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Cake day: June 28th, 2023

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  • If you can find an annual plan that fits your needs, and paying for a year at once is possible, that may work out cheaper per month.

    It’s been a while since I looked for a new plan, but it seems to me that the direction mobile plans are going is that the only differences are how much data and whether anything international is included. Most plans these days include unlimited calls and texts. As someone who doesn’t do much calling or texting and needs like 2GB/month tops, pretty much everything has more than I need. A few years ago I was service hopping to whoever would give me a $10/month plan, but many of those have increased to $15/month.

    The plan I’m currently on is no longer available to new customers, so unfortunately I can’t recommend it to you.



  • The more of the Cosmere you read, the more things will connect and the clearer the picture will be. Every time I re-read SA, I see new connections I’d missed before. Some of that is familiarity with the magics of other planets, because that changes your read from “character did a weird thing” to “hey! that’s magic from this other planet; why/how has it turned up here?”

    In the earlier books, the crossovers between worlds/magics and the underlying “how things work” are more subtle and you’ll miss things on first read. In more recent books, it’s more overt.

    Some of that is because of how much the protagonists themselves understand. For example, in the first Mistborn trilogy the characters really don’t understand what’s going on on their own planet, so of course you don’t get a good explanation. In Secret History, the POV character does run into people who know quite a lot about what is going on, so when Secret History revisits the events of the main trilogy you’re able to understand the forces driving those catastrophic events.

    The characters in SA started off thinking magic wasn’t real and knowing nothing about realms and worlds beyond their own. They are learning a lot through their spren and Hoid, but there is still a lot that they don’t know. And you as the reader are learning along with them.


  • The training rod is definitely not a new addition. I used it in my first game a couple of years ago because I found fishing too hard. There was a dialogue where Willy asked me how I was finding the fishing, and one of my options to reply was “it’s too hard”. Then he told me to buy the training rod. I don’t know if it was available before that; I never looked. But try talking to Willy when you see him and maybe it will come up?

    The lake outside the mine is a good place to start. You get carp there, and sometimes they never leave the position your bar starts in, so you don’t even have to do anything to catch them - free XP!




  • I just finished Dragonsteel Prime. I read Way of Kings Prime when it was released (so: not recently). Dragonsteel (canon) hasn’t been written yet, so I’m not sure what you want to compare DP to?

    Brandon has commented that Dragonsteel (Prime) never got published because the story didn’t really work. Some elements of it eventually turned up in Stormlight, of course.

    I enjoyed both Prime books as a look at early versions of characters, settings, and magics. Reading WoKP after several Stormlight books, it was a little jarring to have a character die in Prime who is very much alive (as of SA4). DP didn’t do that to me; and as much as Brandon says there’s an early version of Shallan in that book, it felt like a wholly different character. I quite enjoyed getting to know Frost a little bit, and seeing early Hoid.


  • My first smartphone was a Sony Xperia Z1 Compact. I’m a woman with all the small pockets that entails, and that phone was a great size. Sony was one of the last manufacturers making a smaller version of their flagship phone without sacrificing performance quality. I would have stuck with this line of phones if it hadn’t been discontinued. Alas.

    My current phone is a OnePlus 6, a gift rather than something I chose. It’s not huge, but it is the biggest phone I have owned. And had I been choosing, I likely would not have considered this model because one of my criteria is that the phone fits comfortably in my pockets.

    It was a happy surprise that the current phone actually does fit well enough (mostly). And this has shown me that I can be more flexible than I thought when it comes to phone size.

    Not sure what direction I’m looking when it comes time to replace this phone. Truthfully, I’d still probably prefer something a little smaller. But in a limited market, you take what you can get.


  • If you already have the cheese on hand, do an experiment. Cut off a piece and freeze it overnight. Next day, defrost it and see how it is. Because the issue you’re concerned about is change to texture or taste after freezing and thawing, you only need to leave it long enough to be fully frozen through - not as long as you normally would for storage.

    (You wouldn’t want to buy a bulk size piece of meat/cheese just to experiment, but if you already have some on hand it’s worth trying for yourself to find out if you’ll find the result satisfactory.)




  • So I’m an American expat living in Australia. Australia has had the option to file directly to ATO, electronically, longer than I’ve been here. (Google suggests since 1999? So, more than 20 years.) It’s an easy process if you have a straightforward tax return.

    It never ceases to amaze me how far behind the rest of the world USA is in some things that just seem like really obvious solutions. Like… Why wouldn’t the IRS want to get tax returns filed directly from the tax payers, skipping the middleman? At least for simple returns. More simplicity, less confusion all around if they get everyone onto the same system. Less paper to wade through, by significantly reducing paper returns. Etc.

    It just seems like such a no-brainer. But I guess that’s why it doesn’t work in the USA. >.<




  • It might depend on where you live. For example, basil is frost sensitive, so where I live it won’t survive outdoors in winter. Coriander races to seed in heat, so even staggered plantings won’t help a whole lot in a hot summer. Parsley might do okay with a few planted at different times of year; at least it seems less driven by season than the other two, in my limited experience.

    You could have more success with indoor pots, if that’s an option for you (that said, I’ve recently had a parsley plant going to seed in my kitchen, so results will vary).

    And if the plants start flowering you can prolong their usefulness by pinching off the flowering stems - though that only buys you some time, rather than preventing the process entirely.


  • Coriander goes to seed quickly in warm weather. Let it self-sow and you’ll get new plants.

    Parsley likewise will self-sow if you let it.

    It’s not really possible to have a continuous plant to pick from due to the life cycle of these plants. But if you let them self-sow, you’ll probably end up with surplus, which you can dry or freeze for use when you don’t have productive plants.