If you have a few trees you can just mow over the leaves right on the lawn which breaks them up enough for your fall fertilizer if you don’t have a use for them. The last few years I’ve been using mine to compost in place my gardens. Haven’t had to bag since

I love Goblins as well so I always make mine Pathfinder inspired so they will be green with a big head who love fire and general chaos instead of orange like dnd goblins. They are always fun since they like to straddle the lines between disgusting, cute, destructive and helpless. I know my players always will befriend them so I like to put a lot of them in there.

I also like to treat them like cockroaches or fruit flies who breed very fast and can adopt to any conditions. So there will be strange variations based on where they live. Mud goblins, fire goblins, moss goblins who just have small physical adaptations to better fit their habitat.

I don’t know if you would call Hobbits Halflings monster races but they are my favorite. I love the way Eberron did them with their mark of hospitability so they have special magic to make everywhere more comfortable and good things just happen to them. I love how they just took the fearlessness and everything good from Kinder and just wrapped it into regular hobbits halfings.

If a dragon is looking down on us magic less short lived specifies as trash what is the point? I want my dragons innately magical in strange ways, clever and older. I enjoy a rampaging dragon but even better if they are doing it on purpose

I love the classic elves and dwarves as fantasy races. They don’t give a shit about our human centric concepts of gender roles. Dwarf women have large beautiful beards and elf men wear long flowy clothing with their long scented hair.

They are generally sports related but anything will do. Its great since its weekly you just have standing plans with the same people. Also people go there specifically to meet people and there is an established group

If you want something more consistent join a group especially one organized around a common activity. When I moved to a new city I joined a local game stores weekly DnD game. It was $5 per week and we played in person every week. It was the same rotating cast so it was fun to meet the same people.

I just joined a running group. While a few are crazy distance runners who do multiple marathons a year, including those who do multiple ultra-marathons a year, there are more casual people like me. Its great to exercise every week and then we get to chat afterwards when we go out for food. These are common in most cities and there might even be more than 1 to try out.

The great things about these groups is you can skip a week without any issue and then just join back in. A shared interest allows you to chat about that as a jumping off point. Also some of these are a wide age range which is interesting to see people in different stages of life.

Its refreshing to see someone taking accountability. As well as he was saying that he was there during protests not the massacre. Close but not identical

In case anyone wants to know how Minnesota Public Radio talks about claims about minnesota

Its been a labor of love over the last few years but we still have lots to go. Creeping Charlie is taking over lots of lawn and we just kind of let it for now. What I have found is that to get it done is a focus on a few weeks of concentrated effort a few times per year. Early spring when the ground is around 50 degrees you can go crazy with spreading clover and letting it grow and watering when needed and then again in the fall. Direct sowing native seeds in the late fall is easy because you shouldn’t dig them in but rather just lay them on the soil. We have lots that haven’t come up but also I keep seeing things I thought were dead and gone coming back. Just got to be open to see what comes up

Our lawn was a complete mess when we got it and was full of dead grass when we bought it a few years ago. We are up here in Minnesota so a little colder than Chicago land but similar climate/ Here is what we have done to upgrade it to more “no lawn”. First off is mow less and remove all fertilizers which I assume you have already done. We have been putting down tons of White Dutch Clover in both the early spring and fall which has just started to bloom this year. We have also been putting down Self Heal and Creeping Thyme which we got from Flawn which we put down over the winter. Not sure what is coming up from that yet. We are going to do their English Daisy in our side lawn.

We have been more focused on our garden which we are planting both natives, edibles and medicinal perennial plants. That has been bringing in bees and other valuable plants. I would recommend Prairie Moon for natives for both research and to purchase seeds. We cut down some trees between our fence and alleyway and put down native last fall. We got some blooms this year but most won’t come until next year. The whole thing is a process since we are dealing growing things. The goal is a stable ecosystem which means things will change every year with plants coming and going as their niches get filled and created.

https://www.prairiemoon.com/ has some good natives and you can buy full plants if you like. You can sort by geographic region, garden zone, bloom time etc.

I love my meundies. My favorite underwear

I always say “moderation in everything, including moderation” often as well

Well all the fancy tools give people confidence into their terrible data. Crap in leads to crap out

Yup. I hope we move back to data mining. I loved to joke that I put on my hardhat and go into the data mine every morning

I’ve been a professional data scientist for 5+ years and I’m okay at my job. Good enough to get 3 different jobs at non FAANG companies and I have already 3 or so hype trains and name changes of what words we use for the same tools and techniques. This AI hype is going to be another one of these with a few niche cases.

Most of my job is insisting on doing something correctly and then being told that doesn’t give the “correct” response based on leadership expectations. I just change what I do until I get the results that people want to see. I’ll just ride this hype wave out here for a few years here learning nothing new again. I’ll find another job based on my experience and requirements gathering to start the cycle again. Maybe I’ll get more data engineering skills which are actually valid

I still have my kbin.social account as well as this current one. Its good to have back ups for both

I just signed up and I know it’s still centralized but I love being able to just look at art. Besides anything that is anti -AI I am in for

Hiking and pace are very mental. It’s someone is slower than the rest of the group they should set the pace. You need to make sure they don’t fall behind because that will make them go even slower because they will lose the friendly chit chat and get discouraged.

You want the most experience hikers on the front and back. They both are needed to keep you group together but back is the just important unless you need a good navigator. Treat it like they did the LoTR put your Gandolf and Aragorn in the front and back while you hike