If you have some green areas near you try climbing trees. It’s a pretty weird hobby and you can start with what feels like humiliating small steps (climbing a hip-height branch). But it’s a great way for getting a different and closer appreciation for nature and also of exercising balance and body control rather than just the muscle growth you’d get at the gym.

I also second martial arts, specially more cultural ones like Capoeira, Kung Fu or Karate rather than competition-focused ones like Boxing.

Gollum. The yellow face in the sky blinds me and I like playing silly games in my dark hideout.

Those are torrent magnet links, you need some torrent client to download them. LibreTorrent is okay on Android.

For listening, I recommend Voice.

Both are on F-droid.

Rice and beans and rice and beans and rice and beans.

Lots of beans and bean-like foods (chickpeas, lentils, peas, soy beans) can be made into a variety of shapes. If you have a pressure cooker you can even cook them relatively quickly in mass and freeze most of it for later. No idea how much that costs in your country, but it’s supposed to be cheap.

You can just make regular bean “soup”, or you can “fry” them in a pan (specially lentils). You can eat chickpeas like popcorn or you can mix them with flour and something sticky (overcooked rice if vegan, egg whites otherwise) and make burgers. Just remember to put something oily like olive oi or butter for taste.

You can also do some really low-nutrition despair foods by mixing wheat flour, salt, water and butter, and frying that in a pan. It’s not healthy, but it’s filling and easy to make, tastes like bread. But of course, if you add to this you can make other cool stuff like pancakes (less salt, lots of sugar, baking powder).

All of the fried stuff get a very homogeneous consistency so they might be fine for your sensory issues.

On the matter of taste, you just need a lot of seasoning.

I really love birds, so it’s hard to choose one. So I’ll choose two.

Here we have the Anu-Preto, it looks like an angry chibi crow.

And also the Biguá, which looks like something out of a dinosaur movie. But don’t be fooled, he’s tiny.

But all birds are beautiful, specially weirdo tropical birds.

The big point: she seems to enjoy your friendship despite there being no romantic interest, so you shouldn’t feel too bad.

The small points (which my just be me projecting my own quirks on her, but bear with me)

Anyways, our friend group went on a vacation back then and I tried to kiss her towards the end of it which she just kind of pushed me away.

I don’t know how it works in your culture, but in my experience people are pretty okay with being asked if they want to kiss beforehand. I know movies make it look like it’s always some spontaneous single braincell situation, but it’s usually way easier that way in parties or whatnot.

Might be worth a try with other future crushes, a “no” may still sting, but won’t keep you awake in dread late at night. The power dynamics are also flipped into something much more manageable.

I’m also scared that I’ll never find somebody and my time is running out

I’m assuming from you still having friends from high school times that you’re not over 45. No, there is no such thing as “time running out”. Take your time and enjoy it, be it with friends and dates, but you absolutely don’t need to conform to some notion of having specific age slots for doing romance (or that you even need romance to be wholly happy in the first place).

If you like somebody and they like you back, cool. If not, you’re not “adulting wrong” or anything like that.

I then decided to shoot my shot and ask her out for dinner.

Going from the way you’re telling it, I want to at least congratulate you on having managed to ask, even if it ultimately a “no”. It can be really stressful and from the way you describe it was a comfortable interaction.

What am I supposed to do? Try to forget about her or keep taking it slow? I feel like her response was quite clear and I don’t want to annoy her anyomre if the feeling isn’t mutual but then again I can’t imagine there are no feelings at all on her side and feel like I shouldn’t give up on it yet.

I don’t speak neurotypical, but I think you got a “no”. Whether it was because of inconvenience or whatever else, that’s what you got. In fact, if you think your intentions were clear (and since you said she was pretty smart), you can assume that she understands you’re interested in her.

That means you should do: nothing.

If she reciprocates but was constrained by whatever, it’s in her court now.

If she doesn’t, well that’s that and you can enjoy the friendship if you can.

It also strangely made me glad I don’t do “interpreting” or subtlety. People are told upfront what I want to say, no “did they notice it was a date invitation” horror.

Whenever I’m stressed I get some very scary and vivid nightmares of being attacked by large dogs.

But other than that I also constantly have very realistic and boring dreams that feed me inconvenient false information.

Just the other day I completely dreamed up a couple of comments from a colleague about a project, and was very confident that they actually had said that until I went back in the message history to double check.

The worst dreams are the ones that follow you while awake.

They could literally just fish one of the candidates from last time’s primaries, who are already part of the administration. Mayo Pete? Kamala Harris? Literally anybody who is not at risk of randomly dying of natural causes from now to January next year?

I still maintain my position that the DNC wants to lose, so they can keep the “battle for the soul of our nation” distraction going for another cycle or two. Though I don’t think it’s going to work, I doubt their electoral system is going to last that long.

If you install the Reddit Enhancement Suite I think it has a dark mode option. It has many other cool features, though the team has entered maintenance mode in recent years.

