If I ever have kids I plan to coordinate a common gift with everyone I'm celebrating with; just have them all chip in a bit, and buy one very nice gift rather than adding to an ever-growing pile of plastic garbage.
My sister has made real effort not to spoil her kids, but it's hopeless. They get so much sparkly trash at every occasion, and I feel like I could might as well have given my gifts directly to the landfill.
Unless they changed something very subtly and very recently, there's a cap on searches on the lower tier and unlimited search on the higher one.
As a Scandinavian, I'm genuinely super happy to hear that! As far as I'm concerned the Christians are very welcome to celebrate whatever they'd like, but they have no right to monopolize the festivities. It's winter solstice goddamn it, it's been celebrated since the beginning of time and belongs to everyone!
It's not really one of those situations where knowing what you're doing makes anything any better, is it
Always wanted to go to BC, it seems incredibly beautiful. So sad to hear how noticeable the effects of climate change are there already.
I've been paying for it for a couple of months now, am pretty happy with it. Feels weird to be paying for a search engine, and as it still only has a finite number of searches every month I still have to get used to not being reluctant to use it, but its results are indeed great. More focused than DuckDuckGo, less bullshit than Google.
It's more recent science, but it seems every step of processing food (boiling, mashing, drying etc) breaks down cell structures, and that this in turn can make it harder for the body to take up nutrition. So you end up eating more but getting less nutritional value.
Research is still ongoing though, and of course mashed potatoes from powder is obviously still much better than ultra-processed food.
In terms of nutritional value it's actually quite a huge difference, with homemade mashed potatoes being a lot better for you. Something about food being healthier when it's less processed.
Still, the powder one is not the worst thing, and boiling up potatoes takes too long some days. I like keeping some texture though, so for me it's homemade whenever I feel like having it. :)
I'm swimming in it! We always have a white Christmas, but this year it's spectacular. You could already ski (cross country) on the 23rd, since then there's 20 more centimetres of crispy new snow on top. It's amazing!
Obviously doesn't compensate for the heat elsewhere, but it won't stop me from appreciating what we've got!
That's fucking great! Keep it up!
It's like a trope. Old men who used to be really shitty fathers and now desperately try to cling on to the image of themselves as the heads of the family even though they will never truly be forgiven for who they used to be, and everyone are kind of afraid that they still are.
It's sad, it's painful, and it's fucking impossible to deal with in a good way.
I used it to learn German almost ten years ago and it was fantastic. When I started out you had a limited number of lives, but they realized this was not good for learning and removed it. This lead to me learning German on Duolingo very successfully - my approach was to aim over my competence level, do difficult challenges, and keep at them until I managed to do it right. High paced, challenging, generally fun, and extremely educational.
Then they re-implemented the limited number of lives not to increase educational value, but to punish non-paying users. This means that I have to do the lessons slow, even honest typos are punished so I have to read and re-read whatever I write before I can jump to the next challenge, and I cannot ever challenge myself by going beyond my skill level.
I paid for a year of Duolingo, but it's very expensive, the whole user experience is more annoying to me even for paid users now than it was as a free user in the past, and I don't like the direction the company has taken and I don't want to encourage them by paying for they enshittified service. Had they kept trying to make it better for everyone I would have been happy to pay €5, possibly €10, per month for a few extra premium features.
Right now it does really feel to me like they are punishing their users and creating a bad user experience on purpose.