Happy Pride Month to LGBTQ+ persons across the country and everywhere! I see you. I appreciate you. I want you to be happy, safe, and authentically you, always. You contribute to society in meaningful, fabulous ways, and I'm proud to stand with you as you celebrate your culture and history.

And, don't worry haters, I see you too! Every year there's a segment of society living in ignorance which feels the need to shit all over Pride by saying things like "WHAT ABOUT THE MILITARY? WHY DO GAYS GET A MONTH BUT OUR MILITARY GETS NOTHING? I'M UNREASONABLY MAD ABOUT THAT, AND BEING MAD SHOWS EVERYBODY I'M A REAL AMERICAN PATRIOT!!"

So here we go...

1. May was National Military Appreciation Month.
2. November is Veterans and Military Families Month.
3. Which is to say that Pride Month isn't taking away anything from our troops being recognized.
4. If you really want to recognize our troops in June, nobody is stopping you. I used to collect foods and snacks so I could send care packages to soldiers every month. The site I used for this was AnySoldier.com, which shut down last year. So now I donate to the USO Care Package Program and Operation Gratitude.
5. Which is to say that if you need a "recognition month" in order to recognize our troops, that's on you. You can do something to support and recognize troops every month if you want. So attacking an important time for LGBTQ+ persons "for the troops" is just performative nonsense.

And for religious haters who find joy in condemning Pride Month as celebrating sin... go right ahead. This is America, after all. But you should know that your highly selective reading of the Bible and your non-contextual interpretation of those passages which you weaponize against LGBTQ+ persons is an incredibly sad way to live as a "Christian," and you really need to read deeper into your Bible for the ultimate message Jesus was trying to teach us. I'm not a Christian, but have been in a Bible study group for the past 22 years. Studying historical context, language translation context, and the different interpretations of Scripture has been an eye-opening experience I highly recommend.

But anyway...

Happy Pride to all who celebrate!

Good news, everyone! I have water again! Sunday the pressure was so low as to be non-existent, but I put a pot under the spout and turned the water on all day. Then around dinner time I had just enough water collected to boil pasta so I could have be some butternut squash ravioli in browned butter with crispy-fried sage. Something I've been wanting since I bought everything for it the previous Sunday.

It was pretty delicious...

Today I had to get my car serviced. Before I could even sit down, I had a text providing me a link to tracking the progress on my car. That's nice, I thought.

It sat in the shop for FORTY-FIVE MINUTES before they got around to it. My appointment was at 2:15. They finally started at 3:00...

Then they managed to get the inspection and oil change done in fifteen minutes, which means their time estimate of "about an hour" was correct in the end. But... dang...

The wait was made worse by a guy in the waiting room watching videos on his phone... WITHOUT USING HEADPHONES... which made the entire wait a horrific experience. Why are assholes so rude like this in public? Because they're assholes, I guess.

After that blight on my day, I went grocery shopping, picked up kitty litter at Petco, and grabbed an ice cream cone at the drive-through before heading home.

Where I had water again, thank heavens. Pasta for everyone!

Nothing surprises me any more. Government can't afford to provide food to hungry kids... but government can afford millions of dollars to gold-plate some statues of horses. Government can't afford Social Security benefits that seniors have earned from a life of work... but government can afford to start a war to distract from its head being in the Epstein Files over 38,000 times. It goes on and on.

This kind of bullshit from the highest levels of government makes everything else seem trite.

But that's not to say there aren't surprising things out there that are giving the government a run for their money.

Because this is the craziest shit I've seen in a minute...

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE... SHIT GETS CRAZIER!

And, I gotta say, the lies coming out of the corporate offices for "Bricks & Minifigs" isn't garnering any sympathy from people. Though I do feel bad for is the franchise owners who are being lied to by corporate and suffering the brunt of the fucked-up bullshit that corporate has enabled...

The original owners of the store are revealing shit about the corporate offices of "Bricks & Minifigs" that's making things far, far worse for this asshole company. There is no doubt what-so-ever that "Bricks & MiniFigs" is a fucking nightmare, and patronizing these poor franchise locations who are blameless feels like a terrible solution, but since they have to send money to corporate, it's pretty much the only solution until corporate is made to pay for what they've done. What absolute fucking monsters.

From top to bottom, this company has done a horrible job of dealing with this situation. The CEO outright lying on tape certainly didn't help.

Whatever happened to right and wrong? It's all shades of grey now, and society is shittier because of it.

Today I took a couple photos with my iPhone, as I do almost every day. It all went well, the photos were nice, and I went on with my life. Then, about an hour later, I picked up my iPhone and it was hot to the touch. That's when I noticed the camera was still running. I exited out of it, assuming it was hot because I accidentally left the camera going. But when I picked up the phone to go home for the day, it was still hot to the touch. So I rebooted it thinking that something was stuck running and off I went.

The reboot did nothing. Furthermore, I saw that my battery level was almost zero. So I ran upstairs and put it on my wireless charger. But when I finally went to bed, I saw that it would charge enough to turn on, run out of charge immediately, then turn off and repeat the cycle over and over and over.

Multiple resets did nothing, probably because it ran out of charge before it could register the reset. So I finally hooked it up (wired) to the most powerful charger I own. This got it charged quickly enough that I was able to shut it down completely before it ran out of power. And when I woke up, it was back to normal.

At which point I realized that I left a malfunctioning phone plugged in all night.

I'm lucky it didn't explode.

In other news, I think I'm too susceptible to social media marketing.

There's a content creator who operates under What the F Show who has been making some Nerf War skits that have been making me regret giving away my Nerf gun...

And so I spent a whole $7 to order a new one. Just to have on-hand, because sometimes I like shooting random visitors to my house with a Nerf dart.

Plus I'll feel safer at night knowing that I'm armed.

Given how the price of everything has skyrocketed, you can't fault restaurants for having to raise their prices.

Except... it really, really seems disproportionate to the rate of inflation in this heinous Trump economy. Because while they've raised their prices, they've also slashed the amount of food you get WHILE slashing the quality of what they're serving! And when people complain? Restaurants blame the consumer!

As if that wasn't bad enough... now we've got restaurants and servers saying that if you can't tip 25%, don't go out to eat? That's a bold statement given that half the time you eat out the service is ass. I ain't tipping 25% for shitty service. It's not an entitlement, it's a tip. I never know if it's a bad day for a server, so I rarely tip under 15% even when service is subpar... but 20%-30% gets reserved for exemplary service.

And since most all of the ingredients are just cheap Sysco crap that's not as good as what you can get at your grocery store, how is eating out even an option now-a-days? $16 for a grilled American cheese sandwich and fries made from frozen potatoes? Seriously? For that kind of money, I could buy an entire loaf of bread, better cheese, and a bag of frozen fries to make a better meal.

