#Save Energy Cost

[superdutyblinds]

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[umihoshi]

some tips for people who just started living on their own

It's been 4 years now, and I'm not regretting a single day that I moved out. No more adapting to what my parents want, no more reporting where I'm going or who I'm bringing over, I can create my save haven the way I like it. For me, it was really the start of becoming myself.

But, there's a bunch of stuff here and there that would've been nice if I had known it from the get-go. And I thought: let's share them!

1 what appliances to invest in?

one thing that is going to come back every single day is cooking. and food is expensive AF if you're not careful. I found 2 great ways to save a bunch of money and they both rely on one thing: Invest in a good freezer! Many grocery stores have systems where they price down things that are close to the shelf life date. One of our local grocery stores can go up to 70% discount! But the problem with those is, you need to eat it right away.... OR DO YOU??? Freezing things close to expiring will let them last for a full freaking month extra. and vegetables go even longer. Plenty of time to use it when you need it (just don't forget to thaw) Be careful though: once you thawed it, you can't freeze it again.

Items are usually also WAY cheaper if you buy them in bulk. Chop them up and in the freezer they go! This one's also great if you don't always have the energy or drive to cook: cook up a large pot of whatever you like, put it in containers and freeze them. I always like doing so with pasta sauce and then cook the pasta fresh~ But it also works great with stews, curry and other types of sauces. stores like IKEA have containers that are just the right size for one meal.

For some of you, the next one may be a no-brainer, but.... My mom was really proud of how fast she was with doing the dishes. She was always like 'why get a dishwasher, I'm faster if I do it myself'. And I have lived up to that same idea up until half a year ago. My kitchen was always a mess, I didn't feel like cooking, inviting people over was embarrassing. I exhausted myself every time visitors would come and I had to fight that monster pile. Please, if you recognize these problems: invest in a dishwasher. Life became SO MUCH easier. My house is clean, my mind is more at ease, social contact increased cuz it's not as big a hassle to clean before guests show up. I really wish I wouldn't have wasted those 3 years fighting a monster that was this easy to tackle in the end...

2 easy cooking

Though it's also a bit of an investment: cooking becomes fucking easy with an airfryer. No oil is added, so it's a bunch healthier. you just put the temperature and timer and it's done. and a lot of things can just fry simultaneously. chuck in some meat and potato's at 400F (200C) for 20 minutes and all you'll have to worry about is adding some vegies with it. springrolls, pizza, potato's, meat. it all gets nice and crunchy too. (prepare vegies in a rice cooker for the same don't-have-to-keep-an-eye-on-it experience. you can cook them simultaneously with rice too!)

Something that became one of my fave dishes of the late is 'stir fried whatever'. it goes like this: Bake whatever meat you fancy, great with egg or tofu too. add whatever vegies (straight out of the freezer is fine). add stir fry sauce in whatever amount seems nice (little for coating, more if you want it to be saucy). make some carbs and you're fucking DONE! no measuring, no thinking what spices to use, it goes with anything and everything. and your local grocery has probably like 5 different flavors. (or at least, it does here. dunno if that's true for America...) like it creamy? add half a cup of soya milk. it takes like 10 minutes tops (not counting the cooking of rice/pasta/potato/bread)

3 think in money or think in space

With tricks like a good freezer, saving money with discount products becomes a whole lot easier. But there are also different discount products that can save you a lot of money. my mom always used to buy like.... packs of 4 toilet rolls. and if you calculate it, buying 3x4 rolls is so much more expensive than buying a 12 pack. But what you'll need for that is space. Try keeping account of a spot like that in your house. cupboard underneath the sink, the spot where they installed the boiler, top shelves you don't often use cuz it's high up, on top of the fridge, garage. I live in an apartment and have a small storage space for my bicycle. Perfect spot for non-consumables. (be careful to keep them out of reach for mice) think toilet paper, tissues, cat litter, soap, shampoo, toothpaste. they'll be good in 2 years too, and you'll still be needing them all the same. I once found this 6 pack of toothpaste for like 3,-! aint no one selling 1 tube for 0,50 when I buy it once I need it.

dunno if this is of any use to someone, but I hope this can help out anyone to safe some money, time or energy! Because it sure did for me.

