Okay, so the most recent skill that I learned - or am still learning - would be making chainmail armour (or just “maille” for the pedantic). In theory, I now have the knowledge how to start from an iron ingot, turn that into a wire and that into the little rings for the armor. But because I want to be done in less than a year (will be part of my wedding outfit), I started with pre-made riveted rings, which I simply bend open, connect to solid rings and then bend closed and press in the rivet.

But since I never get to talk about it in other threads, I also learned how to make super primitive candles. Just yesterday I made candles from pork fat chunks that I ground up in my mortar and pestle. You don’t even need the little fabric to catch fire, you can just literally start lighting up the fat itself if you hold it long enough to a lighter

And before that, about one year ago now, I started learning to play the Herdy Gurdy, which is a lovely instrument, with a very lovely tone. And I even built one myself from a little do-it-yourself model kit, so to speak, which is called the Nerdy Gurdy. I started learning that because I was playing Sea of Thieves and I really enjoyed the sound of the instrument in-game. And then I also thought “hey, what if I not only learn to play it, but also learn to play it for my wedding in 2025?”

Edit because I feel this has been just a year of learning so much stuff for me: ASL. I started learning ASL about a month after I played VRChat for the first time and been practicing ever since. The chance of me getting good use out of ASL anywhere that is not online is pretty much zero, though, because I live in Germany lol

Pretty much as soon as a stable release happens for software on my phone. On my PC it mostly depends (for not-games) how annoyingly the update popup is placed. If it tells me on startup “Now (including a restart of the program) or we’ll remind you on next startup” I usually pick later because I want to work on that, e.g. PDF, immediately. By the time I did the work, I either forgot about updating (repeat cycle next time I use it) or the manual update option is somewhere too obscurely placed and I’m too lazy to find out where.

One of my programs - I think it’s Foxit PDF reader - offers an option to run the update when I close it. That’s so lovely, because it allows me to do my work now and when I’m done, I can let it update in peace while I start something different.

Edit: Because I read Win10 in the comments: For OS updates, I carefully vet the major releases. I stayed on my XP until Win 7 released and was actually an improvement. Then I only upgraded to Win 10 when I acknowledged it as good and because Sea of Thieves wouldn’t run on Win 7. Currently I’m trying to stay as far away from Win 11 as I can. We use it at work and I wouldn’t want to bring this peril into my home.

Not sure about the modern equivalents to this, but in Rome (please correct if wrong) it used to be like that. Firefighters would only put out fires of houses that paid them and otherwise just stood there, watching.

At least that’s what I read in one of those “did you know this about the ancient cultures?” articles and those aren’t always reliable either.

Yep, learned about this just yesterday from the YouTube channel BoyBoy who covered the situation quite well and had a lovely interview with Steven (as lovely as such a depressing topic can be)

You see, I at least buy food from my lunch stipend, although it’s usually my grocery trip and not necessarily my lunch of the day. And I only get about 7€ lunch stipend per day, not >40€.