We tore out the old cabinets (saving them for other home projects) and set out to design a more modern kitchen. Our budget was limited, and we spent about $10,000 on the remodel.

During our design process, we made a few divisive decisions that made our family — and even a few kitchen designers — turn their heads.

Yet despite the naysayers, we have no regrets about the design, and we love cooking in our new space.

Almost immediately after getting our keys, we tore down walls in the kitchen to create an open layout.

This was the first controversial design choice we made during the remodel. We wanted to expand the tiny galley kitchen, but unfortunately, this meant removing walls — and the home's original fireplace.

The (giant) fireplace was located smack-dab in the middle of the house, which wasn't ideal for an open layout.

Some of our friends and family members said we were nuts for removing a fireplace. However, a few others (including us) thought it made the space more practical.

In the end, we're glad we took the extra effort to create a more open space. The job was messy and labor-intensive, but our kitchen feels so much bigger and brighter now.

Perhaps the most controversial decision we made in our kitchen design was installing a smaller-than-average refrigerator.

Every 1950s kitchen remodel comes with its own set of challenges, and our biggest one, by far, was the layout. Due to the placement of windows and doors in the kitchen, we had few areas to put appliances like the oven, refrigerator, and dishwasher.

Notably, we couldn't find a convenient spot for a standard-sized fridge, which usually measures between 29 and 36 inches wide.

Kitchen designers suggested we move our windows and doors to accommodate a larger fridge, but this would almost certainly break our budget.

Instead, we worked with the space we had. We installed an Ikea refrigerator that measures just over 21 inches wide. It fit inside a panel-ready cabinet that matched our other cabinetry.

Friends, family, and designers we spoke to said this was a mistake. They couldn't fathom how we would fit our groceries into the narrow fridge.

After several months living in the new house, though, the smaller refrigerator hasn't been a big deal. With the nearest grocery store a 10-minute walk from our house, we never shop in bulk.

Instead, we shop for fresh ingredients several times a week, and everything fits perfectly into our small fridge.

When it came time to pick our countertops, kitchen designers and family members all recommended materials like quartz and granite. They said a higher-end countertop was a must-have to raise our home's resale value.

Not knowing any better, we initially agreed with their recommendations. We set a budget of $5,000 for countertops, which, for our relatively small kitchen, was a hard price to swallow.

As the renovation continued, I stopped to ask myself whether we really needed to spend thousands of dollars on countertops. Our budget was being stretched further and further by the day, and we still had a long list of projects to complete elsewhere in the home.

So, rather than blow $5,000 on quartz countertops, we spent just $258 on laminate countertops. They may not be quite as pretty or durable as stone, but they work for us.

Perhaps the cheaper countertops could affect our home's resale value in the future, but we have no plans to sell anytime soon.

We still have a few finishing touches to work on, such as adding rugs and artwork, but after spending a little over $10,000 to renovate our kitchen, we're happy with our design choices.

If there's anything I learned in the remodel process, it's that there's no cookie-cutter solution to designing kitchens in older homes. Our 1950s kitchen layout was unique, so we had to get creative.

The low window, for instance, limited where we could place a large fridge, but the space works well as a comfy reading bench.

Likewise, the dark, cramped layout forced us to open up the space. Now, our open-concept layout is perfect for entertaining.

We also reused the kitchen table that came with the home, helping us preserve some of the room's original touches.

Not everyone agreed with our design choices during the remodel, but ultimately, we had to follow what worked for us — and our budget.

In the end, our controversial calls led us to a kitchen we love.

Pixar movies are almost always a sure bet, box-office wise. Five have made over $1 billion, and another 12 have made at least $500 million worldwide.

However, the studio's latest offering, "Elio," a story about a lonely boy who looks to the stars to find friends — and is abducted by aliens in the process — made $154 million worldwide.