[savrenim]

not to be another donations post but you may remember how over the summer we had massive amounts of plumbing problems and other unexpected moving costs? well. after proceeding to work every single hour available to me for six months, take no holidays whatsoever, and budget the hell out of every aspect of my life, I was actually on track to pay everything back and maybe have a little bit of wiggle room by the time summer came around!

and then we got a call from the vet about routine labs saying that if we didn't take Suzy in to an emergency specialty hospital immediately, she would die within in a week, she might die anyways if we took her there, but it was our only chance to have a few more months with her. after an extremely difficult household discussion, we decided that we needed to do as much as we could for her. she's been a beloved member of the family for 18 years. we were not going to abandon her in her hour of need.

with two days at the specialty hospital, the prognosis was better than we could have possibly hoped! the most important thing is she does not have heart problems at all, which means that we can treat her chronic kidney disease with normal IV fluids and with careful treatment she could easily be with us for years to come. the timely intervention also may or may not have saved her from acute kidney failure too, we'll know when we go back to the vet on Wednesday to get her blood checked where her levels have stabilized at.

two days at the specialty hospital means we are also down $3652 , and no longer are on track to pay back everything by July when it comes due unless a couple of uncertain things going forward Go Right, I do not trust everything to Go Right, and we're also still uncertain about what long-term treatment going forward is going to cost.

I still have my ko-fi and my patreon, but honestly, I'm aware that everything is tight for everyone always and there are also a lot of causes that need money right now and in the face of that "hey my family went super out on a limb to try to save our cat and would love some help not falling off" feels kind of shallow. but like. not to sound dumb or like a youtuber or podcaster, but, like. honestly I think the Most Helpful Thing that anyone could do for me right now is take a fucking HelloFresh link that will send you a "free" box for cost-of-shipping ($7ish?) if you Sign Up For An Account that you can then cancel Immediately After The Box Has Shipped and Never Give Them Any More Money Than That and get Six To Ten Meals Out Of It, and for getting someone to "sign up", they will give me a free box too. like. if 13 people are willing to take a link then I don't need to worry about food for the next three months. which would be. HUGE.

so I guess.... dm me if you want a link? otherwise expect to see a lot of promotion of my writing/ patreon as I scramble the hell to try to make this money up

[b-blushes]

GUESS WHAT over the course of the last 2 days i booked a taxi for a thing i'm going to in the summer and can't get home from myself EVEN THOUGH i'm scared of a) taxis and b) contacting new people 👍 wow my power

[rawliverandcigarettes]

One thing that becomes clearer and clearer every time I dare to dip back into The Empire of Preys, is that it's a story for... almost nobody.

(beware: I express a ton of feelings regarding the series under the cut, not all of them positive --and I talk a little bit about my current relationship to the Mass Effect fandom)

Don't get me wrong: I adore it, I am still extremely puzzled at how my brain even began to conceive a story like that, and the first chapter is a complete banger in my honest opinion, and the characters are uncomfortable in a very interesting way, and the worldbuilding is extremely dense with things I hope are meaningful, but.

It's also... pretty hostile to readership? By that I mean: I don't think it can be read passively. A big part of reading TEoP is, first, to understand how systems function normally; and then, understand how these systems interact altogether, how they can be abused, how they are actually abused, and what chain of events these systems will lead to. I am really proud of this interconnectivity --at the same time, it is incredibly dense and demand work. For all the fun and games I can try to inject in there, there are basic principles that can't skip being understood well for the plot to make sense; it's a politically driven story in the dryest possible way --with disaster bisexuals and fashionistas sprinkled on top to lush it up a little, but at heart it is a story about systems interconnecting from the bottom to the top, and it's a tangled mess in there.

So it's... If I'm being honest, and in spite of my genuine love of it, I have to admit it is a little hard to dedicate myself to pushing it further to the degree of polish that it needs. Not to say I won't do it --I will-- but it's impossible not to notice how *barren* the Mass Effect community has gotten in the last couple of years, this year being particularly bad. The readership was barely there anymore when Halfway Home got out, and I'm like... who's even left in there to read 200k worth of words of salarian/turian/asari politics in excruciating detail? Who's even interested in peeling up that toxic system of governance and how soft imperialism manifests in that universe? I still am, because I am invested in that version of Mass Effect and the characters I have put together in that context. But who else?

Of course, there's always this thing of "don't write for an audience, write for yourself", and I'm an absolute follower of that mentality. However.

However.

(oops here comes a condensed version of that Halfway Home post-mortem I promised six months agoooo)

Halfway Home was *hard work*. It's work I decided to go through on my own, and I knew from the start it wouldn't reach that large of an audience --on virtue of being stupid long, about an OC (and a salarian at that, who cares), and having a trigger warning list longer than most people would find reasonable. I am happy that I did the work, and that I chewed the text over until I was absolutely sick of it --but it was basically the best version of what 7 years worth of change and growth and experimentations could get to before absolute burnout. And I am even happy about the readership! I had wonderful comments and I am truly honored that some people invested in that story to the degree they did, and I am fully aware that stories that take much more work get even less attention on the daily. But I would lie to say that I kind of felt... drained, when I saw that I had, indeed, taken too much time to complete it, and the fandom was basically dried up when I finally released it. Watching seven years of my life disappear down the Ao3 drain felt... Well, I won't lie. It felt kind of bad. It felt kind of like grief.

