I wouldn’t have thought so either, but here we are…

The two yotes…

Dorfromantik: this is co-op tile placement game, with some interesting strategy. With each new game, you’ll unlock additional tiles that will let you score more points for the next time. This won Spiel des Jahres in 2023.

Camel Up: while not exactly a co-op, players place bets on a camel race. It’s a fun party-ish game that feels more like the board against the players.

Any of the Zombicide games (including Massive Darkness): these games are lighter dungeon crawler type of a board game. While there’s some strategy, it’s mostly about killing enemies, rolling dice, and getting loot.

Gloomhaven: a deck building, dungeon crawler, this game is much more complex than Zombicide. It’s rated #4 on BBG. Be ready for a long set up, though!

Kingdom Death: Monster: I have never gotten this game to the table, but it’s a boss battle, dice rolling, campaign kind of game, where you can loot the bosses and craft gear.

All I can think of is one of Mr. Lovenstein’s comics… we’re finally free now!

Also, you may find a local store or boutique that sells quirky items. One popular brand that they’ll often carry is Fred, they make lots of ridiculous items. Other brands that I’ve found over the years are Larissa Loden, and Blue Q

Ah, thank you! I don’t know how I missed that meme!

Depending on the audience, there are cute little plush things, Giant Microbes, which have a line of sexual transmitted diseases. If you get one for an SO, they can say, “13esq gave me chlamydia for Christmas…”

Other good joke gifts can come from any inside joke that you may have with your SO, so these are very situational. At one point, I had joked that my SO was a sugar mama because she was paying for something expensive for us. I later got her a t-shirt for a candy called Sugar Mama.

On one date, we were the only ones dining at an outside patio at a nicer Italian restaurant. We had ordered wood fire pizzas. Anyway, a very large rat came to visit the patio, and we had joked about it at the time, even naming the rat. I later gave her an ornament of a felt rat holding a pizza slice (which is apparently a thing).

I can’t think of any others right now, but I love giving little joke gifts to people along with real ones.

Thank you for posting this! I immediately thought of this public announcement of sorts when I read the question.

That’s disappointing

Not to mention, there’s also a lot of human slop.

Stepson might involve some kind of adoption, or, I don’t know… My dad remarried when I was in my late teens, but I didn’t see him much. His wife has never been referred to as my stepmom, etc, but my situation might be different due to a lack of closeness. The OP clearly has some kind of relationship with the kid since they are going to pick them up, but I can see how they might not have that kind of label.

I’d also be interesting in knowing if people have in-unit laundry. Being in an apartment complex where there’s 3 washers for around 50 people, it’s not feasible to wash towels after every use. That also sounds very wasteful!

I shower every other day, and change the towels after a couple of weeks. The schedule is based on when they can get washed (laundry gets done every two weeks for clothes, and so it’s based on the availability of doing extra loads), or at the first sign of a smell or stain.

Bedding gets changed on a monthly basis for the same reasons, again, unless there’s a smell or stain.

Noting a correction is part of a larger scope of annotating something. From Wikipedia:

There is also a two-thousand-year-old character used by Aristarchus of Samothrace called the asteriskos, ※, which he used when proofreading Homeric poetry to mark lines that were duplicated. Origen is known to have also used the asteriskos to mark missing Hebrew lines from his Hexapla. The asterisk evolved in shape over time, but its meaning as a symbol used to correct defects remained.

In the Middle Ages, the asterisk was used to emphasize a particular part of text, often linking those parts of the text to a marginal comment. However, an asterisk was not always used.

Aristarchus of Samothrace was from c. 220 – c. 143 BC, so it’s been used for notation since at least then!

Would its impact create a solar flare? And if that flare was hurtling towards Earth, would it be more devastating than other solar storms we normally see?