The only time I eat out any more is if it's social... I'm meeting up with friends and we need a place to gather. Or I'm traveling and don't have any choice.

Though it's beginning to feel like "not having any choice" is just making expensive excuses. A half-gallon of ice cream and a bag of potato chips from a nearby grocery store is probably half the cost and is a more tasty meal.

Odd weather lately here in Redneckistan.

This afternoon rain started pouring down and I heard Jake hop off the bed upstairs and run down the stairs crying all the way. After he jumped on my lap, I distracted him with a Cheez-It. Usually he loves them, but he was so nervous he just made it wet.

Jenny never made an appearance. My guess is that she ran and hid in the closet.

Though she did come out for belly rubs when I went up to check in on her. Though she did end up falling asleep, trapping me there...

Soon enough she got hungry enough to head back down for her lunch that dispensed from the auto-feeder while she was hiding out.

   
• Don't Fuck with the Babysitter! I had no idea that Disney re-made Adventures in Babysitting! I was scrolling though the Disney+ app and there it was... ten years ago...

I cannot fathom it being even remotely as good as the original. And, to be honest, I have no desire to find out. The first go-around was lightning in a bottle.

   
• IT'S MY BIRTHDAY! I had to Google "Glitter Dumpling Reveal" because I had no fucking clue what that meant. Now I wish I still didn't know. Lord.

I mean, this kind of thing has been around forever. For me it was Baseball Cards and Magic The Gathering Cards. It's the reactions which feel as though they've changed. Kids see performative "reveals" on social media and feel the need to act the same way. Like their life depends on them getting the "right" toy or card or whatever.

   
• Happy Gay Month! This is pretty great...

I'm not a coffee drinker, so I don't know what "gay iced coffee" is, but this still seems a nice thing to do.

   
• Umbrella! Am I the only one who cannot hear Rihanna's Umbrella without thinking of one of the most amazing lip-sync performances of all time?

Not hard to see why Zendaya fell in love with him after that! She got beat in a lip-sync battle because he went all-in. If he's even half as dedicated to a relationship, he's gold.

   
• Authentication Method! This is darn clever, and it surprises me that I never heard of it before...

I love interesting stuff like this.

   
• Dick! A video looking back at the Warren Beatty Dick Tracy movie hit my YouTube feed, and I was bored enough that I watched it. I actually went to the movie on opening night back in 1990 (and got a free premiere T-shirt that had a big movie ticket for the film printed on it). I remembered nothing about the story. All I remember about it is that it starred Charlie Korsmo, Glenne Headly, Al Pacino, and Madonna... and that it was one of the most visually striking films I'd ever seen...

After the video, I grabbed my copy of the DVD and re-watched the movie. Which was kinda funny, because I bought it from a bargain bin ages ago for $5 and it was still in the wrapper because I never watched it. And now I remember why I remembered nothing about the story and why I never watched the DVD... it's kinda boring. Fantastic cinematography, phenomenal makeup, but the story was weak. And Warren Beatty was too old at 55 for the part. Because they didn't have advanced CGI back then, the movie was hugely expensive to produce. They could probably make it cheaper now (adjusted for inflation) but I don't know that it would carry the weight of having shot everything without computer graphics. Probably not.

   
• Super! I tell you what... I will probably end up going to the theater for the first time in years because Supergirl just looks too good to not to. The final trailer and clips look fantastic...

It doesn't hurt that the screenplay is based on one of my favorite comic book stories.

   
See you at the WWDC live-stream tomorrow! Unless, unlike myself, you have a life.

I had a post I started writing last night which I was intending to post today.

That will just have to wait.

Because I awoke to the most glorious news... there is a new trailer for Minecraft Dungeons II and a release date of September 29th...

I have never made a pre-order so fast.

Especially since, unlike the new LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight game, which is coming out months behind other platforms... it's coming out day-and-date with the rest!

The first Minecraft Dungeons is easily the game I've played the most in my life. I can't get enough of it. I'm still playing it. So getting a sequel is like a dream come true.

What a way to start my week!

Today was Apple's World Wide Developer's Conference!

Big news of the day? Siri is profoundly smarter now! Sure it's not like that was a high bar to clear. Siri has been stupid as shit for years.

But anyway... let's get into it all, shall we?

• GOLDEN GATE! Craig is hilarious, as always. The naming announcement of MacOS 27 was almost too on the nose. That's how people think Apple operates in their big spaceship HQ, so why not lean into it?

• REFINEMENT! Focusing on fixing all the crap that users have been begging for seems like a good focus to have. And starting with addressing the horrendous readability problems with "Liquid Glass" is something I never thought Apple would even admit (remember the butterfly keyboard fiasco?). Fine tuning performance is also essential, and speeding up Photos will be a welcome change that's been a long time coming. Fixing searches is nice, but it looks like they aren't going far enough in Mail. I switch over to Microsoft Outlook whenever I have to find stuff because Mail is so flippin' bad.

EQ? I had to rewind, because they blazed past being able to customize the equalizer on AirPods. Holy crap has this been a long time coming!

STREET VIEW! Dang dang dang does the new refinements to Apple Maps 3D views look stunning. I know it will take a while to roll out to everywhere (and some locations like my backwater will be skipped as usual) but this is very cool.

PRIVACY! Apple has always seemed to be more concerned with personal privacy than other companies... and I'm happy that they are going full-throttle on keeping kids safe... but boy did they spend a lot of time on the topic. I get having this as a supplement to the keynote, but to go this hard on it within the keynote just made it feel that Apple didn't have enough material to present, so they dragged this out.

• BAIL OUT! At least they're not hiding that Google bailed out their asses. Apple couldn't manage to get AI working on their own, two years after telling us "Apple Intelligence" was here, so they had to form a "deep collaboration" with Google to use their Gemini AI instead. Unreal. And, as much as I love Craig, his presenting Apple's catastrophic failure as a positive thing was pathetic. I would have had far more respect if he had said "We announced too soon, we lied about where we were at, we fucked up, we apologize, and here's how we're fixing things." But that's not what we got, and I think it was a misstep.

• CONTEXT! The above point having been said, I do appreciate that Apple is putting rails on their AI "solution." The fact that there's an abstraction layer which disassociates users from the AI servers seems a responsible way to keep privacy as a priority.

• FUNKY ORB! I am very, very disappointed with the new representation of Siri in MacOS. I wanted them to use Lil' Finder Guy... but instead we get an orb? I do like that it's being integrated into the island.

• SIRI AI & DEEP INTEGRATION! So far, I have not been impressed with how AI has been "helping" me out on a day to day basis. It's been so bad that I've turned it off or am regularly ignoring it. Watching the demonstration of the new Siri AI makes it seem that Apple it finally... finally upgrading dipshit Siri to something useable. Something that other platforms (namely, Android) has been doing for years now. Better late than never, I guess?

