Yeah, I don’t know if that tracks. Wingspan has sold more than 1.3 million copies (as of September 2021) which is way way way more than the average board game sells.

I’d far more believe that they couldn’t keep up with production than they were intentionally limiting supply.

Ooo, fantastic. I’ve been doing sugar extractions of lemon zest for a mead recently, and we tried drying and blitzing the zests after filtering.

For us the powder was nice (partly because it got a bit candied during the process) but fairly mild in taste. I think it could still absolutely be fun to use to sprinkle on desserts of drinks, for visuals if nothing else.

Our kettle actually partially died a few months ago, had a long debate about what we should replace it with before I realized the contacts on the base had just gotten bent out of place.

A buddy of mine printed the robot mittens for me, and even managed to track down a paint that nearly perfectly matches the color. I absolutely love them. How do you like the metal ones?

Nice! A surprising amount of overlap with out own coffee station!

From my understanding espresso beans do tend to be roasted darker to help increase extraction. I know that at least for my manual espresso press I need to use a significantly different recipe to get a nice shot out of light roasted beans.

Broadly though, I do think the cultural idea of espresso is that it’s a small, super intense cup of coffee which in turn implies it being very bitter as that’s the main coffee flavor people can imagine being intensified. Especially when you consider that a lot of people’s idea of espresso likely comes from pod machines which, in my experience, tend to make very bitter shots.

I was genuinely shocked the first time I had a shot of a espresso from an actual coffee shop and the predominant flavor was sour not bitter.

So, yeah, I do think it’s very common for people to associate espresso with dark and bitter coffee.> I said it sounds like you just haven’t had good espresso

Edit: FWIW, if you’re looking to actually talk to someone about all this, lines like, “I said it sounds like you just haven’t had good espresso,” is not a great way to engender a good conversation.

Rather than a specific system or style, I think the important thing is what gets you and your players excited. Pick a genre or theme that you are your players are into, then find a system that matches that. Once you get into it a bit more you can start digging into different styles of RPGs because you’ll have more context for what it all means and some idea of what you all like.

I like rules light systems because they’ve got a shorter “time to table”, but if everyone is very excited to play DnD, then DnD works because it’ll keep everyone motivated and engaged.

Some ideas:

Sci fi horror game along the lines of Alien: Mothership

Hardscrabble, fools forced to delve into dangerous dungeons and weird woods to make a living: Cairn

Grannies solving murder mysteries a la Miss Marple: Brindlewood Bay

A gang of thieves in a Dishonored-esque whale oil powered city: Blades in the Dark.

A gang of thieves flying a space ship in a star wars or firefly styled galaxy: Scum and Villainy

A doomed world undergoing heavy metal apocalypses: MÖRK BORG, or CY_BORG for the cyberpunk version of that.

Buffy and friends taking down vampire threats, or Mulder trying to find the truth that’s out there: Monster of the Week

Personally I’ve had really good luck introducing new players with Mausritter. The physical version is gives people a tactile card based inventory, the digital version is totally free. It’s super easy for people to get into the head space of tiny mice! There are also tons of fantastic modules to run which makes your job as a DM a lot easier.

This comment got a bit away from me, but I’ve run and played a ton of different systems, so if you have some idea of what you think you and your players will be into I can maybe point you in a more specific direction.

Mausritter is also great at getting people into the “old school” adventuring mindset. It’s easy for people to get that they’re a tiny moues, so they need to be careful, be clever, and run away from dangerous situations.

Plus it’s got fantastic first and third party adventures to run.

Might not be sufficiently fantasy magic for the brief though?

That looks great! We actually don’t add any flavorings into the mix outside of the salt + sugar, we did originally but found out we really liked the very smokey without anything added. I should really go back and try out some different options to see what’s out there though.

We also usually smoke with “neighbor maple”. Which is to say anytime a storm comes through a branches fall out of the big maple tree in our neighbor’s lawn, we take it, chop it up, and smoke stuff with it.

Slicing is both the easiest and most annoying part of the process for me. A few years ago we managed to get a hold of a second hand commercial deli slicer. It works incredibly well, as you might imagine, but then I discovered why you usually don’t have commercial equipment in your home. I use it maybe once every couple months, and it takes about as long to clean the dang thing as it does to actually slice something on it. I’m sure it makes sense in an actual butcher or deli where you’re using it all day, but for me I do 15 minutes of slicing and then have 15 minutes of cleaning off pork fat. It sure does make nice even slices of bacon though.

They go in the freezer, and when we want to use a pack we just toss it into the fridge the day before.

The stars are because I ran out of the good plastic wrap (each has a layer of cling film then layer of freezer paper), and had to do the final two with the bad plastic wrap. I’m less confident about how air tight they are so they’re starred so we eat them first.

That sounds fantastic. I have some relatives that hunt, and I have not taken enough advantage of that.

Gotta set up a deal where they give me meat and I return half of it in the form of bacon or sausage.

We did a mix, although the hardneck did a lot better than the softneck this year. There’s a bit more softneck still in the ground that we’re waiting on.

I personally prefer the hardneck only because it gives me tasty tasty scapes to grill.

It’s fantastic, as simple as just chucking some garlic into a jar with honey. Wait long enough and you get a really nice almost balsamic-y garlicy liquid to drizzle on stuff (I love it on pizza). I’ve also done it with some chopped up habanero included to make it spicy.

Insert usual caveats about being careful with fermenting food at home and doing your own research, and there being a small risk of botulism.

We’ll let them sit and dry to “cure” for a week, at which point they stay good for quite a while in a cool, dry place. I think last time we grew garlic we got a good six or eight months out of them in the basement? We braided them into bundles and hung them up for storage.

Also if you want garlic next year, make sure you plant the bulbs this year before the ground freezes. Garlic is an over-winter situation.

It’s when the first couple sets of leaves (from the bottom) start to die and turn brown. Also motivated by wanting to get other stuff in the ground.

Not that I’m an expert by any means! For gardening I’m mostly following what my wife tells me.