Damn it actually works for some reason.

A place to start might be a friend or family member who is into video games.

Gaming hardware can be a little costly, so you may want to visit with someone and play a selection of games before deciding which direction you’d like to start in. I’ll also point out that video games are often the very most fun when shared with friends.

If my 30 year old woman friend came up to me one day and said “Hey I’ve never really played video games before and I’d like to give them a try, but don’t know where to start,” I think we’d talk awhile first to see if I can find what games are interesting to you. I see a lot of people in this comment section recommending Stardew Valley, which is a game I deeply like and respect though I have seen people bounce right off it, including someone recently here on Lemmy. So while I would recommend giving it a look, if you do bounce off it, don’t just go “video games aren’t for me,” maybe cozy games aren’t for you.

Some questions I might ask are:

Are you looking for a more relaxing or more exciting experience?

Would you like your play sessions to be challenging, contemplative, creative, or competitive?

Are you more interested in story, or gameplay?

How important are flashy fancy graphics to you?

Where will your gameplay sessions fit into your life? Do you want something to do during your daily train ride? Will this replace your daily television hour? Is it what you’re going to do all Saturday afternoon?

Do you see yourself playing games on your couch, at a desk, or on the go?

Do you want to enjoy games alone, or with friends? Will you gather in one place to play together, or play across the internet?

Do you have a genre of fiction you like? Are you into historical drama, sci-fi, fantasy, slapstick comedy?

How do you feel about horror? Both the psychological Lovecraftian existential crisis type, and the “oh god a 10 foot monster with 50 mouths for a mouth just jumped out behind a tree and roared” type?

Nah I guess I’m gonna build shit until it’s time for a dose of buckshot.

Lemmings of Lemmy: What’s your blood type and eyeglass prescription?

I’ve been shaving with a DE razor for about 15 years now, and I haven’t found it any easier or harder to cut yourself with them than the modern “Mach 84 Spike TV Edition” cartridge razors.

Do you use other social media? If yes, which services? What are your screennames and handles? What street did you grow up on? What was your Elementary School’s maiden name?

Young people want to live their own lives, and part of that is choosing their furniture. You finally get a home of your own and the freedom to furnish it how you want and…oh I’m supposed to have all this old crap I don’t really like.

Then your dad starts up with his shit. “Don’t throw out that ratty yellowed old doily. I remember that from when I was a kid.” “Okay, you take it.” Here’s a cabinet of gramma’s china. They bought it for her out of a mail order catalog in the 30’s so it’s more sacred than god’s glans.

We’re also entering the era when the grandparents who are dying and leaving behind their furniture bought all their furniture from Sears and it’s not much better than stuff you can get at Ikea, 40 years out of date, and seen 40 years of tobacco tar, cat piss and grampa farts.

I mean, you don’t ask yourself why the heirs don’t wear their grandparents’ old clothes.

I took a drive today. Around my old stomping grounds, streets I haven’t driven down in years if not decades. Past the hospital where I was born, past the high school I graduated from. Down the highway where my driver’s ed teacher when I was 15 kept bitching at me to lift my head off the headrest. I made sure to drive that stretch of road with my head on the headrest.

I drove past my great grandmother’s old house, where some of my earliest memories were formed. It’s been standing abandoned long enough that trees are growing through the porch now. Past the Yamaha dealership where I bought my first motorcycle, which is now a machine parts warehouse. Past the airport where I got my pilot’s license.

I stopped at the lake by my old college and walked the trail around it, stopping at some of the little fishing piers, benches to look at the lake and the woods. I stopped at the foot bridge over the creek that feeds the lake and just looked upstream and listened to the water babble over the tree roots.

The entire time I was out, my mind could only do two things: hum Auld Lang Syne and envision swimming straight out to sea.

On a related note, the above text felt like an answer to this question.

I always say the moon landings were faked dozens if not hundreds of times and only done for real a half dozen times.

Pilot here. You want to know how important weather data is for safe air travel?

It’s yes% important.

I want to find the man who put sound effects in Microsoft Minesweeper, whenever that happened? When it went from grey Windows 95 looking to the blue background and the smiley face disappeared. I want to find the guy who put those sound effects in the game, and I want to hand plane his scrotum off and then send him home with nothing holding his testicles on but his fruit of the looms.

