I have recently learned that the new helicopter parent type is the snowplow parent - these are the ones that not only shield their kids from the world, but also fully manage their lives for them. I work for the University of California and seeing how absolutely helpless these kids are is scary.

Shaka tea, either ice tea in cans or brew hot from packets.

Temu is absolute cancer in terms of business practices so no surprise here at all.

Universal basic income

Don’t sweat the small stuff. Just let it go.

No dress code here apart from some safety stuff like closed toe shoes, so jeans, T-shirt and sweatshirt.

If being run over counts as an accident I’ve had a heavy truck blast past me a foot away from my face because the guy decided that all the other cars that stopped in front of the crossing to let me go were just slow idiots.

Lindsay’s are good. But not as good as kalamata.

Hey you gotta share.

I dream every night and it is always some kind of a crazy bizarre acid trip that may morph into a nightmare on occasion if I had a bad day or something is weighing on my mind. I’ve had this all my life and sometimes when I don’t dream (which is extremely rare for me) it feels weird waking up.

But that’s the regular stuff, the insane stuff is that I have dreams that reoccur and evolve for decades, and it’s like getting a new season of a show that you watched two years ago, but with new characters and plot lines.

Yeah, way too expensive for us as well so we’re actually planning on moving to the other side of the bay. We are not renting, thankfully, but we’re pretty squeezed and moving elsewhere in Santa Cruz requires paying ridiculous amounts of money I cannot justify.

Nope. There used to be some that went extinct millions of years before humans arrived.

There are porcupines though, but I haven’t seen them in the wild yet.

Santa Cruz, CA. Hi neighbor!

When I moved to USA it blew my mind that there’s no hedgehogs here naturally, I was so used to having them around I kinda thought they’re everywhere. I miss them. Hedgehogs are cool.

I think in more recent times it has to do with using folks as an easy gender neutral address instead of saying you guys etc, and then it spread out everywhere because it is, well, easier and people don’t want to think too much.

The moment it is gifted it becomes their property, so whenever they have no more use for it. I am giving it away knowing that they may not find it amusing very soon or they break it because kids.

I always have Lofi Girl playing quietly in the background when I’m working.

Iirc it used to be that the ground floor was semi-basement, with windows at the ground level hence the name.

I found the routine that works for me which is Selsun Medicated shampoo twice a week and tar shampoo in-between. I still get dry and a little bit itchy scalp but no visible shedding flakes.

The tricky part for me was to realize that overly aggressive shampoos do more harm than good, so the dosage of active ingredient is key. I used to use Neutrogena Tgel Therapeutic tar shampoo, with the lowest dose of tar component, it is however hard to find now and looks like it’s being discontinued, so I switched to MG217 Therapeutic 3% which I dilute with whatever generic shampoo my family is using.

I was born in USSR and it collapsed when I was seven so my memories of it were at the very end when things were tough and scarce. I remember school books that were still about Lenin and Stalin, and we would write essays about Labor day parades and red hammer-and-sickle flags during our English classes, it sounded funny even for us first graders.

Yet, whatever little was available was cheap, we would have deficit problems but not financial ones unless you were trying to buy something that was smuggled into the country, like jeans.

We would take flights to Kazakhstan where my grandma lived, no borders no visas obviously. They lived on their own land there and were much better off in terms of food availability (Google USSR deficit to see what stores looked like).

Then we reached the point when food stamps had to be distributed and it was outright scary. I remember standing by our front door crying, because my mom gave me a bread stamp and sent me to get some bread, and I lost the stamp on the way and couldn’t bring myself to go back home. Eventually I was absent long enough for her to start worrying and she opened the door to go out and found me there sobbing.