&bulls; VOICE! I'm telling you right now... if Apple removes the Australian guy who's been my default voice for Siri, I will be upset. Hopefully they hired the same guy to create this new "more expressive" voice.

• A LITTLE LESS CONVERSATION! The guy presenting Siri conversational chat was way, way too excited about something you have been able to do with ChatGPT for years. I mean, sure, it's nice that Apple has integrated all of it into their OS offerings, and it seems that it's a take on AI that's actually useful for once... but let's stop pretending that this is brilliant new technology. It's kinda embarrassing. And I maintain that before any of these people demonstrate some "amazing new feature" they should have apologized that they forced people to buy new iPhones TWO YEARS AGO to get the crap that they're delivering only just now. I wouldn't have bought the iPhone 16 Pro Max had I known dumbass Siri wasn't going to be fixed until iPhone 18 Pro Max was nigh. Apple owes me an apology... and money.

• APP INTEGRATION! Apple Intelligence being dumped into apps seems like something that sounds great but, in reality, is something I don't want and don't use. For example, having Safari monitor a web page for changes might be useful, but it remains to be seen whether it can recognize what I'm wanting... or just blow out an alert for hundreds of changes that have nothing to do with what I'm wanting it to watch. Another example? The Passwords app being able to go update all my bad passwords with more secure passwords is great. But I have had numerous problems with Passwords not recording new passwords, so this could quickly turn into a nightmare. I hope there's a way to select the sites so I can test this.

• HOMESHIT! HomeKit is a fucking disaster. Here's hoping that, at minimum, Apple Intelligence can fucking backup all my fucking automations so they can be restored when Apple fucking deletes them for no reason. And forgive me for being doubtful that my existing Nest cameras will be "supported" so Apple Intelligence can keep watch on stuff for me. Nope. Apple will likely only be compatible with brand new cameras with no help for older models. So they are announcing something that likely won't be able to be used by the majority of people who would actually like to use it. Not cool.

• SHORTY! Using Apple Intelligence assistance to create shortcuts is nice... but I can't help but wonder how reliable the shortcuts will be. If Home is deleting shit all the time, I don't know that I feel the shortcuts won't do the same. Still, this is a use of AI that seems an actual benefit. Hopefully.

• IMAGE SLOPGROUND! Oh great. Apple is helping people create their own AI slop easier than ever! Fuck them for this Image Playground bullshit that steals from real artists.

• DISRESPECT! Here we go. Apple "respects photography" SO MUCH that the AI tools they're giving you are going to honor the original photo. Sure. Surrrrrre. I mean, the new "reframing" tool looks crazy-cool, but is it really "respecting" anything about the original photo if it's changing everything about it? I'm not going to lie, if these tools are any good I will undoubtedly use them because they are getting more and more capable... but I have so many questions about whether these tools were built ethically by compensating the photographers whose work was used to "generate" stuff... or if it was scraped without permission?

• GET PAID! Well, the AI photo crap isn't free... it costs real money by way of "credits" that come with iCloud Plus subscriptions. Wonder how much of that money goes to all the photographers and artists who got ripped off to train these tools? What's that? ZERO DOLLARS?!? Wish I could even pretend to be surprised.

• MODELS! Oh shocker. The most "advanced" features of all this AI crap won't be available on my two-year-old iPhone 16 Pro MAX, even though I bought it specifically because Apple told me that it would be able to take advantage of the cool "any day now" features they were releasing. This is profoundly shitty, and fuck Apple for being such assholes about it. Everybody who bought the iPhone 16 Pro Max should get a huge sweetheart deal on a new model. But will that happen? No. Trillions of dollars in valuation doesn't come from taking care of your customers and keeping promises.

• IN SUMMARY: "Enhanced with Apple Intelligence, not replaced by it." Sure, Jan. Sure.

Since I'm a member of the Apple Developer Program thanks to interface design projects I was involved with years ago, I went ahead and installed the developer beta of iOS 27 on my iPhone (but not on any of my Macs, because I value my sanity).

The first thing I did... the very first thing... was to run to the settings and change the "Liquid Glass" interface to maximum opaqueness. Still not as good as a solid color, but the frosted appearance is a heck of a lot easier to read than what we previously had. I remain utterly dumbfounded that Apple, a pioneer in computer graphical interfaces, shipped something this fucking bad. Maybe it's because I have old, fucked-up eyes, but "Liquid Glass" is an abhorrent step backwards that is now tolerable. Kinda.

The next thing I did was say "Hey Siri... when is my next flight?" because I was psyched at the thought of Siri not being a brain-dead pile of shit for once. BUT NOPE!

Turns out that "New Siri" isn't on by default. I had to turn it on. At which point it said that I've been added to the waitlist. Which is to say that Siri will continue to be dumb as a box of fucking rocks for the foreseeable future...

That this extremely basic question requires "New Siri" in order to be answered is beyond the pale. Android has been able to do this mundane shit for years! But it gets worse. On my way home from work today, I asked Siri when the last day of school is. Siri blanked out. Realizing that Siri doesn't know where my fucking location is despite it being set up to know that, I re-asked the question but included my city and state. "I can search the internet when you're done driving" (or whatever). Infuriated, I asked why they have to wait for me to stop driving to search the internet. "I can search the internet for that when you're not in the car." I mean, holy fucking shit is Siri a complete waste of time! Apple has BILLIONS of dollars. They couldn't have spent a small fraction of that to make a capable voice assistant? I guess not. Which is why they're licensing technology from Google, of all places.

Something that threw me into shock was a massive decrease in battery life. I usually end the day with around 70% battery left. Less if I ended up playing games or taking a bunch of photos. But suffice to say that anything less than 50% is exceedingly rare for me. But after installing iOS 27? I am lucky to end my day with 10%. Now, this is a developer beta, so you would expect that there's extra stuff running to track bugs and monitor ho things are working. But this much battery life? Doubtful. If I had to guess, it's the indexing which is taking up most of the battery power...

If that's the case, Apple could do themselves a big favor and add that message to the indexing message.

One of the more intriguing new features (and one of the few things AI seems made for doing well) is to help you create shortcuts. I had no idea how smart the system would be, and just asked for a shortcut idea off the top of my head...

I was not expecting much. So you can imagine my total shock when I actually got exactly what I asked for...

Now, see, this right here is where I want my AI. This is fantastic! I will have to play with it further to see what it's limits are, but this is a game changer.

