I've tried lots of pens over the years. The ones I can remember:

• Conid Bulkfiller Regular
• Cross Aventura
• Jinhao 159, X450, (also whatever the Safari clone is, 777 I think?)
• Lamy 2000, 2000 Amber, Safari
• Montblanc 145, 146, 149, 320, 1912, Slimline
• Nakaya Decapod, Neo-Standard
• Parker IM
• Pelikan M200, M600, M800
• Platinum 3776, Preppy
• TWSBI 580, Eco, Vac 700
• Visconti Homo Sapiens Bronze Age, Dark Age
• Waterman Phileas Blue

I'm not much of a collector, so I have cycled through and gotten rid of almost all of these. I only have around ~10 now, just the ones that I really like, or are sentimental, or are just super unique. One brand that's escaped me is Sailor. I've read about the 21K nibs and how people fawn over them. I know there are die-hard Sailor supporters and it seems to mostly revolve around this nib. But, $300+ for a proprietary cartridge/converter that isn't made from unique materials seems like a lot.

So, if I was going to "try" Sailor, as a manufacturer, where does it make sense to start to see if I get it or not? Do people prefer the Realo (piston filled) variants? From what I can tell here and on /r/fountainpens people are mostly content with the C/C versions. So is it just the unique colors? Or is it just the 21K nib and nothing else matters?

/r/personalfinance was one of my more frequented subreddits and I find it pretty valuable. I figure I should try to help get the ball rolling over in the Fediverse and it seems like this is the most active substitute so far.

The "rule" as it were is that to have income in retirement broadly in line with your income before retirement, you need to hit 1x your salary by 30, 2x your salary by 35, 3x by 40, etc. This rule works well for people who 1) start working at 25 and 2) do not experience significant pay raises, as either of those things will set you significantly behind.

Ultimately I use this as a target for what my 401k contribution should be, since I'm already maxing a Roth IRA each year and my company match is fairly low so maxing that is easy. But I definitely can't afford to max the 401k, so I use this to help gauge where I really ought to be in between those bounds.

The way I calculate the target for a year is just sum up my gross income from paychecks for that year. This means it includes salary and bonus but not RSUs. The stocks are too volatile to make the accounting easy, and thus far haven't been a significant fraction of my income. Then, multiply by the factor for the age I turn in that year. It looks like this:

2023 of course are estimates, I won't know those real numbers until ~mid November. "Actual" is the reported balance of my Roth + 401k in Fidelity at the end of the first trading day in November.

A few explanatory features. I started my current job in 2018 but only worked about half that year. I only had a tiny rolled over 401k from a job in grad school. So I've had both reasonably large raises and obviously started super late (even for someone who went to grad school - but hey at least I got in-state tuition!).

It looks like I'm not doing too hot. I started late, wasn't contributing enough in 2018 and 2019 clearly, in 2020 I was saving for a house and finally got serious about contributing in 2020/2021. Maxed a Roth for the first time in 2021. If 2022 hadn't been so astonishingly terrible in the stock market I'd have been steadily gaining ground the entire time though. Now I'm contributing about 21% of my income and since the market is doing better this year I'm back to gaining ground again. I like the rule, even in my "worst case scenario" because it's fairly aggressive and keeps my from spending too frivolously.

So do you use the rule? How closely do you track it? Are you gaining or losing ground? How close to retirement are you?

What is a Grand Tour?

A Grand Tour originally refers to an extended journey through continental Europe, for educational purposes. These journeys were undertaken by wealthy young men as a rite of passage, who visited many historical and cultural sites along the way, seeking to expand their knowledge and appreciation of the classical arts.

Though there is no more need for the aristocracy to elevate themselves above the common people, the desire and effort to broaden one's horizons remains a noble purpose.

Grand Tour is a relatively new contest format over at NE, the parks are incredible, I strongly encourage everyone to at least give them a look, and if you have or are willing to make an NE account, please vote!

Or at least make it a toggle. I don’t think this is what the people who wanted a card style view were after, and it’s way more frustrating for people who like a very dense feed.

My most expensive keyboard.
Driftmechanics Austin R3 Purple
Alu plate
Gateron Oil Kings L+F
Staebies
GMK Posh
Plate foam + case foam from stupidfish

Here is a sound test comparison of the board with and without foam.

With:

https://streamable.com/dow9fs

Without:

https://streamable.com/j2l9vi

I was always cautiously curious about the game but am not thrilled about supporting Rowling. Last time I checked it seemed like it was proving to be extremely difficult to crack. I see some torrents listed but they're not from uploaders I recognize and the seed count seems a little low for a modern high profile release. Are there some good/safe torrents out there by now?

What is a Grand Tour?

A Grand Tour originally refers to an extended journey through continental Europe, for educational purposes. These journeys were undertaken by wealthy young men as a rite of passage, who visited many historical and cultural sites along the way, seeking to expand their knowledge and appreciation of the classical arts.

Though there is no more need for the aristocracy to elevate themselves above the common people, the desire and effort to broaden one's horizons remains a noble purpose.

Grand Tour is a relatively new contest format over at NE, the parks are incredible, I strongly encourage everyone to at least give them a look, and if you have or are willing to make an NE account, please vote!

I'm sorry if these are answered already or otherwise obvious. I've had a chance to explore a bit. Made accounts on lemmy.world, sopuli.xyz and kbin.social. After the last few days kbin.social has become my "main" (as seems to be the case for a lot of people).

Is there a quicker way to access the communities I've subscribed to than going in to my profile, subscribed tab? Is there a push to edit the top bar to make it function more like RES so communities I want to access are 1 click?

How does reputation work? It seems like mine is negative and decreasing, but I can't find any cases where my posts are not at least positive. Is this some kind of ranking relative to something? I only ask because on Reddit there were mod tools built to filter content from people with negative karma - this was actually a good tool to prevent spam and harassment, and I could see the same happening here (eventually), but I want to understand it more.

Is there some kind of change planned to sort order to not so strongly prefer the biggest communities? Even subscribed feeds are overwhelmingly dominated by content from one or two communities for me, I have to go community by community to get a sense of what the current discussion topics are.

If I go to a community on a federated server, and there is a post I know is present there but I cannot see it on kbin, is there any possible way to interact with it? Or is it simply impossible because content can only be shared starting the first time the communities federated?

Can there be some kind of flag to know if when you interact with a post from somewhere, it actually won't show to everyone because that server is defederated or otherwise not showing up in search results (thinking specifically of sopuli.xyz here) ? I know for instance if someone from lemmy.world posted to beehaw.org while defederated, people on lemmy.world will see that but people on beehaw.org won't. I can see this becoming insanely confusing long term if we don't have a way to flag it now. It also sounds like there's no way to check and re-grab content that was posted during a defederated period or potentially due to other technical hiccups. This is strange and makes the platform more confusing than it seems like it needs to be. Is there any plan to do anything about this?

Is anyone else seeing that their reputation is negative and decreasing? I know it doesn’t matter right now, but it became a moderator tool over on Reddit to default send to mod queue posts from anyone with overall negative karma, so it got me curious. I looked through my posts and comments so far and couldn’t find any that weren’t at least 0.

#kbin