Okay, if you can explain to me in detail how four dimensional topology is going to be important to me while I’m stocking the shelves of your grocery store, I’ll give you an answer.

I always just use a cold stick of butter like a crayon. Grab the hot toast and wipe the butter on it straight from the stick. Butter knives are only for room temperature butter.

Well, I didn’t mention tomatoes. And I’m slowly replacing my grass with a sort of food forest. It may not be native wildflowers, but I don’t think I’m lost.

The point in the article assumes you are solely reliant on rain for watering your plants. Where I live it doesn’t rain for like three or four months in the summer, so that argument is invalid. I use irrigation in my orchard every couple of weeks to deeply soak the area around a tree. The wood chips around the trees do help prevent the soil from drying out because they keep it cool. It takes heat energy to evaporate water. And since the mulch blanket keeps the soil cool I only have to water the orchard once every two or three weeks.

I’m 57 and I started running this year. Overtraining is the biggest issue for me. I’m up to about three miles maybe four times per week, but most of those miles are zone 2 HR, really slow and easy runs. On the weekend I’ll do a tempo run, or intervals, alternately. If I maintain that schedule for more than a month or so I end up a little more sore every time I go running and my time starts to drop. So I have to take most of the week off every four or six weeks. I also take a lot of supplements; creatine, L-carnitine, Beta-Alanine, protein, etc. They help. I feel I can exert myself more since I started taking them. I also take EFAs for joint health, collagen for connective tissue recovery, and sometimes MSM, though evidence on that one is spotty.

I wonder if that includes drug overdoses.

One thing to bear in mind is many of these plants don’t grow true to seed. Avocado, peppers, tomatoes, etc., you may get a plant that produces a fruit that resembles the one the seed came from. You may not. I’ve even grown peppers from seed packages that weren’t true to the variety on the label. All it takes is one bee to fly in from a hot pepper plant, for instance, and while the fruit made from the flower that bee pollinated will be true-to-type, the seeds of that fruit won’t be.

“Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering.”

He didn’t say anything specifically about the ethics of human reproduction. He taught that craving sense pleasures leads to suffering. The monks that followed him were celibate. But he knew few would follow that path. So he taught a simplified code of ethics for householders (don’t kill, don’t lie, etc.) and assumed that there would always be people who want to make more people. Rebirth was an important part of his doctrine. The volitional actions you perform in life create karma which then, after your death, produces another birth. Escaping the cycle of karma and rebirth by letting go of the concept of self, of the idea of me and mine, was the ultimate goal of his path. And it’s only possible to get there in a human body. So in that sense he was not an anti-natalist.

Why live? What’s the meaning of life? What’s the purpose of life? I hope I don’t have to explain that people have been asking this question since we first were able to form words and start thinking. You’re going to get as many different opinions to answer this question as there are people to write a response. You could spend a lifetime studying philosophy and not find a definitive answer. And in the end you just have to decide for yourself which answer most speaks to you. Are you atheist, materialist, spiritual, philosophical? Take your pick.

Personally, I like Buddhist philosophy for these kinds of questions. And I suspect the Buddha would say that we are here because of craving for sense pleasures, craving for existence, and ignorance of our true nature and the true nature of reality. We live because we want to exist, we want to have experiences and feel the things that are available to us as living beings. Whether it’s food or sex or money or adventure or admiration or love we feel like getting the things we want will make us happy. The flip side of craving is aversion, where we feel like achieving separation from those things that are unpleasant will make us happy.

Volumes have been written about this and it’s impossible to summarize well in a single post. But if it speaks to you there’s a lot more to say about it.

I don’t remember navigating menus being particularly onerous.

Getting around is tedious at first, but soon you get vehicles, and, even better, this zipline thing that you can put anywhere. Those are fun to build and navigate.

The only recommended combat is tying your enemies up with ropes, or later, with a rope gun. (I wonder if Kojima is into bondage) I mean, you can kill the enemy couriers, but it’s not a good idea.

Industria. It was free on Epic, I think. Took me a while to figure out the boxes said “supplies” and were meant to be broken open to get ammo. Till then it was kind of frustrating running out of ammo over and over. Gameplay and environments kind of remind me of the half life franchise in a way.