#6317: Today is the day
New expansion pack for WoW goes live at 5 PM our time. Woohoo!

Here's hoping it's as much fun as Legion was.

* * *

The usual suspects want "bioengineered food" to be labeled such. If you're going to do that, you'd better label just about everything on the shelf, because there ain't nothing out there that's 100% natural. Everything we eat for food has had its genes tampered with through selective breeding, and in fact if you were to encounter--say--corn in its natural state you'd disregard it as a weed.

Broccoli, kale, cauliflower, brussels sprouts--all these plants were bred from the same base plant which--you got it--you'd call a "weed" if you found it in your garden.

This kind of nonsense is stupid.

* * *

This is why I oppose wind and solar power, right here:

Texas has a huge wind generation system with a capacity of 17,000 megawatts. On August 31, 2016 at noon, output from the wind system fell below 1% of capacity. The Texas wind system frequently has swings of thousands of megawatts within a few hours. It often produces at less than 5% of capacity.

Yet the people depending on that electricity aren't going to accept "Well, the wind ain't blowin' today...." as their refrigerators and air conditioners crap out. (You try being in Texas in August, and tell me how you don't need air conditioning or refrigeration. Go ahead.)

It's a waste of money. And as the article points out it only makes electricity cost more.

* * *

Wait, I thought that Puerto Rico was still a horrifying disaster. This article says that the PR local government stopped distributing aid "after the crisis subsided".

Anyway, a couple shipping containers full of supplies were just left to rot in the tropical sun, because after all it doesn't make Trump look horrible if PR residents get the aid which was sent to them by charitable organizations.

* * *

No, that's not correct at all. Democrats have not "become" anything; they are just letting the mask slip so we can see how they always were.

When I was in college I wanted to put a bumper sticker on my car saying "MEAT IS TASTY". My sister cautioned me not to, because some leftist shithead would vandalize my car. I realized she was right and never did it.

What is happening today is not a sea change in how Democrats act. They were always like this. It's just that the Trump victory has so unhinged them that they're no longer able to control themselves. They're simply incontinent with rage.

* * *

It's the anime and manga influence.

Look, I'm not going to argue Vox's point about the prevalence of pedophilia in Hollywood; that's a known issue and it's too skeevy for me to want to discuss in detail. But I do know a little something about anime and manga, and that's a point I don't mind speaking to.

The entire point with "anime-style" art is relatively simple to understand: about 80% of human facial expression is in the eyes, and the larger you draw the eyes the easier it is to make them expressive. Particularly when you're drawing on an 8.5x11" page which will be further reduced to 5x7".

Contrast American comic art with Japanese. With the American comics I've seen, you can get a few basic expressions: surprise, fear, anger, pleasure or joy, "neutral", and sadness. I have never read an American comic and seen anything other than those emotions on a character's face, and they were always monotonic--I've never seen SuperCoolGuy's expression contain a mixture of emotions.

One of my favorite comic panels ever comes from Maison Ikkoku, a scene where the female lead is toying with the male lead after he is tricked into kissing another woman. She's set him up, so he's standing there with his eyes closed and his face in the right position; and as she looks at his face, there's a mixture of emotions on hers: tenderness, love, forgiveness, and a hint of sadness. It's probably one of the most evocative panels I've ever seen--and that's possible because of how big the eyes are drawn.

(Next panel she's grabbed his cheeks and stretched them, and says with a sly look, "Did you think I was going to kiss you?")

I'm not going to say such a scene is impossible in American-style comics. But it would take some serious artistic chops to make it work, and I've never seen anyone even try.

The other facet is the Japanese obsession with "cute". Big eyes are cute. There's an entire subgenre devoted to characters drawn with "the body ratios of a 4 year old"; it's called "super-deformed" (SD). Lucky Star was not-quite SD but it's close.

"Fine then," you say, "but why is Disney doing it?"

The simple answer is "money". The slightly more complicated answer is "lots of money".

We can argue the particulars, but the simple fact is that Japanese animation has been in the American market since the 1960s, but really took off in the mid-1990s. Sailor Moon was brought over from Japan, and Dragon Ball; and others came, too, like Pokemon (the big one) and others. By the time we hit the 21st century there were not many people who hadn't seen at least some anime.

Animation studios--Disney included--could not help but notice that kids really liked watching anime; the success of Pokemon alone is probably the equivalent of the GDP of some small country somewhere. And as the "hot new thing" in animation there's no question that the people graduating from various art colleges all over the place would pick up influences from Japanese art.

And so? To circle around to the "pedo Hollywood" angle now, I'm not sure how much of the style change comes from that. Recently a lot of evidence has come to light that there is quite a bit of pedophilia among the movers and shakers of this country--Vox makes that point here, something like 2,300 pedophiles arrested in a three-month period--and it's not going to get a lot better, I think.

Hollywood has always been a cesspool--there is a reason reputable hotels used to bar actors, among other undesirables--but I don't think Disney's style change is an indicator of this.

* * *

As for me, the one thing I must do before the new expac goes live is to cut the grass. So I'm going to put on some clothes (I've been writing this in my underwear; help yourself to the brain bleach, it's over there by the Soma and water from the river Lethe) and get it cut.

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#6316: Well, just like that.
Friday night we watched Ready Player One and I enjoyed it. I don't remember the criticisms others had of it, but it was pretty entertaining stuff. That took my entire evening.

Saturday night we went out to dinner (a sit-down burger place, pretty tasty stuff) and then did some grocery shopping. Got home later than usual, and once everything was put away I collapsed.

I did not expect to collapse. I went into the bedroom intending to rig for nighttime (turn on lamp by the bed) but when I got into the bedroom the bed looked so comfortable that I just lay on it. I hadn't turned off the bathroom light yet; after a couple of moments I got up long enough to turn off the bathroom light, and then laid down with purpose.

Next thing I know, Mrs. Fungus is coming to bed and it's after one. I got up long enough to take my pills and have a cookie, then laid down again and slept more.

Why, no, I wasn't tired. Why do you ask?

* * *

I've decided that at some point I'm going to do an in-depth discussion of Interstellar and why I liked it so much. It's been, what, three years years since it came out? Four? So there'll be spoilers in it.

* * *

*Shrug*. My big problem with Harley-Davidson is that they treat their cachet as a license to print money. A bike that would cost $10k from another manufacturer (even an American one) costs $20k solely because it has the H-D logo on it. $1 of wire and plastic which would normally price out around $10 costs $36.50 because it has a H-D part number embossed on it.

