I've been thinking about getting into cast iron cooking. I need a new skillet, and I've seen recommendations for cast iron, but some things seem daunting:

• Seasoning. How bad is it really? Did you purchase a pre-seasoned pan and just cook with it? Do you re-season occasionally? How often? What oil do you use? What is your process?
• Cleaning. How do you clean your skillet? Soap and water? How do you know when you are done cleaning? What materials do you use?
• Unknowns. What did you not know until you started cooking with cast iron? Any surprise benefits/costs?

Have any of you used cast iron, then returned to Teflon or stainless steel after being disappointed in the experience? What are the biggest differences between cooking with cast iron and other materials?

Considering that non-stick manufacturing poses environmental risks, and iron may provide a net positive effect for folks needing more iron in their diet, it seems like this is a natural way to go.

I recently have been reconnecting with something from my childhood: the Krosmoz universe! Anyone who was a kid in France between 2004 and 2012 or so either grew up on it or is at least a little bit familiar with it. Most people outside of the country, if they know of it, generally only know of Dofus, the first of their three (actually five (actually eight if you count the dead ones)) tactical MMORPGs, or the derived TV animated series Wakfu, which was picked up on Netflix at one point. But it's massive here. Even today, they're still quite popular and perpetually developed.

As a medium, video games are not generally so closely tied to countries; more than half of their history has been during the era of globalization and the Internet. Even in the past, when you could only buy games in person in a store, people's minds everywhere were nonetheless on games from overseas. Today, games made in Sweden or Morocco have lived on the same storefronts as games made in Venezuela and Australia for a good while, and I'd bet most people don't even think about where the people who make the games they play come from.

I personally think this is a great thing! But the fact that there's something like Krosmoz, that's so unusually localized to one place, makes me curious to know if there's more; and if there is, I want to know what's unique about it, and what it says about its players and makers, too.

I've asked this before on reddit, and I remember being told about Metin2, an originally Korean MMO that was so popular in Eastern Europe that even a decade after the original Korean and US servers were shut down, players from those countries are still updating the game and keeping it alive. This is a different situation from Krosmoz but another fascinating one. It's the kind of thing I wanna know about.

This is an invitation to yap, if you'll oblige me. Do you have anything like that where you're from? A game or game franchise that only people of your culture know, and that you want everyone else to know about? I wanna hear about it!

I posted this once and immediately deleted it to make it shorter. I did not really succeed. Please don't sue me!

Inspired by the recurring topic every Steam sale over at /r/GameDealsMeta:

• What are some lesser-known or overlooked Steam games that you recommend?

• Are there any genres you’d like hidden gem recommendations for?

If you're interested in previous Hidden Gem topics, you can find them here.

For popular recommendations and general purpose sale discussion, please use the main Steam sale topic.

Optional: Feel free to categorize your recommendations by number of reviews (as a proxy for popularity)

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

Some people here know me, I’ve been open about having been a virgin until I was 24. I didn’t really think about this too much before I had sex, in that there are various skill levels. The person that I lost my virginity to was my age, but she had been having sex for over 10 years. We had a fling for a few months, so for a while she was the only person I was having sex with. I had nothing else to compare that to, and so to me what I was doing with her was the baseline of what sex was. It wasn’t until I started having sex with other people that I realized that she was actually significantly skilled in the area, and was quite a bit above average. So in that way, I lucked out on how I was introduced to sex.

Subsequent sexual partners have been lackluster. For a bit I thought, okay maybe they’re just not experienced even if they are quite a bit older than me and have been supposedly having sex for twenty some odd years. But after more people who claimed to have experience came my way, I started to think okay maybe experience doesn’t matter if you’re just doing the same thing over and over.

I’m going to try to describe what the issue is. Out of the partners that weren’t particularly good in bed, it feels like they can’t move their bodies very well. Like they’re stiff, movement isn’t fluid and they don’t have strong energy, there’s no vigor to them. I came to a theory that if someone can’t dance, that that translates into their performance. Because I think being able to dance, suggests that you have rhythm control, body control, and more explicitly hip control. As well as endurance. The first girl was someone that could dance, so we would dance together a lot and I think my dance ability translated to me being pretty good despite my inexperience. But with women that can’t dance I often find that they struggle to keep up with anything I’m trying to do. Like if I’m trying to set a rhythm they fight against the rhythm, not on purpose, it’s like dancing they just don’t have the rhythm.

Another thing is I last a really long time, like minimum an hour. The first girl was able to keep up with me even as the sessions went on for over two hours. A lot of other women I’ve been with are done by the 20 minute mark. Which to me is just like getting started.

So far this sounds like I’m bragging. But the point I’m getting at is that, I was not physically attracted to the girl I lost my virginity to. While we got along, generally, I also wasn’t super into her personality nor was there that much of an emotional connection from my side anyway. And since then I’ve been with women that I am both physically and mentally attracted to, but because of our lack of sexual compatibility I’m really not as keen on seeing them.

This kind of came into my brain, when I was looking at Reddit posts where people were discussing the former partners of both Ariana Grande and Sabrina Carpenter. Both singers are known for dating unattractive men. So when I saw a user say that, if you listen to how many of their songs are about sex, they likely prioritize sexual compatibility/chemistry above anything else. Which made me realize I think I do too. Maybe it’s just because sex is still a relatively new thing for me, and it’ll dissipate as time goes on. But, I wanted to know if other people were in the same boat.

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