There isn’t really any indication of how often they buy her these things. It could just be once every couple of months, or when she’s had an especially bad day.

Length of video doesn’t factor into whether I watch it at all. If I decide to watch the video, I’ll either watch the whole thing, stop halfway, or just skip forwards to various points depending on how well it caught my interest.

What determines if I open it at all has more to do with who sent it to me, why they sent it to me, and what the title/thumbnail looks like.

The who: I don’t bother clicking on videos from most people. Usually I’m away from my pc at the time and don’t have headphones in so I really can’t be bothered. There are a couple of friends that have very consistently sent me hilarious or fascinating content though, and I will either watch those right away or save it to a watchlist for later. This is a very short and exclusive list.

The why: Context matters. I generally don’t bother watching videos that get sent to me without any sort of explanation - if it’s nothing but a link, it might as well be nothing. If the person sending it can’t even think of an emote or a couple of words to add to it, it’s probably not worth watching. In contrast, sometimes friends will send me a video to get my opinion on something, or to share their current special interest, or because it’s something they’ve made themselves. Those, I will always watch regardless of length. If my close friends are invested in it, I am too to some extent.

The what: If the video has a clickbait title/thumbnail, I’m not clicking it no matter how interesting it sounds.

I most cases, the decision is made long before I even notice the length of the video

It sounds like the centre wasn’t releasing the original artwork though. If they had just made copies of a curated portfolio available for a reasonable price it would’ve been a great fundraiser, but instead they were holding the originals hostage for $2200 AUD if I understand correctly.

Focus less on expressing yourself, and more on what makes her happy. This post is mostly about you - your feelings, and what you want. You’ve given us no information about your girlfriend, and I think that’s indicative of your current mindset. Flip it on its head, and make her feelings the focus instead of your own.

She’s not just your girlfriend, she’s her own, unique person - If you truly listen to her wants and needs and preferences instead of just taking generic advice about “girlfriends”, that’ll make her feel much more special than anything else you can do.

It depends on what you’re looking for.

If you’re happy with kind of shallow young adult fantasy vibes, go for it. The magic system / world-building / characters aren’t especially fleshed out, but they get the job done. The plot again isn’t especially noteworthy, but it was a pretty fun ride and easy to digest. Basically it’s very accessible fantasy, but somewhat mediocre.

If you’re really into classic high fantasy stuff, maybe give it a miss. It probably won’t hit the spot for you.

Regardless of whether you read the books or not, just… forget about the movie.

Background in animation and design sounds perfect for creating assets for streamers/vtubers. There always seems to be some demand for logos, “stingers” (animations that play between changing scenes), looping videos for idle screens (when the streamer isn’t on camera, such a “taking a break” scenes), and emotes. Take a look around vgen.co and see if those types of things might be up your alley.

Whenever I’m in a group of NTs, I typically just step back and observe. Seems to me that they talk a lot about other people in various ways - those that all or most of the people in the conversation know personally, famous people, and/or people that only the speaker knows and are informing the rest of the party about. This always seems to take up a surprising percentage of the conversations and sneak into other topics as well (e.g. If the topic is about painting a wall, some other person that painted a wall recently will get mentioned).

They also seem to talk about the weather (classic), traffic, the price of various items (petrol, milk, taxis, electricity, etc), any local events, TV shows/movies, and restaurants a lot. But all of it at a very superficial level, no one seems interested in doing deep dives into any particular topic or even being very specific about anything. Any and all information is typically anecdotal with no one being inclined to research further into anything being said, just the fact that it was said by someone seems to be enough.

My general impression is that their goal is to fill up the air with inconsequential words. That seems to tick the “being social and maintaining friends” goal for them, and any sort of information gained (e.g. Restaurant recommendations or life updates on a friend) is secondary.

I think there’s one that comes through my neighborhood. I’ve never actually seen it, just heard it, and it never seems to… actually stop. When I was a kid, the ice cream trucks would stop and play their music for a while so people had time to grab their money and run outside. This one just seems to play a few bars of a song as it drives through, makes me wonder if it’s actually an ice cream truck at all.

This is different to a pomo timer but yeah those work great

tldr: The 3 “tips” in the article:

• read and follow the user manual
• buy expensive stuff
• maintain and look after said stuff

… thanks.