"We're the legend! We're American made! There is no other Harley-Davidson!"

...but there is simply no reason to buy one of those things other than the name on them. Paying a premium for a nameplate has always seemed like a bad investment to me and the last time I bought anything based solely on the logo it bore was when I got my first pair of Nike shoes, when I was in seventh grade. Okay? I was twelve, and that was the first and last time I wanted something based purely on who made it.

Taking your brand's main distinguishing factor and pissing it away seems like a bad idea to me. The idea that the H-D crowd will boycott the manufacturer if they move production overseas--well, I don't know how much that will hurt them considering the large number of idiots who champ at the bit to buy a Harley, put straight pipes on it, and ride like he's the leader of Hell's Angels or something. Certainly H-D does not need to make the move in order to remain profitable, not when all their bikes are priced at $ASSRAPE.

* * *

Yesterday was utter dullsville at work. I didn't track how many emails or calls I got, but they were all few and far between, typical for a Saturday.

Instead I worked on AV--proofreading and catching inconsistencies.

The problem I have with this second third of the story is that there are too many people and too many starships for me to keep track of. But the story is going to get simpler. I'm halfway through the first main battle of the war; there will be another which (I am hoping) will be told entirely from the viewpoint of one character, but there will be a lot of ships to keep track of.

After that, though, the big to-do is over and it's just mopping up. And we move on to part three of the story; there will be one more fight in that one, probably not very big, and then we'll be all done.

And then, editing. Finding bad bits and rewriting them. Fixing stuff.

At the end, submission.

Whee!

I am still on the fence about this thing being split into two or three books. Typical novel length is maybe 70,000 words and I'm well over 150,000 with this thing--257 single-spaced pages so far--and I've still got some distance to go before it's completed.

In all probability it will have to be split. I'm going to submit it as one big shmoo, with the proviso that it has been written such that it can be split into thirds with a minimum of effort. Certainly the first part works reasonably well as a self-contained novel, though I am a little unhappy with the denouement. You don't really need to know much about the first part to pick up at the second part, either; I do believe someone picking up the second book would be made curious about what happened in the first one, but you don't need it to understand anything that's happening in the second.

Here's hoping.

* * *

Well, I have some chores and tasks ahead of me today. We're having a mini-staycation this week, staying home and doing stuff around the house and just trying to unwind from a summer that's worn us a bit fine.

First, something to eat.

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#6315: Well, that's a relief
Over the past week or so I've been adding to AV a few paragraphs at a time.

What happens is, I'm at work, and nothing is going on, so I plug in my thumb drive and fire up Word, and start writing, and then I get a call, so I have to stop writing and handle the call. I can be sitting there, inert, for 20-30-40 minutes, but the instant I decide to do something, "bleep" my phone is going off. Argh etc.

...so I'll get a few paragraphs written at a time. It's difficult to maintain continuity, and some other errors have crept in here and there, but the story slowly progresses.

I was worried about it. Being unable to spend any real contiguous time hacking away at the keyboard, I feared, would leave things feeling choppy and uncertain. I am glad to report, however, that I just read through the last twenty pages or so, and they flow smooth and logical, as if they'd been written at one go.

And they read nice, too. You can tell the characters are fighting a war, and the outcome has not been telegraphed to the reader, either, as far as I can see. I like what I just read. It sure reads fast!

Work ended today before I could switch back to the remaining action, but I'll probably have time for that tomorrow--and if not then, Saturday, definitely.

Monday was super busy. It was busier than it's been in a long time, even before the Fort Meyers people started handling Corporate calls. I didn't have time to do anything on Monday. Tuesday was better only by degree.

Today, though, I got some writing done. I was moderately busy, but there were some inactive stretches, so I added perhaps a page--maybe a bit more--to the story.

I'm thinking that July might have been a slow period because it's the middle of summer, when people are doing more fun things and fewer home improvement things, which is why it was a bit slow. I don't know; what I do know is that I don't mind it, either way, one little bitty bit.

And once I'm done with this space battle I have a whole other space battle to deal with. That's going to be the corker.

...and after that space battle I'll find myself working on half a dozen others, plus the creation of an interstellar navy which exists to prevent further interstellar wars; and then there should be one final battle which cements the astropolitical situation for about the next hundred years.

It's a party!

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#6314: STFU racist idiot
You know that dumbass girl NYT hired, the asian one who's a complete racist, sexist, and bigot? One of her racist tweets was about how white people are only fit to live underground because they "burn faster in the sun".

See, bitch, that's why white people invented sunblock. If you take a little look at history you'll see that white people invented a whole lot of shit, things you take for granted, things like electrical power, indoor plumbing, the transistor and integrated circuit, antibiotics--why, the list just goes on and on and on.

You see, white people--when they see a problem--they solve it, at least the smart ones do. White people are creative enough that they invent problems to solve. Okay, like, "Gee, no one's ever gone to the Moon; why don't we try doing that?"

Your culture, left to its own devices, would still be working on better ways to make kimchi if it hadn't been for this little thing we like to call THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION, something done almost entirely by white men, which spread the benefits of western civilization all over the world--because instead of one man being capable of enough economic output to keep himself and his family fed, the industrial revolution enables one man to produce enough to feed several families.

One man in a tractor can till enough land to feed thousands of people. Absent that tractor and the industrial base that supports it, he's plowing a couple of acres with a mule. That same industrial base enables food to be transported thousands of miles overnight, so that you can have fresh produce whenever you want it. Your life expectancy is as long as it is thanks to countless man-years spent in laboratories developing vaccines, antibiotics, and other medicines.

White men. Western civilization. Almost exclusively.

...and that self-same combination is what enables our society to be rich enough to afford purulent wastrels like you. In a society without that combination, you'd be a baby factory living in filth and poverty. You'd need to have a lot of children to help you do all the work required just to stay alive, and also you'd need a lot of them so that you had spares, because some of them would inevitably die of childhood disease. Or, you know, typhoid or cholera.

But because white men did all that inventing and creating, you live in a paradise that people from a century ago couldn't even conceive of.

Might want to think about that before you open your ignorant piehole again.

* * *

The right way to talk to the media. "You seem nice! I'll call you. You seem nice!" Heh.

Tell them how nice and wonderful they are and they have NO STORY. The goal is for them to have NO STORY.

Yep. Yep.

