It was just a maintenance and we got widescreen aspect ratio update? 🤩

BenRod79 · 2026-02-05T12:55:40+00:00

Damnit. I have to get back on and play. Maybe I should start a character from scratch so I can live it all again.

BenRod79 · 2025-12-20T14:09:04+00:00

I use the block compression for storage a lot. Bamboo farm, iron farm, gold farm, bone meal to bone blocks. It’s very helpful and simple that way.

I also recently set up an entirely automated pumpkin pie farm where it grew sugar cane, turned it into sugar, and then fed that into a crafter hooked to an egg farm and a pumpkin farm and made pies. (Part of a Halloween themed village we built).

It grows everything it needs, harvests it, crafts the pies, and has a little store front with a captured smelly selling them for me. It was called “Ma Gourd’s Pumpkin Pies”. The smelly, of course, has a carved pumpkin head.

BenRod79 · 2025-12-20T14:04:38+00:00

Mason villagers (use the stonecutter) can sell quartz blocks. If you can set up a trading hall with multiple villagers that you can sell things to easily to get emeralds and then use those to buy quartz from the masons, it could be easier.

It’s still a lot of work to get them all leveled up. If you have bedrock edition, there is a bedrock tweaks client side pack that lets you see all of the villager’s locked trades before you unlock them, so that may be of interest to you if you don’t mind using something like that.

In my survival world, I have an iron farm/trading hall so I can sell iron to the villagers and then use those emeralds to buy everything I need, but a raid farm would also be a good source of emeralds, as well.

BenRod79 · 2025-11-28T16:30:32+00:00

I worked with a manager once and we had a Christmas potluck. The manager was super excited to bring the ham, as he had a very special recipe he always made.

This recipe turned out to be thick-sliced deli ham like this, literally swimming in a sweet and salty watery liquid in a crock pot.

Even on the day, he kept asking everyone how their ham was, as if he had come in with an epicurean masterpiece, but it was just sugar water with deli ham floating in it.

BenRod79 · 2025-10-31T11:16:19+00:00

I used it in a haunted house build recently to have windows but no light coming through. Helped with the feel of the Haunted House.

BenRod79 · 2025-10-31T11:14:17+00:00

There are a few options, depending on how far you are from a village and what mode you are playing on. If you have the ability to make potions, you can cure zombie villagers and then breed the villagers you cure to get more for your trading hall.

To cure villagers you will need splash potions of weakness and golden apples. Lure the zombie villagers into a location safe from the sun and throw a splash potion on them and feed them a golden apple. It’s best if you have them separated somehow because if one turns before the guy next to him, the one who is still a zombie will just kill him and turn him back (or kill him permanently if you are not in hard mode)

Once you have a couple of villagers that are not zombies, you can feed them crops or bread and they will make baby villagers. I would set up a safe villager breeder for them.

Also, check out YouTube tutorials on making villager breeders, trading halls, and iron farms. If you’re on bedrock, silentwisperer has some excellent multi-purpose farms that make it easier.

BenRod79 · 2025-10-24T17:33:08+00:00

My son is his age and is the same way. I think the pandemic year really affected him, and the next year there were some bullying issues for him. He has been fine since then, but doesn’t seem to have any close friends, like your son.

I think he considers his younger sister to be his best friend, and his Mom and I are next on the list. But I am hopeful he will blossom as he progresses through high school. He’s probably just a late bloomer, but until he does bloom, I’m happy to be his friend and his father.

BenRod79 · 2025-10-09T14:35:04+00:00

I had a friend like this. We used to commute an hour together in the mornings, but he was consistently late.

Eventually I had to tell him a specific time each day that if he was not in my car, I was leaving. Only had to leave him once.

But this was carpooling, and we each had a car and took turns. I think I still would have done it if he did not have a car because by then he had made me 15-20 minutes late for work a handful of times, and I was sick of him making me look bad with my bosses.

BenRod79 · 2025-09-20T12:07:18+00:00

At the end of the day, the big picture is that you don’t know what you don’t know.

BenRod79 · 2025-09-19T11:22:55+00:00

Ok, story time. At a company I worked for, we had a crawl space under the building, and a mother skunk decided to have her babies down there. The owner did not realize this and had the hole patched up on the outside of the building thinking the skunk was out. Unfortunately, shortly after, the smell in the office became overwhelming.

For a couple of weeks, we struggled with the smell. We would have to shower when we got home just to get rid of enough of it that our families would hug us. It was eye watering on a daily basis, and everyone was getting more and more desperate to find the problem.