One of the new features I was interested in is the ability to see better 3D representations in Apple Maps. I love playing armchair traveler to places I have never been (and places I've been, for that matter) so the idea of it all was intriguing. Not that I expected my small city to get a fancier 3D representation... but I was expecting Seattle to have far better 3D. But nope. Everything is just as wonky as it has been. I guess it's going to take time to reach anything outside of San Francisco and New York...

When it comes to HomeKit HomeShit, my expectations are always in the basement. This is hands-down Apple's biggest reoccurring failure. It hasn't worked properly since Day One, and they've made zero attempts at improving it. I am having the same problems now that I've always had. And one of the biggest problems is my Automations disappearing at random. No reason for it... they just vanish. For example, I have a sensor on my garage door which turns the light on when triggered. The Automation for this disappeared a week ago. I also have an Automation which turns some lights on at night. This Automation didn't disappear a week ago, but a part of it did. My neon light all of a sudden stopped turning on, but all the other lights were operating normally. It's frustrating, because going back and fixing all this shit is time-consuming.

Well guess what? The night after installing iOS 27 Developer Beta, my neon started turning on with the other lights again! The garage is still fucked, but one thing that was broken seems to have healed itself. Heaven knows for how long, but it is offering a little bit of encouragement. As I suspected, my older Nest cameras are not compatible with any of the new camera improvements in HomeKit. Typical.

One thing which hasn't been touched is that the Mail unread message count badge is still fucked. If messages get deleted without being read on a different device, the iPhone displays the deleted messages as unread messages with the app icon badge. I honestly have no fucking clue why this can't be fixed. It's fucking embarrassing that this is still a problem in the Year of Our Lord 2026.

And now we come to Photos...

Even though we're talking about a mobile phone, 75% of what I do on my iPhone is take photos. Camera improvements are the only reason I buy new models of iPhone, because I don't care about anything else. The reason I didn't upgrade to the 17 Pro Max is because the camera was almost the same.

This time Apple added a bunch of AI tools to Photos and the result is a mixed bag. Let's walk through some of the things I tried.

The "extend" tool is remarkable. Better than the AI tools in Adobe Photoshop. What I think is going on is that the Google Gemini engine searches the internet to identify what's in your photo, then generates an extension around your image based on what it figures out. Take for example this photo I took in Italy...

I zoom out to extend it...

And vióla! A stunning job of adding the missing information around your photo...

I pulled back on this photo of me, which I selected because of the pattern on my shirt. I thought that might prove to be a challenge, but it did a remarkable job getting that sorted...

   
The new reframe tool works, to a very limited degree of "turning" but the results are a bit odd. There's some uncanny valley going on. This photo of my mom eating in Rome looks okay, but it screws up the angle in a way that feels bizarre. Especially in the eyes. The rotation wasn't very much, but she appears to be looking in an entirely different direction?

   
The next photo I tried got flagged as some kind of safety violation because it had a bare ass in it. Or so I'm guessing...

I have a lot more playing around to do with the Photos app before I can fully understand how it's going to benefit me. And I remain conflicted over the fact that Google's AI models were created based on untold numbers of photographers who weren't compensated for their work. Yes, these are my photos being changed, but the abilities being offered were partly stolen.

I understand that Apple's Image Playground app has been updated, but since there's absolutely no question that it's based on theft of photographers and artists, I won't be messing with it.

There's probably some other improvements that I'm missing, but these are the ones I was wanting to explore. The only thing left that I truly care about is New Siri, because I'm dying to see if Apple finally... FINALLY... has a voice assistant that isn't totally fucking stupid. I'll look at that when (and if) it's ever loaded on my iPhone.

A boy can dream, can't he?

I have yet to run across a word that offends me. Words are, after all, just words. Sure there's ways of stringing words together which can be offensive, but overall I cannot be bothered.

And because of the way I don't process words as "bad," I have a tough time understanding the pearl-clutching that can ensue when somebody hears a word they don't like. I mean, certainly you don't want to say bad words in front of young children who don't have the mental capacity to mimic such words in inappropriate places, but adults can choose to ignore things quite easily.

Today I ran across this clip from the movie Office Romance on Netflix which reminded me of a situation several years ago...

I was in Chicago meeting with some work colleagues at a bar down the street. A friend from the UK was in town, so I invited him along. At some point in the evening, my friend and I were telling stories about each other to my co-workers, when he started his next story with "Let me tell you about this cunt right here!" My co-workers laughed, but two women at the table next to ours did not. They were both upset, but one of the women was completely enraged. My friend apologized and said he forgot that word was viewed differently here, but that did nothing to appease the angry women who took their drinks and walked to another table across the bar.

"What a cunt!" my friend said, as everybody bust out laughing.

A part of me was wondering if we would get asked to leave because the women complained. But, if they did complain, it fell on deaf ears because we were there for another couple hours.

The next day at work I found out from one of my coworkers that the angriest woman did complain about us. But the bartender, who was a woman, just said "Okay" and that was the end of it.

I mentioned it to my British friend a couple nights later before I headed home.

His thoughts on the bartender? "Now THAT'S a cunt!"

When I was in Miami Beach a few weeks ago, I couldn't help but think back to the time I took my mom for a visit. I wanted to stay in a nice place, so I booked a room in the legendary Fontainebleau hotel. When we arrived, I was met by a woman who took me to a desk for check-in. The first words out of her mouth after welcoming us were "And what are you wanting from your Fontainebleau experience this visit?" This puzzled me, so I answered with "Um... a place to sleep while I'm showing my mom around one of my favorite cities?" Which got me an instant look of disdain. She put us in a room that was under a patio room so we could listen to chairs scraping above us all morning. It was a shitty experience, and there was nothing "five star" about my stay. I would have had a far better time staying at a number of hotels which were half the price.

Back when I was traveling to Vegas a few times a year when I was volunteering with a charity, I saw that a new Fontainebleau property was being built in the city. Every time I visited, it looked further along until it just kinda... stopped.

I never knew what happened. I just assumed that financing was paused or whatever. On my last trip to Sin City before the pandemic hit, the property was no closer to opening and my guess was it had been abandoned. The actual story was a little more complicated than that, which I found out when this video popped up in my feed...

The place finally opened at the tail-end of 2023.

But has apparently had a tough go of it. Las Vegas has lapsed into a massive disappointment where prices have skyrocketed as the experience has cratered. Especially when it comes to food and drink because in addition to being incredibly expensive, meals are small portions with poor quality even at celebrated restaurants. Drinks are watered-down. Add on those fucking "resort fees" which mandatorily charge you for bullshit that should be included with the room price, and I'm very glad I don't have to go there 2 or 3 times a year. Because even though I wasn't paying for my visits, I would still be mad to see charity money being wasted like this. Assuming that the charity would still be going to Vegas given how the city has calmed down considerably, and most of the reasons I was working there have evaporated.