* * *

Ordinarily when XKCD descends into politics I am annoyed, but today's comic I could not agree with more than I do.

I honestly believe that regardless of circumstance we should use paper ballots. I think we should never have electronic voting systems. With paper ballots, a person can count the damn things and verify the number of votes cast, and for whom. With electronic systems, it takes one keypress to alter the outcome of an election, and no one will ever know what the real result was.

Also, because this.

* * *

Up too early today. Returning to bed.

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#6313: Bleah.
Man, what a pain in the ass day it was.

* * *

I was going to write another discussion of the latest and greatest from Democrats. You know: it's perfectly okay for Apple or Facebook or Twitter to cut service off to anyone they choose because they're businesses and businesses are able to choose who they serve. (No, because they choose to cut off service to right-wingers.) Christian bakers must make wedding cakes for gay people, though.

I was going to write about the hypocrisy until I realized that one of the most important rules to remember whenever you are dealing with a leftist/progressive/liberal/socialist/whatever is THEY ARE ALL HYPOCRITES, 100% TO THE CORE.

Understanding that simple fact has taken all the outrage out of it for me. I expect treachery and hypocrisy from them the way I expect hairballs from my cat. To expect anything else from them--especially given the evidence--is lunacy.

* * *

Nothing on-line interests me. All I really want to do is go to bed and sleep for a while. Maybe I can do that, but probably not.

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#6312: I also love everything about this story.
This dog brings a leaf to the campus bookstore every day for his cookies. Wow.

* * *

Busy today, surprisingly so. Approximately 90,000,000 people needing password resets. *sigh*

The latest kerfluffle is over a $Major_Hardware_Chain's childrens' charity ad. There have been complaints that in one part of the ad a little boy (5? 6?) is pointing a hose nozzle "like a gun".

I watched the clip. Kid holds up the nozzle with both hands, closes one eye, and says, "I wonder how far this will go?"

"Both hands" because it's an adult-sized tool in a child's hands, for fuck's sake, not because he's "holding it like a gun". It's like, the people who lose their shit over this nonsense never saw kids do anything, never were kids themselves. That squeeze handle, you can squeeze it with one hand because you have the strength of an adult and the thing is sized for your hands, but the kid's got tiny fingers and tiny muscles and he can't.

These people need to get a life, grow the hell up, and stop shitting themselves in terror and horror at the slightest possible hint of a gun. For fuck's sake!

* * *

...which is why I'm glad I didn't field one of those calls, because it would take a mighty act of self-restraint not to deride the fuckin' idiot for being such a waste of protoplasm.

* * *

Fred Reed takes down the racist recently hired by NYT.

Look around you, Thistle Down. Take your time. Get some binoculars and look out the window. Unscrew the lid on your computer, if you can find a screwdriver with the instructions on the handle. Contemplate at leisure. Reflect. And tell me:

Do you see anything invented by a Korean feminist?

That's the money quote right there. I'd quote more but I really don't want to cut-and-paste the whole friggin' article.

* * *

AMD's top-of-the-line processor has 32 computing cores. It can handle 64 threads; if your software supports multithreading, why, this thing will chew through it posthaste.

It's $1,800, but the comparable intel part (which has fewer cores and threads) is like $1,900.

* * *

So, violent crime in Chicago:

Karl Denninger is first. Emphasis removed:

The strictest gun laws in the country and yet gee, all those bad guys seem to have no problems obtaining all the guns and ammunition they would like. Let's remember -- you must have a state-police FOID card to buy firearms and ammunition. No card, no sale. Period.

Indeed.

Then, two from Second City Cop:

Mass shootings in Chicago. He asks a few perfectly reasonable questions.

A few other questions:

How many of these shootings were by Concealed Carriers?
....by people (or folks) with FOID cards?
....by NRA members?
How many were shot by the Chicago Police Department?

Or does that not fit the narratives being thrown around?

Ha! Ha! You amuse me. Of course no one's going to say anything about gangbangers killing people. Half the fricking city government is on the take from those guys.

After shooting people, the thugs just walk away. They don't have to run. They don't even have to walk briskly. Just: BLAM BLAM BLAM and then saunter off, la-di-da.

Because even in the unlikely event they're arrested, the criminal "justice" system will bend over backwards not to impose any consequences for their crimes.

* * *

I realize you don't like it, penis, but what part of "SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED" don't you understand?

Heh.

* * *

No thunderstorms for us tonight, it looks like, even though it's very humid and cooling off. The storms are to the east and south. Oh well.

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#6311: To hell with it
Well, I was working on an addendum to that last post, about the upcoming Star Trek series in which Patrick Stewart reprises his role as Jean-Luc Picard. A mis-click ate it in its entirety, though, so I'm just going to say it's gonna suck and this is probably the best explanation why.

I fully expect Old ManPicard to be Broken Old Man Picard. He's sad. He has lost his friends, he spends his days morose and dreaming of lost glory days. His sole comfort is his PanTransSpeciesFluid life partner, who he met at a Federation Furry meetup. Every episode will have barely-veiled "Trump is evil" and "people who liked the original Trek are toxic fans" messages. Because the heroes of your youth *must* be deconstructed.

That sounds about right.

*sigh*

The thing is, rich as he is, Patrick Stewart himself is a socialist. Oh, holy crap, he's so far left he can't even see the middle from where he's standing. So he's not going to have any problem with the SJW horseshit; he's going to be right in the middle of it.

Funny thing is, I never thought of Picard as a hero. I enjoyed ST:TNG but there was no one on it that I looked up to or found particularly heroic. There are no heroes in that show; there are characters we like and there are villains. But if any of the characters we like were to disappear, we would not much notice it.

Example: Dr. Crusher took off the entirety of the second season. No one cared. In the original series it would have been bleeding obvious--and diminished--if Bones had not been there for an entire season.

Example: Tasha Yar got killed halfway through the first season. Other than producing one of the top five worst episodes in the series' history, no one cared.

In general, there are no heroes in SF these days.

Not that I can see. Who's the hero in Westworld? Who's the hero in Expanse? In Colony? Eh? I see plenty of protagonists. I see too many "anti-heroes", much as I hate the term, people who are the protagonist of the show but who are utterly worthless human beings you would not care to see much less associate with in real life.

In Colony, for example, Will Bowman is the protagonist of the show. He's the main character. He's also a cold-blooded killer; I mean, this guy has killed an army's worth of target dummies just in the third season alone, yet he never expresses any remorse for it or even seems to notice.

