Before the election we will be preparing bugout bags for my nuclear family and establishing concrete plans to flee.

After the election, if Trump wins we will monitor and be ready. At the first sign of trouble we get out of dodge. I have the ability to get EU citizenship for my family if need be. In the meantime, my wife and I have skills that can get us the privilege to move into some countries based on their employment needs.

My family and I would have reasons to be targeted by white nationalists if they felt empowered. I have received semi-threatening letters from such people in the past.

I hate that we have to think this way, but we do.

Each kid and wifey could have individual Daddy/hubby attention at the same time. My yard and home would look immaculate because my ADHD task burnout could be overcome by calling in a new helper.

I could probably make bank and help improve the lot of humanity by allowing my duplicates to go through controlled medical and scientific testing.

At some point one of me would figure out how to leverage this ability for the absolute betterment of humankind. That would probably become a driving mission for the collective me at that point.

Generally, no, but it did last night. We had moved into a new house, and we were trying to tell Uber Eats which train station we were closest to so our delivery person could get off at that station before driving to our house.

We do not love near a train station. It was weird as dreams tend to be.

I use it almost daily, mostly for educational content. I really enjoy how much meaningful content people are producing there in easy-to-consume chunks.

I am also not surprised at how much the potential federal legislation in the US is getting characterized there as, “Ban TikTok.” As much as I enjoy the service, they are absolutely doing their best to spread their own misinformation.

The original Pizzaria Uno cream of broccoli soup from the 90s. It was maybe the perfect version of that soup.

Aaarugh! So you have any idea how many times I tried to force my phone to use the right word and still failed? I think my keyboard hates me.

This is a huge case of, “Yes, but . . . .”

Yes, exercise absolutely can and does help mental health. It helps me a great deal. That said, exercise requires some level of time, energy, and focus. The key is to find a form of exercise that you enjoy or at least do not mind. If going to the gym is exclusively a chore, you will more likely fail. If exercising brings some Internet inherent reward, you will more likely succeed.

I love lifting weights, but I did not have the mental energy to put together a program or figure out how to work around big physical issues after cancer. I paid a trainer to help, and that eliminated enough of the focus needed that going to the gym became fun. Now I am transferring to running my own program because I have learned enough that it is not as big of a mental load. Along the way my energy has also increased.

Contrast this with running. I hate running. It hurts my joints. It hurts my lungs. Getting outside and running should be easier than a trip to the gym, but it is actually much harder for me because there is no inherent reward. It just sucks, and it continues to suck as I get better at it.

So yeah, exercise is great for mental health, even if it is not a cure all. This only holds true once you find something you enjoy. If you think you enjoy nothing, you are most likely wrong. Keep looking. Keep trying. Maybe you like walking. Maybe you like a specific martial art. Maybe you like biking, but only on a stationary bike in your living room while binging your favorite shows.

Find something that you enjoy doing that fits well enough into your life. That way on the days you don’t want to start, you will anyway because you know it will be enjoyable once you are doing it.

I went through a period where I was under doctor’s orders to treat any fluid produced by my body as a biohazard. That meant any time I urinated I had to close the lid and flush twice. So yeah, there was no mellowing in that case.

Ooh, I actually know the answer to this! I had cancer a couple years ago, and it got really dicey for a bit. While my story has a good ending and I am now effectively cancer-free, I had to look the potential of death clear in the face and start making some concrete plans.

My answer is unequivocal - I would prepare my family for my untimely demise. My wife and I got together when we were young enough that we entered adulthood together and grew that way. There is no me and her - there is only us. This is not some creepy codependency thing. We just became adults whose emotional and mental shapes are highly complimentary. That happens when you are with someone longer than you were not. We also have kids for whom I am the primary caretaker and stay-at-home dad while she works. Both boys are autistic though you might not notice it, and I am their primary coregulator. My family needs me in ways that are not universally true across families.

Most of my plan can be summarized as follows:

• Prepare my wife for life without me. Ensure she has the basic skills that I have taken over in our lives. Impress upon her the notion that while she has been the love of my life, I sincerely hope I am but one of hers.
• Spend as much time with my kids as possible. Cement myself in their memories. Record messages and fatherly advice in writing and/or video for every major life event I can think of.
• Set up therapy and support services for my family once I die.
• Get my friends and family on board for specific forms of help as time goes on. People who want to help do nothing when they do not know what to do. They are more likely to follow through when told, “I know Jimmy really looks up to you. After I die, please take him out for some bonding time at least once a month. He is going to be lost without me, and Wife cannot be a masculine role model like I was.”
• Plan my funeral and write my obituary. Make it clear that any of this can be changed.
• Basically, do anything I can to prepare my family for life without me.

I know this is not terribly exciting, but it found that what I feared far more than death was the fate of my family without me there to care for them.

As a small child, I feared that humanity would go extinct. I knew the following:

• Species can go extinct, like the dinosaurs
• In many million years, the sun will expand to encompass the Earth
• If we do not invent interstellar travel before then, say goodbye to humanity like the dinosaurs.

