I’ve always prided myself on being empathetic and sympathetic to people no matter what. During the me too times, a lady was being interviewed about why survivors and victims don’t go to the authorities about their treatment from (men) powerful people.

She said something along the lines of “stand with us if you want things to change, but don’t you dare stand opposite to tell me how offended I’m allowed to be”. In an instant I realised I’d been guilty of minimizing the suffering of others simply because I’d not been through what they’d been through (in a sense - if I wouldn’t be offended why should they?). Changed my whole outlook on life actually

An Instant Pot. The amount of things you can cook / steam / pressure cook is amazing. I cook as much as I can with it as it saves money on using gas cookers. It saves a huge amount of time and money cooking Indian food and there are hundreds of websites out there dedicated to recipes specifically for the instant pot

Syphon Filter - damn that was a great game

Actually it could be both - I have experience of both

The advice I give to all my colleagues (and family) is this: you can’t control the behaviours of others, which means situations can go to places you were not expecting. So for me rule number one is to write everything down. Dates and times and any incidents or interactions that you’ve had. All communication with the other person through official channels and if you need to speak either do it with witnesses, and I know sometimes that’s not possible, so write everything that’s said between you down. If you can do it while you’re meeting with them great, otherwise straight afterwards. Sounds like a lot of work, and it is, but depending on what happens in the future it can save you a lot of heart ache

I’m getting on in years but I mainly watch YouTube as my “TV” over streaming services. I think there’s the YouTuber who just ends up lost in a sea of algorithm suggested garbage (like I used to be). Myself I search out things that really fascinate me - politics, woodworking, programming and over time my suggestions on the home page are really good. So I don’t get videos like “I have everybody in the world $10000000 to spend in 10 seconds”, but I do get really well made and interesting stuff.

Thanks for the reply. I’m going to go the route of reworking an existing controller and seeing if I can make a double joystick controller.

I’ve wanted to make one of these for my Switch. Could anybody help me get started? Can I build it from scratch or would I be buying a kit?

I’m going to guess you’re in the States? I’m from England and live in the Netherlands. I’ve never met anybody ever who didn’t own a kettle. Is it true that it’s really not that common in the States to own a kettle?

Not ideal that we had a percentage of our MacBooks on x86 cpus when the M1’s came out. But I will say they are still running strong. Others have pointed out that newer OS updates won’t work on the older MacBooks. But that’s not a deal breaker for us as we don’t run anything that’s OS specific enough to make the older models obsolete. We have factored in 5 - 7 years of use out of the laptops and we’re on course for that. I myself and using a 10 year old MacBook at home, and although I can’t fire up the latest Adobe Premiere on it, I can certainly get 99% of my work done on it.

I manage my schools IT - and when we started out a few years ago my board were pushing aggressively for Chromebooks. The service provider were talking about how they could roll out hundreds of Chromebooks at the touch of a button. When I asked about the lifespan of a Chromebook I got vague answers. I knew we would get a couple of years max out of each one so I instead pushed for much more expensive MacBooks. 5 years on and we are still using our original MacBook we got back then, with photoshop and other software.

I quit it years ago (I think almost 7 years or so). The thing is I didn’t really look for a replacement. I realised that I wasn’t really keeping in touch with loved ones as much as I was looking at the heavily curated feeds showing me how “perfect” their lives were. The worst thing about this is I could look at a post from a cousin or friend showing me their kitchen remodel or their beautiful holiday pics and meanwhile the gossip from my family contacts told me what was actually going on (but they had maxed out their credit cards for the remodel and holiday couple were actually in the middle of a divorce). Rather than trying to get my family and friends to be more truthful I decided to give my sanity a a time to recover.

My go to travel meals are:

Bread with cheese (and almost whatever else you might put in there). Wrap it in foil and it will be ready to eat whenever.

Cold pasta with cheese - or even normal pasta with tomato sauce cold is great. My Italian friends eat this for lunch regularly.

Cold pizza slices are great - I normally make simple pizza using baguettes and tomato sauce (passata) with cheese. One baguette is enough to make pizza for my family of 4.

Pasta salad - pasta cooked and cooked and then salad of your choice - even cold cuts of meat to well in here and it’s economical to make a huge amount and put it in the fridge

Actually thinking about it, I eat a lot of lunches made from cold leftovers and I think they taste brilliant without having to heat them up. Obviously things like soup, or ramen noodles and other hot liquid meals don’t taste good at all cold.

I really feel for my ISSs brothers and sisters and your unaffordable medicine. I count myself lucky living where I do.

My vote goes to Shadow of the Colossus. The story, the mood, those damn creatures. Just enough frustration to keep you going and enough variation to not make it boring.

Netherlands - we have some of the cleanest tap water here. You can drink water from any tap. Ironically bottled water from the shops is a big seller here and you see people with liters of the stuff in shopping trolleys and I’ve never been able to figure out why anyone would spend money on something that we have an abundance of in our houses