"How did the assault on the collaborators' bunker go today, honey?"
"Not bad. I casually ended the lives of about twelve men. How was your day?"

Westworld is pure nihilism so I suppose including it here is like shooting fish in a barrel. You don't watch that show to root for anyone; you watch it to see what happens. There are no good guys in it. Not one. Everyone in the series is a bad guy. Everyone.

The article I linked talks about "Grimdark" and that's a pretty apt discription. Can't have a story unless everyone is downtrodden and crushed under an authoritarian government and all the people in power are ruthless dictators who will kill whoever they need to in order to get ahead. Double-crossing is the name of the game and there isn't anyone who is honest and trustworthy because those people get wiped out first.

Nihilism by any other name....

Promethean SF is not really in vogue just now. My own humble efforts are promethean; even a story where civilization is collapsing, it's still a promethean story because there are people fighting to keep things together. This isn't a story cataloguing the myriad of ways in which people can be shitty towards each other; it's about good guys trying to stave off disaster.

Anyway, I don't know what I'm talking about, and I think I'm descending into babbling, so off I go.

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#6310: How to know you married the right woman
On our way to the animal show I've got a CD in the stereo and Foreigner's "Hot Blooded" comes on.

Me: Why does he feel the need to explain that he's an endotherm? Aren't all humans warm-blooded?

Her: Because SHUT UP, that's why!!!

Me: Heh.

* * *

This is another reason I don't want to live in California. Besides the egregious taxation, out of control leftist lunacy, excessive regulation, and propensity for earthquakes, that is.

You see, wildfires are part of nature. With the land in its natural state, these fires occur every so often and clear away deadwood, bracken, and underbrush. It revitalizes the land and primes it for fresh growth. The area has significant dry periods, and they call it "fire season" for a reason.

Now, it used to be that the people living there took steps to mitigate the inevitable fires. They'd clear away deadwood themselves, create fire breaks, and do controlled burns and other things which would make the fires manageable. But then the eco-nazi movement got established in government and all those measures were outlawed or de-funded, with the result that a flat tire can create enough sparks to set half the friggin' state on fire.

This article here sums it all up nicely.

...but that is exactly why I don't want to live there, aside from all the other stuff. Any given year, your house could be in the path of a literal firestorm which is so massive that no one on Earth can stop it from wiping out everything you own in a matter of minutes, and quite possibly you too.

* * *

The ethanol mandate never made a friggin' lick of sense anyway. There is nothing about adulterating gasoline with ethanol that is "green". It takes a gallon of diesel fuel to make a gallon of ethanol; all you're doing is moving the petroleum use from automobiles to farm equipment and railroad locomotives.

Not to mention that the inclusion of ethanol in gasoline causes a crapton of other problems for machines that were designed to run on pure gasoline.

* * *

Because shut up, that's why. The press will never own up to its participation in ascientific nonsense. They just parrot whatever the current pravda is, whatever the leftist party line tells them to parrot.

* * *

I suppose being out in the heat yesterday affected me more than I realized. Felt kind of cruddy when we stopped for dinner on our way home--I had a powerful need for fajitas so we went to Rueben's Mexican Grill--but by the time I'd crunched my way through some chips and salsa I'd started to feel better. I ate everything.

Love the nachos there--chips, refried beans, cheese, and the meat of your choice, all baked to gooey crispy perfection. Ate a ton of that. Then the fajitas, and though I ended up leaving some grilled peppers on the platter I ate all the meat and tortillas. I was stuffed, but Mrs. Fungus ordered their donut dessert--ten freshly-made little donuts, still hot, rolled in sugar and cinnamon, and I couldn't help myself but ate my half of that, too.

After that, I felt fine--had not, in fact, realized how bad I was feeling until I'd eaten. So, probably what happened was I didn't drink enough fluids and really needed some kind of salty snack to boot. But that's fine, I guess.

* * *

Today's plan is to relax as much as I possibly can. I'll have to get the grass cut, but otherwise the day is mine.

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#6309: That's so fast!
1) Ordered rearview camera on Thursday. It arrived today. Ebay, $17 shipped. The rearview mirror with integrated LCD clips on to your existing mirror and it actually has two video inputs you can select from. So, theoretically, I could put a low-light camera on the front of the Jeep and use it to enhance my nighttime driving.

I do not want to have all kinds of wires hanging all over the place, so I'm going to be installing this one the right way: removing trim and hiding the wires in it. This probably means I will get a bad case of the "might as wells" and redo the headliner, which has only needed redoing for half a decade, because removing the trim is "step one" in that project.

And when I do install the thing, at the same time I'll run a power wire for the GPS, because I might as well. Right?

* * *

2) Today we went all over creation, Mrs. Fungus and me; we went to a pet show, and then to a flea market. After that we went to Best Buy, where we got two SSDs, one for each of our computers. I got the $30 PNY 120 GB one; she got the $54 SanDisk 240 GB one. Two mounting kits.

Got home, flopped for a bit; then tossed the drives in and copied WoW to them. WoW now runs fast on our machines, for two reasons. A) The obvious one, that SSD is just tons faster than HDD. B) Getting WoW onto its own drive means the system doesn't have to load WoW at the same time it's updating virtual memory and doing this and doing the other thing, all of which require HDD access. So instead of everything going through one pipe, it goes through two.

When SSDs come down in price more, so that a 1 TB drive is no longer $250, we'll migrate to all SSD. For the time being, the HDD is fine for everything else. We leave our machines on (they're on UPSes and we put them to sleep when we're not using them) so booting is a "sometimes" thing, and we don't use any other software that is so disk-intensive.

I do expect them to get cheaper. When I bought the 120 GB drive that's in Seiren, it was something like $70 on sale; now they're about $30 on sale. There are several FLASH plants coming on line all over the world; and with Samsung et alii having perfected 96 layer FLASH, and now being able to store 128 gigabytes on a single IC, it should not be very long now.

Let's face it: with that kind of density available, a 120 GB drive is literally three chips and a circuit board.

And of course that doesn't even take into account the fact that we're still waiting for memristor memory to make its debut. Intel's 3D Xpoint memory is (I'm pretty sure) memristor memory, and that is both faster and more durable than FLASH memory is; but that's only one company. Everyone's invested in FLASH now, but that won't be forever.

