it can be super confusing knowing what to bring as a freshman living in the dorms, so i thought it would be helpful to create a master list of what to bring/not to bring.
please add to the list in the comments — i tried to be thorough but i’m sure i forgot something!!
must have:

• mattress topper
• sheets (twin xl, or full if you’re in cypress)
• pillows (2, maybe a decorative one)
• ottoman
• shower caddy (plastic)
• dehumidifieair purifier
• shower shoes
• comforteduvet
• mirror (full length from walmart are $10)
• brita/water filtepurifier
• backpack, water bottle, notebook, other school essentials
• laptop (even if you use an ipad)
• mini fridge/microwave
• air freshener (bath and body works are the best!)
• dishes (reusable kids dishes from target or disposable ones): spoons, knives, forks, plates, bowls, cups
• laundry basket (rolling or a backpack type are most convenient)
• laundry detergent (warning: tide pods can create issues in the school washers)
• fabric softener
• umbrella
• magnetic key holder (seriously, a personal favorite bc i never lost my keys)
• wallet phone case and/or a lanyard to keep keys on
• umbrella
• firstaid kit (badaids, dayquil + nyquil, melatonin, tylenol, etc.)
• office supplies (scissors, stapler, pens, pencils, etc.)
• towels
• clothes hangers
• disinfecting wipes
• enough socks and underwear
• hanging organizer for shoes
• noise cancelling headphones

nice to have:

• body pillow
• rug
• posters/pictures
• command hooks
• plastic dresser (target/walmart)
• whiteboard
• kettle
• ice cube tray
• desk hutch/organizer
• TV
• rolling cart (ikea has great ones), the skinnier the better
• lamp, fairly lights, LEDs, etc.
• sweatshirts (dorms are very cold)
• extra blankets
• mesh laundry bags
• slippers/slip on shoes
• good walking sneakers
• gator gear
• bedside table (clips on side of bed, great if you need to have a super lofted bed, might take some maneuvering to make it work!)
• sponge + dishsoap
• broom + vacuum
• power strip/extension cord
• candle (not technically allowed…but that’s what the ottoman is for lol)
• airfryer (again, ottoman)
• chip clips
• wall tack/mounting tap
• whiteboard
• over the door organizers (again, not technically allowed, but no one i know has gotten in trouble for them)
• sleep mask + earplugs

what you should know:

• your basic information — home AND dorm addresses, birth date, social security number, prescriptions, medical conditions, usual primary care providedoctor, parent/guardians names and dates of birth
• your UF ID
• how to make a doctor’s appointment
• what food you like (what will you want to make at 2am — drunk or sober? what essentials do you need? cereal, milk, peanut butter, bread, etc. how will you get it?)
• your phone number
• your parent’s phone number
• how to do your laundry
• how to cook at least one very simple meal (sandwich, ramen, pasta, etc.)
• your one.uf login
• how to resolve conflict with your roommate!
• basic social etiquette (don’t slam doors or let them slam past a certain time, try to make your vomit in the toilet, etc.)

don’t bother: * a separate trash can (you will forget to empty it and it will stink up the room! plus there might not even be room for it anyways) * ALL OF YOUR CLOTHES (the number one thing that makes move out hard. you can bring stuff back and trade it out over winter break) * too many shoes (one pair of sneakers, a pair of frat/party shoes, a business casual pair, maybe a pair of boots if you like them, shower shoes should be enough) * things you can buy when you get there (especially if you’re flying, buy shampoo + conditioner when you get here. amazon is your best friend!) * too many pillows * WALLPAPER (it will tear up the walls) * pushpins (maybe i used these, but they leave holes in the walls and a strict RA could charge you for damages. plus, some rooms only have cinder block walls) * pots and pans (unless you plan to cook and already do, you won’t use them) * ironing board * printer * a safe (every room has a drawer that you can add a lock to to make it into a safe if you need to) * a bike if you don’t already use one * anything you plan to start using if you don’t use it already * a rain jacket (if you rush a sorority, you will get a windbreaker, but otherwise no one else uses any kind of rain jacket. an umbrella is key!) * handled steamer
best places for dorm shopping are target and walmart, while the dollar store and five below are great for making things cute and homey!

Played the new season for maybe 12ish hours, but item rework is an improvement andwhere it should have been at launch. However, still has some glaring issues that need work. And some other things that would be great additions. Honestly feels like this last year was Blizzards way of beta testing the game prior to their new expansion.

• blue/white items have 0 value after WT2 and shouldn't ever drop. No reason. Instead, drop a pile of gold equivalent to what the average sell price is instead.
• Rare items are essentially useless past WT3. Would rather just see a large sum of gold and/or crystals drop instead. Just as if you were to salvage it
• everything is so damn expensive. Remember when game initially released, how everyone was up in arms because it cost so much to do just about anything? It's gone right back to it. Seems like the gring up to lvl 70 was so expensive because you swap gear so much. At level 79 and finding most of my end-game gear, the amount of gold dished out slowed and am finally seeing more than $2 million steady in account. Prob more noticeable now because less trash loot equals less income from selling. I always sell rares/blue/white, then salvage the legendaries, even in new season. Have plenty of crystals so salvaging rares isn't needed.
• is red the only color pallet you can choose from in helltide? EVERYTHING is a variant of red. When summoning the new boss, it can get extremely hard to see what's going on since it all blends in together.
• we need a "Quality of life" section in gameplay settings.
  • add/remove highlight from monsters and scenery.
  • option for map overlay
  • option for sharper contrast in skill effects, lingering effects, and overworld scenery.
  • option for auto pickup when walking over item. FOR ALL ITEMS, not just consumables. Then have a slider for pickup radius.
  • zoom distance slider. Have a further zoom distance and a slider to adjust distance.
  • loot filter. There may be less items, but still a lot of trash. I still go to town and sell 90% of the items I pickup.
• we should not have our ability to socket gear locked behind world bosses. If you are going to lock it behind world bosses, then have them spawn more frequently. Or have them align with helltide more often and award multiples. Some people rarely see a world boss because of real life events. Those individuals can no longer make use of crafted gems.
• can we add mechanics, health or something to make world bosses seems more impact full? Maybe start with 1 mechanic and have an additional mechanic each of the potion ticks. So after the third tick, theres 4 mechanics the boss has actively running. Or something similar, because as of now It's a loot piniata that takes less than 10 sec to kill. Would rather click a daily login button and claim the loot as a daily login bonus.
• I've been playing druid, so I don't know about other classes, but been having issues with casting skills and character orientation. Will cast pulverize to my left, but character will face the right. I've had an entire NM dungeon where my char faced right lol. Stuff casts where it should, just trippy when it happens. Running around a dungeon always oriented in one direction is highly entertaining.
• capstone bosses are a complete joke. 1 hit first boss at lvl 40 w/ pulverize druid and completed 2nd boss to go into WT4 at lvl 50 in less than 10 sec. WAAAY to easy lol.
• feel like this game in general is just easy. Devs said in the various streams that they want to keep it easy and not complicate things, but I wonder if they say that because they truly just want an easy experience or if Microsoft wants them to keep it easily playable to boost numbers and subscriptions through game pass?
• make glyph levels sync across all characters. This will make making alts WAY more fun!
• beam colors and effects. The greater affix indicator isn't enough to catch they eye of someone speedrunning, especially since some walls and environments are similar colors and may blend together. They didn't seem to interested in beam color changes during Streams, but what about effects? Keep the colors, but add a bright blue(or other color) shock pulse that surrounds the beam and let's you know that an item with greater affix dropped? I'm almost at the point, level 79, where I'm not picking up legendaried anymore. Have the gear with affixes, tempering that I need and are all 900+. So I'm just picking them up now to upgrade the codex. Anything thats is an upgrade, is minimal percentages at this point. Having something to let me know there's an upgraded item laying there would be huge. The lightning pulse surrounding beam and framing item in inventory would be much appreciated.
• I would like to see something to distinguish Ubers from Regular Unique items as well. Maybe Ubers should have the solid red beam and knarly effect, if it has greater affixes, to get you stoked about it dropping.
• Don't feel like glyphs get enough xp from NM dungeons. From lvl 63 to lvl 79 and 2 glyphs are at 15. I took all my powder off of bonus xp from kills and put it all on glyph xp, but doesnt seems like it's a noticeable increase. Would be nice to see a secondary way to earn glyph xp. Maybe ability to craft a potion that gives you an amount in glyph XP equal to number of cinders spent in helltide. Lasts like 30min or something. Only applicable to WT its crafted in and takes cinders just to make. For example, 200 cinders and X amount of herbs craft a potion that grants you 1 glyph xp for all future cinders spent in 30-60 minutes. With helltide buffed to a level where it doesn't feel like a chore to do anymore, why not have something else to make it even more rewarding.
• buff overworld events and side quests to keep them relevant. Helltide is fun, but need a break from it and NM dungeons periodically. If you buffed side quests and overworked events, would be a nice relief and change of pace.
• we should get a choice to keep the existing or take the new temper. Also xant stand spending 4 tempers and rolling the same stat all 4 times. Pretty depressing.

Game updates are overall good. Brought it back to where it should have been at launch. Will it keep me entertained the entire season? Not a chance. Im 2 days in and getting bored of the repetition. Helltides to WT4, then NM dungeon until glyphs at least lvl 15, then to the 100 stuff, if not there already. But ive also already made each character and leveled to 100 in previous seasons. So i guess the desire to make alts isnt there now, but may be for newer people playing. If you bought the game, then there's no reason why you shouldn't give it a run for a day or two, but I wouldn't buy the game just because of this patch.
Not a fan of making us pay 4 additional times just to fight the lords of hell though. What's a Diablo game without Diablo!!

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Trying to link my Darden Card to my Reverb account but I don't know where to find my Darden Credit Union login information at. Tried checking Krowd but couldn't find it. Do I need to manually set one up or what? Never had a card like this before lol

