Zonetrooper

I actually really like this. It teaches your cat that legs are a resting spot. (Or maybe you don't want them to learn that, since it can lead to Feline Paralysis in Humans.)

Depends on the kind of home and how "handy" you feel yourself to be. There are a lot of minor things around the home which can save you boatloads of money (and be faster to deal with) if you do them yourself.

Tools:

• A multi-bit ratcheting screwdriver. It's my #1 go-to for assorted small fixes. Wirecutter recently recommended the Megapro 211R2C36RD, for what that's worth.
• Multi-tool. Another good "it's not the best at anything, but I use it for everything".
• Adjustable wrench and/or pliers. Good for tightening nuts, holding things tight, bending, and other small tasks.
• Sponge mop. One of the ones with a little handle to help squeeze it out. Great for cleaning floors without killing your back.
• Speaking of which, a good-quality hard plastic bucket. Look for something in the 10-15 liter range. Dirty water, clean water, road salt, supplies, anything which is easy to carry.
• If you are comfortable with power tools, a good quality cordless drill can be a huge help as well.
• If you're comfortable doing your own minor electrical repairs, one of those little outlet checker tools. Saves a ton of time.
• Good quality measuring tools, like a measuring tape and/or bubble level. These needn't kill the budget, but are handy to have.

Comfort:

• I am a firm believer in ceiling fans as a great room cooler. Put one up and be amazed as the room feels comfortable at a range of temperatures.
• Similarly, a small room air circulator or pedestal fan can really help, especially if you're doing some heavy work.
• If you don't have good chairs for the table, I'm a personal fan of Ikea's Bergmund.

Convenience:

• "Lazy susan" cabinet organizers. Game-changer for kitchen cabinets.
• Mr Clean abrasive cleaning pads. You can scrape off a lot of grime with these.

Lastly, for furniture and other things, unless you're in a really small area, check various community marketplace kinds of sites. You can find a lot of critical stuff for less than MSRP, and non-critical stuff at a point that won't break your budget.

I know people I could torment with this. I'm not going to, but God it would be funny.

A lot. Some of them were genuinely great. Some were way less so.

• To Kill a Mockingbird: Earns every bit of reputation it has. Should be shown twice.

• Teacher's Pet: They showed this as a reward. I despised it. Seriously, it sticks in my head

• The outsiders: "Okay, I guess." I remember feeling it was a decent bit of storytelling, but I was too detached from the themes and era to care. Honestly, it was probably too old for kids to identify with.

• When the Levees Broke: In retrospect, one of Lee's weaker works. Nonetheless, it made a hell of an impact on us. We'd mostly seen helicopter's-eye views of New Orleans. Getting down in with the people was a whole different view.

• Tuesdays with Morrie: Apparently it's popular, but we all hated it. Felt it was sentimental slop.

• Brighton Beach Memoirs: Honestly don't remember much. We mostly cared that, at the end, they actually showed the nude photo the lead character received. As kids, that was mind-blowing.

This is a little surprising to me because I read it on a daily basis and haven't seen sign of the paywall yet. I don't know if Ublock Origin is simply squashing that as well, or I'm somehow lucky.

If anything, Tahini - a separate spread common to the Middle East, made from sesame seeds - is vaguely closer to peanut butter.

This. Actually launching a community is hard. Launching a decentralized network of communities is damn hard.

I've been around for long enough to remember the internet before megasites like Reddit, when every community had their own forums and/or website. Specific mod for a specific game? Unique forum. Specific sub-community of a fandom, like a bunch of tech nerds analyzing the starships in Star Wars? Unique forum.

And like, I don't deny that losing that hurt. Each site had its own unique little flavor of community, and the great centralization of the internet definitely steamrolled that flat in favor of mainstream appeal. But centralizing did also improve ease of discovery and access. Now we're trying to build all of those little communities back in what - 2-3 years? In comparison to the 10+ they had to grow in before? It's not going to be easy.

You're already asking good questions, which means you're doing a lot better than many of the people who adopt without thinking. You're also looking for an adult cat, which means you aren't going to have to deal with a kitten's destructive exploratory phase (although, fair warning, adult cats can still be destructive if you don't prepare properly).

One thing I would say is that you should consider two versus one cats. Some cats don't handle being alone for a long time well and can become unhappy, while others prefer not having feline company and would be just fine alone for ~48 hours. A good shelter or adoption agency may be able to tell you whether a cat prefers company or solitary.

Like some other commenters, I would strongly suggest going to local shelters and discussing with them. They should entirely understand if you aren't able to adopt immediately and be able to discuss particulars with you.

