I had gotten out of the habit of reading for pleasure after college because I felt incredibly burned out on it. That had started to bother me because I used to read as one of my main hobbies, so last year I set the goal of reading 1 book. I did that, and read a couple others.

This year I set a goal of 5 books and was able to do that by March, but then I ended up with about 9 in flight books and wasn’t making much progress with them. I felt like I had them hanging over my head and it was stressing me out, so I’m now working on the goal of finishing them by the end of the month.

Its been really nice to realize that I still do love reading and that I still can finish a book even with all the stuff going on in life, its just a matter of sitting down and reading. I credit a silly goal with helping me remember that.

We also had a few of the “Just For Kids” VHS tapes growing up and it took me ages to track down info about the company down when I randomly remembered them a year or two ago. I absolutely loved “The Elmchanted Forest” as well as “Sampson and Sally” and “Katy and the Katerpillar Kids.”

From what I found Just For Kids had bought the rights to some obscure Eastern European films from the 80’s and dubbed them into English before they disappeared themselves which was a disappointment to me given the fond nostalgia I had for their movies. Took me forever to find the films I remembered because of that, but I did eventually.

Actually, if you’re using those for shipping–which is the only thing about Prime I’m interested in given how much I distrust and dislike Amazon–I accidentally discovered an even easier way to exploit them.

If you add something to your cart, then go to check out, you can accept the free Prime period, select Prime shipping, then remove the free Prime trial from your shopping cart before you pay and it will just…keep the Prime shipping on the order.

The first time I did this I was convinced I had fucked something up because I went to cancel my free trial after the item I bought had been delivered and instead of having the option to cancel I was given the option to start another free trial. The second time it happened is when I caught on that I was on to something, and I then tested it again and it just…worked. I’m sure they’ll fix it eventually, andit’s probably totally useless if you like other parts of Prime, but if you want free 1- or 2-day shipping on an order, well then this worked for me as of my last order about two weeks ago.

I’m one of the new ones, but I’ve been aware of and interacted with Lemmy and Mastodon for at least a couple of years.

For me, I liked what I saw but felt like they lacked enough of the network effect to convince my nontechnical friends to make the jump with me. That made me concerned that they would shrivel up and die. I’d recently been interacting a bit more though, Mastodon especially, since I’d say its gained a good amount of traction given Twitter’s…cancerous CEO. Every couple months I found myself downloading Tusky and Jerboa to mess around, but hadn’t made it a habit.

Reddit’s API changes were a line in the sand for me though. I decided I didn’t care about my friends following anymore, and I was ready for a smaller community again, with less rage bait and predatory capitalism.

Does that make me the wrong sort of refugee?