It's been hard to find time to write this past week, but I'm chugging along, however sluggish. I also want to give a huge thanks to u/icallshogun for telling me how to use new-old reddit, because it's already saved me a bunch of time posting this single chapter.
I have a bad habit of last minute editing before I post chapters. I'll usually go over once or twice and switch up a few things. I didn't this time. Why am I telling you this? No idea. Enjoy.
A little PSA: if the next chapter button is missing, it's most likely in the comments (either that, or the next chapter isn't out yet), because sometimes reddit likes to say posts are more than 40k even when they aren't, making them impossible to edit. I just had this problem adding the link to chapter 12.
Many thanks to u/SpacePaladin for making NoP!
Prev -First- Next
------------------------------
Chapter 13: A million miles away
- Memory Transcription Subject: Arlene Brandy, Human Refugee
Date [Standardized Human Time]: October 20th, 2136
The refugee center crested the horizon, with UN banners draped from the second story, and signs marking some of the nearby buildings as temporary housing. I wondered how exactly they convinced people to hand over entire buildings for use. One of them wasn’t even an apartment building, it was offices.
There were more humans around, of course, with the venlil population extremely sparse, only a few brave enough to be anywhere near the ‘den’. I grabbed the door, and opened it, revealing the main lobby, which to my utter surprise, had a venlil at the desk along with a human.
It feels so weird to point out when people are human or not, but that’s just how it is now. I ambled towards the pair, keeping my movements slow and calculated, not to scare the guy. He noticed, and let out a chuckle.
“No need to worry about me ma’am. I’m quite used to humans by now.”
I relaxed, blushing a little. “That makes sense.”
“What do you need?” The venlil asked.
“Oh, I’ve been meaning to get one of those datapads. I have family at home I need to get in touch with.”
“And you are?”
“Arlene Brandy.”
“Uh huh.” He clicked at the computer for a moment. “Well, you’re a little late to the party. We just got five hundred or so new residents, so we’re out of new pads, but I’m sure you can find someone willing to let you borrow theirs.”
“Shit.”
“I’m sorry for the inconvenience. You’re staying at Golden Ridge apartment 113, correct?”
“Yes, why?”
“I’ll have one sent to your door when we get a new shipment.”
“Thank you.” I turned to leave.
“Wait, we wont get more for a few paws yet. Why don’t you try asking to use someone else’s?”
I turned back around to the desk. “Can I use yours?”
"Sorry, mine doesn’t connect to the Earth networks.”
“Shit.”
“Please try not to swear so much, there are children around.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
The guy at the desk was so comfortable around me that it started making me uncomfortable. While the human at the desk didn’t even register me. I bet he was playing solitaire.
I entered the common room. People ambled, walked, teetered, and even ran around, from door to door and table to table. Seating was plentiful, but there weren’t any free spots, because the place was so packed. There really were a lot of them. Refugees, I mean. This was only a tiny fraction too.
How many more? Is there an end to it?
I searched for someone to approach, but found nothing. Everyone was grieving. I didn’t want to interrupt. I didn’t want to see it, I didn’t want to know it was there. My stomach turned in a horrible spiral, and I soon found myself bent over a toilet, ejecting breakfast. I was drooling over the bowl like a rabid dog, eyes watering and legs quaking. My diaphragm expelled one last gust of air, in a horrible coughing fit that lasted uncomfortably long.
I don’t know how I found the bathroom without help, it wasn’t marked very well. I’ve always been good at that sort of thing I guess, whatever ‘that sort of thing’ is.
On my way out, I washed my hands twice, not that it made a difference. The common room was still full of chatter and sobbing, quiet and boisterous both in their own right.
A man in a dress shirt sat alone at a table with his head in his hands. A mother cradled a baby in her arms, rocking him to sleep. In the corner of the room sat a group of people sitting on the ground playing monopoly. A boy ate a droopy sandwich next to a parent, munching listlessly. They all looked so tired. So tired that it could suck the breath right back out of you.
At one of the tables was a man with burns on his arms, and another bandaging him up. He winced when the bandages touched the splotches where blisters used to be, dry and scabbed. There was a good chance the burns were inflicted on purpose, by them. Monsters.
He locked eyes with me, his empty like all the rest. My head jerked away, embarrassment on my face like dye, the mask doing little to hide my frenzied posture. I power walked to another part of the room, behind a group of people conversing. I took off my coat so I wouldn’t overheat in the stuffy room… and also to blend into the crowd.
Staring at burn victims? What is wrong with you?
I looked down at myself. My boots were brown, my pants were black, and my shirt was as well, with a picture of an album cover on the front. My hands were twitchy, and my arm was still bandaged. I could’ve, should’ve lost the dressings by then, but I hadn’t got around to it. I put my coat back on
Since I wasn’t getting anywhere, I decided to take a trip down the hallways, into the dorms, where it was less crowded.
Down the halls, past a few turns, was an open door, with warm light spilling out, and cheerful discussion taking place inside. Taking a peek, I saw a group of 3 people, one of whom was a venlil, playing cards. The funny thing, is it was one of those grungy decks with pictures of naked ladies on them. Well, I don’t know if it was funny, but it stuck with me.
“Hello?” Spoke the venlil.
The other heads turned in my direction. I was discovered. A pang of cold crawled through my spine.
“O-oh, hi.” I tried and failed to act like I hadn’t been watching them for several seconds.
“Hey there, are you one of the new arrivals?” Asked the girl sitting next to the venlil.
“Uh, no, I’ve just been living in a different spot.”
“No wonder you look like shit.” Spoke a middle aged guy with scars. There was an ankle monitor on his leg, though I certainly wasn’t going to question him about it.
“Ben! Don’t be rude.” The girl replied.
“I’m not being rude. We all look like shit. Some of us are shit right now.” Ben mumbled.
“Well you don’t have to be so nihilistic about it.” She turned back to me. “Wanna join us? We could use a fourth.”
“No thanks. I’m trying to get in touch with my family.”
"Well if they’re here, I can find them. I know everyone here.” Said the girl, with a big grin.
"They’re on Earth. I just need to use someone’s datapad. The guy at the desk said we were out of new ones.”
“Did you break yours?”
A nervous laugh escaped me. It felt so weird to have a normal conversation. The last time I talked to a human was only a few days ago, but it felt much longer. Years maybe… or not. My shoulders felt tight, probably from the extra weight. I swallowed a lump that had been growing in my throat since leaving Earth, and my stomach got heavier as a result.
What did she lose?
I cleared my throat. “N-no, I never got one in the first place.”
“Well, no worries. You can use mine if you want. I’m Taylor by the way.” She smiled.
I didn’t smile back. The mask would’ve hidden it anyway. “Thanks. I’m Arlene.”
She handed me the weird alien phone, which I soon realized I didn’t know how to use.
The venlil piped up. “Want me to do it for you?” He stood up.
“Yes please.” I handed him the datapad.
He started tapping away at the device. “These things are super outdated. The interface is really clunky, especially the UN comms.”
I loomed over his shoulder, watching him type in a bunch of stuff into text boxes. “You have to login to make calls?”
“No, this is just the path the call will be taking. Where are you calling?”
“Wisconsin.”
“Where is that?”
“North America.”
*“*Okay, there we go.” He handed the datapad back to me. “Just type in the phone number and you’re good to go.”
“Thanks.” I started punching in the number.
“No problem. I’ve had to do it for Taylor a million times by now.” He chuckled.
“Hey, I know how to do it now!” She replied.
“Then why didn’t you show her how?”
Taylor snorted. “Because then you wouldn’t be useful anymore, and I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.”
“Whatever you say.” He flicked his tail.
“Hey, enough with the snarky tail language.” She crossed her arms.
“What did he say?” Ben asked.
“He said I was a goober.”
I looked up from the datapad. “You have a tail sign for ‘goober’?”
“Of course we do, why wouldn’t we?” He shrugged.
Ben raised his eyebrows, and Taylor laughed. I was still wearing the mask.
"Hey, do you mind if I uh… you know.” I pointed to my face.
“Oh please, you couldn’t possibly be uglier than Taylor.”
“You better be careful Talnek. You’d get a beating if you insulted a lady where I come from.” Ben stated.
Taylor punched Ben in the shoulder. “He’s just messing!”
I removed the mask, and set it down on a table. “Is it alright if I make the call outside?”
“Sure, as long as you don’t manage to brick the thing.” Talnek said, sitting back down at his cards with a snicker.
Taylor shot him a dirty look.
“Thanks again Taylor.”
She grinned like a little kid. “No prob bob!”
I stepped into the hallway, holding the datapad up to my face, and pressed the call button.
It rang.
And rang.
And rang…
Until the display lit up with the face of my dad. My lips curled up in a smile.
“Hey dad.”
“Ope!” He flinched, then grinned. “Hey there sweetie. Havin’ fun up in space?”
“Nevermind that! Are you guys okay? Did Luke make it back alright?”
“Oh we’re doing fine yet. Luke got discharged because of injuries. He got pretty banged up in a crash, but he’s alright.”
“Is mom around?”
"Sorry kiddo, she’s out of town getting gas for the generators.”
My eyes widened. “Generators? Is the power out? Have you been able to get dialysis?”
He rolled his eyes. “Oh don’t worry yourself. We’ve got diesel running the place.”
My hands left marks of sweat on the device. “You are getting your blood cleaned, right?”
“Yes, I am. Even if I wasn’t, your pa’s still got some fight left in ‘em.” He patted his bicep.
I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. “Jesus dad, you had me worried for a second there.”
He chuckled. “Don’t be. Try to have fun up there. No use worrying about somewhere you’re not.”
A sigh escaped me. “I’ll try.”
“That’s my girl! How are the aliens treating ya?”
I frowned. “Well, if I’m being honest, most of them are assholes.”
“That so?”
“Yeah, I mean, I’ve met a few that don’t mind me, but I can count them on one hand.”
“Well that’s better than nothing, ain’t it?” He raised an eyebrow in a joking manner.
I smiled a little. “I guess so.”
“So, tell me about these nice aliens then.”
“Sure- Hold on, is Luke there?”
“He’s sleeping right now. Doctor’s got him on the good stuff.”
“Is it that bad?”
He shouldn’t have enlisted. Asshole. He’s such an idiot. He could have died! “I wanna meet aliens” my ass.
*“*The doc says he’ll be up and at em in a few days, but the pain is still kicking him.”
*“*Is he alright? Like, is he shellshocked?”
Dad frowned. “I was hoping you wouldn’t ask.” He looked past the camera. “He’s pretty bitter about the whole thing.”
My blood ran cold. I knew what it sounded like when he was downplaying something. “Dad. Is he gonna be okay?”
His expression softened. “Luke’s a strong boy. He’ll be okay.”
“He better. I’ll kill him if he’s not. You be sure to tell him that.”
Dad laughed. “Sure, sure. Back to the aliens, if you will.”
“My bad.” Warmth filled my face. “So there’s this guy who lives in my apartment building, right? I come back home after a day of trying, and failing, to get my hands on any materials, craft materials are super expensive here for some reason, by the way, and he’s coming home at the same time, so I say hi to him, and he jumps me!”
Maybe things would get better.
“Their claws are sharp! He scratched me up pretty bad, look.” I raised my arm to the camera, and my dad gasped in response.
"Whoa, that’s a lot of bandages.”
“Yeah, right? I may have put too much actually. Anyway, he charges me, and so I put him in a headlock, and I yell at him to calm down. It might have been a misplay on my part, I have to admit. What, with the venlil thinking we want to eat them and all that jazz.”
Dad nodded, eyes full of stars. This was nice.
“Well, he starts crying, and now I felt like an ass, so I try to calm him down, but he’s not having any of it. So I hand him a doll I made, but that didn’t do much either, so I ended up just having to leave him there. Would you believe it if I told you he came knocking on my door the next day? He wanted to learn felting!”
He burst into laughter, having to wiping a tear from his eye. “I have to say, you have the strangest way of making friends.”
Maybe I was worrying over nothing.
“Oh, I forgot to mention, so, I was trying to get wool, right? But there’s obviously no sheep here on venlil prime.”
“Oh, don’t tell me.”
“So I went around offering free haircuts.”
Dad started wheezing like he had sand in his lungs. He struggled to point a finger at me. “S-so…” He burst into another fit of laughter. “You went around with shears, offering haircuts to the fluffy aliens who think you want to eat them?”
“Yes, that’s exactly right. I give damn good cuts too.” I grinned, face full of mischief.
“So this friend of yours took you up on the offer? What’s his name?”
“Meba. And yes, I sheared him.”
“Okay, Meeh Baah? Are you pulling my leg?”
“Nope, that’s his real name. It means ‘little person’ in venlil, apparently.”
“You’re kidding! That is priceless! What happened then?”
“I sheared him, and then we went inside, and I taught him how to felt, and he got all flabbergasted when he saw me eat vegetables. He did this,” I held up a pointer finger, closing my eyes. “and then he said ‘You can’t eat vegetables, you’re a predator.’”
“Uh huh.”
“So after that, to skip to the good part, he has me follow him to work to *‘*protect him from humans’, and on the way back, just as we’re getting back to the apartments, he collapses in the hallway, hyperventilating and shaking.”
Maybe I could finally calm down.
“Oh no, was he okay?”
“Yeah, I brought him inside and calmed him down, but then the exterminators barged in! He stuffed me into a closet to hide me.”
Dad’s face swelled with disgust. “Ah yes, I’ve heard of them.”
“Well, they mess up the whole apartment, and they only leave because Meba is friends with their boss.”
“He’s buddy buddy with those folks?”
“Well, I don’t really know, but he used his connections to protect me, so I don’t mind. I was scared shitless the whole time. I barely kept myself still.”
“But you’re okay, right? They didn’t hurt you?”
"No, I was fine. I kind of blew up at him though. We made up though, and now he’s even comfortable around me with the mask off!”
“Mask?”
“The UN makes everyone wear masks in public so we don’t scare people.”
“I didn’t know it was that bad.”
“Yeah… it’s kinda scary sometimes.”
Home was still there.
“Don’t worry. I’m sure the rest of em will fall for your charm soon enough.”
“Yeah. After all, who could hate such an enchanting young lady?” I made a not so dignified face.
Dad shot a silly look right back, making us both laugh at our shared stupidity.
“So, since everything’s intact, when should I come home? I should be able to pretty soon.”
He smiled. “Hey, don’t worry about that. You should stay up there until the power comes back in… oh I don’t know, it should be on in a week or two. No reason to come back when the town is still out of whack.”
“What? But I can help out. Isn’t there work to be done?”
His eyes were warm. “Arlene, just have fun. We’ll be fine. Come home when it’s more comfortable.”
What?
“But I miss you guys.”
“I know, I miss you too.” He glanced off to the side for a moment. “But just wait a little longer. I want to roll the red carpet out for you. We’re not going anywhere.”
“Fine, but I expect a royal welcome.”
“Of course.” He grinned. “I better let you go, I have to make dinner.”
“Oh.. okay. I was hoping you’d be able to tell me about what’s going on in town.”
“Nothing crazy, just the usual but with flashlights instead of street lamps. Say hi to Meba for me.”
“Okay. Bye dad.”
“Bye kiddo. Try not to worry yourself so much.”
“I’ll try. I love you,”
“I love you too.”
He hung up the call, and home was gone again.
I popped back into the room to give Taylor her datapad back.
“How’d it go?” She asked.
“Good. I think.” I grabbed my mask, and handed her the device.
She smiled. “I’m glad. Want to stay for a bit? Today is pizza day.”
“I’m good. I should probably head out. Thanks though.”
“Wait a second, here.” Taylor handed me a card.
I turned it over in my fingers. It was off white with gold lettering. A business card. Very… eccentric.
“What’s this?”
“My info, so you can get in touch with me when you get a datapad. I’m kinda the self appointed caretaker of this place. If you need anything, anything at all, I’m your gal.”
I took another look at the card. “Thanks. It means a lot.”
“You’re welcome! See you later.”
“See you.”
---
I sat on the bench by the office, legs crossed, working on a mini venlil, my third one actually. Yes, I was building an army. An army of little venlil that I would use for… something. Each one measured no more than four inches tall, with floppy yarn tails, and bits of blue yarn affixed for eyes.
They say the one who folds a thousand paper cranes will be granted a wish. What do you get for one thousand woolen venlil?
“Arlene?” Meba was walking towards me. His eyes were unfocused, and his tail was motionless, like a doll’s. He dragged his feet on the ground, and his bag weighed on him like a heap of iron. To put it bluntly, he looked like shit.
“Oh hey there. Done with work?”
“Yeah. What are you making?” His voice was monotone.
“More mini venlil.”
He leaned over. “It looks like me.”
“It is made out of your wool. It would be worrying if it didn’t resemble you.”
“I guess. Does this one have a name too?”
“Not yet. Do you have any ideas?”
He thought for a moment, ears swiveling like satellite dishes. “Mulek.”
“Mulek it is. Is that a common name?”
“It was my father’s name.” He didn’t elaborate.
“Oh, speaking of which, my dad says ‘hi’.”
“He’s the… rancher, right?”
“Yeah.” I got up off the bench. “He’s not as scary as he sounds. If you met him, you’d realize his head is just full of muscles and fart jokes. Ready to go?”
He flicked an ear, and we started walking. The sheer complexity of venlil body language never failed to impress me. Not the ear flicks, those were easy, but the tail signals were insane.
“Hey, Meba?”
“Yeah?”
“What’s your job?”
“I’m a computer scientist. Why do you ask?”
“You look really tired. Six hours, sorry, I mean a claw and a half. It’s a long shift for venlil right?”
“Yes, but my job isn’t very physically demanding.”
“It isn’t taking a toll on you?”
“No.” He lied. I mean fuck, did he think I was stupid? I wasn’t, I think. If it wasn’t his job, it was something else.
“Really?”
“Yes, I just didn’t sleep well.” His eyes were drooping in real time.
Fine, be like that. If you won’t open up, I’ll just help another way.
“Do you want me to carry you?”
Meba stopped in his tracks. “C-carry me?”
“You aren’t very heavy. I could give you a piggyback ride the rest of the way.”
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”
“C’mon, I could use the exercise.” I crouched down, beckoning him over with my hands.
"Arlene, I can walk on my own.” He sounded offended.
"At least let me carry your bag.”
Meba sighed. “Fine.”
I stood up and grabbed his bag. “And away we go!”
We arrived at the station, just in time to catch the tube. Meba yanked his bag out of my arms to swipe his card through the terminal. This particular transport was packed to the brim with people, more than a few of them human. Meba visibly stiffened. He sat down, I remained standing.
“You okay?”
“Y-yeah. It’s just a-a lot.” He most definitely wasn’t, he was trembling like a leaf.
I stood between him and the crowd. “Better?”
“A l-little… thanks.”
“Hey, why don’t you work on the scarf, take your mind of things?”
“S-sure.” He grabbed the yarn ball from his bag, along with the crochet hook. Slowly, he removed the clip that was stopping it from unraveling, and stuck the hook through, starting right where he left off. He was definitely getting faster.
The tube rattled.
Outside, the city still breathed.
Kids coming home form school, people like us, coming home from work.
Same old same old.
In my mind, I pictured a fleet, swooping through star systems, making daring maneuvers, shooting down other vessels. So many lights. I imagined the metal stretching, and the hull creaking as it moved. I imagined the little people inside, scurrying around like ants, each wholly insignificant, but still, moving that massive shape.
I turned around to check on Meba.
He was still shaking, like a wet dog in the snow.
God, I miss Milo. Too bad they don’t let dogs on venlil prime.
I put a hand on his shoulder. “Are you gonna be alright?”
He looked up at me, with his funny little eyes. They were full of anger.
“Yes. There’s nothing to be afraid of.” He let out a breath, clenching his jaw. “It’s so s-stupid it makes me sick.”
“Sorry?”
“There’s no t-threat. I shouldn’t be scared.”
I gave him a gentle shake. “Hey, it’s no big deal. You’re doing well.”
“I’m doing h-horrible. I hate these stupid instincts.” He growled. “H-how is this supposed to be an evolutionary advantage? I can b-barely think straight.”
“Take a deep breath.”
“B-brahk this.” He muttered. “You k-know, we’re famous for being w-weak. The b-best in the whole brahking f-federation.”
I frowned. “Don’t say that.”
“We c-can’t run, and w-we can’t fight.”
“That’s not true and you know it.”
“I can’t even c-control myself. I h-hate it.” He let the scarf slide back into his bag.
“Meba, you’re the bravest venlil I’ve met.”
“What d-does that say about us? That I’m one of t-the ‘brave ones’? It’s brahking p-pathetic.”
“Don’t say that about yourself.”
“Brahk! What else am I supposed to say?” He hissed, head finding its way into his paws. “It’s horrible. Horrible, horrible, h-horrible.”
I sat down next to him, and put my arm around his shoulder.
“This is s-so stupid.” He muttered.
“Tell me what happened?”
“No.”
A sigh escaped me. This was exhausting. “Okay.” I pulled him close.
He removed his paws from his face to look at me. “How am I gonna t-talk to Gram’s friend like this? I can’t even h-handle being around a few random humans. How am I going to deal with him e-eating in front of me?”
“You saw me eating, didn’t you?”
“That’s… d-different.”
“We don’t have to go if it makes you uncomfortable. I’m sure they’ll understand.”
“N-no. I need to d-do this. I can’t keep b-being scared all the t-time.” He clutched at his fur.
I bent over to grab the work-in-progress scarf from his bag, and offered him the half finished garment.
Meba received the scarf, with eyes full of ash. “Thanks…” He continued weaving.
But before he could get into a groove, the brakes forced us to brace ourselves. We were home.
The ground still rumbled as we left the station, even with the rubbery pavement dampening the vibrations. The scent of rain was in the air, carrying with it a special tint from the alien soil. Wind was billowing now, whipping my hair and pushing against my thick greatcoat. Meba was somehow unbothered by this, thanks to his wool I assume. There weren’t clouds overhead, but that would change. My hands hid in their pockets.
‘Twas too cold madam!’ Said lefty.
‘Not for I! It’s simply more comfortable in here.’ Said righty.
We passed the yard, heading up to the second floor, and my apartment. I shivered.
*“*I think it’s gonna rain soon.”
*“*Huh? Why do you say that?”
*“*It smells like rain.”
He tilted his head, ears flopping along with it. “I thought human noses weren’t very strong?”
*“*Well, not for most things, but we can smell when it rains from quite a ways away.” I opened the door, and stepped inside, yanking my feet out of their shells. “Come on in.”
Meba followed with no hesitation, even when I deposited the mask on the coffee table. He plopped down on the couch, deflating for a few seconds before digging around in his bag for the scarf. I grabbed some snacks from the kitchen, and brought them to the couch. I plopped down beside him, and flipped the TV to a random channel. Hopefully lazing about would help both of us.
After a few minutes of zoning out to The Exterminators of all things, I managed to doze off somehow. Sights and sounds melded into goop, as my brain ceased exact function. Facts became obscured, no concrete understanding remaining. Static resonating with time stretching like putty, everything subjective, only in the moment.
A tower, in the desert, numbly stalking around crumbling balconies, arms like swarms, legs like chicken wire. No need to blink. Down below is something terrible, but it doesn’t matter. It is safe here. But snow falls, the sky tearing like an old t-shirt, is it? The weave becoming tighter, it stretches along the north, through to the south, a taut little line of cotton. Now I’m tearing too. The tower isn’t crumbling, but folding. ‘Here’s the sun’, I think, mind reeling back to wakefulness, a snout by my face. Milo?
“Who?”
“Huh?” I tried to sit up, bringing a hand to the kink in my neck. My mouth was dry with viscus saliva, the aftermath of a nap. When I made it about half way up, my skull collided with Meba’s freakishly solid face.
I fell back, gripping my forehead with a groan.
Meba jumped back, startled. “A-are you okay?”
"Ugh…” I curled up into a ball to further cradle the lump growing on my head. “Owwie…”
He started hyperventilating, almost jogging in place.
I grabbed him by the arm. “I’m fine. That just hurt like hell. What is it?”
The squirming stopped. “Sorry for waking you up. I just wanted to know if you think this is long enough.” He held up the scarf to my face, which was still partially covered by my other hand.
Jeez, more than enough. That thing must be at least 80 inches. How long have I been out?
“Yeah, need me to help you finish it off?”
“Yes please.”

Story time !
I was expecting an email today that did not come into my inbox, so I checked the spam folder. Instead, I found an odd email that, at first glance appears to come from my own email address. The message claims that I have been compromised by a hacker and that he collected sensitive information on me and my close ones, demanding a bitcoin payment within 48 hours or he will release the compromising information. I only noticed this email 5 days after the reception date, so the 48 hours have long past. I am a pretty conscious person when navigating the web. I don't click on random links and deactivate JS when visiting sketchy websites.
Here is the email body: ""
I was planning to say hello, [redacted abbreviation of my name], but now I think greetings are unnecessary.
Firstly, I already know you and all your loved ones very well.
Secondly, the occasion for which I'm writing to you is not the happiest one for a friendly greeting.
You've heard that the Internet is a dangerous place, infested with malicious links and hackers like me?
Of course, you've heard, but what's the point in it if you are so dismissive of your internet security and don't care what websites you visit?
Times have changed. You read about AI, judging by your browser history, and still didn't understand anything?
Technologies have stepped far forward, and now hackers like me use artificial intelligence.
Thanks to it, I can get not only access to your webcam and record your fun with highly controversial video
(I recorded it also, but now that's not the point), but also to all your devices and not only yours.
And I saved a special sauce for this dish. I went further and sent malicious links to all your contacts from your account.
Yes, someone was smarter and realized that this was a trap and you were hacked, but believe me,
about 70% of your contact list (and these are your friends, colleagues, and family) bought into my scam.
They have as many skeletons in their closet as you do. Some turn out to be hidden homosexuals...
I have accumulated and analyzed a huge amount of compromising data on you and those with whom you communicate.
Very soon I'll start a crossfire - everyone will receive the full history of correspondence
(and there are enough of "sensitive moments") and recordings from the other contact's webcam.
I can go further and put all these files, as well as the recorded fun of you and your hacked contacts with "hardcore videos" into the public domain.
You can imagine, it will be a real sensation!
And everyone will understand where it came from - from you.
For all your contacts and, you will be enemy number one. Even your relatives will take a long time to forgive you and forget such a family shame...
It will be the real end of the world. The only difference is that there will be not four horsemen of the apocalypse, but only one - (=
But there is no such thing as a completely black stripe without any white dots.
Luckily for you, in my case the "Three M Rule" comes into play - Money, Money and Money again.
I'm not interested in your worthless life, I'm interested in people from whom I can profit.
And today you are one of them.
That's why: Transfer $1190 in Bitcoin to: [redacted bitcoin address] ...within 48 hours!
You don't know how to use cryptocurrencies? Use Google, everything is simple.
Once payment is received, I will delete all information associated with you and you will never hear from me again.
Remember one thing: my crypto address is anonymous, and I generated this letter in your mailbox and sent it to you.
You can call the cops, do whatever you want - they won't find me, my demands won't change, but you'll just waste precious time.
The clock is ticking. Tick tock, a minute out of 48 hours has passed right now. An hour will soon pass, and in two days your old life will pass forever.
Either goodbye forever (if I get my payment), or hello to a brave new world in which there will be no place for you.
Hasta La Vista, Baby!
P.S. Almost forgot. Finally learn what incognito tabs, two-factor authentication, and the TOR browser are, for God's sake!
""
The email is clearly very generic with zero proof of compromise. I have ran a full anti-virus scan with Avast that found nothing. I have also checked the login activity of the past month on my outlook account and found no successful logins. I'm sure we all have secrets we don't want to be made public, but I use my computer mainly for work and school, so my search history is not very juicy. Before you ask, I'm not dumb enough to pay the ransom, but I do want to investigate this closely. The email mentioned that he has recordings of me trough my webcam, yet my laptop does not have a built in webcam. I use an external USB camera for remote meetings that I unplug after the call has ended. So my mind shifted the my phone as I do use my phone more than my computer as my email is logged in to my outlook and has been running sluggish these past few weeks. I ran an Avast scan of my phone that found nothing. The last line of his email mentioned that I should learn to use incognito and install 2FA, which I think gave it away as being a scam more than a hack, mainly because I do use incognito and have 2FA enabled on most important accounts.
Normally I would have simply deleted this kind of email, but the fact that the sender appears to be coming from my own email address got me worried. There is 3 possible option I could see in this case,
1) the email address uses characters that are very similar to regular characters used in my email. I would try replying to the email and see if it comes back to my own inbox, but that would not confirm this theory due to my second point.
2) the email address may have been spoofed using software that makes it look like my own. In which case replying to the email will most likely come back into my inbox
3) I have been compromised with a remote execution payload and the email has been sent from my own device, which would explain why there is no logins logged outside my own IP. But whenever I send an email to myself, the email arrives into my inbox and not my spam folder.
Let me know what you think. Is there a way to view the sender's IP or anything that would shed light on this email. ?
Thanks.

