Someday I should get this old VCR fixed. Once the addition is done and I have my basement bedroom setup in place, maybe I'll superficially clean it up and see if it still functions. I highly doubt it does. I looked up the model, and apparently it's from 1991. This jives with my memories from that period.

One of my favorite games of all time is the Mega Drive title "Sword of Vermillion". Overworld traversal is accomplished by navigating grassy plains and dense forest mazes in the first person:



Every time I go for my daily walks I remark to myself that the views essentially right outside my back door are exactly what I picture "Sword of Vermillion" would look like in real life. Finally one day I decided to just snap a few photos in preparation for this post:

I've observed previously that the Left is trying to install a Conservative Theocracy in America, with Wokeism codified into law. I've also explained that such a theoretical State apparatus would be incompatible with the views of Liberalism. Apparently, the Left are "at it" in places like Finland too. And if the Left's dogma is incompatible with liberalism, it's even less compatible with Christianity. For example, here is the Catholic Church's teaching on homosexuality:



Liberalism and Wokeism can not coexist peacefully together. Neither can Christianity and Wokeism.

I suspect Christians and Liberals can get along though, because Christians are about "love they neighbor, and let God slowly work to bring them to the light." One can even see that in the above passage: "homosexuality is wrong and can not be condoned, but at the same time homosexuals must be respected with compassion and dignity." Meanwhile, Liberals are... Liberal: "let Christians be Christians".

The Wokeists, by contrast, are a bit like Muslims in their doctrinal calls for absolute militant domination over non-believers. Wokeists need their own country and State apparatus. Unfortunately, even that may not be enough, because they inevitably would attack their neighbors. Ultimately however, I think Wokism will run out of steam and dissipate in the wind. Look at how quickly the mainstream responded to the school indoctrination, for example, once it was brought to the attention of the general public.

A little over a year ago I wrote a pair of blog posts regarding my initial impressions of the Xbox Series X and the PlayStation 5. It's hard to believe a whole year has gone by since then.

On a persoanl note, so much has changed in my life: I've sold my Murderapolis property, relocated my family permanently to the bug out house, have a perhaps eighty percent complete addition project, have weathered and survived tremendous government overreach and delusion societal meltdown regarding the WuFlu, and most importantly have devoted myself to Jesus.

It's also tough to believe it's been a whole year when just looking at these two machines, but for the opposite reason. There is no discounting their fast loading times, how quiet they are, the effortless way they handle last-generation games at sixty frames per second, and even how impressive are the small glimpses we've seen of their full potential: I'm looking at you, "Rift Apart".

But my overall impression has been that they are the most underwhelming upgrade of any console generation in history. There has been no "Sonic 3 to The Need for Speed" Genesis-to-3DO moment for me. Or a "Crash Bandicoot to Sonic Adventure" transition. I suppose this isn't surprising, given the intrinsically diminishing returns of adding yet more triangles and pixels, and given the slow-down in Moore's Law.

There is very little I can even say about these systems that I didn't already say twelve months ago. Nothing has changed. They are still "last gen games with more trees and grass" machines. Games look pretty much identical on a "PlayStation 4 Pro", just at thirty frames per second instead of sixty. The Series X still doesn't have an HDR dashboard, albeit it at least draws in 4K now.

So instead of repeating what I said last year, I'd like to make a different observation.


One Standard to Rule Them All

Back in the very early 90's, then-CEO of Electronic Arts, Trip Hawkins, was in the middle of having his guys reverse-engineer the Mega Drive's copy mechanism. The story has been told a thousand times, so I won't repeat the whole thing here, instead only commenting that having pulled Sega's teeth to get that sweetheart licensing deal, he said "never again".

So he came up with a new vision: what if video game systems worked like VCRs? You'd just pick whichever brand you want, the "players" would all run the same games, while the manufacturers would compete on price and frills-extras? Game designers would like the low licensing fees, and only needing to focus on one set of specifications. And thus, the 3DO was born. Each model had a little different casing, but had a compatible double-speed CD-ROM drive, and the same Dave Needle-designed "guts" inside:


The LG and first Panasonic 3DO models

Every model had an ARM60 CPU, two "Cell Engine" graphics co-processors, three megabytes of total RAM, an incredible custom audio DSP, and integrated SRAM storage. Even the controllers were materially identical. While each manufacturer went with slightly different ergonomics, they all had the same buttons:


The controller button labels also helped facilitate media playback. Headphone jack and volume was also standard on most 3DO controllers.

When you would play games across the different 3DO models, you might notice that the black levels were ever-so-slightly-different, or that loading times synchronized music differently, as seen in the "Super Street Fighter II Turbo" intro when running on the LG and Sanyo units, versus the Panasonic ones. But other than that, all 3DO systems delivered more or less the same experience and compatibility.

Even product packaging was similar, advertising the same features, with just a little different spin on the branding:


LG's branding for their Goldstar unit.


Matsushita's branding for the Panasonic models had a different flavor.

Trip's business model itself worked fabulously: as like what happened with VCRs in the 80's and 90's, competing manufacturers drove the price of 3DO units from $600 all the way down to $250 by the time the PlayStation and Saturn had come out. However, the 3DO's 1992-era design had some architectural bottlenecks, and it wasn't quite able to compete on a technical level against these newer systems.

Of course, as we would later discover thanks to homebrew developers the 3DO hardware in fact has no problem running hallmark games like Tomb Raider-- but at the time, the perception was that the 3DO was punching above its weight, and perception is all that matters. Not to mention, Sony's incredible PSX marketing blitz not only steamrolled the 3DO, but the Jaguar, Saturn and Nintendo 64 as well.

Alas, Trip Hawkins's "one standard to rule them all" convergence wasn't meant to be. Or was it?


The 3DO Model Realized

In 2021, Sony released their PlayStation 5, while Microsoft pushed out their Xbox Series consoles. Both systems were pressed in the philosophical mold of 2001's original Xbox: from an instruction perspective they were x86 / x64 PCs. Different styling cues were at play, but outside of a very tiny handful of exclusives they ran the same software, and had almost identical "guts":


Their housing looked different, but their internals were almost identical.

They both had UHD Blu-ray optical drives, fast solid state hard drives, the identical RDNA system-on-chips just with slightly different clock speeds and "CU counts", and the same sixteen gigabytes of RAM. Developers could use the same engines, assets, and code across both platforms.

They both even used materially identical subscription-based online service models; they both supported screenshot and video capture plus editing; and they both outputted at the same resolutions. Their controllers had mildly different ergonomics, but the same standardized button layouts.


The controllers were the same. The manufacturers competed on ergonomics and frills, such as Sony's more advanced rumble feature.

When you browsed store shelves, it became immediately obvious that no matter which platform you selected, ninety-plus percent of the games ran on both systems, with nearly identical appearance and performance. The packaging demonstrated different marketing takes on what were essentially the same products:


Here we see 8K, 4K, HDR, and 120 frames per second advertised.


8K, 4K, HDR, and 120 frames per second again. The box is black instead of white.


Conclusion

As he was apt to do, Trip Hawkins had the exact right idea and could see the inevitable direction, only a bit before the world was ready for the execution. The PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series consoles were the realization of the 3DO model: you picked your favorite brand, with the frills you wanted and at the price point you found desirable. Your "player" of choice would then run whatever games you wanted to play.

Right now, the two companies still have some of their own software: for example, Microsoft has "Forza Motorsport", while Sony has "Gran Turismo". But even that may not be the case for much longer. In 2017 Microsoft promised that all of their games would come out simultaneously on the IBM PC. They have subsequently followed up on that promise in a universal way. Earlier this year, Sony made strong intimations that they are headed in the same direction.

Perhaps Trip's model was so forward-thinking that he didn't take it far enough, and everything will simply converge on the PC? Only time will tell. But for now, let's enjoy the 3DO vision, with all of its benefits.

I'm not sure I found them all, or that I have them in the correct order-- but here are three parts of Tucker's Kyle Rittenhouse interview:

• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three

What an unbelievable kid! Reflecting back on a nasty situation I went through around his age, I had nowhere near his maturity or poise at that point in my development. And my situation was about one one-millionth of what he went through! Not even from the same universe.

There is a lot to admire about his temperament, willingness to put himself out there to serve people, and his overall world view about maintaining his composure, and letting go of the things he can't control. How he won everyone over in prison and wound up being card playing buddies with them speaks volumes.

Turns out the guy who ran his SUV through the parade in Wisconsin was a militant black supremacist, black nationalist "BLM" supporter. But I thought white supremacists-- you know, all four of them-- were the threat? I wonder if it was in retaliation to the Rittenhouse verdict?

Speaking of which, I had been fervently praying for Kyle every night during the trial. I nearly shed tears watching his reaction to the verdicts being read. The woman behind him-- sister? not certain-- also choked me up.

But back to the topic at hand, this parade terrorist attack is why I got out of dodge and moved my family to a rural area. I knew that all of the yard signs had real-world consequences. When people start to normalize this kind of iconography, a small percentage of them will put the rhetoric into action.

