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I've always made rice in a pot on the stove and that's served me very well but I also like to steam vegetables, dumplings (usually from frozen), and eat oats for breakfast. After a bit of research, I've determined that I'm in the market for a rice cooker, an appliance I have never owned and have 0 experience with. Like most kitchen gadgets, I find that the market is oversaturated with options and my attempts at research have led me to some wildly different conclusions. Do I stick with brands I know like Cuisinart or KitchenAid? Do I spring for the fancy Japanese brands? Or do I cheap out and then upgrade when the device burns out? How large of a volume do I need? Are the fancy steamer inserts worth it? What if I want to steam rice and veges in one go? And so on

For my personal use case, I make rice 3-4 times per week easily. I need to be able to make enough rice for 4-6 adults max in one sitting. I would like to make a decent amount of dumplings in one go, say enough to get 4-6 adults started while I steam a second round. I want to be capable of steaming veggies and making oats. I want it to have a removable insert for cleaning. I'd like it to be fairly easy to use. Are these common wishlist items for a rice cooker? I am really not sure

Beyond my use case, I'm interested in what people own and use. Do you use it often? Any regrets? What other foods can I make with this gadget?

Edit: I appreciate everyone who has weighed in so far. I did want to add that I prefer not to add an instant pot. Not to discount anyone's experience but I have had bad luck with them (I've had a pair that burned out in the warranty period, one on its first use) and already have a slow cooker and pressure cooker cooker I am very happy with. I know they're amazing and do all kinds of different things but I'm interested primarily in a rice cooker that can handle a few extra tasks

Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

Welcome all to our weekly (ish) gardening group discussion!

Feel free to discuss anything related to gardening, beginner or advanced, challenge or success.

‘Seed’ questions?

1. How long have you been gardening?
2. What’s the best pearl you have learnt?
3. What are you worried about happening this year?
4. When in the season do you enjoy gardening most?

last session

My wife and I just had a baby and are now soaking it all in on maternity and paternity leave. Currently, my wife still has a few weeks of recovery before she is mobile so we have a lot of "tv time" on our hands and are struggling to find things to watch. I was hoping Tilderinos might be able to make some suggestions to fill our sleepless days and nights! It doesn't have to be current and we have a range of borrowed streaming logins so the world is your oyster!

I've added some recent favorites from each of us to give you an idea of our preferences, but don't feel like you need to follow those if you are really excited to share something!

Me:
Shogun
Hilda
Good Omens
The Great Pottery Throwdown
What We do in the Shadows
Bad Sisters
Yellowjackets
Sex Education
Alone

Her:
Gilmore Girls
Outlander
Sullivan's Crossing
A Discovery of Witches
My Life with the Walter Boys
Emily In Paris
Valeria
XOXO Kitty

Both:
Great British Bakeoff
Severance
Clarkson's Farm
Designing the Hebrides
The Office
White Lotus
The Last of Us
Winx Saga (weirdly :) )
The Good Place
Younger
Brooklyn 99
Bridgerton

You're the glue, the leader, the center of gravity, the one making it happen.

Without you, it would probably fall apart, cease to function, or stop.

What is it?
What do you do?
Do people appreciate your role, or is it invisible?

hey there tildes. i’m moving out of texas in august no matter what and am trying to decide between chicago and portland. i was wondering if anyone here has lived in either (or both) locations and could help me decide by sharing their experiences.

i’m currently in texas and by the time i move, i will have only been here 1 year but this was always supposed to be a temporary stop for a job (that is very much not working out due to the owner of the company — i’ve posted about it a few months ago and struggle with it in my mind to this day).

i’ve moved around a bit, both in the same cities and across several states, over the past 5 years. im tired of moving and starting over, so im really going to focus on making the next place work for at least 5 years. the world is too chaotic for me to pretend to see farther out than that.

i had been reading and watching a lot of videos about chicago over the past month or two and now wondering if i should give it a try? i just assumed i would move back to portland by default because i liked it well enough and now im not sure if i should fall back to something familiar or try again somewhere else.

just want to say that i know moving wont magically make my life great and i know i will have to put in a lot of work to make everything work regardless. greener grass and all that.

portland

i’ve lived in portland before (2 years) and visited many, many times in the 7 years before moving there. i liked it for the most part.

things i didn’t like (mostly my opinion/experience)

