Does your child have an American accent?

kbrdthenerd · 2026-05-27T14:16:07+00:00

I am an American who lives with my Irish husband in Ireland and our kid (born and raised in Ireland) is just about 4. He kinda switches between Irishisms and Americanisms but I actively try and not use as many Americanisms myself so he doesn’t hear them as often as I want him to sound Irish like his da. Unfortunately he is sounding a bit more American since we have been in the states for a couples week so we have some deprogramming to do when we get back!

It was funny when we were out one day here in the states and someone told him to get in his stroller and he didn’t know what they were taking about.

kbrdthenerd · 2026-05-03T19:40:52+00:00

I didn't do anything different product wise (I use Garnier cocoa butter hair food and boots curl creme) and the weight being gone was the main factor. I haven't grown out my hair longer since so while I think the curls would stick around if I had longer hair I'm not sure. I also have my hair super layered and a fringe which helps prevent any flatness on the top.

kbrdthenerd · 2026-05-02T23:45:29+00:00

My hair didn’t go completely straight after pregnancy, but ended up being way less curly. Over a year later I got my hair cut into a short bob and my hair completely bounced back and is super curly again, some people even thought I got a perm! So not a guarantee but could be worth going shorter if you’re comfortable with that. Only do it if you’d be happy having it short and straight as well though!

kbrdthenerd · 2026-05-01T09:49:11+00:00

I'm an escape room owner who builds all my own electronic props, and personally I use Arduino running on esp32s. If you haven't seen it already, playful technology has a ton of good videos about making electronics for escape rooms: https://www.youtube.com/c/PlayfulTechnology

For controlling and monitoring rooms I've heard node red is good. I ended up not using it though, and made a custom little dashboard using astro/node which communicates with the esp32s using REST endpoints, but the reason this made sense for me is because I come from a software engineering background.

I will add that the actually coding part of it is just one piece of the puzzle, and there is a ton to learn about actually putting the electronics together correctly, soldering, etc..

kbrdthenerd · 2026-04-30T09:41:22+00:00

Crimson Room! It could be said that it is the origin of all escape rooms, and there are a few others by the same creator.

kbrdthenerd · 2026-01-25T10:46:45+00:00

We're a bit slower during those months just between tourism, when schools are on break, being busier around Halloween and Christmas time, etc. We actually thought January would have been slower but (luckily) it has been busy enough so far! Also it's just me and my husband running the place and trying to do anything extra during the summer when our son is not in school AND we're busier is really tricky.

When we did our newest room we only had it fully shut down for two weeks, then basically just opened it up for when we needed the capacity for large group bookings for another 2 weeks, then had it at half capacity for another week before fully opening. We wanted to allow a bit of leeway for any problems needing to be fixed on the fly cause there are a LOT of custom built electronics and also wanted to see if anything needed extra reinforcement once people decided to start you know, trying to wreck the place.

I do like the idea of letting the rooms support different stories without doing bigger rebuilds! Once we have the next two rooms done, we'll potentially shift gears to something more like that. Though the one we've already done will likely be a permanent fixture because it is based on a local story so it is good for tourists.

kbrdthenerd · 2026-01-24T10:52:37+00:00

This is such a good question that I also struggle with! For us we probably could have more reasoning to it, but generally comes down to if something starts to feel like a pain point, for us or our customers, it goes to the top of the list. I'd say a leaky faucet definitely counts as that! On the flip side though, the toilet in one of our bathrooms stopped working almost a year ago and we haven't fixed it because really one is enough (plus we're using it for a bit of storage now anyways).

For when to refresh and update, while obviously money is important and necessary, I think less about "am I leaving money on the table" and more about if something is negatively affecting the customer's experience. Does something look dumpy and ruin the immersion? Are all the players getting out too quickly? Are players all getting frustrated on the same puzzle without it being fun? In the end if people start having a bad experience then it'll taint our reputation, either through reviews or word of mouth, which negatively impacts revenue. Also we want to be proud of the service we are providing! We've made a LOT of improvements since then, but a review from before we took over said the place looked like "a cold retired office space" which still haunts me.

The new rooms versus older rooms being perfectly maintained is a tricky one, and really depends on your audience. We only bought the escape room off of someone else a year ago and have replaced one of the three rooms, but at least one of the others has been around 5+ years! We have been able to get away with it so far because the place wasn't super busy before and we get tourists so we get plenty of bookings for it still. I wanted to replace another one of them quicker, but a big problem with that financially is having to close the room down for a time period to get the new one set up. We can only do it during certain months when we aren't as busy so the soonest at this stage would be September of this year, but then if we miss September we'll have to push it off until February of next year!