Near term--I'd be surprised if a 1 TB SSD was still $250 this time next year. Maybe $175-ish? Depending on how the new capacity shakes out, of course. Sub-$150 is the price point I'm really waiting for. I could probably get along with a 500 GB drive, in fact, but I prefer not to. Once name-brand 1 TB SSDs go to $149 MSRP I'm there.

Anyway installation was a breeze; the hard part was that these things don't come with SATA signal cables and I had to dig out a couple. Of course these are marketed as replacements for existing drives. Still--

The PNY came in a box; the SanDisk in a blister pack. Heh.

* * *

...trying to figure out how to play around with the backup camera without wiring it into the truck. I have some 12v adapters around here, maybe that would do it....

ADDENDUM:

Yep, a pair of 12v adapters for external hard drives did it. Powered on both camera and monitor.

Monitor can display 16:9 but the camera outputs 4:3, so I had to switch modes on the monitor. Camera has two LEDs which don't have an "off" switch.

Basically, you wire the camera to the backup light circuit, so when you go into reverse, the lights go on, and so does the camera. The monitor is wired to something that's on when the ignition is on, so it goes on as soon as you start the vehicle, but it looks like a mirror until the camera goes on. The presence of a video signal tells the monitor in the rearview mirror to switch on.

Pretty clever. And it was $17, shipped.

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#6308: I just realized this book will never be published.
AV has a female focus character who:

1) Is not instantly good at everything she tries
2) can not beat up a man who is similarly skilled in martial arts
3) won't cut her hair solely so she can wear a space suit
4) likes being a woman and would never change that
5) when abruptly thrust into a command situation, fails.

This book is doomed.

* * *

So, the airplanes were flying below a hundred feet?

Here's a hint: the only time you fly below a hundred feet is when you're landing. No one was landing in the middle of the friggin' ocean.

* * *

John C. Wright continues to fisk The Last Jedi. There's a reason the movie felt so lackluster: it was.

* * *

This chart is an excellent piece of evidence for the claim that we fell into a depression in 2000. Summary: "...China has been strip-mining the U.S. economy of high value-added industries and high-wage jobs...."

That's why I'm not worried about a "trade war" with China. They need us a lot more than we need them.

* * *

Yesterday I tried an experiment.

You see, I realized that if I were to borrow the 120 GB SSD from the laptop Seiren I could put it into my desktop computer, copy WoW to it, and see how much faster it was.

It took me an inordinate amount of time to find a frigging SATA cable, but then it was a matter of minutes to plug it in and check it out. Took a while to copy WoW over (it's a mere 55 GIGABYTES WTF) but once it was there, it was fast.

A loading screen that takes 2-3 minutes with the spinning metal drive takes about ten seconds with the SSD.

So--tomorrow we're going to Best Buy to pick up a couple 120 GB drives. I'll install them in our computers and we'll use them for WoW. Just in time for the new expansion pack!

* * *

Well, that's about all I've got. Today was a Friday, as usual, and nothing special about it. Whee!

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#6307: Who the hell does that?
If you have to reuse condoms because you simply cannot afford to use them only once, you have a problem. I'm not prepared to discuss what that problem is, and it probably varies by person, but it's clearly a problem.

They're single-use, folks. You use it, you throw it away. You don't wash it and reuse it.

WTF.

* * *

A bunch of bits have been spilled over NYT's latest editor, who is an extremely racist dumbass. NYT would not have hired her if she had said those things about black people or hispanics or muslims, but since white people are the source of all that is evil *rolleyes* it's apparently perfectly fine with them that they hired this racist twat.

* * *

Once again, homophobia is perfectly okay as long as it's Democrats who are showing it. If that guy was a Democrat, the denunciations would be legion--but he's Republican, so of course his 14-year-old drawing of Bigfoot with a gigantic penis is something to be derided.

Which is why this made me laugh so much.

* * *

The press is highly uninterested in any mass shooting that involves gangs and which takes place somewhere with very strict gun laws.

Like this one in Chicago. "A motive is unknown at this time," the article says, but the rest of the text makes it plain that gangs were the reason for the shooting.

* * *

Someone needs to be put in jail. Be suspicious of anyone wearing a "punch a nazi" shirt, because he has announced that he is willing to do violence to anyone who disagrees with him.

* * *

Well, it's Thursday night. Garbage night. Whee!

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#6306: Well, that day went.
The nap from about 3:30 until 6:30 is part of it, of course. But today was busy and hectic.

* * *

This is true.

* * *

Haven't added any more to AV, but then I didn't expect to, not today. We'll have to see how things go.

Lots left to do, but none of it is an emergency and can be taken care of in time.

* * *

The other day, I found this:



...which shows the cast of Azumanga Daioh voice actresses doing their thing during the "Osaka gets hiccups" sequence, and then has a Q&A session. It's interesting to see, though probably a lot less so if you've never seen the anime or anything.

* * *

The year was 1976, and we were at Disney World, and I did not want to ride Space Mountain. Hated roller coasters when I was a kid.

...so I stood at the exit and waited for those who were riding it.

Now, in those days, there was an escalator or a people-mover or something there, and apparently RCA had some kind of sponsorship deal going on, because there was this jingle playing, over and over again. Cheesy 1970s stuff, and to this day I can still hear the "RCA!/Leads the way!/blah blah blah" over and over again.



I should not be surprised that it's on YouTube.

Of course, here I sit in "the future!!!"--43 years later--and RCA is no longer doing anything other than stamping its logo on things made by other companies. Hardly "leading the way", if you catch my drift.

Certainly no one foresaw the explosion of computer technology; in 1975 it was just possible to have your own computer, but mostly computers were big machines in air-conditioned rooms, and it took a lot of knowledge to make one do anything useful.

...I thought to myself, "Well, there's always word processing!" I couldn't find any good information on word processing programs but it looks as if WordStar was the first one in 1978, which was two years after my wait at Space Mountain. And the computer you'd need to run even a primitive word processor would have cost as much as a new car in 1976. And probably you would have had to write the program yourself.

* * *

Well, that's all for now, I guess.

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#6305: DURR DUH DUH DUH DERRP DURR DUHHH
DUHH DERR DERP DUHHH

Duhh, I'm a Democrat Senator, duhh, I don't know what laws illegal aliens are breaking when they ENTER THE FREAKING COUNTRY ILLEGALLY, duhh, durr, duhhhhhhh.

* * *

The Center for Science in the Public Interest is a gigantic mass of shitheads struggling for relevance, desperately trying to keep the lipid hypothesis afloat.