I stayed up at night worrying about this. I was precocious in this very difficult way, and it was hard for my parents.

As a teen, this fear was somewhat replaced by an increased understanding of entropy and a fear of the eventual end of the universe.

As an adult, that fear has been somewhat replaced by an increased understanding of human nature and a fear that we will ruin ourselves before either other fear can come to pass.

Looking to the future, I see that my oldest wants to be an engineer for NASA and has the chops to pull that off of his interest maintains. My youngest compulsively helps people. Maybe there are enough people like the two I was blessed with. Maybe one day we can get off this rock and scatter like seeds on the wind. Maybe raising them right will be my small contribution to the continued success of humanity.

I use Lemmy for discussion and reading the thoughts of others, like I used to do with Reddit.

I am old enough that I can’t still use Facebook to check the lives of much of my friends and family. Discord is where I can chat with many of my younger friends.

YouTube gives me short video content for entertainment, and TikTok does the same for more serious topics.

I deep dive Wikipedia so regularly that my wife rightly insists we give at least $20 every time they ask for money.

You are streets ahead with this recommendation.

Friend, I feel this so hard. There are times a pizza should have this feature, but they are rare.

Sandwiches should have their contents rearranged so they each bite has exactly the same amount of filling. If that cannot be done, the bites with the least filling should be eaten first and those with the most should be saved for last.

I bristle on the inside when my kids want a slice of bread for breakfast. Toast is for breakfast, and bread is for other meals. I don’t even actually care about this, but my dad did when I was a little kid and I clearly internalized that lesson.

I always stress to my wife that this is not unethical at all. We are raising two autistic boys. That is a literally insanity-inducing level of non-stop effort. If we get to get on rides faster on the rare occasion we go to theme parks, that is not cheating the system. Our kids have needs, and they have the legal right to have those needs met. Any extra joy we get from not having to wait in absurd lines is easily offset by the other challenges we will face.

Oh, this is great. There may have been more results since I was working on a field project studying them, but to my knowledge we have absolutely no idea! They are not particularly well adapted to the cold, but their range keeps extending northward. This well predates the rapid climate change caused by humans, so we cannot use that as a reason. They are a bit of a mystery.

My guess would be that they are occupying a niche where limited brain and limb development (problems all marsupials face) are not limiting factors on success. Maybe their lack of a close genetic relation when surrounded by placental mammals gives them some pathogen resistance when scavenging? Those are just mildly educated guesses. When I was working with them we had no idea, and our field results were not at all enlightening.

I do not mean to be pedantic, but this is topic I love.

Marsupials do not fill a niche by virtue of their lack of placement. Instead, they have survived so long by virtue of their isolation.

It turns out that the adaptions required for marsupials to birth and raise young without a placenta make them inferior to placental mammals in almost every scenario. They get out competed and die off in almost every instance. South America had marsupials, not placentals, until it formed a land bridge with North America. What happened then? All the marsupials died off with the weird exception of the American possum. The placentals straight up out competed them across the board.

Australia has kept marsupials only because of its extreme isolation. When any type of placental mammal has been introduced to Australia, it has ruined the ecosystem and taken over the niche it fills.

Independent of humans, marsupials are a dying design. We just happen to live at a time when we can see that extinction in process. Yes, humans have sped it up by more rapidly introducing placental species, but we can see how it happened without human intervention as well.

For pots and pans, buy Demeyere. The Demeyere Apollo pots and pans I bought 21 years ago still look just about as good as the day I unboxed them, and I am rough on my cookware. I have a little weathering along the edge of the heart conductive disk on the bottom of some pans, but that is it.

They sit dirty too long and get crusty. They go right into my dishwasher. They fall out of my lower cabinet onto my tile floor all the time. None of this phases them. I bought them over two decades ago because I had an employee discount at a cookware store and the company rep classified them as, “dishwasher recommended.” As an avid home cook and occasional caterer, these pans, a Le Creuset Dutch oven, and my grandmothers’ cast iron are my daily workhorses.

You are going to pay through the nose for Demeyere pans, but they will last long enough for your kids to cook with them after you are gone. You can get their least expensive line of regular pans, cry once, and be good for life.

You might see used Demeyere indoor smokers, asparagus steamers, egg poachers, and other similarly oddball pans in online market places. Ignore those. They were a cheap line made in a different factory at one point. They are not the same quality. All of the regular style Demeyere pans (skillets, sauce pans, woks, sauciers, etc.) are excellent, and I would not hesitate to buy them used.

It was LARPing, but then I got clever. Once my wife was pregnant, it was only a matter of time. Now my kids have grown up in the hobby, and they love it as much as their old man.

I love living in a state where weed is legal commercially. I buy gummies at a dispensary down the road from me since it carries a brand with no residual pot flavor - my wife hates the taste of MJ. I get a tincture I like from a dispensary near my gym. Both make use of microemulsions to provide a fast acting high. When I was across the country in another state where it is legal, I could Google dispensaries, read reviews, and find one close to my hotel that people loved.

In states where it is legal, weed shops have become like any other specialty retail shop, and I am here for it.