Today is the day I usually go into the office to box up all my 2024 files and get everything ready for 2025. It's a great day to do that because nobody is there to intrude and I plow through. But today, much to my surprise, people are actually working! And so I'm putting off my office clean out until Sunday.

Instead I'm cleaning out my laptop. I'm one of those messy people who just drops everything on their desktop and (wrongly) assumes I'll get to it later. Most of them are for work, so that's fairly easy to file away properly. But my personal stuff is more weird and complex. It's recipes. It's memes. It's stuff for this blog. It's photos. It's links. It's ideas. It's absolutely anything you can think of. That's not so easy to file away.

But anyway, here's some stuff that I think I collected for Blogography...

Here's an interesting land feature I found while randomly scrolling through Google Maps. It's a shockingly round island (René-Levasseur Island) inside of a shockingly round lake (Lac Manicouagan) in Canada. It's interesting enough to have its own Wikipedia page here. Long story short, an asteroid slammed into Canada 214 million years ago. And it must have hit near-perpendicular to make such a round hole. It's nicknamed "The Eye of Quebec."

Copyright Google Maps

Copyright Google Maps

Here's a video that I didn't end up using for Caturday because the camera wasn't pointed downward enough (or because YouTube made it into a reel, which displays weird). Still funny. Jenny ran around the corner at breakfast time to run upstairs. Little did she know that Jake was on his way down. She didn't even slow down or hesitate, but instead leaped right over him...

I don't know if I already shared this, but it's a cartoon that I absolutely love...

I have no idea why I saved this. It's a video from my doorbell cam showing the moon traveling across the sky in the upper-left corner there...

This is a photo that I was going to write a blog post about, but could never find a way to make it interesting. Basically, I was opening the drawers of my IKEA shoe cupboard looking for my water shoes and noticed that a shoe was missing. This makes absolutely no sense. I know it was there at one point. But now it's just... gone?!? How? Where did it go? I wouldn't have taken out just one shoe. Did somebody take it? I actually

This is a snack called "Kazbars" that looked amazing, so I took a snapshot of it to remind me to buy it. I ended up finding it (yep, delicious!), but never trashed the photo for some reason...

This is my favorite meme of 2024. It gets passed between my friends and I whenever we have a big expense pop up. It's especially apt for me going into 2025...

Oh look... it's the secret recipe for McDonald's Special Sauce that I've been meaning to try!

I ran across this "recipe" a month ago for Movie Theater Popcorn that I've been meaning to try once I get the ingredients...

And this recipe for School Cafeteria Cheese Pizza sounds amazing. I just found it a week ago and already I'm sad I haven't tried it...

And that's a sampling of what I'm having to deal with. I've got loads more just waiting to be organized and filed away. Happy New Year!

I didn't take enough vacation days, so I'm having to squeeze them in where I can. Which is to say that I have today and tomorrow off. Whee.

What I should be doing is absolutely nothing. What I'm actually doing is getting a lot of minor chores done that I've been avoiding forever. Scrubbing the kitchen. Scrubbing the toilets. Scrubbing the floors.

Pretty much just a lot of scrubbing going on today.

Which doesn't make for an exciting blog entry, but unless somebody is going to pay for a housecleaner to come take care of all this mess, it's all I've got.

I woke up feeling awful, because of course I did. I had the day off. If I'm going to be feeling super-great, you can bet your last dollar it will be on a work day.

So I spent most of my time watching Would I Lie To You? clips on their YouTube channel. As you'd guess from my obsession with British television programmes (see what I did there?) it is, in fact, a British series. A British Competition series hosted by Rob Brydon with David Mitchell and Lee Mack as the team captains. It is categorically one of the most consistently funny things I've ever seen.

David Mitchell is hilariously funny. Any time he's on a quiz show, you're guaranteed a laugh or ten (the second iPad story is so funny that I think I'm permanently damaged)...

Lee Mack is easily one of the quickest wits on the planet. It's insane how fast he is...

An important part of the show is when a guest comes out and each of the three teammates say how they know this person. Only one story is true, and it's up to the other team to suss out which is the truth. It gets crazy...

Sometimes the guests have stories that are absolutely mind-blowing. And half of them are from Bob Mortimer...

There's comedians that appear which I'd never heard of before who are just beyond funny. Like poor Sam Campbell, who has deadpan down...

But the funniest bit I'd seen all day was James Acaster doing a bit on the game of "Squirt." I nearly died...

If you ever need a distraction from the horrors of life, Would I Lie You You? is the place to be.

Yesterday the cats' feeders went off for lunch while I was meal-prepping ingredients for veggie wraps. Jake was all over his food but Jenny was nowhere to be found. I called to her, but she never showed up. So rather than having Jake scarf her food as well, I took the bowl out and sat it on the counter.

Then, as I was dicing tomatoes, I heard this howling that sounded like it was made by an animal on a vibrating bed. I looked down to tell Jake that he already had his lunch and he can't have his sister's too... but it WAS his sister! Jenny was howling, but apparently she was so furious that her lunch was gone that she was shaking. Or something. I honestly don't know what her deal was.

So I was like "Alight, ALRIGHT! I'm getting it!" and she started chowing down.

