BLACK PILLED
I've been in and out of the hospital. Since going back to work I've been pulling as many hours as possible to make up for the hospital bills and lack of having worked which has been exhausting.
I've sat for several hours in front of the computer trying to opine on matters of import but the matters have left me dead inside and unable to type.
These include, but are not limited to:
Ray Epps
Beer Spokes...people
Fox firing the one guy who said on air that the Dominion accusations were bullshit.
The looming food situation in much of the world.
CGM
That the following is a topic of conversation:
The self inflicted erosion of trust in so many of our institutions.
1
My view is that there is clearly malicious information warfare. When I have no spoons to analyze with perspective, it is correct to 'turn off' awareness of the potentially bad fact patterns. Opposition cult is 'expert somewhere has a plan that will have perfect results'. Ends do not justify means, means create ends. Fundamentally, take a break from being genius expert who foresees all, and focus on personally behaving right. Then, maybe good things get done which you cannot foresee or account for. Measureable is not the same set as important, and signal that is not purely noise can still be productively filtered as pure noise, if trying to find the information content is distracting your awareness.
Posted by: Pat Buckman at Tue Apr 25 14:54:11 2023 (r9O5h)
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Tue Apr 25 16:13:41 2023 (LZ7Bg)
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I made a mistake of listening to that idiot and only came to my senses when he started talking about China and India. I have a feeling that he completely forgot about 1962. It was the last war, it was fought in high altitudes, and it ended in a crushing defeat for India. The entire Indian army was routed and disintegrated. Delhi was in panic, they expected Chinese just march in in columns any day. Meanwhile Chinese didn't have any such plans and they just wanted to return to the McDonald line, which they did. That conflict guided the development of nuclear weapons and missiles in India for decades. Their governing circles understood that without nukes, Chinese could wipe their feet upon them at any time. Of course now it's completely different and I agree with his point of Chinese army being an army of peace for decades, and thus worthless. Still, to think that fighting through Himalayas is impossible takes a certain level of ignorance that I am not sure I want to applaud.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Tue Apr 25 21:55:05 2023 (LZ7Bg)
Anniversary! Note:It's a Blogging Best Practice to let your post sit for a bit before hitting "publish" so you can check spelling and grammar with a fresh eye.
It is an even better practice to actually hit "post" and not assume one has made a programming announcement like one did on Discord.
Tonight is the one year anniversary of my first stream. So, despite it being a Saturday we will have an extended channel stream this evening beginning at 9PM EST 1AM UTC.
We are on the Final Fantasy 14 North American server (in Sargatanas) if any members of chat who are FF14 players would like to do a dungeon or something.
However:
After a bit of gaming while people filter in, we will change gears. At around midnight EST (depending on combat and cut-scenes) we will show two films from the 1920s that promise to be quite a treat.
1 Week is a Buster Keaton short from 1923. Watch and be amazed at the master of physical comedy.
Our feature for the evening is CHANG! A semi-documentary from 1927. These days the academic nature of this film is criticized, its educational bonafides being somewhat hampered by the lack of any anthropologists on the 3 person shooting crew, but Adventurers Meriam C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack and Adventuress (and former spy) Marguerite Harrison more than make up for the lack of scholarly references by filming an absolutely great story. This film has been really hard to find and only recently have I managed to track down a copy not in French.
In addition to narrating the title cards, I'll be providing some trivia about the making of the films.
After the movies, we'll most likely do a little bit of grinding, in one of the channels current games.
I have it on very good authority that Twitch.tv/brickmuppet will be livestreaming it. Join my internet alter-ego and his Crack Team of Science Babes....
(well....at least one of them)
...as they discuss this momentous occasion and provide a thoughtful, if snarky peanut gallery to any unplanned fireworks.
Like this for instance...
Join us for the festivities beginning at 07:00 EST/ 11:00 UTC next Wednesday the 19th.
UPDATE: Well...THAT'S a nice clarification. The Space Rocket Launch Schedule website now says that the launch date is TBD. I'm not 100% sure it did not say that before , but I didn't see it, and I'm fairly sure that paragraph was not as long when I read it the first time.
This morning I saw an announcement that it was going to be next Monday and currently I'm seeing this on Yahoo News :
Current federal requests point to a liftoff between Monday, April 17, and Friday, April 21. Many believe Musk would be happy to see Starship fly on April 20, or 4/20, which is often used to reference all things marijuana-related and has become a favorite joke for Musk.
I'm sorry about jumping the gun on this, but it looks like no date is set as of this time.
Spaceflight Now (currently) has the launch as No Earlier Than April 17th.
