Well summer never made me want to kill myself so I tend to prefer it. Severe seasonal affective disorder is interesting.

That said these days I have ways of dealing with it. Turns out running during the winter days is kinda neat because you end up getting endorphins and UV. I also have one of those SAD lamps and they truly work for me. Nowadays I like winter a lot more - especially cozy stuff like knitting and tea.

I do think that the world's increasing waistlines affect people's attitude about summer. I know that the bigger you are, the more miserable the heat can feel. Plus wearing revealing clothes isn't fun for everyone, especially with things like chub rub. On the flip side, being skinny makes you pretty cold so the winter can be miserable. I know that no amount of layers would help the ache in my bones when I was underweight.

This is why autumn is bae. Hot enough to be outside, cold enough to not sweat, pretty colours and harvest activities, Halloween... Autumn wins. Close second is spring, which I hear is fabulous in many places, but in Canada is mostly just freezing winter temperatures, one week of trees blooming, and then just 30 C temperatures after that.

The fact that people took Stoicism, a philosophy that's basically cognitive behavioral therapy for emotional awareness, and twisted it to mean "stiff upper lip" or "repress everything lest you seem weak" is depressing as hell.

Also, don't make the mistake that smaller parrots mean less commitment. Parrotlets and lovebirds are smart, feisty, bite pretty hard, are extremely loud, and still live like 25 years. Budgies are a bit dumber and nicer, but still live a long ass time. Cockatiels have a very nice personality and are musical, but they have 25 year life spans. Consider any small parrot to be a "25 to life" deal.

Also chances are, your parrot (of any kind) either won't talk, or won't shut up about the wrong things. Hope you like hearing the Teams call music at all hours.

Rats carry all the personality of dogs and cats. In theory, you get a pet that you'll enjoy for 2-3 years. In practice, you'll be devastated after your intelligent best friends start dying one by one. Most people cope by buying rats constantly.

Technically none, but my partner pays for Spotify and I'm on a shared YouTube Premium plan. I used to have 5-6 subscriptions and cut them off in January 2022. No regrets! Even buying an old machine second hand, an external storage, and a VPN still costs way less than my many subscriptions. It'll be hard to give up Spotify... Too convenient.

Yeah ok, I really love that Reddit's crappy pedantry about stuff that doesn't matter is bleeding into the new world. First world, to most of us not using 50 year old definitions, means countries universally accepted to have decent human rights. The topic reeled into the Middle East's laws surrounding LGBTQ people, which is a shit argument when talking about banning underage looking content which happens even in countries with great LGBTQ rights. Let's not pretend that the world is this fantastic equal place where the human experience is just dandy across the board.

Also I'm from a third world country! Yugoslavia was the founder of the neutral Non-Aligned movement. That makes it, by most definitions, third world.

Underage fictional content is banned in first world countries like South Korea, Ireland, Norway, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and France. Do you really want to lump the very real discrimination that LGBTQ people face with someone's desire to get off to a 5 year old, sorry - 5000 year old school girl?

Let's flip that argument: should we all abide by American standards? After all, nudity is ok in a lot of places in the world, why should we blur chests?

Tons of countries ban underage looking things, even digital art of it. Countries with bans include Canada, Australia, the UK, France, South Korea, Ireland, Norway, etc.

Yeah even fictional suggestive content is illegal in Canada. And I'm glad!

Photo Pea is where it's at. Browser based Photoshop clone. Unless you're doing art, then go with Krita.

Gimp is needlessly unintuitive. I've used a ton of programs since I was 10 - I've ran Paint Shop Pro (JASC days), Corel Painter, Photoshop (all versions since 7), Krita, Inkscape, a tiny program called Paintstorm Studio, various Oekakis when those were a thing, paint tool SAI, and now Procreate. I have NEVER seen a program weirder than GIMP. People defend GIMP with the old "just because it's not Photoshop doesn't mean it's bad". My dude I've used programs that were entirely in Japanese and they made more sense than GIMP. The way the tools function and where they're located makes no sense.

And now Krita does 99% of everything you'd need GIMP for as the average person (cropping, filters, a bit of editing). There's not a good reason to get GIMP. I'm genuinely confused because the features are there, I'm not sure why they don't reskin the damn thing already.

Parents grew up under authoritarian communism. Their stance is and always has been "social programs rocked, being under that government sucked". No amount of decent living standards will ever make up for the possibility of imprisonment because you disobeyed the ruling party (and disobeying included things like having the wrong haircut, let alone the wrong gender identity).

The colour of the uniform is unimportant. The literature is unimportant. The slogans are unimportant. The leader is unimportant. At the end of the day, you'll still be stuck with a police state telling you how to dress, how to act, how to think, fascist or communist.

Controversial take but in the early days I think it's fine if you replicate the content from the old Reddit posts (maybe even link to the post) as long as you don't claim credit. I think people just wanna see things at first, and then the conversation can grow. It's not like Reddit was chock full of OC.