Started a new playthrough after ~1 years break from the game. I’m about to enter year 1 winter with most of the community centre completed and my coop and barn past their first upgrade which is the quickest I’ve managed on a playthrough before.

I’ve installed this mod that removes Pierre and replaces him with a much kinder shop owner. Because Pierre is the worst.

It was fun growing up in the countryside and things like banshees and fairies being taken as a fact of life. I had a childhood friend that would come in to school saying she heard the banshees howling during the night and then woke up to find out a relative had died.

There was a news report that resurfaced a few years back, accessible here, about the Housing Executive in Newry trying to get a fairy tree chopped down to build houses, and even after trying to bribe the workers with £200 no one would touch it and they had to build around it instead. And another where some builders halted work in the Mournes once they realised they were inside a fairy ring, 3 of them went on to suffer accidents that they attributed to revenge by the fairies, the foreman apologised to the fairies, and even the reporter was too worried to step inside the ring. We were told the legends too, like Tír na nÓg or Finn McCool, but I think it’s amazing how much of the superstition and old mythology has persisted through the years, even after the country becoming Christian and even now as it becomes more secular.

This map is way off. The UK and Ireland both have Aldi Sud but seem to show Nord on this map. This is the correct map from Wikipedia with the rest of the world included, Aldi Nord is in blue and Aldi Sud is in orange:

Unfortunately it’s very real. The author Naomi Klein has a great book about Naomi Wolf called Doppelganger, based on the fact that people keep getting the two of them confused. Her descent into the right-wing conspiracy world is quite a thing.

Quite funny to see someone call Belfast calm and peaceful though. I’m in it quite regularly and usually just want to get out as soon as I can.

The steals feel a bit too ridiculously easy for how powerful they are, the 25% margin of error for the jellyfish tank one made it hard to fail and now this one is to find a giant bright caterpillar located on that town’s main street.

Same in Europe in the late 00s/early 10s anyway - the ads here boasted about it being a good source of slow-release energy to keep you going til lunch

How deep is it? I bought a cheap pre-made one from a bargain shop before learning they need to be about 15cm deep to help them avoid predators, else it’s very unlikely anything will want to visit

The rainbow steps, I was amazed for the amount of times Ben got them right for knowing Adam well enough to adjust his response, like going specifically medium blue for ocean or light green for mint. I was playing along at home for that one by covering the side of the screen with the answers and made a lot of the mistakes Ben almost makes but doesn’t because he knows Adam well enough to predict his logic.

The jellyfish one was cool too, I don’t know if Sam has had a teammate that matches his energy as well as Mike does before, besides maybe Toby.

Nice to see Sam’s bad luck with trains lead to some good luck for him for once, and Ben and Adam’s psychic link is insanely good

It was daylight savings here, so he’s confused why his breakfast and dinner were early and ended up eating them really late this evening instead. He’s been busy scaring off cold callers and junk mailers today as well between his naps.

I put nearly everything into it, since they claim the hot temperatures are enough to kill perennial weeds and to process cooked food quickly enough to not attract rodents. The rougher stuff is good since it helps keep some airflow between the base and the vent. I saw one slug in the early days and it was on the lid trying to get out, haven’t seen any since then. The 60°C temperatures are probably too hot for any pests to want to climb inside and if they did they would turn into compost quite quickly. But it is stupidly expensive, I had it in my basket for about two weeks before deciding to buy it.

Are you able to get a hotbin in Germany? I think some garden centres in Ireland will ship them to mainland Europe if they aren’t sold directly. They do cost about €200-300, but they work very well. I’ve had one for a few weeks now and once the base layer was established it’s been cooking at 50-60°C consistently and should produce either a mulch within the next few weeks or compost within 90 days of it being started. There’s a carbon filter on it to reduce smells and the whole thing is made of thick polypropylene so it should be fairly rat proof. I keep it in my greenhouse to have an additional barrier from rats and because the steam from the vent is helping a little with keeping frost off my seedlings since there has still been some snow and hail here even in March. The only real downside so far has been the price.

There is a bank in the UK that used employee bank balances to prove they didn’t need a pay rise last year, which they were able to do because banking with them was a condition of employment

When I was in school they once checked everyone’s phones to make sure we had installed Twitter and followed the school’s accounts for each department. That was about a decade ago so it’s probably TikTok or something by now.

I think it’s just sold on privately here unfortunately, the council collects food and garden waste but doesn’t allow residents to collect the end product. I’m in Ireland but I believe the same advice applies here, it’s just we moved so late in the winter that autumn sowing wasn’t a possibility. But yes I’m trying to be patient and remember this isn’t a temporary rental, I’m here for the long haul and it doesn’t need to look perfect right away.

Nice! I’ve had no luck germinating my native seeds yet but it is only early Spring and the last frost here isn’t for another few weeks, but there is at least some campanula and primrose out the front that early bumblebees have been feeding on. We bought this house off an ex-landlord so the garden hasn’t been looked after at all - it’s taken me ages finding and digging up all the plastic plants, and there’s glitter in the soil from cheap garden decor that should never have been sold in the first place. Next big project is to build this greenhouse since my home office is so filled up with seed starters I can no longer work in there, then by the summer I should have some usable compost to replenish the plastic contaminated border.

Almost forgot it was earlier (in my timezone anyway) since the US and Europe go into DST two weeks apart but it’s a fun season so far

Nothing better than him being scolded on RTÉ a few years back for saying “up the ra” for £87

At the minute, composting. It’s my first Spring having a house with a garden so I can finally do all the eco-friendly gardening projects I could never do while living in a landlord’s mouldy house. So watching garden and food waste slowly decay is surely the most mundane, but exciting for me, although it’s nice to have a few projects on the go like growing a wildflower patch, having a bed of pollinator-friendly herbs, and planting clover among the grass so it isn’t a monocultural suburban hell

Tor’s channel is great, the neo-Nazi lesbian BDSM Victorian-style video game-developing cult was one of the first of his I’d seen and it’s a wild story.

I don’t understand why the other commenter thinks a video in the videos community is spam

If Labour had any sense they’d be introducing proportional representation, but I suspect the right of the party would rather lose to Reform than enter coalition with the Greens