, because once the seeds of doubt are sown, the validity of the religion as truth will always be questioned, and it therefore is unlikely to be fully adopted by everybody in the society. a society with various different religions, and a mix of religious and non-religious groups will not gain the benefits of a society that has a single religion.

My other half and I are hoping to become expectant parents this year. Don't have any other goals, I suspect once there is a baby on the way we will find ourselves with totally new priorities.

what's the counterargument to this? I know that the "protect the children" argument is rubbish, but how do you refute it without making yourself sound like a pedo-apologist?

the security isn't to stop the bank losing money. it's to stop criminals from gaining money.

if the bank loses the cash they can just print more, so there's no issue for them. but, they can't allow us plebs to get huge amounts of cash without working for it. only they have that privilege.

shitcoins you can live in

don't suppose you know which episode? I'd be very interested to listen to it.

Slow down, breathe, and don't be afraid of stopping talking to think or take a sip of water.

Nervous speakers feel the need to fill silence with filler words (umm, err, etc), or will ramble on quickly with their speech.

Confident speakers will embrace silent moments and allow them to exist naturally. In fact, allowing moments of silence can be very useful because it gives you a chance to take a deep breath, or to have a quick sip of water, or just collect your thoughts, whilst simultaneously giving your audience chance to digest your words and reflect.

Mosquito and black widow spider, because nature isn't quite terrifying enough already

Nightclubs are absolutely awful. In my mid twenties and I've already grown out of them.

any ride at a theme park involving water. why the hell would anybody want to go on a log-flume, for example? what a stupid idea getting yourself soaked in water while fully clothed, then having to spend the rest of the day slightly damp.

Get a refurbished mini pc and install Linux. I got a Lenovo think centre, 8th gen intel i3, 8gb ram, 512gb SSD for £80. installed Debian on it. attached some usb hard disks, now it's a server.

far more powerful than a raspberry pi and barely more expensive.

Isn't this mistakenly assuming that bitcoin is only used when it is moved?

I use bitcoin every day, by leaving it exactly where it is.

Defence stocks won't go up or down based on whether I invest in them. If I invest, it won't prolong the wars, and of I don't invest, it won't cut them short.

The death and destruction is happening anyway and will continue to happen. Why shouldn't I make money off that?

It's not like I'm even making money from the violence, I'm just making money from the movement of a number on a screen that's somehow connected to a company that builds the tools of the violence.