At this point I'm convinced that my cats really do see themselves as kittens and me as their cat dad. Because they act like spoiled little brats who just start complaining and crying and howling the second that something doesn't go their way. And it's getting worse all the time. Jenny has gotten frustrated and cried before, but it was nothing like what's going on now.

And just look at this shit...

There I was on a Zoom meeting, petting Jake all the while. All of a sudden I feel him flop on my hand and there it is... HE'S FALLEN ASLEEP ON MY HAND! Doesn't give a single shit about it. What's weirder is that one of his eyes was still kind of open, which lead me to believe that he might actually be faking it because he wanted to lay on my hand. That's totally something my cats would do.

The little bastards.

I'm just a boy. Standing in front of the blogosphere. Asking it to love him... because an all new Bullet Sunday starts... now...

   
• Well Hello Hello! YouTube's algorithm has found me some really cool content over the years. But sometimes it comes too late. This small channel of blacksmithing videos was being shut down. The two guys who created it could never seem to get any traction, as they were continuously buried by the algorithm. But then? YouTube promoted their final video. And it finally took off. They ballooned to 15,000 subscribers, and a lot of people who would have watched had they only known about it, commented as such. And so here they are... coming back...

Kinda a happy ending for everybody. I hope they can keep growing their channel. If you want to take a look, it's pretty cool.

   
• Future Dutch! So there I was taking a phone call after putting my television on pause. Eventually the Google screensaver engaged, and I came very close to saying WHAT THE BLADE RUNNER ALTERNATE FUTURE IS THIS SHIT?! And noted that the title of the photo included "Vinkeveen" from the Netherlands. So I looked it up and Google Maps and, sure enough...

© Google Maps

© Google Maps

© Google Maps

That is very cool, isn't it?

   
• Oh, Grand! Just a reminder to everybody who hasn't already used a VPN to watch the new Wallace & Gromit movie on the BBC (they've had it since Christmas)... Netflix finally got off their asses and has it available for streaming in the USA. I'll be watching it again just to show Netflix that this is the kind of awesome content I want to see... not another pile of shit that Zack Snyder crapped out his ass...

The movie is just amazingly well-done and well worth your valuable time.

   
• The Prologue and the Promise! I recently watched a video on the history of Walt Disney World's Epcot. That lead me to a video on one of the earliest pavilions in Future World called Horizons. I always thought it was a bit shit to two times I visited before they closed, but there was a giant mural inside that I loved. Never really knew who painted it until I watched this video. Apparently some genius at Disney thought to hire renowned futurist painter and celebrated "space" artist Robert McCall to create it. And it is stunning...

© Disney and McCall Studios

© Disney and McCall Studios

You can read more about this amazing work (plus see many others) on the artist's website here.

   
• Mixbox! WELP! Looks like somebody finally solved the thing I hate most about painting digitally... pigments never work as they should. Programs like Photoshop and Procreate use an additive model which turns everything into a muddy mess. But now a company has come up with a model which simulates actual pigments. This is incredible...

I hope that the Mixbox technology is added to mainstream apps very soon now... it's amazing to me that it's taken this long to get here.

   
• IT'S THE FOG! The Mystery Government Fog is out to get us! DEFEAT THE FOG 2025! (here's a link in case TikTok is being a dick).

FINALLY! The threat of alien spores is being taken seriously by the health care community! Thanks, Dr. Eric!

   
• Unsurprised! My grievances against PayPal are well documented. They stole money from me. They said that a customer didn't get merchandise I sold to them and reversed the money. I provided USPS tracking showing the delivery. I provided an email from the customer saying that they received their order and that they didn't receive a refund. PayPal didn't give a single fucking shit. They kept the money. And since they are not governed by banking regulations, there's NOTHING I CAN DO ABOUT IT. After pestering them for months, they simply stopped responding. So I closed down the Artificial Duck store and was done. I never made a single dollar profit on the shop, sold everything at cost and exact shipping, and did it for the fun of it all. There's no way I could continue and take a loss because payments are revoked over a total lie.

And now it comes out that these heinous fucking assholes at PayPal are just as bad as we knew they were. They've been fucking over their advertisers and their customers with their "Honey" service. Get a load of this...

Nothing would make me happier than PayPal being sued out of existence and shut down. But that will never happen. They get protection from shitty fucking laws that our government creates because our government is too busy sucking Big Business dicks to give a shit about protecting the citizens that elect them. Welcome to the hellscape that it The United States of America.

   
Alrighty then. Until next Sunday then!

The Monday before Christmas, my work had a holiday luncheon. Usually these events aren't the best time for me because I'm a vegetarian trying to eat more vegan. So usually what I end up with is a piece of bread and some salad. But in the last couple years they've been kind enough to request something that I can eat.

This time they got me a vegan wrap that was incredible. Ridiculously delicious...

Ever since then I've been craving another. But I wasn't around enough to place a grocery order until this past Friday. When I ordered all the stuff needed to make an awesome wrap of my own.

And, because once you've prepped all the ingredients wraps are so easy to throw together, I've been eating them day and night, changing ingredients around to find the combination I like ...

After days of eating nothing but wraps for every meal, I have some tips for you...

