damn, hearing it from someone else hits different. sometimes i yearn for the closeness of intimate friendships but the anxiety at the vulnerability of expressing a genuinely held opinion wont let me do anything else

sorry, ive never left a comment like that before and didnt realize it would look off. thanks!

aside from some of the more obvious choices (rushdie, wallace, mccarthy, morrison):

don delillo, esp. underworld and white noise

ted chiang, esp. exhalation

marilyn robinson, esp. housekeeping

denis johnson, esp. jesus’ son and tree of smoke

colson whitehead, esp. the intuitionist and the nickel boys

and while relatively new so maybe not at the same status as some other writers, jamil jan kochai and nana kwame adjei-brenyah will be making lists like these in the future if they keep writing the way they have.

there is a website for a pizza place in seattle whose website does this, maybe you can get some inspiration. dinos

could be worse

i shop bulk as much as i can, eat oatmeal for breakfast daily, and after i had my gall bladder removed i got in the habit of eating 2-3oz portions of animal protein no more than 5 times a week. i spend a bunch of time in the kitchen every week but it definitely softens the blow. it also helps that i have a couple of cheap staple meals i can make for less than $5 per serving.

i also shop around for value. i live near 4 different grocery stores so i dont spend a lot of time doing it, but i do make a run to grocery outlet every month in order to get discounts on bigger items but it can be hit or miss.

i am desperately praying for a pineprinter

i imagine theres a lot of overlap.

i do understand your perspective. i have avoided social media for the last 15 years, and had only interacted on reddit very rarely before moving to lemmy, so it may be that i am less disillusioned, but it seems to me that the better the information, the less negative discourse seems to surround it. the article in the post will definitely incite a lot of negative feelings here, since it seems to confirm a lot of the beliefs of those who feel disenfranchised by the state of the world. so yea, the deck seems pretty well stacked against hope, at least on this thread.

anyway, i appreciate you getting back to me. its nice to hear some solid figures, and that does definitely give me some hope. $10k is achievable, and a 4% down payment is probably the most reassuring figure here, as a lot of the advice i hear is closer to 8-10% which make it just that much further out of reach as id have to save up twice as much or purchase a home worth half as much which is impossible in my current market.

if you could indulge me just a bit further, how far away from a metropolitan area are you? my wife has always grown up in cities and while she does like to visit more rural areas she isnt too keen on relying entirely on a car to get around, or having to own two cars to get by, but like i said before, im curious about any sacrifices wed have to make for that sort of lifestyle so, you know, if thats how it has to be then thats how it has to be.

i replied to your comment because it did give me a bit of hope that it was probable for someone without a six figure salary. i was just looking for some context to see what kind of sacrifices to my lifestyle and living situation i might have to make to achieve that. if it came off as passive or judgmental i am sorry. that was not my intention. i am glad you tried to give others hope that it can be done, but without a clear path to a goal, however conditional, it doesnt end up helping very much.

i dont mean to pry, but i have been trying to work out how i can do this for myself so id be interested how you were able to do it.

im not asking for your life story, and obviously share what youre comfortable with online, but some helpful info would be your salary range, location and cost of home, and down payment (even as just a percentage of the total home cost).

other useful contextual information would be how long it took you to save up for the down payment, whether you did so while paying rent, if you had any other assitance with the down payment (personal loan, gift from family, borrowed against your 401k, etc), state of the home (move-in ready/fixer upper/built yourself), whether you used the loan to acquire furniture, etc.

sorry if thats asking too much but id like to use you as a data point, even if just for myself, and i do need a bit of data to do that.

“applicants must be without decent, safe, and sanitary housing” is that a hard stop or is there some flexibility on that condition? im not trying to pry into your previous situation, but that makes it sound a bit more dire than the average renter.

ive had a new company ipad for almost two years now and i keep getting reminder emails to return the old one which only requires me to drop it off, unpackaged, at a ups store, one of which is a block away from a grocery store i go to often.

ive made a fallout style playlist and my daughter has been loving these songs:

fairley holden - papas getting old

charlene arthur - just look, dont touch, hes mine

boswell sisters - everybody loves my baby

senseless pedantry in general is one of the things that annoy me most. i first started realizing my hatred for reddit when someone replied to a comment where i said ‘bury the lead’ with ‘lede*’ and i was annoyed enough to not comment for a long time after that. im not a 19th century newspaper columnist so unless youre trying to save the barely literate farmers on computer science subreddits from a minor misunderstanding, thats a comment better left unmade.

there is this film from the late 80s called miracle mile about a guy who answers an incoming call at a payphone outside a diner in los angeles, and its a panicked military officer who dialed the wrong phone number who says he just launched americas nukes and that a nuclear retaliation will hit american soil in about an hour. a lot of the film is spent without being fully convinced of the authenticity of the phone call and the film has a slightly dreamlike pacing which makes it feel pretty tense, and theres a scene that stuck with me where the main character has a nosebleed in the diner after the phone call. i feel like even as far as cult films go this one is a little under the radar and, even though its not a life altering film, probably deserves a little more credit than it gets.

dang, i hoped it would be rock and roll mcdonalds on loop

i tend to be long-winded and i dont often have a good sense for what information is explicitly necessary, so i have started a fair few comments that ive lost steam on and convinced myself werent worth posting. i also have not participated in social media for about ten years, so i dont have the sense that i can just casually post something without it being particularly valid, but when i do post its after reassuring myself that what i say doesnt always have to be life-altering.

so yea, probably 40% of the time i bail if i start thinking about it more than i should, which is easy to do when i have to proofread so much due to florisboard not having autocorrect.

yea munch was featured in some crossover between homicide and the original law & order, so when homicide got canceled in 99 they offered richard belzer a spot as munch on svu since it was in the works at the time and he was already in universe

not to mention starting detective john munch’s career