It also had the lowest wide-release opening weekend of any Pixar movie, even unadjusted for inflation, per The Numbers. It made a dismal $20.84 million. That's lower than "Toy Story's" opening weekend in 1995, a full 30 years ago.

We may never know why "Elio" bombed so hard, but we do know that production was troubled, per The Hollywood Reporter, with one source at Pixar calling the resulting low box office "catastrophic."

No matter how controversial the first "Joker" film was, it was a financial success — it was the highest-grossing R-rated movie ever (until this year's "Deadpool & Wolverine") and made over $1 billion worldwide.

If you had told anyone in 2019 that the sequel to "Joker" would barely cross the $200 million threshold, they would not have believed you.

According to estimates by Variety, the film could lose its studio anywhere from $125 to $200 million.

To make matters worse, it also earned the rare "D" on CinemaScore, meaning that nobody saw it, and the people who did hated it.

The MCU is the most successful film franchise of all time, raking in billions of dollars for Disney. But the cracks started to show with "The Marvels," which had the lowest opening of any MCU movie at $65 million.

Forbes reported the film lost $237 million, even though it wasn't actually as bad as some people on the internet would have you believe.

The biographical film about the life of boxer Muhammad Ali had a $107 million production cost that was raised to $118 million after director Michael Mann moved filming to Africa, according to Bomb Report.

Box Office Mojo estimates the film made $87.8 million worldwide. Sony was reportedly on the hook for over $100 million when including marketing costs.

DreamWorks co-founder David Geffen has publicly said that the film, which centered on a legendary sailor framed for stealing a sacred book, lost the studio $125 million, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The film, about the life of Alexander the Great, had a reported budget of $155 million. According to the Bomb Report, the film's gross sank 65.2% in its second weekend and another 68.9% in its third week. Overall, production company Intermedia posted a $29.4 million loss for the year.

Based on the beloved adventure novel by Jules Verne about traveling the world in 80 days, the film had an estimated budget of $110 million, but only made $72 million worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo.

The film is most notable now, perhaps, for being the last acting role of Arnold Schwarzenegger before he became the governor of California.

The film is about three top Navy fighter pilots tasked with manning a drone-like plane. It had a budget of $138 million and was directed by "The Fast and Furious" director Rob Cohen, so everyone had high expectations.

However, it lost at least $56 million due to box-office deficits, and likely even more after taking out movie theaters' cuts and marketing costs, Box Office Mojo reported.

The film follows a treasure hunter as he travels to Africa in search of a long-lost ship. It had a reported production cost of $160 million. The Los Angeles Times reported it lost the studio $78 million, and called it "one of the biggest financial flops in Hollywood history."

"Poseidon" is a remake of the original beloved film, 1972's "The Poseidon Adventure." The disaster movie about a sinking cruise ship had a budget of $160 million. After everything, it lost the studio $69 million, Business Insider previously reported.

The film centered around the biblical tale of Noah's ark, and it starred Steve Carell and Morgan Freeman. It had an estimated budget of $175 million and even became the most expensive comedy of all time, according to Reuters.

But, according to Bomb Report, the film lost one of its backers $50 million.

The film about a young orphan living in a train station starred young actors Asa Butterfield and Chloë Grace Moretz. It ended up going $80 million over budget, according to Bomb Report, and lost the studio $80 million — proving that not every Scorsese film is a box-office hit.

The superhero film about a test pilot who gets a powerful alien ring had an estimated budget of $200 million, but it barely broke even at the box office. Overall, the studio took a $75 million loss, according to Bomb Report.

At the time, superhero films were in the middle of a renaissance after movies like "Iron Man" and "The Dark Knight" had proven that comic-book movies had mass appeal. But, "Green Lantern's" failure shows that a built-in fan base doesn't always lead to success.

"Pan" had an estimated budget of $150 million, but its offensive casting of Rooney Mara as the Native American character Tiger Lily, its heavy reliance on CGI, and general disinterest in another "Peter Pan" film led the movie to box-office bomb status, The New York Times reported.