At the end of the day, it is true that nobody ever cares more about your story than yourself --and again, I am neither fishing for attention nor am I really complaining, even. It is a difficult story to sell and to read through, and I always knew the readership would be extraordinarily slim (and it did find it, and I am beyond uwwuuuuwuwu about it, truly ;;). I knew all of that going in. But I also won't lie that fandom timing was... horrendous --and it is even worse today. The fact that I have *barely* seen a hint of speculation on my dash from the latest N7 trailer does kind of say something as well. Sometimes, things come and go. And I suppose that's okay.

But what of The Empire of Preys? What of my deep care for the characters? What of my (I think, understandable) reluctance about jumping in to the next installments, knowing *for sure* that I'll be lucky if I graze 500 hits on Ao3? And that's me being beyond generous, honestly? I wish I didn't care about that, but I guess I do, a little. I also think it's understandable, wanting to work on things and see an impact from whatever you do --even if it comes from love and care. I'm glad I got to do it once, but do I want my literal masterpiece (I know the wording is strong, but I genuinely think TEoP is the best thing I ever did, counting my professional work that will be experienced by a *much* larger audience, and I have zero ideas how I could top it off conceptually given it felt like everything was being served to me in a trance-like state) being sandwiched between futanari porn and a story about a... certain main pairing being plastered absolutely everywhere and tending to suck all the oxygen in the room. No hate to either concept in particular, I actually like the coexistence of everything, it's part of what's cool about fanfiction! But, also. Also.

I suppose it is the curse of having a brain that works best creatively in the context of fandom --and daring to believe in the importance and necessity of creativity for its own sake, without monetary gain. But also, the very human entitlement thing of... not wanting to pour all of its life energy into a black hole.

It's complicated. I do not have a good answer as of now, at least regarding TEoP. I will keep on working passively on it as of now, once in a while, rediscovering it's genuinely really good from time to time and then moving away from it somewhat, until next time. I'm still doing Zelda stuff as of now, which... has been way more rewarding creatively, not gonna lie. It's a fandom full of lifeblood, with ideas bouncing around, people wanting to meet up, boundless creativity. I have written a micro-trilogy this year (it's here if that interests you), and, while in the same ballpark of attention than Halfway Home, it was undeniably more rewarding. I think I also needed to change mediums --I am currently experimenting with animatics, visual storytelling and extremely humble 2D animations, and I'm having a blast.

So... Yeah. I am fairly certain I will complete The Empire of Preys, because I love it deeply and I want to complete it, for its own sake if anything. But in regards to a timeframe... I'm not promising anything. It will happen. Not sure when! I'm following where creativity feels the more urgent at the moment.

But one day, this is a story that will exist, at the very least, and I think I'll love it deeply as well no matter how it's received. But I think I need a little bit of a positive feedback loop right about now, and so to work on projects that like... will be read. Or watched. Or played. Or experienced. And I'm not positive The Empire of Preys will be that for me, at least right now.

[velvetsainz]

okay i gotta say it: foisting alphatauri's renaming as a great tragedy of capitalism upon formula 1 racing & motorsport in general is...a bit much. especially in a sport that has been a very frequent and early adopter of sportswashing? baby, they happily race in places that have less-than-stellar current human rights records BECAUSE OF THE MONEY. it has nothing to do with attendance. you think bahrain and qatar are major ticket sellers and people were truly clamoring for races there? NO, OF COURSE NOT. it's b/c their governments poured hundreds of millions of dollars (if not more) of government money into f1 and the FIA in the name of sanitizing their nation's image in light of ongoing reports of abhorrent treatment of migrant workers and violent action against other groups inside and outside of their countries. (does really no one remember the 2022 saudia arabian gp? the fact the drivers HAD to race—despite close proximity of the track to a recent missile strike site—for fear that they wouldn't have been allowed to leave by the saudi government? no one? just me?) saudi arabia, bahrain, qatar, the uae, and azerbijan are important current examples, but this is by no means new for the sport; india, malaysia, apartheid south africa, china (which may be returning to the calendar this year—it remains to be seen if the race will actually happen), russia, peronist argentina, and turkey have all held races previously with similar intentions.

and if you want to talk about sponsors, let's actually go after the sponsors that are truly problematic. aston martin ARAMCO. mercedes-amg PETRONAS. camel, marlboro (and philip morris, in general, including their "mission winnow" shell project), orlen, shell, agip, uralkali, ftx (along with other crypto companies), among a plethora of historic sponsors.

listen: i'm not saying that the "visa cashapp racing bulls" (or "stake f1 team kick sauber", for that matter) is a great name for a team—or even a good one—but there are much bigger, much worse issues in the sport that need more attention and more concern than a shitty team name or two.

