Slice the pineapple into rings. Dip the rings into the condensed milk, then dip in a cinnamon sugar (and maybe a little cayenne) to coat it. You want a light coating. We’re not breading it.

Grill it.

Love the look of the lattice.

There’s an entire galaxy of people doing stuff in their free time to support their community, you just never see them if you aren’t also participating in some sort of voluteerism.

Virtually every school in America has a PTA or PTO group of parents that volunteer to support the school. When I was on the board of a PTO, everyone else on the board had jobs but they had schedules that weren’t 9-5s. One was a medical biller that had a set amount of work they had to get thru, so they could just adjust their daily schedule to the needs of the school. Another owned a small family run motel and so was able to volunteer in the mornings when the motel had little work to be done. Another was a remote worker for a company in a different time zone so their “9-5” was off hours locally.

I volunteer at an unhoused shelter now. I get there at 630am with the other volunteers. A bunch of us make breakfast, then catch the bus to downtown for the daily 9-5 (or drive, we live close to downtown). A social worker comes in on her day off on Wednesdays to volunteer as a social worker at the shelter.

I used to volunteer at a Senior Center. Volunteers were mostly college students who worked in voluteering between classes.

Youth sports coaches are mostly volunteers after their work day.

From my experience retirees generally like to support museums, art galleries, and public beautification stuff (picking up trash, planting gardens, etc).

All of them will make the time to protest. Getting motivated to start volunteering is difficult (it was for me!) but once you start to dedicate time to community building activities, you start to see protesting as just another activity that you believe in and need to make time for. For me, it was just like motivating myself to read more. I’m sitting at the house, I know I should do it, but I didn’t. I forced myself to really look at my time management and realized doomscrolling and general bullshitting was taking up a ton of my day. If I just cut down on the bullshit, I had much more time for reading and volunteering and other stuff.

I would crush that.

Yea, it would be more about starting a habit that would result in future security. In a perfect world, it starts here with $75 and a tenner every month, then they start putting in $20, then they ramp it up as they’re able.

Problems are like compound interest. You’re going to deal with them sooner or later but if you do it later, it costs more. Deal with them sooner.

The absolute best use is opening a Vanguard account, putting $75 in VOO, and forgetting you did it for about 20 or 30 years. Even better, put a $10 in there every month as well.

For a gift for myself when I’m not strapped for cash, I use gift cards and cash for something I would never buy myself. It just feels like it makes a bigger impact that way. I remember it.

If going the charity route, go to your nearest unhoused shelter and ask what they need. I volunteer at one that is hanging on by a thread (no real funding other than a small grant from the county, it’s just volunteers). Sometimes donations aren’t hitting everything we need and something has run out. Hot chocolate packets and cup of noodles are so valuable (easily transportable, usable, stable, and withstand outdoor weather) that we were giving out handfuls yesterday instead of our typical limit of 1 per person per day. It’s wild how important those little things are.

We played Rock Band (yarc) for hours at our Xmas Eve party last night. 20 or so people and just about everyone cycled thru to play. That game will never die.

Got them the cosplay they wanted for Xmas. That’s their big gift.

And in this moment, I realized my kid fits some theater kid cosplay archetype that I didn’t know existed.

Gamebillet has been killing it lately

I just refused to have texting back then. I worked for a phone company around that time and the bullshit they would charge for drove me crazy.

did I just get psyllium husk pilled

Boy you called that shot. That’s exactly what I’ve got.

That’s a great question. I’m not sure. I played Blue Prince and really liked it, but my family went and found Seance because they thought it was like Roottrees and Immortality.

Alright, this must actually be a thing because that’s what my kid said about Date Everything, too. The kid is way into voice acting.

• Shape of Dreams: Need to scratch that hack n slash itch. D4 is boring and PoE 2 ran horrible on my machine. New game but under $15.
• Cuphead: One of my kids has wanted to play this for years. Xmas present for him.
• Date Everything: The other kid wants this one. Xmas present. I dunno, man.
• The Seance of Blake Manor: Our family loves these kinds of games and it’s one of the only ways to get us all in a room. New game but under $15.
• Split Fiction: I hate the price still but my wife loved It Takes Two. Fiiiiiiine.
• Duck Detective The Secret Salami: Another family game.
• Echoes of the Plum Grove: I like this kinda stuff
• Capcom Fighting Collection 2: Man I love Power Stone.
• Astro Bot: Reviews are good enough to catch it on black friday deals.
• Spiderman 2: Loved 1 and Miles Morales.

Me too, but people I know into each of those genres usually just play the shit out of those genres. Racing peeps and sports sims peeps usually have a billion hours in them and like 3 playing some else.

I like brutalism and that building suuuuuuuuuuucks

The last time I played (probably 3 or 4 years ago), I had my brother pocket medic for me in the same physical room so I could bark orders at him. He’d never played, but he’s a good fps player. My first life on a pub server I went as a heavy and got a 22 kill streak. We’re a family of highly competent shit talkers and boy, my brother didn’t have shit to say.