That city, by the way, was Robbinsale, Minnesota. I've been meaning to "dox" that stupid place since I am long-since out of there, and thank God for that. The place went from a sleepy, quaint, quiet, retired blue collar neighborhood to the place you see in the yard signs. There were multiple drive-by shootings feet away from my home. I was getting accosted by drug addicts on my walks. Everyone walking around started to look like this:



That second picture in the montage is the company that made the hilariously broken "GTA" remake incidentally. You can't make this stuff up. I wonder why the development was incompetent?

Changing gears, here is some WuFlu clot shot humor for you. A friend sent this to me. The "today" in the second post was from Friday morning. I got a good laugh out of it.



My thinking:



Jokes aside, I pray for these people to see the light one day, and how they've been manipulated. I also pray for them to stay healthy. No one knows what this will do to their bodies, long-term. I've seen some doctors speculate that a mass-fatality event could come of this over the next several years, via phenomena summarized in this image. Please don't let that be true.

In the short-run, the "ADE" thing is very evident in my co-workers, all of whom have been very vocal about having got the clot shots. They are the sickliest group of people I've ever encountered. I like my co-workers. I wish the best for them.

But on to happier things: this is "day one" of my week-long Thanksgiving vacation. I have a fun slate of things lined up for this week, including working through a Catechism study guide with my kids, attending Thanksgiving Mass on Wednesday evening with my wife and kids, watching the rapidly-finishing work on the house addition, and of course playing some video games.

Life is good. God is good!

In addition to the new car I'll be buying myself next year-- the rumored manual transmission GR Supra is the current front-runner-- wifey and I wouldn't mind getting a second all-wheel drive for the winters. Being not very impressed with the incoming WRX, I saw this article and thought, "here is another option". But then... bold emphasis is mine:



And by the by, this is coming from a publication which pushes this kind of drivel, where a radical rainbow person idealogue lectures you about how you need an "attitude adjustment" because your car is momentarily altering the composition of Earth's atmosphere by one zillionth of a percent.

My point being, today's Road and Track complaining about nanny assists must mean they are really bad.

The theories named in this article are hilariously transparent in their intention: "too much horsepower!", "speeding!", "fewer people wearing seatbelts!", and so on.

Cars have had a lot of horsepower for decades now; people have always gone over the speed limit, and besides it's usually people going slow who cause the most danger, especially when they sit in the passing lane; modern cars relentlessly beep and buzz at you when you don't have your seat belt on, I guarantee that's not the explanation.

How about, "all of this 'safety' and 'assist' equipment is not just overwhelming and distracting, but is causing people to develop bad habits, like not paying attention while they're driving?"

That's the most plausible explanation, since this "surge"-- which is B.S. anyway, why can't people be adults and decide what risks are acceptable to them-- coincides perfectly with the past couple of years, where every single freaking new car has these so-called "features".

The first list gives the bureaucrats more power, so those are the made-up reasons they'll use to double down on the things which are causing the problem. It's totally transparent. Acknowledging the latter would cause them to lose power, so they will never discuss that.

When I drive, my eyes don't leave the windshield-mirrors cycle. I don't have the radio on. I listen to the sounds around me, the noise of the tires on the road, the sounds the engine is making. I focus on the communication from the four tires and the road: what signals are they sending? I feel for the car's balance, and how the chassis is rotating. I have a constant mental radar of all cars around me, and I extrapolate their movements with my own, to anticipate potential problems.

Most of all, I relax and enjoy myself, as I push in the clutch, grab the next gear, and feel the rubber biting, propelling me forward. This all is the model I will be teaching my kids once they start driving.

It's nice to see someone like Stockman discussing carbon dioxide data, since it immediately pushes a pin into the hysteria-mongerer's balloon. I have also looked at the numbers, and have written posts about them such as this one. Carbon dioxide is a fraction of one percent of the Earth's atmosphere, and man's contribution to that is small. In sum total, man has changed the composition of the atmosphere by something like a thousandth of a percent. Further, carbon dioxide levels were 237 times higher in the past, and Earth did not become Venus. Stockman also goes through a nice summary of just how often the Earth's climate changed all on its own-- radically, and in both directions.

The parallels between the "climate change" hysteria and the WuFlu hysteria are remarkable. In the former's case, Obama buys property two inches above sea level, and the world's elites fly around in private jets-- while any cursory review of the Earth's past reveals that the narrative is bunk. In the latter's case, the elites go around maskless to private dinner parties at five hundred dollar plate restaurants and let millions of infected illegal aliens cross the border, while telling children that they need to suffocate themselves in school-- while any cursory review of the data on masks, the clot shots, and the WuFlu itself reveals the narrative to be bunk.

If the Earth were really about to end, people would be retiring en masse, cashing out their 401ks, and buying Lamborghinis. If the world were actually in a pandemic, they wouldn't be leaving their houses at all: would you really go grocery shopping if there was a lethal virus floating around killing everyone?

No one actually believes any of this. They don't think the world is about to end. They realize that the WuFlu isn't dangerous, and that taping a piece of toilet paper to their face wouldn't stop it if it was. Like children who pretend believe in Santa Claus for fun, they are feigning belief-- sometimes so ardently that they even fool themselves in moments of weakness-- so they can impress their neighbors and coworkers with how much they "care", and so they have an excuse to not drive into the office anymore. They are so caught in this miasma of groupthink and delusion, that pointing their state out to them causes them to become angry, and aggressive.

And from the elites' standpoint, all of this is about power and control. Nothing more. Put all of these things together, and you have today's clown world.

Want to hear an astonishing song? Listen, and read along.

This is hilarious. I attended an Elasticsearch-related "conference" a few weeks ago, and could have written this comment, about that:



I also chuckled at this comment:



This so-called "accessibility" stuff is pure virtue signaling. Applying it to myself, if I were blind I just wouldn't use computers or play video games. I'd find one of a million other things to do. Just like how I'm not seven feet tall, and don't insist that the NBA be more "accessible". Or how I don't have a 140 IQ, and don't insist that Mensa be more "accessible". Or how I'm not a woman, so I don't insist Victoria's Secret modeling become more "accessible".

The "native lands" thing is even funnier. American Indian societies were pretty barbaric. The only difference between them and the Europeans is that the Europeans were better at battle. Higher IQs meant ocean-faring ships, and firearms. Besides, other hominids had the land before the American Indians-- how far back do we want to go here?

Not sure what to do this morning. Mass isn't until 8:30.

I've been on a tear with reviews, rifling through all of the "Castlevania" games in chronological order. But I'm getting a little burnt out on them. Visual Studio 2022 comes out tomorrow, so I'll be installing that. One of the perks of working for my employer is that I have an enterprise MSDN license-- they encourage us to make use of the keys privately, for learning and career purposes. I will be refreshing some of my skills.

"Forza Horizon 5" comes out on Tuesday. My son and I installed it on his PC and the Series X, so we can play together online. My son's Ryzen 1600 and RTX 2060 are still remarkably capable. I fired up "Flight Simulator" on it yesterday, and even with most of the graphical options cranked way up, the game was butter smooth. So I'm sure "Horizon 5" will look and play amazing for him. He sure loves his driving games.

The addition on the house is coming along. It's all closed in, with windows and the sliding deck doors. It's all shingled. The view out the windows is incredible: overlooking the fields, and the sunrise. The space is quite large, and the vaulted ceiling I insisted on makes it feel very airy. They will be putting the siding on next week. Then it will be HVAC, plumber, foaming, and finally interior finishing. Probably won't be livable until spring. I can't wait to have my new room.

Everyone who knows me will attest that I am the world's single biggest 3DO fan, but even I've had to reset my expectation of what the hardware can do after watching this. What's next, a "Crash Bandicoot" port? I guess I shouldn't be surprised, as Bill Budge's "Blade Force" engine is as smooth as this. But more often 3DO games are quite slow: think "Killing Time" at the worst. Even something like "Road Rash" has stutters. "The Need for Speed" looks butter smooth, until you realize that the game is actually only running at thirteen FPS, and is cleverly designed around that framerate. "Lucienne's Quest" is in the teens, for sure. And so forth.

I also recall "ewhac" wondering why "Gex" has performance issues, but "Soccer Kid" doesn't. His theory was that the "Gex" developers were feeding in images which were causing the hardware to burn cycles "converting" them. Yes, the "Cell Engine" can take arbitrary color-depth and size images, but my understanding is that you can save it cycles by "pre-baking" your assets in a "Cell"-friendly" way.

Speaking of 3DO, I've been monitoring brand new units on eBay. They usually sell between 400 and 500 USD, which isn't bad. I haven't had a working one for well over a year now, and I miss playing on original hardware, even though the "Opera" RetroArch core is pretty solid, and I have my USB 3DO controller adapter. I also noticed that my copy of the aforementioned "Lucienne's Quest" is worth over 400 USD. If only I'd kept that long box. I remember like it was yesterday walking out of "Electronics Boutique" at the Mall of America with the shrink-wrapped box in hand. I had it reserved there, knowing my family was going to that mall on that day.

Finally and totally off topic, I wonder if I had Aaron Rodgers wrong? His opinion is incredibly sensible. It could be "broken clock", or maybe the guy really is pretty good on most things? Not clear.

The Beijing Biden clot shot PDF is out, and after all of the stress it doesn't even apply to me. From the third page, bold emphasis is mine:



I work from home full-time. Boom.

This part on the second page made me chuckle, again bold emphasis is mine:



Oh, is that so? How cute! By the way, the tenth amendment says "hi!"

