anaximander

Absolutely! Another great thing about slow cookers is that they allow for time travel. When you get home from work, you're tired and can't be bothered to cook. Slow cookers let you borrow a few minutes of your morning, when you're awake and fresh, to do your evening cooking! Prepare it in the morning, set it off, and when you get back tired from a long day at work, all you have to do is dish up. Magic.

Story over numbercrunching makes Fate a great choice, particularly Accelerated, which is a streamlined minimalist version. Minimal character stats, simple rules, and it's very flexible, with a lot of the specifics being determined during play to fit the plot. For example, instead of specific skills you have Approaches, which describe how you do things. Your character might be good at being Clever, or Sneaky, or Forceful, etc. You get a bonus to the thing you're doing if you can describe how you're doing it to fit that adjective. It's a system designed to be more of a collaborative storytelling game than a wargaming system, which sounds like it'd suit you.

Translation: "I support people being able to voice their opinions, as long as it doesn't affect me being able to do whatever I want".

A whole generation has been raised with tech that just works and if on the rare occasion it goes wrong, it goes very wrong and either needs IT/Customer Service/etc to fix it for you because the problem is very technical, or it's just broken and you get a new one. This means they have no problem-solving skills because none of the problems they've faced were solvable, and they're scared to get it wrong because getting it wrong breaks things in ways that are bad and expensive. Coming into an environment where trial and error is now not just ok, but expected, is a reversal of some deeply ingrained habits for them. That doesn't mean they can't learn, but it does make it a bit of a culture shock for them.

Cooking. So many people don't even have the bare minimum ability to throw something together from raw ingredients that's vaguely nutritious, palatable, and won't give anyone food poisoning, so of course start there - it's so much cheaper than ready meals and there are plenty of recipes that are fast if time constraints are why you use ready meals. In fact, a trick I've always used is to cook something that serves 4-6 people, divide the extra into tubs, and freeze it. That's a few nights where making dinner is as quick and simple as defrosting something, maybe boiling some rice or pasta to go with. Do this with a half-dozen meals and you can alternate and not have to cook for weeks.

Beyond that though, learning a little more about flavour and technique, how to season a dish like a pro, some more unusual flavour combinations etc. can add real interest to your diet for very little extra effort, time, or cost. A few cheap herbs and spices can cost less than a single portion of what you're cooking and give you enough to enhance months worth of meals.

Cooking yourself a treat is great therapy. Cooking something a bit fancy for someone makes for a cheap yet heartfelt date night. Cooking a meal your family enjoys is really satisfying. Everyone should learn to cook, just a little.

I'm a big fan of Obsidian. It's not open source, but it's free forever and has a rich theming and plugin ecosystem, and it works on just regular markdown files in folders so you're not locked in by proprietary file formats or anything, you can switch to basically anything that edits text and lose nothing. There's paid sync and publish features, but because it's just ordinary text files, you can replicate those for free with OneDrive and Jekyll, or your favourite tools of similar function.

Honestly I think that's just a failing of community ethos. It'd be nice to bring back the expectation that people make the bare minimum attempt to check the rules of a community they're trying to participate in, and let moderators just assume that everyone has read the sidebar rules. If you haven't, and you break a rule by accident... well, tough luck, you'll get the same treatment as everyone else. Next time, read before posting.

When you speak, those in hearing hear your words, and then they're gone. You speak again, and can choose to say things differently. Thus, the spoken word evolves. New phrases, new pronunciations.

When you write, the written text exists and persists, potentially for a long time. At various times in history, writing has been something that took time or expensive materials, so it was less common to do it for trivial or short-lived purposes. It's easy to forget in the modern digital age with the disposable, ephemeral nature of Twitter and text messaging, but by its very nature, writing is designed to last. Therefore, it evolves more slowly.

That brutally simplifies a whole field of linguistic research, but it's an explanation.

As a space behind your house where kids can run about and play, that is safer and nicer to look at than a concrete or bare-earth yard, then I totally support it, particularly if you're in a climate where they don't need much help. As a big pointless expanse to look at and not use for anything, or in parts of the world where keeping the lawn requires massive effort and expense and continual watering, it's a huge waste. And if you're going to have a lawn, at least put some flowerbeds around with pollinator-friendly plants.

My garden has a lawn, because I have a toddler. It also has deep borders stuffed with plants, and at this time of year you can't go half a minute without seeing a bee or a butterfly or something. Also, in this part of the world I don't have to do much to keep it looking good, besides mowing it and chucking a bit of seed on the occasional worn spot.

I'm in the process of writing my own TTRPG so I'd be interested in having a space to discuss, share ideas, get feedback, maybe find playtesters, etc. I joined this community because as a space dedicated to RPGs but not specific to a single one of them, I thought it might be open to that sort of thing.

The fact that Lemmy can federate is an advantage on its own, even if in practice we mostly don't. A federated Reddit wouldn't have had to resort to the blackout; users could have spun up their own instances, defederated from the central instance, and carried on, cutting the problematic management out with very little actual loss to the rest of the community. Even if a single instance ends up dominating, the possibility of federation is a big win for users.

I started looking at writing a bot that comments on conversations with links to similar discussions happening on other instances, which might help these scattered discussions to find each other and join up.