I've been thinking a lot about my career, and how I can re-animate it. I haven't made any decisions yet, but I may need to make some substantial alterations to what I'm doing now:

• Retire this web site, and make an apolitical blog focused purely on video games and technology.


• Get invested in the iOS ecosystem so that I can be "first-in" when their Augmented Reality glasses hit. This means moving to a MacBook Pro, and an iPhone.


• Write the new site in .Net Core, doing the development on a MacBook Pro, using some modern JavaScript framework, and host it on Azure.


• Become an expert-- and I don't use that term lightly-- on iPhone and Augmented Reality development.


• Dabble in robotics and AI development as well, keeping my skills up-to-date.

I had a good run talking about politics, particularly during my twenties and very early thirties. But when I look back at my writing over the past few years, I've really contributed nothing to the subject, as I think I've said my piece already.

As for technology, along with real-time POV-RAY another one of my childhood dreams has been Geordi La Forge's visor. Obviously, at consumer price levels Apple's incoming glasses aren't going to be able to see in infrared or something insane like that-- but the overall concept is basically the same. I think within five years, Augmented Reality glasses are going to be like the iPhone: everyone will be wearing them. And I think it would be a lot of fun to ride that wave on the development side.

So far as Android is concerned, that operating system was really cool in its early days when Google was in fact a noble company. But these days, I don't trust it anymore than I do iOS: I think it's a lateral move. As for GNU/Linux, MacOS is functionally close enough for me. As for Windows 10, the sooner I can say "sayonara" to that, the better; after all, I have the Series X for Microsoft's game ecosystem.

Another option would be a middle ground-- the Vee approach: have one set of professional, visible social media accounts for work, where you say all of the "right" things, and then have a hidden, secondary set of private accounts under pseudonyms. In my case, that would mean keeping the Gab account and this site, while having a parallel web site under my real name, along with real-name accounts on The Twatter, LinkedIn, and elsewhere.

The timing for all of this is nice as well, because once the bug out house addition is complete, I will be moving into a generous nearly twelve-by-twelve foot bedroom in the basement: this will make a nice laboratory of sorts, where I can run desks around much of the perimeter, with different sections devoted to different areas of study.

If you're squeamish, don't watch this, or read on any further.

I wasn't watching this match and I'm just catching up on highlights plus replays and such now, so I can only imagine the suspense: his face is towards the camera, and it's obvious that he's quite literally dead-- completely lifeless, haunting eyes. At that moment, it's like watching a ghost: he's gone. The ironic thing for him is that what saved his life was that the inevitable happened on a football pitch, with trained equipped medics seconds away, versus later on in bed that night like with Davide Astori.

He's a player who has struggled to replicate the form of his earlier years, and maybe now we know why: he probably developed a heart condition a few years ago and wasn't aware of it. Of course, he'll never play football again ala Fabrice Muamba-- but the important thing is that he's alive, plus he's such a talented guy he has a million other things towards which he can excel. And now that he knows about his heart and can get the proper treatment or surgery, he could live to be ninety years old.

Besides that, the twenty-nine year old started senior football as a teenager: that's an over decade-long professional career, playing at the highest levels. In other sports, that would be considered a super long time from where one could build an entire "hall of fame" resume-- so he shouldn't have any regrets: it's as if he had a catastrophic knee injury or something, and the doctors say he shouldn't run on it anymore. I'm sure he'll be amazing at whatever he decides to do in life next: apparently he's very upbeat in the hospital, and doing very well.

Tough to believe that Maurizio Sarri is the Lazio coach: in my mind, it's still totally uncertain and unofficial-- I must have post-traumatic stress problems from the Inzaghi backstabbing!

Every reform I've been wanting for years, Sarri is pushing for, such as a small squad over a large one, then using that money to focus on closing the quality gap between starters and reserves. It's like Lotito needed to hear these things from an outside name whom he respects.

As for the Mercato, the names to which we're being linked took an instant elevation given the coach's profile: I'm hearing Stevan Jovetic, Nikola Maksimovic, Matija Nastasic, Josip Ilicic, Mattia De Sciglio, Davide Zappacosta, Elseid Hysaj, and many others as being real possibilities.