Odds are that eventually I would have been put up at the Fontainebleau Las Vegas.

Which has me wondering if they're still asking people "And what are you wanting from your Fontainebleau experience this visit?" Because I know exactly how I'd answer this time... "I am wanting a clean, comfortable, QUIET room where it might be possible to sleep in after a very long night." Which you'd think would be a given in Las Vegas, but likely not at the Fontainebleau hotel, where you can assume nothing.

As I mentioned a few posts back, I ended up ordering a new Nerf gun. My intent was to shoot darts for the cats to chase. I thought it would be something fun for them.

So I take it out of the package, and shoot a dart from my kitchen... expecting that it will end up in the dining room, which is not so far away. Instead the dart flies the entire length of my home and smacks into the rear window. I was more than a little shocked. Isn't this a kid's toy? How many people have lost an eye because they didn't gauge the amount of force those darts get shot.

But anyway... I never picked up the two darts I fired (it had to be two because I wanted to verify that the first dart wasn't a fluke). And Jake noticed...

So maybe the Nerf gun will end up entertaining the cats anyway.

But carefully.

   
• News of the Week! I did not see this coming!

I'm not going pretend that the original Romy & Michele's High School Reunion was genius fare... but it was entertaining and did have many quotable moments that have infiltrated meme culture. With this being my favorite...

I have said that line in many an inappropriate situation, and, to people who recognize it, that's solid gold, baby!

   
• Reading is Fundamental! Gawd DAMN that read is cold...

But she deserves it, because that's an incredibly shitty take to have. What a piece of shit... wanting people to be bullied.

   
• Taste the Rainbow! I stopped by the local bagel shop that I never knew existed until until yesterday. I asked for a toasted plain bagel with cream cheese. The young woman behind the counter said "Our plain bagels are rainbow this month, is that okay?" — What I wanted to say: "OKAY?? WHY, M'LADY, I AM THRILLED TO FIND A BUSINESS HERE IN REDNECKISTAN BEING INCLUSIVE BY CELEBRATING OUR FELLOW HUMANS IN THE LGBTQ+ COMMUNITY FOR PRIDE MONTH! BRAVO TO YOU! GIVE ME ONE HUNDRED OF YOUR FINEST RAINBOW BAGELS SO I MIGHT DISTRIBUTE THEM ACROSS THE LAND OF OUR FAIR CITY! THIS IS MORE THAN MERELY 'OKAY'... THIS IS PHENOMENAL! GOOD ON YOU!" — What I actually said: "That would be perfect, thanks."

Icing on the cake? This is a darn good bagel... especially for here, which is nowhere near New York City.

   
• Vegas, Baby! Yeah. No. I'm done with Vegas. Especially since I don't have work there anymore. Couldn't care less if I ever go back because of bullshit that's detailed here...

"Resort fees" were the beginning of the end for me. Deceptive practices with no purpose except to deceive. Everything else is just garbage on top of garbage.

   
• 1%! Dang. We really fucked up, didn't we? As a society, I mean...

But now we've got trillionaires and shit.

   
• Woke Sky? Is there anything more cringe than somebody attempting to unleash a beat-down, but fumbles it so badly that they only end up beating themselves?

It's so painfully obvious that he really, really thought he was doing something with that tweet. It's word salad that incorporates buzzwords he knows his base hates... regardless of whether it makes a lick of sense. WOKE! NON-BINARY! Ha ha! GOTHCA! Jesus. How fucking embarrassing.

   
• I Lie Because I Don't Care! Fuck this asshole. I understand that when you have nothing to support your bigotry, your lies are all you got, but forgive me if I don't give a crap. Your bullshit fantasies endangers people. It whips up hate against people who have done NOTHING to you. Not that you care. You don't care who your lies hurt... as long as it's people you don't like...

It would be different if her audience would take two seconds to verify that what she's saying is true... but we all know they won't. She feeds the narrative they want to believe, and it doesn't matter if it's true or not.

   
And that's a wrap on bullets. Until next week, then!

   
I am so tired, y'all.

It's the inhumanity for me.

Every fucking day it's the same thing. People advocating harm towards people who are just trying to live their lives in peace and find a corner of happiness to cling to in this sick, sad, violent world.

And I'm not just talking on a global scale (though that's obviously a huge problem), but with everyday life. The small inhumanities which pile up to make life feel unbearably cruel.

A man on a road trip with his two little girls stops to let them use the bathroom. Obviously he doesn't want to take TWO LITTLE GIRLS INTO THE MEN'S RESTROOM, so he made sure nobody was in the ladies' restroom and helped his daughters there.

Enter a fucking asshole with his inhumanity.

Instead of trying to offer up even a fucking OUNCE of compassion for a father trying to take care of his kids and wait TWO FUCKING MINUTES for these girls to wash their hands... he calls the cops...

And then the asshole woman with this asshole decides to chime in. Which I do not understand at all. You would think that a woman would be understanding that this guy was trying to keep his daughters safe by not taking them into the men's restroom and applaud him for being such a great dad... but NOOOOOOOO! Instead she stands by while this asshole terrorizes these two kids.

Not everywhere has a "Family Restroom" available. And in those cases, parents just have to do the best they can.

And it's the job of the rest of us to lend a hand.

How fucking difficult would it have been for this asshole woman to say "No problem, we can wait a minute" and be a fucking human being?

Apparently insurmountably difficult.

And I don't even fucking know how to react. The obvious answer is to be a little angry and a lot sad. But I choose to cling to the fact that the manager of the QuikTrip, Melissa, was a fucking legend for getting in-between the asshole and these frightened kids, trying to help as best she can...

Give her a fucking parade.

And then, erect a statue of this Father of the Year somewhere, who somehow managed to remain calm, cool, and collected during a very difficult situation because he didn't want to upset his kids more than they already were as some asshole was yelling at them...

Yelling at little girls in the restroom. This is where we're at.

Happy Father's Day on Sunday to this man. He deserves it.

I honestly wasn't going to write more than two posts about Pride Month. It was going to be one post at the beginning, wishing all my friends in the LGBTQ+ community a Happy Pride... then another at the end, summarizing the genre movies I watched for the month. That's it.

But holy crap are people up their asses this year.

So much faux persecution, hate, and bullshit.

And though this excellent piece by Dan McClellan is about baseball, you can apply it to many, many, other scenarios...

And then there's this nonsense...

Serious question... do these assholes even READ the Bible?

Because the meaning of the rainbow for Christians is right there in the Book of Genesis: "I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will remember my covenant..." — Genesis 9:13-15

Rainbows are widely interpreted to be a sign from God that his judgement over the earth has passed and he won't destroy the world with a flood again. Kinda the opposite of a "weapon."

