Kind of, but not much, certainly not anything like a steady income.

I gave one of those apps a try that give you rewards for installing and playing games. After a couple of years I earned up enough points to get about a $50 gift card. None of the games on it are amazing, but some of them are passably entertaining when you just need to kill some time. They’re all, of course, loaded with ads.

This is more of theoretical money at this point, but years ago I bought a small quantity of Bitcoin (like less than 0.1 BTC) and I’ve just kind of been sitting on that. It was about $20 when I bought it, it’s worth quite a bit more than that now. If I were to cash out now, it wouldn’t exactly be life-changing money by any stretch of the imagination, but it might get me a crappy used car, or maybe offset the cost of a nice vacation for me and my wife.

I do the Google opinion reward surveys, which basically pays out as credit for the android app store. Every so often it adds up to enough for me to spring for some paid app I wouldn’t have bought otherwise, or maybe a book or movie or something.

If you want to count it as online, for a while I did taskrabbit, basically an app to get hired doing odd jobs for people, putting IKEA furniture together, yard work, hanging shelves, etc. That wasn’t a bad side gig if you’re handy, but I don’t have the free time for it these days and it was kind of a pain figuring it out on my taxes at the end of the year.

Not me, but I have a friend who was a stripper for a while, when she got out of it, she actually made a decent little chunk of money selling her used stripper heels because some foot fetish people are all about that. She figured out that it could be feasible to just buy some heels, wear them around for a few weeks, and sell them for a profit. She decided it was more trouble than it was worth for her but something like that is potentially an option as well, pretty sure used shoes aren’t the only thing with a weird fetish secondary market you could take advantage of if you know where to look to sell them.

First name is ultimately derived from Hebrew, it’s one of the most common names in the English-speaking world, and variations of it are similarly popular in basically every place where Abrahamic religious have a foothold.

It’s fine. I’ve met plenty of people with my name, I don’t particularly like or dislike it, it is just my name.

My last name is kind of interesting. It’s ultimately of Italian origin, but sometime after arriving in America someone basically decided that it sounded too Italian, dropped the vowel at the end, swapped out about half of the remaining letters, and created a new name that kind of sounds similar to the original.

Looking at it, you’d probably never peg it as an Italian name. Sometimes people look at it and try to pronounce it as if it were French, but that’s not how we pronounce it.

I rather like my last name. I probably use it more than my first. It’s got a nice ring to it, it’s unique, there’s rarely going to be anyone else around with the same name to avoid confusion, it’s got some fun family history to it, and as far as I can tell, it doesn’t exist anywhere in the world outside of my family.

Unfortunately, my family is pretty uncreative with male names, if you look at the top 100 names in the US from the last 100 years, my entire family tree can basically be found in the top 10 or 20. I’m aware of at least one other person with the same first and last name as me and there’s probably a good handful more, and there’s a solid chance they have the same middle name as me too.

I rarely see the extended family so not a huge deal.

I don’t normally recognize specific users online except for a handful of novelty accounts. For all I know, I’ve only ever talked to 3 people on Lemmy. I don’t generally look at usernames, and certainly don’t remember them.

So, my dude, I think it says something that I recognize you. I hit about the 1st sentence of your second paragraph and went “is this that guy again?” And sure enough, you were.

I’m not saying this to belittle you in any way, please go on being your sensitive, submissive, gender-nonconforming self. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

But you’re on here every couple of weeks posting along these same lines, so I can tell that this is really eating at you at a pretty deep level, and while I don’t know what the best solution for you is, it might be professional help, it might be as simple as getting out more, it might be anything in-between, I’m pretty confident that just posting about it on here is probably not going to find you the solutions your seeking.

I’ve usually seen “double bass” used to refer to the string instrument, also called the contrabass, upright bass, or just a bass.

