They say the best gift is one they keep on using. By that logic, my best gift is the tea kettle my brother gave me on Christmas 2018. I was getting into drinking tea, but I had no convenient way to heat up the water. It quickly became my most used Christmas gift ever. Then when the pandemic happened and I started working from home, I used it multiple times a day. It’s been used easily a couple thousand times in the past 6 years and it’s still going strong.

I’m sorry :/ There’s gotta be a way to get those screws out. It’s 100% worth jailbreaking your Switch. Being able to play BotW and TotK on your 27" 1440p monitor significantly improves the experience.

Woops, I meant RAID 1. I’ll go fix that in my post. But I do have an external 4TB SSD with all my games except for the PS4 games since they’re so large. It has about 750 GB of space remaining on it.
I also backed up my games on a friend’s NAS in a separate location.
I also purchased a small rack server that can hold 4 hard drives. I want to buy a few 8 TB drives and set up Gamevault on it to better manage my few hundred games in my collection.

I love iNaturalist. I lived out in the woods for several years and would see so many different bugs that I didn’t recognize. So when I discovered it about 2 years ago, I started taking pictures of every bug I saw and uploading them to the app to learn what they were. And then in August last year there was an unusual explosion of mushroom varieties in our yard. That’s the one area where iNaturalist is a little weak as it really struggled to give me good ID’s for a lot of them. But it should only get better with time.
I’ll see if I can find some mushroom photos to share here.

Edit: one of my favorite mushroom pics I got during the mycological explosion:

Game preservation. I got into it last fall when I learned about OpenGOAL for the Jak and Daxter games. I grew up with those games and were some of my favorites from that generation.
I then learned how easy it was to rip PS1 through 3 games and how simple it is to set up the emulators for each console. I have a sizable collection of games for those generations, so I started ripping.

I then remembered watching LTT’s video about how to jailbreak the Switch. I bought a used Switch from a friend pre-pandemic, but never played the games because I never cared for playing on the Switch itself. So I checked if mine was old enough to jailbreak (Nintendo patched the exploit out of the Switch about a year after it released) and, lo and behold, it was.
It wasn’t easy jailbreaking it. It took several hours over 3 days to do it; I would make some progress, then hit a roadblock I couldn’t figure out, so I’d stop and come back the next day. I’d get a little further, hit another roadblock, and repeat. Once I managed that, I ripped my (small) collection of Switch games and played them on Ryujinx. Now that I could finally play them on my laptop whenever I wanted, I actually had a desire to play them and managed to get through BotW in January.

Then I figured out how to jailbreak my Wii (which is pretty easy, I recommend everyone do it to theirs), so I could rip those games. It can also rip GC games, so I didn’t need to find and jailbreak one of those to do it.

When I learned of shadPS4 this summer and the progress it was making toward playing Bloodborne, I spent $400 on ebay to get a gold PS4 with firmware 9.0 so I could jailbreak it and start dumping PS4 games.

At that point I saw how much space all of the games I ripped took up on my laptop, so I bought a NAS from a friend who was upgrading theirs and set it up with two 8TB hard drives in RAID 1 and stored all my games on there. It’s currently about 60%+ full.

Over Halloween I went to a used game store and saw they were selling a Wii U for $160. I bought it and jailbroke that as well and started ripping those games.

I bought an OG Xbox to jailbreak, but I need to open it up to replace the clock capacitor first. Otherwise it could leak and my effort would be for nothing. I just haven’t got around to it yet.

I realized this was a passion of mine when I accidentally borked my PS4 and it would only boot into safe mode. I was 100% willing to completely wipe it and start the jailbreak from scratch so I could keep doing it.

All told, I’ve ripped about 400+ nearly 600 games (I finally counted) in the past 15 months, spent dozens of hours ripping them, and have zero intention of stopping. I only think about how I can keep expanding my collection. Right now my next consoles will be the 360, PSP, and Vita.

Edit: rephrasing and adding a little more info

I like that he’s being environmentally friendly by using metal straws.

Or is that because real straws would disintegrate in the gasoline?

I bought that Saturday morning at full price. No regerts. In 5 days, I dumped about 30 hours into it.

Define “meaningfully”. There have been several different types of innovations in recent years depending on how you look at it.
Mazda made a gas engine that can switch from spark plug ignition to compression ignition. Though I don’t think they brought it to the states.
Nissan made an engine that can vary its compression ratio on the fly. Something no other engine can do to my knowledge.
Hyundai made a cam shaft that can vary the length of time it opens and closes the valves rather than just varying the time that they open.
There’s a company called Speed of Air that designed piston heads that have dimples in them like a golf ball. Those dimples apparently can significantly improve the engine’s power and, more importantly, its efficiency. Though I don’t have a video link talking about that. Just their site.
Porsche also designed a 6 stroke engine. Though I’ll have to watch the video again as I don’t remember much about it.
If you want to get more experimental, someone made something called a rotary vane engine.

People are definitely still trying to find ways to improve the internal combustion engine. It’s just this technology takes time to reach the mainstream, if it ever does.

I’ll have to reread the article to get the details, but here’s a 5 year old Car and Driver article talking about the 2019 Dodge Ram 3500’s complicated exhaust system it needs in order to meet emissions. So my guess is it’s rather expensive to stay compliant.

Edit: Nvm, it’s a pretty short article that doesn’t say much, but it does include pictures of it.

And think about the impact the whaling industry had on these environments back in the 1800 and 1900s. Who knows how much damage we did and how many potential animals we caused the extinction of by doing that.

You can’t just say that and not link a source talking about this mammal.

Edit: Found a source.

That’s Derpleton from Centaurworld. Is a weird, but good show. Would recommend.

The left one. It’s the Giraffe’s neck that’s long. Not their torso.

Edit: See Derpleton from Centaurworld.

It doesn’t, but with these apps, you can see what information they send back to their servers (if any). If there is no info getting sent back to any servers, then there’s nothing a subpoena can do since there’s no info to subpoena. You can’t obtain info that just isn’t there.

Supernormal stimuli

Not OP, but there’s this Cardamom Chai that I enjoy. It could be worth a shot.

I found two Earl Gray’s that I really enjoy. Earl Gray Cream and Lady Grey. Both good, savory flavors.

I found a tea that’s literally just turmeric and ginger. It’s a very rooty tea. I recommend checking it out if you like ginger.

I’m a big fan of black teas as they have the strongest flavor in my opinion. I’m also partial to the fruity versions.
However, there’s a Saffron Black Tea made by Vahdam that I’ve been rather fond of lately. It has a savory spice to it. Would recommend.

A little of column A, a little of column B.
Idk if it was because it was on an emulator, but when I played Smash for the N64 with friends, all I could think about was the controls felt very clunky and how much smoother Smash Ultimate felt by comparison.