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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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).
@dr.eric.b #fyp ♬ original sound - Eric
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!
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 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.
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.
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!
Well, here it is. The entry where I recap all the things that happened in the year. Except... such a post only really made sense when I was actually doing lots of stuff (meaning prior to 2020). Not that nothing at all happened in 2024. Plenty of stuff happened. It's just that going through it all month-by-month doesn't really work when the notable stuff just isn't a massive list. And here we go...
The single biggest lesson I learned in 2024 is that Apple is a shitty fucking company who does not give a single fuck about your data. I started using their "iCloud Drive" which was more expensive than other options, but I wanted the benefit of integration with all my Apple stuff. And it was great. Until my data started zeroing out. I called support and we watched as file after file would be reduced to zero bytes in real-time. And they could offer no help except to suggest that I copy my files off iCloud Drive (no shit, I started doing that immediately). Of course I had backups, but recent files that hadn't backed up yet were gone. Very old files that never got backed up were gone. And after jumping through hoops Apple blamed me because "iCloud Drive is not a backup service." So if you're using Apple cloud storage, better get your files off of it before they're gone.
I paid loads of money to have my shower ripped out and rebuilt because a company I hired to diagnose a leak told me that was the problem. Except it wasn't the shower at all. It was the toilet. That's a lot of money down the drain. But at least the leaking nightmare is finally over.
I had kidney stones for the first time in many years (I used to get them regularly). But this time was different in that I suffered in absolute agony instead of going to the emergency room for drugs because I really couldn't afford to do that. Despite paying absurd amounts of money for "health insurance." I fucking despise that Americans pay a fucking shit-ton into "health insurance," whose only function is to pull money out of the system and make profits for health insurance company executives.
I ran across one of the funniest cat videos ever this past year, and here it is. The cat is speaking French, but there's subtitles...
Next up in cat news? Jake has a snaggletooth sometimes now...
After yet another eye surgery, I decided to get my eyeball lenses replaced and blogged all about it starting in Part One here (and here are Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, and a follow up post), and that's been very cool.
And, oh yeah, if you've ever wanted a lot of Drunk Dave stories in one place, here you go!
If you're a Disney Parks fan, I wrote a shitload of posts once I got back from Walt Disney World...
The Aurora Borealis visited a couple times...
I finally played around with that AI garbage that all the kids are talking about...
And I'm going to wrap this up in a surprising way by re-mentioning that I discovered the movie Half Brothers in 2024, which really struck a cord with me for some reason. I'm kinda obsessed with the movie, and it's become the film that I put on whenever I need background noise. It's just so well done, in particular the exceptional performance by Gerardo Méndez. This is a comedy, but he has to communicate far past this because there's a lot of heartbreaking stuff going on.
And that's a wrap on 2024. Hope everybody has a safe and happy New Year.
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