Thanks! It’s a really interesting topic and I was excited to learn more. But I’m not sure the writer offered much to support their explanation for why these tropical spices are so closely associated with winter time in the north.
For example, I was underwhelmed by the “cinnamon is an antidiabetic, so it’ll help process all those sugary treats you’re eating over the holidays” fact. Does that really explain why cinnamon is associated with this season from a historical perspective? I can’t say for sure that past generations weren’t adding cinnamon to holiday foods because they knew it was an antidiabetic. But I’m going to continue doubting it until I see something persuasive.
I don’t think the author was trying to say that these spices are harvested in the fall and enjoyed in the winter. In fact, I think they are clearly saying the opposite.
Just as cranberries’ fall harvest makes them a natural choice for Thanksgiving, I thought that perhaps the seasonality of spice harvest had something to do with their use during the winter months. However, this doesn’t appear to be the case.
And
Take ginger…The plants can be harvested at any time of year if they are mature and haven’t been exposed to cold or wind.
Or, if they are trying to make that point, they are doing so in a way that includes contradictory details.
I am looking for a nice ebook reader app for android but it’s proving to be quite difficult. Every app I stumble open misses at least a few things I want. So here is a list of things I want:...
Gonna jump in to agree that Moon+ Reader seems to be the most commonly used. And for good reason: it’s very customizable and it does a great job presenting text in an easy to consume way.
OP, I’m sure you’ve already tried it, but consider giving it another go. You can make it do nearly all the things on your list.
Thanks for sharing this interview and article. It was a really interesting read. I feel like I understand a lot more about how the game came to be now that I’ve read it
Please excuse the poor quality photo, I finished weaving in the ends JUST as our annual Spooktacular movie marathon was kicking off so it was heckin’ dark and spooky in our living room 😂...
Yeah, definitely a tension thing. My previous attempt was tight and small and starting to curl in on itself by the time I got out to the 6th or 7th ring. This one was much better shape wise and I learned to enjoy the feel of working with the looser yarn.
I had to build all the way out to a chain 41 row for this to fit my shoulders and hips properly. I also tried blocking a project for the first time. That really helped the chains relax into the right shape and it gave me a chance to shape the whole thing to fit better as a top. Because really, it wants to be a big lace doily :)
So I know I don’t need a label but I’m trying to sort out some feelings I think conventional society doesn’t give us much room to think about. Pardon the rant. Would love discussion....
Yeah, I’m with you on this. My phone has been my primary reading device for years now. It’s the major driver when I make decisions on what phone to buy. I love reading on it and I’ve never had any problems falling asleep.
Inspired by this post by @lazerp , I had to make a start on my own spiderweb top last week. I’m a bit older and…let’s say “slightly” wider…than the target audience so honestly not sure if it’s going to work or not but it’s so fast and cheap to make I figured why not!...
Because of your post I took a shot at this. I think I grabbed a yarn that was too fine, though, because after making 6 circles worth of it (getting out to the chain 13 band), it’s still not much larger than my palm.
I could have sworn the person in the video said that she was using a size 3 hook. I didn’t know if she meant 3mm or a US 3, but either way that’s a pretty small hook, so I picked a yarn to suit.
What weight of yarn are you using for your project? And what size hook, I guess?
Thank you so much. I’m using exactly the same weight of yarn and roughly the same hook size. I’ve often suspected that I’m putting away too much tension on my crochet knots. I think this is a good gage of that. Instead of grabbing a heavier fiber, I’m going to take another shot at it and see if I can learn to be more loose.
I’m requesting for recommendations for games that stand out from the rest in their genre, and not in the sense of being the best game in that niche but actually bringing something new and innovative to the table. I’ve not had much experience in gaming, but I have a few games to give you a hint on what I am talking about:...
Wow. I’m super impressed with all the suggestions here. I’ll add a few of my own that haven’t been mentioned yet.
Her Story - you query a police archive database for video clips, eventually revealing the plot. Kind of a mash between a murder mystery book with the pages out of order and Google. If you like it, check out Immortality
What Remains of Edith Finch - all you can do is walk around a very unusual house. The narrative reveals itself as you do so. That narrative is fantastical and heartbreaking and also very sweet.
Crawl - multiplayer game - you are all trying to escape a monster and trap filled dungeon. One of you is alive and the rest are spirits who can possess the monsters and traps. Any time a spirit kills the living player, they become the living player. Unique boss fight at the end where multiple spirits control parts of a huge boss monster.
There is really something very different about this game. If you point to any individual part of it, there are other games that do that thing. But all together, it’s quite unique. And it’s a pretty fun game.
I was going to say that Serious Sam isn’t terribly unique. But you’re right about the scale of the battles being far larger than anything else like it. Good call.