I think you’re thinking of paywithfour.com

Which seems to be a standard by-now-pay-later company, which isn’t necessarily a scam, but those companies are very predatory with excessive fees and interest rates and such so they certainly feel scammy. I didn’t do a deep dive on them so I can’t say if they’re necessarily any worse or less legit than any other company (or maybe even better)

But four.com seems to be some sort of enterprise authenticator/SSO company . The website is weird because it doesn’t really tell you much about them, it just kind of has a link to request an invite to sign up

I figure there’s two main options with that. Either they’re sort of a fly by night company just sort of squatting on the domain hoping to profit off of selling it and just have the shell of a website up to give an air of legitimacy

Or they’re just really focused on their enterprise customers and see no reason to really have a public-facing webpage, either your company uses them and you need to log in to manage your account, or you have no real business with them. Maybe they’re sort of a legacy system that a parent company is keeping around to fulfill a contract, maybe they’re getting enough business from in-person sales and word-of-mouth and don’t feel the need to risk overextending themselves by marketing more aggressively

Or of course it could be something nefarious, but without looking into them too much nothing on the face of the website gives me any particular reason to think that.

Counterpoint- why hasn’t blocking been more common?

I’m a millennial, so I’ve basically grown up with the internet. Blocking has been a feature on basically any website, app, etc. that lets you interact with other people for as long as I can remember.

And I’ve never been afraid to use it. I’ve blocked probably hundreds of people across countless platforms over the last 2 decades or so, and I think my Internet experience has been better for it.

When I was in school, and I assume still to this day, one of the big things that always seemed to have people’s feathers ruffled was “cyberbullying” and other sorts of online harassment.

Now I’ll admit, somehow I ended up a reasonably well-liked, maybe even popular dude, (no idea how my weird, antisocial, probably-autistic ass pulled that off) so I was never really the target of it myself.

But it always baffled me how people let it be a thing. A whole lot of those problems always seemed like they could have been solved by just hitting the block button.

Not all of them of course, but a lot of them. Blocking someone of course doesn’t stop them from talking about you to someone else, but at that point a lot of it can just be out of sight and out of mind.

Back when I still had a Facebook, I had probably half of my town blocked because they were always posting dumb shit in the local groups. I had a bunch of businesses blocked because they spammed advertisements everywhere. I had actual friends who I hung out with IRL blocked or at least unfollowed because they flooded my feed with shitposts. Half of my family was blocked because I just didn’t want to deal with them on social media. I preemptively blocked people I work with or otherwise knew casually because they don’t need to see what I’m doing online.

Luckily I don’t have it quite that bad I am just very uncomfortable with it.

Sprained my knee really badly once and the doctor used a giant syringe to drain some fluid after the swelling hadn’t gone down much after a couple weeks. Really didn’t like that, wasn’t even close to passing out, but can’t think I’ve ever been more uncomfortable.

Similarly I’ve also been on-scene with some pretty nasty injuries, and I work in 911 dispatch, I’m generally not bothered by too much.

I have 3

I cannot juggle. I don’t generally lack in hand-eye coordination (not that I’m overly-gifted with it either, but I’d generally say that I’m at least average,) and I understand the theory of it well enough, I’ve even been able to teach people to juggle successfully, it’s just that I, myself, cannot juggle.

I’m also a reasonably handy, technically-minded person, again not an absolute wizard, but if I crack a gadget open, with a couple Google searches and how-to guides, I can usually understand more or less how things work and how to fix them if they’re broken.

But something about sewing machines breaks my mind. There’s something going on right around the bobbin that just doesn’t make sense to my brain and doesn’t seem like it should work, but it apparently does, because I’ve successfully used a sewing machine and can confirm first-hand that they work.

Lastly, I don’t like needles. It’s not a horrible phobia that sends me running for the hills, but something about needles sleeves me out like nothing else. I can suck it up and get my necessary vaccines and such, but I do kind of have to give myself a little internal pep-talk first. It’s not a fear of pain, I have pretty solid pain tolerance and needles really don’t hurt that much at all, it’s specifically needles that weird me out. If there was an option to get my vaccines where a doctor would shank me with a scalpel and rub the vaccine into the wound, I’d absolutely go for it.

