Let's go on an adventure

This is good information to know.

Quick painting practice with a t-rex. Apparently my reference photo was a t-rex named Titus.

however it is a bit loud. that's where my second choice comes in, which is actually this generic metal 12mm button that costs about £2 on aliexpress. these have a really nice tactile snap, although they don't need as much force to actuate as the Jiaben and they also have a little less travel distance, which makes them a bit less satisfying to me. that's the tradeoff for them being almost silent. a good walking-around fidget! I'm working on making one of these into a keychain.

the next tier would be things that aren't all that much fun as a single button because their actuation force is too light and/or they're too small, but they're satisfying in a long-term functional role. good mechanical keyboard switches and Omron mouse buttons fall in this category. my favourites are Gateron low-profile bananas. I love typing on these things so much that sometimes I just sit at my desk and type nonsense for the stims.

then you have your "upper end of mediocre" buttons. I have one of these 19mm "mushroom" style ones I quite like. the big size and lack of an outer housing make it a fun "OH SHIT" button. you could use it as an emergency stop for a dangerous workshop tool, or maybe a crisis mode button where you push it when you're having an anxiety attack and it texts your friend "please send cat pics"

the lower end of mediocre is mostly taken up by plastic buttons. they usually suck. sometimes the rocker-style ones you find mostly in cars and boats can be surprisingly good, but most of them are unbranded so it's hard to predict whether you'll get a good one or not.

at the very bottom of the list is this motherfucker: the Yumo Electric ABS-series ball head button, and its many clones. they lull you in with a shiny metal casing and you think, that'll be nice and clicky, right? but it isn't. this is the mushiest goddamn thing ever constructed. if you made the Pope push one of these he would publicly declare that God is dead.

You can get into this and similarly brain destroying sports without much hassle, and at a low age.

But getting on puberty blockers (not even HRT, PUBERTY BLOCKERS)? No. You need to wait till adulthood, get two doctors letters, and you'll be put on the lowest possible dose of E, with the WORST possible T blocker.

graph one: total CO2 emissions, NOT per capita, by region. By 2020, China, the US, the EU, India, and Russia are the largest players, with the entire rest of the world barely surpassing China's emissions.

Graph two: The same regions but weighted per capita.

If you look at the median individual across the OECD, take out their taxes, and adjust for cost of living by using purchasing power parity to the US dollar, the US median individual has $46,000 of disposable income a year. Only Luxembourg surpasses that (within the OECD)! Germany is at around $33k, the UK at around $25k, Japan around $21k, Mexico around $6k, and the two most populous countries in the world come in with China at $4.5k and India at $2.5k!

(I do need to note that this is disposable income and doesn't account for the value of services provided with tax money, so countries with a stronger investment in public infrastructure look worse here relative to the US than their inhabitants experience.)

I need to emphasize that while purchasing power parity isn't a perfect measure, its goal is to allow comparison of how much someone can afford given both cost of living and currency conversion rates.