STFU and GTFO, assholes.

* * *

Really tired today.

See--yesterday I dragged AV kicking and screaming to the brink of war while I was at work; so after I got home I sat down here and started writing more. Stuff went on in the background but I was a writing demon last night.

I often compare such occasions to the scene in Amadeus where Mozart is writing music as the lush romantic sound crashes around him, and when his wife interrupts him it stops abruptly, because that's exactly what it's like. Only instead of classical music it's spaceships.

Anyway, Mrs. Fungus went to bed early and I resumed writing; and after a while I saw that it was 12:20 and thought, I should probably go to bed soon, myself.

[space battle sounds]

Me: Eh? Holy crap, it's 1:38 AM! I definitely need to go to bed now!

I went to bed with a smile on my face, though, because when you get into one of those zones it's pure 100% fun.

To add insult to injury, I was only able to add a little more to the story while at work today because I was feeling so tired. So I'm right at a point where two ships are about to whale the tar out of each other, and I can't start writing that scene because I'm too tired to write it correctly. And I know that if I do start, it'll be hours before I finish.

I'm making a huge mess of things, too--in a good way--which is one reason I got going so well last night. Once I start these two ships firing at each other I think it's probably going to be a good fifty pages before the shooting stops. I've got battles taking place in two star systems simultaneously, and there will be the seeds of a couple others sprouting before this segment of the story is finished. Crisis #2 will be resolved before this is all over, but then Crisis #3 will begin, and when that one's completed we're pretty much looking at the world as it is in $Release_Candidate_One, but about 95 years earlier.

And a few days ago, I generated the eight-second blurb for the story: "A man who can see the future engineers the downfall of civilization in order to save the human race from extinction."

Might change the last word to "enslavement" or might not. We'll see.

* * *

Anyway, tomorrow is Wednesday, but it promises to be extremely hectic, so I'm not going to get much "me" time in. We might get to have a nap in the afternoon if we're lucky.

Could be worse, though. With the dining room carpeted, we've come to the end of everything but the bathroom renovations. That's drywall and some paint; shouldn't be too bad. Here's hoping.

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#6304: It's starting to kick over all right
AV has begun to pick up. Slow day again today, so I worked on the novel a lot, and was surprised to see that it was qutting time just as I was getting to a good bit.

I'll add more later.

* * *

That is one motherfucker of a markup, there. There's just no other way to put it. I mean, if your cost on a product is $0.23 and you sell it for $59.99?

...in actuality the manufacturer doesn't sell it for that. Typical retail markup is about 150% of cost, so if the retail price is $60, then the manufacturer is selling it for "only" $40.

Which is a profit of 17,391%.

This is why I absolutely cannot stand inkjet printers. I knew that the ink was hideously overpriced; I figured it was "assrape" territory but didn't think that it was "an eternity of getting buggered without lube by every last demon in Hell" territory.

This is why printer companies are so desperate to prevent cartridge refills. There's absolutely nothing special about the ink; though they're (so far) successfully charging thousands of dollars per gallon for it, they buy the stuff in 55 gallon drums for a couple of hundred bucks and then, by virtue of injecting it into custom plastic housings, magically increase the price a hundred and seventy times.

Laser printers? Extremely economical. Five thousand pages or so from a $50 toner cart. Notice that those printers never cost less than about $100 and can only print--unlike inkjet printers, where you get a printer, fax machine, and scanner all in one unit for about $80. The laser equivalent isn't usually less than about $200.

Because they expect to sell you a lot of ink for that inkjet all-in-one. At a 17,000% profit.

* * *

Socialized medicine in the US would cost as much as the current revenue. Which, not to put too fine a point on it, is earmarked for other things; we're not running a $3,200 billion surplus every year, after all.

He does the math and it comes to about $20,000 more per taxpayer per year. Sounds about right. I don't know where Bernie thinks that's going to come from. Perhaps he thinks it will be pooped out by magical rainbow unicorns or something.

* * *

And who is it who's been running Michigan for the past fifty years? Someone remind me, is Kalamazoo a Republican city?

Somehow I doubt it.

* * *

You idiots can just STFU now. "We want more police on the streets!" But the instant police actually, you know, fight crime, you asshats will be out there protesting the police for shooting another choir boy who was going to go to college.

His conclusing paragraph gets it right:

How about you people (or folks) (A) stop shooting, (B) stop covering for shooters, (C) stop electing assholes who get money from shooters, (D) clean up your neighborhood, (E) start snitching, and (F) stop whining about the bed of shit you've created for yourselves.

All you have to do is start treating the police like they are there to help you stay safe. Stop blaming the police for shooting the thugs who try to kill them. That alone would go a long way towards making your neighborhoods safer.

* * *

Got Tuesday to get through; and then Wendesday promises to be extremely busy for a day off. Might get a little nap late in the afternoon. Or might not.

* * *

Cool weather the past few days, but it's supposed to be hotter this weekend. Maybe we'll get to swim a bit. Maybe not. Could be worse.

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#6303: Doing as little as possible
This past week was hectic and annoying enough that I am doing as little as humanly possible today. I need to have one day a week to shut down and recharge; I am not one of those people who can go constantly.

This may or may not be a defect of character. But then I am reminded that even God took a day off after working six days. Granted, He was building an entire universe; I work as a help desk guy. Still. "Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy," goes the commandment, and some Jews take that so seriously they can't even operate light switches because on some level it counts as "using fire".

I just don't want to have to go do a lot of physical labor. Maybe a little light cleaning, cook a meal, write a page or three; the important thing is that I am doing what I want to do rather than anything someone else is requiring of me. To me, that is the essence of recreation.

* * *

To my surprise, about a month after the multi-chapter dump of KissxSis another single chapter came out--that was after waiting something like 14 months to see what happened after the cliffhanger in chapter 109, so I'm sure you can imagine how surprising I found that.

I've been rereading Watamote from the beginning. I end up feeling sorry for Tomoko; it's clear that she suffers from social anxiety, sometimes pretty severe, and because I suffer from that myself it's easy to sympathize for her.

Not that she is completely innocent, as she's kind of a weirdo, and some of her attitudes are a little odd, but I do find that I understand her quite well.

Still, it's an entertaining read.

...I was going to add "Even though it hasn't updated since December of 2017" but I see today that they added another ten chapters to it last week--which I didn't see since I was reading it from the beginning. Argh etc.

