I've found if you accidentally take a spam call it can be fun to string them along and waste their time for a good 30m if you've got time to kill, the humour is great but it also gets you blacklisted for a while and they stop calling

I think they mean to ask for honest feedback, it's quite possible your lack of success is linked to the mindset you have. Expecting to fail us one of the most common reasons to fail, but knowing that success requires a lot of failure is a much healthier approach.

Have you you tried therapy to work through some of these issues? It's helped me quite a lot

While it's a pretty good vpn all round that's super easy to set and forget, I've been having issues the last ~6 months in Australia with the CIDR ranges getting blocked by Google, Reddit, and the like. It's annoying to have it run fine for a few days, then suddenly have every second thing I do needing to solve a captcha for it.

Try the freemium tier for a while and see if it works for you - I may be wrong and you'll run a whole month with nothing, but never hurts to verify.

You can also literally solve problems with a computer lying around - bitcoin mining isn't very useful, but you can contribute to science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volunteer_computing_projects

Read up on your local laws, in Australia for example it's required that 3 basic methods of cash, cheque, and bank transfer are accepted, may be something similar for you

Yeah I don't think I've ever had a bad game honestly, the worst it gets is when the bots spike again and people start raging

For the latter, a good approach is to pick a project or idea and try to make it. If you're familiar with the logic you can look up the syntax for the new language, but it you're fresh off the boat then there is a bunch of good stuff on YouTube, Khan academy and stack overflow that are geared to newbies.

Some starting ideas:

• Make a text based tic Tac toe/card game
• Make a number guessing game
• Find all prime numbers under a number given by the user

Once you've got a decent grip on the logic involved, it can be quite effective to implement more complex approaches to the solution. Instead of guessing randomly, implement a binomial (1:N divided by 2) search algorithm, or have the game play against itself. Go back over how you wrote the solution, and add some good comments, improve the functions descriptions, even refactor some code to be more efficient and more readable. I learnt how to code through doing, textbooks are great for some people but my preferred approach is to make something, break it, and learn how to fix it.

Part of the identity crises that comes with(out) religion is the ultimate question of purpose: why are we suffering, surely it has a reason? Some of us are content to accept that there is no purpose, and therefore we must define our own; others need a purpose greater than themselves and/or to have one defined for them, and look to religion for that purpose. There is no right answer, and the struggle of identity and purpose are well documented in religion, fiction, history, and philosophy.

I was about to say something like this, hands on work is really satisfying when you can see the results in front of you, and even show them off as well!

Even for those us who fit into the straight/white/cis mould, learning how to create purpose and meaning for yourself is a really hard battle against expectations imposed growing up. Thanks for sharing a really wholesome story :)

For secure data destruction, either pay for it to be done properly, or create your own way of doing it. A decent sized drill bit can do all the work for you, at the cost of a new drive of course.

Get some icing and draw the boss on it, would look awesome I bet

To anyone who believes this person is wrong, why are you not then moderating instead? Someone has to, and a good mod who knows nothing on the topic is better than a bad mod who's an expert.

That's more or less my understanding, a nerd knows a lot of useless random facts, but a geek will tell them to you whether you asked or not.

Been having issues with Google/Reddit etc. lately as well on Proton, managed to get around it by switching to a new IP subnet. It's likely they've just blocked IPs with malicious users behind them, which sucks for the rest of us.

It's possible to track the number of hops that a device on a network has, since TTL will be 8-bit numbers (and ususally start at 64, 128, etc.) if the TTL of a packet has 64 from the main device, the devices it's sharing with will be 63 (and so on un the chain for N+1 hops). This may not be exactly how they do it since device fingerprinting would be way simpler, but it is a plausible way of tracking that a device is using a hotspot.

It's also that a bunch of them have private blocklists, but have agreed to the fedipact (seen with :onhover) and therefore have

Fair enough if combat isn't as much your thing! I find the stories that are generated to be excellent, and there tends to be more combat than most similar games which is why I focused more on it.

I was doing great up until ships kept crashing

My usual approach here is to either bombard it with mortars, have a trader "accidentally" set it off, or if neither are available set up a lot of traps and sandbags and get ready for a battle. Make sure you always have plenty of cover, and for psychics especially destroy them sooner to minimise the effects. If they're the newer style of mechanoid raid, you may need to get really close and throw a few explosives in there or otherwise be inside the area and have everyone attack at once.

You can start building whenever you're ready really, but definitely have a good defence set up before you start. For components I usually send a few people off with cattle to carry everything back from a friendly town (since traders can be somewhat sparse at times), and if you trade enough you may even be able to request reinforcements. I try to make sure everyone has the best armor and weapons I can afford/make - if you've got golden tiles but not much better than dusters, then a lot more deaths are likely. Even with the best gear, one of my characters was once killed by a lucky shot in the eye from a measly bow!

If you're more for the survival aspect then definitely feel free to keep it on lower difficulties (I often do at the start), and you can usually make do without much strategy as long as you have good gear, decent cover, and a medic on standby with the best meds you can afford. Turrets or other friendlies are often great distractions, and if they're taking the bullets then none of your colonists are.

Edit: I'd also add that learning from mistakes is great for all areas of life, if you can look at why you failed (not enough farms, too little meds, etc.) and learn from it then you're going to do better the next time. Even if the general strategy stays the same, small changes can make a massive difference.

So a couple of tips I've learnt along the way: what makes a killbox work at all is managing how you can be attacked in the first place. If you can decide the battlefield and delay them as long as possible to be fully prepared, then you're going to be a lot better off. Use traps everywhere, have more turrets than you do people, use artillery when you can, and give your enemy no cover to work with. It doesn't have to be a killbox, but plenty of damage along the way and natural choke points can often defeat a raid before they can even score a hit.

The main point of wealth is that it scales the size of an attack proportionally. People have the greatest weight for wealth, so make sure you can hold off a raid before recruiting 20 prisoners. I don't usually worry too much about keeping wealth low, but you see harder raids if your wealth has outpaced your defence.

The wiki also has plenty of solid strategies for defence if you're stumped, and often working with the environment you've got can be much more fun than creating an artificial killbox (in my opinion anyway). Good defence is the basis for completing any of the quests I've found, so surviving long enough should absolutely help complete them.

Edit: I'd 100% recommend the game to anyone who's interested in a colony builder that's got a decent focus on survival, I've seen many hilarious and really fun things happen with a story that comes simply from chance.

I've had the best experience flipping the print and printing text on top. If it has to be on the bottom though, slowing the print speed and using a slicer with bridging settings may work better.