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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I was more or less forced to contribute at home. It was not just cooking, but the whole process of dinner. It started with me having to set the table, clear the table, do the dishes and when we got a dishwasher, load it. Then I also had to peel potatoes, cut vegetables. The older I got, the more responsibilities I got. At some point I had a dedicated day in the week where nobody would be able to cook for me and others would eat later than I would. These days were initially just me and my dad, so my dad showed me literally once how he made pasta bolognese. The next week, it was my turn. I was given feedback on my cooking and the next week I could try again. I kinda liked doing it so in due time, I also had to cook on another weekday. My mom would show me how she handled certain things and after a while, but the time I was 16, I could make a couple of dishes and did so at least twice a week. My sister was gearing up to be a professional athlete (sadly she never made it that far) so she rarely cooked but once she stopped her sport, she would also cook twice a week.

    This is less the story of how I learned to cook and more the story of how my parents trained their servants to cook for them.





  • Considering the raging success of Borderlands 2, I feel like TPS was more than serviceable. It was received quite badly, even though the gameplay was the same as 2 and the story was at least 65% as good as 2. Maybe the playable characters were not as great. But the world was very well crafted and I actually loved the way the Eridian arc was so much more present, even though there is no Siren character.

    I’m currently doing 4. It feels like a soft hommage to the first game, but it also has some references to TPS. But it also feels like it was made for people who don’t even know there are previous games. Of course, the ones who played the original are maybe outside the target demographic, which was already the case with 3 going by the villains of that game.

    In short: I still love all Borderlands games equally and The PreSequel is definitely up there!


  • I never ‘dated’ in the traditional sense of the word. When I started college, I was about 19 and met someone when I went on a trip with my study association and was in a relationship with her for 8 months. It was sort of love at first sight.

    After that I would meet people through my study association which was all fine but never really turned up anything serious.

    The day I met my wife, I just got out of the relationship I mentioned before. It still took well over a year for us to start anything romantic. We were just okay friends, although at some point she started hanging out at my house more and more so that also kind of just happened.

    I don’t regret not having to go through all the dating things. It might have been nice to meet some more new people, but I’ve always lacked confidence in these situations so I’m not sure I’d be at all comfortable with it either. If there is no click right away, might as well call it a day and stop wasting time.







  • Yes, there’s room for discussion, so there’s no blind support for Israel. I’m not saying there is no support for Israel. Western Europe is walking the line between appeasement politics and reality. They all know that condemning Israel would create tensions with the US.

    But if you look at citizens, pro-Palestine (so not necessarily pro-Hamas) protests are centered around ending human suffering, without actually taking a side in who has a claim to the land there.

    The Netherlands is not participating in the Eurovision Song Festival, which might seem like inconsequential, but it’s a pretty big statement. Winners of the contest are returning the awards now that Israel is not banned from participating.

    Plus the ICJ is located in the Hague, which isn’t recognized by the USA, but also show some moderate doubts towards what Israel is doing.

    The entire situation in Israel is complicated with its roots going far beyond the temporal conscience of people. There’s no clear answer other than that nothing warrants bombing hospitals and blocking humanitarian aid.


  • The USA never really had allies after WWII. They did a lot to stop Germany from taking over the continent, but after that the USA was basically a playground bully, an enforcer, that believes it’s the boss and as long as everyone does what they want, they can be friends.

    Now that they start doing things that don’t align with what the ideals of the European Union or Europe in general, suddenly we start seeing that ‘allies’ is a very relative term.

    The USA just wants to be number 1. Now that they have started destroying their own economy, suddenly the EU, Canada, China, all of them seem like threats.

    Basically the USA is just a market to Europe, and they provide the media we watch in the shape of TV shows and the like. They provide the arms we need to ‘keep peace’ where necessary. If shit is going to hit the fan (more than it did in Ukraine, maybe also tensions in Gaza since Europe doesn’t blindly support Israel), it’s not a given that the USA and Europe will be on the same side, but my point is it was never really a given.


  • Any site that generates content can choose to create an RSS feed. Essentially it’s a link to which the site can push new stories.

    You need an RSS client. Good news! There are a lot of free ones (and open source, too!).

    The pro’s of RSS:

    • all your different go-to news outlets in one place
    • no ad-ridden webpages
    • no dealing with interfaces of said news outlets
    • your pick ff categories, for instance if you’re not interested in celebrity gossip, you just turn that off

    The cons:

    • you’ll need to go collect RSS links from your favorite sites
    • one of your sites might no longer use RSS because they don’t get ad revenue for it
    • RSS readers are often not pretty
    • you might get weirdly formatted text pages sometimes