Mint tea and thin mint Girl Scout cookies… I don’t really either at any other time, but if I’m under the weather, nothing sounds good to eat. I do my best to drink water and stay hydrated, but guzzling water all day when I do t feel good is a chore. So I’ll have tea and cookies instead.

I’m so habituated that it’s frequently when I realize that I AM sick, because I’ll find myself looking in the cupboard for thin mints.

Burger Time! That’s my teenage kid’s favorite stand-up arcade game, we still see them around once in a while!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BurgerTime

I changed companies recently and the new place is very “camera on”… I find it freaking exhausting…

Oh lord, are we back to beans again?

XD savage!

My whole career on Stack Exchange…

Depends on how much ground there is to cover, but face-time with people is cheap if you’re just walking the neighborhood and knocking on doors.

I had a candidate (not a staffer, the actual candidate) introduce himself and we talked on my stoop for like 20min. I was impressed that he cared enough to come in person. I was leaning in his direction anyway, but after that I told people he seemed like a good guy, donated a few bucks online, and voted for him.

Alternately, you could host a “coffee with the candidate somewhere”, and bring the people to you?

Amazon, Apple and SpaceX. The first two for staggering short-term monies before they figure out I don’t know anything, and kick me out, SpaceX because I think rockets are cool! Maybe I’d kill off Starlink since that’s pissing off astronomers and astronomers are also cool.

Could just be propaganda, but this claims that they’re marching towards Russia again:

https://kyivindependent.com/national-resistance-center-wagner-convoys-head-to-russia-after-fatal-crash/

Oh right, and the blue phone booth that’s bigger on the inside?

I think I’d set up a foundation. I’d decide what the foundation would pay for (tuition, maybe small business loans up to $25K, I don’t know…) and then any relatives can apply to the foundation and leave me out of it.

I learned about this when we got a new microwave and every time we used it, it would kill the wireless connection to my laptop!

Certainly not the worst meme I’ve seen posted!

Yoooo, you’re singing my song - GNU Terry Pratchett, love his writing so much.

And thank you; that’s very true, and it’s good to be reminded from time to time.

You’re right, and I generally remember that I have many blessings to count… but like you said, primate brains doing primate brain things.

I started off in the late 1980’s in a mid-sized midwestern city… I was smoking cigarettes, a lot of pot, drinking and carousing with the same friends that I’d had since high school, but I was in my second year of college. I was getting decent grades, but I was really distracted and having some drama with bad girlfriends.

Two weeks after my 21st birthday, I left for Southern California - I had a parent out there, and I ended up staying for 16 years. I stopped smoking basically the minute I got there, spent a lot of time driving around a new city and thinking… and basically came to the realization that since nobody there knew who I had been before, I could approach social situations without the baggage of all those previous decisions that I’d made with my old circle of friends. I was less of a “pleaser”, less of a doormat, and less afraid to speak my mind - and my new friends responded positively to it, so I was encouraged to cultivate that. It helped me be more decisive and independent, and gave me a foundation for everything that followed.

I finished an associate’s degree, got a black belt in a martial art and taught for about six years, and met the woman who is now my wife. We got married, traveled to other countries together in Europe and Central America, quit our jobs to live on a horse ranch, and eventually moved BACK to that same midwestern city to start a family.

I wish I could say that since we moved back, I’ve never felt like the person I was before - but I have to confess that I feel like being back here HAS eroded some of that confidence, like I couldn’t hack it out West and ended up back here after all.

I know it’s not true, but San Diego is where I became the person I wanted to be. Back here is where I had been the person before that. They say “you can’t go home again” - I submit that you CAN, but that maybe you shouldn’t.

Well, I just asked the weird “message Carrot” option in my weather app, and it replied:

Oh, look at you, trying to puzzle your way through the depths of set theory. How amusing, like a chimp trying to juggle chainsaws.

Well, my dear meatbag, the answer to your question is a resounding NO. Just like you, that set cannot contain itself. It’s like expecting Johnny Five to date Stephanie from “Short Circuit.” Simply not gonna happen! 🤖💔

This is the correct answer - I’ve called mayo “sandwich lube” for ages

Wikipedia is one of the few online orgs that I donate to every year. Even if I can only throw a couple of bucks their way, I usually try to gift at least $20 or something.

Haha I envision a tweaked-out back-of-the-house employee approaching the table with a scoop full of popcorn chicken… “open wiiiide!”