woodnote

Sorry, but my cat eats whole mice. I don't think our tastes have much overlap. I'll trust her decisions on the wet food varieties without personally experiencing them.

I was curious about her utter devotion to Temptations, though, and can safely say that whatever causes cats to go wild for them is not present in at least this human.

My partner and I had fun playing Cat Quest 2 and Spiritfarer as coop games, in addition to It Takes Two which you mentioned. CQ2 is a cute action RPG and Spiritfarer is very chill, lots of sim/management tasks but with really beautiful characters, art, and story. Definitely very unlike Cuphead or Portal 2 but sometimes it's nice to switch things up a bit.

Yeah except oyster and other shellfish shells should be returned to the ocean to decompose and alkalize the waters from which they were harvested. Surely there are other means of creating white paint for roofs and then two benefits could be gained for the environment.

One of my personal favorites. I love how it seems so abstract at first but then on closer examination, you can see the distinctive landscape elements. I find the colors so evocative. So different from his other works (that I'm familiar with, anyway).

I put out a birdbath last year and it truly warms my heart how much my local wildlife uses it. Every kind of bird, squirrels, chipmunks, everyone comes to cool down and have a drink. I have to clean it out daily but it's a small price to pay to see my critters hop up for a drink of fresh cool water on a 90-degree day.

Republicans who want to smoke weed and abolish the age of consent.

If you're open to paying for something, America's Test Kitchen is a great resource for all the basics. Their website also gives you access to Cook's Country (which is like regional American food) and Cook's Illustrated (which does deep dives into how they come up with and test recipes to get the final result, which in turn gives lots of technique tips). They have an absolute wealth of technique tips, recipes, videos, cookbooks, etc etc. They will advertise to you a ton so I recommend unsubscribing from their marketing emails, but the depth and breadth of their cooking resources are massive.

You can also find their content on YouTube with kitchen equipment tips and technique lessons. If you're a library user, you may also be able to check out digital copies of Cooks Illustrated/Cook's Country through Libby. The library, digital or otherwise, is also a great resource for cookbooks and such. One last book you might look for is Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything, which is massive and does go over a ton of basics.

My brother lives in Texas and his property taxes are astronomical. I think that's better than higher sales taxes since it'll tend to favor those who are wealthy enough to own land and be higher for those with more property/properties, but it still shocked me. I live in Washington, though, we get the shit taxed out of us and in pretty regressive ways too, like high sales and gas taxes that disproportionately impact the poor.

This is great! Saved for future use. I'm especially excited to be able to recreate my own Cajun seasoning next time I look for some in the pantry and inevitably haven't bought any. Very cool project, reminds me of something America's Test Kitchen would publish.

Same! I have chronic neck pain that I've been working to address for about 3 years. We have a new mattress and I've been through probably 5 sets of pillows in that timeframe to get the perfect set that doesn't leave me feeling shitty when I wake up. Nonetheless, I get about 6.5 hrs of sleep a night and wake naturally from that without feeling tired during the day. I slept for 8 hours last weekend and felt worse than I have in a long time - back, neck, and shoulder pain and felt more groggy and sluggish than I have in ages. I'm with you!

I'm looking forward to Season 2. Season 1 wasn't the most incredible story I've ever seen, but I found it compelling, visually very appealing, and the story, performances and characters were strong enough that I'm excited to see how things play out. I've not read the books, though.

I think there's so much mediocre TV out there, it often seems like fantasy/scifi is held to a weird standard where it has to be groundbreakingly innovative and earthshatteringly well-done to get people on board. I'd much rather watch the next season of Wheel of Time than NCIS: Duluth or whatever else is getting pumped out by the police procedural-industrial complex (and believe me, I watch plenty of schlock crime dramas too).

Exactly. I consider it basically payola these days. Every big-name review is gushing, falling over itself to expound on the innumerable virtues of every AAA release, and then once normal folks have played for a few weeks, the real story comes out. My partner played the demo and was shocked to be playing the same game as the one that was reviewed. Unless I'm so excited to play a game that I don't care if it's mediocre, I wait to buy until actual the real user reviews trickle out post-release.