Posted by: Mauser at Wed Apr 12 19:35:05 2023 (BzEjn)
2
That site you have that reports a date of 4/19 actually said very clearly that no launch time was yet scheduled, they just put that in as a placeholder. Mutliple sources have started saying as of last night (Wednesday) and into this morning, that the FAA launch license will be granted on Friday and the launch attempt will be Monday 4/17.
Posted by: David Eastman at Thu Apr 13 17:12:00 2023 (hiYWq)
Posted by: Mauser at Fri Apr 14 20:02:39 2023 (BzEjn)
4
April 20th is also Hitler's birthday, so if Musk is into the stoner joke, that is reason to suspect that he is really a Nazi.
Posted by: PatBuckman at Sat Apr 15 11:37:34 2023 (r9O5h)
5
Yeah. There's little doubt that a Hitler fetish is what will get reported. His social credit score with the powers that be went way down after he took off the mask, went all Fascist, and started advocating for free speech.
(Did you know that people who advocate for manned spaceflight who are not affiliated with universities or government are actually engaged in an insane plan to try and gain access to Thule' in the hollow earth via the polar opening in NeuSchwabenland? )
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sat Apr 15 13:05:37 2023 (ir7rl)
If this thing works as advertised, it will be a game changer, heralding a massive downturn in launch costs and increase in frequency.
Starship also is designed to go to Mars, though it can potentially reach anywhere between Mercury and the astroid belt, perhaps even the outer Jovian system which is about the absolute distance limit of useful solar power.
This is a much bigger deal than people seem to realize.
This is No Joke: This is No Joke:
All hands to gaming stations:
Tonight at 9pm EST 2am UTC we will be having a surprise Saturday stream. The occasion is the one year anniversary of the first attempt at streaming on the channel as well as the fact that we will almost caertainly finish La Pucelle: Tactics this evening.
If we finish before or around midnight we will also show 2 silent film. The short comedy 1 Week staring Buster Keaton and the Semi-Documentary CHANG from 1927. The latter is a true classic, filmed on location in Siam that follows the lives of a young Thai couple as they try to eek out a living in the unforgiving jungle.
Its academic nature is somewhat hampered by the lack of any anthropologists on the 3 person shooting crew, but Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack and Adventurer (and former spy) Marguerite Harrison more than make up for the lack of scholarly references by filming an absolutely great story. This film has been really hard to find and only just now have I managed to track down a copy not in French.
Stop by, grab a drink and a snack and join us at Twitch.tv/brickmuppet for all the fun.
OK: We did not finish La Pucelle.
Tactics need to be reassessed. Next Movie night will be at the one year anniversary of our first full stream on Saturday April 15.
A Reminder
Just a quick reminder that tomorrow is the last day to download,acquire er... WATCH any particular Pikamee streams you might be fond of, because her agency has stated they will purge all her content once she graduates on April 1.
An Observation.
Yesterday, after confirming that the blog was working again, I literally had my phone in hand to call a friend and tell him the good news. (He had been quite eager to get back to the keyboard with duck pictures). However, as I cleared out my spam comment's, I noted a comment that conveyed the terrible news that my friend had passed away.
On the 8th.
I had not spoken to him since mid February.
Do not let the interval between contacting friends get out of hand. Days become weeks which become months and then years....and then they are gone.
See that you make some time for friends, while you can.
So, yesterday, I learned that Wonderduck, (Eric Carra) had thrown off this mortal coil on the 8th of March.
I do not know the circumstances of his passing beyond that it was due to complications stemming from his health issues, which were many of late.
Eric was a blogger from back when blogging was new and his website remained an eclectic convergence of interests; ducks, history, anime, ducks, wacky anecdotes science fiction, music, Formula One racing, and ducks....rubber ones usually. He was an avid collector of rubber ducks.
Wonderduck's Pond remains a repository for quite a few reviews of anime spanning nigh on 20 years, reviews that were exceptionally entertaining and brought many a chuckle to his readers over the years.
He was also an amateur historiographer with a particular interest in the battle of Midway. Shortly before his health took a sharp turn for the worse in 2021 he was invited to contribute to a historian's roundtable on the battle. Due to his hospitalization he was unable to do so.
'Wonderduck' encouraged me to become an early adopter of mee.nu, when I outgrew Blogger. (His site was hosted on mu.nu, the predecessor of this service.)
He also was a good friend. When I was recovering from my stroke he was in a hospital bed, yet despite his own issues, he gave me considerable encouragement through those dark times.
Eric was a well liked blogger who had a following and counted as fans some of the more impressive representatives of the medium. No small feat.
His last few years were fraught. A blood clot precipitated a hospitalization which in turn led to several other issues that combined to cause him great dismay.
Yet he soldiered on.
