Love ballroom dancing, and especially east coast swing is my jam. Unfortunately no regular social dances in my area but I go when there’s one available. It’s really fun and playful, great way to meet new people and good exercise. Equipment cost is basically a pair of shoes. I joke about dressing up in a dress and heels for my workouts.

Posted most of this in another thread but I’m glad to help share my tricks. I have managed to nearly eliminate Amazon entirely from our lives for the past two years. I usually find things by searching what I want to buy on DuckDuckGo and then adding “-amazon”, “-etsy”, “-walmart”, “-temu” and “-pinterest” as search modifiers.

A lot of little shops are perfectly legit, but watch out for:

Things being ridiculous bargains. Small shops will almost always be more expensive due to higher overheads and less bulk

Too much variety in product (unless they’re a marketplace with 3rd party vendors). A legit shop will have inventory that makes sense together in its theme. If they sell everything from bubblebath to uranium they’re either probably not actually selling it or drop shipping it.

Pictures that look like they come from lots of different sources, or no consistency in images. If they don’t have their own pictures of products or standards of presentation that’s suspicious

Some general recs:

For anything electronic or computer related: B&H Photo or Microcenter

For music stuff: Sweetwater, but there’s a lot of great small music stores, or you can use a marketplace like Reverb

For clothes: if you have any clothes you already enjoy, go directly to their brand website. If you don’t, go to local secondhand shops and touch, handle and try on some clothes to see them in person. I’ve discovered some brands I like by finding something in a thrift store that was well made but not my size or preferred color.

For house repair and DIY stuff: we order from a local building supply store, but there’s also hardwareandtools.com, 1stoplighting, Waysource, Lightbulbs.com, Timothy’s Toolbox etc.

For food items, local grocery stores often offer online shopping and delivery. If it’s a specialty item or imported the import companies sometimes have their own websites. There’s also Hive or GroveCo for some granola type B Corp goodness

For tea, coffee and spices, Adagio and its sister websites

For super fast, need it now shipping, Target has a lot of the same things Amazon does and even does same day delivery for an extra fee for certain items.

For something hard to find you can’t find another site for, try Ebay.

I do business with all sorts of independent retailers and have only had good experiences with them. These are sites that I’ve personally bought from but there are a lot of smaller sites just trying to make a place for themselves on the internet

I have never been, nor seem to be able to get motion sickness. No seasickness either. I can read books on all sorts of moving vehicles, and I love roller coasters. Whip me around upside down in pitch dark at 60mph and I’ll just call it a good time. My husband says I am squandering my powers because I can play as much of whatever motion intense VR game as I want, but I just end up playing Beat Saber most of the time.

Well, the nice thing is GW1 is still there. They decided to keep it going because the cost was minimal enough that it was worth it to them, so all of that content is still perfectly playable and there are still people running ATFH and Droks etc. It has a small dedicated following and is still a fun game in its own right. They’re different games but I enjoy both.

I always enjoy the April Fools efforts from Guild Wars. They’ve done all sorts of things from making all players tiny, giving them bobbleheads, making them go into “airplane mode” (a reference to a t-pose animation glitch but with added “homemade” sound effects) to entire quest lines and even an entirely new game mode inspired by 8 bit platformers that spawned its own festival because it was awesome. This year you can relive some highlights from recent years, but the new addition is being able to open your own Cat Cafe in your homestead.

I find this funny because while reading this post I thought to myself “I don’t see why I wouldn’t date someone like that?” and I identify as demisexual. I’m already taken, unfortunately for OP, but I’m sure if he were to mention wanting someone to cuddle or being lonely to those friends who called him “cute” and “adorable” someone may step up and either find him a match or admit interest.