Nefara @ Nefara @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

I read Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell recently and found it delightful and incredibly original. I haven't heard anything about Piranesi, I'll see if my library has it!

Nation by Terry Pratchett. It's a beautiful and introspective book that has all of STP's humor, humanity and insight but it's completely self contained. I read it recently and wanted to read it again right away.

Grapes straight from the bunch, held overhead while lounging on a chaise

Processed food is usually more expensive per portion than the ingredients alone. The farther you get from the raw ingredients the more expensive it gets. Plus, you're eating all sorts of junk ingredients.

I had about ten years of experience with a very tight food budget to learn what was good value for effort/ingredients.

Good:

Flour, sugar, canned tomatoes, spices, frozen veggies, fresh produce

Bad:

Presliced or pre-grated cheeses, at least in my experience, are marked up 1.5x to 2x the cost per pound of a block. Another commenter said that wasn't the case in their store, but check and see if that is true for you and if the cheeses you got are available in blocks. You can even go to a place with a deli counter and they will slice cheese for you for free, and you will get exactly how much you want with less waste (yes it's an interaction with another human, it'll be alright).

Uncrustables/swiss rolls/mac and cheese... it's not for me to judge what someone chooses for an indulgence, maybe those things are what get you through your day, but you can definitely do better value wise. Mac and cheese from a box is cheaper than those individual cups, and homemade mac and cheese from scratch is even better and extremely easy if you have any kitchen experience. Uncrustables will always be more expensive than just making the sandwich yourself. The swiss rolls... well you know they're a treat. In my opinion if you're going to treat yourself to something unhealthy spend the extra dollar and get something luxurious.

Breads and muffins, again if you could learn how to make them yourself you might be impressed with the results. Bread can be a tricky balance of time, effort and cost of ingredients, and homemade fresh baked bread is incredible, but if you're short on time there's nothing wrong with buying it. Muffins are a quick bread though that you could make at home in under an hour with a mixing bowl and a cupcake pan, and then you could control exactly how much sugar went into them and have hot, fresh muffins. It's worth making them yourself at least once to see if it's something you can add to your routine, you can get a cupcake pan for cheap from a thrift store if you don't have one.

Sauces and dips, as other people have said, they are a lot simpler than you might think to make yourself. In my experience they are one of those things you should challenge yourself to make at least once or twice and see how much effort and time it takes you, and then re-evaluate the jarred/canned stuff. Maybe after making it you realize it is worth the extra dollar or so to save yourself the effort, but maybe you realize it's not that hard and you're able to save money in the long run and have more control over the quality and ingredients.

All this stuff is incremental, and any one thing isn't going to magically fix food costs. Plus as the amount of time in your life to spend on meal prep fluctuates you might find it's worth it to spend the extra money on convenience. However it's important to at least get some experience with the alternatives so you understand what amount of time and effort you are buying by getting those processed foods. Good luck :)

Celestial Seasonings and PG tips are good grocery store brands with paper bags, but for loose leaf it's worth seeing if you have a local tea shop. If there's nowhere nearby, there's some great online sellers. I'm a fan of Adagio and David's tea.

Ok but you said "some of", not "the" best, I wanna know which whiskey you've had that's better than the $12,000 bottle!

Well now you've just reinvented Time Bandits

It does matter if I ever needed to replace it 😬 I know I'd order some other teapot instead but I do love this one and I'd miss it.

It's by Le Creuset, and they apparently rotate out most of their colors. So you can still buy the same teapot in a different color, which is what I ended up doing for my friend. The one I got was a limited run, it's a pretty rich purple they called "cassis", if you search Ebay for anything in that color the prices are nuts!

I had a friend over who complimented my teapot, I love it because it's a nice color, good size and has a stainless steel infuser that fits inside. So I offered to get her one of her own only to find out that this particular color is highly collectible and worth 6-7x what I paid for it originally. Now I have a nice teapot I'm paranoid about anything happening to, haha.

Genuinely was surprised at how good that show was. One of the few that I'll just rewatch entirely on a whim.

My husband got an Oculus before they were bought out only to find out he gets motion sick with most games. I don't get motion sick ever so he was excited to see me try out his library of cool starship and fighter games and all I ever play on it is beat saber, lol. The custom map scene is where it's at!

Like OP, my camera, phones don't cut it and the pictures I've been able to get of my kid with it have made it invaluable. I got the Canon Powershot MKIII and it's gotten some professional quality shots of him and captured a lot of precious moments.