And, oh yeah... THE PRIDE FLAG IS NOT A LITERAL FUCKING RAINBOW!!!

It was intentionally made as its own symbol, with each color representing LGBTQ+ values. Six colors instead of seven. And originally it had 9 or something. The LGBTQ+ community is not "stealing God's rainbow" which is categorically absurd. When Hawaii put a rainbow on their license plates, did they steal it from God? Give me a fucking break.

I swear these assholes spend more time thinking about gay stuff than any gay person I know.

Which is not surprising given the rate that most of them turn out to be closeted homosexuals, and this is just an attempt to divert attention away from them.

Misdirection always works!

Until it doesn't.

Decades ago, I was a kinda-sometimes programmer. Mostly for personal use in a programming languages called Pascal (followed by Modula-2, C++, Objective-C, Perl, Java, and Rust).

Along the way I picked up a few tools which made programming easier. Editors, outliners, re-compilers, and the rest. One thing that I didn't pick up was learning RegEx (or "regex" if you're boring).

Shorthand for Regular Expressions, this is a tool which allows you to search for text in interesting and helpful ways... then act on what you find. And I don't know why I never looked at it. I had certainly heard of it, but ignored it for forever.

Until I couldn't.

This week I have been working on a difficult work project when I finally ran into a wall. I needed to alter hundreds of occurrences of text which was ever-changing. I had no idea how to do it. I assumed there would be a tool that allowed wildcard functions. And there are some. But none of them could do what I needed to do, and I resigned myself to manually changing everything.

And all of a sudden I remembered RegEx.

The reason I couldn't find a tool which did what I needed was because it had already been invented in the 1950's.

Twenty minutes later, and I had learned what I needed to learn and had completed a task which would have taken hours.

My biggest regret in life is that I didn't learn how to learn RegEx earlier than I did.

What do you do when you have hundreds upon hundreds of tiny Instax instant photos? For the longest time, I didn't know. I just collected them in a box.

Initially I wanted to have a wall covered in them. The idea was that I could create slats where the photos could be trapped by temporarily flexing them a bit. Then I could easily pull them out and change them whenever I wanted. But I never found a good way to create the slats. So I moved on to clips. When that didn't work, I moved on to gravity holders. When that didn't work, I gave up.

Then I thought I would buy photo albums.

I bought a few samples, but didn't like any of them because they were all either too expensive to be feasible... too cheap to look good... or too badly constructed to last.

Then one day I found these little books that looked like they would be a fun option to display all my photos. I liked the idea that it was a quick flip-through and I could pile them in a tray on my coffee table...

They aren't perfect though. Because the Instax photos are much thicker than a piece of paper, the books bulge out quite a bit...

So not perfect.

But the best option I've found. For now.

Maybe one of these days I'll come across a better one.

Jenny alternates between acting like a cranky old cat and a little princess kitten, and there's not much in-between.

But in both cases, she's complaining a lot and being demanding. Which is apparently her default. If she wants something, she complains until she gets what she wants. If she's upset at a situation, she complains until it's changed. If she is angry at something, she complains until it's been removed.

Take Thursday night. I was working in bed. Jenny complained until I pet her. Then I wasn't petting her like she wanted so she complained until I figured out what she wanted. Then I needed both hands to type and she grabbed my hand... and complained...

And if I start pulling away anyway, she digs in her claws.

I blame myself.

I've never told these cats "no" except when they jumped on the kitchen counters. And now they don't know the meaning of the word.

UPDATE: The exploit to get around Apple's waitlist for New Siri has been patched, so if you're wanting an early look, you'll have to wait until Apple decides to add more users.

   
• Siri Island! On iPhone, the visual interface for New Siri pops out of the "Dynamic Island" at the top (which is where the selfie-camera and LIDAR sensor is located). When it comes to camouflaging that hole in the screen, I have to say that Apple is doing an amazing job...

On the Mac, you can hold down the F5 key to invoke the Siri Orb, which floats in the top 1/3 of the screen, awaiting your command (though you can move it anywhere, temporarily)...

In a way, I think this orb thing makes Siri feel kinda gimmicky. I mean, I know that there should be some kind of feedback that Siri is listening, but it's taking a lot more of my attention this way than it probably should. I dunno. I think that, in time, this will be toned down quite a bit because people will be more accustomed to knowing that Siri AI is listening. Interesting to note that Apple touts the corner radius on windows being consistent now, but Siri is a notable exception when the text interface opens up.

A bug with the MacOS version is that whenever you initiate Siri, even on another device, the orb will remain on the MacOS screen even after the task was completed. Really hoping they get this squashed, because it's more than a little annoying.

   
• Smarter Siri! I've made it very clear what I've thought about Siri over the years... it's stupid as shit. I mean really bad. Often times it's a "voice assistant" that makes things more work than it would be if you just did it your damn self. So now that Apple has finally... FINALLY... invested some money in upgrading the experience (albeit with Google's help), is it any better? In a word? Yes. With reservations. It's certainly on par with other offerings that I've largely been ignoring but, since it's integrated with the Apple ecosystem, it's something I might actually use. Especially since it's darn capable. Not only for answering questions and doing mundane tasks, but for helping you to get the most out of your Mac/iPhone/iPad/Apple Watch/Whatever. Though, if I'm being honest, there are times I'm not sure if Siri actually is that incredible... or if it's just better than what we had by so much that it feels that way?

   
• Go Deep! Siri has access to all my emails, texts, calendar appointments, and the like. So when I ask "What was the name of that restaurant I ate at in Little Havana" it's able to tell me. But context is everything. When I asked "What was the name of the restaurant I ate at in Miami?" it didn't know, and listed restaurants around my hotel. But when I asked "What was the name of the restaurant I ate at in South Beach?" it found a reservation I made and was able to tell me the correct place. Despite the fact that my hotel was also in South Beach. It's strange how Siri can be smart in guessing what might be the answer based on a piece of information it found... while ignoring the answer in information it fully had access to.

   
• Deep Questions! I wanted to break out "deep search" questions from the next section where I just ask usual questions because it's absolutely bizarre and shouldn't be lumped in somewhere it's bound to get overlooked. I asked Siri what the name of my cats are...

What the heck? MADDIE?!? When I manually searched in an attempt to find our where in the heck this could have come from, I couldn't find it. The reference says "PhoneAppIntentsExtension"... so, Siri got it from... my phone? How? This makes no sense at all. However... once I corrected Siri, it answered correctly with Jake & Jenny from then onwards. But here's the thing... this was a rare stumble. I threw all the bizarre questions I could think of about myself and my life and Siri rarely stumbles. If it's on my iPhone or Mac or wherever, Siri can dig it up. Even if it was 16 years ago...

This will probably come in handy as I get older.

