If Harris won, Trump supporters would have been in disbelief because everything they saw convinced them the presidency was a lock. Trump won, and now Harris supporters are in disbelief because everything they saw convinced them the presidency was a lock. Most of us live in a confirmation bias bubble which tells us what we want to be told. And when reality unfolds otherwise... well... hopes are going to be dashed over expectations not being met.
Alas, reality is my bubble, and I didn't have expectations one way or the other. I knew the race was a dead heat, and the only thing I was certain of was that polls don't mean shit and it was anybody's ballgame.
So while I'm not shocked at the results, I can't help but be disappointed.
Not just because Trump is too fucking old and mentally unfit to be president (just as Biden was), but because his campaign message mostly consisted of calling people stupid and being generally awful. That's what passes for political discourse now? That's really what we want as president?
I guess so, because the American people have spoken.
And the consequences here could be pretty dire if you're anything other than a straight, white, healthy, wealthy, Christian man.
If you're not a man, you have to worry if a full abortion ban is in the cards. This means that not only will rapists get to choose the mother of their children and young girls and women who are pregnant from rape will be forced to carry to term, but that it's increasingly dangerous to get pregnant period. Because if something goes wrong, your chances of dying are much higher if you can't get the care you need when medical professionals are too terrified of being imprisoned to do what they need to do to save your life. That's already been happening since Roe V. Wade was overturned. Trump has said he won't push for a national abortion ban, and I hope that's true, but it seems like it's going to be easier than ever to get state legislation passed.
If you're not a Christian, you have to worry if Christian Nationalism is going to escalate to a point where it's dangerous to practice your faith in a country where you're supposed to have freedom of religion. Our country was founded on the idea that Church and State would be separate. But that hasn't been true in a while, and it's been made very clear that the Christian faith is the only faith that's going to be recognized by the administration. The trickle-down from that should worry everybody including Christians because we don't know what "brand" of Christianity is going to be calling the shots. JD Vance, for example, is a Catholic convert who is intent on forcing Opus Dei Catholic values on Americans. And while Trump can deny ties to Project 2025 all he wants, make no mistake, that's going to be his administration blueprint because too many people tied to it are tied to Trump. And Project 2025 is the blueprint for a Christian Nationalism that's very different from what the average Christian might think.
If you're not wealthy, you have to worry if the tax burden will continue to shift away from millionaires and billionaires onto the backs of the middle and lower classes. Trump has made promises that the wealthy will pay less of their fair share than they already do, so the money has to come from somewhere. And you also worry whether you'll ever be able to retire since Social Security, Medicare, and essential services for the aging could end up gutted. And that's not even touching on these massive tariff increases Trump has promised, which will inevitably end up being put back on Americans... making everything more expensive than it already is. Which will just be extending a trend for consumers, since American corporations are already experiencing record profits thanks to price gouging. It will be interesting to see if Trump will actually do anything about it as he's promised to do. Could be that it's too late to do anything because consolidation into monopolies has progressed too far.
If you're not healthy, you have to worry if health care will even be available to you. Pre-existing conditions, affordable insurance, government-sponsored research, and Federal assistance could all be shuttered if the Affordable Care Act is dismantled. And the nightmare scenario of having an anti-science, anti-vax, anti-doctor politician like RFK in charge of the nation's health agencies could be a blow to health care from which it could take decades to recover. Of all areas to worry about, this could be the most dangerous. People forget (or choose to deny) just how many people died from that initial COVID wave because the White House didn't have a plan for a pandemic response and fully ignore the plan that was left to them. Another event like this could have horrific consequences now that we will be even less prepared. How Americans have been convinced to paint "science" as some kind of evil entity that should be destroyed boggles my mind. I guess we're well on our way to once eradicated diseases like polio to make a comeback.
If you're not white, you have to worry if you're going to be on the receiving end of an even larger share of the violence and inequity than society seems all too anxious to force on you in a country which was designed to be a melting pot of peoples and ideals. Doesn't matter if you're an American citizen or not... if you don't look "MAGA American" or you don't act "MAGA American" or you don't think "MAGA American" you're at risk of becoming a target of political policies. Though even if you are white, our president has made it very clear that anybody defying him will be targeted. Rival politicians, journalists, and anybody not onboard the MAGA Train is seen as a threat worthy of retribution and persecution, and that's going to be regardless of skin color. So at least there's something that will be based on racial equality to come out of the administration? I dunno. What I do know is that if these mass deportations happen, we're going to be in quite a pickle. Who is going to harvest crops and build stuff and do the tough jobs that most American citizens don't (or won't) do? I guess we'll find out. Maybe it will be robots.