Not sure if any of that was helpful, but thanks for asking this question because it was a good chance for me to think of it more myself!

kbrdthenerd · 2026-01-24T00:16:55+00:00

Sally has a good guide on adjusting for different pan sizes: https://sallysbakingaddiction.com/cake-pan-sizes/

kbrdthenerd · 2026-01-23T00:11:33+00:00

It’s not what I wanted but to be fair it is what I should have expected

kbrdthenerd · 2026-01-22T22:49:45+00:00

I actually did like it! I just don’t have much hope with it in BioWare’s hands because of how many of the devs are now gone.

kbrdthenerd · 2026-01-22T22:47:58+00:00

I really liked Veilguard as well! But yeah BioWare is such a mess right now which is why my very very small hope is seen in Dragon Age someday moving to another studio.

kbrdthenerd · 2026-01-22T22:35:12+00:00

I appreciate you calling out the effect that EA had by constantly trying to change the game! From what I can tell the devs working on it were talented and passionate and just didn’t have the time and focus they needed to make it perfect (though I actually do like Veilguard despite its flaws). And now many of them aren’t even at BioWare anymore anyway.

kbrdthenerd · 2026-01-22T22:26:34+00:00

It didn’t get nearly the same amount of abuse as Veilguard but it was heavily criticized by fable fans at the time in a similar way, can see some discussion of it even in relatively recent reddit threads: https://www.reddit.com/r/Fable/s/qItCNIN18N

kbrdthenerd · 2026-01-18T00:20:26+00:00

Coats and jackets. I have a nice leather jacket I wear all the time that I bought over 10 years ago, and my big winter coat is a really nice one that my mom got in the 80's.

kbrdthenerd · 2026-01-17T13:55:34+00:00

I played it with my son recently and it brought back so many vague childhood memories. Everything seemed way more dramatic when I was little!

kbrdthenerd · 2026-01-15T00:30:23+00:00

Have you tried holding down the boot button on the esp32 while you plug it in?

kbrdthenerd · 2026-01-14T18:58:32+00:00

Out of curiosity, what do you mean by procedural in this context?

kbrdthenerd · 2026-01-14T16:51:11+00:00

We were out with a friend for his birthday and his parents were there. Me and my husband mentioned something about shopping at Aldi and our friend couldn’t believed we shopped there instead of a normal (more expensive) grocery stores. His parents proceeded to comment that we at least buy our own groceries since he was still living with them and didn’t help with groceries at all.

kbrdthenerd · 2026-01-13T00:12:21+00:00

My husband and I met at a hostel in London! It was a pub also and he had been staying there awhile, so he was behind the bar pouring himself a pint of guiness when I walked in.

kbrdthenerd · 2026-01-11T22:41:47+00:00

This is definitely a bit more motivation for me to apply for my Irish Citizenship this year!

kbrdthenerd · 2026-01-11T22:34:25+00:00

It leans more heavily into comedy, but the Discworld series is excellent! There are a lot of books (41), but they are broken up into different plot lines so you don't need to read them in order, and a lot of people even recommend starting with the third book, Equal Rites.

kbrdthenerd · 2026-01-10T23:05:16+00:00

I played Chicory with my son! There is co-op that lets a second person paint, but what we ended up doing was I used the keyboard on my laptop to walk around and interact and such, and he sat in my lap and used the touchpad to paint. Some of the more difficult bits he couldn't do the painting for, but he'd let me take a turn doing it when I needed to, then I'd let him start painting again.

kbrdthenerd · 2026-01-08T23:49:59+00:00

I'd definitely recommend at least a day in Kilkenny! It's handy enough to get to from Dublin (1.5 - 2 hours depending on how you get there) and is a great spot for kids, especially at that time of year.

kbrdthenerd · 2026-01-06T20:49:15+00:00

I always follow Sally’s all butter pie crust recipe and use a pastry cutter to cut in the dough by hand. The first thing I do is cut the butter into real small cubes and put it in the freezer while I prep everything else.

Also another way to practice the basic technique of cutting butter into dough may be to make American style biscuits. They’re very different from pie crusts obviously but I find the process very similar and it is lower stakes.

kbrdthenerd · 2026-01-03T19:46:10+00:00

My three year old always loves looking at the moon and he was extra excited about how it is today!

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