   
• Regular Questions! Siri is darn smart when it comes to searching the internet in order to answer questions. Which isn't terribly special because Old Siri could respond correctly when you say "What is the capital of Uzbekistan?" No, where New Siri shines is with the things Old Siri wouldn't have a clue. Things like "Does eBay have any DVD copies of the movie Flight of the Navigator for sale?" where Siri not only says "Yes," but looks to see what options are available...

It goes on and on. I made dozens of searches asking for things that go beyond simple questions. Then I ask questions on the answers to my questions. And questions to the answers on the questions to the answers of my questions. And tossing in stuff like "When was the last day of school where I live?" made no difference. Siri is able to figure it all out. And, unlike Old Siri in my car, New Siri won't tell me I have to wait until I've finished driving.

   
• Photo Query! You can ask Siri about photos you've already taken or images your camera is currently looking at. This is not shocking because Google Lens has been telling Android users where photos were taken, what's the name of the thing or place in the photo you're looking at, or where you can buy something shown in a photo you're looking at. But, if you've never experienced it before, it's a bit of a shock. Not because it's possible, but because Siri always goes extra. I asked Siri what was in this photo I took. Not only did it answer correctly, but told me where it was taken and the story behind it...

Now that's cool. And when it comes to one of my favorite topics, food, Siri is darn handy. Take a photo of what you're eating and Siri will identify it. Then you can ask about the calories or nutritional value. Or you can ask to find some recipes for it. Or where you can buy it locally. Whatever...

Except... when that same rainbow bagel just has cream cheese on it, Siri thinks it's a pill...

Which is a step ahead of Siri not knowing what something is at all...

Still, from all my experiments, it was more often impressive than it was disappointing.

   
• Recipes! And speaking of food... Siri is an ace at tracking down recipes. I ask for a cheese tamale recipe and Siri gets me one. I ask for it to be vegetarian and Siri finds me a new one. I ask for one which uses different cheeses and Siri hunts one down. I ask Siri to add the ingredients to my shopping list and it's done. And then... ten minutes later... an hour later... two hours later... I can ask Siri about the recipe and it has no problem repeating it...

   
• Take Control! Now, the thing that shocked me the most about New Siri is how it can control my Mac. Want the volume higher or lower? No problem. Want the screen brighter or dimmer? No problem. Want a file or app opened? No problem. It's nice to be typing along and have Siri do something while you keep working. To a point. You can't do things like empty your trash or delete something since Siri wants to make sure it's not malicious or accidental... but so many things can be implemented just by asking.

   
• Lack of Control! HomeKit may still be shit, but Siri's ability to control HomeKit seems to be taken to a new level. You can chain commands (at last) and make adjustments (at last) which is a step in the right direction.

   
And there you have it. New Hotness Siri is a massive improvement over Old Shitty Siri. And a use of AI that I'm not opposed to for once. Kind of a taste of the future-sci-fi world we keep reading in books and seeing in movies.

So there I was doom-scrolling through Disney+ to find some background noise while I worked. And there it was... Naked and Afraid.

I've heard of the show, of course. But I've never seen it and it's never popped up on YouTube (which is what I'm watching 90% of the time).

Now, I have nothing against survival adventure shows. I've watched Running Wild (the Bear Grylls show) and Survivorman, and they're fine. Likely staged to a certain extent, but fine.

And then there's Naked and Afraid. No idea why they're naked. I guess butt-cheeks and blurred naughty bits draw viewers...

The show is fine. Weird but fine.

But I'd rather watch Survivor.

   
No.

I don't own a mobile phone with a camera on it. I own a pocket camera which just happens to be able to make phone calls. And a lot of other stuff.

It wasn't always this way. I started with a Canon SLR film camera which I got for my birthday. And while I took it a lot of places, it was as inconspicuous and unobtrusive as a boat anchor. So I didn't take it everywhere, much as I wish I could. All too many times I would be somewhere and see something cool that I'd like to capture for one reason or another. Maybe it would end up being a good reference for a future project. Maybe I liked the way the colors played and thought I might need to use a combination like that one day. Maybe it was something I thought I could cut out and use in a photo collage. Maybe it was a hundred reasons or no reason at all. I just like collecting stuff.

And my iPhone makes it possible to do just that.

Too easy, actually.

I thought about that this afternoon as I was walking to the post office and passed this...

I may ignore it for the rest of my life. Or perhaps I'll be working on something and it will come in handy.

In the meanwhile, it can be blog fodder.

"It don't mean a thang if it ain't got that twang!"
                                        —Duke Ellington (maybe)

I have a longstanding love affair with mayonnaise. It's far and away my favorite condiment. Then I discovered Dutch mayonnaise and things got taken to the next level. Then I started trying to eat more vegan and switched to making my own egg-free mayo. But it never even comes close to what I love about the stuff.

So while I eat considerably less real mayo now-a-days, I do still eat it.

The Dutch mayo I obsess over has gotten very expensive, so I went back to Best Foods (AKA Hellmann's East of the Rocky Mountains). But then one day Duke's mayonnaise somehow showed up at the grocery story. It was on an introductory sale cheaper than Best Food's and so I gave it a shot.

When I got home, I saw that the jar said It's Got Twang! on the lid.

And, sure enough, it does. Duke's doesn't have any sugar and includes a hit of apple cider vinegar, and that's where the "twang" comes from.

I was not a fan.

At least not immediately.

The "twang" was competing with the other flavors on my sandwich or burger. So I decided to use up the jar in potato salad where I could adjust the ingredients to offset it. Problem solved.

But then... I ended up using it in other places from time to time until I started... enjoying it?

And now it's my go-to mayo. Unless it's not on sale and Best Food's is cheaper. Because given the INSANELY FUCKING HIGH PRICE OF GROCERIES, the only thing that tastes better than "twang" is savings.

Though today is a double 626 day because it's 62626 this year.

The chaotic alien from the animated masterpiece Lilo & Stitch is "Experiment 626," but he's better known as "Stitch." And, as somebody who absolutely loves this brilliant Chris Sanders character, it's a day I celebrate. Usually by buying something new for my collection of Stitch crap.

Last year for 626 I purchased a print from my trip to Disney's Aulani resort...

This year I bought a couple of Lilo & Stitch picture discs to frame...

They'll look pretty cool hanging in my guest bathroom with my other Stitch stuff once I get them framed.

My cats are weird in the best ways.

A couple days ago I was giving Jenny belly rubs when she suddenly flopped over and trapped my hand. Just when I accepted the fact that I wouldn't be able to go to work, Jake swooped in and licked her head as a distraction and I was able to escape when she twisted around to give him a better licking angle...

Then Jake decided to use his sister's butt as a pillow, which thrilled her to no end, as you can imagine...