• PNW gray, dreary weather for many months. im prone to bouts of severe depression and it’s a lot of work to keep healthy during the dark months. was in for seattle for 7 years prior to living in portland so i was maxed out with the gray perhaps.
• cost of living is kind of high for the size of city and offerings
• it’s a very slow, sleepy city that feels more like a very big town than a small city. sometimes i liked this about the city (less traffic, crowds) and sometimes i didnt (less “things going on”, especially later at night)
• the sheer amount of unsheltered people and seemingly no solution or even progress. when i lived there, it was really, really bad (2021-2023) and i’ve read that it’s actually gotten worse since ive left. it’s heartbreaking.

things i did like

• green year round, even if it’s gray and winter. beautiful outdoors/hiking, swimming in the river
• proximity to seattle (i have friends there)
• much more agreeable politics for me (Leftists everywhere)
• great food options, fun bars, interesting shops
• very bike friendly (newly into biking, was not when i lived there)
• decent public transit
• relatively friendly people though i did struggle with making deeper connections
• very positive towards folks who are queer or generally nontraditional. that’s important to me
• seems like a lot of creative folk live here

chicago

i’ve never been to chicago. i’ll visit in june to check it out. i also don’t know anyone there. this isn’t a huge deal since i have done this kind of move (only visiting right before moving and not knowing anyone) i guess 3 times now.

reasons i think i will like it

• liberal city
• great public transit
• big, dense city
• diversity
• seemingly decent cost of living
• people say midwesterners are friendly (?)
• job opportunities just by the fact that it’s such a huge city

things that are/may be negative

• brutal winters. i am not used to real winters. seattle/portland had very mild winters and even denver’s were honestly not bad at all. i hear lots of talk about chicago winters.
• crime. no, i don’t think i will be regularly mugged or killed like the US media makes it sometimes seem, but compared to everywhere i’ve lived before, it’s has a higher violent crime rate.
• friends/community. i’m in my mid 30s and it’s harder to make friends the old i get and that’s sort of my number one goal each time i move to a new city. also never really had “community” and would really like to have that in my life.
• politics. i know that portland is generally much more left and chicago is more generic democrat. this isn’t the end of the world and i don’t expect everyone to be as far left as i am but i want to be able to live in the same reality as my community.

huge wall of text, i know, so thanks for those that read it. i’m not great at organizing my thoughts in these posts, but i’m just tryin’ to figure stuff out!

if anyone has anything they want to share based on my likes/dislikes and your experience, please do! i really enjoy reading what the folks here have to say about things.

I'm looking for some recommendations. I'm not a voracious reader, so just about anything you can recommend will be new to me.

I'm not sure how to describe the genre I'm after, which is really why I'm here. I just got done binging Petscop on YouTube; the surreal and Lynchian story telling coupled with the dark subject matter really sucked me in. I'm also somewhat enthralled by some of the higher quality Backrooms content.

I'm interested in short stories or novels.

Edit: sorry for not tagging. I completely forgot!

Japanese Grand Prix
Suzuka Circuit
March 26-29, 2026

Next race:
Miami Grand Prix
Suzuka Circuit
May 1-3, 2026

Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

Server host: tildes.nore.gg (Running Java 1.21.11)
Verification site: https://tildes.nore.gg
BlueMap: https://tildes.nore.gg/map/
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TildesMC

The server operates on a soft whitelist. Anyone can log in and walk around, but you need a Tildes account to gain build access.

We recommend you install our mod web-chat so that you can chat while in your web browser. It turns the server into an old-school chat room.

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I've had the itch lately to play Minecraft again. I originally played on an account my brother gave me in alpha and used that for years before he asked for it back so he could do the account migration in to his Microsoft account to avoid losing it. Microsoft sadly doesn't do regional pricing for Minecraft so I don't think I'll be picking up a copy again soon and will probably wait till my kids are older and I pick up some copies to play with them.

I realized that the game has changed a lot since I last played, and when last played with my friends (probably 5-6 years ago at this point) I remember being a bit lost with all the new things that had been added from when I last played. While it's cool seeing new stuff being added to the game, I also realized that if I were to get Minecraft I would probably get it specifically to play older versions of the game. I saw there was a whole subreddit of people playing older versions of the game over at r/GoldenAgeMinecraft which also showed me that there are mods that essentially fork development from earlier points in Minecraft's history which I think would be cool to explore when I do get the game.

I was curious if any tilders play older versions of Minecraft?
What draws you to that particular version?
Do you play the current release version of Minecraft at all?

Also, anything older Minecraft you felt like sharing, please do. I've been watching some older Minecraft videos on Youtube in my second monitor while I work today.

Edit: I wanted to add this here since I found this out after posting. It turns out that Minecraft's Java edition has a demo mode, and the check for how long you've played the demo mode was added in release version 1.3. So I can go ahead and create a demo account and play the old versions for Free: https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Demo_Mode#Trivia
I do plan on buying the full game eventually, but this will definitely scratch the itch I've been having for a long time and I will look at installing that on my computer once I've tackled my big work items.

