Ask Lemmy

Ham radio. The license is now just a multiple choice quiz--no morse code needed. There are apps that go through the questions in a flashcard style, and if you go through that for 30 minutes a day for a month, you'll pass no problem.

Entry level radios have gotten cheap, too. $25 Bafangs are the butt of jokes around ham radio, and yet everyone seems to have at least one. The older models had harmonic transmission issues that violated FCC requirements, but there's newer ones that clean it up and cost about the same.

I agree with sourdough, I didn't even buy a starter just made one from unbleached white flour and water, it been going strong or more than 15 years now. Other home fermentation projects too, many don't really involve any special equipment. But the secret people don't realize about sourdough is its EASIER to work with, than commercial yeast. Less fussy, less sticky, more robust, just slower. And slower is easier.

Gardening there was some cost involved for me but I have been consistently shocked because I used to kill plants but the food garden is doing great. Not idyllic, sometimes bugs eat all of something, or birds do, or this year my dogs are the late season watermelon (bitches!) but in general it doesn't take a lot of knowledge, I look for sturdy heat tolerant hybrids or plants native to hot wet places, and have gotten fennel, broccoli, cauliflower, tomatoes, okra, collard greens, mustard greens, jalapenos, different lettuces, a few other veggies and the watermelon all this food for not much cost beyond what we are already paying to have a house with a backyard.

Any specific drawing advice? I've always wanted to draw and to paint and have had such difficulty getting off the ground

Hypnosis. Pretty much 100% of what the average person thinks about how hypnosis works is wrong: there's no mysticism, no magnetism, no magic, no Freud, no "clash of willpower", no "permanent side effects", no "mind control", no risk of "never coming back".

You simply have to put a convincing act that you, the hypnotist, have "the power", and nearly everything you say will work. You play with people's expectations. There's no "recipe" for a surefire way to hypnotize someone, because it doesn't "work" with everyone and even on the people it works, it's not the same experience.

Ironically, I have difficulty being hypnotized myself, which sucks. Or maybe I have too high expectations of how I should feel while being hypnotized.