Nice, I love a good battle jacket

I really like being able to do basic tailoring. Like, I grew up surrounded by media that made me view my body as flawed because of all the ways it deviated from the norm. The combo of broad shoulders and big boobs made it impossible to find fitting clothes that weren’t a tent on me. Being able to modify garments that I find, and repair the few items that fit me perfectly has been a big confidence boost.

Missing out on seeing this stuff on social media is probably for the best - a lot of craft content on social media tends to be very “influencer” shaped, where the goal is to make beautiful things look effortless, and that can be demoralising when it’s all you see.

A few years ago, I read about how Mary Molony was an Irish Suffragette who disrupted a speech Winston Churchill was giving in Dundee by ringing a bell every time he tried to speak. She wanted him to apologise for remarks he had made about the women’s suffrage movement.

I remember when I read this, it reeked of something awesome that you find online that’s actually false (the story was shared on social media via a captioned photo with no sources), so I went digging for a proper source to check. I found some newspaper articles from 1908 and I learned that this event did happen, but also that people fucking hated Molony for this. There was a lot of “see, this is why everyone hates the Suffragettes”. (Sorry for saying this and then not sourcing)

It makes sense that people would be salty - Churchill was an asshole, but also a great orator, so I can see why one might be disappointed in missing the chance to see him speak, but I was shocked at the level of vitriol aimed at Molony and other Suffragettes from the time. Until this I hadn’t realised just how unpopular they were at the time. It’s drastically changed my perspective on protests and public perception.

I wish you well for whatever remains of recovering from the illness, it sounds like you’ve had a rough time.

I love the word “Epochalypse”, from the wiki page you linked

Pro tip, next time you shave your legs, change your bedsheets. Freshly shaved legs on fresh bedsheets feels divine. Also, make sure you exfoliate

Source: I’m a cis woman who started out shaving my legs because expectations, then didn’t for a while because fuck the patriarchy, then started shaving legs again, for myself rather than expectations.

Yeah, that’s how I use it too. Like sometimes, I feel like the cards are calling me out, but it’s actually just me calling myself out.

It reminds me of how I give great advice to my friends that I may not always follow myself. Tarot feels like a way of getting distance between me, the advice giver, and me, the dumbass who desperately needs to follow the advice

I can really relate. My mood tanks everytime I see a reminder of the holidays. I used to have a friend who was also estranged from his family, and we’d be grumpy arseholes together over Christmas.

I think you’ve excellently captured the difference here. I didn’t get heavily into Elite Dangerous, but on one of my longest journeys, I scanned a few things that no-one had ever scanned before. I didn’t discover any awesome looking space phenomena that would be worth sharing (at least, none that hadn’t been discovered before), but the prospect that I could was exciting.

Even just the idea that my name would be on other people’s screens if they came and scanned the same things I did, because we were all sharing the same world.

I don’t generally like AI generated images, but this is great

Yay, learning!

This is just needlessly hostile. You seem to dislike America, but imagine if the things that you dislike could change and America could be better. The article linked is a part of the process to understand and hopefully change things so that this kind of awfulness never happens.

Why be so unkind? You and OP appear to be on the same side, wrt being against gun violence.

I think “satanic” is being used in an adverbial sense, rather than as an adjective. By this, I mean that worship that is satanic in manner, which in this sense, means not Christian. By contrast, satanic (adj) worship would be something that actively involves worship of Satan or Satanism.

That being said, I’m probably thinking about this more than he did.

How many leftover working parts were there, or was it a perfect fit with no surplus?

That is the sweetest story, thanks for sharing

It’s a term from gaming which, in the broadest sense, means how they paint the sky to make it look authentic. Imagine being inside a cardboard box - the sides are painted to look like rolling mountains and hills, and the top face is painted to look like a cloudy sky, and if it’s done well, all of these should connect up and give the impression that you’re lookint at a real sky.

Anti-paywall link https://archive.is/MfHFY

I’m doing my part!.gif

I have also had trouble getting into games like this, but advice from my friends is that it’s actually less about the simulation, more about the stories and hilarity that can emerge from the simulation. In particular, I was advised to name each of my starting dwarves, and also to be less “smart” in how I played. In Rimworld, for example, I would load earlier saves if I lost someone important, and I was depriving myself of the kinds of chaos that these games are best at, like the glorious exuberance of rebuilding a colony from one person after a dreadful invasion.

I didn’t end up with Lae’zel in the end, but I hedged my bets for long enough that I got the Long Rest scene where she wakes you up in the night. The encounter ended hilariously fast, but what followed melted my heart and made it very hard to not choose her.

I also love how quickly Lae’zel changes her entire world view, which happened around the same time for me. Mad respect for such principles and focus

I ended up with Astarion. I was en route to romancing Shadowheart, but I got surprisingly few approval moments or interactions with her throughout act 2. At the same time, my character seemed to be taking the shape of “goodie-two-shoes but sassy bitch to those who deserve it”, which gave loads of Astarion approval.

I ended up learning into it and I’m super glad I did. There’s an Act 2 Dark Urge scene that I felt completely changed the romance dynamic between my character and Astarion - it felt like it put us on a much more even footing, and I was surprised by how sincere and empathetic the scene felt (given that Astarion’s main Cope is a mask of flirting and sass).

I had originally wanted to romance Karlach, but there was a bug that prevented her approval from rising and by the time I discovered and fixed it, I had missed loads of Act 1 approval moments