I want your advice. I own a restaurant and i want to develop a food ordering app (web and mobile ) for my restaurant customers? Every day i have different dishes available and i want my customer to login preorder the menu for next days that it will be delivered in his office. Do you believe flutterflow is a good tool for rapid development. Also what database you suggest i should use. Only firebase or use firebase for authentication and whatever else for the orders. My main issue is that i should receive all the orders without mistakes. Thank you in advance!

If you want a TL;DR just skip to the numbered bullet points.
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It's not the devices themselves that are the issue, it's our relationship with the internet that is the issue. The internet wants our attention and we as a species typically want to give it that attention and as such we have made it incredibly easy to do so. Even if you decidedly want to give the internet less attention, it's a difficult thing to achieve because of the combination of the convenient access that is built around the internet and the neural pathways in our brain railroading us to consume media in the shortest path possible. The easiest way of going about using the internet less that I've found is to make the internet less convenient to use. I recently stumbled across a really solid way to do that while still maintaining actual access to the internet if needed and I figured some of you out there may find it useful and maybe others will share their own tips.
​
So backstory: I've been on a heavy privacy kick recently, I'm usually fairly private in all regards but I've been looking into furthering my privacy specifically in the technological realm. Relating to that, I recently started using a dedicated password manager and I access that password manager from my browser as a browser extension that I need to login to prior to being able to access any of my passwords. This is an important piece of the puzzle that you can't ignore if you want to do this. I host my own vaultwarden instance because 'muh privacy' and I think it's neat but that's unnecessary and diametrically opposed to what one would do if they are trying to live a truly simple life. Just use bitwarden, it's free and great. Create an account at bitwarden.com, download their browser extension and login on that.
​
I was doing some research in furtherance of my goal of technological privacy and recently, I've found that Brave is a pretty solid option to stop information-thirsty entities on the other side of the web from identifying you specifically based off of your browser fingerprint so I went ahead and installed that to give it a test spin and combed through the settings where I essentially just turned off anything that related to sharing or saving my information, intending to further my privacy but unintentionally also just generally taking away convenience. Here's a quick rundown of the pertinent stuff that I've done:
​

1. Install Brave browser and disable Brave's native password manager
2. Create an account for and install the browser extension for a password manager that requires you to login to it before you get access to your passwords, be sure to use a long password. (Just use bitwarden: https://bitwarden.com/learning/getting-started-as-an-individual-use )
3. Go through all of the websites you spend too much time on and change the password for them to use randomly generated passwords so that you won't be able to login to them without the password manager or a dedicated effort to remember them, but if you're at that point, you don't actually WANT less internet exposure. You have to want it for this to work.
4. Configure Brave to clear all browser data on exit, at a minimum clear sign-in data and cookies, but clearing all browsing data on exit is the least convenient for you and that's out goal.
5. Use duckduckgo as your search engine. It doesn't have the best search matching so it can be frustrating to use when you're used to google spoon feeding you the most obscure query using the smallest morsel of a hint as to what you were looking for. Remember we're going for inconvenient. (optional but helpful)
6. Configure Brave to disable auto-fill in the URL bar so you need to manually type full URLs to get where you need to go, keep bookmarks(for the things you don't need to moderate your use of only, ofc) or wade your way through duckduckgo. No more typing 'y' to get to youtube. You're going to need to type at minimum 11 characters to get to youtube and that gives you 10 extra characters to think about why you're going there. (optional but helpful)

​
​
The end result is that you open a browser to do some internet-related doom-scrolling, but because you're logged out when you closed the browser last browsing session, nothing is personalized to you anymore so you have to either dig for something that interests you, or deal with unlocking your password manager. In either event it gives you 10, 20, 30 seconds to think about WHY you're on the browser in the first place and about all of the other things you could or should be doing instead. I open my browser, open youtube, see absolute nothing looking back at me, scowl and close the browser because I should be doing dishes right then.
​
You may think that this sounds like you're absolutely crippling your browsing experience, but actually not, you're just adding a blockage on the neural pathway of seeking mindless entertainment. It's plenty usable if you use a good password manager like bitwarden that auto-fills everything for you. Meaning that if you're on the computer for an actual good reason, you'll just spend the 20 or 30 seconds to login, and it's largely the same browsing experience post login to whatever sites you need to be on since first party cookies and sign in data are only removed once the browser actually exits.
​
Feel free to share tips or tricks you have or critique my setup, I figured I'd just share what I have so far.

Start: Narita Airport, April 3rd, 2024
3 people, including me.
Only had a rough itinerary, we didn't have much time to plan. Sakura timing was a shot into the blue but we got lucky.
Renting and driving a car in Japan - easier than expected!
We were a little nervous about renting a car in Japan and driving in a country we've never visited before. But it turned out to be super easy and straightforward. We were welcomed with kindness and got picked up by the car rental agency at the terminal.
There was no surcharge for registering additional drivers. International driver's license issued by Austria was accepted without a translation in Japanese thanks to a bilateral agreement. International driver's license issued by Germany was only accepted with an additional translation on paper in Japanese (expensive). Definitely make sure you have these documents ready before renting the car.
We used Google Maps and mobile data through an eSIM for navigation. The car's built-in navigation system was in Japanese, so we couldn't use it. Tip: in Japan, you can use landline phone numbers to navigate, instead of an address. Google Maps was very reliable, the most important direction signs are also in latin alphabet.
Regarding tolls: you can rent a toll card ("ETC card") from the rental agency for just 300 JPY for the entire trip. Highly recommended, you can just drive through the "ETC" gates at any expressway and it registers the toll to be collected. 1400 km, of which ~1100 km on toll roads (expressways) ended up in a total of 28,900 JPY (~ 180 € / USD) Gas is currently really cheap, we got regular gas for as low as 165 JPY per liter at some places. Fueling the car at self service stations is also the same as in every other countries, have your phone ready to translate the screen. Fuel types are color-coded, so almost impossible to mistake.
Being 3 people, even including tolls and gas, the rental car was still cheaper than 3 rail passes together, and since we had accomodations quite far off the grid, it allowed us more flexibility.
Left-driving traffic did take a few hours to get used to, but Japanese drivers are VERY patient and other drivers would always let us merge when we had troubles switching lanes at intersections etc.
Even parking is pretty straightforward. Almost all accomodations, restaurants and stores offer (limited) parking space. In the cities, you can't just park anywhere, you have dedicated pay parking lots that turned out to be super easy to use: you drive onto your prefered numbered parking space, then an automatic barrier will come up in front or under the car after ~ 3 min., and you can just walk away. When you come back, you type in your parking space number at the machine and pay the amount. Usually they have rates for 30 min., 1h and 24h maximum charge for parking. In Tokyo, we paid 900 JPY for 24h of parking, which we considered a great deal compared to European cities.
The only challenging city for driving and parking was Kyoto. Narrow roads, slow traffic, hardly any space and many tourists and cars at the main attractions. But whenever we were stuck backing out of a full parking lot, someone came rushing to our car to help us back out safely into traffic. I've never encountered such attentiveness for others in any other country.
The expressways are great and save you a lot of time. The speed limits are not always obvious, especially because to our surprise, hardly anyone sticks to them, so we decided to just flow with the left lane traffic to be safe.
There are plenty of tidy rest areas on the expressways offering food, coffee and WiFi.
April 3/4/5: Narita to Fujoyoshida - Restaurant experience instead of Mt. Fuji
Having picked up our little Nissan, we drove straight from Narita to Fujiyoshida. Our accomodation was not directly in the city but on the very outskirts, which turned out to be perfect, because after a long noisy flight we found ourselves in a peaceful Tatami room facing the rainy forest and a sakura tree in bloom. They use heavy blankets and rice pillows for the beds and I slept like a baby on these.
The weather was rainy and not a sign of Mt. Fuji, so we tried some local restaurants and had fantastic Hōtō noodles, a speciality from Yamanashi area. We were extremely hungry and ordered 4 pots for 3 people, and they came back twice to confirm our order. When the food arrived, we realized why they double checked, because one pot is already big enough to be shared by two non-competetitive eaters.
We also learned our first lesson: In busy areas, especially during Sakura time, you should definitely make a reservation, expect lines and also expect restaurants to take the last ordeguests 30-60 minutes before the actual closing time. They also might be randomly closed on Sundays during Sakura. Opening hours/days on Google Maps are hardly reliable. We also realized that reviews in Japan are rather strict. Anything that had "just" 4-star reviews was perfectly fine to eat- 5-star reviewed places were often packed.
My 2 companions are vegans, and there are hardly any Japanese restaurants that offer specifially vegan dishes. But no matter where we went, they were super helpful and always tried their hardest to find a vegan solution for them. We also realized though, that fish isn't always considered as non-vegan, so there's that.
Despite the rain, it was very nice to wander around the city, Fujikawaguchiko lake, and we visited Fujiomurosengen Shrine. The cherry blossoms were still closed at this time.
We also explored some of the nearby towns and found beautiful little shrines everywhere and even stumbled upon a spring celebration ceremony at one of them.
April 5/6: Halfway stop at the shore to Nara and a waterfall
We booked an Airbnb halfway to Nara at a small town at the shore. On the way to the south, we stopped at Shiraito waterfall a wonderful waterfall located at the bottom of Mt. Fuji. 500 JPY for parking, otherwise no admission fee and definitely worth to spend 1-2 hours visiting. On clear days, you have Mt. Fuji as a backdrop. Again we had a wonderful Ryokan located off the beaten path in a small village near the sea. Cherry blossom was in full bloom there and people were incredibly friendly. I highly recommend you to check out some of the little towns in Gamagori, Hamamatsu or south Aichi area.
April 6/7/8: Nara Park
Full cherry blossom in Nara! We had an accomodation close to Nara Park. Around 8-8:30 am the park started filling with visitors and remained full until sunset. For me personally, it was too busy, nevertheless it's a unique experiece to be allowed this close to wild deer and the Park is home to absolutely magnificient ancient temples. My favorite one to visit was Nigatsu-do temple, which is located at the very top of the western park side and is not as full as the large Todai-ji temple. And obviously the famous Sakura pavillon in the park.
Nara offers a great variety of restaurants. My friends found a specifically vegan restaurant for their dinner, I had the best sushi of my life here, at a place called Sushi Ichi.
Regarding our narrow total time frame, 2 days in Nara were perfectly fine to spend without being too rushed.
April 8/9/10: Kyoto
Arriving at our hostel, located at the very northwest end of Kyoto, we realized how much we underestimated the size of Kyoto. We were at least a 45-50 min. drive away from the main attractions. A car is not really helpful in Kyoto. I caught a cold and spent the first day in Kyoto in bed. My friends went to bamboo forest and even in late afternoon, they said it was too crowded. I wish someone would've told us that there was a lesser known little bamboo forest just 10 minutes drive away from our hostel.
The second day was rest and recovery day due to pouring rain. Did some grocery shopping and meal prepping.
On our last day in Kyoto, we woke up to clear blue skies and sunshine - the first time since our arrival in Japan. With the time being still early, we headed to Fushimi Inari-Taisha shrine and even hiked up all the way to Mt. Inari. Surprisingly, it was not as crowded as expected, but on the way down around 9:30 am, the place started to get incredibly full.
Around noon, we sat down for ramen at Fukakusa Ramen Toriton.
As much as we would've loved to stay in Kyoto, getting a new chance to see Mt. Fuji had a higher priority, so with a tear in our eyes, we made our way to Fujiyoshida.
We were not disappointed when we got our first clear view of Mt. Fuji from the highway. It's absolutely impressive, majestic and looks beautiful with the snow covered top.
Maybe it's personal preference, but I don't regret sacrificing a Kyoto day for Mt. Fuji. To get the Kyoto experience, 2 days are not enough either way, so I think 3-4 days would've been the actual minimum.
We managed to see Mt. Fuji in evening light from Shiraito waterfall.
April 10/11/12: Lake Saiko, Mt. Fuji, Aokigahara Forest
This time we had an accomodation in Saikonishi at lake Saiko. Beautiful peaceful area from where you can still see Mt. Fuji a little. In the morning, we managed to get some wonderful shots with Sakura near Oishi Park and then went to the famous Chureito Pagoda.
Similar to Kyoto, getting up early pays off. At Chureito Pagoda, we paid 1,000 JPY for parking but it was almost directly at the entrance. They have a 5-min slot system, so only a certain amount can visit the platform for 5 min and then the next group can go up etc. Everything is very well organized and it wasn't too busy in the morning.
Sakura at the pagoda was still not in full bloom, so we noticed how even within one area, there can be trees that already have leaves next to trees that haven't even reached early bloom.
We noticed how lucky we were to be able to see Sakura having such a small time window that we had chosen many months prior!
As the place got crowded, we decided to spend a chill day exploring the other lakes. Motosu and Shoji Lake didn't turn out that spectacular, we figured they are rather special in autumn, when the skies get clear and the lake water is calm.
We also noticed that even on sunny days, the sky was always a little veiled and the air rather hazy. Finally, we closed the day by strolling through peaceful Aokigahara Forest and wandered to the lava cave and bat cave. This forest is absolutely beautiful, with moss covered lava rocks and wonderful old trees surrounding the walking path. Distances are longer than they appear on the map, so consider bringing a lamp if you plan for longer exploration.
April 12/13/14: Tokyo
After a chill morning having snacks at the Fujikawaguchiko lake, we made our way to Tokyo. And it was not easy. The transition from a peaceful lake and forest area to driving 1h on the expressway through grey veiled industrial landscapes was so harsh that we seriously considered turning around for a while. From the expressway, Tokyo looks everything but exciting. Once we arrived at our accomodation in Katsushika district though, we were welcomed by a lovely Japanese family and felt at home immediately! The little neighborhoods off central Tokyo are absolutely quiet and not busy.
We had hardly any plan for Tokyo and no clue about transportation, so we took a train to Tokyo central station, the most busy train station I have ever encountered in my entire life. Getting out of the train station, another contrast: Central Tokyo is actually pretty quiet. If you compare it to NYC, it's maybe 5-10% of the perceived noise.
I went to a fancy Izakaya sushi restaurant and had a fantastic prime dining experience, for just 4,000 JPY - no chance to get such a wonderful dinner including drinks at a Western restaurant for this price.
We switched from train to metro and bought a 24h metro ticket for just 600 JPY. It's valid for the entire Tokyo Metro network, excluding Toei subway lines, and will get you across most of Tokyo. We figured it to be very intuitive and easy to navigate. It takes a little longer than the train but it's cheaper and more fun to use.
Google Maps is actually very precise and great to navigate through public transport connections, especially the metro. No additional app was needed.
We were surprised though, that public transport itself has no onboard WiFi. The stations have free WiFi but it's not really great and you have to re-login all the time.
We spent the evening strolling around Shinjuku district. Great place for some street photography. The bars were not what we were looking for, but it was fun to see as a visitor.
The next day we split up and I performed the busiest sightseeing trip of my life with just walking big distances and metro hopping: Starting at Tokyo Tower with lunchtime at Prince Shiba park and the Zojo-ji-temple.
Then I headed to Akihabara to do some shopping and get my Japanese Casio watch fixed at a Japanese Casio repair shop (a strange life goal of mine that I didn't know of).
Next stop was the Asakusa district where I visited the famous Asakusa shrine. It was very crowded but somehow still an enjoyable experience.
For sunset, I visited Bunkyo Civic Center to catch a wonderful view over Tokyo. You can get up to the 26th floor directly from the metro station underground and you have a 360° view around the city. It's not too popular, so there are not many visitors, even during sunset.
As a closing experience, I went to Shibuya Crossing. Some people say "it's just a big crossing, I don't get the fuzz about it", but I personally found it to be a totally cool and surreal experience just to see such an enormous amount of people crossing a huge street from all directions, framed by neon signs. You feel like this is the place you see in photos and it doesn't look like that in reality, but it actually does and the feeling to stand there is super cool. Also, it was a Saturday evening, so probably the busiest time of the week too.
Hungry and a little bit overwhelmed and burnt out, I wanted to tick off the last part on my Japan bucket list of trying Kobe beef, but obviously, all the good places were full, so in my hungry blindness I ended up in some Western themed "Steak House" where I was served undercooked normal beef tenderloin that was everything but tender. But hey, falling for just one tourist trap in my entire stay was not that bad, I paid the bill and at least I was full. 3.5; not great, not terrible.
I came home with a monstrous amount of experiences to process but I felt happy that I've been able to see so much of Tokyo within just one day, even if this is definitely a way too stressful itinerary for 1 day.
The next morning, I was so close to re-booking my flight to gain another 2 days in Tokyo, but looking at a shitload of work at home, I decided to stick to my plan and after a last morning walk in peaceful Katsushika, I left Japan, getting a last view onto hazy Mt. Fuji from the airplane window, with a tear in my eye and a bigger wish to come back than I've ever experienced before during travelling.
My two companions are now on their way to Okinawa for a chill week of snorkelling and chilling at the beaches.
For a first time experience, I am quite content with how things went, even though I would've loved to have more time at certain places. I want to re-visit Japan for sure, maybe in fall or winter, and next time I want to make sure to have more than 11 days at hand.
People in Japan are very friendly, and despite the language barrier we had no issues at all communicating what we needed. People pay attention and respect to each other and we were surprised how well maintained a city as large as Tokyo can be. Eating out can sometimes be a little bit of a challenge, but you always have your neighborhood 7-Eleven saving you with a sandwich and Onigiri as a last resort.
TL;DR:

• Renting and driving a car is straightforward and easy in Japan. Gas is cheap, expressway tolls are expensive.
  