In no particular order, and not an exhaustive list

• The Big Lebowski
• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• Sin City
• Lord of The Rings Trilogy
• Star wars Original Trilogy & Rogue One
• Casablanca
• Mad Max Fury Road
• Arrival
• Pulp Fiction
• All the Studio Ghibli movies, but Especially Nausicaa, Princess Mononoke, My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited away, and Grave of the Fireflies
• Blazing Saddles
• Young Frankenstein
• Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life
• Monty Python & the Holy Grail
• Jurassic Park
• Rocky Horror Picture Show
• Blade Runner
• Blade Runner 2049
• Mary & Max
• Akira
• Rocky
• The Godfather 1 & 2, and at that point I guess you might as well watch 3 as well
• Rashomon
• Chinatown
• Jaws
• All quiet on the western front
• Psycho
• Kill Bill 1&2
• The Shawshank Redemption
• Forest Gump
• Fight Club
• The Matrix (just 1)
• Silence of the Lambs
• Taxi Driver
• Back to the future trilogy
• The Usual Suspects
• Apocalypse Now
• Indiana Jones Trilogy
• Dune parts 1&2
• The Shining
• Dredd
• Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
• The Room
• A Clockwork Orange
• Gone with the Wind
• V for Vendetta
• Trainspotting
• Fargo
• Ben Hur
• Children of Men
• Shoot 'em Up
• Logan *The Princess Bride
• Old Yeller
• John Wick series
• Most Disney/Pixar movies
• Most Don Bluth movies

Except for a few obvious spam posts, I’m pretty hard-pressed to think of any specific posts or comments I’ve seen that struck me as bots (although to be fair, I’m there may be some bias due to which communities I choose to follow)

There are, however, plenty of idiots, people who don’t speak fluent English, trolls and other people whose motivations may not be purely good-faith discussion, people who probably have various types of neurodivergence and/or mental health issues

And I could see some of those categories being very easily mistaken as a bot under a lot of circumstances.

1. Ethnic
2. Fusion

Figure that pretty much covers all of my bases.

I feel like 3d printing would probably be slower than just cutting them out by hand with an xacto knife, you can get a pretty good rhythm going and depending on what material you make it out of you can probably cut a few of them out at a time.

Also feels like a bit of a waste to make them out of plastic since it’s something most people would probably only use a couple of times then throw away, and even if you make it out of a recyclable plastic they probably couldn’t be recycled with paint residue (not even gonna touch on the plastic recycling debate right now)

I’d probably try calling around to a couple more print shops and such, maybe some art studios and maker spaces. May also be worth thinking outside the box, the maintenance department of some businesses might have a stencil cutter to stencil things onto their equipment, schools might have them (my mom worked in an elementary school, it wasn’t exactly a stencil maker, but they had a tool for cutting letters out of paper for art projects and such that might work for your purposes)

Short of a dedicated stencil maker (which is pretty pricey) a cricut or similar machine is probably your best bet. They’re not too pricey if you wanted to get one yourself, and don’t know what the arts and crafts scene is like in the EU but I feel like every artsy person in the US went nuts for them a couple years ago and most of the bigger arts and crafts stores around here have a whole aisle dedicated to them (much to my chagrin because they got rid of some other stuff I occasionally need to make room for them) so if you ask around you might be able to find someone who will let you use theirs.

It may also help to rephrase what you’re looking for, especially if you’ve been asking for die-cut templates. You might have better luck asking for stencils, or maybe asking if they have a cricut or vinyl cutter, or maybe even a laser cutter and just providing the file for them to cut out. There’s a chance the employees just aren’t really thinking about what their equipment can do and just know that they don’t have a specific stencil making machine.

A better term for what you’re looking for might be “stencil”

I don’t have any specific recommendations for companies, especially in the EU, I feel like a lot of print shops and sign companies could probably do it for you. If you want to DIY it, you could probably pick up some generic letter stencils from almost any hardware store to trace onto something and cut out yourself. Depending on what material you want it made out of you could probably get anyone with a cricut or similar machine to make one for you if your ok with something like paper or vinyl, or if you for some reason wanted it made out of metal or something else sturdier that a cricut could manage you could try asking around to local machine shops.

In my opinion, the lyrics tell a pretty straightforward story, no real need for metaphor

Someone releases a bunch of balloons into the sky, they get mistaken for enemy aircraft/missiles, and set off a war.

If you get more out of it with your interpretation, more power to you, but it feels like a bit of an unnecessary stretch though.

Ok, where do you get those 50 people?

Do you have 50 people sitting around on-call 24/7/365 just in case they need to go knock on everyone’s door?

Are you taking them off of other jobs to go do this? If this happens at 3AM on a holiday weekend, there’s probably a pretty good reason those other people are already on the clock, like maybe fixing whatever issue is causing the advisory.