1. Mixing all the contents in a bowl with the dressing before adding to the wrap is so game-changing. You get all the tastes in every bite.
2. I started with Italian dressing, but now I'm addicted to a kinda Southwest thing made from vegan mayo with vegan sour cream, chili powder, cumin, smoked paprika, salt, pepper, onion powder, and garlic powder.
3. Spinach is so superior to iceberg lettuce in a wrap. Spinach has flavor, iceberg is just wet and crunchy. Still prefer iceberg in tacos though.
4. My favorite ingredients other than the Southwest dressing and spinach is... black beans, blackened corn, red pepper, black olives, onion, tomato, poblano, and crushed corn chips.
5. I nuke the wrap for 10 seconds just to make it a bit flexible before filling. Any longer than that and the wrap gets chewy. Not nuking makes it crumble.
6. At first I was wrapping the wraps with parchment to keep them together when I cut in half and eat them. Now I don't bother. Using a serrated knife allows you to saw through them while keeping the ingredients inside.

Wraps are such a healthy thing to eat with all those veggies. I hope I never get tired of them. Or at least not so tired that I stop eating them altogether.

As anybody who has read this blog for some time knows, I love LEGO building sets and really love LEGO video games. They're light puzzle games that are more fun than stressful, and I still play them often to relax. Over the years I've owned all of them, from Star Wars and Indiana Jones to Jurassic Park and Batman... and beyond! If LEGO has made it, I've bought it. They're clever, funny, and entertaining.

Today I discovered that Traveller's Tales (the company behind most of the games) had worked up a pitch for a LEGO James Bond game. It never occurred to me to pair them up, but now that their presentation video has leaked it's such a natural franchise to immortalize in LEGO...

Sadly, nothing ever came of the idea, which is a shame. I'd 100% buy it if it existed.

From 1998 through 2001, I was flying to Los Angeles fairly regularly. I had a project in "development" (AKA "development hell") and was consulting after the rights were optioned. This was a crazy period in my life, and I was trying to get the most out of my time there. I made important connections that I still have today. I did new work that was interesting and challenging. I tried standup. I got to know the city fairly well. I met great people. I had a lot of fun.

Which is why the massive fires burning down parts of city are more than a little upsetting. I look at the map and it's very worrisome. The Hollywood Hills are on fire, and the area around the Hollywood Bowl have been evacuated. The Palisades are on fire, and The Getty Villa is there. West Hollywood is endangered north of Sunset Blvd., and iconic places like The Comedy Store are there. Sunset Blvd. itself is closed. To say nothing of the many houses that have burned. It's a horrific situation, and high winds are making a bad situation worse.

Santa Monica, where I've stayed. Pasadena, where I've worked. Hollywood where I played. I could wake up in the morning and find any or all of them engulfed in flames. I have a lot of memories tied up in Northern L.A., and my anxiety is in overdrive just thinking about what's happening there and all the people who have lost their homes.

And the animals, of course.

This is Lahaina, Maui all over again for me.

I think that if I hadn't been through wildfires in my past I wouldn't react so horribly when they strike places I know.

But I have and they do.

Stay safe, everybody.

This morning I woke up to scour the news to find out what's happening with the L.A. fires. It's a depressing necessity because closing my eyes to it isn't going to make it go away.

The only thing worse than the actual news are some disgusting "Christians" enamoured with the idea that the fires are "God's punishment" for Hollywood. Because isn't that the way it always goes? If disaster strikes a largely Conservative area, everything gets blamed on anybody except the people living there. It's the gays. It's abortion. It's Obama. However... the minute disaster strikes a largely Progressive area, it's because God hates them and they deserve His wrath. How "Christians" think that this kind of idiotic "logic" makes it okay for them to promote hate against people they don't like... IN GOD'S NAME... is absolutely wild. Just further evidence that many "Christians" today are Christians in name only, and have no real interest in living a life that honors Christ. Compassion and mercy have gone right out the window.

But anyway...

I watched a lot of footage from the fires. But the one that hit me hardest was a video that Hallmark actor Cameron Mathison shot of his destroyed home. This looks like something out of a post-apocalyptic video game instead of reality, and it's a very sobering watch...

Yeah. Children are being murdered around the globe, but God is spending His time burning down Cameron Mathison's house. Get the fuck out of here.

Nothing happened today because I've been obsessing over a social media time-suck.

It's a tale as old as time.

A father, his two sons, and his son-in-law work together at a family realtor's office. One day, for whatever reason... be it boredom, nothing better to do, or an idea to "go viral" to drive more traffic to their firm... they make a video.

They apparently had fun doing it because then they made another. And another. And another. And eventually they're getting hundreds of thousands of views, and an occasional viral hit getting millions.

I've been following this group for quite a while, but this is the video which got me going back through their old videos this evening. Boy does it ring true right now...

   
So many of their ideas start from a mundane truth that's funny when viewed through the perspective they bring to it...

   
A lot of their best videos trade off their relationships as family...

   
As if that wasn't all enough... there's also surprisingly good dancing! And you can find it all right here.

My cats have been even more lazy than usual today and I'm following their lead. Instead of cleaning the house, doing laundry, and taking care of all the boring and mundane human crap that I should be doing... I'm laying in bed and scrolling through the internet.

Which, as you probably realize, is mostly cat videos and cat content.

I saw this post from last August and it couldn't be more authentic cat...

   
This one killed me. Be sure to watch with the sound on because the hilarity is worth the effort...

   
I'd gladly go to Starbucks for a pup cup for my cats if it would make them like riding in the car. Just listen to this cat...

   
And now, this...