I kinda figured. It’s been the default mobile browser layout for a while, and it’s fugly, but I’d gotten used to it. I always use old.reddit on desktop for the lemmy-inspired theme.

A few months ago, the search engine expanded its offering by making available data from OCLC’s proprietary WorldCat database. Anna’s Archive scraped several terabytes of data over the course of a year and published roughly 700 million unique records online, for free.

Scraping data is now “hacking”. Every single computer science department will have to close its doors and surrender their research datasets to the police.

I had to disable my old reddit redirect extension, and then my VPN because apparently reddit blocks those now, because I was curious whether it was a design thing.

Turns out it’s still ugly as shit. But regarding politics, it looks more like 4chan to me. I suppose a particle of 4chan was always part of every redditor, but now that a lot of the older power users left and it became a designated content farm, all bets are off.

In a way it kinda makes me hopeful, lots of people used to think that r/worldnews was balanced. I wonder if normal people will look at the libs craving blood in every post and be weirded out by reddit altogether now (rather than just the very obviously reactionary spots like the trump subreddit).

Shooting blind as I have no first-hand experience with this, but you may find people in a similar “isolated immigrant” situation in language courses for the local language.

They’ll probably not all be native English speakers, but it’s usually the Lingua Franca in these things.

It also depends on the country and your range of interests, but universities usually tend to have a significant number of foreign students (specially if they’re free). Maybe you could look into university-related events and programmes that are open to the general community.

It never stops, but I’ve managed to accept it over time. Some things are mildly joyful, relationships, pets, some specific foodstuffs.

But overall they’re kinda like a very diluted juice. I’m not going to give advice because my way of dealing with it is probably not the best one, but once I got used to it, life became somewhat bearable.

Like eating bland food that you know is going to maintain you alive. Or more accurately, like doing that horribly boring job because you know other people need it a lot.

I recommend UltimMC, though the server will need to have “online-mode” set to off, which will disable Mojang server validation and present some security vulnerabilities.

I’ve only seen this accusation used in the extremely liberal sections of Reddit or our friendly lib instances.

It doesn’t really feel like an efficient way to derail a conversation in text: you say something, the person responds asking for a source; either 1) you reply with the source or 2) you don’t and the conversation dies.

Compare that with “Just Asking Questions”, which can quickly frame complex issues in unstated but obvious ways that usually pander to preconceptions or even conspiracy theories. Those need to be directly confronted (or banned) every time and can easily pass as curious cluenessless.

But irl it can be very annoying. Imagine having a conversation where the person asks you to cite the source of every remark like you’re a walking academic article. Dealt with a Trotskyist fake leftist fucko who once even wanted me to cite the Kinsey-scale paper after I offhandedly mentioned it while talking about my bisexual living experiences.

Edit: but libs hate both this and JAQing because they have no actual sources and can’t properly answer those questions without sounding reactionary themselves.

Lefty Twitter isn’t great either. It’s not horrid shit like this but it’s lots of Maoists or Orthodox Marxists telling you that you know nothing about Marx.

It’s basically this 99% of the time.

Disclaimer: This is in part something that I wish I had heard some time ago, so it might be too personal and miss the mark at points.

Ever since the pandemic started I’ve become a terminally online antisocial weirdo who barely ever leaves my room, let alone the house.

If you live with family, you might find leaving the house easier than just the room. Grab some headphones, put on an audiobook, podcast or just music and try to take small walks. If you’re not physically fit right now, you’ll probably not get very far, and that’s okay.

I don’t know what kind of food is generally sold in the US, but try to find a reasonably distant restaurant that sells some okay but still tasty food. My Brazilian analogue would be some rice-and-beans-based meal, you can probably find something similar to your taste, but as a rule of thumb prefer boiled to fried. You’ll also not be able to suddenly become a great healthy cook right away, and that’s okay.

An important part of doing unpleasant but healthy things, is that they’re usually only unpleasant in the beginning. They’ll eventually become comfortable too. Starting is usually the hardest bit.

But honestly the most important part is using your material conditions as a tool rather than a cudgel to beat yourself up. Frankly, if you’re not able to do revolutionary work right now you’ll probably not be able to do much counter-revolutionary work either, so that’s not something you should worry about. But also, if you have money to spare, use it on yourself to make yourself feel better. Therapy, counselling, non-free group classes are all things you can do to make your life actually better which are not “parasitic”. Make full use of the tools that have been given to you without shame, as if you had ever had that much of a choice in receiving them in the first place.

Also a small recommendation, have you listened to the “It’s not just in your head” podcast by Harriet Fraad? It talks a lot about the relation between activism and mental health. You can pick some specific episodes that talk about things you most immediately care about, be it material or mental, and see if it is worth it.

Mildly unrelated but it would be nice to do some rebuilding at !mentalhealth@lemmygrad.ml, because I bet a lot of people here and on the Bear would have use for it.