I have more hours than I’d like to admit to myself logged in Guild Wars 1 and 2, and haven’t booted 1 in years. This is exciting, looking forward to a reason to dust off my old characters.

I don’t recommend spray foam for a number of reasons, a few being that it offgasses VOCs after installation and can obscure or make future access to repairing surfaces impossible. If, for instance, water in your bathroom seeps into your subfloor, that repair becomes suddenly infinitely more complex if you have to fight through spray foam.

I highly recommend mineral wool batts, even if you do thin ones. They can be cut with a thrift store bread knife/any serrated knife and friction fit between the joists. Very easy install for an amateur, very forgiving. Save the spray foam for those tricky gaps next to doors and windows.

We bought ours from a local contractor supply store, and it was cheaper than Orange or Blue store and they delivered for free. Not sure where you’re at but search around.

Deli meat cut thick, no thanks. I want to see through it or I’m not eating it

I get that a lot of people are hostile to tarot, and the mysticism and hooie around it are definitely something to be guarded against.

However, genuinely, it can be a very useful tool for thinking about your current situation, and planning strategies for future action. It can be a very helpful step to add to making a difficult decision and sometimes the random aspect can reveal your own biases or make you rethink conclusions you’ve made. It’s not going to work for divination, there’s nothing that can predict the future, but it can help you learn some things about yourself.

Obviously, therapy would be better, but to start I recommend reading the companion book that comes with most tarot card sets front to back, and also deciding what those cards mean to you and how you want to interpret them. Then, do readings for yourself until you’re comfortable, then your friends, and finally strangers. You would be offering a third party perspective and helping them through the same decision making process you do for yourself. Again, anyone saying it will help tell the future is selling you bullshit, but sometimes people need a neutral third party to bounce a difficult to chew conundrum off of for twenty minutes and that is worth something.

Like a lot of things that’s very location dependent. Geographical region, level of development, point in history etc. You and I are both correct, for example my scenario is accurate to ancient Rome or a pre-industrial European village, your scenario is true in 19th century Western American homesteaders or deeply rural communities. A similar thing happened with sewing machines where the invention of a modern tool outsourced a skilled, paid job (making clothes) to unpaid domestic labor. Did some individuals without prior access to those professional services benefit? Of course, but it meant that the bespoke clothing industry and the clothes laundering industries both deflated to the point of not being widely or cheaply available anymore, and the labor that once was a paid job was expected to be done for free.

My point was that it is not such an easy thing to point to that instantly made everyone’s lives better.

It was a time consuming task but it was one done as a job. Cleaning clothes was a whole industry, and getting your clothes laundered was generally affordable and something you could pay others to do for you. The washing machine allows people to do it themselves easier, but with needing to buy the machine, paying for detergent and additives, water use, keeping up with maintenance, it’s not for free. What the washing machine did was take away an industry where people had paying jobs to do the task, and turn the task into a self-care obligation that locks you into consumership. Can you make your own washing machine? Your own detergent? You have to buy those things and then do the labor yourself, unpaid. Who really benefited? The laundry industry was a tough one to work in but it was a paid job for the working class. It’s now a way for corporations to make money off of unpaid labor.

I’ve wanted to visit Italy for about 20 years now. Maybe some day. There’s always some other need for the money and time.

When I go outside in a place that has plants I try to ID at least one that I don’t know. When I get a positive ID on it, I’ll look it up and sometimes it will have edible or medicinal properties.

Oh man I got to enjoy a chicken of the woods mushroom for the first time last year and it was amazing. We enjoyed sumac tea all summer and have a bounty of hickory nuts this fall. I made wild riverbank grape jelly from grapes harvested from my mom’s backyard. Definitely need to be careful with ID’ing and never picking something you’re not 100% sure of but it’s liberating and satisfying.

Pilling a cat is a skill but one worth learning. I had two elderly cats who each needed pills and both hated it in their foods. I hold the kitty in my lap, pull back their head and poke a finger between their front teeth and release the pill down their throat. Then stroke the throat gently and release, and give them a high value treat right away. First time is rough but it gets better and becomes routine for everybody. If the cost ends up being a big difference it’s something to consider

Try Debian based Linux Mint with the KDE plasma desktop environment. Linux has its issues but they’re honest issues. Linux has hiccups because a bunch of volunteers are trying to build an airplane while flying it, while Windows has a bunch of C suite goons purposely creating a hostile user environment to monetize you for every red cent.

I think when people talk about “falling behind” they’re actually talking about missing out on the initial gold rush of novel uses, quick cash grabs, and straight up scams that a lot of people are making short term money on.

If Narnia is real, the most important thing for all people is owning a wardrobe and keeping the hinges on it.

We live pretty frugally in comparison to our peers. Less than $30 a month in subscriptions, our utility bills are low, we eat out maybe once a month and every other meal is made at home. We thrift and get just about everything we can second hand from yard sales or friends. It used to be that we were putting aside money, now there’s less extra. We’re getting ready for worse, and planting fruit trees, learning gardening and canning, and reaching out to our neighbors.

Been daydreaming about a city builder sim that realistically characterizes cars. No “magic parking”, no perfect drivers, with pollution mapping, traffic deaths, an average commute time per citizen as a statistic, that kind of thing.

I imagine it starting out exactly like Cities: Skylines, where you start building out your town with commercial and industrial and residential zones. As you lay out roads and utilities, the citizens keep demanding more parking and bigger roads. If you build them, your town becomes mostly parking lots and huge, dangerous roads. People complain about living near pollution, loud car noises, traffic deaths and commute times. Your town would have negative income from all of the building and maintenance costs and constantly be needing to be bailed out due to how expensive it all is.

The trick, then, would be not to listen to the complaints from car drivers. The only way to build your town where the budget is balanced properly is to increase density, utilize mixed use areas, and to build as few large roads and utility corridors as possible. The game wouldn’t tell you this outright, it would simply give you realistic price tags and maintenance costs compared to people moved and let the player problem solve and optimize.

There would be a robust palette of micromobility options, public transit, greenways and parks and pedestrian areas. Car access would be optional for building placement and based more on emergency vehicles or services. You could design your own streets with your desired configuration of bike paths, street cars, pedestrian walkways and green spaces and save templates to use elsewhere.

There would be lots of beautiful middle density building models, parks, and plazas, and a mode where you could rehabilitate an already developed car centric city.

If someone made this game I would be so happy and play it all the time, making a perfect transit utopia

Friendly reminder that a common propaganda tactic is to discourage your opposition from voting

Cilantro, with the soapy gene. It tastes like soap, but eh, I kind of like it.

I keep coming back to it and catching more references and recurring characters. It’s very rewatchable!

I think as far as shows that I love and come back to, and that I keep thinking of and want to own on physical media:

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
She-Ra: Princesses of Power
The Good Place
The Addams Family (the black and white one)
Parks & Recreation
Star Trek TNG, Lower Decks, and Deep Space 9