I miss the days when the obnoxious fireworks were illegal in my state :sigh:

This year, Sacramento upped the fine to $1,000 for the first firework, $2,500 for the second and $5,000 per firework after that. If you lit a firework on city property, such as a park or a school, the fine goes up to $10,000 each. There’s no limit to how many fines you can be issued.

“If we see multiple fireworks being used at a single property, we can stack the violations based upon how many fireworks they’re using,” SFD Fire Marshal Jason Lee told KCRA. “So, it could be thousands of dollars per location.”

Hell yeah. Keep me awake till 3 am with your constant “boom boom boom”, that’s gonna cost ya. The only thing that would make this story better is if after a certain threshold, they bring in armed Predator drones.

If I’m coming off a bit cranky, it’s because I’ve barely slept in 4 days.

I tried a true dumb phone but was breaking out my laptop too much for everyday tasks (dumb phones these days can do hotspot).

The flip phone I have runs Android 11, so I have the bare minimum necessary chat apps, email, GPS maps, and such. The main draw is that those work well enough, but anything more than that is possible but very frustrating. That’s kind of what the Minimal is about: e.g. yeah, you can watch YouTube videos on it, but you won’t want to.

Then, when the detox period is up and you’re fully off the addiction, you can get the standard phone back.

That’s kinda what I did. I used my flip like a true dumb phone for 30 days as a challenge and then un-dumbed it a little bit back to where only my basic needs were met and nothing more. I assumed I’d have rushed back to my old smartphone, but after breaking a bunch of habits, I found I didn’t really want to. Plus, I really missed T9 texting as weird as that sounds lol.

I was that guy lol

A few of my friends were in a band in college and played at a bunch of local/regional dives. I was the light and sound guy if the venue didn’t have their own, so I was at most of their shows.

It wasn’t part of their set, but they did keep Free Bird up their sleeve and would play it when someone shouted it. If no one did, I’d step up and yell “Play some Free Bird!” in my most exaggerated southern drawl.

They Might Be Giants - Istanbul (Not Constantinople)

Yeah the marketing for it was lost on me. I already digitally detoxed last year when I switched to the flip phone I’m currently using, so I ignored the sales pitch and just looked at it from the cool hardware perspective and mostly reasonable price.

Credit where it’s due, though: I tried unsuccessfully to just uninstall the time sink apps from my regular smartphone and always ended up just reinstalling them. It took using a device that couldn’t feasibly run those (plus a weaning-off period) for me to fully let go. Seems like that is what the marketing is trying to target.

For me, touching grass is pretty much quite literally that. I spend spring through autumn outside as much as I can just keeping the grass mowed, maintaining the landscaping, and generally just doing something barefoot in the dirt (or, as much as I can be on my 1/3 acre in the suburbs lol).

“Touching grass” generally just means going and doing something, anything, besides doom scrolling. Or, at least that’s how I’ve always interpreted it.

In the winter when I can’t do the literal interpretation of “touch grass”, I try to focus on my hobbies.

How do people just be so chill about all this? Am I overreacting? Are they underreacting? What even is the healthy about of fear to have?

Little bit of A, little bit of B. People around here will be quick to tell you differently, but you can’t be in fear/rage mode 24/7/365. Look for the good things that are happening. Strengthen your connections with the good people in your life. Take more naps. Unsubscribe from or hide news/politics communities for a few days or even log off of Lemmy entirely for a bit (I swear, some people here make it their mission to keep people constantly raging about something).

Focus on what you can do/change and try not to think/worry about the things you can’t (in before the usual response: no, this doesn’t mean ‘bury your head in the sand’ or forget about those things entirely).

Bottom line is you gotta take care of yourself and find a way to look away from the horrors of the world once in a while; the good is still there.

Former carnivore current lacto-ovo vegetarian except I’m lactose intolerant lol. I’ll occasionally roll the dice with cheese if the dish is tempting enough but I generally avoid dairy due to the GI distress.

A few times a year I’ll cheat and just eat whatever I want, so that’s where the cheat day list comes in. I’ll pick a few things off the list and have at it. I just added this to that haha.

I can’t eat any of that, but holy crap it looks delicious. I’ll add this to my list of candidates for my next cheat day though.

I honestly don’t think they’d tell me, but I’d also be interested to know. Fingers crossed they have some stock on hand for the occasional replacement.

It does have a physical keyboard, too. Sadly can’t give it much of a review given the circumstances, but it does have a good feel and seems like it would be pleasant to type on.

Yeah, I have a ticket in with support but haven’t heard back yet. I did ask specifically about the turnaround time for a replacement. Hopefully that’s a reasonable amount of time. I definitely don’t want $400+ tied up until the next batch ships in September.

Mostly the e-ink display and the QWERTY keyboard.

By its nature, it’s not great for doom scrolling, TikTok, or videos (the major time sinks with most phones). Those aren’t my use-cases anyway; I’m more of a reader than a watcher so I figured this would be like a supercharged version of my Kobo (which I love) that has a physical keyboard (which I have missed terribly in smartphones).

Edit: Plus, its 4:3 e-ink display and keyboard just scream “install Termux on me!” Also planned to use it as a nice portable SSH terminal like I used to have back when smartphones had slide-out keyboards.

I’m rocking an aging Cat S22 Flip right now and have been trying to figure out what to replace it with. The Minimal Phone seemed like exactly what I wanted. Sad that it arrived DOA and am probably not going to bother replacing it; waiting weeks for something that arrives DOA is a hard thing to recover from.

Well, I don’t even know what to say to that. Except that in Puerto Rico, a McFlurry it’s called a Señor Flurry.

I mean, she intentionally chose “Night Bird” because she knew he couldn’t play it. Even in the episode proper, she’s was trolling masterfully lol.

That’s amazing. I can’t believe that’s real, lol.

Eh, maybe if Riker belted it out in Spanish lol.

🎵Y en conclusion, tu eres mi ilusión 🎵

3 day weekend, 4 days of yard work to catch up on b/c of the recent rains.

https://lemmy.ca/post/46655208