 The Hollywood Reporter predicted that the film "could see losses in the $130 million to $150 million range" back in 2015.

A sequel to the 2010 Tim Burton film "Alice in Wonderland," "Alice Through the Looking Glass" had an estimated budget of $170 million and ended up costing Disney an estimated $70 million — it was especially shocking, considering that the first film topped $1 billion.

The film follows the Big Friendly Giant as he befriends a young orphan Sophie, even though it goes against giant nature. It had an estimated budget of $140 million, and according to The Hollywood Reporter, "lost $90 million to $100 million for partners Disney, [Steven] Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment and Participant Media."

It's one of the acclaimed director's biggest flops.

The film follows a young Arthur after the murder of his father and his quest to gain back the throne of Camelot. It had an estimated budget of $175 million and only grossed $148 million, according to Box Office Mojo. Forbes blamed the lack of movie stars, extensive re-shoots, and an inflated budget, among other things, for the film's reported $150 million loss.

DC's answer to Marvel's "Avengers" superhero team-up movie had an estimated budget of $300 million. Business Insider reported that the film could have cost Warner Bros. up to $100 million.

The mind-bending story of young Meg's journey across time and space to rescue her father from darkness had a reported budget of $103 million, and Yahoo Finance reported that Disney lost between $86 million and $186 million on the film.

The film follows a young Han Solo (played by Alden Ehrenreich), the most iconic space smuggler of all time, as he meets his future partner and best friend Chewbacca, future frenemy Lando Calrissian, and a heretofore unknown love interest Qi'ra.

It had an estimated budget of $275 million. Though the film made over $392 million worldwide, that's nothing when you compare it to the $2 billion gross of "The Force Awakens," and the $1 billion grosses of "The Last Jedi" and "The Rise of Skywalker."

The CGI-heavy movie about a tribe of cats called the Jellicles had an estimated budget of $95 million and a famously cursed production. Though "Cats" is a beloved musical and ran on Broadway for years, audiences didn't show the film version the same love. Deadline calculated losses at approximately $113.6 million.

The film about a doctor who can talk to animals had an estimated budget of $175 million and an all-star voice cast including Tom Holland, Emma Thompson, Rami Malek, Octavia Spencer, and more. That didn't stop Vulture from calling it "2020's first official mega-flop."

The Observer estimated that "Dolittle" needed to make $500 million to turn a profit and with a final gross of just half that, you can be sure that no one at Universal was pleased with those results.

There was no shortage of artificial Christmas trees at either retailer.

Each seemed to sell every variation of tree imaginable. Shoppers could choose between blinking white lights or solid colorful ones, branches covered in snow or lightly flocked with it, and a wide range of heights.

I saw trees that were black, pink, and Grinch-green, as well as ones made from sparkly tinsel. Whatever type of artificial tree you're dreaming of this year, chances are you'll find it at either store.

In addition to multipacks of ball-shaped filler baubles for just about any tree-decorating color scheme, each store stocked plenty of specialty ornaments.

I also saw character-themed ornaments — from franchises like Harry Potter and Elf on the Shelf — at both stores.

At Hobby Lobby, I bought a glass camera ornament for my film-loving teenage son.

At Michaels, I grabbed both a monogrammed "P" ornament (for our family's last name) and a fuzzy felt mouse wearing a Mrs. Claus-style dress and holding a tray of cookies.

Ultimately, my ideal tree would have a mix of fun designs and baubles from Michaels and Hobby Lobby.

Again, anything you could dream of for decking your halls was on offer at Michaels and at Hobby Lobby, from strands of plastic Christmas candies to long swaths of realistic-looking pine garland.

Each store also had a decent selection of seasonal outdoor decorations — light-up figurines, metal yard signs, inflatable lawn figures, and more.

Michaels had arranged its holiday decor by theme in a series of three or four aisles.

