My partner stresses too much with work and I wish I could help more. But all I can do is give comfort and urge to at least let things go when at home.
Any practical advice is always brushed off, which I can understand. Sometimes you just need to vent and I don’t mind listening about what happened this time. I just hate seeing them like this, it does make me worry a bit about their health.

PICO-8, though it’s more of an on-and-off again project of trying to teach myself to program again.
But I like the limitations you have to work with, and even I can create some crude 8x8 sprites :)

Maps and compass. I like the reliability of finding my way no matter where I am. Plus it’s fun!
Especially the trick of using two landmarks to pinpoint my location on a map makes me feel like an old-fashioned navigator :)

I don’t know about over there, but here they’ve started selling them with paper straws. Making it even more impossible to puncture that stupid little hole while ruining the straw in the process.

And of course it’s the only thing my daughter wants to drink. I’ve had to resort to using a nail file to open those things.

I made a crochet axolotl!

It’s my first attempt and I’m pretty happy with how he turned out.
I used super bulky blanket yarn, so he’s nice and cuddly :)

Yum, war fries :)

Waiting for my daughter to fall asleep. It’s a long drawn out process following the daily ritual where she gets out of bed within 2 minutes saying “I can’t sleep!”
Then I have to bring her back to bed, sing another lullaby, and pray to whatever sleep deity that will listen that she will stay put this time.
Today appears to be a good day, I can hear her slurping from her water bottle but she’s staying put. Hopefully she’ll be out in another 5 minutes. I wonder who I have to thank this time, Hypnos?

I wasn’t into music at that time, but I was crazy about the fairy tales my dad recorded from various radio plays.
I had several cassettes to listen during long car rides and it was great imagining the scenes in my head as the stories played out.

This is so sweet 💕

Happy Birthday!
Sorry to hear about your birthday money, I hope you’ll still get to have nice day in spite of it!

Thank you so much for that suggestion!
It was right there in the manual, I really am an idiot sometimes. The beeping is softer now. It’s still super shrill and repeating, but at least it doesn’t give me an heart attack :)

I can’t disable it entirely, there’s too much washing going on to just ignore it completely. But this definitely helps!

We have a German brand washing machine that makes an ear piercing beep when the wash is done and repeats doing this every minute for 15 minutes straight. It is the most annoying and attention-seeking appliance in the house.
When it was time to replace the dryer, we intentionally got an Asian model with a lovely little tune that’ll play exactly once. I’ll never get tired of hearing that tune, because that god awful washing machine will always remind me of the alternative.

Thank you!

It’s going to get better! The kids just left for a 5 day beach vacation with grandma.
And now me and my partner are off for our own mini holiday 💕

Speaking as a story-heavy RPG enthusiast, so my focus is more on story-telling and exploration. I don’t think it’s the graphics that’s holding back the exploration potential, but rather the complexity of actually creating huge game worlds. You tend to end up with either a procedural generated world without a lot of cohesion, or one that’s a mile wide but an inch deep in interactivity.
Just look at Baldur’s Gate 3. It’s a hugely complex and reactive game world, but it’s locations and the way you are allowed to explore them are reduced to three linear chapters. Even if you switched to, say Baldur’s Gate 2 era graphics, it would still not be possible to create a game in a single huge explorable world with the same level of complexity and story telling.

Though I’m definitely with you on scaling down the graphics in exchange for richer and more interactive worlds, I do think there’s a hard limit on how much better those worlds would get.

I crochet little animals for friends and family.
Unasked, most of the time :)

Worrying what other people think of me.
I know I shouldn’t care, but it’s hard not to.

“Political ideologies, an introduction” by Andrew Heywood, is available for free online.

It was required reading for my history study in uni about ten years ago. This seems to be a newer edition. It’s quite a read, but it covers a lot of isms in a generally unbiased manner.

No, I’m sorry. I wish I could help but I’m a bit out of my depth with this one. You might try a local career counselor, but that really depends on where you live and who’s available.

I wish you the best of luck though, I hope you’ll find what you’re looking for.

My first computer was our family’s 286 Wang pc. I used it mainly to play Sierra games. It’s how I learned a lot of my first English words.
I got my first cellphone, a Sony-Ericsson, around 2003 and only because my brother gave it to me. I was a staunch hater of cellphones but too Dutch to pass up on a free thing :)