I have observed Buy Nothing day(s) since the early 2000s. My personal philosophy is, this is a day set aside to meditate on the difference between want and need.

Do you need to queue up at 4pm on Thanksgiving night to fill your car with cut-rate b-stock imported consumer goods made specifically for $10 door buster sales? No. Fucking nobody does. Your family hates receiving gifts from you, because it’s all bound for the landfill in a few months.

Do you need food? Yeah. And maybe the produce is all on sale today.

Think of the labor and the plastic and the waste before you participate in conspicuous consumption. Think of the fuel it takes to get from the factory to the port, across the seas, into a warehouse or a plane, just to be purchased and discarded after a day or a month or a year. This is one of the ways we’re dooming ourselves as a species.

Like everything else, just do the best you can. If you need groceries or gas or medicine, go buy them. Meet your needs. If you want the big TV, and the price is right, do it. But think a bit about second hand goods, or working with what you have, or going without. Refurbishment sites exist, and a two year old item is functionally the same as a new one. Not much changes year over year. They just make you think it changes.

What are your needs today?

I’m also in my 40s, and I’ve flip-flopped between ISTP and INTP since my teens. I just took it again and today I’m INTP. Hooray for consistency, I guess…

p.s. if you take the test from the link, you do Not have to add your email to see your results. Don’t give your info away.

😭😭

Show me your little butthole guy

I need to know all the butthole monsters.

*my search history is cursed. Here’s a non-wiki link for a few other oddities

Hey look at this little guy

NSFW, if your work doesn’t like little butthole guys from Japan

Möth

Here’s one from five years ago:

The first Starlink satellites were already clearly visible shortly after launch last year, and some observatories found their images of the night sky ruined. On Thursday, SpaceX is set to launch its latest batch of Starlink satellites, with a set of 60 to join the fleet of 653 that have been launched since May 2019. In a several years the entire network is expected to swell to 12,000 satellites, with a possible expansion to 42,000.

Note: As of May 2025, the constellation consists of over 7,600 mass-produced small satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO)… Starlink comprises 65% of all active satellites.

I’m keeping this post up because it’s relevant to the community, and I enjoy tear-down pieces about how Musk is a hack and everything he touches turns to shit.

(Look up how starlink ruined earth-based astronomy, if you need some additional anger today.)

Sploot

Lol. Good.

The account was 2 hours old and had 30+ well-researched posts. There’s no Humans Only rule here (yet) but we very much don’t need three-paragraph chatbot essays on how to clean up OP’s wiki article. Too aggressive.

I also don’t know what *ptb means.

I know there’s a sync lag, but it worries me that I can remove something that breaks rules, but people on other instances can still read it seven hours later…

Can you still read the bot spam analysis? I removed the comment 12 hours ago…

Hot.

This shit needs to make a comeback, not 1999 jncos and raver fur.

Bonus relevant xkcd

Oh lol he really did spend all the money, didn’t he.

That’s the great thing, though. Everyone in the community is leading by example.

Sometimes we post explanations. Sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we forget to remove the -Wikipedia from the auto generated title.

Yall are all welcome to do as you please, within the instance rules and the rules posted in the sidebar.

In this community, it’s up to OP whether they add more info to the title, copy the first paragraph and insert as text, or let the post title ride.

If you truly can’t abide by this structure, [email protected] is much more stringent about posting a wall of explanatory text.