Exciting times!

On a totally unrelated note, it's incredible living full-time in a rural area. When I skim the news now, it feels like I'm reading about a different planet, so far removed am I from the destitution of the urban setting. I should have packed up the family and shifted them here a long time ago.

It's difficult to overstate just how pathetic the video game industry is right now. My standard is "something which will blow my mind"-- think "Mario 64". If you can't meet that, then "something which looks like fun even if it is boring and second order." If you can't meet that, then "doesn't have totally offensive aesthetics or politics", which is about the lowest bar possible.

Out of all of the games shown at "E3" so far, zero percent-- literally not even one game-- gets over the first bar. Maybe ten percent of them-- think "Forza Horizon 5"-- fit that second category. The rest meanwhile can't even get over the lowest-of-all-bars, being actively repulsive in some way-- usually on the "woke factor" scale, but sometimes in other manners as well.

The YouTube chat seemed to mirror my opinion. I'm genuinely surprised the video game industry hasn't had another crash like it did in the 1980s: how many times can people re-buy "Halo" deathmatch with a fresh coat of paint, or "Assassin's Creed Six Hundred", or drive cars through corn fields with five percent prettier graphics, before they just find better things to do with their time?

I loosely followed "E3" yesterday and, judging by the real-time YouTube chat sessions, the glaring disconnect between the super bizarre, cringey soy boy and pink-haired SJW presenters plus game designers, and the average person who actually plays video games, has never been wider: hundreds of comments scrolled by describing the pre-rendered CGI nonsense as "boring", page after page of "cringe" and "woke" or "libtards" when character designs were shown, and so forth.

Professional video game people live in their own bubble, just like the East and West Coast elites with regards to actual politics.

The most interesting example contrasting games of yore and the contemporary hobby come in the form of the "Final Fantasy VII" remake: the original game was technologically and artistically groundbreaking-- it was a landmark cultural moment. The whole game was made in about two years, and took thirty or forty hours to play through. The remake, by contrast, is technologically mediocre-at-best, has no notable aesthetic accomplishments, has orchestra-remixed music which removes all of the personality from those pieces, and it took five years to make yet only contains a tiny fraction of the story! And that tiny fraction is so bloated that it takes thirty hours just to get through, all by itself.

Now they're evidently re-making the re-make to take advantage of the PlayStation 5. Maybe it'll be like "Grand Theft Auto V": we'll have "Final Fantasy VII" remake getting rehashed over and over during the next eight years. I marathoned the original "Final Fantasy VII" the week it came out back then, and really liked it-- but I've already played it: why can't the game developers come up with a new cultural phenomenon, instead of riding indefinitely on the coat tails of the previous ones? Further, who is asking for these remakes anyway? It's like an entire generation of people are "stuck" in their childhoods and just can't move on.

In any event and back to "E3", Microsoft's presentation is today at noon, while we'll probably and finally find out what the "Switch Pro" is, on Tuesday.

This is the most important video Vee has ever done. Yes, he's been at the bleeding edge of "Cultural Marxism" and "Wokeness" too, but arguably the topic of the aforelinked video is why those ideologies are being pushed.

Almost all of my direct co-workers have fallen for this ploy and the CEO is all-in, but I guess that isn't a surprise since they were all taping paper towels to their faces and getting injected with experimental cocktails from multi-billion dollar drug corporations with no legal liability, and with who-knows-what long-term side effects, just to avoid getting the sniffles.

I think the reason people are susceptible to this is the same reason people bought mortgage backed securities back in the day, or why a dog swallows a heart worm pill wrapped in cheese: if you package a turd in an outwardly attractive package, gullible people low in the ability to think critically will eat it.

I did a budget yesterday and I would need to make about twenty dollars per hour to break even, with a cut-down budget. Of course, this would mean no money for car repairs, emergency vet bills, and no hobbies other than free "ebooks". In that way, Dr. Strangelove Schwab has already won: either I get with the program and have money but no sanity, or I ditch the program and have sanity but no money.