• In Kyoto, I recommend public transport, bicycle or walking instead of driving.
  
• Parking even in cities is not a big deal either.
  
• Mt. Fuji is definitely worth visiting and it's worth waiting for good weather.
  
• Weather in April can be a gamble with lots of rain and cold temperatures. Even on sunny days, skies are rather hazy.
  
• Kyoto and Tokyo are, not surprisingly, more time-consuming than you expect. 3-4 days minimum for Kyoto, 4 days minimum for Tokyo.
  
• Restaurant opening hours are not always reliable, make sure to be there 1 hour before closing at latest.
  
• Staying at a traditional Ryokan is an absolute must.
  
• Japanese people are kind, respectful, friendly and helpful. It's good to know the most basic things in Japanese and to always carry cash.
  
• Small towns off the beaten path can hold the most beautiful and unique experiences.
  
• Public WiFi is a lot less common in Japan than expected. Nara has free city WiFi, in Tokyo it varies greatly.
  

So I recently stayed here using two GOH certificates to get some cheap nights in for status. I did two back to back stays applying a GOH to both since the max on the cert is 7 days. Mixed experience in terms of service and ease:

• Checkin: Short line, probably due to coming at the right time. They didn't immediately recognize the GOH but when I prompted them about the waived resort fees and free breakfast they honored it. Also gave me two free bottles of water (maybe 300ml?)
• Room: Upgraded to a renovated suite that was a strip view in the Ipanema Tower, which is a studio suite but very very large. No larger renovated suites were available at the time according to the front desk. There is an empty mini bar fridge that looks like it'll eventually be stocked and another small separate fridge (maybe for wine?) that I used for my takeout containers. No coffee maker. The room was decently renovated but looked a bit cheap and for some reason there was a large cabinet near the front door dresser that looked unfinished. View of the strip was nice.
• Breakfast: Hash House A Go Go is where you can get free breakfast until 11am. They started semi-enforcing this in the middle of my stay but none of the staff really cared if I showed around 12pm or later. They also get VERY busy starting at 10am and the wait times for just getting your order in could be 20min and waiting for the food to be ready was around 40min. Food is meh and partake in the excessiveness that is Las Vegas. There didn't seem to be a limit on the number of things you could order but I usually just ordered something one to two portions and some bottled water to go. I would rate this a 3/5 (partly because it's free). Portions for most foods are massive.
  • The decent options in my opinion are the
    • avocado toast (surprisingly good and normal sized)
    • egg white omelette (again normal size, regular tasting) with fruit
    • steak and eggs (got this sunny side up or over-easy)
    • chicken and waffles (super sized but quite decent even though there was a bit too much breading on the chicken; waffles had some crispy and were filled with bacon)
    • spinach and/or salad (nice healthy option and normal sized but ask for dressing on the side)
    • french toast (super sized but nice batter and very tasty)
    • breakfast hash (again decent and I would get this with the fried potatoes)
  • Some really bad options were the
    • fried chicken eggs benedict (they tried to re-invent the wheel with this dish and some terrible funky sauce with fried cheese over mashed potatoes) WHY??!!
    • egg scrambles (i'm not sure if they used carton eggs or something but this tasted very rubbery); the ham and cheddar one was passable but plain as a side was terrible
  • Things I think I would try next time
    • Super sized pancakes that looked like 6 pancakes they built into one
    • Burger (I never felt this was a good breakfast option)
• Gym: Very basic and closes at 9pm (I forgot when it opens) but I did some cardio and weights here so glad it existed
• Pool: Didn't try this but at least one was open and I saw people floating around
• Getting stuff delivered: Probably not a common use case but I needed something shipped there and it was a HUGE pain. They don't allow things to be received by the bell desk so everything is directed to Fedex which is open from 9am - 5pm on weekdays only. If you get a package outside of these hours then the delivery will fail and they need to try again and you better hope they deliver it within these times. In the end I shipped it to a local Amazon locker to retrieve it because my package ended up "missing" after 2 attempts. Maybe this is common in Vegas? I don't know but something I learned the hard way.
• Casinos: I don't gamble so I just passed through these areas on my way to my room but the one thing I did notice was the heavy heavy smoke smell. It completely reeked and sat in the air so not good for sensitive folks.
• Onsite restaurants / food delivery: Ok so the onsite restaurants also kind of sucked. There is a korean place and dim sum place that I tried but you might as well just walk to Chinatown which is 15min on foot to get much much better food. Starbucks was decent but they kept running out of some ingredients for their specialty drinks and never restocked in my time there. There is a Walgreens across the street to pick up snacks and I also got Chick-fil-a one day which was next to the Walgreens. My food delivery was a mixed experience. Some dropped my food off at the hotel front desk (near an area that was unmanned) so I had to keep an eye out to make sure I got to the lobby right as they dropped off to prevent it from being stolen. Some met me in the lobby. Some met me at the rideshare zone in their car.
• Walking to the strip: It is an unpleasant over a bridge to the strip as many others have said. I had a particularly unpleasant situation because I saw a random drunk dude who was holding a gigantic rock in his head threatening another guy walking in front of him while I was about 30ft away. That aside, the walk is doable on a not super hot day and preferably during daylight.
• Checkout bill: So they didn't properly combine my two reservations and I got multiple calls and knocks on my door on day 7 which was quickly fixed after a visit to the VIP registration desk (they reserve this for all Hyatt members with some status). They also didn't take my breakfasts off the bill initially so I had to ask them to once I received the breakdown. I did this in person the first time since it was in the middle of my stay. The second time I had to call in and it was a bit of a hassle because of the wait times and re-directs but still quite seamless.
• Would I do it again: For $25ish / night, definitely yes. It's very reasonable with waived resort fees and a nice staycation IMO. Decent wifi too at ~15mbps. Just make sure to re-login every 7 days.

Top 6 Updates of the Week:

• IG’s CEO confirms ‘nobody reaches all of their followers’ due to user activity factors.
• Meta shares new update on their AI content and moderated media policies.
• LinkedIn introduces CTV ads for B2B campaigns.
• OpenAI and Google potentially violated creators’ copyrights by training AI using Youtube videos.
• Youtube launches 4 new updates to enhance analytics and live streams.
• Walmart expands retail media access to small and non-endemic businesses.

Trending

• Google puts forward an offer to acquire Hubspot.
• Discord begins their Advertising quest with launch of ad format ‘Sponsored Quests’.
• OpenAI announces Instant-Use ChatGPT with no-login required but your discussions will be used for model training.
• Daily Mail launches new social-first video advertising product.
• Chase Bank will let Advertisers target customers based on spending data.
• After Liquid Death’s Black makeup launch, Velveeta has launched cheese-inspired hair dye with Julia Fox.
• Snapchat changes their ‘Solar System’ feature after backlash from users.
• Google published their AI Sprinters report about AI opportunities for developing countries.
• Elon Musk is back to giving free blue checks and premium subscriptions to creators.
• ASOS launches creative agency review.
• Lil Yachty revives McDonald’s ‘Menu Song’ across Canada and launches new menu.
• McDonald’s and LeoBurnett launch a Pre-Nug Agreement for Couples, Influencers & Friends.

TikTok 🎶

• TikTok launches STEM content feed across Europe.
• TikTok adds a new section in Activity Center for ‘Recently Deleted Posts’.
• New TikTok Survey highlights users aren’t annoyed by Shops related content.
• TikTok faces nationwide investigations by dozens of US States.
• CapCut templates are now available on desktop for users.

Instagram & Threads 🗂️

• IG testing new cash bonuses for creators, encouraging them to post more.
• Instagram working on challenges for broadcast channels.
• Instagram adds Notify sticker for IG Stories, to help creators reach more of your audience.
• Instagram adds new privacy option for shared collections.
• Meta plans to pay you for Threads posts, the creator program currently in testing.
• IG testing a new feed filter for reels, it’s called Inspiration.
• IG testing a new ‘mutuals’ section in profiles tab.

Meta 😅

• Facebook upgrades their full-screen video player and hints at algorithm changes, deprioritising unedited content.
• Meta introduces major audience targeting and insights update.
• Meta denies that they gave Netflix access to read users’ private messages on FB.
• Meta adds ‘Opportunity Score’ in Meta Ads Manager.
• Meta & Stanford published their Community Forum about Responsible AI development.
• Meta introduces Age Confirmation Checks for VR users.
• WhatsApp gets improved emoji reactions for photos and videos.
• WhatsApp rolling out the feature that allows users to disable link previews in chats.

X (Twitter) 🕹️

• X starts to push against bot accounts, influencers are losing followers, including Elon.
• X adds another layer of quality and moderation to Community Notes.
• X names a new Head of Safety, Kylie McRoberts.
• X gets rid of Pronoun Display options on user accounts.
• Community Notes are now available in India.
• X launches the new explore page on web, it comes with better visuals. L
• X might leave the Brazil Market over censorship and massive fines.
• X Job search is now available on web.

Youtube 🕹️

• Youtube’s AI feature ‘Skip Ahead’ is now in live testing.
• Youtube brings Multiview to Coachella Livestreams in major expansion.

Google 🔦

• Google testing new tools for better shopping experience on search.
• Google publishes Tutorial on identifying INP issues.
• Google discontinues Translate Community Contribution Feature.
• Google will issue Display & Video 360 linking recommendation in GA.
• Google AI overviews launches in UK.
• Google expands Vehicle Listing Ads to new markets.
• Google considers charging for AI Search features.
• Google talks about importance of Ad Strength.
• Seroundtable’s April 2024 Google Webmaster Report.

Agency News

• Publicis New York names Joe Mongognia Chief Creative Officer.
• DDB Sydney and OMD partner to reintroduce McDonald’s iconic Big Mac chant in new TV campaign.
• Nordic Naturals names Laughlin Constable as Creative AOR.
• Dyson China ends partnership with mindshare, hands media account to Publicis.
• Cancer Research UK appoints Born Social as Agency of Record.
• Carter’s appoints Mischief @ No Fixed Address as creative AOR.
• VaynerMedia LA appointed as Integrated Agency for Yaamava’ Resort & Casino.
• BMF named PR Agency of Record for three notable US Hotels, including The Ritz Carlton, SF.
• Ziebart International, Automotive company hires Griffin Archer as creative AOR.
• Elyse Boulet Acquires PIGEON, Ad Agency.
• Rapp appoints Troy Hitch as Global CCO.
• Topo Athletic taps Tantrum Agency as new creative Agency of Record.
• ALHI (Luxury Hotels) acquires 62ABOVE, Marketing agency.
• Sage set to appoint iProspect and Dentsu as global media and B2B marketing partners.
• Holy Moly Dips appoints AGIT8 London to build long-term brand campaign.

Brands & Ads 🏓

My Fav; Indian Cookie brand, Good Day launches a Guerrilla Ad campaign, and it uses influencer culture, joy of finding lost money and nostalgia to win the audience love.

• Papa John launches new campaign with Outkast’s Big Boi to promote the new brand platform.
• Target taps Kristen Wiig to utilise her SNL ‘Target Lady’ character in the latest campaign.
• Renault trolls old car adverts to promote new e-reasons to buy a car like Renault.
• Panadol’s new campaign combines historic pains with pains of present, it targets your imagination and perception with visuals vs audio strategy.
• John Cena faces raccoon in the latest ad campaign for Hefty.
• Solo Stove celebrates National Deep Dish Pizza Day by launching Pizza Cooking Adventure.
• Lunchables mark their return to Canada after a a 15 year break.
• Cricket Wireless and WWE launch ‘Chair Phone’ in a new brand campaign.
• Ving Rhames showed up for Arby’s announcing the start of free sandwich month.
• Lay’s changes commentator’s voice using AI in a social experiment, pointing out the gender bias in football commentary.
• CIBC marries travel and oysters in the latest brand campaign, The World is your Oyster.
• Pedigree promotes love at first sight, but replace humans with adorable dogs.
• Heineken’s latest campaign accepts their AI failure and announces new rewards for people taking the trash to the right bins.
• Uncommon’s Ad for Hiscox UK is clear and highlights the solution without much work.
• Weetabix’s new campaign highlights cereal as the solution to decline of British Economy.
• Cadbury relaunches ‘The Big Win Win’ offer, this time advert focuses on local shops.

AI 🤨

• Amazon announces $2.75 billion investment in AI firm, Anthropic.
• New Research highlights 60% of Perplexity AI results overlap with Top 10 Google links.
• OpenAI expands its custom models program.
• Perplexity AI Search has a plan to sell Ads.
• Anthropic publishes new AI research paper testing if AI will answer harmful questions or form an evil/wrong opinion.
• OpenAI previews a new AI voice generation model.
• Stability AI launches Stable Audio 2.0.
• Le Pub APAC is using AI to gamify literature for Singapore Libraries.
• Every US Agency will appoint a Chief AI Officer.
• KLM Airline launches AI destination finder ‘Ask Atlas’.

Snap & Reddit

• Reddit’s stock is fluctuating a little.
• Snapchat launches Advanced partner program for agencies and brand partners.
• Snapchat announces 2024 Partner Summit and Lens Fest.

Microsoft & LinkedIn

• Microsoft will upgrade native campaigns to enhanced CPC.
• Bing Search tests removing cache link.
• Microsoft expands Max Conversion value to more campaign types and shares other April updates.
• LinkedIn launches Live Event Ads.

Marketing & AdTech

• Deloitte Digital unveils GenAI powered Rebrand.
• Omnicom Media Group ranked #1 for net new business for second consecutive year.
• New York Times partners with Adelaide to track Ad engagement.
• Patreon follows Reddit’s approach to content moderation, allowing creators to appoint community members as moderators.
• Spotify is changing its subscription pricing plans again, no audiobooks.
• The JIC Certifies Comscore and VideoAmp as National TV Currencies.
• Yahoo to acquire Artifact, a failed AI news platform from IG Co-founders.
• Spotify announces new Ad product ‘Live Experiences’ your brand’s way into Spotify events.
• Cadent announces Intent to acquire AdTheorent, A performance adverting pioneer.
• ASA banned Nationwide Bank’s new TV Adverts for misleading public on bank closures.
• Marks & Spencer named UK’s most prominent online grocery brand.
• Specsavers launches a new Roblox Obstacle Course.
• Pets at Home announce multi-year partnership with Global.

I hope this helps to plan your week ahead. You can find all the sources and Ad links in this archive post.

Top 6 Updates of the Week:

• IG’s CEO confirms ‘nobody reaches all of their followers’ due to user activity factors.
• Meta shares new update on their AI content and moderated media policies.
• LinkedIn introduces CTV ads for B2B campaigns.
• OpenAI and Google potentially violated creators’ copyrights by training AI using Youtube videos.
• Youtube launches 4 new updates to enhance analytics and live streams.
• Walmart expands retail media access to small and non-endemic businesses.

Trending

• Google puts forward an offer to acquire Hubspot.
• Discord begins their Advertising quest with launch of ad format ‘Sponsored Quests’.
• OpenAI announces Instant-Use ChatGPT with no-login required but your discussions will be used for model training.
• Daily Mail launches new social-first video advertising product.
• Chase Bank will let Advertisers target customers based on spending data.
• After Liquid Death’s Black makeup launch, Velveeta has launched cheese-inspired hair dye with Julia Fox.
• Snapchat changes their ‘Solar System’ feature after backlash from users.
• Google published their AI Sprinters report about AI opportunities for developing countries.
• Elon Musk is back to giving free blue checks and premium subscriptions to creators.
• ASOS launches creative agency review.
• Lil Yachty revives McDonald’s ‘Menu Song’ across Canada and launches new menu.
• McDonald’s and LeoBurnett launch a Pre-Nug Agreement for Couples, Influencers & Friends.

TikTok 🎶

• TikTok launches STEM content feed across Europe.
• TikTok adds a new section in Activity Center for ‘Recently Deleted Posts’.
• New TikTok Survey highlights users aren’t annoyed by Shops related content.
• TikTok faces nationwide investigations by dozens of US States.
• CapCut templates are now available on desktop for users.

Instagram & Threads 🗂️

• IG testing new cash bonuses for creators, encouraging them to post more.
• Instagram working on challenges for broadcast channels.
• Instagram adds Notify sticker for IG Stories, to help creators reach more of your audience.
• Instagram adds new privacy option for shared collections.
• Meta plans to pay you for Threads posts, the creator program currently in testing.
• IG testing a new feed filter for reels, it’s called Inspiration.
• IG testing a new ‘mutuals’ section in profiles tab.

Meta 😅

• Facebook upgrades their full-screen video player and hints at algorithm changes, deprioritising unedited content.
• Meta introduces major audience targeting and insights update.
• Meta denies that they gave Netflix access to read users’ private messages on FB.
• Meta adds ‘Opportunity Score’ in Meta Ads Manager.
• Meta & Stanford published their Community Forum about Responsible AI development.
• Meta introduces Age Confirmation Checks for VR users.
• WhatsApp gets improved emoji reactions for photos and videos.
• WhatsApp rolling out the feature that allows users to disable link previews in chats.

X (Twitter) 🕹️

• X starts to push against bot accounts, influencers are losing followers, including Elon.
• X adds another layer of quality and moderation to Community Notes.
• X names a new Head of Safety, Kylie McRoberts.
• X gets rid of Pronoun Display options on user accounts.
• Community Notes are now available in India.
• X launches the new explore page on web, it comes with better visuals. L
• X might leave the Brazil Market over censorship and massive fines.
• X Job search is now available on web.

Youtube 🕹️

• Youtube’s AI feature ‘Skip Ahead’ is now in live testing.
• Youtube brings Multiview to Coachella Livestreams in major expansion.