And if you're not straight, well... what isn't on the table to worry about? A government backed by the Supreme Court means that marriage could be threatened. Equality and anti-discrimination protections could be threatened. Access to health care and social services could be threatened. It goes on and on and on. These marginalized persons have been ruthlessly attacked on the campaign trail with lies and vitriol, and the election has sent a very clear message to the LGBTQ+ community: We're going to do everything we can to relegate you to second-class citizen status and strip away anything that benefits you. And it's more than a little heartbreaking to think that this will make a toxic society even more aggressive when it comes to my LGBTQ+ friends and co-workers who are doing nothing but trying their best to play the hand they were dealt in life.
So, yeah, I am choosing to hope for the best, but it's tough not to be pessimistic when Trump will likely do exactly what he's said he'll do. I wasn't spitballing fantasy scenarios in this entry... he's showed us exactly who he is, let us know in no uncertain terms what he's about, and promises were made. So you have to be preparing yourself for the worst case scenario if you don't fit in the "MAGA American" mold despite being 100% American.
This will undoubtedly include a lot of Trump supporters who don't realize this means them.
So I guess we'll see what unfolds over the next four years. Could it be that a lot of people are worrying about nothing?
Anything is possible.
Alas, it's just not very probable in this case.
In the anxiety-riddled night before today's election, I decided to bask in the glow of a little retail therapy. Which is tough to do when you don't have extra money to spare but, hey, it's the little things in life, amirite? Just because you're web-shopping doesn't mean that you actually have to buy something.
Except when you do.
As I mentioned on Sunday, I've not had a working oven for months. Since the end of June, I think. I've always had it in my head that I'll make do with my air fryer and toaster oven until a compelling enough deal on an oven comes along. In other words, I want a good-quality mid-priced oven at a low-priced cost. And that usually means snagging a Black Friday deal, though I think I've historically gotten my best appliance deals on President's Day for some reason.
So while I had no plan to purchase anything, I started looking at various sites to see what model I might want to get if it ended up on sale.
And lo-and-behold, Home Depot had a "Special Buy" price of $750 on a $1,100 model that I would never purchase if not for the fact that the sale price was only $50 over than the high end of my $650-$700 budget (which ain't all that much given the cheapest models hover around $500).
And so... money be damned, I bought it. They're bringing it on Thursday.
Never mind that I had to spend an additional $40 for a new power cable to get my "free" installation, plus another $50 to have my junked oven hauled away... I'll be able to bake again, and that's what matters.
To be honest, I don't think oven I bought is worth $1,099 because it's pretty basic. I think they priced it that high just so they could create a "Special Buy" to get people to think it's this massive bargain they can't pass up. It does have "Air Fry" and "Air Baking" modes (like most ovens do now-a-days), which is nice I guess. But the big feature they tout is "No Preheat" technology, which is kind of silly because I've never preheated an oven in my entire life, and my air fryer already did this (an air fryer I'll probably still use because it's small, gives perfect results, and uses less energy than an oven). But other than that? Eh. I can cook stuff with it.
My old oven (which is comparable to this one and cost $600) lasted 8-1/2 years.
Which, to be honest, is 3-1/2 years longer than I expected, given how everything is built to be replaceable instead of being built to last any more.
I had toyed with the idea of getting it repaired because it's probably just an element gone bad, but the oven suffered some major damage almost immediately when my mom with dementia got confused and cooked plastic in it. I managed to eventually get it all scraped and scrubbed off, but doing so destroyed the finish of the oven box which made it impossible to keep clean. Spills never wiped off... they fused to the metal interior no matter how quickly you tried to remove them. Which hasn't been a fun way to cook for all these years. I lived in fear of grease spatter and drips. Hopefully my new oven will manage to stay cleaner longer.
And so... now I'm poor.
But at least I'll be able to bake bread again, because trying to do that in a toaster oven hasn't been great.
Lies and betrayal are very hard to get past.
Because it can be hard to break away from what you get latched onto.
Just like the octopus in this adorable video, some people are content to stick with trash they've somehow picked up along the way... passing up on something much better because they're waiting for something absolutely perfect to come along. Sometimes you're lucky, like this octopus, and perfect gets served up to you and you're able to leave your trash behind for greener pastures...
But what if perfect never arrives? Then you've just saddled yourself to garbage for the rest of your life.
I've worked very hard to let go of the things (and people) who have screwed me over, made my life worse, and had essentially became unhealthy trash I was stuck to. But throwing your trash in a garbage bin doesn't mean that you're entirely rid of it. You have to then take the trash out, which can be a messy task. So you might end up delaying and delaying and delaying, because you don't want to get messy. In which case it's still around, making you aware of it occasionally when the bad smell wafts your way.
Then hopefully one day when you've finally gotten tired of the smell, you take the trash out.
At which time you hope it stays wherever it gets hauls away to, all while secretly fearing it will come crawling back into your life one day.
Then the news comes that it got buried in a landfill a while back.