Last time I checked, quadruple-masked pink haired bozos sitting in their tax payer funded cubicles can't unilaterally re-write the Constitution. Nice try though!

The only thing which will be annoying is that my employer requires that I go into the office four times per year. But I'll just stall and find a way out of it if pressed: my employer has lost a significant portion of their workforce recently-- they need me more than I need them. Worst case: I'll quit, become a contractor, and they can bring me back at twice the pay.

My daughter and I have started to play around with NFTs-- we put up a test one just to figure out how all of the pieces fit together. Here is her profile on OpenSea. Right now the challenging part is how to get views: people are creating so many of these that any individual item gets buried almost instantly.

First you had "Doke V", and now you have "Honor of Kings: World". The Chinese and South Koreans went from making cheesy knock-off video games to the two most graphically cutting-edge titles I've ever seen. Even the writing in these two games looks interesting-- no wokeness here.

As the United States has died, eaten alive from the inside out by value-less, post-modern, hedonistic Marxist forces over the past thirty five years, its culture has become vapid and empty: no first order things of any value are created. Simultaneously, Japan has degenerated into a hopeless place where businessmen hang themselves in the woods, and young people don't even bother having sex anymore much less trying to procreate. Their culture too has become a pale imitation of what it once was.

But then you have China: they have a cultural identity and aren't afraid of flaunting it and promoting it. You can see their swagger in their emerging cultural output. South Korea seems pretty vacuous and materialistic, but even they seem to be a step ahead of Japan these days.

American nerd children from the 70s and 80s always wanted to learn Japanese, so they could import video games and manga. I wonder if American nerd kids from this just-started decade will all be teaching themselves Mandarin or Korean? That is, if we even have functioning electricity or running water by then.

Once per day I make a quick sweep through some game forums to make sure I'm not missing any major news. This morning I saw a couple of interesting comments on this thread. Favorite game of the "generation" so far? Bold emphasis is mine.



Someone replied:



When I review a game, I try to be as objective as possible, largely attempting to leave my personal taste out of my analysis. However, I've often thought that I need to add a new field to the 'Wharf-- something like "subjective factor". You would see a clear separation between games from the 80s and 90s, and titles post-2000 or so.

Metroid Dread would be a rare modern game which would "show up" on that alternative scale. I gave it a solid review as-is, but the whole time I was playing it I was getting the same "this is somewhat of a masterpiece" vibe that I get when playing games from the 80s and 90s-- in other words, exactly the sentiment expressed in the forum comments above.

It also evoked for me "it's not me, it's the world". I think more people are starting to wake up to that reality.

Coming up on a full year since the release of the Series X and PlayStation 5, off the top of my head I can only name three games which actually push the hardware: the "Demon's Souls" remake, the latest "Ratchet & Clank" title, and "Flight Simulator". The hardware is there, and the tooling is there, so what's the holdup?

Budgets.

In our current texture mapped polygon-focused industry, making a game which looks like the aforementioned three titles is so preposterously expensive-- I've heard industry execs float "two hundred million dollars"-- that the new systems will need massive install bases to make these new breed of games feasible. And the games won't be taking many innovation-focused risks in their designs either.

Imagine Christmas of 1990, and all the Genesis can run are Master System games, still with PSG audio, but with a few more colors on screen.

I'm wondering if hardware will follow the same pattern: we will wind up with a limit on computing power not based on the inevitable silicon density constraints, as commonly thought, but based instead on financial constraints? As in, the economics of building and running a fabrication facility capable of creating cutting edge hardware will only make sense under the most specific of circumstances?

I've lately been doing a lot of work with RetroArch, HDMI-to-S-Video, with 8bitDo controllers-- but there are days when I wake up and just want the real thing. On a whim I pulled my PC Engine out of storage and hooked it up.

Still works! Here it is playing Yngwie Malmsteen's "Trilogy"-- an original 1986 press of the CD-- using its 1988-era optical mechanism. While this specific Duo-R came from 1993, to think that a Japanese dude may have sat in 1988 staring at this exact same user interface, listening to this exact same CD (Yngwie was very popular in Japan), on the exact same optical assembly tech, is mind blowing.

Heck, the fact that an 8-bit system can play audio CDs and even has a user interface like this is insane enough. Craziest platform in the history of the medium: everything from primitive NES-style games on ROM cards to almost 32-bit quality shmups with Redbook audio, and everything in between.



In other news, I'm doing a bunch of reading on NFTs. H wants to try her hand at selling some of her art digitally. The problem is that the big NFT marketplaces all run on Ethereum, and apparently the "gas" prices are insane on that bogged down network right now. I'm investigating a couple of options at the moment.

One thing I like that Microsoft is doing these days is having an almost Nintendo-like focus on gameplay-- this, versus the woke Hollywood walking simulators of Sony.

"Gears Tactics", "Flight Simulator", "Minecraft", "Grounded", and "Minecraft Dungeons" are just a few examples. Imminently, we'll have the new "Age of Empires" title. Even their "triple-A"-style games are very gameplay oriented-- think "Gears 5" from a few years ago. "Halo Infinite" is looking interesting, as is the new "Forza Horizon" title. Over the next couple of years, we'll get a plethora of WRPGs from them, like "Avowed" and the new "Fable" release. I'm digging it.

On a game-related note, I also want to plug my son's YouTube channel: he's been putting up a lot of game, space, and numbers-related content.

As urban men's testosterone levels continue to plummet, there are interesting sociological phenomena which have emerged.

• Primate Behavior: Signal submission.
• Emotionally Crippled: Can only inauthentically mime emotions. Elect leaders who are same way.
• Conditioned: Totally checked out from surroundings, Universe 25-style. They will not even intervene when someone is being raped.

Irrational people don't realize they are being irrational. They will use any manner of ex post facto "reasoning" necessary to make themselves appear reasonable, to themselves. When a critical mass of people are irrational, society takes on bizarre characteristics, yet almost everyone pretends that the state of affairs is ordinary.

The reason people are becoming increasingly irrational is because they are regressing into base-brained mammals, operating on the same instinctive level as chimpanzees. It's Haidt's "elephant-rider" analogy, accelerated. The only remaining upper-brained capability is being used to justify why they are acting like monkeys-- to make themselves appear rational.

This talk is well-worth listening to: anyone who regularly interacts with young people today will be able to relate. Regular readers will recall frequent references on this blog to a lack of authenticity in the world today, which is a point the speaker emphasizes in his diatribe.

Seven years ago I wrote this: "it's the world, not me", I concluded. This mirrors the conclusion at which the speaker arrives: "When your environment collapses, you collapse." The talk also recalls Stefan Molyneux's "do what you're going to do, but know why you're doing it": motives matter.

There were lots of interesting comments to the video, here are a couple-- bold emphasis is mine:



I too have written about this extensively. When I was young, old people had a quiet sort of wisdom about them, lots of personality, and many stories to share. When I talk to a sixty five year old today, it's the same as talking to a twenty year old. It calls to mind that old joke: They don't have sixty five years' of experience-- they have one year of experience, sixty five times over.

And:



Hearken back to the pair of aforelinked pictures. Almost everyone I know in the world today is pulling even further towards the latter picture, and away from the former. They are pulling in the exact opposite direction from where the world needs to go: towards centralized authority, towards coddled atomization. It's difficult to relate to people who have these instincts.

Wifey and I were playing New World together last night, when I suddenly had a Steam client popup appear, saying that my key had been revoked due to a refund. Minutes later and while I was doing initial investigations, wifey got the same message. As it turns out and in the words of a customer service rep, "Most of the customers are across the globe are getting this error." Just when I thought I'd seen everything in this hobby...

Someone on Gab posted a comment regarding Calhoun's "Universe 25" experiments, which I then subsequently looked up. The full article is well-worth the read because this exact experiment, down to the minutest details, is playing out in American society right now, but with humans:

• Abundant, near-infinite food. Absence of predators.


• Males lose their purpose in society, become super passive and pessimistic. They "check out" (gen x).


• Females lose maternal instinct and interest in mating; they become super aggressive, territorial (modern career women, feminists). Many of them start murdering their young (abortion).


• A handful of alphas take over the society and beat everyone else up for no real purpose, since their material needs are already met (bankers, CEOs, politicians).


• The young which do survive in this twisted society never learn how to socialize properly. They just sit around eating and preening themselves (soy boys).


• Eventually the society collapses and population falls to zero.

The Wikipedia version of this experiment is hilarious: I don't want to directly link them traffic, but it white washes all modern sociological parallels, and condenses the whole thing down to "a study about overpopulation." Hah!

Instead, let's turn to Calhoun's own conclusions, bold emphasis is mine:



Not to make this about me, but I fit into the model via this observation from Calhoun's notes: "The excess that find no social niches emigrate." Remember: I just relocated my family full-time to the bug out house just this year. As an adult I have never felt like I have a social niche, a sentiment I've repeated to my wife and also my mother many times over the years.

I disagree with Calhoun on one minor point: he gives his hard conclusions a cop-out escape hatch with his "...and having expectancies to do so..." words-- which even he surely knew was nonsense as he said them. Social roles aren't arbitrary constructs: they are hard-wired via millions of years of evolution. He was just trying to pour some sugar on the experiment's outcome to make it go down a little easier (see? there is hope!).

