Not wordy, but all fantastic games to play with young kids:

Mastermind
Blokus
Qwirkle
Othello
Lanterns
Tsuro

For ones that are a little older/can read a bit:

Ticket to Ride (also teaches a bit of geography)
Castle Panic
King of Tokyo/New York
Flip Ships

I started reading to mine at about 4 months, and 1 is definitely old enough to read to. I was asking my one year old questions about the book and the pictures like "can you find the kitty?" and he showed me just how many words he understood and what he knew from that. It's so important for them to hear language and be communicated with, even if they don't have the control to speak themselves yet.

I have my four-year-old help me find products in the grocery store, and if he points to something based on how it looks I'll say "let's make sure, sound it out!" If we are out, I'll pretend I have trouble finding a sign or store and tell him to watch out for it for me. "We're looking for the library what letter does that start with? Ok, look for signs with a word starting with L!" I'm hoping to make him aware of the words all around us and get comfortable with the idea that he is perfectly capable of figuring it out, even if he takes a long time. We read before bed every night as well.

I think as far as making your kid read for x amount of time... probably the most important thing at that age is making sure they love reading and find it fun. I would be concerned that a boring book or reading when they have a lot of energy to burn might make it feel like a chore. So sitting down for 20 minutes close to bed time with a good story after a busy day while you read nearby and are available for help sounds lovely. Sitting down to read a reference book for 20 minutes when you just got home from school and you want to play and your parent is hovering over your shoulder and judging you, no thanks!! So I think the "how" is more important than the "how much".

Like a lot of things that's very location dependent. Geographical region, level of development, point in history etc. You and I are both correct, for example my scenario is accurate to ancient Rome or a pre-industrial European village, your scenario is true in 19th century Western American homesteaders or deeply rural communities. A similar thing happened with sewing machines where the invention of a modern tool outsourced a skilled, paid job (making clothes) to unpaid domestic labor. Did some individuals without prior access to those professional services benefit? Of course, but it meant that the bespoke clothing industry and the clothes laundering industries both deflated to the point of not being widely or cheaply available anymore, and the labor that once was a paid job was expected to be done for free.

My point was that it is not such an easy thing to point to that instantly made everyone's lives better.

White "chocolate" is not chocolate, it's a chocolate byproduct and has no place being called by such a lofty title.

It was a time consuming task but it was one done as a job. Cleaning clothes was a whole industry, and getting your clothes laundered was generally affordable and something you could pay others to do for you. The washing machine allows people to do it themselves easier, but with needing to buy the machine, paying for detergent and additives, water use, keeping up with maintenance, it's not for free. What the washing machine did was take away an industry where people had paying jobs to do the task, and turn the task into a self-care obligation that locks you into consumership. Can you make your own washing machine? Your own detergent? You have to buy those things and then do the labor yourself, unpaid. Who really benefited? The laundry industry was a tough one to work in but it was a paid job for the working class. It's now a way for corporations to make money off of unpaid labor.

I was an incredibly angsty teenager, mad at the world and hostile to just about everyone by default. Apathetic, grumpy, and uninterested in physical activity or the things I liked as a preteen.

After having a baby and getting very little sleep for 6 months I recognized some of my old patterns. Turns out, it wasn't just part of being a teen, I was chronically sleep deprived. I was up at 6am most days back then, when I would sleep until 1pm on weekends. I think a lot of teens are unfairly characterized as angry and defiant when they're operating on half or a quarter of the sleep they need.

It's pretty common to want to be a woman and not have gender dysphoria. I'd bet something like half of all humans experience this.

Delicious in Dungeon, Frieren, Hands off my Eizouken, and Bocchi the Rock probably

Edited to add Spy x Family, and I suppose Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood depending on if one feels Winry is sexualized.

If playfully poking fun at authority by demonstrating how the intended consequences of petty rules can be subverted creatively irks you, you're in the wrong community, hun.

I have an intense distaste for Discovery, and wouldn't recommend it.

