May you start every sentence with “Like,”

I met my partner 25 years ago online on a sort of social network website called sixdegrees. They lived in Singapore and me in the Netherlands. I already had a trip planned to SG so ee decided to meet up.
It was a fun time, but we were both way too shy and insecure to make a move (it was our first relationship :)
It took another couple of weeks before we finally worked up the courage to admit our feelings. We had a long distance relationship for less than a year before it fizzled out.

About six years later we got in touch again and the spark reignited. They came to visit me and we fell truely in love. Plans were made and my partner moved to NL two years later. We’ve been together for 16 years now.

This joke was passed on to me from my mom:

What is black, hides in a tree, and is extremely dangerous?

I wasn’t into music at that time, but I was crazy about the fairy tales my dad recorded from various radio plays.
I had several cassettes to listen during long car rides and it was great imagining the scenes in my head as the stories played out.

Edvard Grieg - In the hall of the mountain king.

🎶Dum dum dum dum dum dum dum, dum dum dum, dum dum dum🎶

I’m so sorry about your duck, I wish you the best and hope you’ll feel a bit better soon.

Here’s an epic tale about vikings, metal and marching bands. It really is one of my favorites.
https://youtu.be/VtYEz4OKCn8?si=rDTnwVIY7cs_t46-

I hope it helps.

A badly trained LLM.
Let them ask whatever they want of it without any way of verifying if what it says is correct.

Happy Birthday!
Sorry to hear about your birthday money, I hope you’ll still get to have nice day in spite of it!

Here you go :)

Thank you so much for that suggestion!
It was right there in the manual, I really am an idiot sometimes. The beeping is softer now. It’s still super shrill and repeating, but at least it doesn’t give me an heart attack :)

I can’t disable it entirely, there’s too much washing going on to just ignore it completely. But this definitely helps!

We have a German brand washing machine that makes an ear piercing beep when the wash is done and repeats doing this every minute for 15 minutes straight. It is the most annoying and attention-seeking appliance in the house.
When it was time to replace the dryer, we intentionally got an Asian model with a lovely little tune that’ll play exactly once. I’ll never get tired of hearing that tune, because that god awful washing machine will always remind me of the alternative.

Thank you!

It’s going to get better! The kids just left for a 5 day beach vacation with grandma.
And now me and my partner are off for our own mini holiday 💕

Speaking as a story-heavy RPG enthusiast, so my focus is more on story-telling and exploration. I don’t think it’s the graphics that’s holding back the exploration potential, but rather the complexity of actually creating huge game worlds. You tend to end up with either a procedural generated world without a lot of cohesion, or one that’s a mile wide but an inch deep in interactivity.
Just look at Baldur’s Gate 3. It’s a hugely complex and reactive game world, but it’s locations and the way you are allowed to explore them are reduced to three linear chapters. Even if you switched to, say Baldur’s Gate 2 era graphics, it would still not be possible to create a game in a single huge explorable world with the same level of complexity and story telling.

Though I’m definitely with you on scaling down the graphics in exchange for richer and more interactive worlds, I do think there’s a hard limit on how much better those worlds would get.

I crochet little animals for friends and family.
Unasked, most of the time :)

When I was a kid our family went on vacation to the US. Everyone kept asking if I was Dutch, which I thought was German (Deutsch).
So I kept correcting them, saying I was Netherlandish :)

Worrying what other people think of me.
I know I shouldn’t care, but it’s hard not to.

Arriving home with my newborn son. It was the first moment when it really sank in that I’m a parent and we have to take care of this tiny little thing.
It wasn’t a warm feeling but more of a fuuuuuck! What do we do? What do we do?! feeling. The enormity of the responsibility just overwhelmed me.
I somehow got through it and the post-natal care lady that visited a few hours later really helped with grounding the situation.

Anyway, it’s not a crazy situation for most of you. But for me it really felt like a “I can’t believe this is happening!” situation.

“Political ideologies, an introduction” by Andrew Heywood, is available for free online.

It was required reading for my history study in uni about ten years ago. This seems to be a newer edition. It’s quite a read, but it covers a lot of isms in a generally unbiased manner.

I love passion fruit! The inside looks like a bunch of alien eyes, but it tastes so good.
I just wish they had more filling