Welcome to issue #045 

Have you ever wanted to just switch your brain off and unwind or go full potato mode, and just vegetate on the on the couch. I honestly think there is nothing wrong with doing this and I savour my Sundays for this very occasion, but it seems like hustle culture just drums it into us that we need to be productive 24/7 and well....that mentality is toxic. 

My point is, I recently discovered Stardew Valley and its been a nice and relaxing little escape from reality.

For those that have no clue what I'm talking about, Stardew Valley is a retro farming simulator that I found on the Appstore with a great story and probably the most relaxing sound track that I've come across in a long time, to the extent that I'd probably make a Spotify playlist of just Stardew Valley tracks.

Anyways this sparked my curiosity on how it might effect my own productivity which brought me to a great blog series by Deprocrastination that touches on the topics of gaming, and how they effect us, both in the positive and the negative sense over the span of 5 very awesome articles!

10/10 would still farm parsnips on Stardew Valley 😂

Now for this weeks issue✌

Just a reminder that I have classifieds available for the coming weeks. If you're interested in advertising on The Slice, reach out to me.

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This weeks featured newsletter is Hacker News Digest , that sends regular emails of the top Hacker News stories .

Okay, so this is by no means a "small" newsletter, but its a newsletter that I also think a lot of my audience don't sub to.

I'm a big fan of Hacker News, but I don't really have the time to constantly check what the tops story is, so with this newsletter I get the top 30 stores sent to me daily and honestly, its very with it!

Reading this newsletter with my morning coffee = 10/10 👌

How not to fool yourself 101
Fooling yourself is a very human phenomenon. It’s something you see across domains and across segments of varying scientific literacy.

We fool ourselves because from an evolutionary perspective, for the longest time, we were unable to influence our external world. If you can’t influence the world around you, the “sour grapes” line of reasoning is more productive. Read More

The Most Respectful Interpretation 
Consider this situation: You email a colleague with a question expecting a prompt response, but hours or days later you’ve yet to hear from them. Perhaps you can’t move forward on your project without their input so you find yourself blocked. How do you imagine you feel in this situation? Read more

A practical guide to reducing loneliness.
This Medium article I came across hits a bit close to home for me, so I thought I'd share.

"Feel alone? Turns out, you’re not as alone as you think. According to a survey from October 2020, 60% of American millennials experience loneliness regularly during COVID-19.
Unfortunately, the loneliness epidemic won’t go away when COVID-19 ends.

In fact, COVID-19 simply accelerated realities that we would have encountered anyway — including widespread loneliness." Read more 

The great perils of social interaction.
If an alien ever immigrated to Earth, he’d be a social disaster.

He’d try his hardest to learn by observing how humans behave, but it wouldn’t be easy—he’d see someone ask a stranger for a cigarette and he’d go ask for a sip of someone’s latte. He’d see a couple kissing on the street and he’d go try to kiss the policeman on the corner. He’d stare. He’d get food all over his alien face. And when he got tired, he’d lie down on the sidewalk. Read more 

How to bootstrap a startup.
Bootstrapping is building a company from the ground up with nothing but personal savings, and with luck, the cash coming in from the first sales. The name comes from the old adage of “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” — an unfortunate origin for a method that still requires plenty of help from others. 

Think of this newsletter for example, its totally 100% bootstrapped by me. Check it out

My current HTML boilerplate.
I still use a lot of html today, and to be honest I quite enjoy writing it, and often times when I feel like it, I code entire issues of this newsletter in HTML. This blog post really did open my eyes and even teach me a few new tricks when it comes to writing HTML. It should be noted that I'm not a coder and I'm completely self taught in this regard, so finding something like this a god send. Check it out

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