At which time you might be conflicted about your feelings. So you choose to drop the negative and focus on the positive. You try to be thankful for the happy times you once had. The times when you were blissfully unaware that you had become attached to trash that would eventually unleash an avalanche of garbage on your life.
What else can you do, really?
Clinging to bitterness and hatred turns you into the garbage you managed to escape from.
And do you really want to be the trash in somebody else's life?
I may have finally turned the heat on to make my cats happy, but never fear, I still have money left to blog... because an all new Bullet Sunday starts... now...
• Bread! Yesterday I baked a loaf of bread for a neighbor, but since my oven is broke I had to make it one of those flat loaves and bake it in my toaster over. It turns out pretty great, all things considered. But then all I could think of was freshly-baked bread, so I checked to see if my starter was good to go, and...
Bread for me today. Except I actually made rolls, because I figured it would be easier to make sliders or little sandwiches that way. =sigh= I sure hope that there's some really good deals on ovens for Black Friday... or, more likely, for President's Day. I want to be able to bake stuff again.
• Winner Winner! My favorite game show is Pyramid (which started as The $10,000 Pyramid). I remember watching it with my mom when I was a kid, though I think by then it was The $25,000 Pyramid
What's surprising to me is that even though you know all of these runs are winning runs, it's still stressful! There's some great players on here. Noticeably missing is Rachel Dratch, who is spooky-good at the game...
I kinda wish there was a way to play that game for everyday people. I mean, sure, they've made home versions over the years, but it's not the same experience as pairing up with a celebrity on a show stage with an audience and playing. Guess I'll just have to apply one day or something.
• And Speaking of Game Shows... There's loads of game shows out of the UK that I obsess over. The two most notable being Taskmaster and 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown. Absolutely nobody does game shows like the Brits when they are celebrity competitions. Nobody. Since there's no real contestants and just famous people having a laugh, it gets absolutely bonkers, and is so much fun to watch. Take for example...
I don't know why we don't do more of this kind of thing on our side of the pond.
• Early Days! Somebody shared this video of gymnast Ian Gunther asking other gymnasts he's performing with to sign a photo for him... but it's not a current photo, it's a photo of them when they were young...
The reactions are priceless. I love stuff like this.
• Stranger Things! Doctor Strange: The Multiverse of Madness grossed nearly a billion dollars worldwide and had a brilliant teaser for a sequel when Clea showed up in the post-credits scene. But the most exciting part? Somehow they got frickin' Charlize Theron to play Clea!
So where is Doctor Strange 3 on the development slate? We keep hearing about new Avengers movies, new Spider-Man movies and the like... but no sequel to a near-billion dollar film that people are dying to see? Is Kevin Feige still in charge at Marvel Studios? What's going on there?
• And speaking of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Doctor Strage... You can't put this much thought into super-hero movies...
Wanda was done pretty dirty. I mean, yeah, I get it... kinda compelling to have an innocent hero get corrupted in a way that makes them become a villain. And Wanda did turning to The Darkhold would only speed up that process. But come on! The Scarlet Witch has been abused to death in the MCU, and it's beyond bizarre that they don't seem to be interested in redemption for the character. I keep hoping that this will be rectified... maybe it will happen in the Vision Quest mini-series... but the longer they wait the more it seems like nobody cares.
• NEWS: A Pregnant Teenager Died After Trying to Get Care in Three Visits to Texas Emergency Rooms! So much blood on these asshole's hands, and yet NONE OF THEIR SUPPORTERS GIVE A SHIT! This country hates women. HATES them. Their only purpose is breeding stock to make more labor and more cult members. Other than that? Oh it's always "Oh well" and moving on to more death.
As I'm typing this, somebody on Facebook just commented "...if women die because of a problem with the baby, that's God's will." And I am like, if absolutely everything that happens is God's will and He's an all-powerful being Who can make anything a reality, then why didn't God just design it so that terminating a pregnancy for any reason results in immediate death? If He's God, then He could absolutely have designed it to work that way, right? — Then the conversation spiraled into "the devil" and "temptation" and "God's wrath" and every other bullshit thing you can think of from a person with no critical thinking skills who hasn't studied the Bible even a little bit. I am so fucking tired of this shit.
And now back to my toasty 72° homestead.
I think that Jake may be in the early stages of arthritis.
Or maybe he's just getting old. But in any event, I've noticed small things about how he moves and how he's jumping and such. Like he's a little bit stiff or maybe even experiencing some pain? I dunno. But I'm going to start in on making life a little easier for him now rather than one day being blindsided and having to do everything at once.
I know there are probably people who would laugh at me for going to all this expense and trouble, but I laugh at people who think that's funny. When my grandmother was having difficulty, we installed a walk-in tub, bought a rocking chair that could raise up, and installed all kinds of things to make her life easier, more convenient, and safer. Why wouldn't I do the same for my cats? There were days that Jake and Jenny made my life easier just by existing. The least I can do is repay the favor.