Now I'm trying to decide if I should read through or skip to the new ones. Oh well--first world problems.

Addendum:

...not being too far from the new chapters I read through to them, to find that I've already read them. How could I read them and not remember reading them until I re-read them?

Probably what happened is that I read them, wasn't sure about what was going on (since it had been so long since the last update) that I decided to go back and reread the whole thing and promptly forgot that I'd read them.

*sigh*

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#6302: Why does it take such willpower?
I refer to the bag of white cheddar-flavored "Poppables" on my desk. These are artificial food, made from potatoes I think, but they're crispy and tasty and it takes a Will save at a -3 penalty for me to stop eating them!

*sigh*

* * *

Government is an asshole. Son builds wheelchair ramp for his elderly mother, who needs a wheelchair. Local government forces son to tear wheelchair ramp down, because there was no permit issued for building it.

Assholes.

* * *

Socialism kills by the millions. Never forget that.

* * *

Okay, I can guarantee that eating four bags of junk food per week is what did it, not the fact that it was spicy. Anyone want to take a bet on how many tons this 17-year-old girl weighs, who eats 4 bags of Cheetos per week?

Holy crap.

* * *

All because the headline sells papers and ad spots. It's actually no more dangerous today than it was when I was a young free-range fungus, leaving home in the morning and not getting back until the sun began to set.

Lies, damned lies, statistics. You know the drill.

* * *

Totally dead day today. Three e-mails, three calls all day. *sigh*

Wrote some more AV, though. One more push and I think we can start combat. Looking forward to it.

* * *

Lastly, Larry Correia on Faceboob:



Now, this just makes me happy to see.

"Some uncountable number of SF fans out there who left believing they were somehow Not Wanted by established fandom."

Quoth Larry:

She can’t imagine how you guys could feel unwanted, after they labeled you all as racist, sexist, homophobic, hatemongery, Nazis who wanted to kick women out of publishing and drag gays to death behind your jacked up pickup trucks after you got done abusing your wives.

And quoth Brad Torgerson:

This is the Worldcon you wanted. This is the "fandom" you desired: ideologically one-sided to such a supremely toxic level, the identitarians who now occupy all the places of importance in the 50-and-under group, are driving out what's left of the grownups—who were already being driven out under *your* watch. And when the identitarians have no more moderates and conservatives to thrash, they turn on and will thrash the Trufans and the self-styled "allies" among the silver-haired set. You cannot dial this back with a disingenuous tweet about heart-brokenness. The rot has been taking place under your aegis for 20+ years.

Truly it has been.

But of course they wouldn't be SJWs if they weren't also hypocrites.

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#6301: This is so poorly written it's virtually nonsense
For crying out loud, you have one job, here. It's an article about Cambridge physicists demonstrating that wormholes in spacetime are possible.

The hypothetical solution established at Cambridge has to do with the properties of quantum energy, which conveys that even vacuums are teaming by means of waves of energy. If you visualize two metal plates in a vacuum, some waves of energy would be excessively big enough to fit between the plates, meaning that the space-time among the plates would have negative energy.

GAAHH.

Vacuum is indeed teeming with virtual particles--particle pairs that pop into existence, then recombine and disappear again.

And yes: if you put two plates extremely close together, there will be less energy between them than there is around them. The two plates will therefore be attracted to each other. This is called the Casimir force, because the vacuum between the plates is much higher than the vaccum around them. Because there's less room between them for virtual particles.

If the plates are kept separated, then yes, there is negative energy between them with respect to the space around them. It's a relative measure, not absolute.

In this tiny little fact hides the secret to limitless energy that makes nuclear power look like a fat guy on a generator bicycle. There's enough quantum vacuum energy in a single cubic inch to boil all the water on Earth.

The problem is, of course, extracting it....

* * *

That's what you get for canceling Joan of Arcadia, you JERK!

Big surprise: CBS CEO Leslie Moonves is a sexual harasser just like all the other scumwads in Hollywood.

It's worth noting:

The reporter-stooge said, "The allegations are said in part to involve instances of unwanted kissing and touching that occurred more than 20 years ago, as well as numerous claims that occurred more recently."

Another way to say the same thing? "The allegations relate a pattern of abuse that spans 20+ years."

...as one commentor astutely points out. Those two statements are semantically equivalent but their connotations are different; one of them implies that the nonsense took place 20 years ago. And that is the impression the "reporter-stooge" wants you take away from all this. "Well, this is stuff that happened two decades ago, so why get all upset about it?"

Because that fucker canceled Joan of Arcadia, that's why!

* * *

This really is a dog-bites-man story and I've taken to passing those up. I mean, I could go down the list of stuff--like the story over at AoSHQ where they point out that during Obama's term it was totally wrong to call it a "regime", but now it's okay. That's "dog-bites-man" stuff, because you can't be a Democrat without being a hypocrite.

So this is another "well, that's not even remotely surprising" story.

Basics: about 1/3 of the property taxes collected by the City of Chicago go into a special slush fund which is controlled solely by the mayor. Last year, that was some $660 million dollars.

Of course the article ends with a brief discussion of a couple of bills in the Illinois legislature which are meant to stop this sort of obvious and heinous corruption, but let's face it: Rahm Emanuel is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Mike Madigan, who--we have noted previously--basically runs the state. Back when Daley was still in office (before we were saddled with Emanuel) Daley and Madigan ran the state, but I don't see Daley giving that up and I'd bet money his fingers are still in the pie, too, somehow.

TL;DR: Illinois is a corrupt Democrat feifdom.

* * *

Gloriously cool tonight--dewpoint in the mid-fifties--so the windows are open. And now, WoW time!

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#6300: Dekita!
So after the last post I resumed work. I finished sorting and repacking and threw out a whole bunch of stuff, and cut down all the boxes and put them in the recycle bin, and moved and rearranged and tucked and--

And it's fantastic. There's more room down there now than there was last July.

With all that completed--and with the attic stuff stowed up there--I hauled out the tractor and cut the grass, so I got that chore checked off my "to do" list.

So now, I will go take a shower, and then go to get my wife's RXs, and something for dinner. And then I will probably collapse into a tired little puddle.

But, oh well. Got done today what I wanted to get done, all of it, and I feel great.

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#6299: That's it, I need a break
Well, I did not go to work today. I laid down in bed for a bit, intending just to relax a little, and then blammo it was after noon. Called in and said I would not, after all, be in today, and then set myself in motion.

