Sephora

I had to look at the board; yes! I should have put on some music in the background and I'd have bingo, @Samtian. I should be more attentive to what activities I'm marking off in relation to the board, I guess, lol! I haven't been to coffee shops as often so the ginger spritzer was a new one - it was okay, I can see myself trying to recreate it at home, but changing things up a little bit. 😆 Okay, let me see if I can explain Connections. Essentially, every day a board is posted with 16 words on it. The 16 words contain 4 groups of 4 words that are somehow grouped together, each group has a different level of difficulty. The goal is to figure out which 4 words are grouped togehter. The New York Times releases a different Connections game every day at midnight. There are sites that have previous games you can play. I included an older game in the spoiler to better demonstrate how to play the game. The basic set up is generally the same though there are some differences between how it shows up on the NYT (vs whatever company is posting the older games). SpoilerUsing the game from January 1, 2025 (figured that goes back far enough that people who are currently playing it have already completed that one. If you have not and were planning on doing that one, stop now and do not look ahead. I'll leave some space so answers don't get spoiled ...***This is how the January 1, 2025 Connections board looked like- So, 16 words arranged in four rows and four columns- You're allowed a certain number of mistakes - 4- Shuffle - you can shuffle the placement of the words in case seeing them positioned differently on the board might help with your word association. - Deselect All - if you picked / selected / highlighted a few words but want to deselect all of them at once, you can press this tab- Submit - when you have grouped 4 words together that you think belong together, you select / hit "Submit" and see whether your proposed grouping is correct. Okay, let's play.Here, I've selected "Glowstick" + "Firefly" + "Radium" + "Aurora" with the idea that these 4 words should be grouped together because they are things that glow. After hitting "Submit", this is what appears on the screen (for the game as shown on the site that has past NYT Connections game - NOTE: this shows up a little differently on the actual New York Times site / app) - So, those 4 words were correctly grouped together - "Things That Luminesce". I mentioned there are 4 categories / groupings for each game, each with a different level of difficulty. The groups and level of difficulty are by color. My recollection is that the degree of difficulty is, by color, from easiest to hardest - yellow (easiest), blue, green, purple (most challenging), but I think that depends on the player. There are times when I cannot figure out the yellow grouping or when I can only figure out the yellow group by figuring out all the other ones first. lolAlright, now that the first group of 4 has been correctly identified, onto finding out another group of 4.This time, I chose "Earthworm" + "Slug" + "Salamander" + "Eel" and grouping them as having in common that they are animals or "slippery little suckers" 🤣 Yes, @Samtian, this is how my brain works sometimes. hahaha! I hit "Submit" and this is what pops up - "Slimy Animals" Fine. I suppose that is more eloquently stated but "slippery little suckers" seemed just right to me. 😂 Moving on to the next group of four, but before doing so, I selected "Shuffle" and it moved the remaining words around so that they now show up like this - Hmmmmm ...Going with "Windmill" + "Clog" + "Tulip" + "Canal" being things from or known as being connected with The Netherlands or the Dutch. Hit "Submit" and ...Dutch Symbols. Got it.That leaves, by process of elimination, the last 4 words to be grouped and submitted together - "Raindrop" + "Gatecrash" + Skydive" + "Waterfall" but I don't know what the association of those words would be. Final resultsSpoilerThat last one, the purple category, the most challenging, what they have in common is that the ending of each of the four words is synonymous with "plunge". Yeah, sometimes that's how the connections work. There's also been groupings where the words are commonly part of ____keeper, like bee + book + gate + goal Using the game from January 1, 2025 (figured that goes back far enough that people who are currently playing it have already completed that one. If you have not and were planning on doing that one, stop now and do not look ahead. I'll leave some space so answers don't get spoiled ...***This is how the January 1, 2025 Connections board looked like- So, 16 words arranged in four rows and four columns- You're allowed a certain number of mistakes - 4- Shuffle - you can shuffle the placement of the words in case seeing them positioned differently on the board might help with your word association. - Deselect All - if you picked / selected / highlighted a few words but want to deselect all of them at once, you can press this tab- Submit - when you have grouped 4 words together that you think belong together, you select / hit "Submit" and see whether your proposed grouping is correct. Okay, let's play.Here, I've selected "Glowstick" + "Firefly" + "Radium" + "Aurora" with the idea that these 4 words should be grouped together because they are things that glow. After hitting "Submit", this is what appears on the screen (for the game as shown on the site that has past NYT Connections game - NOTE: this shows up a little differently on the actual New York Times site / app) - So, those 4 words were correctly grouped together - "Things That Luminesce". I mentioned there are 4 categories / groupings for each game, each with a different level of difficulty. The groups and level of difficulty are by color. My recollection is that the degree of difficulty is, by color, from easiest to hardest - yellow (easiest), blue, green, purple (most challenging), but I think that depends on the player. There are times when I cannot figure out the yellow grouping or when I can only figure out the yellow group by figuring out all the other ones first. lolAlright, now that the first group of 4 has been correctly identified, onto finding out another group of 4.This time, I chose "Earthworm" + "Slug" + "Salamander" + "Eel" and grouping them as having in common that they are animals or "slippery little suckers" Yes, , this is how my brain works sometimes. hahaha! I hit "Submit" and this is what pops up - "Slimy Animals" Fine. I suppose that is more eloquently stated but "slippery little suckers" seemed just right to me. Moving on to the next group of four, but before doing so, I selected "Shuffle" and it moved the remaining words around so that they now show up like this - Hmmmmm ...Going with "Windmill" + "Clog" + "Tulip" + "Canal" being things from or known as being connected with The Netherlands or the Dutch. Hit "Submit" and ...Dutch Symbols. Got it.That leaves, by process of elimination, the last 4 words to be grouped and submitted together - "Raindrop" + "Gatecrash" + Skydive" + "Waterfall" but I don't know what the association of those words would be. Final resultsThat last one, the purple category, the most challenging, what they have in common is that the ending of each of the four words is synonymous with "plunge". Yeah, sometimes that's how the connections work. There's also been groupings where the words are commonly part of ____keeper, like bee + book + gate + goal There you have it. You can play Connections on the NYT's app or just through the website, whether or not you are subscribed to the NYT, but there are, of course, certain benefits and perks that come with subscription to the NYT. Maybe worth giving a try, Samtian?

Lol

@TeamBIC For the last couple weeks, I’ve had increasingly frequent trouble accessing BIC. I can log in at the .com homepage (which I always do), but lately it takes at least a full minute for my avatar to replace the generic Sephora avatar on that homepage. Then when I try to visit BIC, I often get a 504 error (504 Gateway Time-out) instead of the Community homepage Sometimes I can reach BIC, but pages take at least 60 seconds to finish loading—and it’s always images (including people’s avatars) that are slow to load. And sometimes I get a 504 when trying to open BIC threads. When this happens, I can still reach .com pages. I don’t have screenshots right now, but I can take some next time this happens. I assume the tech folks don’t need a screenshot of the 504 error page (they should already know how that looks, along with other standard errors like 404). But if they need to see a page struggling to load, I can show that later. 504 errors are usually a server proxy issue, so it doesn’t really matter what OS & browser I used to get the error. But for the heck of it, it’s happened to me with Safari on both my iPad and iPhone, as well as Chrome on both devices (desktop mode on tablet, mobile mode on phone).

Sorry for the many posts I don't quite know how to add multiple pictures but I also got sol de Janeiro 71 and a touch and berrybliss and another touchland green apple with a pink touchland case and finally a sol de Janeiro mini purple set for 59