seth

Man, you're so right about that. I had a similar experience.

I had an art class in middle school and was enjoying the hands on craft part of it, and getting to see the final output of the unique things everyone created. For one assignment, we had potted plants on our shared tables and were given paints and canvas and told to paint what we saw. I painted the plant like I saw it, trying to get all the leaves looking like the one leaf I saw that didn't have any blemishes on it, and I got an F. I only understood after getting the F, what the instructor wanted was us to paint the exact colors and lines and light our eyes saw, unprocessed, not whatever processing and perspective our minds gave it. I got a D in the class, the first time I didn't get an A for any class on a report card. Before that, I loved doing all kinds of art just for the sake of creating, without thinking about how other people would perceive it, and after that, I have never enjoyed making any art except music.

It was a pivotal moment besides that, because getting the D after trying my hardest and enjoying the process ultimately shifted my locus of control from mostly internal to almost completely external, and I no longer cared about doing well in school.

I love rice and lentils. How do you cook/season your lentils?

What's your issue with PBS?

So Clover. Square cards have one word on each side, and each player gets 4 cards randomly arranged in a 2x2 grid on a clover-shaped board. You have to take the two words from each side of the grid and come up with a single word that you think the other people will be able to use to discern how your cards were arranged, when they've been mixed up. If they guess wrong the first time, you take off the cards they got wrong and leave the ones they got right, and they get one more guess. It's a lot of fun because sometimes you'll get easy combinations like "rain" and "purple" and you can write something like, "prince," for that side which most people over a certain age are going to get immediately, and then a lot of times you'll be scratching your head trying to figure out how to come up with a single word to get people to guess that "cloud" and "phone" go together.

Often you might solve that by just putting a word that is so closely associated with one of the words that the other one is just a throwaway card word you're hoping they'll be able to arrange by thar card's other word exposed on the next side. What makes it harder and mixes it up is, before you shuffle up your four cards after writing your words down, you have to draw another card so the group has 5 to choose from for arranging in the right order, and sometimes that fifth card has words that really throw off your clues.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/329839/so-clover

https://www.amazon.com/Cooperative-Association-Playtime-Repos-Production/dp/B0941TJHXX

Football is a dangerous sport

It's also a list of brand equivalents, which is a helpful tool for shopping. They're all made in the same place and just packaged differently, so comparing unit prices between different stores can give a basic idea of which stores tack on a lot more overhead than others.

I always heard "2 seconds of space" which is a lot more than a few car lengths, to give yourself time to react to both what's in front of you and to the sides, and account for if their brakes perform better than yours. Two seconds of distance is a lot, though, and kind of impractical in traffic.

You think this arrow is pointing to the right, when it is clearly pointing up and to the left? Fascinating.

Iirc that toaster was originally priced at what would be the equivalent of around $250 today. Things are designed cheaply today because that's what people are willing to pay for. It's not just the companies marketing cheaper shit but also the consumers buying it trying to save a few bucks or days of shipping instead of just getting something that lasts. Also, the Sunbeam T20 technical repair manual is detailed and freely available, because appliances at that time were meant to be able to be repaired if they did break. I used it when I bought mine to fix the spring mechanism that wasn't coming up all the way. These days companies don't even provide that information.

Edit: damn it, I just wrote up a review of the T20 before seeing it was already posted. The T20 I got (used, obviously) from the original owner on ebay in 2013 is still going strong 75 years later!

Close to 100% if you follow a normal maintenance schedule. For a place where it's rarely needed, that's once a year. For a place where you get a lot of snow or rain, you inspect, clean, and test it every quarter. If it has sealed bearings, that takes all of 5 minutes.

I'm surprised by the number of homeowners I know who don't routinely inspect their roofs, water heaters and HVAC, or plumbing, or at least pay someone else to do it if they aren't willing to spend a couple hours one time making a checklist and watching a few YouTube videos to learn how to do it themselves. They don't even glance at their roofs from the ground after a big storm to see if there was any damage (I've pointed out missing shingles before). It honestly takes maybe 4 hours a year to do preventative home maintenance, and keeps you from having to spend thousands of dollars doing repairs and replacements.