Just a reminder (yet again) that the world is bigger than the US. I live in the UK, we don’t water our lawns here. Grass will grow literally anywhere with no human involvement. Letting your lawn grow a little longer is great for wildlife - the bees love the clover! In you live in the countryside get a sheep/cow/goat/donkey/llama and you’ll feed livestock without having to mow it either.

That said, fuck leaf blowers. There is absolutely no need for that noise.

I use a wheelchair on occasion - when I’m unwell and use my wheelchair I measure about 3cm taller than when I’m well and have been walking!

Don’t worry, I have a life threatening illness and reduced life expectancy anyway. And I’m not suicidal. It was already my preferred way to go, this ordeal with my mum just made it crystal clear in my mind. Thankfully I have access to everything I need already so I wouldn’t get anyone else in trouble and my loved ones understand my decision and feel similarly. It being legal would be a bonus, but I’m not letting a law stop me.

My mums been in hospital for 10 weeks. She only 62 and was admitted for a fairly routine infection after chemo for breast cancer. Since she’s been in hospital I’ve lost count of all the things that have gone wrong but the most distressing thing is the hospital delirium she’s developed. I’d never have believed my mum could become so violent and abusive, it’s like she’s a completely different person. She has absolutely no agency over her body at the moment, she can’t even sit up unaided. It’s so horribly undignified that it’s completely cemented my decision to commit suicide once I get a terminal diagnosis (or a diagnosis that I know I couldn’t deal with graciously). I can’t have children so it’s a small comfort that I won’t inflict the pain and heartbreak I’m experiencing from my mum, but I don’t ever want to treat my partner how she’s treating my dad. I’m going out on my own terms if at all possible.

It touches on it briefly, but refeeding syndrome is a killer and is very hard to treat even in hospital not in a war zone. Even if the war stopped tomorrow and food was abundant, there’s nowhere to treat patients who have been starving - more will die.

I wish I could watch sports matches on demand, not just live. And I wish ad-free podcasts were available to pirate. It’s an unrealistic dream.

It’s a fairly niche sport, but Amazon had the tennis rights here in the UK. They’ve gone to sky now and the very minimum you’d need to pay is £30 p/m for much less choice in the way you watch matches. As for prime music, they have a good amount of ad-free podcasts, including everything from wondery. I only have prime for the free next day shipping and free returns by collection, but the tennis and podcasts were a really great extra.

I’m in the UK but I’m largely housebound. Prime is life changing for disabled people like myself. I won’t cancel my subscription but I’ll probably pirate anything I want to watch on prime video in future, which isn’t much now they don’t have the tennis rights in the UK.

I get your point but in this case it’s not JRR Tolkiens estate who’s claiming copyright infringement, it’s a random production company in Sweden or something. A production company in an entirely different country with no real ties to JRRT has decided an independent cafe built on the same street as Tolkien grew up on, opposite the mill he used as inspiration, is harming their asset somehow by calling themselves the hungry hobbit.

When it happened I thought the typeface was the issue rather than the word hobbit. But no.Here’s before and this is after. I can’t get my head around the fact that the production company sued this tiny sandwich shop. It’s so ridiculous!

That’s precisely what happened here. The place had been called the hungry hobbit for years under multiple owners. The current owner bought it, updated some official paperwork and within the first 6 months of her ownership got hit with the “unauthorised usage” bs. She couldn’t afford to fight it. Thankfully the “hungry hobb” is still doing enough business to stay open 12 years later.

Yeah, this guy didn’t have a leg to stand on. There’s an independently owned cafe opposite sarhole mill (inspiration for “the shire”) on the street JRR Tolkien grew up on called “the hungry hobbit”. It’s been called that since 2005 - before the release of the hobbit film. A production company sued this tiny sandwich shop, sitting on a roundabout 3 miles south of Birmingham for the unauthorised use of the word “hobbit”. That was completely egregious imo. It’s now called “the hungry hobb” - they just took down the last two letters on the sign. I really should grab a sandwich from them one day.

I don’t turn airplane mode on and I haven’t jailbroken it. I download all my books from Anna’s archive on my phone and then send them to my kindle email address. The books appear on my kindle in seconds. No DRM issues. I have the oasis because I’m a big reader and I highly recommend it.

I downloaded some stuff on the Disney app on my iPad for my flight to Greece last month and it worked perfectly.

I’m gonna say no, it doesn’t count. Mainly cos I can move one with just a twitch from the other and I’m not special at all.

Thanks, I appreciate it!

Could you send it to me too please?

Yep, increasing the text size helped a little, but adjusting the spacing, alignment and margins helped a lot. I keep the margins thin/small, the alignment left justified and the spacing moderate-wide. Those adjustments plus the more legible font has made reading almost as easy as before my eyesight was damaged. I do have to focus more though, or the words/letters in the centre of my vision go walkabout!

I was able to show that people who stutter “stutter” when they read silently, as well as reading aloud! Although pressure/stress also makes stuttering worse, as you said.

That anticipation you mentioned - it’s called your phonological loop. It’s a cognitive process that happens subconsciously when we form words in our heads before speaking or as we’re reading. One school of thought about the cause of stuttering (and what my research supported) was that people who stutter are over vigilant in their phonological loop. Everyone analyses their speech before it’s articulated to a certain extent, but people who stutter seem to over analyse it like they’re almost expecting an error due to their stutter. That over analysis increases cognitive load and makes you even more likely to stutter; a self fulfilling prophecy, as you said.

I’ll take a look at my literature review later if I get a chance - I’ll let you know if I can find a paper about the effect of fonts.

I sustained damage to my macular last year and switched my kindle font to open dyslexic (as well as make the text larger and more spaced out) after reading became harder. That font helped to “anchor” the words down, particularly in the middle of my vision. Someone suggested a hyperlegible font which works almost as well but is better looking. From my very limited experience, I find the Cyrillic alphabet harder to read than the Roman alphabet - but that could just be my lack of familiarity with it. I learnt a little Ukrainian but only using duolingo.

I don’t know if this little nugget of info might help you, but years ago I was doing a PhD in psycholinguistics. I vaguely remember that different fonts can have an effect on comprehension and recall. I briefly considered an experiment to see if stuttering could be induced by different scripts. That was a long time ago though, I don’t know if that’s still the accepted case.