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Adafruit
I know I have featured Adafruit in the past but it’s always good to feature again, especially since I buy from her store regularly for tech needs. Especially since Radio Shack has closed down…right when I needed to buy more diodes and resistors for my personal projects – such as an automatic cat feeder and an automated snowglobe to help me sleep better.

While I usually prefer to go to an actual store for supplies, Adafruit has pretty much everything a techie person needs. In addition, this woman-owned online store also has how-to guides and easy-to-follow projects to teach coding, soldering and general electronics creating.

There are some pretty pricy bits and bobs on the site but if you’re learning arduino, there is the budget pack for $34.95. It’s bare bones but you can learn basic programming and circuitry.

If you want to solder things together, they’re available on the site, too. The cheapest soldering iron is this pen-like soldering iron for $22. The cheapest solder on the site is $5.95. You won’t need to use much for each project, especially beginner projects. Also, as a tip – get a solder sucker, the cheapest being $5 on adafruit. It’s okay to not get the soldering stuff first, especially if you’re learning programming and circuitry. If you’re at the point of soldering, you’re pretty much at the final stages of your project. Don’t spend money, solder or time on your first LED blink. It’s better to save for a project.

NationStates
Definitely have featured this pretty recently but I just got back into the game so I want to bring it up again.

NationStates is an online text-driven role playing game (rpg) where you run a fictional nation and make all the decisions for it. You can run a democratic nation, a socialist nation, an oppressive nation, whatever you want. And the decisions you make can create a ripple effect for your nation, even have its government reclassified.

You get four issues a day and they appear with two to five options, all acted out by an affected person of the issue. The options are very light-heartedly written, which is part of the fun of the game. If you ignore the game for too long, you’ll just have five total issues to answer before the “new issues” timer restarts.

The issues may play well with fantasy but they can definitely stem from real world events, such as the Flint water crisis, should police wear body cameras, and sustainable energy. Of course, there are light hearted issues such as your nationfolk fussing about being able to walk around nude, should the government invite ufos to visit and if there should be a national holiday dedicated to the act of whistling. You can bypass any issue and whatever you pick will either drop the tax rate of your nation or hike it. And the interesting part? It’s not clear cut of what will actually benefit the nation, tax wise. Or even for your nation’s civil rights or economy or political rights. Good ideas can quickly become disasters for your nation and bad ideas can become popular and well loved. I’ve selected solutions that I thought would help everyone and it just threw my nation into disarray. Just like in real life, it’s a difficult balance.

It’s been a fun experience to get back on NationStates proper, especially since I’m older now and also previously worked for the US government. I think I make more competent choices for the country I have, Dursto, which I run as a socialist nation because I’m a socialist, myself. My nation isn’t perfect (yay for making sleepy choices), but it’s something. Each choice you make changes how the country runs.

Try it for yourself! You can interact with other nations as well, forming alliances or starting wars. I just have my nation basically mind its business, I don’t visit other nations nor am I part of any alliances. I don’t bother other nations so I pretty much stay out of the way. Hooray!