Oh man, I just want to give a shout out to the Splatoon ink mechanic.
The game is a competitive arena shooter. That would be pretty uninteresting, but instead of competing for kills or holding objectives, the teams are competing to cover the largest surface area with ink or paint. That’s pretty neat. But there’s more.
Every player has a special “squid mode” they can use when standing on ink of their colour. When in squid mode players travel much faster, can travel up walls, and are extremely hard to spot, but can not attack or lay new ink.
This makes the laying ink in specific areas valuable, as it makes it faster to get from the spawn point to the front faster and easier. It also rewards holding contiguous trails of ink, or conversely, cutting off your opponent’s ink trails.
Thanks for that! I actually had to put the game down for several months because my child had just been born and I couldn’t handle one of the scenes in the game. It was heavily telegraphed, so I had time to stop the game before anything upsetting happened. And when I went back to it months later it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it might be. But yeah, it’s a game about the death of many family members, told through metaphor and fanatical imagery.
I learned a few years back that the Hugo Award that you see on the cover of some books is actually a very different kind of award than most.
Works are nominated and voted on by people like you and me. In fact, right now you can go become a voting member of the Hugo Awards and have a say on who wins each category this year. I’ve really enjoyed reading the nominated works and casting my vote for the past several years.
It’s a great way to discover novels and shorter form stories that you may not have otherwise known about.
Special shout out to Catherynne M. Valente for writing something I love almost every year!
That was a fascinating read. The plasticity of the brain constantly amazes me. It’s incredible the way some parts of the brain will just handle tasks that are seemingly totally unrelated.
I’ve had a great time playing some of the ‘smaller’ games lately: Dredge (adore this game so much), Dave the Diver, Cloudpunk, Stray, Octopath II, Observer....
I knew that I was going to enjoy A Short Hike before I played it. What I didn’t expect was how much I enjoyed it. There’s so much more there than I anticipated and some of it is really lovely.
Please consider WanderSong. It’s a small game and was made with so much love. Games can have a huge variety of plots and environments. But the vast majority of games, regardless of what they are about, are actually about victory. You’re a space dwarf mining for minerals, but the game is all about mastery and winning. You’re a dragon-kin with magic shouts, but every quest is about achieving a victory over a challenge. And so on.
I would say that WanderSong is not a game about victory. It’s a game about happiness. The character, the mechanics, the plot, the environments; they all serve first to explore the meaning of happiness. There’s nothing else quite like it. You can find it here.
I agree that the world does not need “you” to reduce your footprint to zero. But people do have collective power. If everyone reduced their footprint a bit, that would make a dent.
Even better is if everyone realized that the big polluting beasts are fed by us. Everyone withholding just a little money from these corporations makes the graph of their profit go from pointing up to pointing down. And they sit up and take notice at that, even if they are still making billions annually. They are literally a house of cards and we are the bottom layer.
I hadn’t even considered asking. It’s a Michael’s craft shop, so I assumed they just stock whatever corporate HQ tells them to. But the people who work there are passionate and if there’s a way for it to happen they’d be happy to let me know, I’m sure. Thanks.
Personal background: I strongly feel just about everyone grows up and has something shitty about them. I know growing up I definitely thought and said some less-than-ideal jokes about women, minorities, etc. And while some of that was the proverbial ‘the times’, and some was growing up in a sheltered hyper Christian southern...
I feel this comment is brushing off the important point the commentator above is making. I understand that you wanted to clarify or defend your original statement. But if you don’t respond appropriately to what the person you’re talking to has said, you’re not really having a conversation. Instead you’re just talking at someone.
For me it’s first person puzzle games. I can think of maybe a dozen off the top of my head that came out in the last decade. I especially enjoy when they’re open world. The ability to just quit a puzzle that’s stumped you and go try something else for a little bit is incredibly refreshing.
I’ve been thinking about the disappearance of God games. I think they didn’t disappear, but they evolved so much that we don’t recognize them anymore.
I feel some moved into the direction that we now call “simulators”, like RimWorld, the Sims, Two Point Hospital, and more. In my mind, the big difference between the God games of old and those new games is that in the older games your role as the player was explicitly defined, where in the new games it’s not. In the old games, you were “playing the role of a god in that realm”. The new games don’t bother to tell you “who” you are in this setting. You’re just the player, get on with it, play the game.
I feel like other God games moved in the direction of top down colony builders, like Against the Storm or Frostpunk. And again, I think the big difference between those games and something like Populous is that your role as the player doesn’t have an explicit name in the game world. You’re not a “God”. But most of the rest of the trappings are there, I think.
I love obscure and overlooked games and want to share a bunch with all of you. Most “hidden gem” threads end up listing titles with thousands of reviews or that got some level of marketing. I aim to mostly avoid that. While you may see a few familiar games here, everything in the list below has under 1500 reviews on Steam...