Are we relying on volunteers? How are we going to get ahold of them to let them know, let alone guarantee that they’re actually going to show up.

We gonna mobilize the national guard to do it? How long is that gonna take to get going?

Maybe we’ll just press-gang the first 50 people we can get our hands on to do it. What could possibly go wrong?

But let’s say getting the people is a solved problem. How are they getting around? Not every area is easily walkable. Do we have 50 municipal cars on standby for them to use? Are we going to have additional people driving them around to the needed areas in vans? Are they using their personal vehicles and will need to be compensated for gas and mileage (not to mention probably an insurance nightmare for those people using personal vehicles for non-personal use)

I am very bad at remembering to clean my water bottles regularly, I have about 4 nalgene bottles and a CamelBak in fairly regular rotation, they get left in the car, sometimes with water in them, sometimes empty but rarely totally dry, often for days, weeks, or even moths at a time. I don’t drink water that’s been sitting in my bottles for that long, but I’ve never noticed any weird smells, scum, cloudiness, mold, etc when I go to empty them.

And I can’t say I’ve ever had an issue with mold or any other funkiness in any of my bottles.

And I think a lot of it is that I only put water in my bottles, no flavorings or anything else (except maybe occasionally iodine or other water purification products when I’m camping, which of course is just going to kill anything that would start growing in there otherwise)

I also usually (but not always) fill them with purified water to begin with.

The roads get better, the drivers get worse, there’s jughandles everywhere, they won’t let me pump my own gas, and there’s liquor stores that aren’t owned by the state.

Also I have to cross a river, and pretty much everything gets flatter.

For the other borders, mostly the same. One direction you start seeing more places serving crab, another has no sales tax, one is just boring and depressing, and the other unless you cross at some very specific places is mostly just woods and farms and shit that kind of blend into our own but with better roads.

Imagine the book as almost a Ken Burns style documentary made after the zombie war, going back and interviewing the people who were there and lived through it collecting their stories.

It’s been a while since I read it, but each chapter is a different person being interviewed telling their story, more or less in chronological order. The stories don’t really overlap directly with each other, but together they paint a great overall picture of the war from start to finish.

And it’s a good cross section of different people, soldiers, scientists, ordinary people, an astronaut who was stranded on the ISS for the duration of the war, etc.

I think everyone who read the book really wants it to be picked up as a mockumentary miniseries in that sort of style with “archival” footage with people being interviewed giving voiceovers and all the other usual documentary trappings.

And the Zombie Survival Guide is also a fantastic companion to it that is basically done as a, well, survival guide, that was distributed during the war, and is referenced once or twice throughout WWZ

Only half-jokingly, my suggestion te my wife is to have me cremated, then mix my ashes in with some concrete to make a life-sized statue of me.

Stick me on the front lawn and dress me up for holidays, put a pointy hat on me and make a giant lawn gnome, stick a bowl on my head to use as a bird bath, or dump me at a cemetery and let me be my own headstone, doesn’t really matter to me, I’ll be dead, I won’t care, but I figure she might as well be able to get a chuckle out of it, and maybe ruffle the feathers of some HOA Karen while she’s at it.

She actually really likes the idea. She wants to have my statue posed like Buddy Christ from Dogma.

And maybe go ahead and do the same with the ashes of any dogs I’ve had and stick them right next to me. Better than having them take up space on the mantle forever, and they’re more deserving of a monument than I’ll ever be.

My family has some experience with this

My mom’s cousin was a wonderful person, her husband, however, was an enormous piece of shit in just about every way you could imagine.

She got sick and died, he never had a funeral for her.

Then he up and died maybe a year or so later.

My mom was still listed as the executrix of their wills, so it fell on her to decide what to do with him.

And she decided on nothing. Let the coroner haul his body away and never claimed it.

After a while they cremate the remains, they hold onto them for a while to see if any other next of kin wants to claim them, then after a while they bury or scatter them somewhere if no one does.

I’m sure the exact specifics of how that all works varies a bit from place to place, but in general that’s gonna be an option. They can’t exactly force you to pay for a funeral you don’t want, and the local government has some plan on dealing with bodies no one wants to pony up for a funeral for (otherwise there’d be a lot of corpses of homeless people and such piling up in a freezer somewhere)