The Americans who still refuse to realize that this was ENTIRELY THE FUCKING POINT are beyond infuriating.

Anyone who still believes they’re “voting there way out of this” are delusional.

Within less than an hour, Rule 34 will come into effect and someone will make a porn-film about them.

I was a tech-manager at Staples when those launched and it was an absolute shit-storm right from the start with returns and complaints.

The only thing crazier from that time was an HP WebOS tablet (I can’t remember the name) that launched with pretty big fanfare with HP trying to take a marketing page out of Apples playbook, only to have it fail so completely that they announced a week later that support was being dropped and any remaining stock was offered to anyone who wanted at 99 bucks.

Wild days indeed.

Jide Remix Ultratablet.

Kinda glitchy from the start. Got one minor software update before the company decided to focus first only on their mini-desktops and soon after, B2B; dropping the consumer support entirely.

Which wouldn’t have been so bad is the released the proprietary blobs for others to use to keep up support. The hardware was nice, and the concept was one of the first to try an “Android version of a Surface”. But to my knowledge, no ROMs have ever been made for it.

Yeah. Chin definitely has a lot to do with it. And the skinny goatee he usually wears with it. Makes him look like Jafar from the animated Alladin. With the fuller moustache and beard from the photo above, It’s already less jarring to me.

I have no idea why, but something about his face has always bothered me. To the point where I can’t even focus on his performances.

Its almost like the proportions are all wrong. Like an upside down triangle or something.

And I know that’s unfair; dude is probably a good guy. Haven’t heard of an scandals or anything. I just have an irrational hatred of his face.

True about the pay.

In general I just feel like our representatives are too far removed from the people they’re supposed to serve.

Here in Canada, we’ve had a couple of floor-crossers from the Conservatives to the Liberals, and social media is up in arms about how that shouldn’t be allowed. “We voted Conservative, not Liberal”. Whenever someone points out (and rightly so) that in the parliamentary system you’re voting for an individual, not a party, they freak out and say that’s not how it works.

They fundamentally have no idea how a representative democracy is supposed to work.

A part of that comes from an American culture bleeding up into Canada a bit, with people thinking they vote directly for the Prime Minister the same was Americans directly vote for their president. But a bigger part of it is that those representatives spend more time in Ottawa than in their own ridings. And if a representative loses their seat in an election, they can just pick a different riding where they don’t even live and run again. It’s ridiculous.

Basically democratic socialism but with a few rules:

1. No billionaires. After 500 million, it’s taxed at 100%
2. No Corporations. Private business ownership only. No Shareholders or Hedge Funds. Basically no wall street.
3. Lobbying on behalf of an industry is banned.
4. No party “whips” that exist to make a representative vote the party line even if they’re personally disagree with the party on that particular issue. Representatives need to truly represent their constituents, not their party. In fact, fuck the entire concept of “party politics”. Ditch it.
5. By law, a representative has to have actually lived in their riding for 5 years or more.
6. Representatives are required to spend at least 80% of their time in their constituency, in their office. It’s a 9-5 job. No more of this showing up to vote bullshit and then fucking off to Mexico. You serve your constituents, and your job is to be in your office to listen to them tell you what they want 5 days a week, 8 hours a day. Otherwise, what do they pay you for?
7. With the exception of meeting twice a year in person, most bills in congress/parliament are able to be done completely virtually. The representative studies the issue, consults with his constituents and votes accordingly. They do so without any input from their so-called peers. The only input they are allowed is from their constituents and legitimate experts in whatever field they are looking into.
8. Representatives have a strict two term limit and an age limit.
9. At any point, your constituents (and ONLY your constituents) can trigger a recall election due to no-confidence.
10. You’re a “servant of the people”; not the other way around. You get a working man’s salary; enough to live and a small dispensation for travel expenses, office staff, etc… But using your position to enrich your own personal wealth is grounds for an immediate arrest.

My desktop that was powerful enough to do most things died a few months ago at the worst possible time; it came on the heels of emptying a lot of my savings on vets to find out that my girl had advanced bone cancer, and then even more on sending her over the rainbow bridge and getting her cremated.

So both as a way to save some money and a way to keep my mind off of her, I’ve been putting together a new computer using a few spare parts that I have had laying around. Truth is, my old computer, though old, had been upgraded up the wazoo through the years to the point where most of that stuff could just transfer over (750 watt powersupply, Nvidia 3060 12gb card, max amount of RAM that it could take, etc…)

All I really needed was a new mainboard and processor. As long as I bought a used one that used DDR4 instead of 5, I already had everything I needed.

The “Project” is adapting my second-to-last PC case to accept newer components. (upgrading the front USB ports, things like that) Because it’s an OEM Acer case, I can’t simply order in an upgraded swappable unit, so I’m having to get creative with soldering.

It’ll probably fail and I’ll have to buy a new case too, but oh well. It’s fun to try. I have so many old computer parts laying around, let’s see how Dr. Frankenstein I can go.

Wrath of Khan directors cut.

Lost my soul-dog to bone cancer at the end of February.

R.I.P. Ripley. Love you, baby-girl.

Corporations are not your friend. Ethics plays no part in it. It’s economics. If they price themselves out of the competition, that’s their problem, not yours.

Wasn’t it leaked in a memo that Trump was planning some kind of “confrontation” at the dinner?

Is anyone stupid enough to believe this asshole?

Anything by Bear McCreary.

Black Sails is my personal favourite.

https://youtu.be/XFTcA4QLHw0

That is very true. However (at least from what I was always taught) the reason employers “require” ANY degree is less about what you learn and more about showing them that you have ability and commitment necessary TO learn.

