I feel the same about Paris, there’s nothing romantic or magical about it. It had easily the worst air pollution I’ve ever seen in Europe (but I understand that’s improved a lot in the last decade), it’s overcrowded and smells like sewage everywhere. Not a place I’d ever care to visit again. That said I use a number of French services and I really like a lot of their cultural exports, and I’d love to explore other areas of France.
Had a guy in one of my grad school courses who always found a way to shoehorn in the fact that he’d summited Everest not just once, but TWICE! 🙄 Climbing Everest just strikes me as rich person bragging rights, and it isn’t even that impressive given that a lot of the people who do it pay porters to carry their supplies and dig their latrines.
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Food bank in the US. Food drives and individual donations of food don’t really mean shit to food banks and they result in overwhelmingly low quality food. Your local food bank isn’t hurting for your expired cans of coconut milk or your forgotten boxes of Kraft mac & cheese. Sugary junk and expired food will be sorted out and tossed. Most staple foods at food banks are distributed by the federal government or purchased by the food bank. Most other foods are donated in large volume by supermarkets and manufacturers. What food banks really need from you is donations of money, not food.
Another thing about food banks is that some supermarkets and manufacturers abuse them to dump their spoiled, expired or overproduced goods and get a tax write-off on them. I worked at a medium sized food bank that would throw away multiple pallets of sugary bakery items from Walmart every day because they didn’t meet our nutrition guidelines and Walmart had been told repeatedly not to donate them, but they did it anyway for the tax write-off. Ever walk into a Walmart and wonder how they can have so much bakery crap on display and sell it before it expires? Yeah, most of that stuff will be marked down multiple times and then trucked to the local food bank where it will be thrown away. Trader Joe’s also does this with their returns (most of their donations are unusable). Whole Foods on the other hand is really amazing about donating tons of high quality stuff on a daily basis.
That’s the one I immediately thought of too. We use my girlfriend’s sister’s account to binge classic shows, but it routinely plays a completely different episode than the one we selected. You also can’t pause most episodes, so you have to exit the episode and then start it back up again and find wherever you left off. And on top of all that they show ads for their own shitty shows before every episode – dude we’re watching Andy Griffith, clearly we’re not the target audience for your G-rated “Friends” knockoff.
Learn from my experience!
I was obsessed with the same thing for a time so I bought one of those blue ear bulb syringes to aid with earwax removal. I’d put earwax removal drops in my ears, wait a few minutes and then use the bulb syringe to rinse the drops out of my ears, before squeezing the remaining water out of the bulb syringe and setting it on my counter. I did this almost every day for weeks.
One day I noticed a bit of gray earwax coming out after squirting water from the bulb syringe into my ears, like a few small chunks of it. I was so excited, my persistence was finally paying off!! The next day I did it again and there were even more gray earwax chunks!! Holy shit, I must have knocked something loose! Third day it happened again and this time I was suspicious, so I grabbed a pair of scissors and cut open the bulb syringe to find that it was full of mold. I’d been squirting chunks of mold into my ears and when they fell into the sink I thought they were earwax.
Now I use a translucent bulb syringe that’s split in the middle, so I can take it apart to dry properly and I’ll see if anything is growing inside of it.
If you haven’t tried then I recommend hydrogen peroxide in your ears. I dilute it 1:1 with water, but some people use it straight from the bottle. It feels SO GOOD and helps with earwax removal.
I randomly point at my cat and tell her, “YOU!! I know what you’ve done!” and then I run at her. She immediately goes WILD and starts tearing around the apartment and doing little lion roars. If I stop pursuit too soon then she’ll taunt me by jumping over me on the sofa over and over again until I continue chasing her. When I “catch” her then she gives me a sassy slap in the face and scampers off.
But that would require getting up off my sofa and walking across the living room.
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I was intrigued by your description but also thought I’d hate it. Gave it a listen and was pleasantly surprised, he’s super talented and his music is totally unique.
I’ve been getting into tech house lately. It’s fun and catchy with really satisfying bass.
I lived in a cheap studio in Boston that was infested with roaches. Every 3-4 months I would spray Raid where the walls met the floor and that always worked well until they gradually started appearing again.
I lived in another studio that got a bedbug infestation. My building’s management paid for the place to be heat treated – they wheeled in two giant space heaters and had them powered by a generator on a truck five stories below on the street. I never saw another one again, but it destroyed all my books.
Nowadays I’m way more picky about where I live and I haven’t had any pest issues in over a decade.
72 F / 22 C in winter and 68 F / 20 C in summer. We live in a LEED Platinum building and the electric bill for our 2-bedroom apartment never goes above $50, so we set it to whatever is most comfortable.
Mine has trekking poles! (Colorado)
I learned about this from a can of ///Fear.Movie.Lions beer from Stone Brewing:
What 3 words pinpoint where this indelible beast was born? The location is printed on the can. There’s a 3m x 3m square in our Richmond, VA brewery with these three words painted on it. What three words? Exactly! For the uninitiated, that’s What3Words.
Not really, my car was a mess! At least nothing was missing though.
So this isn’t a VPN service, but having read your comments it might work…
When I was in Sweden recently I needed to do something online with the appearance that I was in the US. First I tried using a couple of VPN services but they were detected by the website I was trying to use and I got an “access denied” message. So my travel partner activated their Verizon TravelPass and let me hotspot off it. TravelPass gave us a regular Verizon wireless address out of California and I was able to complete my task. Unfortunately though it’s $12/day.
I do the exact same thing, except instead of paying monthly for hosting, I pay $12/year for addy.io. Super reliable service and I can easily manage my email aliases with their phone app.
Haha, they just told me in a normal voice, but obviously I had to play along if I wanted to get back into the country. The experience was a bit dramatic, like something from TV, but it wasn’t actually scary because I had nothing to hide. They also asked if I had anything in my car they should know about, so I said I had a stash of liquor and explained that I was moving and wanted to bring my booze – but they didn’t care and didn’t touch my alcohol.
I’m a 6’2" guy and people only mess with me if they’re intoxicated. I’m always completely aware of my surroundings unless I’m in a crowded place that should be safe (like malls and airports).
All my sketchy encounters were on public transit, so I no longer take it in my city (transit in Denver is THE FUCKING WORST). I’ve been threatened and followed multiple times by drugged out weirdos, but let me tell you about the two worst incidents: 1) I was jumped and attacked by a random guy at an empty train station, there was nobody around to help or even witness and I ran for my life as he chased me; 2) guy at a bus stop recognized me from my workplace and he followed me on the bus to my girlfriend’s place and then on another bus back to my home and he started hanging around outside my workplace hoping to run into me. So yeah most of the time I’m hyper-aware of everything happening around me in public and you’re right to be as well.