I think butter would be a very interesting one! Especially for the spreadable kind.

The only other item I’ve done this with was beer. We had about 10 of our college friends all bring one or two kinds of beer each in a paper bag, smuggling in to the designated “staging” room. I wasn’t super into beer so I just did the facilitating on this one - I randomized the order and handed out samples of the beer in small cups to everyone, and everyone gave a ranking and some thoughts, as well as trying to guess what the beer was. At the end, I entered everything into excel and had a little presentation of the results. It was a fun night.

The most memorable part was when our friend who LOVES this one particular (somewhat pricey) craft beer gave it like a 3/10. He spent the entire night ranking everything quite low and waiting for his fav to come up, expecting to immediately recognize it and give it an 11 - to the point where he accused me of missing his contribution completely - just to discover it was beer #4 and he had already made disparaging comments about it.

My husband and I got curious about the variance in canned tomatoes one day, so we got one can from every brand we could find. We had a blind tasting session where we tried each one without knowing what brand it was (palate cleansers in between) and ranked them all out of 10 with some comments. We didn’t share our rankings or thoughts with each other until the Big Reveal at the end when we found out which tomatoes were which.

Turned out we actually preferred some of the cheaper brands, and the most expensive ones got worse ratings. There wasn’t a direct relationship between price and preference, but it was interesting.

It was a fun day. We also did the same thing with soda water.

“Slipping back into that character of Hal for me was so rewarding — I missed him,” Cranston, 69, says. “It’s been almost 20 years since we said goodbye. And he’s a sweet, lovable man. He’s really a lovable guy, and it was fun to see all my whole family back together. It was great.”

Cranston also shared what helped him get back into character for the reboot […] “It’s a short-sleeve shirt that Hal would wear, a patterned short-sleeve shirt that screams out he’s not going anywhere,”

I’m in exactly the same boat. Swapped both my Dropbox and emails over to Proton about 6 months ago and paid for 2 years, sigh

Thank you!

What is this false narrative? Genuine question, I’m out of the loop and might not recognize the misinformation if/when I see it.

Sorry if it’s a stupid question, couldn’t work it out from a quick scan of the comments.

It makes me uncomfortable

Me. I hate being in the spotlight. My own wedding made me very uncomfortable because I was the centre of attention, one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life

For good sleep hygiene, you’re supposed to avoid doing literally anything but sleeping in your bed (including sex and just lying there awake). It builds a strong association between bed and sleep in your brain so that you get to sleep easier or something. I’ve always found this one impossible but it’s probably a good tip if you have the capacity for it.

Me and my extended family have begun a tradition of giving each other silly joke gifts instead of serious ones.

• My father in law doesn’t drink alcohol so I got him “alcohol-free” beer. It was just an empty beer bottle. Technically alcohol-free!
• a couple of days before Christmas, my husband came back from doing the grocery shopping. I stole most of the non-perishable items when he wasn’t looking, wrapped them, and put them under the tree. He thought I was a mind reader and gotten him exactly what he was planning to buy for himself until he saw them all together and realized it was his own shopping.
• I went to a dollar store and just picked out anything with badly translated English and distributed them as appropriate to pad out numbers. One of them was a tiny plastic chopping board that claimed to be “high tech” and for “professionals”. Another was a roll of duct tape. There was also a pack of serviettes that had “serves you right!” in bright colors on the front. Anything that was silly and cheap but would still would see some use.
• I have a vegan sibling-in-law. A couple of years ago, we were joking about how plant-based chocolate treats for dogs were cheaper than the ones for humans. I think they’ve safely forgotten about that conversation now so this year I’m going to give them a little treat.
• I think at one point I just wrapped a big box of packing peanuts with absolutely nothing else inside. I vaguely recall adding some rocks for extra weight in a gift somewhere, might have been that one.

Some of these would not have been funny at all if my family hadn’t already been expecting shenanigans instead of real gifts, so keep your audience in mind!

The reason we started doing this was because our family stopped getting each other gifts many years ago and everyone enjoyed the lack of stress and being able to focus on quality time. And then my husband and I had a kid, and of course everyone wanted to buy her gifts. But we didn’t want her to be the only one with gifts under the tree and develop some kind of weird complex about it, so these playful low-stakes gifts to each other were our solution.