My electric kettle, I drink a lot of tea and it's so damn useful. I got one with an all metal interior and no visible heating element, it has a bad pour but I still would have a noticeable dip in my daily quality of life without it.

This one is random but a three foot tall solid wood Balinese dragon statue. I got it at an import shop that was closing, it had some damage and so had been marked down and marked down again. I paid less than 10% of the original price of an intact one. We didn't have a car so my boyfriend at the time and I had to take it with us on the subway. It's like 75lbs. On our ~mile walk back to our apartment someone asked directions to a local Asian art exhibition and we had to tell them we didn't know where it was while holding this thing between us. It's beautiful despite the damage and it makes me happy every time I see it. Plus, whenever someone comments on it I have a fun story to share.

I think it can boil down to not recognizing the personhood of women. That the infinite complexity that can come from a rich tapestry woven of culture, personality, ability, interests and experiences can be shoved into a narrow and limited role. A misogynist will only see a sex doll, or a maid, or a baby making machine etc, and then judge a woman's worth based on how well they fit in that role. If a woman doesn't perform the roles that person expects or desires then they get angry and hateful that this other human being didn't meet those unreasonable expectations of them.

Misogynists might not think they hate women, just that a woman doesn't "belong" working in a machine shop. They might not consciously think men are superior, but they see certain tasks associated with women (cleaning, care work, teaching) as low value, undesirable or less worthy of respect. They might not actively choose how to divide domestic tasks, but will say that women are "naturally" better at them. And just to be clear, plenty of women are misogynists too.

Not being a misogynist involves seeing women as equally valid and worthy humans on the same bases you would judge any other person (IE, a man).

In your posts you make a lot of sweeping generalizations about all women being this or that without seeming to recognize that half of all the humans on earth are women. It's not like we're some subset or subclass or minority. There is basically no statement you could make that could actually apply to ALL women. So perhaps why you are running into people using this term with you is that you are ignoring a women's personhood.

If some guy with blond hair was a jerk to you, would you go online and complain about how all blond people are jerks and they don't like you and you don't understand why they're all so hostile? You would probably recognize that that one person was just a jerk. Then if you were a jerk to every blond person you met from then on, based on that experience, they would probably all respond to you poorly back and just feed a loop of nastiness and resentment.

If you don't want to be a misogynist, then you must learn and remember that every woman is a person of their own, with their own personalities and histories and just as many idiosyncrasies, faculties, and basic rights as any man.

All wives in all relationships ever? So does that mean your dad thinks all men live in filth? Do gay men all unanimously hire house cleaners? Are gay women the only people he thinks deserve equitable labor division in the home?

That's a funny kind of "respect". I think most people share a different definition of it.

You'd probably mind if your ice cream had lead in it. Microplastics will be the lead poisoning of the new century. They're carcinogens and endocrine disruptors and we don't even know the full extent of the effects they have.

Overnight oats, just steel cut oats in whole milk left in the fridge for at least 4 hours. Healthier and cheaper than a box cereal and so so easy. But if I didn't think ahead to chuck some in the fridge beforehand, then it's gotta be hardboiled eggs. I always have eggs in the fridge and chucking them in a pot and waiting 11 minutes is as easy as it gets.

Well, aside from eating fruit/berries with cheese and crackers but that could be argued to be a snack not a meal.

I'm a big Dune fan but I was miffed at how unsatisfying and clipped the first movie was. It's not a complete movie on its own, it really needed to finish with the acceptance ritual of the Fremen and then that would allow movie 2 to start by playing with what happens during the time jump in the latter half of the book. I loved the ambience and the attention to detail in the movie, but tons of the little details lost their meaning and their payoffs without more context. (The bullfighter metaphor, the palms for example). I would have preferred the details to be cut or saved for an "extended version" rather than just be used as Easter eggs. I'm really counting on movie 2 to bring it all together so I can just treat it like one epic movie.

Lol yep prismatic bolt embermage is the character I got to max. I realized super early how great that skill was and fully invested in it. I also played sword and board engie and dual pistol Outlander. So maybe if I had invested more in other skills or wanted different builds for my embermage I'd have a more lukewarm view of the game. I had a lot of fun with the builds I did try though.

I never had to go grind for gear, I usually had enough gold to gamble and transmute a decent equipment set together for each character. I did grind for levels in the extra map zones though after finishing the New Game+.