I spotted a collection of nutcracker-themed decor and a section for traditional red, white, and green items. The pink-peppermint decorations and vintage-style collection featuring dogs and cats also caught my eye.

Somewhat similar to Michaels, some of Hobby Lobby's holiday decor was organized by style throughout the store.

I perused adorable snowman items on one set of shelves and a collection of holiday trees and reindeer on another. A whole display was dedicated to Santa, and one shelf was packed with baby-pink and light-blue gingerbread-house-style decorations.

That said, Hobby Lobby's seasonal displays seemed to be really spread out throughout the store. I had to walk through the front, middle, and back of the building to see everything on offer for the holidays.

Michaels was stocked with a variety of Elf on the Shelf merchandise, including candy, outfits, craft kits, plushies, and games. The store had plenty of actual figurines for sale, too.

If your kids are fans of these characters and all the shenanigans they bring to the holidays, Michaels is a must-visit stop.

I found several aisles at Hobby Lobby with items themed around "How the Grinch Stole Christmas."

The chain seemed to have something for just about every fan of the franchise, from lamps with shades covered in Grinch-green fur to mugs designed to look like Max and Cindy Lou Who

I visited Michaels with my husband and 15-year-old daughter, and we all found decor we enjoyed.

My daughter loved the "silly cats" found across Michaels' vintage-style Christmas collection.

Meanwhile, my husband was interested in the all-black Christmas decorations from the "Silent Night" collection. These darkly unique nutcrackers, ornaments, figurines, and other decor items would make for a pretty elegant … or spooky … holiday display.

I didn't see much at Hobby Lobby that strayed too far from what I'd consider traditional Christmas decor.

Many pieces simply featured Santa Claus, trees, candy canes, gingerbread houses, and snowmen without many styles that feel particularly new or different.

Its wide selection of more standard holiday fare certainly isn't a bad thing, though; it just depends on your style. Plus, classics are often classic for a reason.

Michaels had exactly what my daughter wanted from a holiday-decor shopping experience.

She was thrilled to find tons of unfinished wood holiday village pieces, which she's seen a lot on TikTok lately.

In fact, the two of us plan to have some of her friends and their moms over soon to paint a DIY Christmas village, and we know where we'll be buying the supplies.

For now, she picked up a few unfinished wooden nutcrackers to paint.

On the other hand, my teen wasn't so impressed by the offerings at Hobby Lobby and the style of some of its decor.

"These are as big as I am," she said as she picked up one of the store's enormous stuffed gingerbread men. "I don't get it."

She didn't really find any crafts or pieces she wanted to take home, either. However, I found lots of items I loved at Hobby Lobby, from a snowman teapot to Santa espresso cups.

Maybe she's just not the chain's target audience.

Both craft and decor retailers seem to always be running sales with a certain percentage off specific items, and the holidays are no exception.

On our trip to Michaels, several craft kits were 30% off, holiday candles were three-for-$9.99, and most holiday decor was on sale for half off.

At Hobby Lobby, everything "Christmas" was 50% off.

Both regularly offer coupons and various promotions throughout the season, so it's a good idea to keep an eye on each store's mobile app and weekly ad.

Michaels and Hobby Lobby tend to go all out for Christmas, but I always look to see if they have sections for other winter holidays, such as Hanukkah, Diwali, and Kwanzaa.

Some years, I've found displays with items for holidays other than Christmas at Michaels, but I haven't seen anything yet at my local store.

Given Hobby Lobby's CEO is a devout Christian and the chain doesn't even sell Halloween decorations, I wasn't surprised Christmas was (once again) the only winter holiday I found represented on its shelves.

I found way more seasonal craft supplies at Michaels than at Hobby Lobby, so it'd be my go-to stop for my artsy holiday needs.

The chain impressed me with offerings like craft kits for a range of ages, as well as wooden figurines and ceramic holiday lamps that anyone could personalize.

This week alone, my daughter and I have stopped into our local Michaels twice to buy unfinished wood pieces that we can paint while watching Hallmark holiday movies.

