I get where you’re coming from. I tend to have to “click” with an artist/band before I can really sink into them. Sometimes it never happens.

That being said, I think the best approach to Prince is chronological. His oldest music tends to be the most accessible. As he developed, he got more experimental and that can make it harder to vibe with if you go in without familiarity.

I’d hit up the Wikipedia page and kind of surf through his first three albums. If you haven’t “gotten” what made him popular back then, then the best you’ll reach is appreciating his talent on an abstract level rather than feeling it. Nothing wrong with that at all, clicking with a given music segment or not doesn’t mean anything other than the fact that it doesn’t vibe for you.

But, he really was an amazing songwriter. So you could try browsing just his lyrics and see if that gets you into things that way. I know I’m not a musician in any way, so the subtleties of his guitar and other instrumental talent are beyond me, but I can comfortably say that he was capable of lyrics that could match any poet you wanted to point at. The craft of how he would structure a song is damn potent.

Even his bumping, club friendly stuff like Cream or Get Off is crafted extremely well. So if you’re into lyrics enough, that might be the path that makes him click for you

That’s a new one to me! Thanks, I really do love discovering new words :)

I’ve used all of those except wheeliebin, which I’ve never run across before.

Ain’t no shame in borrowing good slang, and that’s something brits do extremely well imo. It’s usually easy to use, rolls off the tongue, and sounds just silly enough.

I’m right chuffed about it

Kinda depends on what features in sync made you like it.

Overall, boost, connect, thunder and summit each get close to parity, but only close. But, you could say that in reverse, (that sync only gets close to parity with any of them) it isn’t a slight against any of them.

Eternity is another one that I’ve had good use of, but development on that seems to be stopped as well, so I dunno if that’s a useful option.

Past those, you get less similarity in ux and ui than would make sense to compare. Like, the apps that mimic voyager (or whatever the popular iOS reddit app was called), things are laid out so different that if you used sync as a primary, you aren’t likely to enjoy that ui.

On a phone, I kinda favor connect over sync, despite it looking very unlike it compared to boost or eternity. But on a tablet, nothing else does double columns in portrait worth a damn for me, and aren’t great in landscape either. But boost and eternity come the closest to the visual ease sync has.

that’s sync

I was going to include screen shots of the ones I have on this tablet, but uploads shit the bed and are being weird after that one. So no promises that I can do them all

boost

eternity

connect

and interstellar since it does piefed better than anything else I’ve tried, and still does lemmy just fine.

Decided to install thunder and summit long enough to give a visual

thunder

annnd summit

As you can tell, everyone has a slightly different approach to the UI. But they’re even more variable in what settings are available, little niceties, etc. Theming is all over the place from a bare bones light/dark/oled to the relative broad visual options of boost and sync. None of them are bad at all. They’re reliable, work even on older devices without bogging them down, and are all easy enough to get going with.

Aight, a few suggestions so you can have something approaching a decent cup.

Assuming you’re stuck with bags, which isn’t the best tea, how you heat the water only matters a little and you can get a fairly similar state with a microwave.

Nuke the water twice. It’s going to vary depending on the microwave, obviously, but this the low powered stuff in most hotel rooms, go with 1:30 twice. The water should be just under boiling after the second zap. Stir in between, then stir before dunking bags. This also assumes a “coffee mug” sized vessel, which is usually about 8oz (y’all brits still use those liquid measures? I’m not sure, but I can calculate the CCs if you don’t have access to an app for that). If the cups are smaller, maybe do two one-minute zaps and check the temp.

Now, if you’ve got loose tea and your own steeper, it’s about the same, but you can go a little hotter (more hot? My brain can’t parse the right grammar) since the steeper will suck up some of the heat, and do so quickly.

Tbh though, the difference in nuked tea and more properly steeped is likely moot if you’re using the bags the hotel provides. Most of those are utter crap even by US hot tea standards.

That’s also assuming the front desk doesn’t have kettles. They aren’t usually in rooms, but some places do have them available on request, particularly in cities, and even moreso in cities they have a lot of European/British visitors.

You’ll likely need to warm the cuppa

No worries :)

That is a very confusing set of criteria. You want someone like two specific artists in the title, then name two specific bands/artists in the text that are radically different from those in the title (not to mention each other tbh)

That being said, you might like Norah Jones. Haim has a similar vibe to Merton, though I’m not sure either is specifically “romantic” overall.

There’s Sade for another smooth soul voice.

Toni Braxton might scratch an Adele-ish itch. At least her early stuff.

Kinda spitballing here. But there wouldn’t be an Adele without Aretha, Nina Simone, and Etta James. I would even argue that those three are the greatest voices in soul, and rank high with any genre open to comparison. Shit, even if you don’t like them, you gotta listen to some of their stuff (assuming you haven’t) just to understand the foundation of soul. Yeah, there are men that could have their own top three like that, but op specified female singers by their examples. (Shout out to Barry White and Marvin Gaye in particular)

Ooh! Joss Stone! Gotta give her a listen. Not as smooth as some of the queens listed above, but just as much depth.

Corinne Bailey Rae is worth it too.

A bit less well known, but Allison Young does a solid retro-jazz style that’s not quite in the same zone, but her voice is so good you should try her out anyway.