Google 🔦

• Google testing new tools for better shopping experience on search.
• Google publishes Tutorial on identifying INP issues.
• Google discontinues Translate Community Contribution Feature.
• Google will issue Display & Video 360 linking recommendation in GA.
• Google AI overviews launches in UK.
• Google expands Vehicle Listing Ads to new markets.
• Google considers charging for AI Search features.
• Google talks about importance of Ad Strength.
• Seroundtable’s April 2024 Google Webmaster Report.

Agency News

• Publicis New York names Joe Mongognia Chief Creative Officer.
• DDB Sydney and OMD partner to reintroduce McDonald’s iconic Big Mac chant in new TV campaign.
• Nordic Naturals names Laughlin Constable as Creative AOR.
• Dyson China ends partnership with mindshare, hands media account to Publicis.
• Cancer Research UK appoints Born Social as Agency of Record.
• Carter’s appoints Mischief @ No Fixed Address as creative AOR.
• VaynerMedia LA appointed as Integrated Agency for Yaamava’ Resort & Casino.
• BMF named PR Agency of Record for three notable US Hotels, including The Ritz Carlton, SF.
• Ziebart International, Automotive company hires Griffin Archer as creative AOR.
• Elyse Boulet Acquires PIGEON, Ad Agency.
• Rapp appoints Troy Hitch as Global CCO.
• Topo Athletic taps Tantrum Agency as new creative Agency of Record.
• ALHI (Luxury Hotels) acquires 62ABOVE, Marketing agency.
• Sage set to appoint iProspect and Dentsu as global media and B2B marketing partners.
• Holy Moly Dips appoints AGIT8 London to build long-term brand campaign.

Brands & Ads 🏓

My Fav; Indian Cookie brand, Good Day launches a Guerrilla Ad campaign, and it uses influencer culture, joy of finding lost money and nostalgia to win the audience love.

• Papa John launches new campaign with Outkast’s Big Boi to promote the new brand platform.
• Target taps Kristen Wiig to utilise her SNL ‘Target Lady’ character in the latest campaign.
• Renault trolls old car adverts to promote new e-reasons to buy a car like Renault.
• Panadol’s new campaign combines historic pains with pains of present, it targets your imagination and perception with visuals vs audio strategy.
• John Cena faces raccoon in the latest ad campaign for Hefty.
• Solo Stove celebrates National Deep Dish Pizza Day by launching Pizza Cooking Adventure.
• Lunchables mark their return to Canada after a a 15 year break.
• Cricket Wireless and WWE launch ‘Chair Phone’ in a new brand campaign.
• Ving Rhames showed up for Arby’s announcing the start of free sandwich month.
• Lay’s changes commentator’s voice using AI in a social experiment, pointing out the gender bias in football commentary.
• CIBC marries travel and oysters in the latest brand campaign, The World is your Oyster.
• Pedigree promotes love at first sight, but replace humans with adorable dogs.
• Heineken’s latest campaign accepts their AI failure and announces new rewards for people taking the trash to the right bins.
• Uncommon’s Ad for Hiscox UK is clear and highlights the solution without much work.
• Weetabix’s new campaign highlights cereal as the solution to decline of British Economy.
• Cadbury relaunches ‘The Big Win Win’ offer, this time advert focuses on local shops.

AI 🤨

• Amazon announces $2.75 billion investment in AI firm, Anthropic.
• New Research highlights 60% of Perplexity AI results overlap with Top 10 Google links.
• OpenAI expands its custom models program.
• Perplexity AI Search has a plan to sell Ads.
• Anthropic publishes new AI research paper testing if AI will answer harmful questions or form an evil/wrong opinion.
• OpenAI previews a new AI voice generation model.
• Stability AI launches Stable Audio 2.0.
• Le Pub APAC is using AI to gamify literature for Singapore Libraries.
• Every US Agency will appoint a Chief AI Officer.
• KLM Airline launches AI destination finder ‘Ask Atlas’.

Snap & Reddit

• Reddit’s stock is fluctuating a little.
• Snapchat launches Advanced partner program for agencies and brand partners.
• Snapchat announces 2024 Partner Summit and Lens Fest.

Microsoft & LinkedIn

• Microsoft will upgrade native campaigns to enhanced CPC.
• Bing Search tests removing cache link.
• Microsoft expands Max Conversion value to more campaign types and shares other April updates.
• LinkedIn launches Live Event Ads.

Marketing & AdTech

• Deloitte Digital unveils GenAI powered Rebrand.
• Omnicom Media Group ranked #1 for net new business for second consecutive year.
• New York Times partners with Adelaide to track Ad engagement.
• Patreon follows Reddit’s approach to content moderation, allowing creators to appoint community members as moderators.
• Spotify is changing its subscription pricing plans again, no audiobooks.
• The JIC Certifies Comscore and VideoAmp as National TV Currencies.
• Yahoo to acquire Artifact, a failed AI news platform from IG Co-founders.
• Spotify announces new Ad product ‘Live Experiences’ your brand’s way into Spotify events.
• Cadent announces Intent to acquire AdTheorent, A performance adverting pioneer.
• ASA banned Nationwide Bank’s new TV Adverts for misleading public on bank closures.
• Marks & Spencer named UK’s most prominent online grocery brand.
• Specsavers launches a new Roblox Obstacle Course.
• Pets at Home announce multi-year partnership with Global.

I hope this helps to plan your week ahead. You can find all the sources and Ad links in this archive post.

Top 6 Updates of the Week:

• IG’s CEO confirms ‘nobody reaches all of their followers’ due to user activity factors.
• Meta shares new update on their AI content and moderated media policies.
• LinkedIn introduces CTV ads for B2B campaigns.
• OpenAI and Google potentially violated creators’ copyrights by training AI using Youtube videos.
• Youtube launches 4 new updates to enhance analytics and live streams.
• Walmart expands retail media access to small and non-endemic businesses.

Trending

• Google puts forward an offer to acquire Hubspot.
• Discord begins their Advertising quest with launch of ad format ‘Sponsored Quests’.
• OpenAI announces Instant-Use ChatGPT with no-login required but your discussions will be used for model training.
• Daily Mail launches new social-first video advertising product.
• Chase Bank will let Advertisers target customers based on spending data.
• After Liquid Death’s Black makeup launch, Velveeta has launched cheese-inspired hair dye with Julia Fox.
• Snapchat changes their ‘Solar System’ feature after backlash from users.
• Google published their AI Sprinters report about AI opportunities for developing countries.
• Elon Musk is back to giving free blue checks and premium subscriptions to creators.
• ASOS launches creative agency review.
• Lil Yachty revives McDonald’s ‘Menu Song’ across Canada and launches new menu.
• McDonald’s and LeoBurnett launch a Pre-Nug Agreement for Couples, Influencers & Friends.

TikTok 🎶

• TikTok launches STEM content feed across Europe.
• TikTok adds a new section in Activity Center for ‘Recently Deleted Posts’.
• New TikTok Survey highlights users aren’t annoyed by Shops related content.
• TikTok faces nationwide investigations by dozens of US States.
• CapCut templates are now available on desktop for users.

Instagram & Threads 🗂️

• IG testing new cash bonuses for creators, encouraging them to post more.
• Instagram working on challenges for broadcast channels.
• Instagram adds Notify sticker for IG Stories, to help creators reach more of your audience.
• Instagram adds new privacy option for shared collections.
• Meta plans to pay you for Threads posts, the creator program currently in testing.
• IG testing a new feed filter for reels, it’s called Inspiration.
• IG testing a new ‘mutuals’ section in profiles tab.

Meta 😅

• Facebook upgrades their full-screen video player and hints at algorithm changes, deprioritising unedited content.
• Meta introduces major audience targeting and insights update.
• Meta denies that they gave Netflix access to read users’ private messages on FB.
• Meta adds ‘Opportunity Score’ in Meta Ads Manager.
• Meta & Stanford published their Community Forum about Responsible AI development.
• Meta introduces Age Confirmation Checks for VR users.
• WhatsApp gets improved emoji reactions for photos and videos.
• WhatsApp rolling out the feature that allows users to disable link previews in chats.

X (Twitter) 🕹️

• X starts to push against bot accounts, influencers are losing followers, including Elon.
• X adds another layer of quality and moderation to Community Notes.
• X names a new Head of Safety, Kylie McRoberts.
• X gets rid of Pronoun Display options on user accounts.
• Community Notes are now available in India.
• X launches the new explore page on web, it comes with better visuals. L
• X might leave the Brazil Market over censorship and massive fines.
• X Job search is now available on web.

Youtube 🕹️

• Youtube’s AI feature ‘Skip Ahead’ is now in live testing.
• Youtube brings Multiview to Coachella Livestreams in major expansion.

Google 🔦

• Google testing new tools for better shopping experience on search.
• Google publishes Tutorial on identifying INP issues.
• Google discontinues Translate Community Contribution Feature.
• Google will issue Display & Video 360 linking recommendation in GA.
• Google AI overviews launches in UK.
• Google expands Vehicle Listing Ads to new markets.
• Google considers charging for AI Search features.
• Google talks about importance of Ad Strength.
• Seroundtable’s April 2024 Google Webmaster Report.

Agency News

• Publicis New York names Joe Mongognia Chief Creative Officer.
• DDB Sydney and OMD partner to reintroduce McDonald’s iconic Big Mac chant in new TV campaign.
• Nordic Naturals names Laughlin Constable as Creative AOR.
• Dyson China ends partnership with mindshare, hands media account to Publicis.
• Cancer Research UK appoints Born Social as Agency of Record.
• Carter’s appoints Mischief @ No Fixed Address as creative AOR.
• VaynerMedia LA appointed as Integrated Agency for Yaamava’ Resort & Casino.
• BMF named PR Agency of Record for three notable US Hotels, including The Ritz Carlton, SF.
• Ziebart International, Automotive company hires Griffin Archer as creative AOR.
• Elyse Boulet Acquires PIGEON, Ad Agency.
• Rapp appoints Troy Hitch as Global CCO.
• Topo Athletic taps Tantrum Agency as new creative Agency of Record.
• ALHI (Luxury Hotels) acquires 62ABOVE, Marketing agency.
• Sage set to appoint iProspect and Dentsu as global media and B2B marketing partners.
• Holy Moly Dips appoints AGIT8 London to build long-term brand campaign.

Brands & Ads 🏓

My Fav; Indian Cookie brand, Good Day launches a Guerrilla Ad campaign, and it uses influencer culture, joy of finding lost money and nostalgia to win the audience love.

• Papa John launches new campaign with Outkast’s Big Boi to promote the new brand platform.
• Target taps Kristen Wiig to utilise her SNL ‘Target Lady’ character in the latest campaign.
• Renault trolls old car adverts to promote new e-reasons to buy a car like Renault.
• Panadol’s new campaign combines historic pains with pains of present, it targets your imagination and perception with visuals vs audio strategy.
• John Cena faces raccoon in the latest ad campaign for Hefty.
• Solo Stove celebrates National Deep Dish Pizza Day by launching Pizza Cooking Adventure.
• Lunchables mark their return to Canada after a a 15 year break.
• Cricket Wireless and WWE launch ‘Chair Phone’ in a new brand campaign.
• Ving Rhames showed up for Arby’s announcing the start of free sandwich month.
• Lay’s changes commentator’s voice using AI in a social experiment, pointing out the gender bias in football commentary.
• CIBC marries travel and oysters in the latest brand campaign, The World is your Oyster.
• Pedigree promotes love at first sight, but replace humans with adorable dogs.
• Heineken’s latest campaign accepts their AI failure and announces new rewards for people taking the trash to the right bins.
• Uncommon’s Ad for Hiscox UK is clear and highlights the solution without much work.
• Weetabix’s new campaign highlights cereal as the solution to decline of British Economy.
• Cadbury relaunches ‘The Big Win Win’ offer, this time advert focuses on local shops.

AI 🤨

• Amazon announces $2.75 billion investment in AI firm, Anthropic.
• New Research highlights 60% of Perplexity AI results overlap with Top 10 Google links.
• OpenAI expands its custom models program.
• Perplexity AI Search has a plan to sell Ads.
• Anthropic publishes new AI research paper testing if AI will answer harmful questions or form an evil/wrong opinion.
• OpenAI previews a new AI voice generation model.
• Stability AI launches Stable Audio 2.0.
• Le Pub APAC is using AI to gamify literature for Singapore Libraries.
• Every US Agency will appoint a Chief AI Officer.
• KLM Airline launches AI destination finder ‘Ask Atlas’.

Snap & Reddit

• Reddit’s stock is fluctuating a little.
• Snapchat launches Advanced partner program for agencies and brand partners.
• Snapchat announces 2024 Partner Summit and Lens Fest.

Microsoft & LinkedIn

• Microsoft will upgrade native campaigns to enhanced CPC.
• Bing Search tests removing cache link.
• Microsoft expands Max Conversion value to more campaign types and shares other April updates.
• LinkedIn launches Live Event Ads.

Marketing & AdTech

• Deloitte Digital unveils GenAI powered Rebrand.
• Omnicom Media Group ranked #1 for net new business for second consecutive year.
• New York Times partners with Adelaide to track Ad engagement.
• Patreon follows Reddit’s approach to content moderation, allowing creators to appoint community members as moderators.
• Spotify is changing its subscription pricing plans again, no audiobooks.
• The JIC Certifies Comscore and VideoAmp as National TV Currencies.
• Yahoo to acquire Artifact, a failed AI news platform from IG Co-founders.
• Spotify announces new Ad product ‘Live Experiences’ your brand’s way into Spotify events.
• Cadent announces Intent to acquire AdTheorent, A performance adverting pioneer.
• ASA banned Nationwide Bank’s new TV Adverts for misleading public on bank closures.
• Marks & Spencer named UK’s most prominent online grocery brand.
• Specsavers launches a new Roblox Obstacle Course.
• Pets at Home announce multi-year partnership with Global.

I hope this helps to plan your week ahead. You can find all the sources and Ad links in this archive post.

I chose the infinite Access for iPhone plan, and getting it was the iPhone 15 Pro. Getting the plan was pretty simple; it wasn’t a hard process. Once I got the phone and started, the activation process was easy, and porting my phone number was fast. Once activated and seeing the service up and running, I started testing things out, and, to be honest, it was a bad start. I was getting data, but it was slow; the speed I tested was 400 mbps, but the problem was the data congestion because I live in NY and data slows down when traffic is overloading. Text and calls didn’t work immediately after activating; it took a while to see it working, and 2-step verification text codes didn’t work when trying to login to my social media and bank accounts for 2 days (boost infinite support representative confirmed to me that it’ll take 2 or 3 days for verification text codes to start showing up on my phone).
After using the service for 3 days, everything is working properly, and when using the data outside, the slowdowns are unnoticeable, but it happens sometimes depending on where you are going.
So far, boost infinite is a good deal. There are pros and cons to the service, but with everyone’s feedback, including mines, I see boost infinite improving over time.
Update: I found a little workaround to combat network congestion/IPS throttling on boost infinite on the dish network. In my feedback I mentioned that I get slow-downs when using data due to network congestion in busy areas on the dish network. By using VPN (I recommend using NordVPN) on mobile data, you’ll get faster loading speeds and no throttling. The only con is it’ll increase mobile data usage by a little, but VPN will protect your online privacy, especially using public Wi-Fi.

We have youtube premium so I use youtube for music as well as videos. I don't have a separate login for my kid and mostly use my own account for her Thomas and Friends, Sesame Street, Rachel, and of course music she listens to. I didn't subscribe to any kids stuff and my algorithm didn't seem like it was suffering too badly.
Until last night. I was washing dishes after the child was in bed and listening to Beyoncé's cover of Jolene and the next song to come up was from Caspar Babypants. The contrast between the two was absolutely jarring. Nope. No more.
Off to set up a YouTube kids to keep this from ever happening again.

I was, for years, a DirecTV dish guy. Then it got super expensive and the quality sucked it it rained so I took a comcast deal. So it's been a while for me. I have, for the last year, been with TTTV. For the most part, it was okay, though lacking. Root Sports is the main difference as I live in the PNW and baseball is only shown there and YTTV doesn't have it.
I'm trying to compare the PQ right now between the two. There are clearly some channels better on one than the other (I'm looking at, of all things, the food network right now and it's not as clear as YTTV is with the same channel...not sure why.)
Happily, I can still get Sunday Ticket via YouTube, though it will be a bit more expensive.
So DTV people: what should I be noticing? I signed up for 5 day trial of the full meal deal (Premiere) which would mean I'd go drop my paramount+ subscription and my Max subscription as I can use the apps with my DirecTV login, correct? (though if I understand it, my Max experience will be not as awesome as signing up directly with them)
Also, if I stick with this, what does getting a gemini box do for me? (I am currently watching via an AppleTV box).
Update: not having profiles is a big miss -- one solid thing youtubetv has is that my DVR isn't polluted with the other people in the house.

My husband and I have quasi-combined finances - he works in IT and I work in health insurance. We both work from home full-time. We have one joint account for kid/household expenses and each have separate checking, savings and retirement accounts. We don’t have access to each others’ personal accounts, but are generally aware of the other’s spending/balances/expenses. I don’t know exact figures for all of his stuff, so I ballpark when I need to.