For anyone looking to become Catholic, I have a couple of documents to share. First, there is a really nice Catechism study guide. Second, I created an accompanying worksheet-format document, where you can conveniently fill in your answers to the questions for posterity.

• Study Guide
• Worksheet

Of course, you'll also want to order a copy of the Catechism along with a Catholic Bible. Regarding the latter, I prefer the classical non-PC translation, fonts, and ancient pictures from the illustrated "New Revised Standard Edition"-- whereas wifey is loving her plain English, color-coded "Great Adventure Catholic Bible". Ideally, it's best to own multiple Bibles, so you can cross reference translations to get a clearer picture.

It feels like we're living in a real-world playout of "Atlas Shrugged". The article blames the jobs numbers on employee fears of the WuFlu-- and that may well be true, in the isolation of this specific report. But I'm also regularly seeing basic IT services going down for prolonged periods, airlines cancelling thousands of flights due to protesting pilots, huge shortages of electronics, major shipping delays due to an incredible lack of truck drivers, significant increases in food prices, rolling blackouts in places like England, and so forth.

In my workplace, I keep getting whiffs of the names of people who have left, and it reads like a "who's who" of some of the brightest, most ambitious people I've worked with. Recall that in the aforementioned Ayn Rand novel, by the end of the story New York City-- due to a combination of the smartest people "checking out" of the system, and bureaucrats and their grifter business pals taking control-- had no working electricity, massive snow drifts everywhere, no running infrastructure, and so forth. I think we're headed there.

I've also noticed over these years that Conservatives specifically have disappeared almost altogether: it used to be that half of journalists were Conservative, half of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs were Conservative, and so on. Today, it's something like seventy to ninety-five percent of people in these fields are not just Lefties, but activist-types. Is there a "Galt's Gulch" somewhere about which I'm unaware?

True, in my current community the script is flipped: other than retired healthcare cartel doctors by the lake or a handful of idiots in the nearest town, it's probably ninety-five percent Conservative here. But population density is low here as well: it's not that many people in total; where have all the rest gone? At least many of the things I've been talking about on this blog, some of them for over a decade, are finally getting acknowledged by the mainstream. Take ganders at this, or this. In the latter case, Tucker didn't even get to interest rates, the manipulation of which are so harmful that they even put QE to shame.

Some time fairly recently, Bloomberg had it from reputable sources that Nintendo was going to release the "Switch Pro" this year, but due to the government-hyper-overreaction-to-the-WuFlu-induced "chip shortages", the Japanese game maker couldn't source the parts. However, their sourcing department had already ordered an entire warehouse's worth of OLED screens!

Scrambling to figure out what to do, the idea came up to retrofit the current Switch hardware with these fancy screens-- and that's what they went with, hence why the Switch OLED is such a goofy product. It turns out that the dock itself uses HDMI 2.0-- so, 4K/60/HDR capable. Undoubtedly, those "Pro" docks were already manufactured, and just got shoved into the Switch OLED boxes-- "here you go!"

Of course, Nintendo has denied these rumors, and people like John Linneman are offering a countering theory regarding the docks, that they are just "future proofed"-- which makes no sense to me, since the inevitable "Switch Pro" will ship with its own dock in the box anyway.

It looks like the next false flag catastrophe is going to be a so-called "cyber pandemic": people have already surrendered their most fundamental freedoms for one "pandemic" ("plandemic", "scamdemic"), so the silly name makes sense, stacking on the precedent building I've been warning about on this blog since early 2020.

If you have a half an hour to spare, listen to this: I did, and took some notes.

• I think this false flag will use back doors in Windows and other operating systems. This session starts off by warning that the apparently impending "cyber pandemic" will be like the 2003 malware disaster, but much larger in scope. I was working tech support at Best Buy that year, and the reason that worm was so bad was because Windows XP was a piece of junk: 100% of the "infected" systems were Windows XP installations, we had a whole room of them. Windows 10 / 11 are a million times more secure-- hence why this will probably be back door-driven


• The first "guest" was some dude named David Koh-- a government bureaucrat from Singapore. He emphasized that now that the WuFlu has made "us" all "dependent on digital services", that they all need to be "viewed as essential." And since they are "essential", there is "collective responsibility" to
  "optimize the full potential of the digital economy" and "increase the cyber hygiene of all internet users". I'd never heard that term before: it's a scary one, and again cleverly chosen.


• He also said that the threat will have a "constantly changing nature", and that as a result there will need to be "close cooperation between all stakeholders". In other words, it will be endlessly convenient moving of goal posts, just like they did with the WuFlu.


• Next up was some typically thin-lipped Australian female bureaucrat-- the sort who is locking people in camps in Sidney-- named Michelle Price, from some group called "AustCyber". She talked about "Quadtech", a "special network between Australia, the United States, India, and Japan". I don't know if she meant computer network or not, since she then went on the blab about "collaboration" and "think tanks".


• She emphasized repeatedly that "public / private partnerships are critical"-- so, Fascism. She said that they would need to "ensure trust" and "ensure availability"-- not sure if "trust" means authentication between systems, or "public trust" in whatever the heck they're doing? She also threw out the term "trusted market". She ended by exclaiming, with an obvious "duper's delight" smile that "we're living a cyber pandemic right now!"


• The next speaker was a Jew in Israel named Gil Shwed, who is the CEO of some company called "Check Point Software Technologies". This guy was just there to get rich selling network equipment, as all he had to say repeatedly was that "we" need to "build infrastructure"-- which of course, his company conveniently makes as he pointed out. He said that with this "cyber pandemic" that "every attack will be a new mutation"-- another WuFlu precedent, moving goal posts. This time, it'll be his company selling the endless "booster shots."


• Finally, there was by a mile the scariest person present: a DC Swamp creature named Clara Tsao. Her job title was "Global Shaper". Speaking of shapes, her face was shaped like a fleshless human skull, sort of like the "scream mask"-- and she had this bright red lipstick on. Her eyes were solid black. As she spoke, in between every single pause her face would elastically snap into this huge, fake ear-to-ear lip-filled bright red grin, like "Joo Dee" from "Avatar: The Last Airbender".


• She was immediately teed up by Samir Saran, the host. Almost the first word he threw out was "infodemic"-- yet another new term! "We're seeing all of this fake news, post-truth (?), misinformation, and synthetic data (?)." What does Joo Dee think about all of this?


• The first thing she says is that it's the "most vulnerable" who are suffering-- those darned old people, clicking on Fox News! She explains that she's a "disinformation researcher" (and I'm the Queen of England), who came "through a White House program". She then postures about her care for small businesses-- I guess like how Davos initiated the world's largest wealth transfer in history to multi-billion dollar corporations during the WuFlu scamdemic?


• "An example of these problems are all of the 'misinformation' regarding mask wearing." So, she's referring to Dr. Fausti in March of 2020, then? Then she threw out that term again: "cyber hygiene." Clearly, they all got the memo on that one.


• She then made the most disingenuous series of statements spoken during the entire half hour, that plastic grin glued onto her face the entire time: in the span of two sentences, I listened in amazement as she pivoted from "none of our infrastructure is secure", to "no one is trusting our election systems even though they are totally secure." Her mid-stream 180 degree pivot was scary enough, but for anyone who watched the Maricopa Audit as I did, her statements were patently absurd too.


• The presentation concluded with what the "new ideal" should be, so that "everyone can work together". Once again, "public / private partnership" will be key-- so, think multi-billion dollar corporations violating the Nuremberg Code with their employees, at the government's behest: governments and corporations caring about our health!


• The most interesting question came from the host: "Do you think citizens trust enterprises enough?" The Australian woman responded by first saying that the "word 'trust' needs to be 'redefined'", and that the "old version", "from the 1960s", just doesn't work anymore. I need to get out my globalist decoder ring to decipher what she meant by that. But second, she said that they can get citizens onboard by "leveraging psychology", since "people already use and trust technology."

So there you have it-- hopefully these notes will be helpful to people; there is a significant chance that the next manufactured crisis will take this direction.

Titles like those from the "Fallout" series, or "The Outer Worlds", have computer terminals in them which reveal all of the evil things the in-world corporations do, via what amount to secret email chains. This reads like straight out of one of those games.

Marxist radical lefties are almost universally the writers for those kinds of video games, so they love making fake evil companies. But in real life, they are one hundred percent behind companies like Pfizer! "Get the 'vax', you bigot!"

The Bible is filled with God delivering messages and miracles through prophets. In a student Bible I've been reading, the supplementary commentary asks, "Who is God speaking through today? Have you seen God performing miracles in today's world?"

Yesterday, there was a crew working on the addition project. My wife kept noticing one of them, a youthful looking fellow who was singing and practically dancing as he worked: he looked like the happiest person she had ever seen. At the end of the day, he needed to come into the house to unplug an extension cord he had run.

As he was departing, something he said caused a voice in my head to tell me, "mention that you've returned to Jesus." This prompted the most incredible exchange I've ever had in my life.


Death and Return

He explained to me that he has had several experiences in his life, where God revealed things to him. He had a first marriage, which he divorced, abandoning his children as he moved out of state. Some years ago, he collapsed on the floor, totally dead: heart was not beating.

