Category: whatever

Sorry Disney. Too late. It was too late as soon as you did it. The example must be made. I hope you lost billions and billions and continue to.

Tony Alva posted this on his Instagram account today, from a recent trip to England. Tony’s account is one of the few reason I still have an IG account. I love Alva’s skating. These pics aways look great.

WARNING. RAMBLING POST

Things in this country just keep getting crazier. Y’all all know what I’m talking about. It’s really exhausting to think about, and yet we must think about it at least a bit. When to allow the crazy into your personal sensorium is a question we must all answer for ourselves, as well as how to react to the crazy. It is easy to feel helpless to affect any real change, and yet collectively we can. This week we told Hulu and Disney both to go fuck themselves by cancelling our subscriptions. Both are capitulating to the crazy so they don’t get our money. None of it.

In the meantime, I am finding the things that give me some peace and joy and peacefully enjoying them. Listening to music with my wife. Walking our dog. Chilling with our cat. Playing D&D and Traveller. Reading science fiction novels. Blogging.

Back a few years ago when my wife was diagnosed with cancer I increased our cable TV package to their maximum package I wanted to make sure she had any entertainment she wanted. Now, several years later, it is about $200 a month and we never use it. At most we watch the local and national news. We watch no shows. No series. Nothing. We have hundreds of channels and there is NOTHING on that I have any desire to watch. The stuff I might watch if the TV is on would be the original Star Trek and a few other things, but I don’t. So we are getting rid of it all. GONE. No cable TV. With the internet, the public library, our stereo, and our games, we have more than enough to have fun. That is $2400 a fucking year! Insane. That is a good portion of our yearly property taxes. Obviously I should have cancelled it years ago.

Basically we are cancelling a lot of subscription services that have been bleeding us dry. I got rid of Apple TV last week when they emailed to tell me it was going up from $9 a month to $12. I only had it to watch Foundation, and I will survive quite well without it. I just saw that they fucked over Jon Stewart, so I ‘m head of the curve.  Also cancelling Amazon Prime. I can’t say I’ll stop using Amazon. The damned Kindle is just too nice. I love my Kindle eBooks, and theirs is the only eBook system that doesn’t suck. Sorry, that is not one of the hills I’m willing to die on. Yet.

It is really impossible, unless you go live in a hollow tree in the woods, to avoid doing business with evil, or at best amoral, people and corporations. Most of the time the chains of ownership of the big companies is very convoluted, and when you get to the end they are owned by some scumbag “investment company” run by the worst tech and biz bros that can be grown in whatever evil labs they come from. So my point isn’t to be perfect in cancelling or simply not buying things, or to even be consistent, but to be better. All these  money grubbing rats care about is more money. So deny them as much as I can.

Some bad things are going on.

The problem is capitalism.

That is all.

Well, I tested negative for Covid this morning. Still have a lot of snot, but I went to work for the first time in over a week. I did OK. About 2pm I was feeling pretty tired, but not as bad as the day before.

One more day of work this week and then the weekend. I’m going to lay off exercise for at least a month. That sucks because I have an aikido seminar I’m going to miss and I want to do some skateboarding, but I also don’t want to over-tax my body and end up with long Covid.

By the way, a message to whoever brought this fucking virus into our world. Go fuck yourself. Whether you are a lazy researcher who spilled a bottle of virus somewhere or some monkey-eating asshole buying bushmeat in a dirty market, please please please go fuck yourself.

Seriously. I have stuff to do, and now we’ve gotta live the rest of our lives dealing with this bullshit.

Dear Unknown Reader – you may have noticed a lot of cursing on this blog lately. I’m just annoyed and grumpy.

I have about 15 months until I retire. That’s a secret. Don’t tell anyone. Once I retire I am going to seriously reduce my contact with the germ-carrying unwashed masses.

Well, after all this time we finally ended up with Covid.

I was going to write a lost about it, but honestly I just don’t really care right now. I just want to get well, and for my wife to get well, and move forward. Fuck this shit.

A few months ago we ventured down to the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center in Dallas to check out the Oddities & Curiosities Expo.

I’ll start by saying this is not really my “tribe.” I knew that going in. I prefer the nerd stuff. Happening simultaneously, and unknown to us,  was Fan Expo Dallas in another of the huge areas at the convention center, which is closer but still not really a direct hit on my nerd/fandom target.

When we got down to the convention center is was early in the day and already the place was getting packed. No biggie. I just chilled and found us some parking.

As we walked over the the venue the variety of humans was impressive. For the Oddities Expo you had the weirdoes with all the piercings, lots of tats, black clothing, etc. I say “weirdos” only in the positive sense. I appreciate a harmless weirdo enjoying their thing. Side by side with what I can only call pseudo-goth-horror-weirdos were the cosplayers there for the Fan Expo. Looking for a dude with a beard dressed up as Little Bo Peep or whatever the current anime trend is? We got you covered.

Cosplay is fine by me. People create amazing things.

I support it when people get together to share their interests. I had a good time. I was kinda hoping the Oddities and Curiosities might be a bit more varied.  It is mostly stuff like taxidermy (seriously), horror-inspired gruesome art and knick-knacks, etc. Again, just not my thing. It’s like the New Jim Rose Circus blew up in there. Body horror, mutilation, whatever. I feel like a lot of the vendors were just selling shit they ordered from a Chinese factory. However, a lot were in fact selling stuff they had made themselves, and that’s cool. We found on vendor who was selling her own art, which featured some very beautiful colors and really stood out in the sea of disturbing stuff. We bought a small print which is, in fact, quite beautiful.

