Professional fundraiser, having worked in non-profit my entire career (and my university degree was in a social sciences field). I wouldn’t call myself technically proficient, but I’m technically savvy - I was an early adopter of the internet as a teen, and have been online in some form or another since the mid-90s. Fuck spez.

Yeah, this is pretty much my standard now too. I was in hospital for a day surgery recently and was more than a little taken aback at the fact that I was one of the only people masking.

A wise choice, it’s a time-suck for sure.

Ahhh good ol’ FPS death. I never make it that far, mainly because I love to embark somewhere with a waterfall.

Dwarf Fortress, been playing it off and on for many years now. I happily bought the steam version when it came out!

Excellent log, my dog gives it four out of four paws straight up on the air. Because he’s lying on his back like a dead cockroach under my desk right now.

I’ve been gardening now since the first year of the pandemic, and I will absolutely never grow enough to sustain myself. Perhaps on an acreage, if that was my full time job? If I was lucky? But it’s a LOT of work to grow food at a sustainable level, and that’s not even counting how one goes about processing and preserving it, saving seeds for next year, ensuring there’s enough to last till the first harvest next year.

Garden for the pleasure of it, and enjoy those small pleasures. I successfully over-wintered all my strawberries (in Canada! In a raised bed!) and they’re producing like mad this spring. I certainly couldn’t live off them, and perhaps they won’t make it to next year, but I’m enjoying eating the berries right now.

(And you may already know this, but I found that hand-fertilizing the silks was really successful when I grew a small plot of corn!)

Ontario, Canada/the city of Ottawa subreddit - holy shit, this is the current-top-level comment/thread on a post in the Ottawa subreddit commenting on the wild weather they got yesterday.

If that’s not mainstream collapse awareness, I don’t know what is.

You’ve already gotten advice on preserving, but what about sharing/donating the bounty?

Some cities have public portals where you can post the location of your fruit tree and indicate people can help themselves. There’s also this webpage. And failing that, you could reach out to a local foodbank - they may be able to have volunteers come collect the fruit?