I have an inside joke about living in Rhode Island...
I was in Hawaii last summer, and I got talking to a local, and when they asked where I lived and I said Rhode Island, they responded like "Ah, so you understand the difficulties of living on an island, it's nice to know we aren't alone out here in the ocean!"
So now I say "Rhode Island, the other island state."
Where in Rhody? I live in Providence!
33/M, always looking for IRL people to hang out with...
Such a small world. I made a post a couple days ago looking for snail-mail penpals anywhere on earth, I was really itching to talk to someone outside the USA-o-sphere in a slow, deliberate way, and the first person that responded lives like 2 hours as the crow flies on the tip of Long Island haha.
What travel pillow did you get? Many moons ago I got a Nemo Fillo camping pillow, and that thing has followed me everywhere. It's so so tiny when collapsed, then you inflate it with air to exactly the size/firmness you want.
I just looked now and they have different sizes and colors, when I got it there was only 1 size, and you could get it in any color you want as long as it was black (which is probably good because black doesn't show stains and I definitely would have gotten the yellow one if given the choice, which would probably look nasty by now lol)
I got to visit the Nemo equipment factory/office in Dover NH a long time ago, and it was really cool seeing the space they work on and invent/design new equipment. Shortly after, I bought a Nemo tent (a long discontinued model), and it has kept me comfortable and dry for the last ~10 years and has showed no signs of deteriorating. I always plug the brand whenever I can because I just think they make really good stuff.
I also made a poor financial decision and bought a Sea to Summit inflatable neck pillow recently specifically for an 11 hour flight. It was way more expensive than a neck pillow has any right to be, but I'm a sucker for things that collapse into tiny pouches. It's super comfy, though, and I've used it on a bunch of flights since!
I've done something similar. I'm somewhat different to you in that I don't really care all that much about eating, but I was having BIG problems with eating because I was bored. I also started smoking weed (occasionally, like once or twice a week, just a little bit), and let me tell you, the munchies posses me.
I switched to eating 1 packet of Huel savory meal replacement for dinner each night, and keeping 0 other food in my apartment (I'm single and live alone, nobody else to feed), and my work has a cafeteria that serves excellent cheap breakfast and lunch. I truly mean nothing in my apartment, because one time I got high and cooked like 2 cups of rice and added a random can of diced tomatoes and some random spices and ate the whole thing. I don't know why I don't have the compulsion to consume more than 1 Huel packet, but I'm not going to question it. I'm also saving a buttload of money, because each packet is like $4, paired with the cafeteria at work, I'm never spending more than ~$12-15 a day on food, which is WAY less than what I used to spend buying and cooking myself stuff. I'm also lazy, and clicking the kettle on and pouring a packet being the only steps required to make a whole meal is a big bonus.
The packets are actually really tasty, I get 4 flavors and change it up depending on how I'm feeling. Everyone that I've told this to so far thinks I'm some crazy person lol, but it works for me.
I wasn't originally doing this for weight loss, more just consumption control, because I was constantly feeling like garbage after eating random junk all evening when I had a bored night in.
In the last ~year, I've taken 4 inches off my waist, went from waist size 34 pants being snug to 30-31 fitting just right. I just sorted through my closet the other day to pare down the amount of clothes I have, and tried on a bunch of 34 inch waist shorts and pants I haven't worn in a while, and they were HUGE, like even wearing them with a belt, they'd have been all bunched up and awkward. I have no idea how much I weighed before, or how much I weigh now...
Another aspect of this might be that in the last year, I learned that I am lactose intolerant. Instead of taking lactaid pills or whatever, I've just chosen to completely cut out dairy. No more ice-cream, no more pizza, no more fried cheese whatevers... and that definitely feels like it could be helping lol.
I do feel like I'm really lucky that it's teken aproximately 0 effort on my part. I know plenty of people (like my mom) who have had a lifelong struggle to maintain a healthy body weight.
https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/US/en/product/aldrich/483036
~$200 for 8.3e20 tiny golf balls? Pretty good deal if you ask me.