Section One: Assets and Debt

Retirement Balance: $60,663.69 spread across two 401ks. I got a job with a 401k when I was 25 and pre-kids was pretty aggressive at contributing to it (17% for me + a 4% match from that job). I’m currently contributing 10% pre-tax, I started at 15% but with inflation and having another mouth to feed once my daughter started solids, I’ve bumped it down. It will go back up to 11% in July and once I hit 1 year at my job this spring, my new employer will match up to 5%. I also had 35% of my bonus contributed pre-tax which I kind of regret in the present day but my future self is probably jazzed. My husband has somewhere in the $150-$200k range in his 401k and then some more in a Roth, but I don’t remember how much.
Equity if you're a homeowner: Technically, my husband owns our home - I was pregnant and in grad school when we purchased in 2020, so we didn’t really know where I was headed careeincome-wise. He (we) have roughly $330k in equity in it - we got it for a (relative) steal in 2020 and were able to lock in a 3.5% interest rate. We paid $475,000 and were able to put $200,000 down as a downpayment because we’re very, very privileged. My husband took $50,000 from the sale of his first home and his parents gifted us the other $150,000 - at the time they said it was a loan, but we’ve brought up starting to pay it back and they said it was my husband’s inheritance early. I’m not from a family with the sort of financial assets to do something like this so it makes me feel both weird and lucky.
Savings account balance: $3,406.08 in my personal savings. Husband has roughly $100,000 in his (we know we should have this somewhere smartebetter but…haven’t done it yet cause we’re dumb)
Checking account balance: $776.82 in my personal, $542.14 in our joint. I don’t know my husband’s balance but he usually tries to keep between $2-$4,000 in there.
HSA: $628.76
Credit card debt: $1,895.29 - I use my card for almost everything to get points and lately am pretty good about paying the statement balance to avoid interest charges. I wasn’t always, but I got a new job about 9 months ago that came with a nice pay bump, which has helped. I do 2 payments a month, one from each check, and use my cash back as an additional payment. My husband has no credit card debt, he pays his balance in full each month.
Student loan debt: $47,394; $1,500 is an interest-free private loan from a local community organization, the rest are federal loans
My original total was $57,894.00 ($12,000 interest-free total, $45,894 federal), so that’s depressing since I’ve been making payments for 10 years on an Income-driven plan. However, at its highest, my balance was about $60k so I actually feel somewhat good about this number. I continued paying all through Covid interest rate pauses and grad school when my loans were in deferment, which is the first time I saw meaningful change in my balance. I lived at home for a few years after college, then moved into the house my then-boyfriend-now-husband owned, so not having any housing costs has allowed me to always focus on paying on my loans.
Roughly 40% was for a Bachelor’s in graphic design, the rest was for a Master’s in Clinical Mental Health Counseling. I’m not using either degree because I’m an idiot a corporate sellout a mom who chose financial gain + work-life balance over a purposeful and important career. My husband has a Bachelor’s but no student loan debt - he did the financially-smart route of community college then commuting to a local state college and his parents paid for his (much cheaper) degree.
Car loan: $26,632.46 at 3.99%, 42 months remaining; I have some baggage around unreliable cars and unexpected auto expenses, so I leased for most of my adult life because it was worth the reduction in stress. When my lease was up in fall 2023, we wanted to upgrade to a 3-row SUV so we could fit both kids/car seats and our large dog in the car more comfortably. Rates were GARBAGE though and there was no advantage to leasing at all, plus the used inventory was shitty and overpriced so we decided to buy new. We put down $10,000 cash from savings and did a 4-year loan to get the lowest rate possible. This is “my car” but is really the family car. My husband drives a 2008 Jeep that he was gifted when his dad’s friend passed away - there’s no payment on it and it has very low mileage despite its age, so we’ll have it at least until we pay off my car if not longer. Once this car is paid off, we’ll see if we want to trade in the ’08 for something newer.
Personal net-worth: $-1,120.67 (this excludes my husband’s assets, like his savings and our home). I’ve never calculated this before and was excited to see it’s almost neutral/positive! My new job and annual bonus are definitely what pushed me to this spot. I’m sure it was much, much more negative in my late teens and twenties.

Section Two: Income

Income Progression: After college, I worked as a graphic designer for about 5 years, starting at $34,000 and getting up to about $40,000. In 2018, I had a crisis of conscience and decided to go to grad school to become a therapist. I was going to be kicked off my parents’ health insurance and my job offered no benefits, so I decided to switch fields to my current industry “temporarily” so I could WFH during grad school and have grown up things like vision, dental, and a 401k. I found that I LOVED working from home (before it was even so prevalent!) and wow, it turns out that making good money makes life easier and less stressful.
The plan was to leave this field once I graduated in 2021 and become a therapist but…my life and the world changed a lot since I first enrolled. I had my first child 3 months before graduating and the prospect of taking a huge pay cut PLUS having my work-life balance go out the window was unappealing. I still have a few years before the door officially closes on my therapy aspirations but it seems unlikely I’ll change at this point. I grapple with this because I feel a little embarrassed/ashamed/like a bad person/financially dumb for all of this. But, I also have a really nice, comfortable, privileged life that I enjoy so… yeah.
I've been working in my current field for 6 years consistently, plus have an additional 4 years of on-and-off experience as an intern/contract worker. My starting salary in this field was $48,000. I worked at one company for about 5 years before leaving for my current company last spring. When I left my last job, I was making $80,000, so it was a huge pay jump to go to my current position. I honestly never thought I would make this kind of salary. When I was on my second maternity leave, my two work besties told me they were jumping ship to a bigger company with more resources and less drama. Eventually they convinced me to go with them. Things were sounding dire at my old job, so I planned to quit even if I didn’t land the new one. I would either be a SAHM for a bit or pursue therapy or look for something else entirely. I’m glad with how things turned out.
I’ve also taken 2 long (by US standards) partially-paid maternity leaves - one for 4 months, one for 6, both at about 80% of my salary, so my earnings those years were lower. They were both funded by my state and some PTO tacked on, not my job directly. I also owed a lot in taxes those years :(
Main Job Monthly Take Home:
$5414.18 per month after deductions
$1,384.26 in deductions each month:

• $875 to my 401k
• $76.12 for family dental plan
• $423.48 for family medical
• $9.66 for vision for my husband and myself

Bonus: my position has an annual bonus structure of up to 15% depending on company and personal performance. This was paid out to me this month. It was pro-rated since I haven’t been there for a year and came out to just under $8,000, which blew my mind. I had 35% go to my 401k, ~30% went to taxes, and I used the rest to pay off a small but high-interest (6.8%) student loan.
I do not have my husband’s exact take-home, but he makes a little more than me and is on my health insurance, so I’d guess he’s in the $6,500 ballpark.
We have no side gigs or other income streams.
Section Three: Expenses
Mortgage / HOA fees: My husband covers the mortgage, which is about $1,600/month. We have a laughable annual HOA fee of $200, which I pay.
Home + car insurance: we bundle insurance and pay for the whole year to get a 10% discount, it ends up being around $3k. Sometimes we split this, sometimes my husband pays it all. Just depends on my cash flow at the time.
Savings contribution: $400/month to my personal savings
Debt payments: $700 to student loans- $50 to the interest-free, which is the minimum; $650 federal. My husband does not contribute to my student loan payments.
Donations: $20.60/month, half to Educate Girls and half to Carbon 180
Electric: Variable from $225-$400 depending on the month. Woof. I pay this bill.
Propane (heat and hot water): we pre-buy yearly to (hopefully) get the best rate. We do $2,500 annually, which averages to $208 monthly. My husband pays this.
Wifi/Cable/Landline: $104.99 for wifi, my husband pays this. We are cable-less, we have an antenna and get basic channels and steal my in-law’s login to watch some stuff on the interwebs. We steal my mommy’s Netflix.
Cellphone: $33.85 for my line/phone. My husband’s is paid for through his job because he is “on-call” weekends and nights in case there’s an outage or some other issue (which happens a few times a year).
Subscriptions:

• Spotify: $10.99
• NYT: $4 - this is a promo price, I’ll cancel once it goes up
• Email: $6.38 - this is a throwback from when I was a designer and had my own email/web hosting. I cancelled my website hosting but have been too lazy to switch EVERYTHING from my paid email address to a free gmail one. Ugh.
• iCloud: $2.99
• Instacart+: $99/year
• Amazon prime: $139/year
• Substack: $45/year to a chef whose recipes I enjoy

Gym membership: $30/month for my husband’s membership
Monthly cleaning: $120, this includes a deep clean of the bathroom and kitchen, straightening/wipe down of the living room, and the floors on the first floor (vacuuming bedroom/living room, mopping kitchen/dining/foyer). I pay for this.
Pet expenses: ~$150/month. This includes food for 1 dog, 3 cats, litter, and 4 prescriptions for our dog (flea/tick, heart worm, allergy pills, and generic Prozac cause he’s an anxious boy). I pay for this.
Car payment: $684 - we have 60/40 split on this, with me paying more.
Paid hobbies: $150/month for weekly dance classes (2 for just me, 1 for me and the kids) + an additional $3-400/year for costumes. $150/year for a membership and weekly playgroups at our town’s children’s museum.
Preschool: $296 for 2 days of preschool per week for my son. They do not provide food or diapers. We split this from the joint account.
Childcare: we are exceedingly lucky to have family help + flexible jobs, so the preschool days mentioned above are our only childcare expense. We provide lunch to our moms when they help out and a few times a year try to do thank you gifts like massages, theater tickets, a nice dinner, etc.
Trash collection: $65.93 we have to do private trash and recycling pickup because it’s not a service our town offers. We split this from the joint account.
Kids misc. (diapers, clothes, health needs etc): ~$100/month.
Groceries: we average about $800/month for our family of 4. We get takeout 1-4 times a week, all other meals and snacks are eaten at home.

Section Four: Money Diary

Day 1 -
7:00 - I wake up in a good mood - I have 2 young kids (3 years and 1 year) and the entire family has been swapping two different sicknesses around the last 2 weeks. This is the first day where we’re all feeling 100% and it’s supposed to be a beautiful outside. My husband goes to the gym while the kids and I do breakfast and get dressed at home. At 10 am, we head to the local roller skating rink for their toddler skate hours, which my 3yo is very excited about. I have a coupon for $2 off admission because I’m a member of my town’s children’s museum, so this family outing only costs $7. Can’t beat that! ($7)
12 - After skating, my husband takes the baby home to nap and I take our older child with me to run errands. We stop by the post office to mail a bereavement gift to a friend who lost her dog ($6.50) and get gas ($44.42). It’s lunch time but I have more errands I want to do, so I decided my son and I will grab a bite out. We try to get hot dogs from a gas station but they’re out and my son can’t have anything else there because of his food allergies. We head to McDonald’s instead - he gets a happy meal, which he devours, plus 4 more nuggets. I get a QPwC. I cannot believe how much it costs, even with a 20% off code through the app. ($21.41)
My son takes his sweet time eating lunch and my husband asks us to head back so he can do yard work, so I don’t get to finish my errands which annoys me. I love being a mom but it’s hard not being able to just blow around in the breeze like I used to! When we get home, we play outside for a while. Around 3:30 I realize we don’t have a dinner plan, so the kids and I head to the grocery store. We buy sausage and chicken wings for dinner, strawberries, tomatoes, a corned beef that’s on sale for St. Patrick’s Day, Irish soda bread, rye bread and I grab a mini chocolate cream pie for myself ($50.14). We finish off the evening with dinner, watching a movie, and bedtime routines.
Daily total: $129.47
Day 2 -
6:45 - Our Sunday starts early but it’s a nice, slow start to the day. After getting the kids set up with breakfast, my husband heads to the gym. Both kids are kind of cranky, so we spend some time snuggling on the couch watching cartoons while I do some work tasks that take about 30 minutes. I don’t have to work weekends or overtime often, so I don’t mind when I have to do something like this. I make myself some coffee, bacon, and warm up 3 slices of Irish Soda Bread on the skillet with butter - my daughter then steals half of my breakfast. Sigh. She always steals my food but she’s very cute, so I can’t stay mad.
11 - Once my husband is back, I take my son to finish the errands we didn’t get to yesterday. We pick up some free clothes for the kids from my Buy Nothing group, then head to the store. We had a wedding to attend a few weeks ago that my husband needed clothes for, so now I’m returning what he didn’t use. I would have gotten about $75 back on my credit card, but the Marshall’s checkout aisle lures me in with its siren song. I buy 3 types of cleaners I’ve been meaning to replenish (carpet, tile, cooktop), so only $63.29 gets debited back to my account. I also meetup at the police station to sell a barely-used crib mattress and toddler bed to someone from Facebook marketplace, which gets me an additional $60 - the mattress was a gift and I only paid $50 for the bed, so that’s a $10 profit, cha-chiiiiiiing! We head home and the family scrounge’s leftovers from the fridge for lunch - it’s a free-for-all of hot dogs, sausage and peppers, ham sandwiches, and soup. I cook a lot during the week, so I like using weekend lunches to get a bit of a break.
After lunch, I put in some online orders I’ve been meaning to do. I place a Costco order through Instacart for household staples like paper products, frozen chicken nuggets, Greek yogurt, butter, maple syrup, frozen fruit, and add a new dog bed for our dog. I hate the fees Instacart comes with, but Costco is 30 minutes each way plus the hour+ I’d be inside shopping, so it’s an expense that’s worth the time I save every 4-6 weeks, at least at this point while my kids are so young ($361.35). Next, I order some Easter chocolates for my son’s basket. This is the first year he understands holidays and has been asking for chocolate bunnies and chocolate eggs, but he’s got a dairy allergy so I’ve been saying No a lot, which sucks. I learned about a company called No Whey that has allergy-friendly holiday chocolates - I’m excited and grateful products like this exist for my son, even if it comes at a premium price. I order a bunny, eggs, 3 chocolate pops, and a tube of what looks like non-dairy M&M’s ($38.81). Finally, I order my husband’s birthday present, a Galaxy Smartwatch. Now that we’re out of the baby fog, we’re both trying to prioritize our health more and he’s mentioned wanting one in passing, so I hope he likes it. I check the return policy and set a reminder for 1 week before the return window closes in case he doesn’t. The watch is on sale and I buy from a site that has 10% cash back with Rakuten, so I save about $70 ($327.24). Sadly, this online shopping has really offset the $10 profit I made earlier.
2 - I spend the rest of the afternoon doing chores like laundry, dishes, and picking up. I also spend some downtime reading my book. I’m almost done with Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and it’s making me heartsick the way only a good book can.
6 - We meet my father-in-law out for dinner at a local Italian restaurant for dinner - he pays, which isn’t unexpected but is still a nice treat. We get home and do all of the bed time things before going to sleep ourselves around 9:30.
Daily total: $727.40
Day 3 -
6:45 - Ugh. The work week. Today’s going to be hectic so I’m not looking forward to it. My mother-in-law usually watches the kids Mondays but she’s on vacation, which means we’ll be balancing childcare and work today. Thankfully, it’s the quiet season for my job, so I was able to front load some work last week so I have flexibility today. I wake up before the kids and log on to get some tasks done. Once they’re up, I give them a breakfast of frozen waffles and yogurt and throw together a crockpot for dinner. I use the corned beef I bought yesterday, along with some potatoes and carrots I already had and I’ll serve it all with the rye bread. I make myself a quick breakfast of bacon and Irish soda bread and get my 3yo out the door for a dentist appointment. I wanted my husband to take him, but he had some work thing come up, blah. Sometimes I leave medical appointments feeling like a bad mom because of whatever health reminders we get that I know we’re slacking on, like flossing or dropping the baby’s pacifier. The appointment goes well though and I only have a small copay that I use my HSA card for ($4).
11 - When I get back, the baby is down for a nap and my husband seems really stressed about the work thing, so I resign myself to being the point person for the kids today. I set my son up with a snack and get some work done quickly before getting lunch heated up for everyone. We have the leftovers from the restaurant last night, supplemented with a side salad I throw together. I have 2 important meetings after lunch, so I send both kids to my husband’s office. They’ll be getting more screen time than we’d like today but it is what it is. The afternoon flies by in a blur of emails-snacks-meetings-diapers-baby nap time #2. My last meeting of the day is a long company-wide town hall, so I can listen in without needing to participate. I decide to log in on my phone so I can put laundry away and play outside with my 3 year old while his sister naps. It’s a little chilly but the fresh air feels nice and we spend over an hour out there while the corporate big wigs talk about numbers and engagement surveys and benefit fairs and things like being a family or whatever.
4 - I’m so glad dinner’s already done so I can focus on other things, like playing with the kids and picking up a little. Some days, I feel like spend all of my time feeding everyone, picking up toys, and running the dishwasher. I wanted to get a workout in today, but my husband’s work thing is still ongoing at 6:30 PM, so I just do some squats, kicks and jumps in the bathroom while the kids take a bath. My husband’s work thing keeps him working till very late, so we don’t get our usual “chill on the couch and watch tv” time. I decide to use the evening to get the house in order instead, even though I’m tired. My spidey senses are telling me we might be in for a long week, so having the house tidy will at least make one thing easier. By the time I go to bed, every room downstairs is picked up enough to run our robot vacuum/mop, trash and recycling are empty, dishwasher is unloaded and reloaded, and the kitchen has been wiped down. I feel like I “did it all” today!
Daily total: $4
Day 4-
7 - I don’t know what time my husband was done with work, but it was late so I took the baby monitor on my side of the bed even though it was his night. I have enough time to feed the cats, give the dog his medicine, and prep my daughter’s breakfast before she wakes up. I sit with her while she eats. My son is supposed to have preschool today, but they’re unexpectedly closed because a staff member passed away. I didn’t know her because she’s in a different classroom but I love the preschool and she’s left a family behind. It’s got me feeling sad. Thankfully, my mom is able to help with the kids today, so I google some toddler activities happening so I can give her ideas to get them out of the house. I donate to the GoFundMe for the preschool teacher’s family and remember I also need to buy some raffle calendars to support the Children’s Museum spring fundraiser, so I do that, too ($88.50). I get the kids ready for the day and once my mom gets here, I logon to work around 9.
12 - I was tunnel-vision on a tedious work task I inherited when we let someone go when I hear everyone return home, which means it’s lunchtime! Usually, we have whatever we ate for dinner the night before but there aren’t enough leftovers for everyone so I whip up some chicken quesadillas using a rotisserie chicken from a few days ago that was on its last legs. I serve it with a salad kit for an easy side. I also use my lunch break to call about a medical bill I received that wasn’t sent through my insurance first. This happens ALL. THE. TIME. so I always carefully examine my medical bills and EOBs instead of just blindly paying them. I hardly used my health insurance in my 20’s, but between 2 pregnancies/births and all the visits young children have, I’ve spent so much time on the phone with our insurance or providers about billing in the last 5 years. It’s a pain, but it’s “saved” us thousands of dollars that I’m sure some other people would just spend without questioning. I’m lucky to have the time, energy, resources, and ability to navigate these types of systems. It shouldn’t be this complicated!
2:30 - it’s time to put my son down for his nap (assuming he deigns to take one)… and he does!! Yay! The baby will take her second nap around 3, so I send my mom home for the day. Now back to work.
4:30 - both kids take great afternoon naps and I was able to bang out the rest of what I wanted to do for work and then some, so I sign off when they wake up. I start prepping dinner, which will be air fried chicken leg quarters I had in the freezer, mashed potatoes, and a sauce that has bacon, sweet potato, and mushrooms. Chicken leg quarters have been my favorite cut of meat lately because the thighs are the perfect size for the adults and the drums are the perfect size for the kids. It takes a little more time because there’s some butchering involved, but I get 8 portions from a package that only cost me $7.34, so it’s worth it.
8 - we’ve finally wrapped up the various weeknight responsibilities and it’s time to relax! We watch the first episode of Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, then head in for some reading and bed time around 9.
Daily total: $88.50
Day 5 -
7:30 - I slept like absolute garbage and wake up feeling more tired than when I went to bed. I can also feel a headache brewing. We’re without childcare again today, so I should have signed on early to get some work done but I lounge in bed instead. Since it’s the off-season, I don’t have any pressing deadlines right now anyway - just self-imposed ones that can be flexible if needed. I finally roll out of bed around 8:15 and make myself coffee + a bagel. The kids get yogurt, fruit, and French toast sticks. I get my son out the door juuuuuuust on time for his speech therapy appointment. He used to receive his therapy in our home which was GREAT, but now he has to go to the local elementary school. Most weeks my mom or MIL take him, but they’re not available this week. I use the 30 minutes he’s in his visit to research a work thing my boss asked me about, so the time is well-spent.
12:30 - When we got home from speech, the baby is napping, so I pass my son off to my husband. When we don’t have help with the kids, we try to stagger our work so we each get a few hours to focus on work and will do some in the evening as needed. I hit a natural stopping point in my task so I serve lunch, which is leftovers of the chicken + potatoes + sauce from last night. I have the kids for most of the afternoon, so I don’t get as much work done as I’d like and I snap at my husband about it. In hindsight, I know the stress was from a culmination of our regular childcare routine being thrown off and my being tired/cranky from the poor sleep so I apologize later.
4:15 - Wednesday means it’s dance night, which is both my most and least favorite night of the week. I do a Mommy & Me class with the kids, chauffeur then home, scarf down a quick dinner (leftover corned beef, potatoes, carrots and rye bread), and then back to the studio to take classes myself from 6:30-9ish. It’s exhausting and at times it’s been hard to budget for, but it’s also so important to me, especially since becoming a mom. I love that it’s guaranteed time to disconnect and where I’m not someone’s mom or employee or wife - I’m just me, doing something for myself. The first six months of motherhood were really lonely and isolating for a myriad of reasons - new identity, sleep deprivation, hormones, Covid - and getting back to my dance family made me feel like a human again. I paid for lessons last week but when I get there, I’m reminded that I haven’t paid for the overnight NYC trip the studio is taking next month. I use the $60 cash I got from selling the bed and mattress on Sunday and write a check for the rest ($280).
9:15 - finally released and on my way home! I DESPERATELY want to hit up the McDonald’s drive through for some fries like I do most weeks, but I resist. I am so strong and so brave.
Daily total: $280
Day 6 -
8:15 - slept in today because I slept like shit again, this time because my daughter woke at 11p and 5a. Frankly, it’s rude she did this on my monitor night and not her dad’s. I want to stay in bed longer but have to get my son ready for preschool. I don’t know how I would have survived these last 3 years of unpredictable sleep if I had to go into an office. Getting to sleep till 8 or take a nap on my lunch break as needed has probably saved my life! Husband’s on drop off duty so I make a coffee and a bagel for me and the little lady to share and get logged in to work. My husband gets back around 9:30 and then puts our daughter down for her first nap.
12:30 - I had no meetings this morning, so I was able to knock out everything I hoped to do yesterday and then some, yay! The morning flew by and it’s suddenly lunch time. I throw together some peanut butter sandwiches for us and send some emails from my laptop while my daughter and I eat. I left the table for 32 seconds to fill my water bottle and my dog sniped my sandwich!! Honestly, there is no respect in this house. I have to make a second one, aka he’s blown our PB&J budget out of the water with his gluttony. After lunch, I have a 1-on-1 with my boss and it goes really well. My stress about my work performance yesterday was unfounded because she’s happy with my turnaround times and how I’ve handled the extra work I’ve taken on lately. I feel better about work stuff.
3:30 - my husband picked our son up from school and he hangs with me in my office for a bit before I put his sister down for her second nap. I kind of feel like I might be getting sick - I can’t tell if I’m just run down from poor sleep or if a cold is brewing and my headache is back. I decide to try and lay down with him between meetings in hopes he’ll nap and I’ll get a little rest. He doesn’t nap but I feel a little more energized after laying down for 30 minutes and taking ibuprofen. Now I can power through a few more tasks and one more meeting before calling it quits for today!
5:15 - my last meeting of the day ran over a little - GROSS! Thankfully, it’s the best night of the week, Takeout Thursday (ToT as we call it around here) for the parents. My son says he wants mac & cheese and chicken nuggets; I can’t stomach the price of a box of dairy-free m&c, so I make the sauce myself whenever he requests it. I’m positively delighted to find I have a little container of it in the freezer, so getting dinner on the table for the kids is a breeze. My husband is trying to avoid fried foods because of a 75 Soft challenge he’s doing, so makes himself eggs, avocado toast, and bacon. Left to my own devices, I decide to get KFC ($13.36). I haven’t had much of an appetite this week, so I don’t finish it all.
8 - after dinner, we have playtime/snuggle on the couch and chill time. I realize we’re almost out of diapers, so I place an Amazon order for more before heading into the bedroom around 9 ($55.94). I’m 94% done with my book according to my kindle and I really hope I can finish it tonight!
Daily total: $69.30
Day 7 -
7:15 - finally Friday! I had trouble falling asleep last night so I took some melatonin/chamomile gummies and got a pretty good night’s rest finally. When I wake up, I’m sleep-trapped by my 3yo, so I browse my phone and start looking at this week’s grocery sales and coupons. I load a few to my account and start casually making a meal plan in my head. My husband got up with our 1yo and texted me to say he thinks she’s sick, which enhances my suspicions that I’m unwell, too. It was a blissful 7 days where we were all healthy, but here we go again 😩 I sneak out of bed around 7:45 so my husband can go to the gym. I pick up the living room a bit while my coffee brews and my daughter plays. You’d never know I spent most of Monday evening cleaning this place by the looks of it. I guess that’s what a week of living in a house will do. My son wakes around 8, so I get all 3 of us dressed and ready for the day. I throw a waffle into the toaster for my son and hash brown into the air fryer for myself, then think about how my girly goo steals my breakfast all the time and add another hash brown. I’ll top it with eggs scrambled with spinach and cheese. I log in on my work laptop around 8:45 while we eat breakfast.
11 - The baby goes down for a nap and I take my son to his weekly playgroup. This is supposed to be my husband’s thing, but another work thing has come up. I would normally just have him skip, but he’s missed the last few weeks and with our schedule all thrown off this week, I want to get him out of the house. While I’m there, I chip in for our group’s fundraiser raffle basket using cash I nabbed from my husband’s wallet - one of the most obvious generational differences with our 10 year age gap is that he ALWAYS has cash and I never do ($10). Thankfully, he’s a good sharer. We have to leave playgroup early so I can log in to a standing noon meeting. My team is in all different time zones, so I end up having 2-3 lunchtime calls a week which I hate. I eat my leftover KFC during the call.
4 - my husband took the lead on the kids all afternoon so I could button this week’s work tasks up. While I’ve been working, I start to feel like I’m crashing and think maybe I am getting sick after all? I try to nap with my son again but get pulled into another work task, so I just make tea with honey and vow to take it easy this weekend. I check my personal email and see that our electric bill has been charged for this month ($326.33). I was hoping to grocery shop this afternoon but I’m too tired and haven’t finished my list, so it will have to wait until tomorrow.
7 - Dinner is done, showers have been showered and it’s finally time to relax into the weekend! A few weeks ago, we inacted Dad Does Dinner Fridays (#DDDF) where my husband has to plan, shop for, and cook dinner from A-Z with no input from or questions to me allowed. It’s glorious. This week, he pandered to the children by choosing hot dogs and home fries after they rejected his previous picks of burgers and steak. We end the night by watching the new Roadhouse, which we both find surprisingly funny. I snack on some chocolate chip cookies and trü frü chocolate covered strawberries that had been kicking around the freezer. I finished my book last night and will start The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes tonight. It’s been a long week and I’m happy to have the next two days to chill a bit!
Daily total: $336.33
Weekly total: $1,635
Breakdown:

• Food + Drink: $485.07 (I included the Costco order in here but some of it was also for Home + health)
• Fun / Entertainment: $287
• Home + Health: $386.27
• Clothes + Beauty: $0
• Transport: $44.42
• Other: $432.24 in gifts/donations

Reflection: This was an expensive week for me! My husband’s birthday gift and paying for the NYC trip were outliers (and pricey ones at that). The other things I spent on are more inline with my typical spending habits. I know I could also slim down our grocery budget but I really enjoy cooking and food matters to me, so it’s an area I’m always more willing to splurge on. I was a little discouraged looking at my student loan balance in comparison to where I started - before kids, I was always so aggressive about making extra payments, but I lost the wind in my sails after $20k forgiveness was dangled in front of me and then snatched away. At this rate, I have about 8 more years of paying which feels both like an eternity and like nothing. Finally, this whole exercise just reinforced what I already know: I have been incredibly fortunate to be the benefactor of my in-laws’ financial well-being. From my husband’s lack of debt, to his ability to buy and sell 2 homes with large down payments/low rates and more. And while my parents haven’t been in a position to support me financially, they’ve helped in other ways (letting me live at home, helping with childcare so we avoid daycare costs). I grew up in a Just-Enough family, so the kind of financial security we have is surprising to me and I’m grateful for it.

BACKGROUND
Job: Office Admin
Industry: A/E/C
Location: Near a MCOL city, USA
Context: I intend for this to be a monthly diary, updated quarterly to the sub around the end of March, June, September, and December 2024. I aim to give updates for one year on current debt/assets, income/expenses if they change, averaged spending in different categories, and my thoughts around different aspects of my life related to finances as they come up.
I thought this might be an interesting more real-time format for a debt diary, and would give me the motivation to stay the course! This is the first of four planned updates.
Part 1: $41,431 total debt - some info about income progression plus comments elaborate on how I got into the debt. I responded to most comments and will try to keep doing so. I so appreciate everyone who took the time to read and interact or even just offer well wishes! I read everything multiple times.
SECTION ONE: CURRENT DEBT AND ASSETS
Credit card debt: $14,990 on 4 cards

• Card 1: $7,340 at 0% until August
• Card 2: $550 at 0% until July
• Card 3: $5,000 at 18.25%
• Card 4: $2,100 at 27.24%