While we never physically met, we did used to correspond at least once a week, however, I had not spoken to him in just over a month. Despite his myriad problems, his main complaint was that he was having difficulty blogging due to technical issues, so he was still pursuing his hobby after everything.
Wonderduck had a lot of hurdles to deal with in his short life. Despite that he brought smiles to the faces of many people from all over the world over the years and made the world just a little quirkier and fun.
Few people accomplish that.
Eric, you will be missed.
We've managed to obtain an actual picture of Eric in heaven, studying naval history and being a kaiju.
1
Hospitals kill. The sleep deprivation is a legitimate crime against humanity when bad guys use it, but we allow hospitals to continue with it. And, of course, infections. Finally, one of my friends died in post-op in 2002 because they mixed-up his meds. I was quite relieved when Wonderduck transitioned to rehab, but then he had to check in again and looks like that was too much.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Mon Mar 27 16:31:56 2023 (LZ7Bg)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Mon Mar 27 23:40:03 2023 (PiXy!)
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March 8 is the feast of St. John of God, who tried to improve conditions in hospitals (among other things). So I guess Wonderduck has been recruited for a new job.
I do want people I know to stop dying, though. This last five years has been rough.
Posted by: Suburbanbanshee at Wed Mar 29 11:25:18 2023 (cHUaN)
4
I haven't checked the Anime blogs I follow recently, so this is the first I'd heard of Wonderduck's passing. I've followed him during his medical travails of the past few years, and always enjoyed his wit and style.
Very sad to hear that he's gone.
Posted by: jabrwok at Fri Apr 7 18:33:32 2023 (T4WaI)
We. Be. BLOGGIN'!
So I woke up late this morning. Very, very late.
It's actually 13:21 EST.
I've got some errands to run before I stream at 18:00, but before I ran out the door in a mad tizzy I checked my E-mails.
And there in my gmail account vying for attention with all the "5.56mm ammo IN STOCK" spam was a message from the blogfather, the Antipodean of awesomeness, the man himself, Pixy Misa.
"The problem with the blog is fixed. Please return my pet turtles unharmed."
So before I run out into the world, let's test this to see if it works.
Remember: When Doing the Spicy Curry Challenge...
Bleach is a base and therefore does not qualify as a spice.
Picture of Bleach Bottle Goes Here
This unfortunate fact befell a Japanese school teacher last September who got transferred to a different homeroom against her wishes. She responded to this affront by sneaking BLEACH into the curry of her new class....as one does....when one is crazy and evil....and a public school teacher.
This story was covered by various outlets at the time but her trial has garnered some coverage as well. Her stated reasoning seems to be that she did not want the students to "create happy memories without me" (Giggle translate is here). This does not make sense because she attempted to poison the new class, not the class she was unhealthily attached to.
Nevertheless Miss. Munchausen by Proxy Sensei seems to have gotten transferred into the class of a protagonist in some kids elementary school drama because the child in charge of distributing the curry noted that it was emanating bleach stank and, being unimpressed with the teachers response to their concerns, warned the class and got the principle, saving their class.
Miss Munchausen by Proxy Sensei was the only teacher who did not show up for the all hands meeting the principle called after being tracked down by the principle confessed to the crime and related in great detail how she'd done it.
1
Bummer. On the other hand, easy to contest those charges.
Posted by: David Eastman at Sat Mar 11 21:20:15 2023 (sYlgI)
2
This is just a fact of life with cards. Even the chip does not protect fully from this. Also, online merchants are compromised periodically.
I ended using 4 cards.
Card 1: for a small number of recurring payments that I do not want to fail and for Amazon (historically it includes AWS S3 that hosts my backups and I also do not want to fail). I do not give this card to anyone else unless in a dire emergency.
Card 2: Everyday use where it gets stolen all the time.
Card 3: Backup (it's my wife's mileage card)
Card 4: Amex for aviation and travel items, mostly aviation fuel, parking, landing fees, hotels etc.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Mon Mar 13 14:27:04 2023 (LZ7Bg)
As was mentioned briefly in the brief post talking about the Silvervale situation, Pikamee had a similar experience to Silvervale in that she announced that she was going to be playing The Game That Must Not be Named. This also resulted in massive harassment from the degenerate hellions that get their marching orders from the latest Twitter encyclical. This included death threats and doxxing.
You see, J.K. Rowling (the creator of Harry Potter) has expressed views that do not align perfectly with the most extreme transgender activists. Thus, playing the game is said by Twitter freaks to be literally killing somebody with gender dysphoria.
Normally the rantings of mentally ill cultists can just be ignored, but this is more difficult when you are a public figure who has to engage the public. It is also much harder when the gleeful lynch mobs actively hound you.
