Love rosemary with garlic and lemon. I use it on my dry brined turkey under the skin, crushed in quinoa and in herbal bread. So good, definitely my favorite herb.

Sorry basil, I do love you too but it’s not close.

Because as much as they want to claim they’re logical and rational, no logical or rational argument would ever be the thing to convince them. Identity politics prevents people from accepting anything from the “other side”, so they ask for sources so they can point to it as biased and unfair etc. There’s really no point in arguing with someone like that using facts. The things most likely to change their mind is their own personal experience or writing an entirely new narrative about the world.

First thing I would look into is how water is getting into those cracks in the first place. Check your gutters and make sure they’re cleaned out and at appropriate angles, and check the downspouts. Water should be draining away from your home, not into it. You might need to put up some sort of awning or tarp, and fix the angles of those pavers/concrete. If there’s water flowing into the foundation then it’s going to be a reoccurring problem.

I think they’re kinda cute, I like to say they’re not skeletons, they’re “bone golems”.

This is what we dealt with last time we tried childcare. We attempted to put him at a nice place at age 2, but he was just not ready and too attached to us to have a good experience. He stuck it out for a couple of months but the light left his eyes as soon as he realized we were gone. We pulled him out and kept him home for another year.

When we mentioned trying it again to him, he was immediately anxious about being left. The day we were supposed to start he was scream crying and inconsolable. The people at the daycare kept saying “just drop him off, don’t worry, we can distract him” but I didn’t want to betray his trust again. We took it slow, we went on a tour, spent some time with his teachers, and then did an hour of him playing without me there. We built up the length of time without us over a few more days, and now we have a much better foundation of trust and familiarity. He actively looks forward to going now, which is huge for him.

The “laughs” all felt from the outside. There was very little humor aimed at the people who would self identify as nerds and way more “haha look at these nerds and how quirky they are” set ups. Sure there are misogynist asshole nerds but usually they need to grow beyond that to find friends and partners. As far as I could tell none of them did. Sheldon and Howard were still super sexist, Leonard was still passive and whiny, but the story pushed forward foisting “perfect matches” on them.

Throughout the whole thing there was very little actual geek humor, and it felt denigrating to actual nerds.

It sounds to me like you might have trouble communicating what you need and the behavior you expect from others. There probably needs to be some work done on establishing boundaries and what constitutes healthy relationships before working on the DBT stuff. I don’t think you can fully blame the therapists, because you probably have been going to them and saying “I have trouble with emotional regulation” but not giving the greater context of “people keep transgressing my boundaries and it’s driving me more and more crazy”

Because yes, the only thing we have control over is ourselves and the actions we take, but you absolutely do not have to tolerate being treated poorly. It sounds like you need some tools in your tool box for healthy communication, because we teach others how to treat us. Learning how to assert your needs, your space and “rules of engagement” and then sticking to them is a whole other thing than emotional dysregulation.

I’ve posted this a few times but here it is again for you:

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 that apply if you’re in the US:

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.

For cosmetics, skin care and some home cleaning things, there’s Hive or Grove Collaborative which try to prioritize sustainability

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

For that “everything store” experience, Costco will ship a good percentage of its offerings for free with a membership in the continental US.

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

It seems you’re aware of your emotions at least, but when you’re having these conversations with others you will probably want to scale the level of response to the situation and the relationship. A coworker who asks you how your weekend was should get a very brief and vague response, and a close friend who earnestly asks you how you’ve been over coffee can get the details.

How are you?

Level 1 : Not great, honestly
Level 2 : I’m going through a rough patch right now
Level 3 : I’m dealing with a loss in the family
Level 4 : My cat died, and I miss him a lot
Level 5 : I’m heartbroken, he was with me for such a big part of my life, I don’t know if I can go through this again with another pet

If someone asks you how you are in a time sensitive setting (work, grocery store, party with other people) and they’re just an acquaintance, basically never go above level 3, even when pressed. If you have an hour or two to talk with a close friend that has been equally emotionally open with you, then go for it. There’s no reason to be dishonest but try to limit the detail you go into to roughly the same amount of time they have spent sharing their feelings with you. If you don’t know how long that is, or they haven’t, then be as vague as possible. You need to listen to them as well, and build up a reciprocity of sharing. If they don’t share with you then they are probably not interested in that level of intimacy.