Hobby Lobby was full of items I'd use for hosting, from festive paper goods to ceramic serving platters emblazoned with seasonal sayings and images.

While shopping there, I found baking supplies, gingerbread-house decorating kits, games to play during Christmas dinner, and more.

The retailer would be the perfect spot to pick up everything you need to host a holiday gathering, whether that's a dinner party or a cookie exchange.

It's safe to say you could head into Michaels or Hobby Lobby and find everything you need to decorate both the inside and outside of your home for the holidays.

However, the one you should shop at depends on your priorities.

If you're looking for holiday craft supplies or some DIY inspiration for the season, Michaels may be the place to start. It's an especially good spot for those wanting more unconventional decor to suit a wider range of tastes and styles.

And if you're entertaining a lot over this Christmas season, Hobby Lobby should have everything you need. It's also a solid stop for anyone who wants to decorate their space with more classic seasonal imagery and designs.

Both stores are full to the brim with holiday offerings right now, so you can't go wrong at either. No matter which you choose to shop at, just remember to stop for a peppermint latte on the way.

Jay Graber was born Lantian Graber in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to a mother who is an immigrant from China during the Cultural Revolution and a father of Swiss descent. Her mother, who is an acupuncturist, named Graber "Lantian", which means "blue sky" in Chinese, as a wish that she would have "boundless freedom." She was aptly named for the job she would eventually be given.

Her father is a mathematics teacher, and in a 2024 profile of Graber in Cosmico, he is cited as a source of intellectual and academic influence for Graber.

At the University of Pennsylvania, Graber studied Science, Technology & Society, which is an interdisciplinary program that examines how technological innovation intersects with culture, politics, and ethics.

Rather than focusing solely on coding or engineering, the program allowed Graber to explore the broader systems that shape how technology is developed and utilized, an approach that later influenced her views on social networks and digital governance.

Some of her key guiding views include a decentralized internet and open source social media protocols. "We believe that the protocol is the fundamental guarantee on freedom of speech," Graber said once during an interview with Fast Company.

Graber's early career unfolded during the first wave of blockchain innovation in the mid-2010s. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, she began her career as a software engineer at SkuChain, a startup focused on utilizing blockchain for supply-chain management. Around the same time, she also built and soldered bitcoin-mining rigs, deepening her technical grasp of decentralized systems beyond software.

Between 2016 and 2018, Graber joined the privacy-focused cryptocurrency project Zcash as a junior developer, contributing to one of the most advanced implementations of zero-knowledge proofs. Later, in 2019, she founded Happening, Inc., an events app that aimed to help communities organize and connect through shared experiences.

Happening, Inc. never really took off, but these early roles grounded Graber in both the engineering and ideological foundations of decentralized technology, which later shaped the vision for Bluesky as an open, user-controlled social network.

When Jack Dorsey, then CEO of Twitter, first announced Bluesky in late 2019, it was a small, Twitter-funded initiative tasked with researching an open and decentralized standard for social media.

By August 2021, Dorsey decided to onboard Graber, who was then known in crypto circles for her work on Zcash and decentralized community tools, to lead and accelerate the effort. However, according to an April 2025 profile of Graber in the New Yorker, she quickly realized that for Bluesky to fulfill its mission, it needs to create a social protocol separate from any single corporation and maintain independence from Twitter.

With Dorsey's backing, Graber negotiated a formal spin-out by October 2021 and incorporated Bluesky as a public benefit corporation, a legal structure that allowed it to prioritize user benefits and open standards over shareholder profit.

Twitter provided an initial $13 million in funding to give the new entity "freedom and independence to get started," as Dorsey publicly described at the time.

Graber's early move to separate Bluesky from Twitter may have saved it.

When Elon Musk acquired Twitter in 2022 and renamed the platform X, Bluesky's independence allowed it to thrive and emerge as a competitor to X as droves of users left the platform.

