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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Love ballroom dancing, and especially east coast swing is my jam. Unfortunately no regular social dances in my area but I go when there’s one available. It’s really fun and playful, great way to meet new people and good exercise. Equipment cost is basically a pair of shoes. I joke about dressing up in a dress and heels for my workouts.





  • Posted most of this in another thread but I’m glad to help share my tricks. I have managed to nearly eliminate Amazon entirely from our lives for the past two years. I usually find things by searching what I want to buy on DuckDuckGo and then adding “-amazon”, “-etsy”, “-walmart”, “-temu” and “-pinterest” as search modifiers.

    A lot of little shops are perfectly legit, but watch out for:

    Things being ridiculous bargains. Small shops will almost always be more expensive due to higher overheads and less bulk

    Too much variety in product (unless they’re a marketplace with 3rd party vendors). A legit shop will have inventory that makes sense together in its theme. If they sell everything from bubblebath to uranium they’re either probably not actually selling it or drop shipping it.

    Pictures that look like they come from lots of different sources, or no consistency in images. If they don’t have their own pictures of products or standards of presentation that’s suspicious

    Some general recs:

    For anything electronic or computer related: B&H Photo or Microcenter

    For music stuff: Sweetwater, but there’s a lot of great small music stores, or you can use a marketplace like Reverb

    For clothes: if you have any clothes you already enjoy, go directly to their brand website. If you don’t, go to local secondhand shops and touch, handle and try on some clothes to see them in person. I’ve discovered some brands I like by finding something in a thrift store that was well made but not my size or preferred color.

    For house repair and DIY stuff: we order from a local building supply store, but there’s also hardwareandtools.com, 1stoplighting, Waysource, Lightbulbs.com, Timothy’s Toolbox etc.

    For food items, local grocery stores often offer online shopping and delivery. If it’s a specialty item or imported the import companies sometimes have their own websites. There’s also Hive or GroveCo for some granola type B Corp goodness

    For tea, coffee and spices, Adagio and its sister websites

    For super fast, need it now shipping, Target has a lot of the same things Amazon does and even does same day delivery for an extra fee for certain items.

    For something hard to find you can’t find another site for, try Ebay.

    I do business with all sorts of independent retailers and have only had good experiences with them. These are sites that I’ve personally bought from but there are a lot of smaller sites just trying to make a place for themselves on the internet


  • Really enjoyed the whole series, and when I heard about the adaptation I was psyched. It’s a very cinematic series that is begging for adaptation. While there’s definitely a lot of deadpan humor in the books, the trailer seems a lot more “whacky” than it should be. Hopefully they’re just playing it up for the trailer. I was also hoping for a more androgynous/NB murderbot but I could be won over. Either way, I’ll definitely be watching