Like the world's worst "Mega Man" boss, holy buckets is this Fausti guy a liar: in 2018 he presented a slide which was titled "NIH Lifts Funding Pause on Gain-of-Function Research". The slide's bullets explained that along with this resumption, a committee would be created to decide which projects to fund.

Obviously, this was terrible: why was the United States government once again investing in research regarding how to modify animal viruses so that they could infect humans? Isn't that as flagrantly evil as all of the back-room research going on during World War II?

But here is how Fausti explained the very slide, as it was being shown to his audience, bold emphasis is mine:



How stupid did he think his audience was? "Who do you believe, me or your own eyes?" This would be like me putting up a slide which says I'm going to gun pedestrians down with my car, then explaining to the room "No, no, all this means is that I'm going to sit in my car behind the steering wheel and decide where to point the car."

The one thing I've learned about this Fausti dude over the past couple of years is how sleazy he is at employing rhetorical tools: I'd even go so far as to say he's a master at it, and this is a good example.

To play devil's advocate, I am trying to track down that full clip-- perhaps in the following sentences he explained himself more fully. I'll post again if I'm able to find it-- but let's just say that I doubt it, based on his tone in the above quote.

Here is an assortment of topics for your reading enjoyment.


WuFlu-Related Corruption

Yet another Tucker Carlson monologue worth a listen. Gee, you don't think this exact same scenario has been playing out with the so-called "anthropogenic climate change" scene as well, do you?

Skeptics of the skeptics often use the non-argument "but how could all of these people have been in on it, and not said anything?" Easy: the same way they all went around wearing WuFlu Burqas for a year, in spite of the fact a huge percentage of them were non-believers of the Branch Covidian faith; the same way people like me keep their mouths shut at work while Woketopia takes over; the same reason even privately ardent opponents of the Kim regime snitch on their other twenty four million neighbors in North Korea; and on and on.

It's called "fear". It's called "groupthink". It's called "conflicts of interest". It's pretty easy to put in place if the conditions are right and people have been properly prepared.

My favorite part of this was how the guys who created the letter discussed in the monologue went on to repeatedly reference what was behind-the-scenes their own letter as proof in support of their position. It reminds me of this Google-related confirmation bias post I wrote a few years ago.

Incidentally, it's interesting reading that post again, because my prediction came absolutely true to such a degree that its "spill-over" effect has even impacted DuckDuckGo, which is totally unreliable today as it farms results from other search engines. Gab is essentially my search engine today: it's the only way I can find "verboten" information.

Gab is incredible, by the by: I will post an opinion which has gotten me mocked, called names, and ridiculed-- even silly little things like "I like Phantasy Star III more than IV", believe it or not-- and the first responses I get on Gab are, "Yeah, me too!" I've never been surrounded by such like-minded people, in every way, as on that site, to the point where I'd never had many of my own tastes mirrored back to me ever, in my entire life, until subscribing there.

But back to the topic: people often ask "what is the 'deep state'?" It's people mentioned in this Tucker monologue, and thousands of more like them all over the place: Statists who mistakenly charted a State due to what Thomas Sowell called the "unconstrained vision", thinking it would represent the interests of them-- instead, cronies instantly take over this foolishly-granted monopoly on force, and use it to further their self-interests. That's the "deep state".


Evil Corporations

Take a listen to this video, and tell me corporations aren't evil. I've noticed over the months that Vee has come off of his "multi-billion dollar unaccountable corporations" line, probably because people like me were criticizing him for it in the comments-- but he was right, I deserve a big plate of crow. I'm after the truth, not pride: the Bernie Bros. can watch me eat it for all I care.

I recently wrote a post about how, in a way of thinking, labor unions "plug a loophole" in the corporation model, and I think that now more than ever.

"Corporations" are play-pretend, government-created entities where the State apparatus grants them collective liability-- i.e. "limited liability". But the profits are not collectively distributed: they go to the top, and are doled out in the form of salaries by the internal oligarch "executives". Further, employees have virtually no say in how the company is run: they are ordered what to do in top-down hierarchical fashion, like a military.

In other words, the internal oligarchs at corporations reap the private profits, but collectivize the risk. Sound familiar?