His wife, hysterically sobbing and panicking, called an ambulance. Meanwhile, he was literally outside of his body, looking down on his body in the casket, at his funeral. "It wasn't even like a dream-- it was real, as real as you and me standing here right now." He could feel the presence of Jesus standing behind him. Next to him was his eldest son-- one of those he had abandoned: crying.

He suddenly saw every mistake he'd made in his life, played before him like a movie. He turned to Jesus, and said "God, I know I've messed up, I know I've sinned, I know I've left my children. You've come to take me back to you, and I accept that. I don't deserve another chance. But please, please give me one more chance!"

Suddenly, he woke up, was staring at the ceiling. He leapt to his feet, stumbling and gasping for breath. His wife, completely astonished, grabbed him, told him that an ambulance was on the way. They ran tests and scans on him in the hospital, whereafter the doctor, almost fumbling for words, explained what had happened.

"You quite literally tore an artery in your neck. People do not come back from this. Me and the other doctors were in the other room, trying to explain how this is possible: you physically should not be alive right now. This is a miracle."

After this, he abandoned his business, and told his wife: "We're moving back to Minnesota. Start looking for houses. I don't care about my business, or anything else: God will take care of all of that. I need to go back to my kids."


A Second and Third Miracle

He had a friend who had broken two bones in his hand. After multiple surgeries, his friend still could not bend the hand. "Let me try to say a prayer for you over the phone, and ask God to help your hand heal." He said the prayer, and suddenly his friend exclaimed, "Oh my God! Oh my God! I can bend my hand! I can move it again!"

He couldn't even believe it himself at first: a prayer had literally healed his friend, right in that moment.

Some time later, his eldest son-- one with whom he had been re-united, and for whose safety he had been praying daily-- was driving in the dark. As he was passing through a juncture, he realized that car headlights were right on top of him, about to smash into his door: one of them had missed a stop sign! He closed his eyes, preparing himself for death-- but then, no impact. He looked to his right, and saw the brake lights of the other car, the driver very obviously just as confused and disoriented as he was.

He explained to his father: "Dad, with the way that intersection was situated, there was quite literally no way we could have missed each other. The headlights were feet away, shining straight into my window! The other car passed through me, or the other way around-- there is no other possible way."


Revelations

He laid his hand on my shoulder, and said a prayer over me and my household.

I know it sounds strange, but there is no way his words weren't divinely inspired: the things he said in that prayer, the way the words just came to him, and how closely the subsequent things he revealed to me fit exact questions I had without me having spoken a word, not to mention the timing of him arriving-- in a period of incredibly intense stress I've been in the last several days-- is too much to be a coincidence.

• The first thing he reminded me of was St. Peter, walking on water: he was fine! Until he took his eyes off of Jesus, and started looking at the boat and elsewhere-- then he started to sink. "If you keep your eyes on Jesus alone, God will close some doors and open others, for you." I have been under immense stress, worrying that I will lose my career due to the clot shot mandates. Through this man, God told me exactly what I needed to hear.


• Next, he told me to open the Bible, and read Psalms 91. With how the world is today, I have been so worried about my kids falling prey to temptation. After he left I did read Psalms 91, and it gave me the perfect message to use for a talk with my children.


• After that, he told me that I will hear a lot about denomination this, denomination that-- that I will hear different interpretations of scripture, meant to distract me from scripture's core meaning. He told me to remember that all who believe in Jesus are brothers and sisters. This was clearly a direct rebuke of what I'd written at the very end of this blog post-- but of course, the man had no idea I even had a blog, much less anything I'd written!


• He explained to me that we are, in fact, in the end times. He was worried-- "I could be wrong, but this is what I think"-- that the "vaccine" was the mark of the beast, and that there will be a total of seven shots to complete the mark. We're on shot three right now, but they keep talking about future booster shots.

Conclusion

I'm not necessarily saying that this man was a modern-day prophet or anything so dramatic-- but just like what happened a couple of weeks ago in the rain, God sent someone directly to me, to teach me some lesson I needed to learn, right when I needed to learn it.

I shouldn't have done this, but on a whim this morning I called the Target in town-- one of only two video game-carrying stores within a seventy mile radius of my house-- to see if they had any. Well...



I shouldn't have done it: I have an almost seven hundred dollar Steam Deck showing up early next year, and "Switch Pro" will probably also be out by the end of the next year-- which I'll also buy, for sure. On the flip-side, I have my fortieth birthday in nine days, and I sure as heck have the cash for it now that I have no mortgage and minimal bills.

Why not treat myself? Shame it wasn't the white one: but I've always liked the two-toned controllers anyway. Beyond the screen, the battery on my current unit is terrible by now, I have "drift" in one of my joy-cons, and they've actually fixed the "drift" with these latest joy-con renditions.

I did buy it on one stipulation however: that I won't open it until my actual birthday. So I won't be posting any pictures or anything until sometime after that. My copy of "Metroid Dread" also showed up today, so I'll be starting that over the weekend on my current Switch.

I mentioned previously that I've been playing "New World". It has a pretty cool graphics engine-- like all games of this type it's somewhat low-tech compared to the bleeding edge, but is still leaps and bounds over other games in the genre, like "The Elder Scrolls Online".







Here you can even see some cool looking volumetric fog. Yes I know, Unreal had that in 1998-- but it's still a neat effect which isn't commonly used.



The main thing with makes "New World" unique is that control of the map's different regions is constantly being duked out by PvP-flagged players from each of three colored factions. The controlling faction sets the tax rates for that region's town hub, and also does projects to improve the crafting stations.



The game has pretty modern looking water. It obviously just uses screen space reflections, but the resolution is pretty high, and the wave effect is nice.







Unfortunately, being in such a secular society where young people are taught to hate religion, virtually no one picks the faction I did: yellow. They are the religious faction, trying to spread faith in "the spark". The young people don't even get the name: "The Covenant"-- obviously a reference to the covenant God made with his people through Abraham.

Here you can see that yellow is about to get wiped off the map altogether.



It's difficult to capture combat screenshots, but the engine is fully real-time, like a single player game. You get slaughtered if you don't dodge and block. You get two swappable weapons-- I'm using the fire staff as my primary, and a rapier for close-range. Combat is a lot of fun.

Flagging as PvP makes your name and icon above your character turn red in the other players' views. This means that you can get ambushed at absolutely any time, adding a new "head on a swivel" tactical aspect to the gameplay: don't take the main road if you're weak!

I'll write more about "New World" as I continue to progress in it. It's the only MMORPG I've ever had fun with it-- it's all I want to play right now.

This George Clooney quote is instructive:



Everyone wants to be a part of something bigger than themselves. Today's Western world is so decadent, that people are desperately reaching to the point of hilarity for some sort of cause that they can cling to. This is what has led to Cultural Marxism, and Hollywood people equating the importance and heroism of the Normandy Landing with getting the clot shot.

Ironically, one of the key lessons of World War II resulted in the Nuremberg Trials. I guess Mr. Clooney isn't familiar with that one.

It's sort of like this "cloud migration" project I'm steeped in at work. We reached a point with computers back in the early naughts, where they did everything they needed to do: they were supporting "ecommerce" and letting people do their taxes. But in true "landfill economy" style, all of these highly paid IT engineers had to do something with their time to ensure job security-- so now we're making systems almost unsupportably complicated, to create a one percent better ecommerce experience, centralized on the servers of evil multi-billion dollar corporations.

In my daily work, I raise the stock price of a global conglomerate by a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of one percent. Yet they are willing to pay me a six figure income, just to get that miniscule return. "Landfill economy". One of the few observations which Marx got right. Or how about, "the bureaucracy needs to grow to support the growing needs of the bureaucracy."

Same thing with cars: they reached their zenith in the early naughts: they were reliable, didn't pollute anymore, got great gas mileage, and were safe. How then to continue selling new cars? "Landfill economy": start filling them with dorky, distracting "gadgets" and ridiculous "features" which no one asked for. Move the "pollution" goal post to include plant food (carbon dioxide).

Society as a whole operates this way: American was veritably racism-free, as my entire generation was raised to be color blind, to the point where I didn't even notice Obozo was black until it was explicitly pointed out to me. Now? Race and what we don't have in common is all anyone even talks about anymore: regression.

All things follow the same curve: raw, then polished, then perfected-- then tinkered with and destroyed, because rather than move on to something else, people chase the "diminishing return" curve until the changes become counter-productive, whereafter "the thing" actually regresses.

In my personal life, I wrote this blog with like thirty lines of PHP in a weekend, in October of 2007. I haven't touched the code since-- because it works, and it does exactly what I need it to do! It was "perfected"-- I moved on to other things.

Where society needs to go is towards localization: you can still have division of labor benefits, but where IT equipment and other pieces of technology are designed to function locally, and where they can be delivered to local communities, which can then be increasingly self-sufficient-- sort of like how the Enterprise in "Star Trek" delivers high-tech farming equipment to colony planets.

My blog was local to me-- so I reaped the productivity benefits of no longer needing to constantly "enhance" it, directly; whereas today, centralization means that the giant corporations "collectively" see the productivity benefits, while supply-and-demand driven wage labor prices fail to keep pace with central bank-induced (another centralization!) inflation.