Then again, Jake just lunged at his sister as she came inside then chased her at full speed around the house. So maybe he's not getting quite so bad as I'm thinking?
Apple had their "Mac Week" this week. Except it was more like "Mac Part-Week" because they stopped announcing new stuff after three days. I was fully expecting updates across the entire Mac line... iMac, Mac mini, MacBook, Mac Studio, and Mac Pro (or possibly some new Mac-based HomeKit device or wildcard tech).
Instead we got iMac, Mac mini, and MacBook.
Which ain't nuthin', but still.
iMAC
I bought the first Apple Silicon iMac with the M1 chip back in 2021. The only thing I didn't like about it was the color. The original yellow model I got was too light and the yellow aluminum looked like urine. It was so bad that I exchanged it for blue because the photo looked nothing like what Apple showed on their website. The new models have deeper, more vibrant colors, so my one complaint was addressed...
My iMac is mostly used for video conferencing. It's exceptional for that. I do work on it too, and the M1 chip is plenty good for the basic stuff I do on it. I won't be upgrading.
MAC MINI
The new mini is more mini than ever before. I want one, but not because I need it for anything. I just want one because it's so darn adorable...
The price is pretty good for the power you get. If I didn't have a NAS already, I'd buy one to hook up to a RAID and use it to serve files at home. NAS drives are usually so embarrassingly underpowered with last-gen chips and barely enough memory. With Mac mini I could build a better, faster, more-powerful NAS for the money. But, I don't have a bunch of cash laying around, so I'll just be sticking with what I got. It's fine.
MACBOOK
And here we are. The one temptation which might be too good for me to pass up. I skipped last year's M3 Max upgrade because it wasn't a hefty enough upgrade to my M2 Max (which was an upgrade from the year before). But the leap from M2 Max to M4 Max? Well. That's another matter entirely. I use my MacBook for serious work. The most demanding of which is 3D rendering. It takes a lot of power to do that quickly...
The M4 Max is 3.5× faster than M1 Max. So it stands to reason that it's around 2.5× faster than the M2 Max. Or thereabouts. Even if it's just twice as fast, that's a game-changer for me. To finish a render in half the time? I dunno, man. That's a lot of time saved. That might be worth it. And so... I'll be waiting to see the benchmarks. If there's a significant leap, like two times or two-and-half times, then I may not be able to stop myself from upgrading. Dangit anyway. That'll be a good chunk of money I can't afford, even with trade-in. Though the matte display option is kinda the icing on the cake.
For the longest time, Halloween was my favorite holiday.
But then I got cats. And not just any cats, but cats who are terrified of other people. And noise. So a day where people are coming to the door screaming TRICK-OR-TREAT is pretty much their nightmare scenario. To Jake and Jenny, it's the scariest day of the year for realsies.
And it's no picnic for me, I gotta say.
My home has the living room in the back, kitchen and dining room at the front. So every time somebody comes to the door, I have to go running across my house to get there. I usually deep-clean my kitchen on Halloween because of this, but this year it wasn't in me after the rough day I had.
Fortunately, my home is covered by a full array of security cameras, so I just have the camera at my front door running on my televison so I can see people coming before they knock or ring.
But that doesn't save me from having to run to the door fifty times.
Though I should welcome the excersise given that I bought too much candy again this year and will have to eat it myself, darnit.
=sigh=
It's really telling when you get some bad news... but because of what you've been through in the past, you have no idea what your reaction should be. Or even if the bad news is, in fact, fake news.
I was so naïve for so long. Now I'm just numb.
National Cat Day (as well as International Cat Day) are hysterical.
As anybody who owns a cat (or, more likely, has a cat own them) can tell you, EVERY DAY IS NATIONAL CAT DAY! To say otherwise is absurd.
I mean, just look at these assholes...
Do they in any way look as if it's not National Cat Day?
This photo was taken months ago, so there's your answer.
So this is how it's going to be?
Apple shitting over everything with A.I. and "smarts" whether you want it or not?
I regularly have to list a bag size in millimeters, then put the weight of the product it can hold. And the format is to use an "=" after the size. Such as "190×250=240g"
This is something I do a lot. A lot. All of a sudden, when I type "190×250=" Apple "Intelligence" will automatically insert "47500"... and the only way to get rid of it is to backspace FIVE TIMES. It doesn't allow you to hit backspace once to delete the entire number in one go (as it would when a word is suggested on my iPhone).
This is categorically fucking stupid. There should be a keyboard shortcut when you want to insert math into an email. Apple Mail shouldn't just assume you want math and pop it into your email when you NEVER FUCKING ASKED FOR IT.
Living in the future is so awesome, y'all. A.I. is here, has no fucking clue what it's doing, but is taking a big ol' crap on you anyway. Typical.
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