u/LawIll1453

most of my gaming time lately comes in pretty random chunks, so i've stopped trying to play games that need a full evening.

i usually have some time while meal prep is going on, so i've been downloading a few games ahead of time and testing what works well on my M2 Air. older Windows stuff goes through CrossOver, and native Mac versions get priority when they're available

turn-based and pause-friendly games have been working much better for me than anything that expects a two-hour uninterrupted session. Into the Breach was basically perfect for this. i've also gone through BG3 already, so i'm trying not to immediately start another 100-hour RPG.

the annoying part is finding games that fit the schedule without spending half the available time messing around with compatibility settings

for people who mostly play in short sessions, what actually works for you on Mac?

do you stick with native games, keep a few CrossOver bottles set up, use Apple Arcade for shorter stuff, or are there particular games that just happen to work really well when you might have to quit at any moment?

mostly looking for things that are easy to pick up, play for 20–60 minutes, and come back to later without losing the thread

Getting to the offer stage is one thing. Knowing what to ask for when your background is a patchwork of part time hours and contract gigs is a completely different problem, and nobody really talks about the mechanics of it.

The standard advice is to research market rates, know your worth, all that. But market rate data assumes you are comparing yourself to someone with a clean full time trajectory. When you have been doing contract HR work alongside a separate part time job, your comp history looks nothing like a benchmark and the numbers feel impossible to anchor to.

What trips me up is whether to frame my ask around what the full time version of this role pays, which feels like the right move but also slightly bold given my background, or whether to let my comp history do the talking, which would probably sell me short. One hiring manager asked me to walk through my total earnings across both roles and I honestly did not know how to present that without it sounding complicated.

For people who came from nontraditional or mixed work histories, how did you actually handle the salary conversation? Did you lead with the full time market rate from the start or did you build toward it differently? I want the real version of how that conversation went, not the polished answer.

Three years of contract HR work and I still brace myself every time someone asks how long I've been in HR. The projects were real, the problems were real, the policies I wrote are still being used at companies I no longer work with. But because none of it comes with a single employer's name and a clean start and end date, I never fully know how it lands on the other side of the table.

The frustrating part is that freelance forces you to contextswitch constantly, figure things out without a team, and deliver without handholding. That should count for something. But I've had interviews where the moment I explain the contract structure, the energy shifts and I can feel them recalculating.

What I genuinely can't figure out is whether this is a framing problem on my end or whether some hiring managers just have a ceiling on how much they trust nontraditional work history regardless of what you show them. And if it is a framing problem, what actually fixed it for you. Not the advice about confidence or owning your story, but the specific thing you said or changed in how you presented it that made the difference in a real interview.

Has anyone successfully made the jump from mostly freelance to a fulltime HR role without it being a whole explanation every single time?

My starter discard situation got out of hand a few weeks ago. I had a jar in the fridge that was getting embarrassingly full and I told myself I'd just knock out some crackers to deal with it. That turned into me spending a Saturday afternoon going down a rabbit hole of discard recipes and now I have strong opinions about discard pancakes versus discard flatbread, which was not on my bingo card for this year.

What I'm actually curious about is whether other people keep discard baking as a side thing or if it ended up reshaping how they bake overall. For me it started purely practical, like a meal prep mentality where nothing gets wasted, but it changed how I think about my starter now. I feed it more deliberately because I'm thinking about what I want to make with the discard that week.

The crackers were genuinely great by the way. Thin, a little tangy, very easy. I used about 200g discard, 30g olive oil, salt, and whatever seeds were in my pantry. Rolled flat, scored into rough squares, baked at 375F for around 18 to 20 minutes until crispy. No shaping anxiety, no dutch oven, no bulk ferment math. Kind of refreshing after a loaf that humbled me last week.

Curious if anyone else plans their discard use in advance or if it's always reactive.

My weeks are genuinely unpredictable. Some days I'm at the dental office at 7am, some days I'm home working contracts on my laptop until noon, and that makes planning a bulk ferment feel like a gamble. I've had loaves go way too far because a shift ran long and I forgot dough was sitting on the counter.

I meal prep everything else in my life so I figured sourdough would fit right in. It mostly does, but timing is the part that keeps tripping me up. I started doing cold retard overnight more out of desperation than strategy, and it honestly saved me. Now I basically mix and shape the night before and bake when I actually have a window the next morning.

What I'm still not consistent on is bulk time. My kitchen runs warm in the afternoon and cool in the morning, so the same recipe behaves differently depending on when I start it. I've been going by dough feel rather than the clock and that's getting better, but I'm not fully there yet.

Curious how other people with patchy schedules handle this. Do you just lean hard into cold ferment for everything, or have you found a rhythm that accounts for a kitchen that changes temp during the day?

Flour: bread flour 450g, water 325g, starter 90g, salt 9g. Stretch and folds every 30 min for 2 hours, bulk 5 to 6 hours at around 74F, cold retard 10 to 12 hours, baked at 500F in a dutch oven.