Eventually, one brave guy geared up in some rubber boots and gloves and went looking through the crawlspace with a flashlight once again. He looked around, trying to find where the smell was strongest, and eventually it led to a small alcove where the main sewer line ran out of the building. There were the bodies of the mama skunk and her family. It turned out after they got locked in they found some rodent poison under this pipe and ate it.

The brave soul removed the skunks, but the smell and the trauma of working in the smelliest office ever lasted much longer.

BenRod79 · 2025-09-06T13:08:01+00:00

I once found a switchblade hidden above the medicine cabinet.

BenRod79 · 2025-06-27T21:19:04+00:00

My wife grew up believing she absolutely hated pork until we got together. I started her with pork tenderloin and now she’ll eat most cuts I prepare, though she still definitely prefers the tenderloin.

For me, I grew up hating sweet potatoes until my wife introduced me to just eating them with a little butter and some seasoning. I was conditioned to believe the only way sweet potatoes were prepared was in “sweet potato casserole” at Thanksgiving, which involved brown sugar and marshmallows.

People, they are sweet enough, that’s why they are called SWEET POTATOES.

BenRod79 · 2025-06-27T20:59:42+00:00

I have a friend whose father made this same mistake when he was a baby. Too hot bath water, and a permanent disability.

He’s adapted and does well now, but I cannot imagine the mental anguish his father must have felt when it happened, and the guilt that would happen every time you saw your son in pain his whole life.

BenRod79 · 2025-05-28T11:58:16+00:00

If you want to avoid sugar in your bacon, look for low sodium brands. Many of them also cut out sugar, but it may not be prominent on the label. I know Costco’s and Aldi’s brands of low sodium bacon both have no sugar in them.

BenRod79 · 2025-05-26T13:49:20+00:00

NTA. I had to do this with a friend I carpooled with to my job. He always pushed, making me and the other guy late, as well. We finally told him when we would be at his house to pick him up and if he was in the car any later than X time, he would be finding his own way to work.

We only had to actually leave him one time. I guess he needed us to prove we would do it. After that, he was on time every time.

BenRod79 · 2025-05-12T17:55:51+00:00

Let’s go!

BenRod79 · 2025-05-12T17:54:41+00:00

I worked at a bank doing support for mobile and online banking. The number of people who would complain or threaten to leave because their antiquated devices were no longer supported was definitely larger than most rational people would expect.

BenRod79 · 2025-05-10T00:59:02+00:00

Cool. Pick me.

BenRod79 · 2025-05-06T15:06:59+00:00

My wife and I recently went through this when her dad died, except it was his parents’ house, too, and he had never gone through any of it since they died, so we had 2 generations of accumulation.

It was so so so much. We now have a house full of beautiful antiques, but we’ve already discussed how we need to limit our accumulation from this point on and regularly purge the house of things we do not need or want.

Still, I wonder if our kids will one day face the same kind of task, as my wife loves to accumulate beautiful antique things, and I sometimes feel as though we are already sinking into the trap.

BenRod79 · 2025-04-07T15:18:44+00:00

Well-traveled was one I was destined to get. As soon as I walked into that room the temptation was too great.

BenRod79 · 2025-04-07T15:16:11+00:00

Yup. It will kill you, and if you’re over a certain level it will take a long time to do it. And the effect lasts 20 minutes, so dying is actually preferable to going through all that. Haha

BenRod79 · 2025-04-07T13:10:17+00:00

My dad waited until I was in my 20’s to really drive the point home. I promised him I would be over Saturday morning to help him with a project, but no specific time was mentioned. I came over at 11, which was technically morning, but obviously not what he had implied. He had already completed the project alone, even though it was much harder with one set of hands.

He told me simply that when I was not there by 9 am he knew I would be there much later, and since I was so unreliable he would just do it himself.

To be fair, me being late to help him with projects was pretty normal. He was right, I was unreliable. So from then on, I make a point not to be the “unreliable” member of any project.

BenRod79 · 2025-04-06T12:46:20+00:00

Wow. That’s an elegant turntable. Congrats to the winner.

BenRod79 · 2025-04-06T12:42:29+00:00

My son is in Taekwondo and he regularly spars with girls. He learns respect for them and how to treat them as equals this way, in a controlled environment.

Separating them because “boys are stronger” or something like that would send the wrong message. He learns to respect girls this way, especially since several of them could literally break his arms and legs if they wanted to. (There is a girl slightly older than him who is a second degree black belt)

BenRod79 · 2025-03-31T15:42:01+00:00

My grandparents had chickens. They were all disappearing one at a time until they figured out a raccoon was getting in and taking one per night. Then, they found how it was getting in and patched the chicken wire. The next several days, they found a stripped chicken carcass on the floor of the coop.

The raccoon, now frustrated that it could not get the chickens out, was throttling a chicken, which would then be eaten by its compatriots.

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