I dunno, my brain has hit a wall trying to circle back into Motown, which is n amazing musical destination to hit, but not quite the same vibe as Adele brings, but informed the underpinnings of a lot of later singers. Diana Ross alone could take the crown in that regard. But Motown covers a wide range of styles, which makes it a great music era/genre/whatever-you-wanna-call-it to dive into when looking for romantic music.

One problem

Batteries.

I’ve used old devices as many things: security cameras, a form of intercom, digital picture frames, etc. The real problem is that the batteries eventually go bad, and become dangerous.

For the few devices that have realistically replaceable batteries, that’s no big deal, but how many of those are left now?

No thanks to the potential fire, I’ll pass. The few devices I have left that I can swap batteries out are becoming harder to find new batteries for as well, so that’s an issue beyond their anemic hardware (I’m talking really old tablets at this point)

It’s not so much the foods, though both were amazing cooks in their own ways, with some amazing standards meals they’d turn out. It’s them making it that really hits as a loss.

Both of them contributed to me learning how to cook, and in some ways I ended up improving on what I learned from them by virtue of having both.

But, if I had to nail down one specific meal/dish from each that I miss the hell out of, I think my paternal grandmother’s breakfasts are the most missed of hers. The woman could put on a spread! Eggs, grits, sausage, liver mush, biscuits, red-eye gravy, with her home made jams and jellies. Gods, you want to talk about feeding an army, when all of us grandkids would stay over at once, there would be her, my grandfather, one uncle, and eleven kids ranging from toddlers to teenagers at one point.

And she never missed a step, while doing it all with us young’ns under foot. She was damm fine baker, and a master of country cooking/soul food, but her breakfasts were next level.

My maternal grandmother could do that kind of cooking too, though not as well. Where she was a standout was with more of the suburban American cuisine. The roasts and casseroles and traditional holiday meals. I think those holiday meals are what I miss most, though her meatloaf and spaghetti were both amazeballs. My grandfather was a hunter, so some kind of bird would be featured often, be it goose, duck, or turkey. Sometimes as the only meat source, sometimes alongside a store bought turkey if a lot of the more distant family was showing up.

Even after she decided she was done babysitting a bird and my uncle took over that part with a deep fryer, her sides still wreck those I’ve had with other people. Sweet potatoes, three-bean salad, seven layer salad, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, deviled eggs, asparagus, peas, all kinds of options, sometimes with all of those, plus others, plus desserts. Most of the veggies were from their garden, though they would be home canned fur Christmas, and some would be for Thanksgiving.

It wasn’t that any given item was so good (though they were), it’s that all of everything either made was so consistently amazing. Never a flop, never a dud.

Kinda surprising they didn’t give the character more oomph for romance. She essentially starts out as the most versatile option for it, being able to mesh into pretty much any arc and remain interesting.

I can imagine lol.

She really is awesome. Her writing combined with the voice actor make her feel so damn real and likeable. When I got her second “upgrade” to her heart, the options I had included a hug, and it was so fulfilling. I wanted to hug her. I was smiling from it for a while after I’d moved on.

For real, her voice actor did a phenomenal job on making the character feel real and relatable. The writers definitely did their job well with her, but the performance takes it to another level. I agree with you, top game character ever for me, even over Minsc lol.

I’ve heard that shadowheart is really finicky to romance.

I unexpectedly got minthara started by random clicking after a the raid playing the durge origin as a side thing when I need a break from act 3’s tangled web of arcs. It was… less romance than soft core porn, but if there’s good development in act 2/3 it could be really interesting.

Astarion is so high maintenance lol. I bet it’s a wild ride getting him from A to B

Karlach though, that’s my homie. If she was real, I would hang with her any time. I can imagine her romance story being very sweet

There’s low resource games that would do fine. You aren’t gonna be able to run a graphics intense FPS, but I’ve seen people run Minecraft, stardew valley and the like on minis.

I just wish Wheaton had gotten better scripts to work with.

He put in the work, and turned in reliable performances across the years of the show, but an actor can only do so much. Wesley was so spottily written that nobody could have made the character entirely likable to the fan base as a whole.

Turtle vagina

Ngl, that would likely be me.

Not just because I like chickens, though that’s a factor.

In my neighborhood, if you go the posted speed limit going one direction in the section that my house is on, you’d be going slow enough to be able to correct and not hit an animal. Going the other direction, as long as you don’t slam the pedal down, it’s the same.

So anyone hitting any critter with the possible exception of squirrels is 99.9~% likely to be doing something they shouldn’t. I’ve gotten in altercations about it before because we have not just a lot of pets in the area, but kids. So some fucking moron is going to hear about out when they’re showing exactly how fucking stupid they are.

But, I also happen to kinda know all the neighborhood chickens. Not necessarily on a first name, come her for petting basis, but I know which birds live where. Since I also have my own, and would gladly curb stomp any motherfucker that fucked with them, I would likely at least lay hands on a motherfucker for killing any of the neighborhood birds by being a moron. I’m old, but my tolerance for fuckery like that keeps getting lower as I age.

Accidents do happen, but some jackass trying to be all badass by speeding in a residential area can fuck right off and die. And yes, I’m talking about you, Robert, you absolute prat. Jackass. Done told you once. Fuckwit.

Anyway, yeah, chances are high the lady was justified as long as the dude is still alive