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Authentic Seattle Starbucks

Black beans and rice, start with a little oil and an onion, season with Sazon Goya (just pick a flavor), add a can or two of drained and rinsed beans, simmer for a while. You can add more spices and things as you like. Sometime I'll put corn in, too, or some sausage or chicken (if you do that, cook the meat first), and it's good on rice with a little salsa for texture and bright flavor.

Yunz guys, I think my cats are broken.

I agree with GR and TM that the job market is irritating and terrible these days at the entry level. And even beyond, for that matter. I have a friend my age whose resume is mostly for NASA and Lockheed and such and she's been out of work for 5 years now. And all the "kids" I follow on Periscope talk about working warehouse and call center jobs or they're doing Door Dash/Uber driving stuff while they try and launch a career as an artist or a web designer or what-have-you.

First pass on my Silver Spook Halloween costume. Silver Spook is the homeless hactivist/revolutionary protagonist from my Deus Ex mod. The silverized trenchcoat is a craftable augmentation that thwarts infrared vision of the Predator drones so the AI police state has trouble shooting hellfire missiles at you. Here's the in-game character. I think it's pretty close except I gotta go get some $3 sunglasses and chop the lenses up into isosceles triangles. (Painting done by Green Robot!)

Every job I've had, including working at game companies of various size and teaching in a US public school, has paid as much or less than the job you were at, Xeno. GR and I were basically homeless the entire development of Neofeud, like I said. We can only survive now because real estate in this area is shit, it's somewhat the wild west (barely any cops), and the houses are basically rotting to pieces. There are only shit-tier jobs nowadays, man. Unless your parents are millionaires, you're like a drug dealer, criminal, or corporate criminal. Even if you make over 50,000, in the US we'd be paying $30,000 out for healthcare costs (not including deductibles) so you might end up being more fucked to shit limping around trying to get insulin through go-fund-mes if you SOMEHOW manage to make $40+ an hour. Or maybe you just crack a rib falling off your Deliveroo gig-hustle, go to hospital, the Big Pharma drugdealer pretending to be a doctor slips you fentanyl and you OD on it a month later, and die that way like millions of other Americans. The only friend from high school I know that has his own place is a real estate agent cause his daddy worked in real estate after being at the vampire squid of planet Earth, Goldman Sachs. His job was to auction off pieces of Oahu to Chinese, Saudi billionaires so they can leave the apartments empty and make more homeless people and homeless kids for me to try and take care of as a social worker for go-fuck-yourself-and-starve an hour wages. *Literally* everyone else I know lives multigenerationally, like 5-10 families to a house, with every member in the house working, often multiple jobs. Unless they like inherited a shit ton of money from a rich relative or daddy is the CEO of Ebay or something. I just talked to a United Airlines aircraft *engineer*, like that rare person with a college degree actually working in his field. He's been at it for over a decade and can't afford to live on the island he works on. (Works on Oahu, flies back to the Big Island to see his wife and kid once a week but his boss is emailing him all Sunday with work-related tasks trying to drag him back on his day off). It's shit all the way down, man.

On my way downtown to visit a couple of visiting foreigners. Pics to follow, I expect

Much of my computer "skill" is intuition based on what I see happening on the screen. I'm horrible at troubleshooting, explaining, or assisting over the phone, regardless of the tech-savviness of the person on the other end.

Sorry in advance to our non-USians, but there is mischief afoot and in this case a few people taking the time to help might make a difference. In the US there is a law called the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). It simply says that if a bank takes deposits from people in a neighborhood, then they also have to offer banking services to those people (loans, branches etc). Since we live in the era of Trump, where collusion and corruption are the norm, all of our financial regulators are now led by former bankers. One asshole is pushing to "reform" CRA... by making it easier for banks to ignore low income people and neighborhoods. If you don't think that is just super, please check this out. https://ncrc.org/treasurecra/ The super easy way to comment is right here, no personal info is required. https://www.regulations.gov/comment?D=OCC-2018-0008-0001 Don't know anything about banking or government regulations? It doesn't matter, sketch out 3-4 sentences about how you use banks and why you think they matter to low income people and neighborhoods and hit "submit". Your comment matters, they do really look at these and read them all and they will cite your comment in the final rule. Regulations like this might get a few hundred comments at most, and the outcome will impact millions of people. Thank you in advance.

Got the kid her first laptop. School uses chromebooks for everything, her digital literacy class starts with teaching google suite products, setting up the OS, and some other stuff that 80% of adults can't do. The rest of the teachers use google docs for all the work too it seems. So rather than constantly have to log out her school account from my pc and my mac we plunked down $100 for a refurbed chromebook at micro center. These little tanks are pretty damn cool, but weirdly limited. First we find the first user that signs in is the "owner", and since she signed in first with her school account all of the security restriction that the school machines have were enforced on her machine. There was no way to add other users, google play and app downloads were restricted etc. All the stuff you would expect for school laptops, but automatically on her machine. I finally figure out that I need to "powerwash" i.e. reset the thing to clear all accounts. Then signed in with her personal google account (substituting the school's draconian control settings with my own muahahaha) which set THAT as the owner. Then I sign in to her school google account which, since it is NOT the owner account cannot lock out the other stuff she wants to do. This shit makes me miss my old Atari.