I would be one hundred percent ok with the State, tomorrow, enacting a law forcing all corporations to submit to immediate labor unions within their organizations: after all, the corporations are already "fake" State-created phenomena, why not just go all the way and stop them from having their cake and eating it too?

Of course, what would happen is that the unions would destroy the corporations by hamstringing those company's abilities to control their cost structures-- and over time, all of the corporations would go bankrupt. From there, all of the businesses would become private, which means smaller and more distributed: both profits and risk would be private.

Naturally, none of this would ever happen because the CEOs and politicians are all in it together: that's what Fascism as an economic system is, and that's what we have. Almost no one will bite the hand which feeds them.


Burnout

Is it bad that I took the "Maslach Burnout Inventory" and got the following one hundred percent honest scores?

• Section A: 37
• Section B: 29
• Section C: 22

These numbers are off-the-charts apparently: for reference, the cut-off for "high-level burnout" in the sections, in order, are "30 and up", "12 and up", and "33 or less". There's essentially not a day which goes by, during which I don't wonder if I'm going to outright collapse in some way.

My workplace has these huge glass walls and rows of glass-windowed offices down a long hallway, near some escalators: I used to fantasize about taking a baseball bat or an axe, running down the line, and watching the glass cascade down in sheets. Of course, I never got close to doing it, but I often wondered if I'd get bad enough where I would-- and that was more than five years ago, way back before I'd started working from home!

What finally prompted me to get the "work from home arrangement" from HR was that I was derealized to the point that on a daily basis weird visual phenomena were frequently occurring-- veritably like stress-induced hallucinations: as an example, in a "one-on-one" meeting with my manager at the time, her head looked huge, like some sort of gigantic, crude, misshapen, freckled, moon-shaped flesh balloon! Needless to say, I wasn't comprehending a word she was saying, and almost broke out laughing in the middle of the "conversation" due to how bizarre her appearance was!

One time the derealization randomly went away in the middle of a meeting: for the first time in at-the-time nearly ten years-- much longer than that now-- I felt normal, for about two seconds: I could feel the warmth from the window, the smells in the conference room, actual emotions-- and I came within inches of screaming in terror, at which point the blanket went over me again. I'm not sure which set of triggers caused that to happen, because I'd love to try to reproduce the effect to see if I can get a larger window of insight-- not to mention how relieving it felt, even if it was scary too.

I think this all stems from undiagnosed Asperger's, which has led me into untenable career choices and social situations. No one ever sees it because I'm so good at faking it, in the interest of being the tireless little soldier who doesn't complain. For example, I was clinically (mis)diagnosed with "Generalized Anxiety Disorder"-- because I don't stim or exhibit many outward facing characteristics. "GAD" as a diagnosis means "we don't know what the hell is wrong with you."

Some day things will go sideways enough that it forces a change-- until then, I'll keep on with the six figure income and horde as much cash, crypto, precious metals, ammo, and other durable goods as possible.

I thought I would get emotional or nostalgic when stepping out of my Murderapolis house for probably the last time ever, after having lived there for over fifteen years-- but I felt nothing, despite having raised my two kids from birth there: no nostalgia, no sense of anything left behind, no positive memories-- it was like walking out of a gas station. I shrugged, sat down in my car, and drove away.

There is another round of layoffs happening at my company, this month. I really wish they would let us volunteer for those. I hope I get cut, but I have such good performance reviews-- top three-or-so percent of the entire enterprise last fiscal year-- that I don't think it will happen.

Add on the stress of the addition project and moving, and that's why I haven't been recording videos. I'll get back to it in the coming weeks.

Up until now, I had no idea English football had gotten this bad; I tuned it out a decade ago after I got bored with the "banging two rocks together" tactics, and went all-in on the Italian game-- but had I stuck with it, I'd for sure be dumping it now: there is no way I would pay money for tickets or even watch matches on television with giant "BLM" signs everywhere.

If Lazio ever pulled this stunt, it'd be the last time I watched them. Thankfully though, and say what you will about Italian culture at large, Italy is essentially immune from this sort of nonsense-- and especially Lotito, who is pragmatic enough at least to understand how alienating this junk is: he'd never see the Curva filled again.

