Cheap real estate?!

It’ll just get escaped by quotes.

EDIT: it might be a better idea to use non-ascii characters.

Thanks :D One of these days I want to draw the mech he’s piloting, but I’ve been doing all these with a mouse and I suck at perspective.

Are there other mechs for sale?

What is a fish hook mass? A giant tangled wad of fish hooks?

I know what it does, but “replacement” implies the original is no longer there.

I can purchase (a/the) mechagodzilla on the open market?

What prompts the market for replacement pineal glands?

So water is rare enough to serve as currency?

Does it require an internet connection or can it operate locally? Does it need an app/account?

I’m in the US.

I haven’t differentiated the various regions of Focus in terms of diet, but I have defined a few things about yinrih cuisine and a few foods or snacks.

The yinrih gustatory system is less senative then that of a human. Cooking emphasizes texture and temperature, overall mouth feel, rather than taste. They CAN taste, and dishes do incorporate flavors, but it’s far less sophisticated compared to human gastronomy.

The most common livestock bred for meat is the wormcow. Male wormcows grow what are called trophic limbs while the female gestates the calf. The calf eats these trophic limbs while it grows before assuming a herbivorous diet as an adult. This process is not harmful or even painful to the father, and he can regrow the limbs the next time a calf is expected. These limbs are harvested without killing the animal. The meat is naturally spicy as it contains large amounts of capsaicin (or analogous compounds) to deter insects from eating the wormcow’s technically dead legs. Humans compare the meat to beef, though it keeps better, not acquiring that rancid flavor so quickly.

Most yinrih dishes, including wormcow, are served in bowls in a state somewhere between salad and stew, always prepared such that utensils are not needed, with the food already cut into bite sized chunks. Cultures very on whether the bowl is brought up to the mouth or whether the diner lowers his head to meet the bowl on the table, but yinrih eat, as the shape of their heads suggest, like dogs, directly from the bowl.

Snacks, or “tail food”, are meant to be eaten casually while standing. Since all four paws are occupied in bearing the diner’s weight, he must use his tail to grasp the food and bring it to his mouth. These foods include the same sort of processed empty calorie laden junk food familiar to humans, often salty or sweet in flavor, crunchy or gummy or creamy in texture.

There is a cream cultivated from certain plants that fills a role similar to butter. The flavor is too subtle for yinrih but they do enjoy using it as a binder or a base to add other flavors to. The Commonthroat word for this cream (which I don’t have to hand) is the “butter” used in the profane expression “cloaca butter” meaning nonsense or BS.

Spacers have a very different way of eating since they are in microgravity and can use all their paws to grasp now that they don’t have to hold their weight. I haven’t detailed much about how they eat other than that there’s a hydroponically grown meat substitute called “leasemeat” (the word “lease” coming from an archaic English word for “false”). It comes from a fungus and is often gussied up to approximate the texture or flavor of other meats, but it’s a poor substitute, and real meat is an expensive luxury.

On the tidally locked planet Hearthside there is a “snack” of sorts called “cooling bark” (“bark” referring to a strip of tree bark). It’s like those dissolving mouth wash strips that used to be so popular. The difference is it’s really, really, REALLY minty, like a reverse Carolina Reaper. It’s potent enough to cause pain and even fainting in humans. It’s meant to provide relief from the heat of the nightless desert rather than to freshen the breath. It effects the entire body rather than just the mouth.

Salamanders are amphibians, or do you mean the mythological salamander? If they’re amphibians, that would present some interesting logistic issues. Their skin would need to stay moist and they would need to lay their eggs in water.

My description was rather poor in hindsight. Their parrot-ness is mostly in the colorful feathers, large beak designed for crushing, and long macaw-like tail feathers. They’re not zygodactyl like parrots, and probably have longer legs like an ostrich. I’m not sure where they exist on the food chain, but they’re likely social as that would make them easier to tame. They are clever and possibly tool-users in the vein of corvids (or indeed parrots).

A mix of brands. Sonoff, Thirdreality, and Hue’s own motion/light/temp sensor. The current Amazon listing for the Hue motion sensor says the Hue bridge is required, so I don’t know if they’ve locked it down.

I’m not really familiar with Deseret besides the history and concept. It was optimized for typesetting, lacking ascenders and descenders that tend to break off of metal type over time. That makes it hard to read. It sure has an aesthetic though, and I fancy it would make a great arcane glowing script flowing across a magical obelisk. Shavian was made for the pen. Every letter can be written in a single stroke without lifting the pen, and it uses ascenders and descenders to make the coastlines of words more distinct. Shavian also strives for a “mid-Atlantic” accent in its spelling. This does create some issues if, like me, your dialect uses the same first vowel in cot, caught, father, and bother.

Of the two I think Shavian has a bigger following.

ugh I hate this. I have two absolutes when it comes to what makes a good smart device. First, it has to be able to be controlled via a local network, be it wifi, zigbee, z-wave, bluetooth, etc. There is no reason why my communication needs to leave my network when both the sender and receiver are in the same network. Second, it must work as a dumb device. If my LAN goes down or access is otherwise impeded I don’t want it to be a brick.

I use ZHA.

I got into Hue way back in 2014, before I knew what HA was, and before I cared about local control. Hue is OK, and they have a wide variety of form factors to choose from, but I’m always afraid they’ll enshitify to the point you can’t pair the bulbs with a non hue zigbee controller. I’m pretty sure I can’t update the bulbs unless they’re connected to a hue bridge.

Using smart bulbs to mitigate the lack of in-wall plugs/switches is a great idea. I do that with my bedroom fan since the light chain is busted.

𐑢𐑧𐑤 𐑦𐑓 𐑞𐑨𐑑𐑕 𐑞 𐑒𐑱𐑕, 𐑮𐑩𐑡𐑧𐑒𐑑 ·𐑤𐑨𐑑𐑦𐑯, 𐑧𐑥𐑚𐑮𐑱𐑕 ·𐑖𐑱𐑝𐑾𐑯.

𐐊𐑉 𐐔𐐯𐑅𐐨𐑉𐐯𐐻 𐐮𐑁 𐐷𐐭’𐑉𐐨 𐐩 𐐣𐐫𐑉𐑋𐐲𐑌.