Glad to hear t-pose is the way to go. I’m beginning to think it’s the solution to the world’s problems.

For me, it was AIM chatrooms and ebaums forums, maybe the super early days of Skype (before being sold to Microsoft obviously). Shit did feel more real, and while content maybe didn’t come out at the same frequency, and there sure was shit, you just knew you were talking about it with other people. Made some good friends back then, would’ve been cool to stay in touch, but 20+ years is a long time.

What are people going to say, “Yeah, I knew he was gonna do it, but I had other shit going on so I ignored it.” Meaningless quote you hear all too often after people commit suicide unfortunately. And I don’t mean to admonish anyone, but who comes out afterwards and says “Yeah, his life was shit and he was a miserable fuck it was only a matter of time.”

I’ve talked for years with friends of mine about MLB+Steroids+Aluminum Bats. I want to see someone hit two 700ft homers in a night.

My six year old daughter is getting the hanging of the spelling and whatnot, but earlier on in her Kindergarten year, words like “driver,” to her, started with a J. I had never thought about it, but it absolutely (at least in our NJ dialect) has a J sound, because, as you say, we all talk fucked up (paraphrasing).

I feel like it’s the glottal T. I know for me, personally, my tongue doesn’t touch my teeth, but there is still a T sound. I am not British, though I am from Jersey (New).

It’s chaos, but Jon Bois is amazing at putting order to even the most chaotic things. If you don’t know him, he’s purely a sports guy, but he has a number of video series on YouTube that are absolutely great watches, regardless of whether you like sports. I hate (American) football, but he has a number of videos I watched intently, because he does a great job of analyzing random number sets and plotting them out in a way that is visually appealing. Guy is a nut, and it makes for great television (obviously not TV but yeah).

Yeah, I believe you will absolutely find something to put there. But I also write this from my dining room, which the China hutch behind me also has Lego sculptures and slime, and there’s cabinets with children’s art supplies and whatnot. And I to my right is the kids playroom, but also the way to our ground floor bathroom, and so you take your life (at least your feet) into your hands when nature calls. But I just tell myself, when they’re older, they have less shit, it’ll be better. Right?

My kids do each have their own rooms though, and I think that’s a fair line to draw. Boy and girl. Boy’s room is a shoebox, but he’ll survive.

Unfortunately, I renovated my detached garage into a place to hangout, and so I can kiss that goodbye in like 10 years.

Different strokes and all that, but I tend to say the more space you have, the more shit goes in it. We have about 1350sf, two kids, cat, on a quarter acre. We rely on the kids being able to (when they’re a bit older) go out around our town, which are homes on properties just like mine, but with parks and a downtown and a meandering Brook with green space all around it. I say to my wife, could we use a little more space? Absolutely. Could we use the space we have a little more wisely? Also absolutely. I just know that if we had more space, we would instantly fill it with more crap, so we’re good.

Cruise ship or bust.

And it’s just a drawing but I’m trying to realize it in actual size. Cruise ships are huge, pushing 250 or so feet out of the water. That’s considered a high-rise in the construction world.

Now I look at that loopdy-lopp and say hey, that boat could fit. I’m ignoring all the other physics and shit and just Matchbox car’g that boat through that loop. That makes that loop like, what, 1000 feet? And that is ignoring the structure beneath the surface, and also the other dimensions of this, and the sheer velocity and volume of water.

So I’m gonna call this one a hard maybe. Perhaps if the world could set aside it’s differences, we could do a sort of space race, but instead a ship flip, or a boat float, or some other rhyme.

It is. I watched it with my daughter when s1 came out, and it was well beyond just tolerable, which is the baseline for kids shows. Good story, well acted, great animations, good music.

They’re the size of my kids, since they’re generally the target if my references to goofballs.

And I guess my phone thought changing golfball to goofball was what I needed. Maybe I should read a little better what I write. Maybe next time.

Funny, I’m in NJ, and within the past month I’ve seen guava and rhubarb for the first time ever on the shelves. Haven’t gotten rhubarb yet, I really don’t know anything about it.

I just got into guava recently. I live in Jersey and my local ShopRite started stocking clamshells with six guavas or so, ranging in size from a goofball to something larger than a goofball but smaller than a baseball. Maybe like billiards ball sized. I’d never eaten them before like a month ago, and so the seeds threw me T first, but I’ve got the technique down now and shit, when they’re ripened, nice and soft, they are fantastic. I worry about the day when I get to ShopRite and the guavas are no longer.

including places whose current inhabitants I would not want to publicly associate myself with.

Long way to say Staten Island.

And a giant dick from JC sounds like someone who moved in sometime after 2000. I feel like the old timers, the real legit JC people, are anything but dicks. That city went through some hard, hard times, and it’s in its golden age right now, it’s nice to see.

I think NJ tends to be a love it or hate it kinda place. I lived outside of NJ a couple of times, but it pulled me back in, as they say.

As for South Central PA, closest I’ve gotten was probably King of Prussia, perhaps. Don’t really know much about it, but I’m always interested. Got a family now, and being able to pop them in a car to go to some kind of experience, versus the cost and hassle of flying (i.e. doors fall off), is appealing to me. And I’m at a point in my life where I can bring my kids to places I find interesting but they find incredibly boring, but when they get to my age they will continue the cycle (barring the apocalypse, of course).

And as for OC, MD, I feel like if you have a beach place you go to, that’s where you go. I’ve been going to essentially the same place for 37 years, at this point. On our way there, we pass Ontario license plates for all them who head down to Wildwood or maybe to MD too. I’ll probably take the family to Rehoboth or Ocean City, MD, at some point, just for the sake of checking the box (barring them being underwater, of course).

I’ll say, haven’t been in a while, but my brother lived in SF and then Palo Alto for a bit during and after law school, so 2009-14 we’ll say, and I had a blast every time I went to visit. I haven’t been back since, and obviously people say the city has changed a bit, but back then it was such a different lifestyle from the East Coast.

I always go back to this story, at that time Dunkin Donuts’s catchphrase or whatever, at least in the NEC, was America Runs on Dunkin, but when I went out west they would say America’s Favorite Coffee, and I always found it a pretty apropos juxtaposition of the coastal mentalities. In NY/NJ, we were all about work. Everyone works, you go out after work in your fuckin suits, you talked about work. It was a culture, and it ran on coffee (sometimes Dunkin). But out west, people seemed to be more interested in taking in life, the sights, the food, and yes, the fucking coffee.

And the catchphrase for the middle of America was “drink it or don’t, nobody cares about you”.

JK, flyover states!

Jersey. The best state.

For real, that’s a story in itself. And then Madi’s old man knows some guys on the force so they say it’s fake, that’s story two. I’m honestly more interested in story one, because some loser is out here stalking this 16-year-old girl so they can screw her shit up, presumably out of jealousy.

My kids will play sports and dance and do whatever. I have no interest in pushing them towards very serious leagues, because time and again the people involved in them have shown they are all losers. My kids will not be professional athletes, we are not particularly tall or strong or fast, but they can do well, be healthy, and make friends, that’s about all I want from it.

This ain’t just Christian though, it’s Catholic. I know some non-denominational, or even Methodist Churches that would be totally cool with it, but Catholics run a harder line, at least where I’m from.

I think the school should have the right to fire him. I also think it (and any other religious school or land use) doesn’t deserve tax money or tax exempt status.