   
I'll stop there because I could drop dozens and dozens of other things that have been inundating my personal time lately.

And you, if you'll excuse me, I'm scrubbing the cat feeding station, cleaning the water fountains, filling the Litter-Robots, washing the kitty warming pad covers, and doing all the other cat-maintenance chores that Jake and Jenny demand of me.

Don't look now but the world isn't ending after all... because an all new Bullet Sunday starts... now...

   
• AMNK! Oh look. This is my life right here...

And here's Part One...

Yeah. Just like that.

   
• This Moment! Well this was unanticipated. I had no idea that Able Heart had beautiful feel good tracks like this until it popped up in my feed...

Another artist I need to keep an eye on, it would seem.

   
• Viral! NEWSFLASH: Crucial Firefighting Plane Grounded In LA Because Of Idiot Drone Operator. Who gives a crap that homes are burning... I want footage to go viral on TikTok!

   
• SPACE! ELEVATOR! I loathe the AppleTV adaptation of Foundation, but keep coming back to this awesome scene every time I see anything about building a space elevator. It's incredibly well-done...

The trail of destruction as the cable for the space elevator falls acrss the earth is epic.

   
• Baked! Have I mentioned that I still loathe my new Whirlpool oven? After finally fixing it so it will actually work (the element was not fully seated or something), I run into new things to loathe always. In addition to the control panel layout being shit, my latest consistent source of hate is that YOU CAN'T KEEP THE DOOR OPEN WHEN BROILING! WHO THE FUCK DESIGNS AN OVEN LIKE THIS? You can't look through the window to keep watch, it isn't tall enough. You have to constantly open and close the door to look. This is fucking madness. In all my years of using an oven, including my previous Whirlpool, you could leave the door open to broil. I will never buy another shitty fucking Whirlpool appliance again. What a waste of money for something so frustrating. — Seriously thinking of welding the fucking door sensor permanently shut. But then I'd void my warranty? Lord.

   
• Spring Break! NEWSFLASH: 2 bodies found in the wheel well of a JetBlue plane in Fort Lauderdale, airline says. WTF? So... let's think this through. You stow away in a wheel well where the landing gear goes after takeoff. Assuming you can avoid getting crushed by it, you'll then reach a cruising altitude of 40,000 feet where it's freezing cold and you can't get oxygen?!? I just... what could the motivation be for something like this? "Screw New York weather, I'm going to Ft. Lauderdale!" or something? I dunno. Maybe if they didn't have someplace warm to ride out the winter this would seem like a good idea... but if this "keeps happening" it seems as though there should be some kind of sensor to tell the cockpit if there is a presence in the wheel well.

   
Until next Sunday, assuming the earth is still here.

The big news today is that Sonos's CEO has finally stepped down after his company forced a shitty app release in order to meet a ship date on a calendar for headphones... not giving a crap that it fucked over longtime loyal customers in the process.

But this is a rather gross simplification of events of record.

• First of all, don't go crying for the now ex-CEO. He's getting $1.9 MILLION DOLLARS in severance. That's probably slightly more than the 100 people who got laid off because of a situation the now ex-CEO was presiding over.
• The new "Interim CEO" had a good message for Sonos staff that went out today. And he's worked as an engineer for Apple, so it's assumed that he understands the importance of earning and maintaining customer loyalty. But he also was leadership at Quibi, a disaster that's so massively huge that I'm surprised he's still able to work in the tech field. So while things are likely looking up, I'm tempering my expectations.
• The Sonos app, while greatly improved over the steaming pile of shit that initially got forced on everybody (hey, you can scroll through a playlist without constantly pausing now!), is still far from perfect. It's not intuitive at all. You can't configure it in a way that makes sense to you. Want to pin your playlists so you can get to them easily? FUCK YOU! And I just don't get it. There are plenty of talented UI architects out there, why isn't Sonos hiring people who understand elegance via simplicity in design? I'd assume that people developing the app at Sonos use Sonos, but you wouldn't know it given how the app works. Or doesn't. I still fucking hate it, even though it's mostly usable for what I need now.
• People are losing sight of the fact that not only was the now-ex-CEO in charge when the whole app fiasco happened... he also presided over the Sonos Arc's "Pop of Death" that didn't allow many customers to use its hallmark feature, Dolby Atmos, for nearly TWO FUCKING YEARS. He didn't give a single shit that the entire reason I purchased the soundbar was FOR DOLBY ATMOS. At no time did Sonos ask me (or anybody?) what our setup was so the could expedite a fix. Or ask us to ship our setup so they could figure it out. The CEO had them meander around FOR TWO YEARS working on other stuff before solving the problem. TWO FUCKING YEARS. This is inexcusable. This is unforgivable.
• I don't think I will ever forgive Sonos for all they've put me through. And if I could afford to replace my Sonos gear after lighting it all on fire in the middle of the street, I would do that. Probably. Sonos has gone from being a company I loved and advocated for to a company I loathe with every fiber of my being. And their management made it happen. Whether management can swing the pendulum back before they go bankrupt is anybody's guess.

My home is not very big at all, but still bigger than I need. I could get by with half the size for myself and my cats just fine. When I bought it the location was the most important factor, because I'd be taking care of a mom with dementia. Living in my old neighborhood where people know her and, more importantly, she knows them, is what mattered.