• Breadboarding outside the case is still widely recommended, especially if you aren't bringing any components forward from an old machine.

• Pay close attention to the first-time startup processes for your system. Some have different startup procedures (e.g., AM5 memory training).

• Make sure you have adequate containers for all small components (screws of course, but also power harnesses, mounting plates, etc...). Anything you take out of the packaging or case will "walk away" if you just put it down "wherever".

• Have a flashlight. Maybe obvious, but even in a larger case it can be hard to see if something is properly seating, a cable is making a turn properly, and so on...

• Lastly, manage your cables. Tension on connections is bad, and it can help with airflow in a case as well.

I mean, you can argue some semantics about "peaceful".

What it is undeniable is that it prevented global powers from going directly to total war, resulting in a much diminished number of casualties (both soldiers and civilians) compared to the World Wars. Nothing since then, even if we summed up all the wars going on around the world at any given moment, rival the unthinkable numbers of dead who piled up those conflicts, nor - if I can speculate a bit - would they have rivaled another worldwide industrialized conflict.

But.

Does that actually mean the world is "more peaceful"?

One can argue that the undeniable reality that you are much less likely to be killed in a war between nations today means "Yes." One can also argue that peace should not be measured by cold mathematics: That the continued existence of smaller-scale conflicts around the world, internal conflicts within countries, or deaths from non-national conflicts such as the ongoing gun violence epidemic in the US or deaths caused by polluting megacorporations mean it has not gotten "more peaceful"; the risks have just changed.

I suppose it depends on how you are analyzing all of this, in the end.

Just one note: I don't know what the nature of your thesis is, but you might get more nuanced results by something like assigning each book in a pair a 1-5 score. Right now, an answer of "I like #1 better than #2" could mean a few things:

• #2 is just awful and I hate it.
• Both are really good, but #1 is just slightly better.
• #1 just slaps and nothing could compare to it.

Disclaimer, I am not a physicist, just a guy with interest in sci-fi, science, and too much free time.

is their any theory centered around our frame of reference having a past but not a future?

So, the answer is, yes, this is actually kind of a common theory on how time actually works. Maybe.

This has to do with physics, and the fact that no two observers have the same perfect frame of reference. For most of us humans, our frames of reference are close enough to be identical on a day-to-day basis. It's even close enough for (most) science. But it's not true on a perfect level. For instance, special relativity says that time passes differently for objects in motion; GPS satellites have to correct for the fact that their onboard clocks are experience "slower" time than us observers on Earth. Even astronauts "lose" about ~1/100th of a second for every year spent on the ISS.

What's this got to do with the future not existing, though?

So we know no two observers have a perfectly identical frame of reference - there is no objective "truth" of when something occurred. Cool. Now what? Well, what we can talk about is historic light cones. Because the speed of light in a vacuum is a universal constant, we can determine how far from you a photon departing your actions would travel. Places that photon would reach at any given point in time following your action are said to be within your historic light cone, and in common parlance, the past. The boundary of how far that photon is reaching at any given moment is, from your frame of reference, "the present". But since nothing can exceed the speed of light, it is impossible for an observer to view beyond the present, into the future.

The catch, of course, is reference frames. You used a plural - "our frame of reference", "we're blazing a trail forward" - but the reality is that each of us has a minutely different reference frame and is blazing a minutely different trail. Again, for almost any day-to-day purposes this is irrelevant... but there are certain scientific experiments which exploit or even rely on this absence of reference frame.

Cool, what about time travel again?

In my first comment above, I mentioned something called closed timelike curves. Those are an actual thing: By severely bending spacetime, you can theoretically cause a photon to "curve" around and end up at the same point in time it was produced, now in its subjective past, while mathematically not violating quantum physics.

This is where things get kind of freaky and headachy; if a photon can be sent into its subjective past, doesn't that imply a future now existing, in which that photon will be generated? The answer is, not in the frame of reference of that particular photon. A historic light cone of that photon being generated, now in that photon's future, still exists; but that photon is now generating a new, detached lightcone...

Like I said, headachy. I also have to emphasize that while the math holds up, there's ample reason to believe CTCs don't exist, chief among them that our mathematical understanding of quantum physics may still be imperfect.

tl;dr: Yes, absence of reference frames means that each distinct observer is blazing their own trail, which spreads into the "past" at the speed of light. The future, exceeding the speed of light, is unobservable. This framework does provide a mathematical concept of how you could send something into your subjective past, but such a means is still theoretical at best.