English class is just a place to go to be wrong according to someone with no actual skills.

English itself is the result of numerous rounds of multilingual people mashing together the most efficient bits of other languages. The rules are so inconsistent that there kind of aren’t any. Also, written English and spoken English are two different languages with different rules, which is why you sound pompous when reading aloud formal essays and why you have to invent emoticons and even start to do rich formatting and change fonts to translate casual conversation into writing.

Take a persuasive writing class at an American college, typically numbered as ENG-112, they might touch on a few points about how to create effective arguments, they’re mostly going to grade on pedantic points of grammar, punctuation, spelling and MLA formatting. They’re not going to teach you a damn thing about teaching, partially because they’re obligated to generate test scores and testing a skill-based curriculum is more difficult than a pedantic rule following one, and mostly because they don’t have any actual teaching skills themselves.

Which is why there is a nationwide industry of your high school teacher teaching you how to use semicolons and a college professor marking you wrong for doing it that way.

There’s a guy on Youtube by the name of Chris Boden. Slightly controversial figure but he seems to mean well. A video of his that seemed to be venting/reconciling himself included the phrase

“So you wake up one morning in your impact crater and you start. Again.”

A VGA card. In an IBM PS/2.

The first 3D accelerator card I ever had was a Voodoo 2 of some variety.

That older board I linked above? Here’s what it looks like after a year of service. They do take scars especially from pizza wheels apparently, but there’s no splintering, there’s no bits fraying off into the food, and if it’s too scarred up I can sand it smooth and keep using it. Compare that to a plastic board where I’m almost afraid to cut chicken on them twice.

Thank you!

Make sure to upvote flicker’s comment, they started it. Saying nice things about my project and asking genuine questions and all. Of course I was going to take the time to answer in what I hope is helpful detail.

Having cooking and baking also among my hobbies, I also hope that someone seeing this post in their All feed learns what end grain cutting boards are, why they want one, and make the investment, hopefully one made by a local craftsman. Using a quality knife on a quality cutting board elevates the experience of making a meal.

I can’t take credit for the pattern, Etsy is full of them.

I think this would be a ten-coin block.

Sanding isn’t that bad, I put on a noise cancelling headset with some tunes on and then I can just vibe out while the random orbital does the work. It’s kind of a nice change of pace from the constant thinking about dimensions and processes. Sanding a cutting board can become an hour of guaranteed peace.

Ooh that sounds good, keep us up to speed on any developments. If peanut butter doesn’t work out, maybe caramel? Or butterscotch? Baking season is upon us, I may have to give it a whirl myself.

Welcome to the woodworking community and thank you for your kind compliments!

This board is designed to minimize the damage it takes from knives in two ways: First, it’s made out of two rather hard wood species, black walnut and hard maple. Take it from the man who hand planed it, it is NOT easy to push steel through this material. Second, it’s an end grain cutting board. All of the individual “boards” that make up the panel are turned end-grain up to present their “ends” to the cutting surface.

The obvious way to make a cutting board out of wood is to take a plank, put it on your counter and start cutting food on it. Try this and you’ll find it doesn’t last long, because your knife will sever the fibers in the surface which will start to detach into the food and leave slashes behind for bits of food and bacteria to fester in…not great. If you cross-cut that plank into wide but short strips, turn them 90 degrees so the end grain is facing up, and glue them back together, now you have a surface where all the fibers are standing vertically, and your knife will pass between them, often without actually severing anything.

You will sometimes hear end grain cutting boards called “self-healing” which is a bit of an exaggeration. Smaller knife marks may not have actually cut anything and instead just moved some of the wood fibers around a little, and changes in heat, humidity and mechanical action may put them back where they were and the mark disappears. Washing and oiling the board may take some of the shallower knife marks out.

Keeping your knife sharp and using good cutting technique will also minimize the damage done to any cutting board simply because you won’t have to push as hard to make the cut. Ultimately though the board is considered a wear item. It will start to show knife marks and even start to wear down over time. I have a wood shop, so if it starts getting unacceptably worn I can plane a few thousandths of an inch off, sand it, oil it and keep right on going. I plan on having this cutting board in service until I’m too old to handle kitchen knives anymore.

Also, it’ll be awhile before this particular board ever feels a knife; I’m using it as a dough kneading surface. I’ll continue to use this one for cutting.