Because I'm single, I have been toying with the idea of finding something smaller. Cheaper to maintain and heat/cool (and clean!) as I get older. But something became immediately apparent as I was looking around... I wouldn't come out ahead on a downsizing deal, and it's proving really difficult to wrap my head around. Shouldn't the difference between the sale price of the bigger place and the purchase price of the smaller place be putting money in my pocket?

No. — At least not right now.

Smaller doesn't automatically equal cheaper.

Unless I gave up on home ownership completely and moved to an apartment. But given the money I've sunk into this place over the years, that's a short-term windfall that would likely cost me even more money long-term.

And so I guess I'm staying put for a while longer.

Which saves me from having to explain to my cats that they'd have to adjust their excessive lifestyle to live in less space. Something they probably wouldn't be happy about at all.

I've heard that as we get older we have a harder and harder time getting the sleep we need. It's hard to fall asleep. Waking up is what's easy. Then it's even harder to fall back asleep.

Apparently I've reached that point, because I feel lucky if I can manage to get five or six hours sleep. Most times it's less. Sometimes a lot less. As an example, here's my sleep from last night...

   
Three hours and nine minutes. I should have taken a nap when I got home from work, but I wasn't tired.

No idea how that was even possible.

How can I function on three hours sleep?

Awww, man. In many ways, David Lynch is a genius who cannot be touched. Between Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, Eraserhead, and even Dune... WHICH I ARGUE WAS A FANTASTIC ADAPTATION FOR THE DAY... I admire his work so much, and was sad to hear that he had died.

YouTube is not letting me embed an awesome video where David Lynch is talking about the time he met George Lucas because Lucas wanted him to direct Return of the Jedi. But it's awesome so I am giving you the link right here. Everything I love about David Lynch is encapsulated in this story. You MUST watch it. Even if you're not a fan and don't understand his work. Especially then, because it will explain why so many people are fans of his, and how it translates to what he does.

Rest in Peace, sir.

And so our bought-and-paid-for "Supreme" Court has unanimously said that Americans don't have the fucking freedom to decide for themselves what they can and cannot access on the internet, making a decision for all of us that TikTok can be actually be banned. Turns out that only American companies are allowed to promote misinformation, exploit our personal information, and send our data to China! Anybody else does it and it's a "matter of National Security." Despite some valid concerns, this is some stupid shit right here. Guess TikTok didn't buy off the right politicians...

The entire TikTok fiasco is both straightforward and complex. President Trump is the one who set out to ban it. Then Democrats got into power and President Biden co-signed it, but passed the buck back to Trump as he returns to power. So now Trump is in a position to either save TikTok or sink it thanks to the "Supreme" Court (making Democrats look fucking stupid as usual, regadless of which way he goes). That's the simple version. The complexity comes from all the political shit surrounding the simple version. Take for example Senator Tom Cotton, Republican from Arkansas. He's the guy who torpedoed an extension to TikTok shutting down. He's very aggressive about it. But why? Well, the corrupt asshole has a book coming out called Seven Things You Can't Say About China. Him being able to claim that he's the guy who took a tough stand against China by banning TikTok is great promotion for his book (which I'm assuming is about taking a tough stand against China). This is a total conflict of interest, but that's hardly surprising coming from a politician. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. All those politicians taking money from Facebook have to repay that favor somehow, and what better way than to shut down a huge competitor? It goes on and on. And until we start executing politicians who fuck over American citizens to serve their own lust for money and power, it's going to continue.

   
And speaking of seriously stupid shit... I have written about the flerfer (flat earther) movement many, many times on Blogography. I just don't get it. We had this shit figured out before the time of Jesus Christ. It's an easily verifiable fact that the earth is a globe. Shoot a rifle or mortar over a long distance. You'll have to adjust for the curvature of the earth and its Coriolis force to hit your target. Or, even easier, just watch a ship disappear over the horizon because it's going behind the curvature of the earth. Or you can do something like this simple two minute experiment where flerfers debunked themselves...

Fast forward to The Final Experiment. A guy flew some flerfers to Antarctica to observe the 24-hour sun, something that's impossible on a flat earth. And something I know is real, BECAUSE I'VE BEEN THERE AND HAVE FUCKING SEEN IT FIRST-HAND! And of course the flerfers are calling the whole "Final Experiment" a lie, which is beyond stupid.

And then today, finally, the video I've been waiting for has finally arrived. Professor Dave weighed in. It's certified gold. ..

   
Blergh. I was going to write about a few other stupid things... including, but not limited to, Apple "Intelligence," a teacher who left their cocaine in an elementary school bathroom in Vegas, and go off on social media influencers yet again... but stupidity is exhausting enough.

I had a huge list of chores I needed to get done today, but have been so exhausted from lack of sleep that I didn't really have the energy to do any of it.

So what did I do instead of working around the house? I sat on the couch and veged out in front of the television. I was hoping that would lead to me falling asleep and getting a nap, but that wasn't to be.

The good news is that I had company. I looked up and saw Jenny staring at me from the table...

And next thing I know, I have a television buddy snuggled up next to me...

Which, let's face it, is a lot better than sleep anyway.

I've made it my mission today to start deep-cleaning my home because it's just gone too long without. But I won't leave my daily blog entry hanging... because an all new Bullet Sunday starts... now...