Edit 2: I found that you can use the Betacraft launcher to access these older versions as well. I wish I had found that previously as I spent a solid ~30 minutes fiddling with my Win 10 LTSC computer getting the Windows Store and other services installed and it still wasn't letting me properly launch the old Minecraft versions.

For context, I live in the tropics and get a lot of sunlight for most of the year outside of monsoon season.

I was recently chatting with some coworkers and one of the mentioned baking cookies on their dashboard during the summer, and I remember my brother mentioning doing that when he lived in Arizona. That is something I could probably do here, but we always keep a sunshade up in our car so it isn't incredibly hot when we get inside.

This got me thinking about solar ovens since I remember seeing a video of someone using one to cook online awhile ago, and I was curious if anyone here has one or has any experience using one and if it was worth it or if they would have any recommendations.

I relatively recently reinstalled my OS (distro-hopping to Fedora KDE) and as I was installing my various everyday programs, I began to wonder whether there were any solid competitors to VSCode in the space other than IntelliJ products (which I strongly dislike compared to VSCode already). I've used VSCode for a while, but I've definitely noticed my experience with the app getting a little bloated and overwhelmed. But I'm not keeping my finger on the pulse of new IDEs, so I don't know if there's anything new (or at least a solid alternative of some sort) out there that people are switching to.

I'm on Linux, so nothing Mac-exclusive. I know VSCode's extension library is probably hard to match given its popularity, but I'd hope for an alternative that at least has potential to have extensions to cover lesser-known languages and file formats for me. I liked the look and feel of VS Code when I switched to it years ago, so I'm all for apps with similar vibes, but I'd like something that feels faster and more focused.

Please don't recommend vim. I've already heard of vim, and if I wanted to switch to it I would have already.

Looking Back on Temple of Elemental Evil

My table wrapped up T1-T4 Temple of Elemental Evil a few months ago, and I decided to take a break before moving on to I6 Ravenloft to play some video games for a bit. It's a good thing, too, because there's been several hospitalizations and deaths so far this year, but that's a topic for elsewhere.

After having finished it, I can confidently say that I don't really get all the hype T1-T4 gets in this day and age. Perhaps when it was new, but I still see people today lauding its greatness. It was... fine. T1 had a very strong start, no real complaints there, but as the book went on it meandered more and left a lot to be desired in the third and especially fourth floors of the dungeon. I've heard rumors that Gygax was unable to finish it in time due to being pulled away for TSR business often, so he gave all his notes to Mentzer to complete the work. I would believe it, personally. I've also since been told that the campaign book has an errata, so perhaps that fixes a lot of our issues with it, but I've not read it; no real interest in running this again.

The Upcoming Ravenloft Run

Moving past that, though, we'll be starting back up on April 11th with the group's first batch of characters going to the castle representing Ravenloft to have dinner with the Count; some of them received a letter inviting them over to congratulate them on their work within the region and on the power they've gained. The players know what they're getting into, but the characters don't. Joining us this go around are:

• Rowan Human Magic-User 7 (~66k XP)
  • Henchman Freya, Human Fighter 5 (~18k XP)
  • Henchman Rikka, Human Fighter 5 (~18k XP)
• Iskandar, Human Magic-User 8 (~106k XP)
  • Henchman Thorgisl, Human Fighter 2 (~2k XP)
• Ser Duncan, Human Paladin 6 (~55k XP)
• Melceth, Human Cleric 7 (~55k XP)
• Elowyn, Elf Fighter 5 / Magus 5 (~55k XP)

Looking Ahead to the New World

Regardless of what the results of the Ravenloft module are, there will then be a time skip of a couple or few years before a portal to a new setting, Jovian, will be made available to the group; a planet with two suns--a very large, incredibly bright one representing Bahamut and a much smaller, dimmer one representing Tiamat--that is bathed in an eternal twilight. Two major themes I aim to hit with this setting are reclamation and perseverance.

To go along with the change in setting, I am also planning on making other changes to the game. We are:

• finally getting rid of the gnome
• retaining the half-ogre
• adding the mul, which are a half-human/half-dwarf race from Dark Sun
• removing the Assassin class
• adding the Runecaster class
• replacing the base Cleric class with a specialty priest for each of our 17 deities
• allowing halflings to be Illusionist in the absence of the gnome
• allowing mul to be Occultists, a custom class of my making
• allowing half-orcs to be a Magus, another custom class of my making, in the absence of the Assassin

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.