The volume of drool boggles my mind

important PUPdate: trio of St. Bernard friends in dog shelter find FURever home, stay together:

I think it's important to remember that it's not just you. It fucking sucks, but it's NOT just you. Most people around your/our age are working for below-average wages, and over half of them are working in service industry jobs that don't utilize their degrees. If they are working in a job in the field of their degree, they are severely underpaid. And then on top of that, they are usually working at least one "side hustle" job - driving for Lyft or Uber, delivering groceries, walking dogs. Just in our own lives, for TM and our family to be able to live, we are caretaking (aka, living without rent) in a falling-apart house in the middle of nowhere, on EBT and Medicare. When he was working as a STEM teacher on Oahu, we lived in his parents' home with his parents and his two adult siblings. His mom is a teacher, his dad is a teacher, his brother works full-time, his sister is a teacher, and TM was working as a teacher and everyone contributed to bills and rent and we were collectively scraping by. It's easy to think that it's a you-problem, but honestly from our experience and the experiences of others and the articles and statistics... this is how it is for too many of us.

I just do rice and steamed veggies pretty frequently, with a packet of tuna thrown in for flavor and protein. It's my go-to easy meal. 1/3 cup Basmati rice in a microwave safe bowl with 3/4 cup water Nuke 3 minutes and chop broccoli, mushrooms and mini bell peppers up while it's cooking. Throw all veggies in on top of rice and nuke 9 more minutes. When done, the rice should still be moist but not with standing fluid. Adjust according to taste and microwave. Stir in a Lemon Pepper tuna packet and a dash of olive oil or soy sauce, to taste (I pretty much just do Costco olive oil these days). I also sprinkle shredded Parmesan cheese on it usually, but that's optional.

https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/zm9989/the-final-days-of-netrunner

@heavyboots (and any other autosports fans): a young Kimi Raikonen playing Colin McRae Rally 2.0 on the original PS:

Meanwhile, in suburbia…

I have to do it all the time, unfortunately, as they live 150 miles from town. But yes, it definitely adds a new degree of difficulty.

I literally had to get off the phone with my dad last night because I was punching the seat beside me and my forehead to deal with the absolute rage he was causing while I was trying to drive down the freeway and talk him through copying a fucking file from a USB stick to the his computer… end users can definitely be the bane of you existence if they aren't at least moderately tech savvy. And it's not like he's this bad on purpose. He wants to be helpful, it's just that he literally can't understand the difference between a window and a file inside a window. And I've trained him on this 100 times so I'm just done at this point.

Hotel Artemis - Super highly recommended. A very classically cyberpunk movie in the right way. I'm going to be doing a video review of this for the channel. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5834262/

We've just bought what will probably be our last car. Traditional petrol/automatic. We're out in the sticks, don't have a bus service we can walk to, very poor cellphone service, no sign of public electric charging points in our area. It all hardly matters. We do very few miles a year. I think I filled the tank a max of 6 times last year. Just shopping, and doctor visits. The golf course is 4 minutes away. We've started using grocery home delivery, so that reduces the pressure on shopping. The car we're trading in is 18 years old with 108000 on the clock, and most of that was when I regularly commuted to London in the first 10 years. I think we'd be cheaper with taxis, but they have 6 or 7 miles to come and most of them smell awful.

I'm finding this to be pretty good. Now that I am off social media altogether (wait, does Linkedin count?) this is a welcome respite.

Welcome! Yep, you're not alone in the Jackpot feeling.

The cake was a hit! I got specific compliments for the filling we brought home ONE piece

Since the oldest Minibot (aka Baby Razorgirl) is turning seven tomorrow, today I created a cake! My brief as per M was: a layered chocolate cake, with purple buttercream, a panda, her name, and green bamboo around the sides. SO. I made two layers of Bean Brownie Cake: 6 eggs 1 drained/rinsed can of black beans 2 tablespoons cocoa powder 1 teaspoon baking powder 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons yogurt (plain, vanilla, Greek - whatever you have!) 1 - 1.5 cups of sweetener (I used Splenda and add it to taste) Blend together and bake in two 8-inch round layers (350 for 25 minutes or so, until it tests done). Then I decided that it would be fun to have a filling other than more buttercream, so I made creme pat. It was my first attempt and I think it turned out well! I halved this recipe and used Splenda instead of sugar. I made vanilla Splenda buttercream and colored it with neon food coloring And then, decorated! The panda has mini chocolate chips as well I tried to keep it a surprise from Miss M at first but she was so excited she couldn't stay away and supervised the decorating process - and then proceeded to watch a "Cake" episode of The Great British Baking Show (I use Splenda instead of sugar and make non-wheat-flour versions of foods to fit TM's food restrictions for his health and to fit better into the macros I'm trying to stick to for weight loss. We're completely used to it after eating like this for... well, TM has for 7+ years now!)