One important addendum: Paul forgot to mention that this whole knee business started with Crapperdick, in direct response to "could have been my son" and "hands up, don't shoot", both of which were colossal lies. Even if you remove the "BLM" factor itself, the knee thing has been nonsense from day one: since then, think Jussie Smollett, Breonna Taylor, Bubba Wallace, Fentanyl Floyd... it's all one big false narrative.

I've been picking my way through Linneman and Audi's "Quake" video, and am finding it to be unsatisfying-- not because the material isn't exceptional, but rather for the reason that more than any other game in my life, "Quake" holds a special place for me: at the risk of sounding cheesy, I have my own "story" with it, and no video made by someone else can come close to representing my view of that title.


Childhood

My dad and I assembled an IBM PC Clone kit in 1989-- a 386SX with 4 meg. of RAM-- and I played a ton of EGA DOS games on that system. We didn't have a sound card or even a mouse: it was strictly a DOS PC. In 1991 we bought a Gravis Gamepad-- which was the standard PC controller all the way until the late 90s-- and it came bundled with this game called "Commander Keen: Invasion of the Vorticons", which introduced me to a new company called "id Software". Up until something like 1997, my friends and I all pronounced it "Eye-dee", not knowing any better.

I recall being home sick from elementary school one day, playing my way through that first "Commander Keen" episode. I really liked the minimalistic, evocative artwork, and that the character was thematically reminiscent of "Calvin" from "Calvin & Hobbes"-- a comic strip I was obsessed with at the time.

I was ten in 1992 when "Wolfenstein 3D" came out, and my best friend at the time and I played it non-stop: we both had the official hint guide with all of the maps in it-- it was one of the first video games I truly fell in love with, and I still play it all of the time.


Doom

Via a screenshot in a printed mail order catalog of what I later found out was an "imp" throwing a fireball, I realized that the guys who made "Wolf3D" had made a new game, apparently called "Doom". A few days later, my dad walked into the house with a floppy of the shareware version. I played it for maybe a half an hour, shrugged-- "Meh"-- and went back to the aforementioned Nazi killing predecessor: in that first impression, I much preferred the more colorful style of "Wolf3D", the human enemies with actual voice acting, the flat levels, and so forth.

But, I gave this latest id release a second chance, then a third, and it grew on me to the point where it eventually became one of my favorite games. I even bought a thick hint guide with all of the maps in it, and made some levels of my own which my best friend and I would play via modem-to-modem. Of course, our parents would mess up our "deathmatches" by picking up the phone half the time, but that was part of the charm and novelty of that era: what we were doing shouldn't have been possible in the first place!

Incidentally, it's hard to overstate how scary "Doom" was at the time, especially for a kid my age. I remember standing outside the door where you encounter the first "pinky demon", hearing that snarling sound effect, and just not wanting to open the door: some of these enemies were as big as the player, and almost as fast!

The map editors in those days-- I think the one I used was called "Deep"-- required you to draw the "sectors" in a counter-clockwise manner, otherwise they wouldn't render correctly in the game. "Doom" level editing in those early days was very time consuming, as just making two hallways with a door between was cumbersome, especially if you wanted to change a sector later-- have fun re-drawing half the map.

One time I made a level with a one-way invisible wall, adjoining a hallway filled with barrels, with the "hidden" part accessible only via a secret door. I played my friend and kept pot-shotting him with the pistol, or damaging him by blowing up barrels: he had no idea how he was even taking damage! "Who is shooting me??" I could see him, but he couldn't see me! Finally, he caught me going into the secret door, and the gig was up.


Quake

About this time, John Romero was writing a lot on his .plan file about this new game they were working on, where you could move all of your limbs separately-- the game was set in this big open world, you could meet with rival factions, one of your team hiding up in a tree to snipe their leader in a sort of Yakuza-like betrayal...

As I found out decades later when I read "Masters of Doom" a few years ago, "Quake" was a project from hell: there was a huge rift in the team, where Romero-- just like during "Wolf3D" development-- wanted to do something really ambitious, while the rest of the team desired to keep it simple. Meanwhile, Carmack just could not get the culling working correctly in his new engine-- practically having a mental breakdown in the process, forcing him to bring in help in the form of Abrash-- causing the rest of the team to re-do levels five or even six times, or even to just sit idle waiting.