Thanks! It's on my (very long) list of things to do lol.
Ideally I'd love to host it, too, I've been building up a small network rack with some fancy equipment, but I never seem to have the time to sit down and actually figure it all out... One of these days!
I feel like you could do this with some kind of stereolithography process like in semiconductor processing... You could very easily create the green, hole, and putter at astronomically tiny scales as microscopic thin slabs of silicon, but the roundness of the ball, I don't know enough about the specific processes to know how you might go about that. I'm sure it'd be possible with enough smart people thinking about it, though.
Actually interacting with this game, though? Are you imagining like Atomic force microscopy, a tiny tiny little putter attached to a much larger macroscopic assembly able to be manually manipulated?
I've had a really really REALLY fun time using "shitty" old cameras.
Just grab a cheap early 2000's digital point-and-shoot. (Or in my case, over 100 of them)
My instagram is linked on my profile, I have almost 2500 photos posted from my entire collection.
I was at a community arts/crafts event this weekend and met someone who was also rocking a point-and-shoot digital camera (though his was about 20 years newer than mine lol), and we got to talking, and he seems really cool and we're going to try and meet up this week and do some photography. I've been sick or out of the state or had emergency family stuff come up for the last 3 weeks of planned social events I've had, so it was really nice to talk to someone and engage for a bit, I was starting to get really lonely.
The craft was making cyanotype with Apollo 15 lunar command module film strips, which was... frickin' awesome.
Here are some of the shots from said 28 year old camera (at their original size, just as they came off the 2Mb memory card)
I've been rocking my Lightphone 3 for a month as my full-time daily driver, with no companion device (Well, I have a Boox palma, but I only read on it, don't have any need for its other features/apps)
If I would have went straight from my previous normal of being super connected and addicted to my phone to where I'm at now, I wouldn't have been able to swing it. It's taken me almost 3 years of slow progress to be able to just fully ditch the smart stuff. Just start slow, keep on it, and you'll get there eventually is you really want to.
And all you have to do to move where your number points is to swap the SIM card. It takes only a coupe seconds. I still have my old smartphone that I pop the SIM into when I go to concerts so I don't break/lose my various dumb devices I've had over the years. The Lightphone 3 doesn't support eSim yet, though it's on the roadmap somewhere. It might be an idea to get a cheap smartphone that can use a regular SIM. Especially if it's a really low-tier device, you'll be able to use it, but the poor performance might push you to ditch the apps faster.
Up until 2020, the official name for the state was actually "State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations", though nobody actually used the full name. It was dropped in 2020 via a ballot initiative to amend the state's constitution, now it's just "Rhode Island". Surprised it took so long!
Another interesting fact is that if you take the full "outline" of the state, ~15% of the total surface area is covered by water (inlets, bays, harbors). There's a lot of ocean around. And OP forgot Aquidneck Island, which is in the Naragansett bay, connected to the rest of the state with 2 bridges, and has some major towns on it like Portsmouth and Newport. There's also Conanicut island with Jamestown, also connected by 2 bridges, and Prudence island, not connected by bridges but still up in the bay (You can take a quick ferry from Bristol)
The state is currently embroiled in a shitstorm due to the westbound side of a major interstate highway bridge over the Seekonk river connecting the smaller East side of the state (and the southeastern part of Massachusetts) to the West side of the state being broken... it's been broken for over a year, and there's currently still no concrete plan to build a replacement, and the demolition of the broken half is still underway and there's controversy over how it's being demolished... They re-routed the Westbound traffic over half of the Eastbound side, and it causes a metric fuckload of traffic during rush hour and there's no good detour. Many people expect the crazy amount of extra weight and wear/tear on the Westbound side to cause it to have problems and/or need to be replaced much sooner than anticipated. I live in Providence, which is directly adjacent to this broken bridge. In the morning, I drive South to work avoiding the traffic entirely, and it takes me ~10-12 minutes to get to work. On the way home in the afternoon when I have to drive WITH that traffic, it takes me between 30 minutes to an hour to get home depending on how bad the traffic is.