I never liked going out to eat or drink, but its gotten insane lately. Seems like everywhere is $15 or more for a simple cocktail, $10 or more for a Miller Lite. Insulting when the staff might only be making $2.13 per hour, and I need to tip and add tax so that gets close to $20 for a drink I could have ppuree myself at home for probably $1. Bars and restaurants have also started to use Kore and more tactics to make themselves less pleasant to hang out in, enoucoraging faster consumption and quicker turn times to try to get more customers. Louder music, less comfortabke chairs, etc.

I used to build a gaming PC for both myself and my wife roughly every 6 or 7 years. I never needed anything top-of-the-line: I am perfectly satisfied with 1080p 60fps and playing older games. I liked to maximize value. I built myself a PC in 2019 and my wife one in 2020, just as the pandemic was starting to hit. At this point I am starting to wonder whether those will be the last PC's I will afford in my lifetime.

I expect Streaming Services will be a common answer here. I started messing around with Jellyfin a few years ago, and my wife and I had slowly been buying DVD's and Blu-Rays, occasionally supplemented by the high seas. This year we finally canceled our HBO and Netflix subscriptions. We also decided to try to cancel Spotify, so I went ahead and ripped all our CD's, gathered our pirated collection (organized separately to make it easier to potentially decide to buy that music later), and started buying more music from artists directly. I'm good enough to cancel today, but my wife has become accustomed to the near-infinite supply of variety that Spotify has so... Yeah