I could rant about it a la Angela Collier for 4 hours but here's my main issues boiled down to a bulleted list:

Some things I like about Star Trek:

• Optimistic future, humans can create greatness and beauty if they continue to check and overcome their faults
• No black and white villains. All antagonists are given nuance and development and many become favored allies
• Themes of teamwork, a functional ensemble, core crew are all valid and valued, no one star of the show.
• No such thing as magic or gods, everything is in the realm of human understanding if we have sufficient knowledge

Guess what Disovery has?

• Nihilistic, apocalyptic future
• Bad guys that are just bad, they're evil, don't ask questions
• One principal star of the show that is the focus of nearly every episode
• No attempt to explain things with any veneer of science

Then add on some blatant examples of total ignorance for the universe it's set in, attempts at ham handed fan service by shoe horning in clumsy references to characters from other series, you have a show that is farther from Star Trek than a 14 year old's submission on IO9. When it actually let the supporting cast do things, they were charming and likable, but Stamets, Saru and Tilly weren't enough to keep me from getting mad at just about every episode.

If you don't really care about or know anything about Star Trek it can be entertaining I guess, but why watch it when there's Strange New Worlds, Lower Decks and The Orville?

I refuse to support or use subscription software, because back in my day we paid for software once and if we wanted a newer version we had the choice to just stew in our bug ridden version lacking the latest features forever and WE WERE HAPPY TO DO SO

If people are generally nice to you by default, and willing to break little rules for you, you are probably attractive. Attractive people are treated better on average, and strangers you interact with who have no obligations to you will have a positive bias towards you. They might let you into the shop to grab something real quick as they close, or a person on break might help you when they were off the clock, or invite you to take something normally reserved for a specific group you're not a part of. Those are perks and special treatment, and not the norm for people who are unattractive.

If you find yourself thinking "well people do that for me sometimes but it's just because I'm polite and friendly" or something, now you're getting it.

Wow, how did Google find out something they gave to Google? I'm perplexed!

It's a good wake up call though for anyone that thought that anything you give them is private

I don't want Chrome on my Linux system but I almost installed it last night. Why? Because apparently half the internet says that that is what is necessary if you want to screen share or mirror your monitor to a smart TV on the same network because "the linux implementation of Miracast is fucked". Oh, don't worry, you can try Brave or Chromium too, except they don't work because while the TV shows up as an option you can cast to, you can't actually cast because the option is grayed out due to some "specific media sites" error. Don't worry, this option can be changed in the //flags and if that doesn't work then try changing this other flag, except that other flag doesn't exist on Brave and Chromium and it must be assumed it only exists on Chrome.

But wait, there's a utility called MKchromecast, it mimics the ability without needing to install chrome, but doesn't recognize the TV. Oh it has all of these dependencies that need to be downloaded. It still doesn't work. There's always Gnome Displays, which has the exact same pattern of missing a bunch dependencies that must be hunted down and then not seeing the TV. While searching for dependencies on my software manager I find Jubii, a nice little media caster with a tidy, intuitive UI that happily connects to my TV immediately and cheerfully shows me all of media libraries but as soon as I ask it to play a mirror of my screen it loads for 2 minutes and times out with an error.

Then I realized it was 4:30am and I had to go to bed.

Then kiddo starts leaving the tribbles in the pantry and using them as an excuse as to where all that sugary cereal went...

I've started noticing birds, and worse, I've started recognizing them.

If I was DMing that game I wouldn't argue, but every other NPC they encountered would say "Wow tall guy! You must be good at picking apples!" until they decided they needed to do a reincarnation to get away from it.

I'm excited to see the progress of 3d printers becoming more user friendly, reliable and inexpensive. I've been keeping an eye on the development of consumer printing and there are so many types of materials to print with at higher and higher details with less troubleshooting needed. I'm thinking I'll finally jump in this year but I've had very little time for hobbies lately.

Some HOA's are literally just to pay for the maintenance of a shared private drive, which IMO is reasonable. So, we explicitly refused to make any offers or consider any homes in HOA's which didn't let us see their charter. Interestingly enough, that was all of them... makes you think.