In September 2023, Bluesky only had around 1 million registered users, but this figure climbed to more than 20 million by the end of November 2024. The meteoric rise came after a user surge in Brazil after X was temporarily restricted there, as well as 1.25 million user gains the week after Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election.

As of November 2025, Bluesky has around 40 million registered users. That is no match for X's roughly 560 million users, but it provided an alternative for those dissatisfied with X's ownership and content moderation.

Graber has taken a subtle dig at Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.

During SXSW in Austin in March 2025, Graber wore a black T-shirt that reads "Mundus sine caesaribus," meaning "a world without Caesars." The design and font are widely interpreted as a response to Zuckerberg's own Latin slogan shirt, which reads "Aut Zuck aut nihil," meaning "either Zuck or nothing."

The shirt drew public curiosity, and Bluesky began selling the same shirt. A spokesperson for the company told Business Insider at the time that the shirts sold out in 30 minutes, representing the company's "democratic approach, where no single CEO or company controls your experience online."

Compared to other Silicon Valley CEOs who run major social media platforms, all of whom are billionaires, Graber has a very modest net worth.

Estimates of Graber's net worth fall between $2.95 million and $5 million, mostly depending on her equity in Bluesky. Since Bluesky is not a publicly traded company, Graber's stake in the company and her annual compensation are not publicly disclosed.

As of early 2025, Bluesky's valuation is estimated to be around $700 million.

Graber positions Bluesky as a new kind of social network.

Bluesky is built on an open-source Authenticated Transfer Protocol, which decentralizes social networking and hands more control to users rather than a single company or executive.

"The billionaire proof is in the way everything is designed, and so if someone bought or if the Bluesky company went down, everything is open source," Graber told CNBC in an interview in November 2024.

"What happened to Twitter couldn't happen to us in the same ways, because you would always have the option to immediately move without having to start over," Graber added, referring to Musk's purchase of the platform that is now named X.

Unlike traditional social platforms like X or Facebook, Bluesky is built on an open-source ecosystem called the ATmosphere, powered by the Authenticated Transfer Protocol. The system gives users the ability to design and customize their own ranking algorithms, carry their posts and followers with them across different apps, and avoid being subject to any platform's arbitrary or politically driven moderation decisions.

Bluesky became a platform widely used by progressive activists and community organizers.

The Tesla Takedown movement, a pushback against Tesla CEO Elon Musk's involvement with Donald Trump and the White House's DOGE office, famously spread via Bluesky when actor Alex Winter contacted a sociologist in Boston to build a website where people could organize local protests.

But the progressiveness of Bluesky also seems to have spooked some politicians. Semafor's media reporter Max Tani wrote in May 2025 that some congressional staffers told him that they gave up on using Bluesky as an alternative to X, because "their bosses kept getting yelled at by Democratic users angry at their impotence."

Graber is unfazed by Bluesky's slower growth in terms of registered and active users.

In an interview in May with Fast Company, Graber said that reports of Bluesky's death are "greatly exaggerated" and that growth "comes in waves," with new communities being established at each stage.

"We're still seeing a lot of community formation, and one of the most exciting things is how structurally different this is," said Graber. "It's not just another social site that has to be a singular winner-take-all in an ecosystem with existing incumbents."

In 2025, Bluesky still added around 10 million newly registered users.

Graber has tips on how to thrive in an era of AI, and reliance is not the answer.

"AI can handle many reasoning tasks, but if we fully outsource our thinking, it's not good enough," Graber told Business Insider.

She added that for students, that might mean writing essays by hand to "build the muscle for critical thinking."

At Bluesky, Graber said AI is used for moderation and curation but never runs on its own, because while AI delivers packaged expertise, human value lies in judgment and adaptability.

For job seekers, Graber encourages workers to adopt a generalist mindset and master core skills such as writing and coding.

"If you don't know what good code looks like," she said, "you won't be able to evaluate AI's output."