It can be a healthy way to have a relationship as long as you’re honest with your partners. Don’t promise them the moon and eternal love. Don’t lie about your intentions. Keep up with STD testing and use protection obviously.

There are people out there looking for friends with benefits and are happy to find a regular partner who respects consent, takes feedback and is a known quantity. There are also aromantic people out there who are happy to have a purely physical relationship. There’s someone for everyone. Finding that kind of relationship might have its challenges but the internet helps with that at least.

You might not be identifying reasonable feminists then, because the “men are trash” ones are more visible. You’re probably surrounded by feminists and encountering them all the time, but unless you’re asking them their stance about reproductive rights or equality in parental leave or something else in conversation you wouldn’t know it.

I imagine for OP it was a bit like picking up a salve for a rash in the pharmacy and realizing it says “homeopathic remedy” on the side.

I just picked up a book called Unfuck Your Boundaries. It’s written by a trauma therapist but the style, if you can’t guess from the title, is very casual and easy to read. I am still reading it, so I can’t give a full review, but it’s approachable and entertaining while covering the fundamentals.

https://microcosmpublishing.com/catalog/books/8188

Faith in others or trust in others has absolutely nothing to do with thinking there’s an invisible, ultra powerful person just chilling somewhere in space just because someone wrote a book about it 2000 years ago.

Is the fear of hell or divine retribution the only thing keeping you from doing things that harm others? Yikes.

Why do you fear Batman?

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I don’t think that’s a fair assessment of Guild Wars 2. It was not a true sequel to Guild Wars 1 but it’s a decent game in its own right. I can see that if you’re playing a great city builder game and they announced a sequel, you would be thrown if that sequel was a 4x instead. But in this analogy, it’s a damn good 4x and maybe even the best amongst its contemporaries. Plus the original game is still there in all of its charm and originality, they’ve kept the servers running this long and seem to plan on keeping on doing so until no one is playing.

Yep absolutely seconding this one. Everything is very much a play-as-you-want playground, with many ways to level and a low stress, community based world. Pretty much everything that causes friction against other players in other MMOs (kill stealing, limited resource mining, open world pvp etc) just isn’t in the game or in its own place you don’t have to go.

I will say that it has a lot of complexity and systems on systems that have built up over time that can be opaque and overwhelming. But again, you have the choice not to engage, and can do perfectly well running your character around maps exploring and picking cabbages and pumpkins and doing whatever you think looks interesting. Just remember to change out your armor and weapons every few levels on your way to 80.

Kolanaki linked it above. It’s a disgusting crusty gamer den implying the game is so addictive you’ll live in filth. I remember that image being on the first couple of pages of a PC Gamer issue from the late 90s or early 00’s.

I remember seeing these ads as an impressionable young gamer and getting the idea that Playstations had games that were scary and weird, and Nintendo games and handhelds were for boys. Generally the ads told me “this is not for you”. Because I only ever saw ads for specific PC games and never for PCs themselves, (they were aimed at adults, not in the kind of magazines and comics young me was perusing) even though I was still not the target market it clicked more with me. I think that might be a part of why I’ve only ever really gotten into PC games over the years. I knew there were games I’d like and games I wouldn’t, and never got the same platform level messaging.

I remember seeing an ad for Thief and thought it looked cool, and I remember being super grossed out by that Quake 3 ad, but I never felt unwelcome or out of place playing PC games. In contrast, the focus on marketing to young males is really obvious in those console ads.

Examples of some PC game ads I remember working for me and led to me getting them:

https://cdn.mobygames.com/promos/18308445-thief-the-dark-project-magazine-advertisement-pc-gamer-usa-issue.jpg

https://www.retromags.com/rmg_fs/gallery_imgs/monthly_2022_06/large.1061174590_LordsofMagic02(December1997).jpg.82c9c4e56622e154a87711d93647ccc3.jpg

https://cdn.mobygames.com/promos/6568546-the-elder-scrolls-iii-morrowind-magazine-advertisement-pc-gamer-.jpg