Personal loan: $6,257 at 11.84%
Auto loan: $14,443 at 2.9%
Retirement balance: $5,716
Savings account balance: $3,033 in an HYSA at 4.35%
Tax savings account balance: $200
Checking account balance: $452
HSA account balance: $894
​
SECTION TWO: INCOME
Income Progression: I received a promotion and raise for 2024 and updated my total income in the title to reflect this + new expected side gigs income.
My bonus and side gigs income could definitely end up being +/- but my estimate for last year was close. The income in the title is mine alone.
I make ~81k including estimated bonus at my main job, and am conservatively estimating I’ll make ~12k at each side gig for an additional ~24k total.
Main Job Monthly Take Home: ~$4,225
Deductions: -$155 to HSA to receive max employer match.
-$393 to 401k to receive max employer match.
-$80 after taxes for partner’s dental and vision.
Not getting into all of my taxes but I did the math after my first paycheck this year and it is math-ing.
Side Gig Monthly Take Home: Averaged $975 gross per month between 2 side gigs. All over the map though: January I made $138; March I made $2,500.
Still have the OG side gig (~14 hrs/month at $18/hr; hours will increase in April). In March I took on additional responsibilities for higher pay (~16 hrs/month at $30/hr)
Re-started Instacart shopping (Goal $18-20/hr minimum for however many hours I feel up for)
I adjusted my W-4 withholdings at my main job this year to cover side gig taxes but am also saving about 10% of my gross per month. If I don’t end up needing it, I’ve tricked myself into saving more money.
Other: My partner (let’s call them P this time) gives me at least $550 biweekly towards their share of our expenses—rent/utilities, groceries/household, subscriptions, car insurance—plus their phone bill. I make around 70% of our combined income.
​
SECTION THREE: MONTHLY EXPENSES
Rent: $960 my share / $1,450 total. Small 1 bedroom with loft space.
Renters / home insurance: $6.50 my share / $13 total. We got a basic policy from Lemonade right after my first post but I may adjust it to better cover all our musical equipment.
Savings contribution: $0 — normally aim for $200, but I contributed $600 in January from my bonus and decided to pause. I am planning to save $200/mo for Q2.
Debt payments: I averaged $1,259 per month towards credit card payments this quarter, or right on target!
This tells me that my goal of paying $1,200 towards cards AND saving $200/month was not totally realistic before. However, with my increased side gig income it will be doable.
$382 for personal loan (18 months to go).
Electric: Varies monthly between $75-$115. $64 for my share / $97 average.
Storage: I no longer contribute to this but wanted to update for the many who commented—we did get rid of one unit as planned and I am helping P pare it all down slowly but that’s mostly their project.
Wifi: $30 my share / $45 total.
Cellphone: $100 for my phone and Apple watch.
Subscriptions: $32 my share / $44 total. Hulu, HBO Max, and Spotify (not shared). I share logins with family and friends for other apps.
Car payment / insurance: $378 auto loan (39 months to go).
$185 my share / $370 total car insurance for 2 cars. Our rate went up and we switched this split to 50/50.
Food + Drink: $400 my share / $600 total groceries. We stayed right on budget here.
Some folks asked why this was not 50/50 on my last post. P will grab me food if they eat out, I buy stuff that only I eat within this budget since I do big grocery shops and they buy some of their own stuff. We had this same budget split in the opposite direction before. If I ever start to feel a type of way about it we’ll simply discuss and adjust.
Averaged $90 a month for coffee— I discovered an oat milk creamer that I LOVE, thanks to shopping for it a lot on Instacart one week. So, more coffee at home for me.
Averaged $87 on eating out for lunch occasionally during work weeks (5-6 times/month). P started making me lots of lunches and dinners this month 🥰
We go out to eat once a month as a date and split the bill equally; averaged $40 monthly for me as budgeted. P found a sushi spot with a good lunch special and it’s been our go-to this quarter.
As mentioned last time, food spend may feel high but is my main indulgence. I could stop buying coffee and eating out completely but I would lose my mind!
Fun / Entertainment: I averaged $45 per month this quarter, more than double my budgeted $20. The good news is I have no free time or motivation for going out any more, so maybe this will balance out for the year.
A close friend decided to move rather suddenly and I went in hard on the going away get-togethers that our friend group had. I don’t regret this at all, and I’m really sad he’s moved away. We have always had a purely sibling-like bond that means a lot to me.
The rest of my entertainment is playing/listening to music, a little art making with my supply hoard, going for walks, browsing Reddit, reading books on Libby, and the TV/Movie app subscriptions.
Home + Health: Household expenses are in our grocery budget since most consumables are purchased there (paper products, shampoo, soaps, dish stuff, toothpaste, etc).
We averaged $73 per month on laundry. This is higher than last year so I am adjusting accordingly. Going to the laundromat should also count as entertainment—there is so much local drama, and I have or overhear the weirdest conversations. It’s wonderful.
Clothes + Beauty: Averaged $57 per month this quarter, also high. I found a new product that is helping my skin be more consistently happy, and I had to replace some makeup before a work event—nothing fancy, just basics from ELF. I’m not a daily makeup girlie.
I also ran out of 4 (out of 5!) routine skincare products at the same exact time, which is highly unusual, so I expect this number to go down next quarter. I shouldn’t need to buy any products until Q3, maybe only the second cheapest one ($15), and if that’s true I’ll be back on track for the year.
Transport: Averaged $206 per month for gas—this number went up because I started Instacart in March and spent twice as much on gas. If I keep up Instacart at the same pace this will increase to around $300 next quarter but should level out.
​
DEBT DIARY
JANUARY 2024
Current Total: $39,360 - Down by $2,071
Credit card debt: $17,350 on 4 cards
Personal loan: $6,886
Auto loan: $15,124
Retirement balance: $4,260
Savings account balance: $3,011
Checking account balance: $422
HSA account balance: $344
CREDIT CARDS
I am down to 4 credit cards with balances! It was a huge psychological boost to pay off the other 4 high interest cards using my bonus.
~$8.7k of my credit card debt is at 0% until July and August. I have ~$5.25k at 18.25% and ~$3.4k at 27.24% — Avalanche method on the high interest cards from here out! I'll pay some interest on the higher 0% balance (unless I can roll it in to a new 0% later) but am determined not to on the lower one.
I used this calculator and it tells me the highest interest card should be done by July if I stick to the plan. I hope my payment plan is sustainable in practice.
I will have to work hard to not get demotivated when my balance drops by less next month AND my savings doesn’t go up—“perfect” often ends up being the enemy of “good enough” for me, and it’s been a lifelong struggle to combat this tendency in lots of areas of my life.
More less than perfect: I have 12 open credit cards. This is an insane number!!! It was 15, but I just closed my 3 highest interest cards. I got them around the same time in 2021, they have no real benefits, low limits, and I haven’t used them in over a year. I kept opening cards “to lower my utilization.” I shouldn’t care!!! I am going to look at all my cards again and see what I can close next; those 3 were obvious.
SPENDING
Getting a better handle on my spending is going to be crucial in growing from this and succeeding at my goal. I had a lightbulb moment when I got paid at the end of December about my feelings around spending—this is when I’m most likely to say “screw it, I have money for XYZ” and be less conscientious because it feels like I have so much money all of a sudden.
This may sound like an incredibly obvious insight, but I found it so helpful. I thought my main problem with credit cards was making too-large payments. But there is likely also an element of using them when my checking account is low because I spent too much on non-essentials when I was feeling flush at the beginning of the month, instead of being honest about my budget. They’re similar problems but slightly different.
I started keeping a “countdown” of all my variable budget categories in a note on my phone and updating it with every purchase, and this helped me make better decisions all month. I don’t think the note is the best long term strategy but I think it is helpful while I figure out how to make better choices. Progress not perfection!
Stress is another spending trigger I was able to apply some mindfulness to. Something stressful happened at work and my first impulse after damage control was, “I should get a little treat.” I don’t think it’s bad to get a little treat occasionally, but it made me wonder how often am I doing so without thinking about it, and how much do they add up?
I did get one (a green drink from the grocery store), but only after I asked myself if it works in my budget (I counted it towards groceries because it’s not unusual for me to buy myself something like that on a normal grocery shop). Again, this might seem elementary, but it was really helpful for me to be aware of. I could also go for a walk, listen to music, phone/text a friend, or do some stretching to feel better instead of spending even a small amount of money (the drink was $4).
P and I split the cost 50/50 of buying shelving for our record player and record collection ($120 each; I used money from my bonus). It feels GREAT to finally enjoy this collection again—it’s been a couple years since we had a good set up—and to edit it down from 20+ boxes that were stacked in our hallway. We got rid of a few boxes worth. Yes, I have Spotify but that’s for my car and work. There is something so deeply enjoyable about perusing, picking out, and playing a record. IYKYK.
Speaking of P, we talked about the storage units again and they agreed to take on the cost of paying for them. I was willing to negotiate a different split but I think they realized how much it was stressing me out, and they feel like having the full burden of the cost will motivate them to put more effort into getting rid of stuff. Even if they don’t, the cost of keeping them for this entire year + the time we’ve already had them is still less than replacing the higher ticket items inside.
JOBS
It’s the slow season for my side gig so I’m working less and I need to account for that in my budgeting and spending next month—not eating lunches out or getting coffee as much seems like the obvious cut. Eating lunch out didn’t feel exciting to me this month so I’m not feeling sad about it. I’m bored of the options near my office and not into ordering delivery.
I can safely expect to take home more from my side gig in Q2-Q3, but this was the least I’ve ever made in a month ($138). Still, I never expected to have this gig I enjoy so much during the winter and I’m grateful I do. The bookkeeping aspect ended up not working out for reasons that have nothing to do with me, which is totally fine.
I had a sweet conversation with the owner and she expressed how much she enjoys working with me and that I’m one of their best contractors. I’m very much a “words of affirmation” gal so that made me feel warm and fuzzy.
TAXES
I did my taxes the millisecond I could. I feel like it’s one of the most “off-brand” things about me. I am notorious for waiting until the last possible minute to do lots of things.
I messed up last year by not changing my W-4 withholding for my 1099 gig, nor paying quarterly taxes, and also somehow slightly underpaying FITW at my main job. But it all worked out with what I saved—I never accounted for this in my last diary but it was around $1,300; I owed about 2/3rds of that between my job and gig.
I have had self-employment income in the past and habitually saved 25% of my gross for taxes, but I always paid those quarterly. I fixed this for 2024 by updating my main job W-4. I find the new W-4 form confusing even if it theoretically allows you to fine tune your withholding better.
I’m planning to save the remainder of my saved tax money and my unexpectedly large state tax return when I get it next month—I know I could apply it to debt but having the cushion feels secure to me right now.
​
FEBRUARY 2024
Current Total: $37,584 - down by $1,776
Credit card debt: $16,230 on 4 cards
Personal loan: $6,572
Auto loan: $14,782
Retirement balance: $4,995
Savings account balance: $3,022
Checking account balance: $148 (I get paid tomorrow!)
HSA account balance: $625
CREDIT CARDS
I’m down to $8,280 on the 0% balances, $5,150 on the 18.25% balance and $2,800 on the 27.24% balance.
I know it’s best practice to automate payments and I will one day—I autopay all my other bills— but I genuinely look forward to manually making credit card payments as soon as my paycheck direct deposits. It gives me a boost that’s hard to pinpoint…a feeling of control? Satisfaction? I’m not sure but I’m going to continue while I work on digging my way out.
All my card due dates are the first week of the month; I changed them when I started getting paid monthly. When I had more cards with balances this was a very helpful move and I would recommend it to anyone facing debt and multiple payments to juggle.
JOBS
I got a promotion and raise for 2024 at my main job! I wasn’t expecting this until 2025 based on my last review—it seemed like something to work towards—so a lot of my thoughts around work have been about how I can achieve that, and it feels weird to be here already when I was expecting 6-12 more months of work towards it. It’s also more of an adjustment to reflect my current responsibilities vs. “here, now you have more responsibilities.”
I put a ton of effort into my job last year. It’s difficult for me to give myself credit sometimes—I truly love both my role and where I work, so it doesn’t really feel that difficult—but objectively I can see that I juggled a lot, took on some huge tasks, and overall handled it very well. Telling myself to remember this feeling and that I can apply the same tenacity towards the project of paying off debts.
SPENDING
My car unexpectedly needed some work to the tune of my entire surprise tax return. The humor of the cosmic joke is truly in the timing. 🥲 As it turns out this car is much less forgiving of pushing the limit on oil changes than my old car, so I have learned an expensive and valuable lesson.
I didn’t price shop for this repair; getting it done fast was important since I am so reliant on my car for work. I’m grateful I had my tax return to cover this. It’s still painful for me to pull from my savings account right after I added that money to it. Even though I know that’s why I have it.
I know this might be surprising based on my debt situation but I do like to save! Even when I was making very little money for nearly 2 years during my first detour from my “normal” career path, I always made a point to squirrel some away for later.
Still, I’m no worse off with savings than where I expected to be for the next 3 months, and I have not added to my debt. The tax return was a bonus that it feels like the universe gifted me especially for this purpose.
So much of this journey is about adjusting my mindset towards my finances. I’m not really surprised, because I have found this to be true about a lot of other areas of personal growth, but I guess I’m surprised it took me this long to apply that idea to finances too.
The little budgeting countdown note I implemented last month was truly so helpful and I kept it up for part of February. I stopped after something sad, difficult, and frustrating happened between me and a very old friend that involved helping them with money (the remainder of my saved tax money). I’m not going to talk about it, it’s very personal and complex, but I got upset and stopped caring about tracking. Back on the horse for March. I tried using YNAB but I just could not get excited about it no matter how hard I tried.
I have noticed this month that I get most angsty around my finances right before I get paid at my main job, but I think it also has to do with that week usually coinciding perfectly with when I experience PMS. Putting it in that context did help me feel a more chill about it this month.
TRAVEL
Last year P and I talked about going on a short trip this month to visit a close friend—they moved to a place we want to visit, we love and miss them a ton, and obviously it would have been fun to have a little getaway. We travel well together and always have a blast.
But it doesn’t make ANY sense right now. I really hate saying “no” to fun stuff that P wants to do, but am starting to feel more comfortable with it. It’s 100% a me problem—they never do, say, or act any type of way that makes me feel bad about saying no. I just want to be able to do things that make them happy, and I feel anxious when I say no. I recognize a little of my dad in this tendency.
We talked about saving up specifically to take this trip next year instead. If we both stay on track with debt payments that may be doable in 2025! I am enjoying finding new reasons to stay motivated. I should make a vision board with my art supply stash.
OTHER
P is also getting more motivated to budget and save based on my contagious enthusiasm about this, and it makes me feel good to see us start growing more together in this way. We talk and dream a lot about our long-term goals this month.
Auto loan aside, it looks like if I stay the course that I will be out of other debts by my 37th birthday and be able to enjoy my money a lot more. P will be in better shape by their birthday this year.
It’s hard for me to imagine what having around $1,600 “extra” every month will even feel like— a favorite commenter on my last post who described that point in their own journey said, “dammit, I’m a rich bitch now!” and that’s the vibe I’m envisioning for myself too.
​
MARCH 2024
Current Total: $35,681 - Down by $1,943
Credit card debt: $14,990 on 4 cards
Personal loan: $6,257
Auto loan: $14,443
Retirement balance: $5,700
Savings account balance: $3,033
Tax savings account balance: $200
Checking account balance: $452
HSA account balance: $894
CREDIT CARDS
I’m down to $7,890 on the 0% balances, $5,000 on the 18.25% balance and $2,100 on the 27.24% balance. Let’s goooo!!
I started putting daily purchases on one of my credit cards (not one with a balance) and paying them off fully every other week. This felt like a positive exercise in utilizing a credit card appropriately and I’m glad I have a little practice doing it now. It still made me feel very nervous, which is probably good, but I did a great job spending only as much as I could pay back (it was already in my checking) and I think that’s progress.
JOBS
The owner at my side gig knows I’m an admin and asked for my resume because they are focusing on growth this year and need support. Long story short, we agreed to me working for them on administrative items for around 4 hours weekly at $30/hr.
I am THRILLED about this development. A lot of my work experience comes from early-stage companies. I thrive in the chaos and particularly love crafting systems, digital file organization, and process documentation, all of which I am now hired to do. The role will evolve as we figure out what is needed. The 4 hours a week can be literally whenever I want and I have been knocking it out all at once or in 1-2 hour chunks when I’m feeling motivated.
In other job news, I was cleaning up an old email account and realized I still have an active Instacart shopper account, so I started doing that on Sundays with an initial goal of netting a quick extra $100 weekly. My taxes are going to be so fun next year!! 🫠
Once I got going…I couldn’t stop. I started picking up orders on my way home from my main job (and can now write off a lot of that mileage I was driving home anyway). I grossed almost $500 my 2nd week and had another lightbulb moment that this could help me get out of debt WAY faster.
I feel energized by this. I’m suited to the task and I’m enjoying it, so I’m going to keep it up for as long as I can handle it. I’m being choosy about what deliveries I accept and aiming to gross minimum $18-$20 per hour. My worst weekly hourly average was $17.50, but I learned a lot from that week and my overall average for this month was $20.11/hr, squeaking just above top of my target range.
I made P promise to tell me if it becomes too much and I know they would, but so far they have been understanding and supportive. We already worked different schedules so we’re not seeing each other much less and we still make intentional time for our little dates or just vegging out together (our favorite) on the weekend.
SPENDING
Ugh. Cars 🥹 My car needed new front and rear brakes for $650 and P’s needed a repair they did on their own but still cost $500, about half being the part needed. I helped them out with this and they will pay me back over the next couple of months, which we have always done when one of us has a bigger expense we can’t cover on our own.
Thank goodness I made the extra side gig income this month. This would have dented my savings, big time. I put both of these expenses on a card and paid them off fully (as of yesterday!) with Instacart money.
I was excited to see my overall debt go down more this month after I started Instacart, but at least it didn’t go up!! I’ll take the W. I have put so much money into my car the last 4 months (nearly 3k between tires, brakes, and the February repair) so I’m hoping I don’t have to do anything else for awhile.
​
Q1 REFLECTION
I really looked forward to writing stuff down here and I think that contributed a lot to my success this quarter. Seeing my numbers continue to go down feels amazing, especially after realizing in December how much I added to my debt last year.
I’m excited about my newfound side gigs momentum. I have way less free time but I feel better in some ways, like the more I do the more I have energy to do. I have to be so efficient with my time to balance it all, but it’s working for now and I feel good. I’ve never made-or thought I could make-100k in a year and that’s also an exciting prospect.
Am I overly ambitious for having 3 (or 4 if we split the OG side gig into it’s two distinct functions) jobs/gigs right now? Maybe, but I know it’s not forever and it’s in service to a meaningful goal. It doesn’t feel difficult in that context. I have unmedicated ADHD (diagnosed over 20 years ago/stopped taking meds in college) and my brain is genuinely delighted by the level of multitasking going on right now. If I get overwhelmed, I can ease up on Instacart.
We’ll see how it all flows from April-June. I’m looking forward to figuring out a sustainable rhythm for a longer period of time, not just while it’s new and I’m enthusiastic about it.
I think the end of this quarter potentially laid the groundwork for some major progress, and I’m excited to see it play out. I’ll be able to pay ALL monthly bills in full the first week of April (a rare combo of my job pay, side gig pay, and P’s pay all hitting within 3 days + my projected Instacart earnings) instead of waiting to make a couple payments til their later due dates, which is an incredible feeling!
Finally, I never brought this up in the diary and I feel like it may surface in the comments. I would rather not reply about it multiple times and I’m feeling preemptively protective of P, who exists for me as a whole entire complex human being that I actively choose to share my life with daily, and for all of you as a few sentences in a Reddit post. I’m obviously working a lot right now, so what is P doing?
P has one job and generally works minimum 50 hours/week. Their job is INTENSELY physical and they have less energy than I do, in general and due to their job. I’m a lot more adaptable than P—no shade, they agree—so there’s more things I might try or do to generate income that they would never consider or excel at in the same way. They are much better when their energy is more slow and focused. They’re more intentional and I’m more, “let’s throw it all at the wall and see what sticks.” We are very different in this way (and in many more), but it works for us and I think we’re more balanced together.
P’s overtime pay is currently going towards some collections (I’ve known about these a long time and helped them negotiate settlements or payments this quarter) that will be done by October. They took over all our shared chores at home except big grocery shops (because I’m at the grocery store daily) and laundry (because I love my local laundromat drama and weirdos). Once their debt’s settled around October they are planning on redirecting their overtime pay to me towards my debt efforts, and eventually that money will go towards shared savings for shared goals.
I wrote A LOT (again) even with tons of editing, so no real further reflections, and many thanks for reading if you did. I look forward to chatting again with commenters over the weekend, and very much appreciate the sub’s continued support ❤️ See you in June!!

Before restarting my career in IT, I was very experienced in IT but I was working as a dishwasher in a very unique restaurant environment.
Under the first management I worked under, I could comfortably call myself the most comfortable team member. washing dishes with headphones in and only paying heed when I am yelled at for certain pieces. Which didn't bother me as it's a very high stress environment for the cooks and yade yada.
However. As management left to open their own restaurant to rescue their business after COVID, that's when issues started for me...
New management came. And under the pressure of the new management, the fact that the old team had almost entirely left and the fact that the environment changed from one where it's been basically the same team for a year with minor changes to getting brand new set of staff every 3 weeks. The only real constant was me. Expanding me from dishwasher to front of house greeting staff to dishwasher AND front of house greeting staff to basically being a one man army at the job.
"This is a tales of tech support subreddit, what's the story of a dishwasher got to do here?"
Well, if my duties hadn't expanded to contain managing some of the technical sides of business, I wouldn't be here. Would I?
I had the regular thing pop up here and there that benefited from my work experience, ticket printers needing some network troubleshooting "Surprisingly resilient printers might I add." Our POS system needing updates, upgrades and long calls with support to get it working. To the computer where business was conducted. It was all slowly but surely becoming my duty.
I feel the need to mention some of the politics of this place. There were 3 owners, one was the old manager who left to start his own business and was slowly beginning to distance himself. One who was a hard cheapskate who didn't treat his employees all that well and didn't like me, and one was a hard cheapskate who didn't treat his employees well at all but for some reason inexplicably liked me.
We were under the management of owner 3 right now. With owner 2 livid that I was touching ANY of the back of business things. But I frankly didn't care. I like doing IT stuff, I know it might be freaky to some of y'all but I liked fixing the office printer whenever it didn't work all that well.
Here, however, begins the controversy.
one day. I was asked by my boss, owner 3 to change the menu prices on the restaurant's website as we were now increasing prices.
I told him this should be easy. Just edit a couple of lines of HTML. I went to the website to check it out on my phone. In my many years of working here I was aware of the website but not that it was much more than a promotional page, the menu and it's prices and that it was http, yes. It lacked an SSL certificate.
I click on the website from my phone to check it out, I flick away the SSL certificate warning as if it were nothing. "It doesn't matter that this site is insecure. We don't have anything important on it anyways!"
However, a weird tab caught my eye on top of the screen. Right next to the menu....
"Gift cards"...........
Huh... is this.... What is this page?
I click on it, and in horror I see before my eyes.... A form......
This form requests the following information.
First name, last name, first and last name of receiver.... email address..... home address......... Birthday????????? PHONE NUMBER?!?!?!?!! WHO WROTE ALL THIS!!!!
Ignoring all this... And ignoring the questions of my manager... I click on the "order now" button and it takes me to a paypal pay page.....
"THIS PAGE DOESN'T HAVE AN SSL CERTIFICATE" I shout panicked.
The owner, taken aback replies "what?"
I explain to him that this page basically compromises the information of any user who inputs anything into the fields in the page would basically be broadcasting it to the entire half of the internet that it has to go through until it reaches the server hosting our website. Frankly he does not care despite my insistence... I tell him that we can go to the website management page their provider gives them. He tells me to do that he has to get the login information from owner #2.
He tells owner #2 we're trying to change the menu prices. He gives his login information to owner #3, owner #3 logs me in from the restaurant's imac. I change a few lines of HTM frm like 41/43 to 49/51. Huge price hike. I beautify some of the inconsistencies in the formatting of the pricing and I send it online.
At this point began the begging and pleading to "purchase" an ssl certificate from the domain provider. A shady host where you have to pay 50$ yearly for their most "basic" SSL cert.
He wouldn't do so, and he definitely wouldn't change hosts especially since that host is who he bought the domain from. So now we're at a bit of a pickle.
However, the save came completely unrelated to me. As finally, it was owner #1's paypal and personal Email that was linked to the gift card page. And he decided to focus more on his new restaurant and ignore the old one! And when they asked me if I could somehow change it... I said that, of course..... I can not! I have no knowledge on how to do so! Not only do I have no experience actually designing pages. But that changing both the Email where all this information went AND the paypal page where the money would be sent would be incredibly hard for me and it could get messed up! I don't want to be held responsible!
Instead, I suggested using a third party gift card processing app that can integrate to our POS system instead of just being an excel database of codes sent from one of the owner's Emails that we aren't even able to cross reference in a timely manner! Just get a solution that reads QR codes and confirms them directly to our app and subtracts it that way so it's tracked!
We'd have to pay a subscription fee as well, ofc. But they liked this idea so much that they went ahead and bought it before I even knew lol.
All that was left to do is actually implement it. Being the lazybones I am I wrote some HTML embed in some text that said "Click here for gift cards". Beautified the page a little more and even got the footer to stick to the bottom of the screen like some sort of fancy website! And in recognition of this achievement I deleted the name of the "web designer" whom was commissioned for this website who used one of those other HTML template pages from the mid 2000s to "write" the whole website. Which left it's name in the html code as comments...
And my solution worked!
Well... At this point I'd hardly call myself the "dishwasher" for that place. I was practically running the show and covering for almost everyone who cold quit on us until one day I decided to quit myself over an altercation with owner #2.
In the end, a few years later, I went to the website again to check it out and to my surprise very little has changed from when I changed it. In a way, I'm glad my fingerprint on it is still there. The gift card coupon page embed... Still very happy about it. And decided to post it here.

My dad struggles with modern day technology like using smart phones and managing multiple app account logins and passwords.
He recently called who he thought was Dish to help him reset his password on his account and ended up giving all his information to a scammer. Name, birthdate, credit card, SSN, safety questions - the works.
He says he’s frozen his credit but I’m worried he’s not doing all that he should given the amount of information he gave away. There seems to be a lot of services selling identity theft / protection packages. Are any of these worth it?
Should my dad be taking more significant action? I’m having nightmares of him losing all his money and becoming my dependent.