sylphrin

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

This was actually proposed as the official New Zealand flag back in 2015

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Kiwi_flag

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.