The first screenshots leaked-- by now, the game had a name in "Quake"-- and I was mesmerized. I had two dreams in those days: the first was playing a game like "Doom" but in full 3D like "Virtua Racing" in the arcades-- which was another title I loved-- with floors-above-floors and all of that; the second dream was doing "POV-RAY" so fast that it could be done in real-time-- a dream which was realized for me when I bought my RTX 2080 in 2018, right when Nvidia's "Turing" launched.

But back to "Quake", I breathlessly read the id team's .plan files religiously every day, amd absorbed every small information morsel.


QTest

In very late 1995 or very early 1996, my dad and I had built a Pentium 133 system with 16 meg. of RAM, a SoundBlaster Pro, and a nice video card. We also jumped from CompuServe to an internet-proper service, which we used in our dual-booting DOS/Windows 3.11 and OS/2 Warp setup. I was rapidly introduced to new concepts such as Gopher, FTP, IRC, Usenet, and the Mosaic web browser. I taught myself HTML and started making my first-ever web sites.

This was also right in the middle of the 3DO era for me, and one evening I was at my friend's house participating in a real-time chat-- what young kids these days call an "AMA"-- with Trip Hawkins via AOL. When it was our turn, we asked him if any 3D fighters were coming out on the system, to which he replied "We have a lot of exciting software, yada yada yada, one coming out is called 'Ballz', look for that."

We all know how "Ballz" turned out: it was a far cry from "Virtua Fighter" or "Tekken", to put it mildly, and wasn't even "3D".

In any event, right in the middle of this chat session, we checked the AOL game news section in a separate window, and: QTest had just been uploaded to id's FTP server! Being only 14 and not having driver's licenses, we called my dad and asked him to bring us to my house-- simultaneously, I had another one of my friends have his mom drop him off too.

We got a bunch of candy and soda from the convenience store near my home at the time, and waited for QTest to download. It was getting late, maybe 21:00 or 22:00, but I'd gotten permission from my mom to essentially have an all-nighter with my friends.

The download finished, we installed it, ran the .exe file, and... how the heck do you play this thing? We were stuck at what looked like a DOS prompt within the game! We dialed up to the internet and checked Carmack's .plan file-- "open dm1", and "connect [ip addr]" to join a server. We wrote those commands down on a napkin, dutifully restarted the game, typed "open dm1", and I proceeded to have one of the three most incredible video game experiences of my life (in chronological order: "Road Rash" on 3DO, "Quake" on DOS, and "Mario 64" on the Nintendo 64).


3D

QTest was so startling that we initially just stood in place, gasping at the gothic architecture. We hit the arrow keys, and slowly started traversing this 3D space, which was by a mile the most immersive thing we'd ever experienced. We spent almost a full ten minutes strafing around an ammo crate: "you can see it differently from all directions!" Then we walked under a bridge, then over the same bridge, using the "PGDN" key to look over the edge.

At one point we fell into the water, and clipped through the bottom of the map, or so we'd thought: "haha, funny bug!" But then we realized: this isn't like the water in "Doom", where you just walk on top of it-- in QTest, you can go in the water! We hadn't clipped through the level: we were swimming! While you could "swim" in Duke3D, it looked nothing like this, where you could look and swim in all directions, in true 3D, with an incredible wavering graphical effect.

My imagination immediately went into overdrive: in "Quake", you could make underwater 3D mazes! Just think of the possibilities!

Finally, we decided to connect to a server: a list of IP addresses were floating around-- we plugged one in, spawned into DM3, and immediately got fragged by a rocket. The guy who killed us typed, "We move fast here." Our jaws were on the floor: we were playing deathmatch with random, anonymous people over the internet, and several of them at once! We sat up all night playing, and got so good at the multi-second delay between pressing keys and having it manifest on-screen that we could strafe around corners-- again, with the keyboard mind you-- and peg people who were running at us post-turn.