[foyiiwae]

I tend not to let work leak into my personal life too much. But I know a lot of people are suffering with heating and keeping warm and costs and such. And I do work giving money guidance...so the knowledge helps in some cases.

I do want to direct to Money Saving Expert and their tips on heating the human not the home. It may help some of you who could be struggling. Being cold is rotten.https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/.../heat-the-human-not.../

Stay warm friends <3

[dutybcrne]

Thinkings thinkings of Fatui!Kaeya have been reawakened in reviewing Arle's teasers/animations

[arcaneyouth]

i think if i just had 10 extra dollars to spare each month maybe i would not feel so miserable.

[undeadhousewife]

So help me I swear to god. Doing last minute grocery run before a big road trip tomorrow and guess who got a flat tire? 😐

[giantkillerjack]

"Oh, Jack. You silly boi. You know that help at the top of the stairs is no help at all."

---

Art piece i may delete later about my parents offering money to me and my sisters to pay for either grad school (a thing I don't want and can't do with my disability) or my wedding (also a thing I don't need/want), but not for anything that would actually help me escape poverty and find stable housing and income.

Like, I recognize the privilege of being able to complain that my parents have offered me a bunch of money but in the wrong way.

But also if that money is on top of a flight of stairs that I can't climb (but my sisters can), then I haven't really been offered money, so much as I have watched money I need be placed somewhere I can't reach it. Which tbh feels worse than if it was never mentioned to me in the first place.

I was gonna send this art to them and i wrote this big long message to go with it, but then I decided to wait until my therapy session on Tuesday to talk it thru with her first, since I've literally never regretted doing that.

Besides, both of my parents are lawyers and right now they're providing me and my friends with a lot of free legal advice about this property we're trying to buy together, so I don't want to rock the boat currently.

I just wish I knew if I had access to that money as a poor person in need of stable housing and quality disability care, and I wish my parents weren't world-class hLepers who have a long and triggering history of engaging me in rigorous debate about the kind of help I should be allowed to receive from them as a disabled person.

Nothing like having to provide an argument that would hold up in court every time I'm sick and need help! Love that! Love that I can't even talk about money with them now without having invasive thoughts about it for days to come due to past incidences in which this repeated behavior of theirs literally endangered my life!!

Not like I need that mental capacity for working on the largest and most exciting opportunity of my life that also happens to line up with my hopes and dreams for the future!! It's fine!! What do I even need mental capacity for anyway?????

This wouldn't even be the first time this little Distrust Fund has caused problems for my relationship with my parents. They are very opposed to that money being used to help my disability and it has caused PROBLEMS for us that we have never quite recovered from.

It's just difficult to be reminded that although our relationship has gotten better (mostly thanks to me setting boundaries), that doesn't mean they now actually believe what I need for my disability when I tell them.

They really do love me, and they have only ever acted with the best of intentions . But good intentions cease to matter when the impact is harmful and repeated. And they have proven to be repeatedly incapable of providing non-ableist support for me again and again and again. They've even genuinely tried to learn; and sometimes it really seems like my mom has made progress with her therapist (who is disabled), but who knows when I can so jarringly be reminded of how quickly that toxic ableist thinking can show its ugly face.

It's so clear to me and they don't even know it's there.

It feels like I'm in a horror movie when I try to get them to understand their own ableism, and that is a good good sign that I may want to consider an approach that minimizes my mental damage instead. Even if it means I don't get their stupid, deeply-conditional-and-yet-the-conditions-are-SO-vague-and-they-won't-admit-it money.

[the-busy-ghost]

Heard a Full-Grown Adult who was sitting behind me on the train tonight genuinely say “I don’t know why people are worrying about the cost of living” and honestly even if he was joking, I’m amazed his girlfriend didn’t dump him on the spot

[robotsynth]

me, who has been grinding last-minute catalog points nonstop for the past week:

[soovyclub]

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10 Ways to Save on Living Costs During the Cost of Living Crisis How to save money on household bills, shopping and living costs during the cost-of-living crisis. Including ways to make extra money, and reduce waste and energy consumption. https://www.soovy.club/blog/ways-to-save-money-on-living-costs

[sevenangrybees]

Not enough AI criticism out there that brings up just how fucking bad it is for the environment. Like all the art and writing theft, consent violation, collecting of personal and sometimes even HIPPA protected data, and labor issues should be enough to slam dunk it into the trash, but ON TOP OF ALL THAT it's also consuming massive amounts of water and electricity just like blockchain bullshit.