   
• Furnishings! When I bought my home, I had less than no money. But I had to furnish it completely from scratch for two people because the stuff my mom had was all hand-me-downs that were damaged and falling apart. I ended up buying everything at IKEA because it was cheap (though I did buy the real wood "Hemnes" IKEA instead of the MDF fake wood stuff, because I needed it to last a while). With the exception of my IKEA Hemnes bed, which is a squeaky pile of shit, I'm happy with all the furniture. But it's not ideal. My dream is to learn how to make quality furniture to replace all my IKEA, but wood has just been too expensive. Maybe one day! — Anyway, this is a fascinating video which explains where we're at when it comes to furniture in America...

Yeah, I gotta learn to make my own furniture! Starting with a bed!

   
• -A45! She's not wrong. Just like America's idiotic failure to adopt the metric system, failing to adopt the A4 system is equally stupid...

I am increasingly convinced that the USA clings to stupid as a point of pride, because we do it all the time.

   
• Prophecies Unfulfilled! When Dune: Prophecy began, it had narrative and structure problems but I liked the idea of it all. For the first three episodes they felt like they were building towards something interesting, and I was intrigued enough that I was willing to overlook the flaws. Plus it was beautiful. Then the fourth episode came along and it was awful. It was so bad that it instantly negated the excitement I was trying to hold onto, and it only went downhill from there. It was so badly scripted and so boring, and by the end of it all I didn't give a shit about any of it. Everything amazing about the Denis Villeneuve Dune masterpieces was gone. I was badly disappointed. But not as disappointed as this guy...

Oh yeah, he totally nailed it. And watching this video shows me just how desperate I was to love the show that I was overlooking all the bad things about it. Until I couldn't any more with Episode 04. I hope to God that they manage to write their way out of the dud the show became in its first season, because I really want to have great Dune stories to watch.

   
• Shocking! BWAH HA HA HA HA HAAAAAA: The Vegas Tesla Loop Is A Glorified Crosswalk.

   
• Switch it Up! I bought the original Nintendo Switch the minute I could get my hands on one. I wanted a very good handheld system, and Nintendo pumps out games that are exceptional and fun. I wish I had time to use it more, but I don't, so I am not sure I'll be investing in the Switch 2. Unless there's a game for it that's super-compelling...

What we really need to see are specs. Just once I'd love for Nintendo to release something that's not woefully underpowered when compared to Xbox and PlayStation. Sure, Nintendo is smart in realizing that the game play is more important than anything else... but it's just sad that games which run beautifully on my Xbox drop to a subpar experience on my Switch. It would be different if it was only a handheld system, but it's a television console as well and really needs to be able to keep up.

   
• Climate Changed! NEWSFLASH: 2024 first year to pass 1.5C global warming limit. Online, people are laugh-reacting to this story. Guess they find the challenges and horrors that their kids and grandkids will face to be funny? — As for me? I'm done giving a shit about selfish, uneducated, ignorant, asshole humans. What I care about are the other living creatures on this planet that are facing extinction because of something they had nothing to do with.

   
• The Future is Now! Just over seven years ago, I wrote a post about guns. In this post, which got me some pushback, I said that passing gun control legislation was a stop-gap measure that was doomed to fail because technology would eventually allow people to 3D print any gun they want. Well... surprise: Americans Are Posting 3D-Printed Gun Videos to China’s RedNote With Surprising Success. This right here is what I've been talking about all this time. Banning guns in a day and age where anybody can 3-D print whatever they want in their basement is not going to solve the problem. And what happens when 3-D metal printing technology is mainstream? We need to be creative in how we address gun violence, and yet everybody continues to think old world solutions are going to work in the new world which we live. Just think about the horrors of what will be possible in another seven years. We're late on creating solutions. Soon we'll be too late, and hand-wringing has gotten us nowhere.

   
Back to house cleaning, I suppose. Ugh.

As I do every year, I started my day listening to Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech in its entirety. So many people quote snippets of it to support their personal narrative while completely ignoring the bigger picture, and that's why I listen to the whole thing every year.

I had the day off but ended up working most of it anyway. I have a dentist appointment tomorrow, so it seemed the smart thing to do.

Though now that I'm home and exhausted, perhaps it would have been smarter to stay home and zone out in front of the television? The world may never know.

UPDATE: And my blog is dead again. I don't know if it keeps getting hacked or what.

In order to de-stress from my day, I've decided to play through all the LEGO video games I own, trying to get them each to 100% completion. I started with LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga played it off-and-on for a couple weeks, then set it aside to start in on my favorite of all the LEGO releases: the first LEGO Batman game, which is the first one that I bought in 2008. I skipped LEGO Star Wars and LEGO Indiana Jones because they looked like they were just replaying the movies. But LEGO Batman was a fully original story, looked like silly no-stress fun, and was playable on my Nintendo Wii (the only system I had at the time).

And it was exactly what I needed. A simple diversion from life. It was amazing just how much they packed into it, with clever puzzles and smart level design from start to finish...

The vehicle levels had crappy controls and the ladder/jumping mechanics were terrible... but still fun to play.

Then I went back and played LEGO Star Wars and LEGO Indiana Jones, found them equally easy to pick up as a distraction, and have been buying all the LEGO games ever since.

Just for fun I thought I'd rank all the LEGO games I've played...