Pikamee has been to the U.S. and speaks English, but is not obsessed with politics and really has no frame of reference for our blinkered gender ideology debates and associated insanity, which was, no doubt, an out of context problem from her perspective. This foul brigading becomes very hard to ignore with when doxxing and death threats are involved and this is particularly true in Japan given fairly recent events involving idols.
They mercilessly bullied this poor girl from another country who had literally nothing to do with any of this this lunatic critical studies shit. They brigaded her so ferociously that she cancelled plans to play the game. Then she was hounded into cancelling another stream. And another
Pikamee has now announced she's "graduating", which is a neurotically polite Japanese euphemism for idols that basically means retirement.
Pikamee was a hilarious and talented bi-lingual streamer that helped to establish V-tubing as a genre. Pikamee clips have made the rounds for years, have been the basis of countless memes and have brought joy to millions.
Now, because of some mentally ill narcissistic cultists, she's gone.
I'm not a particular fanboi of Rowling or her views. Her TERFitude is an extension of her very anti-male brand of feminism, but her remarks on the trans issue have not been particularly hateful or insane. (Biological men in women's locker rooms is a legitimate concern, as some unfortunate schoolgirls here in Virginia found out 2 years ago).
However, my opinion on one bit of somebody's public persona are not really germane to anything. She's an individual. Rowling wrote a popular series of books, that, while not MY cup of tea, are well crafted, beloved, and got millions of kids to actually read. Furthermore, I generally believe that we should separate the art from the artist in most cases that don't involve violence*.
Speech is not violence.
Violence is violence.
But we're now in a situation where normal discourse is counted as violence and actual violence by political extremists is considered speech.
This cannot stand.
I noted on stream last night that I stream on an iMac and my only console is a PS2, but if I had the equipment I'd stream HOGWART'S LEGACY in a hot minute. I'll also support anyone who does so. I'm gonna buy the game (a game I cannot play) next week. I hope it is the best selling game of the year and these pitiless Jacobin myrmidons get their noses rubbed in their own impotence.
Good by Pikamee.
Thanks for all the fun.
*(Lovecraft's stated views on ethnicity and race were abhorrent, but his work brilliant. If he were alive, I'd not vote for him. Marrion Zimmer Bradely ran a pedophile ring, so I've tossed her books.)
1
If "trans women" were actually trying to be women, they would perfectly understand women's need to have private restrooms, lockerrooms, etc. They would understand fear of being raped. And they would be pushing for separate restrooms for themselves.
But largely they are not pushing for more unisex bathrooms, or for anything like that. Because most of the activists are misogynists or autogynephiles. Or both.
And frankly, the number of male sex offenders and rapists who suddenly discover their identity when it is time to go to prison is pretty amazing... And they should probably have their own prison, just for them.
It is a shame for the guys who just want to dress up in women's clothing, or who have genuine issues of other kinds, to be lumped in with dangerous predators. But then again, they are not the ones arriving at women's shelters and raping the women who were already in trouble.
I wonder when the vigilantism starts. Hopefully we get things in order before it gets to that point, but we'll see.
Posted by: Suburbanbanshee at Mon Mar 6 11:10:21 2023 (sF8WE)
2
The only good thing that can arise from such petty tyranny of the young white middle class nihilist set (Based on the most common demographic of the woke class.) is if they make the mistake of participating in Woke Olympics while NOT residing in the US can result in classic unintended consequences. Namely, defamation as a legal case is a lot easier to purse outside the US - as unhinged Twitter users in the UK have found to their cost.
Posted by: cxt217 at Mon Mar 6 21:38:34 2023 (2tHvf)
3
Some pretty horrible people seem to self select for activist.
Situations are kinda amazing really, just not in a wonderful way.
I seem to be particularly out of answers tonight.
I'm sure there are remedies, I just do not have any new ideas.
Posted by: Pat Buckman at Tue Mar 7 23:59:32 2023 (r9O5h)
RESULTS!
So, night before last, ACAB, Defund the Police, and "Law and order is racist!" finally got results in the form of a running gun battle down my suburban street that shot out several car windows and missed a neighbors head (in his house) by about 8 inches.
Don't know how much longer I'm gonna be staying here.
1
Well, maybe we are supposed to be going full Frank Castle/Mack Bolan, and that this is why things are not having the initially claimed results. Community policing could be understood as vigilante killings.
Spoilers: Full Metal Vigilante actually isn't the answer, those academics simply had zero contact with or awareness of reality.
Posted by: PatBuckman at Thu Mar 2 13:17:17 2023 (r9O5h)
2
Ah, the joys of living in a cul-de-sac. Any running gun battles automatically reach a dead end.
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