Never talk to me or my Mastoson ever again.

Looking at a map of their range they might be in the very southernmost part maybe near Madison, but just barely. You’d probably had to head towards Illinois or Indiana for a better chance of finding them.

If you use the app iNaturalist you can also find geotagged groves. Taking a quick peek there’s a handful in southern WI like I said, but they really pick up once you move south.

Unfortunately I’ve never used LaTeX so someone else will have to answer that.

I… love you too?

For anyone doing academic writing, I use a combination of Logseq, Zotero, and Zettlr. All open source. Collect articles in Zotero. Annotate and take notes on those articles in Logseq with absolutely amazing PDF annotation tools. Write draft in Zettlr which allows me to enter Zotero citations and reference Logseq notes.

Bonus shoutout to LibreOffice for exporting and formatting the final draft. And that’s your recipe for one all-natural, organic, FOSS thesis!

Yeah seconded that it’s not FOSS but still a great app. Logseq is a good FOSS alternative for a knowledge base, and I really like Zettlr for long form md writing and note taking too.

I use a lot of note apps partially for school partially for fun but man Logseq PDF annotation is incredible. That plus native Zotero integration is a game changer for anything academic.

Good list I make use of a lot of these too. Keep both LibreOffice and OnlyOffice around depending on how I feel that day but been leaning towards LO quite a bit recently.

I will say I had Caprine for a while but my god it uses so much memory, it has an absolutely massive footprint on my laptop. I find a nice compromise is using messenger.com as that way I can still send and read messages without delving into the horrors of FB, plus can keep it in a container.

Many locals haven’t either! They really are a hidden gem.

They make it to farmers markets occasionally, and the trees are very easy to identify and surprisingly common. If you know what to look for, most wooded areas in their range will have some pawpaw trees. They generally only fruit for a few weeks in late September/early October but the good news is you’re right on time!

Just doing my part to spread the good word.

Someone else mentioned pawpaws but i just want to emphasize pawpaws are the shit. Plus if you live in the Eastern US especially the Midwest pawpaw season is HERE. You have no excuse not to leave your house this moment and find your nearest pawpaw grove.

Not convinced? Congrats you have subscribed to pawpaw facts:

• they are related to the custard apple and were brought this far north in the shit of prehistoric giant sloths
• they taste like somewhere between a mango and a banana, and so our ancestors in all their wisdom gave them names like Indiana banana, Ohio banana, \ banana
• they are a CAPITALIST NIGHTMARE as they have terrible shelf life so can really only be eaten fresh or bought from a farmers market
• foraging for pawpaws is super fun as they grow in groves, have super skinny trunks and branches with large long leaves and surprisingly big fruit. To harvest pawpaws you give the trees a gentle shake and ripe fruit will just fall off. Don’t shake too hard or you might knock down fruit that isn’t ripe! Not cool!
• to enjoy just shake em down, cut it open and eat the fresh fruit inside (not the skin). Do not eat the big ass seeds leave them where you found em so that out beautiful native pawpaw groves FLOURISH

All in all pawpaws are 10/10 if you want to feel like a literal Animal Crossing character shaking down trees for sustenance and having a great time eating fresh fruit outdoors

The lengths to which this game goes to steal all my free time is absurd.

It’s completely understandable to respond that way towards people who are dismissing or attacking a fundamental part of who you are.

At the same time it’s important to note they are a small sample size of their religious/ethnic/national background. Each of those groups is probably so large as to contain every kind of person from saints to bigots, which is why hating a group that large is fundamentally irrational.

Honor your own feelings, don’t make excuses for their bigotry, but remember that they like any of us are just small parts of the groups they belong to.

Wasn’t self-hosting but trying it out with their server for awhile. I think the idea is great, and I think one of its big UI advantages is it’s a lot more intuitive on mobile than most other personal knowledge management / note takers I’ve used.

I did find it pretty buggy at times and a lot of the features not built out enough yet to be a daily driver for any particular use case of mine yet. I’ve tucked away into my “cool projects to check up on at a later date” mental drawer.

As someone with what feels like three more or less made up degrees, I’ll say having a degree in general is often a prerequisite for many jobs so it is better than not having a degree for sure.

In terms of hard skills, I also wish I’d developed more in college, but it’s still possible to develop those outside of school either on the job, on your own time, etc.

Your first job or your next job might not be your dream job or even all that relevant to your studies. But its much better to build skills and experience while also bringing in income, and it will make your next job search all the better.

Good luck, I’m currently job searching too and it’s soul crushing but we’ll make it!

Awesome, yeah I’d say Sigur Rós is the most similar to Mogwai on that list (especially Kveikur which is a pretty dark album). The other two usually do more shimmery, pretty guitar tracks rather than the more hard rock/metal/noise influence you get with Mogwai. But check them all out, hope you enjoy!

A lot of post-rock bands might be good for you. Usually atmospheric/instrumental music played with typical rock instruments and little to no vocals.

Some of my favorites are Explosions in the Sky, Mogwai, El Ten Eleven, and Sigur Rós.

(although Sigur Rós technically features vocals but it’s a language of nonsense sounds the lead singer Jónsi made up called Hopelandic, so it’s instrumental-voice I guess??)

The shortest concert I’ve ever been to was Monsters & Men right after they dropped their first album. They came on stage, played literally every song, and then said “thanks that’s all of them guys” and left. To be fair, it was all of them.

There’s been two albums since. Strangers to Ourselves has some gems but I think a lot of people found to be a weaker release. The most recent one, The Golden Casket, I liked quite a bit better.

Tragically, Jeremiah Green, the drummer and one of the founding members of MM, passed away in Dec 2022. They haven’t disbanded or anything but their output might change pretty significantly from here on out.