Nah, honestly anything better than the bottom-of-the-barrel acrylics is going to add up quickly when you buy enough of it to make something like a sweater. If you want to use natural fibers (wool, cotton, I’ll take bamboo too) that’s a large jump in price, even if you’re not getting anything too fancy. And I feel like if I’m going to spend months hand-knitting a sweater, I don’t want to end up with something that’s all plastic and will degrade in a year.

I do also have some fancy hand-dyed yarns that were properly expensive and these ones are indeed 100% on me :P But they’re not really what I’m talking about here.

Crocheting/knitting is cheap to try out but once you really get into it (and start worrying about yarn quality and so on), the money pit opens. Ask me how I know.

Yup, Nintendo in particular has a bad habit of just sitting on a bunch of old games, keeping them unavailable on modern system despite the fact that there’s clearly a market for it. And occasionally they’ll reach into their great big bag of classics, pull something out and say “we’ve done the bare minimum so you can run this on our current gen system (Switch), that will be 50 dollars for a 20 year old game”.

After watching a mad scientist/chemistry youtuber NileRed trying to cook, I think that those skill sets are completely separate and may, in fact, be mutually exclusive to some degree.

As someone from Europe (Poland to be more specific), I’d recommend to not worry about it. Really. Learn to say “hello”, “where’s the bathroom”, and “thank you”, the rest you’ll handle in English or use improvised sign language if the person you’re talking to doesn’t speak it (which at least in Poland gets rarer and rarer with every year). Or google translate, automatic translators work decently well for basic things.

Nobody will mind - honestly, if you were to actually learn Polish most of us would react with “that’s really impressive but why bother???” You’ll get the same reaction in most other countries except for maybe Spain/Germany/France, they’ll be more used to people knowing their languages, but at least in Germany they’ll still probably try to talk to you in English.

Of course if you want to learn for fun then go ahead, but there’s no need to put too much pressure on yourself, I’ve been all over Europe knowing only English, Polish and how to read cyrillic script and it was more than enough. English gets you 90% of the way there.

I don’t know what specific countries you’ll be going through, but focusing on French (if going through France), German (in Germany + a bunch of neighbouring countries + a lot of old people who don’t speak English in Western Europe will know it), and some slavic language (probably Polish and/or Russian, Polish will get you through Poland and with effort through Czech Republic, Slovakia, and parts of Ukraine, Russian is useful because, as with German in Western Europe, a lot of older people in former Soviet republics will speak it, but bear in mind it has some negative connotations) should cover the basics.

If you have any questions feel free to message me!

I use mine on a sofa (for gaming, even!), but I get around the issue a bit by having a pad under the laptop. It’s literally just a hard plastic board with a beanbag attached underneath, I think I got it from IKEA. It isolates the laptop a bit from dust and improves airflow + lets it heat up without burning my knees + the one I have is just large enough that I can also use my wireless mouse on it when I push my laptop to the left.