I’m excited to see the progress of 3d printers becoming more user friendly, reliable and inexpensive. I’ve been keeping an eye on the development of consumer printing and there are so many types of materials to print with at higher and higher details with less troubleshooting needed. I’m thinking I’ll finally jump in this year but I’ve had very little time for hobbies lately.

Ranch dressing, or a mix of half ranch dressing and half ketchup I call “krantchup”. Specifically Marie’s ranch mixed with Primitive Kitchen ketchup is so good on fries.

Here’s a picture of the dough from a similar recipe to what I use

If you do a search for “Irish soda bread” you’ll get almost all the same kind of pictures of X cut boules with some kind of add ins. Sounds like the brown bread is something different, but it’s probably still yummy.

I’m not sure if you’ve tried making it but the recipes that I have tried all result in a dough that’s capable of standing on its own as a boule. If you do an image search you can see a lot of images of Irish soda bread with X score marks baked in to their tops, which you couldn’t make with a liquid batter.

Yep, Irish soda bread is a quickbread made from a dough with baking soda as the rising agent, and it is absolutely a bread, not a cake.

My two year old has rotating favorite colors. He knows our favorite colors and he will bring us objects that are those colors, and then we ask what his favorite color is. He’ll pick out a marker or point to something or say a color. It changes every few days. Today was “lello”, a few days ago it was “bu”. He’s probably been interested in colorful objects (favoring something in primary colors vs pastels or neutrals) since about 5 months. So at least this kid has been interested in color almost from the beginning.

How about The Romans in Their Decadence? (Thomas Couture)

I’ve been getting into having a pdf of the various manuals for things around the house on my phone. I recently consulted the manuals for my fridge, a new dehumidifier and the lawn mower and it was pretty awesome not having to find and dig out a paper booklet each time. My phone is on me all the time plus I can get rid of the paper copies.

You can achieve the same thing with a metal spoon dipped in hot water, like after stirring a fresh cup of tea. It should be hot enough to hurt but not to burn/damage your skin. I’ve been doing this trick for ages and it works every time :)

I went grocery shopping and realized the music was all stuff I liked and recognized. I even knew the words 😭

The last few times I’ve found music I like via a method that was repeatable was searching through tags on Bandcamp. If I was listening to something I liked, I could look at the tags (electro, downtempo, big band etc) and click a few of those to find similar music. As far as a filter for quality, the number of followers for a page might be a decent metric because the genres are extremely precise and niche, and most of the biggest artists don’t self publish. There’s some amazing stuff on there to be found.

You can call me paranoid, but the first thing I thought of when I heard about it was how excited the Nazis would have been to access a database like that when they came into power. Imagine knowing the names and addresses of whatever Undesirables you wanted to single out, and exactly what percentage of “impure” they were. Ethnic makeup information can also be used against you in things like gerrymandering congressional districts to hand select voters and disenfranchise minorities. It’s pretty safe to assume that once your genetic profile has been gathered by a private company, it’s vulnerable to all sorts of bad actors gaining access and using that information. Would you want the KKK or the Proud Boys knowing just what percentage black you are? No thanks.

Ok but you said “some of”, not “the” best, I wanna know which whiskey you’ve had that’s better than the $12,000 bottle!

It does matter if I ever needed to replace it 😬 I know I’d order some other teapot instead but I do love this one and I’d miss it.

It’s by Le Creuset, and they apparently rotate out most of their colors. So you can still buy the same teapot in a different color, which is what I ended up doing for my friend. The one I got was a limited run, it’s a pretty rich purple they called “cassis”, if you search Ebay for anything in that color the prices are nuts!

I had a friend over who complimented my teapot, I love it because it’s a nice color, good size and has a stainless steel infuser that fits inside. So I offered to get her one of her own only to find out that this particular color is highly collectible and worth 6-7x what I paid for it originally. Now I have a nice teapot I’m paranoid about anything happening to, haha.

My husband got an Oculus before they were bought out only to find out he gets motion sick with most games. I don’t get motion sick ever so he was excited to see me try out his library of cool starship and fighter games and all I ever play on it is beat saber, lol. The custom map scene is where it’s at!

Like OP, my camera, phones don’t cut it and the pictures I’ve been able to get of my kid with it have made it invaluable. I got the Canon Powershot MKIII and it’s gotten some professional quality shots of him and captured a lot of precious moments.

My electric kettle, I drink a lot of tea and it’s so damn useful. I got one with an all metal interior and no visible heating element, it has a bad pour but I still would have a noticeable dip in my daily quality of life without it.

This one is random but a three foot tall solid wood Balinese dragon statue. I got it at an import shop that was closing, it had some damage and so had been marked down and marked down again. I paid less than 10% of the original price of an intact one. We didn’t have a car so my boyfriend at the time and I had to take it with us on the subway. It’s like 75lbs. On our ~mile walk back to our apartment someone asked directions to a local Asian art exhibition and we had to tell them we didn’t know where it was while holding this thing between us. It’s beautiful despite the damage and it makes me happy every time I see it. Plus, whenever someone comments on it I have a fun story to share.

If people can work and live anywhere they want, they want nature.

This is a huge generalization and you seem to imply that would mean populations spreading out into semi rural areas. Studies have shown people are happier with access to nature, but you seem to forget green spaces, parks and tree lined streets exist. I loved living in a walkable city and absolutely would again if I could afford it.

As far as losing weight goes, the importance of that will really depend on the type of person you want to date. If you’re only attracted to people who put a lot of effort into their fitness and appearance, you’ll have to do the same. If that’s not as important to you though, there are definitely options out there. Online dating might be rough, but being kind, respectful, comfortable in who you are, and open minded will take you a long way.