Love ballroom dancing, and especially east coast swing is my jam. Unfortunately no regular social dances in my area but I go when there’s one available. It’s really fun and playful, great way to meet new people and good exercise. Equipment cost is basically a pair of shoes. I joke about dressing up in a dress and heels for my workouts.

Considering how famously hard to kill werewolves are, it would probably have to be a chocolate wrapped in silver and then eaten with the foil on to do any real harm.

Posted most of this in another thread but I’m glad to help share my tricks. I have managed to nearly eliminate Amazon entirely from our lives for the past two years. I usually find things by searching what I want to buy on DuckDuckGo and then adding “-amazon”, “-etsy”, “-walmart”, “-temu” and “-pinterest” as search modifiers.

A lot of little shops are perfectly legit, but watch out for:

Things being ridiculous bargains. Small shops will almost always be more expensive due to higher overheads and less bulk

Too much variety in product (unless they’re a marketplace with 3rd party vendors). A legit shop will have inventory that makes sense together in its theme. If they sell everything from bubblebath to uranium they’re either probably not actually selling it or drop shipping it.

Pictures that look like they come from lots of different sources, or no consistency in images. If they don’t have their own pictures of products or standards of presentation that’s suspicious

Some general recs:

For anything electronic or computer related: B&H Photo or Microcenter

For music stuff: Sweetwater, but there’s a lot of great small music stores, or you can use a marketplace like Reverb

For clothes: if you have any clothes you already enjoy, go directly to their brand website. If you don’t, go to local secondhand shops and touch, handle and try on some clothes to see them in person. I’ve discovered some brands I like by finding something in a thrift store that was well made but not my size or preferred color.

For house repair and DIY stuff: we order from a local building supply store, but there’s also hardwareandtools.com, 1stoplighting, Waysource, Lightbulbs.com, Timothy’s Toolbox etc.

For food items, local grocery stores often offer online shopping and delivery. If it’s a specialty item or imported the import companies sometimes have their own websites. There’s also Hive or GroveCo for some granola type B Corp goodness

For tea, coffee and spices, Adagio and its sister websites

For super fast, need it now shipping, Target has a lot of the same things Amazon does and even does same day delivery for an extra fee for certain items.

For something hard to find you can’t find another site for, try Ebay.

I do business with all sorts of independent retailers and have only had good experiences with them. These are sites that I’ve personally bought from but there are a lot of smaller sites just trying to make a place for themselves on the internet

I have never been, nor seem to be able to get motion sickness. No seasickness either. I can read books on all sorts of moving vehicles, and I love roller coasters. Whip me around upside down in pitch dark at 60mph and I’ll just call it a good time. My husband says I am squandering my powers because I can play as much of whatever motion intense VR game as I want, but I just end up playing Beat Saber most of the time.

Well, the nice thing is GW1 is still there. They decided to keep it going because the cost was minimal enough that it was worth it to them, so all of that content is still perfectly playable and there are still people running ATFH and Droks etc. It has a small dedicated following and is still a fun game in its own right. They’re different games but I enjoy both.

I always enjoy the April Fools efforts from Guild Wars. They’ve done all sorts of things from making all players tiny, giving them bobbleheads, making them go into “airplane mode” (a reference to a t-pose animation glitch but with added “homemade” sound effects) to entire quest lines and even an entirely new game mode inspired by 8 bit platformers that spawned its own festival because it was awesome. This year you can relive some highlights from recent years, but the new addition is being able to open your own Cat Cafe in your homestead.

I find this funny because while reading this post I thought to myself “I don’t see why I wouldn’t date someone like that?” and I identify as demisexual. I’m already taken, unfortunately for OP, but I’m sure if he were to mention wanting someone to cuddle or being lonely to those friends who called him “cute” and “adorable” someone may step up and either find him a match or admit interest.