But again, people should 100% follow their instincts on this stuff, because I’d rather have a neighbor with a house full of stuffed raccoons and a bone through their nose than a conservative republican who hates everyone that has a personality or any joy in their lives.

We just got back from a week-long road trip. First to Louisiana to see an uncle and cousins, the over to Dothan, Alabama, to see my dads’s twin brother. I hadn’t seen that brother in 16 years. Last saw him at my dad’s funeral. A lot has happened in those 16 years to keep everyone busy, but that’s still way too long to go without seeing someone. From my observation I’d say he’s in the early stages of dementia right now. Not too bad, but I’ve seen this before and I think I know what is coming.

It’s weird the things you think about as you get older and the previous generations are almost all gone. A lot of wishful thinking. Being there with my uncle and my two cousins, I couldn’t help but think that my grandmother would be very happy that we were all together, even for a short time. I would love to believe that my dad somehow knows I went to see his brother.

It sucks that families are so spread out. Maybe it was better when people didn’t move far from home and continued to live, suffocated (haha), in small communities where there is some continuity of life and sense of connectedness. Sitting here in the Dallas area, with my parent both dead, my wife and I have no family life at all here.  We have each other. We have friends. This is where our life is, but for me there is a sense of aloneness now that my parents are gone.

I’d not been to Alabama since I was about 13 or 14, when we drove from Dallas to Florida on vacation. Beautiful land. I found the people there welcoming. On the way home we went through Selma, where we drove over the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where cops beat the shit out of civil rights marchers in 1965. A good reminder of who the law actually works for.

Honestly, between Dallas and Dothan there isn’t really a lot to see along the I-20 route.

The trip made me appreciate Texas’s own Buc-ees, where you can stop and refuel, get a breakfast taco at any time of the day and some reasonably good coffee, and use a restroom clean enough to eat in. Traveling on a lot of roads most restrooms look like recent murder scenes. I always wonder how the employees can even stand to use them. They have to use them too, right?

Yeah, this is kind of a rambling post.

We rented a Ford Expedition for the trip. Our own cars would be considered small-ish SUVs. Mazda CX-5s.  The Expedition was really nice on the road. While it didn’t get very good gas milage, the massive tank allowed to go nearly 600 miles on one tank of gas. The seats were wide and comfortable. I wouldn’t want to own one. They are expensive, too big to really fit in our garage, and the insurance on one would be a lot more than I want to pay, but as a rental for vacation I liked it a lot.

It was good to get out of town for a few days and see my family. It is now Sunday, and I still have Monday and Tuesday off to chill and get refreshed.

I am firmly Anti-Productivity.

Obsession with productivity and optimization is the antithesis of a life well-lived.

You will never be productive enough the leaders of the Cult of Productivity. “Productivity” as it is measured is higher than ever in history, and yet we still all slave away. The idea of Productivity is bullshit as are the methods of measuring it.

The so-called Protestant Work Ethic is simply a means of getting people to slave away for their whole lives. It’s a lie.

No matter how optimized you are, you will still eventually die. No matter how rich you are you will die just like everyone else. Beyond not smoking, killing your liver with booze, you have no control over anything. Fit people get cancer and die every – single – day.

This is just a reminder. For myself.

OK, maybe I don’t work in a sweat shop, but my 3-day weekend is drawing to a close.

Amazingly, after having 2 days off and having some fun and relaxation with no stress from rushing around, I had the energy today to clean our bedroom really well. I mean — like – really well. Going to really enjoy sleeping in there tonight on clean sheets, with a clean floor, the bathroom super clean, and all my clothing washed and folded/hung.

I’m not necessarily looking at a 4-day work week though. I have a library outreach event to do on Saturday, and some other stuff that will keep me busy a bit late one night this week. In the morning I’ll look at everything and see if I can work out a work-free Friday. That would be nice.

We are halfway through Memorial Day weekend.

If there is anything better than a three-day weekend, it can only be a four -day or more weekend, vacation, or simply being retired.

Yesterday I spent the morning skateboarding, then we chilled the rest of the day, listened to music, and just generally relaxed.

Today we got up, bought some coffee and took the pup for a walk at the nature preserve, came home and relaxed with more coffee. Then we drove out to Forever Young record store in Grand Prairie and did some record shopping, my wife procuring two excellent albums and I bought 1978’s All Mod Cons, by the Jam, one of my favorite bands. I need to delve into Paul Weller’s other material. Note to self. Genius is genius.

The more I look into it, the more I realize how much of my favorite music was created before 1980. I feel kind of dumb to have not realized this before, but that post-punk era was just so good!

It is, as I type these exact words right now, 6:29pm. With the lovely three-day weekend I have been able to relax, have fun, enjoy my family, and not feel rushed at all. I worked from home on Friday, so the Tyranny of Laundry is not currently oppressing me.

As the fateful hour of 8pm approaches, the usual feeling of Sunday night depression is not seeping into my psyche. As we walked our dog about 20 minutes ago I was thinking about this and coming to the realization of how much middle-class misery is caused by feeling like one must rush from one thing to another. Constant time pressure cooker. To some extent we do this to ourselves, but only to feel like we actually have a life outside of work. I am lucky I actually love what I do and have a great employer, something 99.999999999% of people can’t say, but still I’d like to work less.

Aside from buying these records today, my holiday consumerism included ordering a higher-quality cartridge for our turntable, the red Ortofon 2M. My friend Dale tells me this will make a noticeable difference from the stock cartridge that came on our turntable. Looking forward to checking out the new records with the new needle.

I suppose this goes without saying, but you will NEVER find a word on this blog written by AI. Nor will you find an AI-generated image or sound.

If you use AI to write you have given up and are making the world a worse place. Fuck you.

That is all.