But it was either that or Jenny would have to find a way to earn money so she can live the excessive lifestyle that she's become accustomed to.

   
• Greed Hike! After record-breaking financial quarters worth billions upon billions of dollars in profit, Tim Cook announced that price hikes for Apple devices are "unavoidable," and they arrived this week. It's been noted that last year alone Apple raked in $112 billion and spent $310 billion on stock buybacks. Which is to say that Tim Cook is full of shit. His company has more money than some countries, and the idea that they can't absorb the RAM price increases THAT APPLE FUCKING CONTRIBUTED TO WITH THEIR AI BULLSHIT, well... forgive me for laughing. And for hanging on to my existing Apple products for a good, long, while.

   
• Don't Get Grifted! The insanity just keeps piling up...

People are entirely too easy to manipulate when it comes to their health. And I have no idea how we got here.

   
• Feral Hogs! This may seem funny... but my friend Doug and I were chased by feral hogs in Kauai, and it was terrifying. They are horrific. Which, if you've seen the movie Hannibal, you already know...

You would not want to meet a feral hog in a dark alley. Or anywhere else, I'm guessing.

   
• She's Super! The hate being lobbed at Milly Alcock because she dared to accept an acting job as Supergirl in a movie is repugnant. Snyder fan-bros aren't just content to say "I am not going to watch the movie because I don't like the direction of the James Gunn universe"... oh no. They have to attack Milly's looks and anything else they can think of to make it personal, despite the fact that she's getting rave reviews by people who don't care for the movie that much...

On every post where Supergirl is even mentioned, Snyder-bros are unloading with hate and adding things like "FLOP!" and "Sasha Calle is the ONLY Supergirl!" and whatever. And here's the thing. These same people didn't even turn out for Saha Calle's only appearance as Supergirl in The Flash, which is widely regarded as one of the biggest box office flops of all time. The projection here is insane.

   
• Cut-Proof? It's genuinely jaw dropping how the fact that an abundance of evidence exists to disprove the non-stop lies, but people are still choosing to believe them all...

Counting to 45,000 isn't difficult at all when you don't fucking count in the first place.

   
• Receipts! Megyn Kelly unleashed a disgusting viral video against Haitians who arrived here with a temporary protection status. It was horrific enough that people are coming forward with viral comments of their own to hit back. And, if they are even half-true, they're damning enough that they should ruin her. But we all know how that works. People like this get a pass for some reason. I can't fathom how Amy Coney Barrett will explain voting to strip TPS protections from endangered Haitians when two of her adopted children are from Haiti and this will likely result in some... or many... of them losing their life.

   
• Watson is on the Case! There's a practice at Apple whereas some company comes out with a very good app for their various devices which has killer features... at which point Apple will put those same features into their own apps or operating systems, essentially destroying the app which had the idea first. Way back in 2001 an app named Watson was released by a small developer which added a lot of useful tools to Apple's Sherlock search utility. Soon after, Apple released an updated Sherlock which could do all the things Watson could do... and it was game over. After this kept happening, the term "Sherlocking" was popularized to describe the process. Fast forward to now and Apple's new Siri-enabled Calendar app allows you to add appointments and such just by talking or typing to it with natural language commands. This was the hallmark feature of a competing calendar app called Fantastical, which I purchased back in the day. And I still use it, even though the developer switched to the dreaded "subscription model" which I do not pay for because my old license allows the basic functions to still be used. So now the question becomes... will I ditch Fantastical in favor of Calendar? And the answer is yes, probably. I'd rather not have additional apps installed to worry about, and odds are Apple's built-in app will work fine for me. Not that Fantastical's developer will care, because they're not getting any money off of me anyway. On one hand I'm sad that another developer has been Sherlocked. It's bad for the platform. But, on the other hand, I hate subscription models so much that I won't be losing any sleep over it either.

   
And now back to my recovery.

Last Wednesday I woke up and had a massive spot in my vision. After years of stuff like this, I didn't panic. I thought perhaps it was a new floater, and eventually my brain would learn to disregard it just as it had a dozen times before.

But this time it was different.

Then it disappeared. Kinda. But it left a massive blurry spot behind, which caused a doozy of a headache. So I visited my awesome optometrist who took photos of my eye. She was concerned that her equipment (which is mostly built for prescribing glasses and contacts and monitoring general eye health) wasn't extensive enough to see what's going on, so she made me an urgent appointment at the ophthalmologist.

And today was the day.

The took new photo scans of my eyes... including some a machine I had never seen before.

Turns out there's a tear on my retina...

It's that nasty green thing at the top...

Dumb luck worked in my favor, because a surgeon happened to be walking by as he was leaving for the day and saw my pictures. He walked into the room to take a look in my eye for himself and said that I should have surgery to put a scar around the tear so it doesn't get any bigger and detach my retina. That sounded scary, so I asked how soon I could get on the schedule to have it done.

"I'm going to do it right now."

Next thing I know, I'm staring into a laser gun with a lens stuck to my eye as my amazing surgeon starts blasting hundreds of flashes of light at my retina... damaging the tissue so it will scar over and make a barrier to keep my tear from spreading and causing serious problems.

I was told it might hurt and feel like a dull ache in my eye. I felt it, but it didn't hurt.

When I left the clinic, it was empty. Which made me realize how lucky I was to have a doctor care so much about protecting my vision that he stayed late to take care of it.

I was able to drive home with two pairs of sunglasses on my face and was fine. For about an hour. Then the dull ache pain thing started happening, so I took an overdose of Advil with a Benadryl chaser and went to bed. And once the pain drifted away, so did I.

I slept for 9-1/2 hours, which is more sleep than I've gotten in decades. And now I'm sitting in bed with my cats trying to pull out of my sleep-haze so I can get to work.

Which is sure to be fun because the blurry spot is still there, and I'm told it could be six months before my brain can make it go away enough so I don't notice it.

Don't get old, folks... there's nothing good that comes of it. One day things are fine, the next day your eyeball is falling apart.

My eye felt... bruised? I guess? today. But was otherwise pain-free. The only problem I faced was my eye feeling tired. And moving my eyes made it tired faster, so I tried to look straight ahead and move my head around to where I needed to see.

Last night when I would close my eyes to try and sleep, my lasered eye would display a light show of red lines which looked something like this...

This morning I was surprised to find that the lines were still there whenever I closed my eye... even if it was just a blink. Distracting and annoying. But it was gone after a few hours, so no harm no foul, I guess.

I thought I would probably take my pills and go to bed at 7pm, but it's almost 8pm and I'm going to see if I can make it until 9pm so that my sleep schedule (such as it is) won't be wildly disrupted.

In the meanwhile, I am trying to adjust to a huge blurry spot in my vision and hope that I can either get used to it or it will diminish in time.