1. LEGO Batman. It was the first one I played and still feels like it's the best. Newer games got bigger and more complex, but this was a home run right out of the gate.
2. LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga. It's LEGO. It's Star Wars. It's beautifully designed gameplay that has been refined to perfection.
3. LEGO Marvel Super-Heroes Collection. The missions for the sequel, LEGO Marvel Super-Heroes 2 were better, and the open world they created for it was incredible... but I still prefer the first one. It was perfectly balanced and meticulously designed in a way the sequel didn't quite reach. But when they both got released together, it elevated the pair.
4. LEGO DC Villains. I never expected that LEGO would build a game around the bad guys, but here it is. And it's a lot of fun to play.
5. LEGO Batman 2: DC Heroes. When this title debuted, I was shocked at the fact that they made an open-world LEGO game... and let you play as other DC heroes like Superman and Wonder Woman. That set the standard for everything that followed, but this is the game where it all began.
6. LEGO City Undercover. This huge open-world game has one of the best stories of any LEGO game. Plus it used the Wii-U touch-screen controller in fun and smart ways.
7. LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga. This collection included the first two LEGO Star Wars games in one box and, while not as vast as The Complete Saga, this was loads of fun to play.
8. LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures When I finally got around to playing this, I was surprised at the way they managed to take such a limited character set (compared to the huge number for Batman and Star Wars) and manage to keep all the levels so fresh.
9. LEGO Lord of the Rings. You just knew the game was going to be good based on the source material alone. But they got so many of the details so right that it was easy to look past some of the faults in the gameplay.
10. LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean. I spent way too much time just staring at how they made Captain Jack Sparrow walk. He kinda has this saunter which mimics Johnny Depp so flawlessly that it's almost a distraction. But a good one.
11. LEGO Dimensions. This incredible game which was massive in scope and had unexpected level releases that came with actual LEGO brick sets to build (seriously... everything from Wizard of Oz to Back to the Future to Ghostbusters to Doctor Who to ET to Adventure Time... and so much more!) were there. Alas, the game got shut down, so now I have are the memories.
12. LEGO Jurassic World. You can play as the LEGO dinosaurs. What more could you ever want in a game?
13. LEGO Harry Potter Collection. Containing both the Years 1-4 and Years 5-7 games, this is a good puzzler with a charming take on material that I don't care for at all (I hated the first two Harry Potter books so much I never picked up another). Then Joanne "JK" Rowling ended up being a raging bigot and transphobic pile of shit and I begrudgingly still play the LEGO games even though I have no desire to buy anything she touches ever again.
14. LEGO Batman 3: Beyond Gotham This was a truly disappointing release after the brilliant original two LEGO Batman games. No idea what happened... maybe they were rushed... but this just didn't hit (or play) the same as what came before. But, hey. It's LEGO Batman.
15. LEGO The Hobbit. Just like the movies, this game took a small amount of excellent material and dragged it out in a way that made it less great. But it's still a lot of fun to play.
16. LEGO Indiana Jones 2. I had fun... I guess... but the puzzles and action were just not up to the stratospheric levels of the original. And there were parts of it that were incredibly frustrating to try and play through.
17. The Lego Ninjago Movie. This time around the game focused more on the combat than the puzzles. And since the repetitive combat is the thing I like least about the games, it kinda sunk this one for me. Still, the levels were well-designed and had enough to keep me playing.
18. LEGO Marvel's Avengers. This was a 100% adaptation of the movies, and kinda suffered because of it. Where the LEGO Marvel Super-Heroes games were a joy to play with their original stories and open worlds that could take you anywhere... this time around things felt a lot more limited.
19. The Lego Movie Videogame. Given how much I loved the movie, I was expecting this to be a home run. But it just... wasn't. It had problems. Though the way they mimicked the way the characters moved through the scenes was not one of them. That part was brilliant.
20. LEGO The Incredibles. This was a very good adaptation of the movies, but not a great game to play. It was so repetetive that it was a slog just to get through story mode, and some glitches had me screaming at my television. Not what I'm looking for in a game that's supposed to be easy and stress-reducing.
21. LEGO Universe. This was LEGO's attempt at a MMORPG (Massive Multi-Player Online Role Playing Game) which was actually well-thought out and designed, but technically frustrating and difficult to play (and sometimes actually unplayable). Probably because I was playing the MacOS X version, which was actually the Windows version with an emulator wrapper (or so I've heard). I was ultimately mad that I spent good money to access it from its earliest days in public beta because I didn't want to play it. LEGO shut down the game servers fairly quickly (I don't think it even made it two years). Kinda a ripoff, to be honest.
22. The Lego Movie 2 Videogame. All the problems from the first game were somehow magnified. This is the only game I didn't even play through the entire storyline, because I got so frustrated with it. I will undoubtedly try again... though probably won't be worrying about going back in Free Play to get it to 100%. Probably.

Strange. It seems like there's more than this. Probably because I excluded the Nintendo 3DS and iOS games, which were well-constructed but just not as good as the console games and were less fun to play.

A couple years ago I didn't so much delist Blogography from Google as I stopped keeping Google in the loop as to what I was writing here. The pandemic had gotten to be more than enough to deal with, and referral traffic from people with an axe to grind wasn't something I felt like dealing with. A side-benefit was that the number of ridiculous marketing emails I received plummeted.

