Haha, that pre-bed burst of energy where you get more done in an hour than you did most of the day, and then get to go lie in bed with your mind racing about everything you were going to do and will definitely do tomorrow instead of sleeping, and then feel guilty for not being able to stick to the schedule people are asking you to and that your life demands, yeah that shit is the best.

It’s been a struggle all of my life to live on a diurnal schedule, we are the cave guardians

I appreciate the shout out to Guild Wars there. Aside from the opaque learning curve it’s one of the most player friendly live service games going.

This is really well articulated and puts into words the reason I stopped playing. I was one of those non FPS players who really thrived on Sym and Moira and Mercy and I felt welcomed and appreciated when it first came out. I just had fun and that made me want to try to get better and kept me coming back. As they kept retooling things, especially with Sym 3.0, I felt they were deliberately pushing me and people like me out. Instead of having a fun, wild and playful team game for my friends to all have a good time in, it became just another FPS game.

Seconding 9 Parchments and the Trine series. They are both by the same studio and they are beautiful games, they make sure every new scene is a tableau worthy of a screenshot with hyper saturated fanciful environments. The gameplay is fun, polished and goes by fast, in a good way.

I’m excited to see the progress of 3d printers becoming more user friendly, reliable and inexpensive. I’ve been keeping an eye on the development of consumer printing and there are so many types of materials to print with at higher and higher details with less troubleshooting needed. I’m thinking I’ll finally jump in this year but I’ve had very little time for hobbies lately.

Ranch dressing, or a mix of half ranch dressing and half ketchup I call “krantchup”. Specifically Marie’s ranch mixed with Primitive Kitchen ketchup is so good on fries.

I’m a sucker for a cello. When I’m testing new audio equipment I put on Austin Wintory’s soundtrack to Journey. So, so beautiful.

Stellaris has a fine soundtrack, but I found myself vibing way more playing it with FlyByNo’s soundtrack for Endless Space. Endless Space didn’t have the staying power with me that Stellaris did but that soundtrack is * chef’s kiss * .

When dealing with upholstery, the materials are much thicker than your average entry point sewing machine will be able to handle. The feet might not be able to feed the heavy material through, and some machines will be physically unable to feed your material under the needle where seams meet. In most sewing projects there may be four or even six layers of material at some points where seams meet or need to be rolled over, which would require more space between the foot and plate than most machines could handle. So if your principle interest in sewing is upholstery, you will probably have to find a machine explicitly made for that task and it won’t be cheap.

Here’s a picture of the dough from a similar recipe to what I use

If you do a search for “Irish soda bread” you’ll get almost all the same kind of pictures of X cut boules with some kind of add ins. Sounds like the brown bread is something different, but it’s probably still yummy.

I’m not sure if you’ve tried making it but the recipes that I have tried all result in a dough that’s capable of standing on its own as a boule. If you do an image search you can see a lot of images of Irish soda bread with X score marks baked in to their tops, which you couldn’t make with a liquid batter.

Yep, Irish soda bread is a quickbread made from a dough with baking soda as the rising agent, and it is absolutely a bread, not a cake.

My two year old has rotating favorite colors. He knows our favorite colors and he will bring us objects that are those colors, and then we ask what his favorite color is. He’ll pick out a marker or point to something or say a color. It changes every few days. Today was “lello”, a few days ago it was “bu”. He’s probably been interested in colorful objects (favoring something in primary colors vs pastels or neutrals) since about 5 months. So at least this kid has been interested in color almost from the beginning.

How about The Romans in Their Decadence? (Thomas Couture)

I’ve been getting into having a pdf of the various manuals for things around the house on my phone. I recently consulted the manuals for my fridge, a new dehumidifier and the lawn mower and it was pretty awesome not having to find and dig out a paper booklet each time. My phone is on me all the time plus I can get rid of the paper copies.

Yes, the first one is goofy but it did the whole “what would an actually average person do with superhero powers” shtick before it was cool, and managed to make it funny and pretty sweet too.

I use down feather pillows, they are easily customizable but they can go “flat” and hard in the middle of the night. Putting your head down on a freshly fluffed one is utterly sublime, though.

I have fallen in love with bamboo rayon pillowcases, (aka modal, aka tencel, aka lyocell). They can be extremely soft and smooth like silk but are much hardier, so you can wash them like normal laundry.

I think one of the biggest issues with BE attempting to follow in AC’s footsteps is that the factions were not distinct, and it felt extremely generic. BE’s factions were all similar, played similarly, and all had the same options for development and could all take the same evolutions. In AC, not only were the faction leaders ideologies revealed in quotes in the tech tree and secret projects, it was inescapable in the game mechanics. The reason I feel Stellaris is a closer sibling is that it managed to mimic something of how it felt to be an idealogical leader attempting to make sure your values and your goals for the future were the ones that were supreme. BE was “civ in space”.

That’s ok. I like to play music but guitar just isn’t that fun for me either. I have trouble remembering fingering and chords and it’s hard on my squishy delicate nerd fingers. The musical instruments I’ve been able to keep with and practice I did so because I just liked messing with them and making nice sounds. Did you make this post hoping people would encourage you to keep at it? You don’t have to keep at it if it’s not fun, you can sell the guitars to some local aspiring musician. What I would recommend is trying out some other instruments, maybe at a music store. Something drove you to try out guitar, maybe that creative spark just needs a piano, or a glockenspiel, or a zither or something else instead. Just… try before you buy next time.