I really love tilapia in butter with a bit of lemon, salt and pepper. It’s a mild and subtle tasting fish, and it’s hard to mess it up when cooking. You can get frozen loins for cheap because they’re plant fed and easily farmed. Cook until flakey, don’t burn it, serve with some pan fried or roasted veggies and rice or quinoa. I’ve only ever had it take on that “fishy” smell when I left it to thaw in the fridge too long.

There’s a site called “goods unite us” that I’ll check before making a big purchase or deciding to make a store a regular stop. It has the average donation history of the company and who they donated to. It sucks that we have a Home Depot in a really convenient location but they’re especially egregious donators.

Organizing, teaching and leading raids absolutely helped with my leadership skills and IRL confidence!

OP: “my fear is the government disappearing me in the night”
You: “pff that doesn’t happen, you’re overreacting”
Me: “it does happen to x people”
You: “oh well don’t be one of those people”

Brilliant. Yes, OP is the problem, not that the government is kidnapping people when they show political dissent.

Ffs.

Well all they would have to do is have a green card and have been involved in the “wrong kind” of protest apparently.

However. I admit. This is not the best way to change diaper. A good diaper change is not fast. It’s a time for bonding. It’s not something I want to do in a public space with the rest of the family waiting for us, but at home, it’s the perfect time to get some eye contact with the baby and confirming that, yes, your father is there for you to get you out of all the shit you get yourself into. It’s perfectly fine if it takes half an hour in which most of the time is spent playing peak-a-boo. It’s a chore, but it’s also a much needed break from other chores. And this counts for both parents at the same time. Your partner would love nothing more than for you to disappear with the baby for half an hour.

I love this perspective. I’ve definitely become inured to diaper changes and I try to get them done as fast as possible, but this is sweet and you’re right, it’s a moment for some low key play, eye contact and for them to know you’re taking good care of them. What a nice way of looking at cleaning up poop 😆

There are some really simple recipes and some cheap machines available though, the ones that use a drum you pre-freeze are like $60-80 new and really cheap used. You can make ice cream with milk, cream, sugar, a flavor of choice and a bit of something alcoholic and it’s fantastic. I never buy ice cream anymore, and it’s so much better (and cheaper) than store bought.

It’s so hard to get a good texture too, to get a nice soft foldable one that is thin but tough enough not to rip is an art. My attempts, and I did give it a good damn few tries, were all sad failures and, well, I decided pre-packaged wraps/tortillas are worth the cost to save my sanity lol.

This, I love, LOVE croissants, and have basically baked and made every other thing I love that much at some point or another. Flattening a giant sheet of butter again and again into a dough sheet? Ain’t nobody got time for that

I like to make up pasta dishes in sauce with veggies that reheat well. Pasta alfredo (made with butter and parmigiano reggiano) with spinach and pieces of chicken, or red sauce pasta with a bunch of veggies like zucchini, broccoli, onions and even beans, with some olive oil in the sauce. I buy the precut frozen veggie medleys and chuck them in. You can also make egg fried rice with veggies in it, with your choice of butters and oils. Cheese, nuts, dairy, eggs, I agree with other commenters that fat is not your enemy. Sugar and ultra-processed stuff should still be avoided but embrace the butter, haha.

Peanut butter is also fantastic for healthy calorie density and travels well.

I was just thinking about this today. Any corporations big enough for us all to know have likely done more bad things than praiseworthy things. Patagonia is the closest I can think of to a good company we may all know.

Costco seems pretty solid. I’m in the northeast US and I feel good about supporting Market Basket. Valve isn’t so bad. There ARE some ethical big corporations just trying to do their thing out there and understand that providing the services and products they’re meant to is more important than “line go up”, they’re just few and far between.

Subbed to Enchanterium 👍 thanks for the rec!

Yes! It was such a pleasant surprise on my feed. Unfortunately they said they won’t be continuing because of Youtube’s enforcement policies around copyrighted material so those videos were meant to be a limited series.