We sure hope it’ll be interesting, ya! We’re going for a fantasy/medieval vibe with a little tournament to win a wish from the queen. And it’s obvious what my wish will be, when I win that thing lol

Okay, so the most recent skill that I learned - or am still learning - would be making chainmail armour (or just “maille” for the pedantic). In theory, I now have the knowledge how to start from an iron ingot, turn that into a wire and that into the little rings for the armor. But because I want to be done in less than a year (will be part of my wedding outfit), I started with pre-made riveted rings, which I simply bend open, connect to solid rings and then bend closed and press in the rivet.

But since I never get to talk about it in other threads, I also learned how to make super primitive candles. Just yesterday I made candles from pork fat chunks that I ground up in my mortar and pestle. You don’t even need the little fabric to catch fire, you can just literally start lighting up the fat itself if you hold it long enough to a lighter

And before that, about one year ago now, I started learning to play the Herdy Gurdy, which is a lovely instrument, with a very lovely tone. And I even built one myself from a little do-it-yourself model kit, so to speak, which is called the Nerdy Gurdy. I started learning that because I was playing Sea of Thieves and I really enjoyed the sound of the instrument in-game. And then I also thought “hey, what if I not only learn to play it, but also learn to play it for my wedding in 2025?”

Edit because I feel this has been just a year of learning so much stuff for me: ASL. I started learning ASL about a month after I played VRChat for the first time and been practicing ever since. The chance of me getting good use out of ASL anywhere that is not online is pretty much zero, though, because I live in Germany lol

Pretty much as soon as a stable release happens for software on my phone. On my PC it mostly depends (for not-games) how annoyingly the update popup is placed. If it tells me on startup “Now (including a restart of the program) or we’ll remind you on next startup” I usually pick later because I want to work on that, e.g. PDF, immediately. By the time I did the work, I either forgot about updating (repeat cycle next time I use it) or the manual update option is somewhere too obscurely placed and I’m too lazy to find out where.

One of my programs - I think it’s Foxit PDF reader - offers an option to run the update when I close it. That’s so lovely, because it allows me to do my work now and when I’m done, I can let it update in peace while I start something different.

Edit: Because I read Win10 in the comments: For OS updates, I carefully vet the major releases. I stayed on my XP until Win 7 released and was actually an improvement. Then I only upgraded to Win 10 when I acknowledged it as good and because Sea of Thieves wouldn’t run on Win 7. Currently I’m trying to stay as far away from Win 11 as I can. We use it at work and I wouldn’t want to bring this peril into my home.

Not sure about the modern equivalents to this, but in Rome (please correct if wrong) it used to be like that. Firefighters would only put out fires of houses that paid them and otherwise just stood there, watching.

At least that’s what I read in one of those “did you know this about the ancient cultures?” articles and those aren’t always reliable either.

Yep, learned about this just yesterday from the YouTube channel BoyBoy who covered the situation quite well and had a lovely interview with Steven (as lovely as such a depressing topic can be)

You see, I at least buy food from my lunch stipend, although it’s usually my grocery trip and not necessarily my lunch of the day. And I only get about 7€ lunch stipend per day, not >40€.

Square Home.

I know the Windows Phone experiment failed but it was my first smartphone that I bought and not just inherited my dad’s work-iPhone when it became deprecated. I really love the “live tile” type home screen and Square Home improves on it as well, instead of just carbon copying it.

Other than that, the FUTO keyboard / voice input and Grayjay, although these three technically offer a lifelong free testing period, similar to WinRAR, but even less obnoxious because they don’t even remind you that they want you to pay for them.

After 10 or so minutes of inactivity my monitor shuts down (well, screen black, not actually pushing the power button on the monitor).

When I know I’ll leave for half an hour or more (and I’m not downloading something big), I hit the physical sleep button on my keyboard. Iunno, not needing to go through a couple clicks on the start menu and instead just pressing two buttons makes me more likely to use it.

Lastly, when I’ll be gone for multiple hours (sleeping, working, etc.) and I don’t have a huge or particularly slow download, I shut it off. But I never turn off my multi plug rectangle, unless we got a heavy thunderstorm.

Was out at a bar with my gf and another girl friend. Some random guy put his arm across my shoulder from behind and pulled up into my view, went “Heyyy prett- whoawhoa” cue nervous/awkward laugh. I guess, to him, I was the prettiest of the three girls until he realised there were only two girls and a guy hah

Thanks for the input, I know my reply is plenty late x.x

I totally get the "a full stop seems arrogant, which is why, unless I write formal mails for work or such, just skip the full stop in short one-sentence-answers or if a linebreak makes for better reading because my two or three sentences pertain to different topics.

Memories once buried have been unearthed…

But really, books already are not the way to make a fortune unless you are in the field of basically being able to dictate what books are used in every educational institution in an entire nation. How would they imagine a pirate, who shares these books, has server upkeep to pay and at best gets very sporadic donations, could afford a lavish lifestyle from this endeavour?

Yeah. The clown award (and similar “derogatory” awards) giving the receiver Steam points is the worst thing that happened to the quality of posts/comments on the Steam forums. The first two comment pages on patchnotes of games like Helldivers 2 are almost exclusively pointfarmers doing their best to reap clown awards.

Oh hey, can you try to explain why you want to do that? I’m always confused by it because unless you mean to end on a dramatic pause, these are just regular sentences and those usually end on a period (or nothing/smiley, if you’re an internet person

I also answer all calls I get and (usually) call back if they missed me. I actively gave my number to one or two research groups for polls. They call maybe twice per year, so it’s alright.

As for scammers, maybe 10% of calls are of that sort and so far I enjoy messing with them when they call.

If you have birds in your area, try finding and identifying them (for example by using Merlin Bird ID).

Can confirm, StreetComplete is very fun to enhance your general existence in / awareness of a place.

Fair points you’re making there!

I guess it never bothered me enough to have even crossed my mind.

I need to look into the latency thing. From my limited knowledge it makes no sense that a wireless mouse could have better latency than a wired one. Unless the wire is made of something barely conductive to electricity and the wireless works with stupidly fast transmission tech, I guess o.o

Nah, looks about right and empty

But what are the benefits of a wireless mouse? You don’t have to string the cable from the back of your PC to the mousepad, sure, but that’s something you do once a blue moon (unless you often go to LAN partys (which, in itself, are probably not a thing anymore)). At work, okay, I sometimes get up off my chair and have my company-provided wireless mouse on my leg to keep scrolling while I read through legal documents, but that’s a rare use case, too, no?

“Don’t use Wikipedia as a source.”

Man, if I want to get a pretty good overview on almost anything, Wikipedia is the best and most accessible way. Luckily, the consensus seems to slowly change to a cautious “Don’t use Wikipedia as your only source, especially on controversial topics.”