Ran errands--need to go back to the store to pick up RXes for the Mrs, but I can do that any time before about 9:30 and that'll be okay.

Got myself a couple of Whoppers, came home and ate them, and then set to work--on the basement.

We have movers bringing furniture from storage in less than a week--one reason we got so pissed off at Luna's usual horseshit--and that basement needs to be severely de-cluttered before then. I had it nice and usable last year before all the attic-cleaning and the renovations began, but time and entropy did for that. I've got boxes of drywall stuff, boxes of painting stuff, boxes of boxing stuff--all kinds of nonsense. So today I'm digging into the pile and sorting it and gleaning the last little bits and pieces which can be summarily ejected, and attempting to organize and consolidate what is being kept.

I am pleased with the progress thus far.

I've decided that anyone worth paying to make new cushions for the sofa I have in the garage will be capable of making them without a pattern to work from, so I'm (to my wife's delight) throwing away the old cushions. It's one of those sofas which has a hardwood frame with no upholstery attached to it; there are removable cushions that you set on it (one two three, across seat and back) and they are what make it comfortable.

The extant cushions are decades old. Mom preferred to sleep on that sofa; it was what she had in her bedroom for a bed and it was mere feet from her computer--and because of that, these cushions are absolutely saturated with cigarette smoke. I had thought to try pulling out the padding, washing the covers, and putting new foam inside, but I think they're just too far gone for that.

I have a pile of Halloween decorations which will go into the attic, next to the Christmas decorations.

My old backpack, which was my brother's before he abandoned it--this is a backpack with an aluminum frame, an actual backpack rather than a knapsack--that can go in the attic. I have not used it since 1993 and I could probably just dispose of it, but gee what if I want to go camping again someday? *sigh*

(Actually? Paranoid impulse: what if I need to bug out and can only do so on foot?)

There are a lot of things I'd like to shove up there but cannot, because the space is not climate controlled. Two big boxes of videotapes--but the tapes would perish if left in those conditions for any length of time. Assorted books and papers--but, what if squirrels get into there? It's happened before, mice at least. No.

What I'll probably do for the paper stuff is to get sealable plastic containers and put them in there. That should keep the rodents and the bugs off, if any, and then they can go up there. Books, papers, magazines, comics, everything.

...but after about 90 minutes' work, I needed a break. I'm not just sitting there sorting; I'm moving and lifting and shoving, too, and that's what's got me in a sweat. I needed a break.

In a few minutes I'll go back downstairs and continue the work. Whee!

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#6298: Now I understand.
This is what explained it to me simply enough that I got it. The whole Mueller investigation seems like an unendurable boil on Trump's backside, and he can fire all those shitheads, so why doesn't he? It seemed to me that he wanted to avoid all the political fallout, similar to what he got when he fired Comey. All of which he is 100% entitled to do.

But:

No matter how much money Mueller spends or how many prosecutors he hires, he can't save Hillary.

Hillary's lies split Mueller's congressional constituency of Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans. And if Mueller can't prove Hillary's stolen election conspiracy theory, the Democrats will be the first to turn on him. The longer the Mueller investigation drags on, the higher the expectations for its outcome grow. Like Madoff, Mueller is trapped in an investigative pyramid scheme that he can never deliver on. And so all he can do is keep growing the pyramid, branch it out and drag it on for as long as humanly possible.

That's the Washington D.C. way.

Hillary Clinton’s reverse Midas Touch cost the Democrats the election. Their obsession with Hillary's election conspiracy theories is likely to cost them the midterm elections. The average voter cares about the economy. The Russia conspiracy theories leave swing voters unimpressed and uninterested. And when the Mueller investigation runs out of every trick and gimmick, it will also be Hillary's fault.

And by the time that's done, the Democrats will have wasted three elections chasing Hillary's lies.

This is why Trump isn't getting rid of it: it's politically advantageous to him. It keeps Democrats focused on something that is 100% nothingburger and which--so far--has done more to hurt Democrats than anything he could do on his own. The investigation isn't going to find anything on him, and the longer it goes on, the worse it gets for the opposition.

He'll probably fire everyone in December, then.

* * *

If you don't have ovaries and a uterus, you don't get periods. A biological male taking female hormones is physically incapable of having a period. The symptoms that women experience every month are due to fluctuations in their hormones, something regulated by ovaries and the pituitary. Men--lacking ovaries--do not experience these variations.

Note that I'm not saying that variations in their hormones are impossible; only that it's not a period, which is something biological that only females do. The symptoms these men experience may be due to psychosomatic causes, hormonal variations from their bodies' own attempts at self-regulation, or from the simple fact that no one takes their medication at exactly the same time every day, week, or month (depending on the dosing regimin).

Even so, I'm still leaning towards "mental illness".

* * *

What is "democratic socialism"? Well, it's socialism, which always has the exact same endpoint of any other kind of socialism. Meaning that it ends with poverty and want and a boot stomping a human face for as long as they can cling to power.

* * *

Suddenly the left is interested in states' rights. Trump's EPA ending California's waiver for federal smog rules is oh-so-terrible because "muh tenth amendment."

Meanwhile:

At this point, the green justice warriors may be regretting their decision to target Scott Pruitt so viciously. The new acting head of the EPA seems to have taken the driver's seat and is speeding along a road called Regulatory Rollback.

As much as you don't like someone that Trump appointed? Just be careful about ousting him, because the next person Trump appoints may be even less to your liking than the first guy was.

I, personally, love this. I love seeing California's special treatment go by the wayside. I love that California is no longer going to be setting emissions policy for the US. And I love that the eco-nazis--having gotten what they wanted from Pruitt's ouster--are now less happy with his replacement.

This is a trend I want to see continue: sure, get rid of our guy...but watch out for his successor.

* * *

What's surprising about this? Leftists always leave a huge toxic mess for others to clean up.

* * *

Government spending is part of how GDP is figured. It's the "G" in the equation. And it turns out that we're not really sure how much the government is spending.

$240 billion is less than two percent of federal spending, but as Vox Day points out, when GDP is less than the error in your federal spending, you have no idea if the economy is growing or shrinking.

* * *

Having rid themselves of all badthinkers and wrongthinkers, the SJWs of WorldCon turn on each other. And we just sit back and eat popcorn and laugh at them.

* * *

Because of Luna, asininity, I told work I'd be in late today, which is why the post is going up now instead of this evening. With the post done, I might as well get on with my day.

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