The imagery from the first picture in this article is jarring, given the context of the piece itself: it's an aircraft carrier flying the Japanese flag, in the Pacific, and now with the expectation that fixed-wing aircraft will be launching from just such vessels. Takes me back to my "Aces of the Pacific" days.

But that's not what I want to discuss this morning: one thing which has been on my mind is the Pope.

First, an image: picture chief-of-security Worf on the bridge of the Enterprise, expressing more concern for the Romulan vessel about to blast them out of the stars, versus his own ship and crewmates-- for ideological reasons, or because it would get him praise from Romulan extremists on The Twatter.

That's Beijing Biden. That's Cameltoe. That's Chuckie Schumer. That's Nancy Pelosi. That's the CEOs of billion dollar corporations, including my own employer.

These people have no loyalty or moral fabric at all, other than profit and power. They will gladly throw their own people under the bus if it will make them a dime-- outsource, vilify, support domestic terrorists like "BLM" and other racist, anti-white agitators, then import cheap labor and voters via open borders to replace the old, uncooperative-with-their-ideology constituency and employees.

The reason people flock to Donald Trump is because he his platform is based on putting America's interests first: he's like the actual Worf from "Star Trek: The Next Generation"-- the ultimate champion of the ship and its safety.

What does this have to do with the Pope? He should be the ultimate champion of Catholics, the Catholic Faith, the Catholic People, and Catholic Values. Instead, he goes out of his way to throw Catholics and Catholic tradition under the bus, expressing more concern for the people who hate Catholics, than the Catholics themselves!

• He's said repeatedly that Catholics should "apologize to gays". When a Muslim terrorist shot up the Orlando night club, he blamed Christians for not being nice enough to gays. He even once said of gays, "who am I to judge?" Who are you? The Catholic Pope, for Pete's sake!


• He is repeatedly pushing for a one world government, even though that is quite literally a key facet of the "end of times", as described in Revelation.


• He has said that atheists can go to heaven, which is completely and utterly incorrect according to almost four thousand years of scripture and theological analysis.


• He repeatedly appears to support paganism: take a look at idol worship footage like this, or his Nancy Pelosi-like "we need to listen to the cry of the Earth" quotations.


• He repeatedly endorses open borders, in a total distortion of scripture. This is one theological question which I actually know something about, having worked my way through much of the Old Testament: when God told the Israelis to leave food in their fields for "aliens", that was absolutely no endorsement of deliberately sending foreign armies into the Israelite camp, to rape and pillage. When God made his Covenant with the Israelis, he told them to defeat and throw out those who were then in the "land of milk and honey".


• He requires a so-called "green pass" for pilgrims to enter Vatican City. This is another Revelation-endorsement: mark of the devil.


• In response to the Muslim terrorist-perpetrated slaughter of Charlie Hedbo, he had this to say: "...if Mr. Gasparri, my great friend, says a curse word against my mother, he can expect a punch. This is normal... you cannot provoke, you cannot insult other people's faiths, you cannot make fun of faith."


• I've saved these for last, as they are hearsay from an uncorroborated source, but: a prominent Italian journalist was told by the Pope that the latter does not believe that Christ was God-incarnate, and that there is in fact no hell-- souls just "disappear".

People want more Trump from the Pope, and less Beijing Biden-- and you can see this in Mass attendance numbers and the huge drop in seminarians: both were trends before Francis, but they have rapidly accelerated under him.

My impression of Francis is that he has the same basic psychological and personality makeup of a Twatter SJW. This has led him to compromise his own Christian principles with those of the diametrically incompatible "Cultural Marxist" religion. Then, in the heat of interview questions, he is weak like so many "leaders" today, saying what he thinks people want to hear, versus what it actually true.

This also raises a theological question for me: in "Mises 'Regression Theory of Money'" fashion, the Church traces its roots back to Christ Himself, who was the first Pope, and who then blessed the ecclesia-- his disciples-- thus bestowing them with the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit enabled St. Peter to pass the Papal torch to St. Linus, to St. Cletus, and on and on.

In other words, it was an almost Libertarian-like notion of delegated authority, except in this case from God to Christ to Peter, and down the line. This is also why Protestantism misses the mark: just like how government has no natural authority to do ninety-nine percent of what it does, so too did Martin Luther lack the authority to redefine Christianity, throw books out of the Bible which contradicted him, and so forth.

What, then, happened with the appointment of Francis? Indeed, theoretically the current ecclesias are the present-day recipients of the wisdom of the Holy Spirit-- so how then did pretenders and usurpers control the delegation, as is clearly what appears to have happened?

I think the answer is to trust in God: there is a greater plan afoot. But still, the development is troubling for my small mind.

Having always been one of those "first kid on the block" people, I used the "Installation Assistant" to force the Windows 11 upgrade on my gaming PC this morning, and I can't get over how polished it is compared to its abysmal predecessor: this feels like the jump from Windows Me to XP-- it's that large. Everything is so crisp and snappy! That disconnected feeling where Windows and Store updates would "hang" seems like it's been either eliminated, or at least mitigated. I immediately-- as in, fifteen seconds in-- adjusted to the centered "start button" and simplified pinning system.

Of course, that aforementioned comparison breaks down "under the hood" a bit: Me to XP involved a massive kernel shift from legacy "Win9x" to full-fledged NT-- whereas, 10 to 11 involves less "guts" reinvention by comparison, to the point where absolutely everything from my VPN client to my DisplayFusion Pro window position profiles to my Open Hardware Monitor widget "just worked", right out of the box.

They added a "widgets" menu, which flies open on the left-hand side of the screen. I was actually able to add Lazio to the sports one, so I can get to their results and schedule with one click. There is a fake news one which you can't remove or customize-- but if you add three widgets and set them all to large, it gets shoved off the bottom of the screen on a 1080p display, never to be seen again.

Now it's off to fire up New World to check on gaming performance and behavior.

I am not, in fact, dead! I just haven't had much worth writing about lately-- I've already said my piece about video games, economics, politics, the WuFlu, cars, and just about everything else: everything I can say from here will just be repeating myself. I might start writing more about Catholicism, as that is a new topic for me-- but I'm not certain I'm versed enough in theology yet to not sound like a moron.

I've been playing a lot of Amazon's "New World" since it came out a few days ago. I'll do a post dedicated to it, but in general I'm really enjoying it: it's a rare game made for everyone, which actually succeeds at all of the different play styles. For me, I'm almost totally free-wandering around the map, never running out of fun things to do or explore. I'm also going to post my "Metroid Fusion" review soon, right in time for the release of "Dread".

I watched the Maricopa County election audit live presentation, but before I get to the meat of it, let me illustrate the resistance this whole process had from the Left, right up to the YouTube stream descriptions themselves:



My hope from this presentation was that little risk or fraud would be detected: this country has enough problem between the Left opening the border to a full-scale invasion, employing Totalitarian measures against innocent civilians, the full-scale institution of Fascistic corporate-government collusion, trying to destroy the ability for cities to maintain law and order, and the endless pushing of a reverse-KKK worldview. The last thing we need to add is "deliberately broken elections" to the list.

Unfortunately, my worst fears were reinforced: the presentation started out in a promising way, verifying that at least the county did not miscount the ballots, as were supplied to the auditors. The Leftist media was really quick to pick up on these first few slides and run away with them. Unfortunately, the presentation turned into a train wreck immediately after. There is no point in me reproducing their entire presentation, since you can just watch it yourself-- but let me just provide the flavor:

• The various election databases showed massive discrepancies in counts. For example, ~255,000 votes were registered which had no corresponding entries in the "received" file.


• Serial numbers for the ballots were perforated over, making them impossible to read. Many different paper stocks were used somehow.


• The server hosting the election management system had wide open admin user access to everyone who had the password, which was the standard install password for the software, and which was shared across all accounts.


• The election systems were demonstrably connected to the internet at various points. Windows Update and virus definition updates had not been run since 2019.


• The Windows Security logs were purposefully deleted by an admin account. The voting database files were deleted the day before the audit.

Lots of legislation was proposed at the end of the presentation, but as I wrote in the days following the "election", people were deliberately breaking the laws which were already there: passing more laws is not somehow going to magically fix things. Unfortunately there isn't an easy fix for this one, as people acting in this way is an outcome of decades of decadence and moral decay in America's society. Perhaps the introduction of firing squads (partially joking) for anyone who deletes security logs on election servers would provide a strong enough deterrent?

I've been getting to know a lot of the neighbors by the lake very near my house, and a consistent pattern in this rural area versus the urban area where I grew up is just now unbelievably nice the people here are. And I'm not using a watered down version of "nice" either-- I mean, genuinely and authentically nice: pretentiousless.

I was just out for my usual walk down to the lake, and it started to rain. I was in front of a neighbor's house-- we'll just call him "Mark"-- and decided to turn around. I got about three quarters up the road, and heard a car approaching. It was Mark! "Do you need a ride?" "No", I responded, "I'm almost back now. Thanks for offering though, I appreciate it!" "Ok, see you around!" he answered in turn.

Stepping off the road to let his car pass-- I'd naturally assumed he was heading into town, and just happened to see me on the way-- I heard tire noises: a car making a "k-turn". It was then that it hit me: he saw me walking, got dressed, put on his shoes, went out into the rain, hopped in his car, and drove up the road just to give me a ride!