At one precise moment this weekend, nearly all of the 8 billion people on Earth will be able to see sunlight in the sky, the counterpart to the “moment of darkness” that unfolds in December.
I’ve been using my Fairphone 4 for a couple of months now and I really like it. It wasn’t easy to get it in Canada, but it works great with my carrier here. Getting my hands on some spare parts and a wallet case here wasn’t easy either.
But now I have a repairable phone with an extra battery and an extra camera module. I should be able to run this hardware for years to come regardless of wear and tear or the longevity of the company. I’m hoping to get 6 years out of it. I ran my previous LG phone for 7 before switching; had to replace the battery twice, which was easy because that model had a removable battery.
How cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger became the scents of winter holidays, far from their tropical origins (theconversation.com)
Any good ebook readers for Android?
I am looking for a nice ebook reader app for android but it’s proving to be quite difficult. Every app I stumble open misses at least a few things I want. So here is a list of things I want:...
Steam Sale Games
What are people excited about for with the steam sale? Any hidden gems you’d like to share with the class?
Growing Up Broken (stainedglasswoman.substack.com)
A House of Cards Built on Trust: Puzzle Design in Cocoon | Remap (remapradio.com)
Finished my Halloween top just in time! (media.mastodon.sunny.garden)
Please excuse the poor quality photo, I finished weaving in the ends JUST as our annual Spooktacular movie marathon was kicking off so it was heckin’ dark and spooky in our living room 😂...
what is it called when you can be romantically and sexually attractedwith multiple people at the same time?
So I know I don’t need a label but I’m trying to sort out some feelings I think conventional society doesn’t give us much room to think about. Pardon the rant. Would love discussion....
I read before bed but am unsure if I should be using a no back light Kindle or if the Kindle app on my iPhone is ok? Anyone have experience with sleeping quality after reading using either of these?
Extra info:...
WIP Wednesday: Lemmy is a terrible influence (i.imgur.com)
Inspired by this post by @lazerp , I had to make a start on my own spiderweb top last week. I’m a bit older and…let’s say “slightly” wider…than the target audience so honestly not sure if it’s going to work or not but it’s so fast and cheap to make I figured why not!...
Looking for games with unique core mechanics
I’m requesting for recommendations for games that stand out from the rest in their genre, and not in the sense of being the best game in that niche but actually bringing something new and innovative to the table. I’ve not had much experience in gaming, but I have a few games to give you a hint on what I am talking about:...
Transfer Orbit: 17 new sci-fi and fantasy books to read in September 2023 (transfer-orbit.ghost.io)
this is one of the main newsletters i use to keep up with new sci-fi and speculative fiction releases. it’s pretty good!
Surprise Discovery About Dopamine May Help Explain Parkinson's (www.sciencealert.com)
Suggestions for smaller-y games if I liked _______
I’ve had a great time playing some of the ‘smaller’ games lately: Dredge (adore this game so much), Dave the Diver, Cloudpunk, Stray, Octopath II, Observer....
"Wind and solar power pollute the Earth and make life miserable:" DeSantis's Florida Approves Climate-Denial Videos in Schools (www.scientificamerican.com)
(August) What are you working on now, DIY? (beehaw.org)
Making any progress, you slackers? Tell us about it!
Help finding yarn
I’ve been thinking about starting a new project....
Bram Moolenaar, creator of vim, has passed away (groups.google.com)
Help me help a coworker not be an incel?
Personal background: I strongly feel just about everyone grows up and has something shitty about them. I know growing up I definitely thought and said some less-than-ideal jokes about women, minorities, etc. And while some of that was the proverbial ‘the times’, and some was growing up in a sheltered hyper Christian southern...
What are some game genres / styles you like that aren't being made anymore, or are being mde but not very often?
For me it’s first person puzzle games. I can think of maybe a dozen off the top of my head that came out in the last decade. I especially enjoy when they’re open world. The ability to just quit a puzzle that’s stumped you and go try something else for a little bit is incredibly refreshing.
Actual Hidden Gems on Steam
I love obscure and overlooked games and want to share a bunch with all of you. Most “hidden gem” threads end up listing titles with thousands of reviews or that got some level of marketing. I aim to mostly avoid that. While you may see a few familiar games here, everything in the list below has under 1500 reviews on Steam...
99% of humans are about to experience sunlight at the same time (www.accuweather.com)
At one precise moment this weekend, nearly all of the 8 billion people on Earth will be able to see sunlight in the sky, the counterpart to the “moment of darkness” that unfolds in December.
Fairphone 4—the repairable, sustainable smartphone—is coming to the US (arstechnica.com)