Then, over Christmas break I decided to rebuild my indexing and get Google to crawling again.

Obivously it worked, because this morning I received an email promising to "drive traffic and increase reveue for your website Blogography.com!" And it's like... what revenue? I ain't selling anything here. It was then I got to wondering just who in the hell would be stupid enough to hire some random company that's just spamming you with absolutely no effort made to even so much as look at your site to see if it generates revenue (even when they claim to have looked by adding some random link they found "interesting" on your site).

And so... yeah, my useless crap is back on Google now. But at what cost?

Despite being a certified Apple whore, I have never hesitated to call out their "smart voice assistant" as being stupid as shit. And even that's being generous. I wrote sometime last year that I was seriously excited that Apple Intelligence was coming to smarten Siri up and make the technology finally be consistently useful.

Well, I think we all know how that turned out.

I've been in on Apple's take on AI since the developer's beta, and Siri is stupid as ever. Absolutely nothing has changed. Basic commands fail at an alarming rate. Trying to get Siri to understand anything is a challenge. I have gotten so frustrated at times that I've been screaming at an iPod mini in the bathroom while getting ready for work... or into my iPhone in my pocket from my AirPods... or at CarPlay while driving.

Just today I asked Siri via CarPlay to get me directions to the grocery store in Big City. I knew where it was, but wanted the fastest route from where I was at. I asked, very specifically, for the store I wanted. Siri still gave me two options... one in the next city over that was farther away... which is absolute madness. After having to tap the screen for the one I wanted because I didn't know how the fuck you vocally tell Siri which option to use when you've already given it the literal city and street, Apple Maps sent me in the opposite fucking direction. So I gave up and told Siri to "cancel navigation." After a seriously long pause, Siri said that it couldn't do that right now, then proceeded to keep giving me directions to the wrong store. And it's like... what, exactly, the fuck do you have to do to just get Siri to send you to the fucking store that you asked for in the first place?

I was so fucking enraged by the time I made two taps on the screen to cancel the wrong directions that I very nearly punched my finger through the damn screen. Siri is fucking useless and Apple "Intelligence" is a fucking joke.

The problem is magnified exponentially when you're attempting to get Siri to take control of shitty fucking Apple tech like HomeKit. My God. How basic of a command is "Hey Siri, turn off the kitchen lights?" that Siri doesn't know what in the hell to do? How big of a fucking failure is your technology if the most rudimentary commands can't be interpreted?

And it ain't just me. This story on Daring Fireball is pathetically hilarious: Siri Is Super Dumb and Getting Dumber.

Yep. That pretty much sums it up.

I've been a vegetarian since Earth Day 1988. Back when I first went out to eat meat-free, I had to do a lot of finagling to construct meals I could enjoy. And it was fine. Being vegetarian was my choice, and restaurants are in no way obligated to deal with that (though I usually prioritizing patronizing those restaurants that did).

Over the years restaurants have expanded their meatless options substantially. And I've been grateful. Now-a-days when I go to a restaurant, there's usually at least one dish that was designed to be vegetarian from the ground up. And it's usually delicious.

The problem has always always been that most times restaurants have a vegetarian option they are compelled to go way extra on it. You can't just get a veggie hamburger, it comes covered in mushrooms and piled high with roasted vegetables and shit I have no desire to eat on a burger. And I've never quite understood it. Just make the same burger you make for meat-eaters and substitute the veggie patty. Simple. Veggie patty, lettuce, tomato, onion, pickles... cheese and sauce if you want it.

The exception has been fast-food chains.

Many times, they just get it.

At Burger King you can get an Impossible Whopper made just like a whopper, but with an Impossible meatless patty. It's amazing.

At Taco Bell you can get a Black Bean Chalupa made just like a Chalupa Supreme, but with black beans. They're great.

McDonalds had test-marketed a McVeggie burger in New York when I was there and it's long been my favorite vegetarian burger because it was just a delicious burger. That happened to be meat-free. I wish they had rolled it out nation-wide permanently.

Sometimes chains create something amazing only to drop it inexplicably.

One of the best sandwiches I've ever eaten was the "Veggie" at Earl of Sandwich. Perfect. Delicious. Perfectly delicious. Then they dropped it and gave us a Caprese sandwich as the vegetarian option. Still had all the ingredients to make a Veggie, but it wasn't on the menu. Infuriating. If I were to guess, they wanted a more expensive sandiwch so that vegetarians were paying the same amount that meat-eaters were paying. But if this was the case, just price all the sandwiches the same. I wouldn't care! I'd gladly pay the dollar extra to get what I wanted. Some locations brought the Veggie back, for which I am incredibly grateful because it's still the best sandwich going... but why not all? Disney Springs in Florida has the Veggie. Downtown Disney in California does not. What the fuck? Now, just like at Arby's, you have to pay for a meat sandwich, have them remove the meat, then pay extra to get the sandwich you want. Vegetarians have to pay more for less. But, hey... at least you can do that.

I haven't had to think much about eating out meat-free since the pandemic because I haven't done a lot of traveling. Locally I just stick to places I know and don't have to think about what to order. But this year I have a couple trips planned and know that decisions will have to be made. A part of me is excited at the idea of finding new and interesting dishes to try. The other part of me is hoping they've added a Burger King since I was last there.

Sometimes easy and tasty go hand in hand.