That is the kind of absolute selflessness which I don't know I've ever personally experienced in my whole life. I'm not even family to him: I'm essentially a total stranger! Next time I see him, I am going to thank him profusely. I really think God sent him my way: I was feeling very down about people in general earlier today, so He showed me that there is a lot of good in the world too.

This entire Mark Steyn discourse is worth a read, but the below quote from the "Q and A" portion stuck out to me the most:

My understanding of Fascism is that it views "society" not as a mere shorthand word for the rolled up aggregate of individuals, but as its own organism with its own rights, separate from the human organisms of which it's composed. I thought of that as I read this piece. From the editorial, bold emphasis is mine:



In other words, the flagrant and infuriating double standard-- used purely as a wedge against the Left's political opponents-- was justified as a way to protect "the society organism's" health. In other words, Fascism! From so-called "anti-Fascists". They do this with the border too: "It's too bad your daughter got raped and murdered, but just remember that it's good for society to have millions of illegal immigrants coming in every year."

Interestingly, they also use a Paganistic take on this same formula: that the Earth-- which is just a ball of rock-- is also an organism in and of itself, and if you're opposed to "carbon credits" enriching billionaire Elon Musk, or the shutting down of the Keystone pipeline, or think that denying fossil fuel-powered ambulances to third-world people is not a nice thing to do, that you're "hurting the Earth". Of course, molecules of dirt can't be "healthy or unhealthy"-- they just are. But that's exactly how the Left tries to push their radical environmentalism.

Who can forget Nancy Pelosi's blaming wildfires on "Mother Gaia" being angry with humans?

The danger with this Fascistic line of thinking is that it can be used to rationalize anything; with an individual, it can be objectively proven that eating fifty gallons of ice cream or that having a tumor are bad for an individual's body. But with a "society", which does not have a body, who is to say what's "healthy" or "unhealthy" for it? Ditto for dirt molecules.

Whenever the question of "the greater good", "Mother Earth", or "society" comes into play regarding some proposed measure, the real question is: good for whom specifically within society? Radical environmentalism is good for Obozo's rich, grifting solar panel makers-- not so much for poor people; open borders is good for the billionaires at Amazon and Google who want cheap labor-- not so much for actual American citizens, who eat the inflation created by the welfare expansion; the BLM protestor double standard was good for Chuckie Schumer's power, not so much for flyover American's trust in the government.

And so on.

Imagine that the Ku Klux Klan spent decades co-opting universities, and taught everyone that by nature of their genetics, black homosexual people are evil colonizers.

The students then became elementary teachers so they could brainwash young children with anti-black, anti-gay toddler books; they took over the HR departments, and enacted policies to deliberately hire as many straight white men as possible; they took over media companies, and made sure every film normalized the KKK worldview; they took over the government, and even the military, calling people who complained about the KKK "domestic terrorists".

When you in turn complain about a video game's heroic characters all being Aryan master race blue-eyed "Mary Sue" white males, who run around and slaughter all of the villains and enemies, who all just happen to be black lesbians, I reply to you on Twitter: "What, you don't like having white people in video games? What a snowflake!"

I think most Leftists today who make that kind of argument are feigning ignorance: they are merely trolling with the strawman. But for those among them who legitimately don't get it, well... try exhibiting some empathy using the above mental exercise for practice. And if you still don't get how ridiculous your position is, watch this video.

I have two firearms which I've never even fired due to a lack of ammo-- until a friend sent my wife this URL. Now I've got two hundred and fifty rounds of 5.56 NATO coming for that Springfield Saint Victor I bought some time ago, and plenty of 9mm for the Ruger PPQ Q5 Match as well. Time to go shooting! Our family here have their own backstopped area for hand guns, and even a rifle range.

Onto another topic, regular readers will recall that I wrote extensively about how important it was to not comply with the WuFlu Burqa nonsense, because doing so would give the big "thumbs up" to the power brokers: unless people engaged in disobedience, "vaccine" mandates would be next. Before we put a penny into the addition, I raised the question: maybe we should relocate the family to someplace else, like Florida, Texas, South Dakota, or even Mississippi or Alabama? All I got in response was, "Sniper is such a weirdo! What a whack-job conspiracy theorist! I hate Trump because he said mean things on Twitter, and Kristi Noem is a nutcase!"

Now the "vaccine" mandates are here, and I'm getting "It's too bad we broke ground on the addition, maybe we should relocate to South Dakota? Joe is a despot, and Kristi Noem is the best!" I'm not bringing this up to shame or embarrass anyone, or even to say "I told you so"-- rather, the lesson is simple: people need to stand on principle because it's the right thing to do, not cede ground until it's something which personally causes them discomfort. And believe it or not, I do once in a while have valuable perspective: it might be worth listening to me in the future.

And on to yet another topic, I'm trying to decide whether to even keep my PlayStation 5. Sony billed this as the "Future of PlayStation", and I couldn't even make it twenty seconds in before I started rapidly paging through it to see if there was anything interesting. It was so over-the-top woke and culturally degenerate, and so filled with boring Hollywood walking simulators, that there wasn't a single game on offer I'd even consider buying.

The only actual video game they showed was Gran Turismo 7, and even that appeared to have undergone a significant downgrade when you compare it with that initial trailer-- the trailer which prompted me to pursue the system pre-order in the first place.

As I wrote in my week-one impression, I really like the PlayStation 5 unit, its dashboard (when it's not shoving Left-wing politics at me via its default "Explore" tab), and its controller-- but I'm struggling to see which niche it fills in my console line-up. With Game Pass and superior power, the Series X has the modern gaming thing wrapped up, while the Switch's portable form factor and real game-focused library owns the "old games collection" and indie areas. The only thing Sony's system has is its exclusives, which universally look terrible.

As a parting prank link, and on the "woke and morally degenerate front", check out Alex Battaglia's Instagram account. I always knew there was something a little "off" about him, but I didn't know he was this "out there". I still enjoy the guy's commentary, but let's just say his private life is a bit strange, to put it mildly.

A few weeks ago I decided to return to God: I found a parish in my new area, overcame incredible nerves to confess twenty-plus years' worth of sins to the priest, have been praying and reading the Bible daily, and have been attending Mass every Sunday since.

What a transformation-- I feel like a new man! It's given my life so much meaning and purpose. Even better, I've been taking my daughter with me to Mass, and she likes it so much that she wants to become Catholic!

Every time I say the Lord's Prayer, this line strikes me poignantly: "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is in heaven." We are God's soldiers, His little worker bees down on Earth, and our goal is to construct and bring about His kingdom here. Could there be a more important mission?

Addition project excavation took place a few days ago, it's fantastic that the project finally underway! The new septic tanks are in place, and the hole for the basement portion is fully dug. My property was filled with trucks and giant tractors all week, took up a lot of my time communicating with everyone, on top of my full-time career which was also very busy this past week.





I spent four and a half hours this afternoon slogging through the mud, carefully seeding and raking all three thousand-plus square feet of dirt you see here. I should hopefully get enough grass growth over the next week or two to prevent erosion, particularly around the mounds. I had about twenty pounds of clay caked onto my boots by the end!

Next step will be the concrete pouring, along with the electrician to hook the pump from the lift tank to the main tank, then fluids out to the drain field. From there, the main floor construction can begin! Tomorrow will be mowing, then hopefully after that I can take a couple of days to relax.

I spent some time this afternoon in Flight Simulator flying directly into the major hurricane, from the North. Here is what it looked like as I approached, click for the full size version:



After flying directly through the wall of cloud pillars, this is what I was greeted with on the inside:



I climbed to as high as the Beechcraft Bonanza would let me go without stalling: 12,200 feet-- but it wasn't anywhere near high enough. To see how close I was to the top, I took the drone camera upwards, and several thousand feet yet higher I was greeted with this astonishing view.



I then initiated a slow descent, getting buffeted and ricocheted everywhere, all the way down to 1000 feet-- and even at that low level, visibility was zero. I had to abort my attempt to land near New Orleans, instead heading back to the Northeast for a bit, whereupon I performed a haphazard-yet-successful landing at some small airfield.



Here is my plane, safe and sound after its incredible journey.

This is a very interesting video, in that I see this stuff just about daily in my workplace-- but for some reason, the critical mass of my co-workers don't seem to understand that they are being manipulated towards the goal of instituting Communism.

Any time you hear terms like "ally", "the people's [insert word]", "social democrat", "people of color", "activate", "have a conversation", "equity", "tell a story", or any other myriad expressions, your tail should immediately go up: almost certainly the person saying those things is not only a straight-up Communist, but a radical activist.

Once you peel back the onion and see that individual X, who says they aren't a radical but rather that they just want to "have a conversation", you see that they are cross-board members with both educational institutions, and literal Marxist groups-- as listed on those very organization's web sites, for those who bother to look. They are lying to you in their denial. There is also a lot of overlap with so-called "organized labor".

Speaking of looking people up, I did some quick investigations into this Trevor Louden-- turns out he was very active in his native New Zealand, combating the Soviet influence there in the 1980s.

The "triple-A" space is in a terrible position, something about which I remarked here-- but pleasantly, an entire parallel games industry has emerged, almost totally separate from the "primary" one, and it's cranking out incredible stuff, to the point where for the first time in twenty years I find myself not really playing older games much.