An employer isn’t generally interested in what you know; they’re always going to teach you their way of doing things anyway.

Employers want to know that you have the focus to actually learn their systems.

So the end result of “fast degrees” will be the opposite of what job hunters think. It’ll just devalue degrees in the eyes of employers because it no longer signifies the very metric they were measuring, which was the ability to pay attention

Even Slenderman needs a break sometimes.

“Paying it forward” is fundamentally the most important weapon we have against the oligarchy, and simply refusing to participate in the endless cycle of new technology.

A long time ago, I kind of stumbled into a habit of “paying my hardware forward”. It started because it was simply a pain in the ass to try to sell something on ebay because your first ten offers are scam artists.

So when I upgraded a drawing tablet that I was using, I had a friend of a friend that was looking to try digital drawing and said “Here you go. The only thing I ask is that when you upgrade, or when you’re done with it, give it forward to someone else who could make use of it.”

Later, the same thing happened again with a camera stabilizer. I had bought one that it turned out was too lightweight for my DSLR. So I had to buy a heavier weight one. Meanwhile, a friend’s son was a budding filmmaker just using his cell phone to make stupid movies with his friends and I said “Hey…he’ll like this. The only thing I ask is when HE upgrades, or whatever, he passes it forward to another person”

Even something as simple as a dog ramp I bought for my aging dog. After he passed, it hung around in my shed until a friend of mine’s dog needed an operation and couldn’t do stairs. When her dog recovered she asked if I wanted it back and I said, no…just pass it forward.

I’ve done it with spare monitors. Old laptops that someone has needed for school, etc…

So what started as me just being too impatient to deal with ebay became something that literally makes me feel good knowing that I’m helping someone out, or even better, supporting another person’s artistic passion.

On the other hand, I would fire someone instantly if they had cheated their degree like this.

But all you’re doing in that case is making them attend a community college with a bunch of wacky misfits for a few years.

My only concern would be a question of retention.

It’s easy to pass an exam if you’re writing it almost immediately after taking in the information. But remembering the information at the end of the school year when you’re writing your final exam and it’s a topic you learned in the first week takes a different kind of study skill.

It boils down to the old Cram for midterms question. How much do you retain?

My take is that retention comes from revisiting a topic multiple times over the course of a year. One and done studying to pass an exam doesn’t leave an imprint on the memory that’s going to last.

Full on sobbing? About a month ago, maybe a little less. choking up and tearing up and being unable to speak, just now as I type this.

At the end of February, I had to unexpectedly say goodbye to my girl Ripley (Mastiff/Lab cross). I think a lot of people have a soul dog, and for me, Ripley was that. She very literally saved my life by simply being there during my darkest depressions, and whenever I would have a panic attack, I would bury my face in her fur and breath in, and her scent would somehow pull me out of it. I live now absolutely terrified of what’s going to happen the next time I have an anxiety attack and she’s not around.

About three weeks before, she started limping. Vet said basically that it’s either a sprained muscle or bone cancer. I said, well, let’s start optimistic, get her some painkillers and muscle relaxants to give her leg time to heal if it’s a sprain and then go from there. And for about three weeks, it worked. Went off the meds 10 days later and was seemingly back to normal. So I figure I dodged a bullet.

At the end of February, it starts up again; worse this time. So I make another vet appointment for x-rays, but it wouldn’t be until the end of the week, and because she’s in pain, the vet asks if I can drop her off and she can hang around there so that they can squeeze her in, in between actual appointments that same day. I said yes, not even thinking for a moment that this would be the last time I would see her awake and alert.

I knew that it was possibly bone cancer. I was expecting that. That isn’t what haunts me and makes me cry when I think about it. It’s two things primarily.

1. The absolute sudden nature of it. I get a phone call saying that they’re asking my permission to sedate her for the x-ray because it’s too uncomfortable and painful for her to sit in the machine in the proper position to xray her leg otherwise. And then a second phone call an hour later, not only confirming that it was bone cancer, but that it had already started into her lungs. I had to make a choice. I could either take her home for a day or two to say goodbye in private, but in order to not be in pain she would essentially be so drugged up that she wouldn’t really have an quality of life anyway. Or I could race to the vet and say my goodbye’s right then and there. That unexpectedness hit me like a tonne of bricks, but what really hurt was…

2. I called a friend to drive me to the vet and be there with me while I said goodbye. When we arrived, Ripley was still only just starting to come out of the first sedation that she had been given in order to take the x-ray. I spent almost an hour, just laying on the floor next to her, talking to her and stroking her fur. But I don’t know…and I’ll never truly know for sure; if she knew that I was there for her in her final moments. Did she wake up enough from the first sedative enough to register my presence with her before they gave her the next one in order to start the euthenasia process?

Or did my Ripley go to her rest thinking that she was alone, and her last memory of me was dropping her off at the vet?

My friend insists that she felt Ripley’s breathing speed up when she heard my voice, but she could just be trying to make me feel better. And it’s that unknown that still makes me cry whenever I think of it, even two months later.

The last ugly sobbing cry was a month after she passed, the crematorium sent me her ashes back, and, unbeknownst to me, they took a nose print of her nose for me. Seeing that nose print broke me all over again. It’ll soon be a tattoo.

Anyway, I’m going to stop now. I’ve run on long enough and I’m on the verge of crying again. Pretty manly for a 50-year old dude, I know… But she was my everything and I miss her terribly every day.