ystael

That is gorgeous! I do a lot of curry, tonkatsu, okonomiyaki, etc but I have never tried ramen - always thought the broth would be a huge project. But you make it look so good!

Are you older? My parents moved near Traverse City to retire, since my family has done summer vacations up there for 70+ years. The year-round population in Leelanau and Grand Traverse counties now skews heavily older due to all the retirees, and also due to gentrification pricing a lot of families out.

This has mixed effects on health care in particular. On one side, a higher proportion of medical professionals work every day with the specific problems of an older population, and there are lots of relevant specialists. On the other side, availability of primary care can be difficult.

There's always Super Hexagon!

Some years ago I finished Consider Phlebas and was left so depressed by the entire thing that I never picked up another Culture book. Same experience with Alastair Reynolds's Revelation Space. Maybe there is just a subgenre of SF that I shouldn't read.

Oldie but goodie: Ra. Good decisions but doesn't drag on too long, works at lots of different player skill and seriousness levels. Has worked better than Catan or Carcassonne for me to introduce people to hobby games. Also chanting while someone bangs the Ra meeple never gets old. (I have the early 2000s Uberplay edition with the big blue wood Ra.)

I'm surprised not to see any of the Monster Hunter games yet! Maybe that's because most MH soundtracks are more a collection of individual themes than a unified soundtrack for a world, but a lot of those tracks are pretty great.

I don't know whether it is considered polite to link to youtube recordings of tracks here. My particular favorites from World are all zone themes: "Rulers of the Wildspire", "Dancer in the Coral Highlands", "Roars across the Hinterlands". You hear these tunes a lot - whenever you're fighting something in that zone that doesn't have its own theme - so they'd better be good. Fortunately almost all of them live up to that standard!

This is a story skip. Many forms of character progress in FFXIV are gated by that individual character completing the main storyline quests.

A story skip boosts the character to the beginning of the current expansion tier, so it is not possible to use this mechanic to compete with standard players on current content. I think the intended use case is alt characters (which are less necessary in FFXIV because you can play all jobs on one character, but many players still have them).

If you are looking for "learn fight, get better, epic win" without much of a death penalty, maybe look at Monster Hunter?

It's not the same as a Souls game - not much world exploration, not much plot, zero gothiness - but it is 3D Fantasy Boss Fights: The Game. With 14 genuinely different weapon classes to choose from.

And if you faint three times and fail the quest, all you've lost are the consumables you spent on the attempt. (If you give up early and bail, you haven't even lost that.)

Swans - Soundtracks for the Blind

This album sums up 20 years of Swans's first incarnation in a double disc that's part melancholic wall-of-noise drone rock, part found-sounds ambient soundscape, and just a little bit of callback to the aggressive noise that they started with. Taught me to enjoy not-purely-electronic music again, after several years as a fairly pretentious experimental/IDM head. There are lyrics, but much of the storytelling is between and behind the lyrics, not in them.

• From Gamecube, the first Metroid Prime -- nearly every Metroid game is good, but Prime 1 was and remains something special. I am not sure people really believed going in that the lonely exploration of the 2D Metroid games could make the leap to 3D, with its very different perspective on environmental puzzles. Prime succeeded brilliantly, and while adding scannable objects with words was a break from Metroid series tradition, it ended up making the world feel more immersive, not less. Just remastered for Switch, and it's really, honestly, just a remaster -- they didn't need to change a thing.
• From PlayStation, Einhänder. I am not a shmup enthusiast, more somebody who likes shmups and loves watching shmups, but is too impatient to put in the required practice. (I may have gotten to stage 3 of Ikaruga on a single credit ... once.) Einhänder is the only shmup I have ever beaten. A big part of that is the way the gunpod system works: you have several different choices of weapon available at any time, which means most problems in the game have several genuinely different solutions. It's not as memorization-intensive as R-Type or as reliant on reaction time and flawless focus as your typical Cave game. This was also the first game that got me to figure out how to rip soundtracks off of PlayStation games so I could listen to it at work.
• From PlayStation, another vote for Final Fantasy Tactics. The game was amazing but (as with all the best JRPGs) the soundtrack took it up another level. I can still hear "Trisection" in my head whenever I picture one of those gridded hills.
• From Game Boy Advance, Wario Land 4. It's just ... weird and creative and wacky and stressful and frustrating. I don't normally like classic Mario platformers much; dying in one hit to a mushroom has always irritated me. (Dying in one hit in a shmup is OK, somehow.) Wario's 8-hit health pool and the emphasis on environmental puzzle-solving makes this game feel much more like a metroidvania in some ways. Plus you smash enemies with your butt.

Perhaps it's more of a hobby than a little luxury, but if you do any handwriting at all, a nice fountain pen and quality notebook. It's just a nice feeling to write with a really smooth pen on good paper. And if you have RSI/arthritis like me, you may find that fountain pens are less fatiguing to use than a roller ball or gel pen. Sure, you have to clean and refill every so often, but that turns into a fun little ritual itself.