Just take a look at this: it's a brand new Game Boy Advance release, but will also-- provided enough funding becomes available-- see an enhanced, "Hi-Bit" Switch port. Incredible! The art style is mildly pretentious maybe, but not to enough of a degree to annoy me. We've had home brew games on older systems for a long time now, but what if we start seeing old systems used as new systems, with cross-platform releases with modern hardware become a normal thing? Talk about exciting!

The "OptiDoom" guy wants to make a brand new first-person shooter for 3DO, and he already has my name down as level designer and composer-- so I'm willing to do my part. If my baseline mental health improves, I also want to dive head first into making more "Sniperpon Productions" releases but this time for PCs proper, using "Godot Engine" as opposed to Fuze on Switch.

One other trend I'm starting to see, and this one is just as potentially exciting if it continues: indie game mentality trickling into the "triple-A" space. New engines are so capable that smaller development teams can make games with modern graphics on a smaller-ish budget, provided they keep their core scope contained. For instance, these (ignore the annoying music) are the best graphics I've ever seen in a video game-- maybe even better than the latest "Ratchet and Clank"-- yet look at how experimental the gameplay is!

In particular, pay attention to the: texture resolution, particle effects everywhere, volumetric dynamically-lit fog, incredible temporal reconstruction or upscaling, volumetric fluid dynamics and clouds, per-object motion blur, Bokeh depth of field, plus insanely rich and high contrast lighting. Wifey watched this and couldn't even believe it was a game: "it looks like a modern-day CGI movie." I get major "Wonderful 101" and "Splatoon" vibes; more games like this please!

I get that the precedent-based English Common Law system is one of the foundational tenets which led to the formation of contemporary Western society, but precedent isn't everything, as this piece illustrates well. If I proclaim "well, I murdered someone last month, so what the heck", obviously the act of murder is still immoral. I don't care if corporations already mandate other vaccines, nor do I care if somehow FDA approval has formerly meant that everyone views whatever food and drug as being magically safer after that point, along with innumerable other possible examples: wrong is wrong, and each instance of some act needs to be ethically evaluated in a vacuum.

I've already tried to drive this point home before, but I think it's worth restating-- the argument to be made against the WuFlu injections is that it's morally wrong to force someone to undergo a medical "treatment" against their will: full stop. And yes, excluding them from society is "forcing against their will." Even if the WuFlu didn't have a 99.9% survival rate-- let's presume 90% of people die from it, and let's also presume that the "vaccines" actually inoculate-- forcing vaccination is not an acceptable route. There are dozens of other solutions which could mitigate people becoming ill, which are perfectly ethical.

The more I ponder the new Z, the more doubts I start to have. For starters, people who follow the recent car industry more closely than I say that there is zero chance of getting this car for anywhere near forty thousand: dealers will install options, markups will be made, and in practice even the base model is essentially going to be a fifty thousand dollar car, if not even more.

But the bigger issue, and one which led me to extreme dismay regarding this impending model, is what I found at the bottom of the official product page: "automatic braking", "collision warnings", "blind spot warnings", "land departure warnings"-- this car has every nightmare in the books: it's as bad as my mother-in-law's Subaru Forester!

I'm not the only one who gets completely and utterly overwhelmed by all of this gadgetry, check out this article. While it focuses on pensioners, I suspect you would get the same types of responses from many forty year-olds like myself, not to mention a lot of it is personality-driven (bold emphasis is mine):



All of this leads me to: for that kind of money, why in the world wouldn't I just buy a used C7 Corvette, of which they are tons on used car sites? The new Z isn't even on the same planet in terms of performance, and best of all this Corvette generation started in 2014: it doesn't have any of the "safety" stuff at all! It still has a touch screen, which is somewhat annoying, but that's about it.

The base model has 460 bhp, a seven speed manual, can do 0-60 in 3.6 seconds, pulls 1.03g on the skidpad, and can brake from 60 to 0 in 100 feet. Those are supercar numbers. I can get one for fifty thousand bucks, with less than seven thousand miles on it: essentially a brand new car. It's also exotic looking. The only downside I can think of is that I see a lot of them in my rural area. But I shouldn't let that dissuade me.

Food for thought.

This Ron DeSantis guy is absolutely the best. Of course, I can answer his question regarding why Xiden couldn't care less about American citizens trying to escape Afghanistan, but wants Federal stormtroopers to strap masks onto Kindergartners against those kids' parents' wills.

Present-day Democrats are only concerned with furthering ideological goals. Afghanistan provides them with another opportunity to flood America with Democrat-voting aliens-- so when you see that plane shot, with the hold filled with foreigners, that's what it's about. Beyond that, the Democrats don't care about Afghanistan, they hold their own citizens in contempt anyway, so yes, why would Xiden interrupt his vacation to provide safety for them? Raggedy Ann put foreign nationals in the same category as US citizens when saying whom would get priority at the airport during a press conference, and that tells you everything you need to know.

Regarding Kindergartners, The Ideology requires absolute conformity to its pantheon of beliefs, and that requires not just that children to be subjected to indoctrination by the "teachers", but that the children are taught to submit and obey: here are the right answers, here is the proper way to view the world, now shut up, memorize, and regurgitate. I have a family member who has been in different prisons, so I've seen those places from the inside while visiting-- and when I see shots of kids in schools today, masked, hands by their sides, forced to stand feet apart, I observe that my family member literally has more freedom in prison then these kids do in "school". And that is by design.

So in the contemporary Democrat worldview, the Kindergartners thing literally is a higher priority than Afghanistan, and it's easy to see how if you view it through the lens of their religion.

Here it is, finally and officially. Nissan's social media rep repeatedly responded to YouTube comments asking about price with "starting around forty thousand". I'll go test drive one of these in the spring, and if I like it, I'll buy it. Apparently they're offering two trims, but even though I could technically afford the higher-end one, it's tough to justify so much money for a car: so I'll get the cheaper one, replacing a blue Z with another blue Z.

This new Z is everything I have been dreaming about for a decade: four hundred horse power, a manual transmission, and a modernized design take-- the back end especially, as in my book the 300ZX has always had a top three rear of any car, ever.

If I don't like it, I'll go try out the new Toyobaru "GR 86": it's obviously not in the same power class as the new Z, but I've heard it's just as pleasant to drive as the current generation MX-5. The new WRX reveal got pushed back to September, and while one of those would be more practical given my wintry rural setting with sketchy plowing, I'm not impressed with the long-term build quality of my wife's, and I really want another sports car, having been obsessed with them since about age three.

I've been carefully watching everything my employer's HR department has been saying with regards to the WuFlu, and it doesn't look like they are going to mandate the injections. It's difficult to anticipate though, since from day one they have been making one unscientific and unsubstantiated statement after another:



Apparently some Karens are complaining, and the company is telling them to suck it up. In isolation this is a good thing, but fully recognize that it's because they are worried profits are about to take a huge hit due to Xiden's price inflation-- not because they are suddenly concerned with being rational regarding the WuFlu itself.



"Safe and effective", huh?

On the first point, the VAERS database says otherwise. In fact, people who have had the WuFlu and "recovered"-- you know, from the sniffles-- like me are almost four times more likely to have an "adverse effect": you know, like death. This is why the shots need to be on a person-by-person basis, as they are not blanket "safe" for everyone.

As for "effective", take a look at Israel: "the cases, the cases!" Except, 80% of their country has had two doses of the various injections. Or what about that recent cruise ship outbreak where everyone had the shots? Or how about in Massachusetts, where 74% of the infected had the shots?

And by the by, the people who have had the shots are still spreading pathogen, just like the people who haven't had the injections.



Oh oh, someone has been asking too many questions: "But I thought the CDC said...?" And here it comes: "Yup, better wear a mask even if you've had the shots." But in the paragraph above, they said the injections are "effective"? So why would I need to wear a mask if I've had the shots? Hello?

And about those masks: cloth and surgical masks do not prevent the spread of viruses. So what in the world does that have to do with making the office "safer"?

But here comes the real kicker: the company prohibited use of the office for months-on-end, because it was way too dangerous for anyone to work there. Now, they say that the risk of working there was "medium to low" all along. If that was true, then why was it ever closed? What does "medium" or "low" even mean, incidentally? By what metrics? Did they do studies? What kind of science is applied to come up with those terms?

In any event, now they are saying that the risk of working in the office is "almost zero." Almost zero! Because people are taping a Kleenex to their nose, and have had mysterious injections which don't stop them from transmitting or catching the virus. The office went from "so dangerous it had to be closed" to "almost zero risk", and nothing actually changed-- other than rising input cost inflation!

Then they drop the myth about it being the people who haven't had the shots being the ones spreading pathogen, which as I illustrated above-- and can with a dozen other sources and examples-- is simply not true. In fact, the data suggests to the guy who invented this "vaccine" technology that people who have had the shots are spreading the virus at an increased rate, versus those who haven't.

One last thing: notice how there are zero sources linked to any of the above. It's all unsubstantiated, pulled out of their rear ends, simply because they are afraid of profits dropping-- not because they care about their employee's health in any way, shape, or form.

This goes for all governments, corporations, and so on: you need to be your own champion, stand your own ground, and make the health choices which are right for your body, and your own situation.