I bought these and started DAO again a couple days ago. I had them on console before, but it was cheap enough to add to my Steam account. I loaded up a ton of mods this time. So far I’m having fun, but it crashes a lot, so I’m quick saving constantly. I’m not sure if the crashing is the game, my laptop, or the mods. I’m assuming its the mods and so far don’t care enough to figure out which one(s). The good news is, I can go from desktop to loaded game in about 30 seconds, which is a nice change from modern games that take forever to load.

For those commenting on EA, if you buy on Steam you’ll get a launcher, but you don’t need the EA app to play (at least for DAO, I haven’t gotten to the others yet). However, if you just don’t want to give your $7 to EA (after Steam’s cut), that’s totally understandable.

Sugar Bee and Rockit apples!

One of my prior roles was moved from a proper office to an open office and one of the “selling” points was “you can work from anywhere in our cool new building!”. So, I spent most of my day anywhere but my desk. I got my work done and half my time was spent in meetings either way, but if I didn’t have somewhere to be, I’d be in the quietest spot I could find in the building (cafeteria mid-morning/afternoon, conference area when there were no meetings, outside, the lobby, etc.). I was regularly commended for adopting the new culture.

Switch game prices are ridiculous! I think my (teenage) kids have 4 games for their Switch because nobody wants to pay those prices. I don’t know how many 100s of dollars they’ve spent on Steam games over the years at $5-20 per game, but they’re never willing to spend $40-60 and they won’t even put Switch games on their wishlist at that price.

Depends on your hairstyle, but I used to have my hair cut about once a month for $20-25. I bought a set of electric hair clippers for about $30 more than 15 years ago and learned to cut it myself and have saved thousands of dollars. Its a simple men’s cut, so it works for me.

An electric razor or a quality safety razor are also possibilities. I used to use the disposable gillette razor cartridges at about $4 per head, which lasted 3-4 weeks (I used them until they hurt to save money). Now I have both a safety razor and an electric razor (I don’t need both, the electric was a gift). The safety razor was $45 and and blades are about $0.10. Blades last about a week instead of a month, but it paid for itself in about a year. I experimented with various shaving creams as well, but eventually went back to canned shaving cream because the time spent creating a good lather in alternative forms was annoying and not worth the savings.

The electric razor may or may not pay for itself depending on how much it cost and how often you have to change the head and the cost of cleaning solutions, but I do enjoy having it for a quick shave. It definitely is not as good of a shave though.

Hey, I’ve been there! Related to Christmas, every year Nevada City has a Victorian Christmas celebration where they all dress fancy and neighboring Grass Valley has Cornish Christmas, that seems to celebrate the working class. Total speculation on my part, I’m guessing in the 1800s all the mine owners lived in Nevada City and all the miners lived in Grass Valley.

I’m a big fan of gardening with native plants. Here are a couple of sites that might help you if you want to try that:

https://npsnj.org/native-plants/plant-lists/ https://www.jerseyyards.org/jersey-friendly-plants/native-plants/ https://www.backyardgardenlover.com/new-jersey-native-plants-list/

From a design perspective I’d probably start off with a couple of small shrubs on either side of the steps that are either evergreen or have year-round interest. If you go with native plants, you could check out inkberry holly (need male & female plants to get fruit) or catawba rhododendron. I’m sure there are other great options, but I’m not from the area and just recognized those two from my region. For non-natives, cryptomeria globosa nana or gold mop cypress might fit well.

Beyond that, I’d find a good local nursery and tell them how much space you have to fill and load up with perennials. My personal preference would be to focus on creating a butterfly/hummingbird garden. Just buy 2-3 of everything and plant them in little groups using the recommended spacing as a guide. Then, load mulch between all of the plants and wait for it to fill in over the next 2-3 years. I like bark mulch, but currently use pine straw (that’s the big thing here in the south); I despise rock mulch.

Another option is to get a seed mix from a place like prairemoon.com and just spread it and let nature take its course. It will take longer, but save you time and money compared to buying and planting individual plants.

From there you can just keep going and replace all your grass and never have to mow again! :)

I don’t find it worthwhile to spend mental energy thinking about food, so I eat the same things constantly (though I occasionally change the menu). My wife doesn’t like eating the same thing more than a couple of times in a row, so she always wants to make something different, but is constantly stressing about what to plan for meals. She reinforces my view that food planning is not worth mental energy.

I haven’t tried it yet, but A Little to the Left looks like a fun organizing game. It was just added to Game Pass if you have that. I also see my daughter playing Power Washer Simulator sometimes, which I haven’t tried, but it looks like it could be satisfying to play.

I’m a big fan of Don’t Nod games (Life is Strange, Tell Me Why) for atmospheric storytelling. Life is Strange: True Colors is from Deck Nine games, but falls in the same category. Detroit: Become Human is also kind of similar, but it occasionally throws in sections where you have to quickly react with button pushing that I don’t enjoy. One thing I find interesting about all of these is that you can play them more than once with different choices to get different paths, but so far I haven’t replayed any of them because I felt like the path I took was meaningful and I don’t want to change my story yet.

An MMO could be a good way to go. My wife isn’t really into gaming, but we played WoW together on and off for years. I haven’t played them much, but if I were to recommend one to start with now I’d probably check out Final Fantasy 14 or Elder Scrolls Online.

This is essentially the same way that my employer sets pay ranges.

They send a list of job titles and descriptions to an outside company along with the number of employees and how much each of those employees are paid. Lots of other employers send their info and the outside company tries to match up all the job descriptions and then sends back to all of the employers what the “market range” is for every job.

My employer then decides where in that range they think is “competitive” (hint: its near the bottom). That’s the amount HR and Finance are willing to approve when hiring someone into a role, regardless of experience. The wages are only “competitive” if every other employer goes along with the scheme and offers the same amount.

I’ve been playing Starfield almost daily since release on Game Pass. I would much rather play on PC with mods, but its a super mediocre game and I’m not ready to pay anything close to full price for it when I can play on Game Pass. I really hope they release some better content for it over the next year or two and then sell me a complete edition on PC and I’ll start again with mods to get rid of the BS if they haven’t already done so in future patches.

I got stuck a few hours into it and quit trying. I really want to love this game and play it through multiple times, but it just doesn’t make sense to me and I don’t want to read any guides or spoilers. I want whatever path I take through the game to be my path, but it isn’t working for me.

When I got my Steam Deck a few months ago, I spent the first week or so just modding Skyrim so I could play it on yet another device. Then I played it a ton until I finally took a break for some other games.

At this point I’m mainly still on Windows because it is the easiest thing to do - I know how to use it and it is already installed on all my PCs. At least 3 of my PCs are eligible to upgrade to Win11 (2 are not), but I have no plans to ever upgrade. So, when security updates stop, that will be my motivation to give Linux another try.

My wife just made a favorite of mine: gnocchi soup with spicy turkey sausage.

A Dog’s Breakfast

I really liked Alton Brown’s show Good Eats. I thought he did a nice job explaining the science behind cooking methods and ingredients in an easy to understand way.

So does anyone know if there is a bot I can load on my phone and PC to auto solve these and save me the annoyance?

I just learned about this from another post a month or so ago and since I changed the way I tie my shoes, they have never gotten loose or untied. I can’t believe I went my whole life tying my shoes wrong!