TeaHands

Got this through our letterbox yesterday. What sort of supernatural powers do we think they're talking?

I did always quite fancy the power of invisibility when I was younger although nowadays I'd probably pick teleportation. Not sure where "supernatural power" ends and "superhero power" begins, though 🤔

Maybe this is more like the ability to be slightly see-through and float 6 inches off the ground. Which I guess is still cool in its own way.

I feel like most Saturday TV from my childhood wouldn't hold up, but in my mind at least Gladiators was the exception! Really hope they don't ruin it.

(17:50, BBC1 for the unaware)

Wanted to post more socks this month but between illness, lemm.ee breaking (hai this is @[email protected] alt account), my hard drive breaking, and general holiday nonsense I have failed to do so.

So here's a collage of a load of them instead!

The ones in the top left were my first ever ones, I'd got overconfident and committed to making his n' hers pairs so when I hated the first lot there were still two more socks to go. It put me off trying socks again for SO LONG 😂

Will update later with the pattern links for anyone interested but right now I need food!

We're a 12-owner league split into 6 "rivalries" that play twice per year.

Husbands and wives trying to be the one claiming glory for their household, lifelong friendships at risk of being ruined forever, it's a lot of fun. And especially because the final week of regular season is, you guessed it, rivalry week.

We have two teams vying for the final playoff spot this week. One of them is brand new to the league this year, invited by his childhood friend who now is gleefully looking forward to the chance to break his heart in his first year. Adding to the drama is that earlier in the season our playoff hopeful traded away Rachaad White to his rival....for Rhamondre Stevenson. Ouch.

The other relevant matchup this week is between two work colleagues, the one in with a playoff chance being the boss of the other. The underling has had an absolutely trash season that was over before it started, but one of his only victories was against his boss in the first rivalry week and he seems determined to repeat that win. Now, can you guess who has his annual performance review coming up at work on Monday?

This weekend should be a good one! She says, from her high and mighty guaranteed spot in playoffs.

What's going down in your league?

Now that 0.19 is in testing on a couple of servers we're faced with the reality that Liftoff is probably not going to be functional for much longer. So I'm curious what everyone's got planned.

Personally I've got my eye on [email protected] which is currently under development but looks like it might be the closest to my ideal. Developer describes it thusly:

I liked the feature richness of Liftoff (e.g. the possibility to explore all the communities of an external instance), the multi-community feature of Summit and the polished UI of Thunder and I wished I could have them all in the same app.

It's currently very promising, but also very buggy so I'm hopeful it might be in a more usable state by the time 0.19 starts majorly rolling out. We shall see. The dev put out a call for testers a couple days ago but I'm sure more wouldn't hurt if anyone wants to give it a whirl.

I've tried most of the main Android options by this point, Summit gets the most use just because of multi-communities (great for sports and other happening-right-now events) but I'm really not a fan of its interface.

Boost looks nice and simple, but I find a lot of the features to be just straight-up broken.

Sync and Eternity both put me off with their looks even though they look totally different to each other!

Connect would probably be my second choice so far, but I'd still need to keep Summit around for the multi-communities which is a bit annoying.

That's about the extent of my investigations at this point. Would love to hear which you've tried and what you like / dislike from the point of view of a Liftoff user. Let's get some recommendations ironed out before everything breaks and this group is overrun with people asking why 😅

Could be outstanding, could be something you've already completed.

I like to break my goals down into a sort of ladder with the eventual goal at the top, but smaller achievements on the way. So to that end my bucket list includes such gems as:

• Go out for a meal alone
• Buy a fancy ice lolly without feeling guilty about it
• Climb up the nearby hill without stopping for a break
• Reach out to for a catchup
• Finish reading the whole Discworld book series (I never did read the last one, iykyk)

Haven't been feeling well this week so I took the opportunity to log into the game for the first time in years. Maybe Past Me knew when she logged out that it was going to be for a while, because she made sure I was in a lovely spot for the sunrise when I came back!

Happy to see Laurelin server is still going strong, I've been pottering around it on and off for 12 years now and still never even made it to Moria due to spending all my time farming, smoking pipe-weed on the roof of my hobbit house, and back in the day playing quite a lot of creep and RP-selling dyes in Bree when I should've been levelling instead 😅

That's my Christmas break game sorted, anyway. Do they still do the Yule festival?

Went down with a mysterious cough on Tuesday night. Seemed like just a bad cold Wednesday, got worse and added dizziness to the mix Thursday, now today the dizziness is gone (hooray) but whatever I've got has changed tack and is trying out severe nausea on me instead (booo).

Was supposed to be out tomorrow with a friend I've not seen since August. Not impressed.

So while I spend the next few days swooning around the house complaining about it like an actual child, I'd love to hear some happy things to focus on instead!

Weekend plans, amusing anecdotes, promises to avenge me should I not make it through, jokes at my expense, all equally welcome. For the love of god just distract me 😭

Plus switching from the subscription model to a one-time fee for commercial PC-only license. Nice.

I enjoyed this part of the announcement:

We have seen other platforms making awkward moves with their pricing and terms, so we thought, what if we did the opposite

I wonder who they could possibly be referencing 🤔

First pub, two drinks, £10.70. Ouch, we thought. But that must just be what it costs round there nowadays.

Second pub, literally round the corner. Same two drinks came to £6 something.

I'm trying to be normal today and do my actual job instead of falling into a hyperfixated rabbithole of how pubs work and how they can possibly be so different despite being in essentially the same location and about the same size. But I can't get it out of my mind!

Both of them had dogs in, so it can't be that. The more expensive one was much more brightly lit, so maybe pub-grade lightbulbs are very expensive? 🤔

Any subject-matter experts hanging about who can put me out of my misery?

You may or may not have heard of the gross Android 14 bug currently affecting people with multiple user accounts on their phone. I'm in this picture, hi, this is me.

When I heard about the bug, I stopped using the second profile and everything seemed to be fine. A narrow escape, right?!

Alas, no.

This morning I saw something vaguely amusing, and thought "my friends at UKCasual will chortle quietly at this". Tried to take a photo...camera crashed. And again. And that's apparently it! I now have no access to storage on my phone and am left hoping Google come up with a fix asap.

Not even going to tell you what the amusing photo was, so ner.

How's your day going? 😩

The two pound coins are especially manky, if that affects your suggestions at all.