That’s why I’ll never smoke crack.

Transcended the rectum, right into the colon.

Yeah, I need to remember if it was ginko or something else. I’m not the greatest rememberer, so I’ll go back and check the recording. Perhaps not natural meant not native, but I recall being surprised at the description. We shall see, always interesting.

Yeah, the complaining about spotify’s free tier is something I just don’t get. I grew up listening to the goddamn radio. No choice in what to listen to and ads all the time. But when your jam came on, it felt great every time.

I’m on a family plan with some friends. I’ve discovered a ton of new music because of Spotify. I’ve gone to many shows, bought merch, vinyls, for bands I never would’ve known had it not been for Spotify.

I’m just not sure what people want, but it reeks of entitlement. If you’re gonna pirate music, by all means, go to town. Nobody cares.

Yeah this is a big problem I see often. You have underground utilities? Tree planting becomes a huge thing. And in a lot of these walkable areas, places you’d want trees, folks tend to also prefer not to have the wires overhead with telephone poles everywhere, and so they’ve been backed into a corner.

I did just sit through a presentation by my local environmental commission where they addressed the issue. The solution seems to be trees bred for the specific environment: deciduous provides shade but doesn’t drop a lot of leaves; can grow tall but the root ball grows in a certain way so as not to interrupt sidewalks and utilities; hearty and resilient. I can’t recall the trees, but they were described as essentially not naturally occuring.

I go on Reddit and come here and I nod along and I’m like yes, yes, and then I leave and sometimes it feels like coming up from being underwater. We are quite literally surrounded in propaganda. It has never been easier to disseminate opinions, especially when the majority of our communications (mine for sure) come via text on a screen. It is in every single facet of our lives.

And so I talk to my brother and he always tries to get me to think more, he’s a smart guy. He says things like “Who benefits the most” from whatever, opinion I’ve talked to him about, and so frequently it goes back to corporations. I don’t want to get overtly political, but personally the best way I try to think about things is linearly: this thing we are talking about, trace it to its logical end point and origin. And then feel helpless again.

Well, what are the fundraisers for? They have them by me, for PTO, for the band, for sports, etc. Extracurriculars. We’re not fundraising for school lunches and books (yet).

It’s a slippery slope between saying something ironically and having it become part of your lexicon.

It used to be so much more Linux, but replacing that with politically charged statements parading as memes isn’t a much better alternative. My two least favorite parts of Lemmy are how every conversation is somehow just one degree of separation from Linux or Nazis. Meme about dogs? Now the conversation is about genocide.

You know, it should be obvious, but until you brought it up here, I was guilty of thinking of it as just some colloquialism (which it very well may be). But if you think of the suffix -oid, taking “humanoid” for example, you get something that isn’t presenting itself as a human. But I didn’t come to that conclusion, I just was like, wow, they bop the Pope with a hammer.

So thanks.

Ehh, I dunno. Back in high school and the years shortly after, we’d take trips down 287 to Rutgers to visit the Grease trucks for one of their famous fat sandwiches. The name tells the tale, the sandwiches are absurd, but great late night drunk food. Fat Darrel was my go-to, chicken fingers, mozz sticks and marinara, French fries, on a sub roll. They had a variety of sandwiches, and they’d even name one after you if you could eat three in an hour, which even back then, when I swam competitively, smoked a lot of weed, and was a human garbage disposal, eating three period was a tall order.

I will say, the French fries were probably the least important ingredient to most of their sandwiches, but it was a package deal, you get what you get.

Have a daughter also, so I know it all too well! Our focus is “It’s normal but private.” We will see how that goes.

My wife texted me the other day:

You know that yellow slide our son carries around? Well, he started sticking his penis in it, you have to talk to him now.

He’s 4. It’s just what boys do.

I fast between all my meals, so yeah.

Nah, must be something else, can’t be my own poor decisions.

And this is perhaps me using the wrong term (translator v. interpreter), as I’m talking about speaking and not writing. I can never remember which is which, if there is a distinction.

House of Leaves drags at times. At times it’s gripping, and at times I was bored stiff. It’s interesting, I think it’s nutty, I think it’s a real reach and ought to be lauded, but I just never thought it was that good. I’ve discovered I’m just a sucker for classic epic fantasy though, so perhaps it just weren’t for me. I also read it 20 years ago at this point, and so perhaps with my maturity I might enjoy another read. My brother in law just got me a copy actually, which is good because my original copy disappeared.

I never read Twilight so I have nothing to add there.

I worked with a translator yesterday. She teaches courses, but she said she does translation because the money is good. I’ve worked with her for a while at this point, as well as dozens of other translators, on nearly a daily basis. They’re very much still in demand.

Yep, I interact with a couple different ones two or three times a week. I see them more than I used to.

I have a three year loan at 1.9%. Why would I cough up an additional $20k now, when I could hang on to my cash and, at the very least, leave it in an account that earns twice that (and then some) in interest?