Recall that this was mere hours after QTest hit the FTP server. My friends and I were three of the first maybe thousand people to ever play a deathmatch game and land a frag over the internet, in the entire history of the medium, where perhaps hundreds of millions of "frags" are earned every day across hundreds of titles: it's a badge of honor, of sorts.

At some point, someone figured out how to spawn beta versions of the enemies into the QTest maps, and even released "hacked" versions with enemies pre-placed in logical spots. Seeing a fully 3D "Shambler" for the first-time was astonishing: you could even land and stand on his head, because he was polygonal!


Shareware and Mouse Look

The "/" key toggled free look, and people quickly found out that if you hit that key, you could move your mouse around and aim that way-- even up and down!-- instead of with the keyboard. I was one of the first people to adopt "mouse look"-- my dad and I had this trackball, and a competitive breach developed between keyboard players, who you could always identify because they were shooting the stairs beneath you instead of you, and mouse players.

It might sound strange by today's standards to play a game like "Quake" with a trackball, but recall that this was the birth of a whole new genre: there were no rules, no standards, "WASD" wouldn't be "a thing" until the 2000s, and people played with whatever they had. One of my arch-rivals used a flight stick, and he was a top-drawer player.

I was playing three or four hours per day at this point, and after a few months the full-on shareware version came out. I wasn't big on some of the changed sound effects-- especially the removal of the incredible and gruesome QTest player fall sound-- and I thought the single player was kind of boring: it was like Doom, but with all of the personality removed.

But the deathmatch was better than ever, and that was all that mattered to me. On top of it, some guy figured out how to hack the BSP file format, and released screenshots of the first-ever custom "Quake" map: a single cube room. Very soon after he made a level editor, and in a matter of weeks a "modding" community was born.

I pleaded with my parents to let me pre-order the full version. They eventually relented, and I vividly, like it was yesterday, remember the whole phone conversation I had with the lady at id who took my order. I could tell that she could tell from my voice how young and nervous I was, so she was super friendly and patient with me as she took down the card info, and placed my order.

It felt like years that I had to wait: every day over summer vacation when I saw the mail truck, I'd sprint to the mailbox to see if it was there. Otherwise, I was playing five or six hours per day at that point, becoming very prolific at running the maps systematically, scooping up the rocket launcher and various armors the instant they'd re-spawn, then using my advantage to rack up massive frag leads at chokepoints.

Every week or two Carmack would release a new version, which you'd "pkunzip" over the top of the directory. I remember being really excited to see what had been changed, both in single player and deathmatch.


The Assassins

Finally, the day came: I opened the mailbox, and there it was-- this sexy, almost leathery-feeling cardboard flip envelope containing the game disc and manual-- I still have it in a box somewhere. I installed it and did an all-nighter, playing through all four episodes. In the ensuing weeks and months, my skills continued to grow, and I became one of the most prolific players on the internet: I could join essentially any server at any time, and win matches by sometimes twenty or thirty frags.

I even remember seeing some "celebrity" names appear in matches I was playing. For example, there was a guy named "Lord Soth" who ran probably the most popular shareware pages on the very young web, and I went up against-- and handily beat-- him on a few occasions.

There was a secret way to get colored text and special characters into your name, and I made a script which would auto-run on every game startup, to configure my "Sniper" player name, set my player "skin" colors of aquamarine top with beige bottom, and set up my custom control scheme: left alt for back, Z and X for strafe left and right respectively, and right mouse button to go forward. I even set up a toggleable mode which would take a screenshot every time I got a frag!

In those days, The Quake Stomping Grounds, Redwood's News, and Blue's News were my main sites-- the first one being based right out of Murderapolis, where I lived! They would run competitions where you'd record an in-game demo trying to accomplish some arbitrary task they'd made up, as quickly as possible-- then you'd "pkzip" the demo file, and upload it to their FTP server. They also maintained one of the best IP address server lists.

Windows 95 had come out by then, but my dad was such an OS/2 Warp fan, and didn't like Microsoft, so deep in 1996 I was still playing from DOS, using a command line-based TCP/IP TSR to dial up and hold the internet connection. In one of the patches, Carmack must have altered the network code, and my chat messages would take in order of five minutes to get to the other players. That became moot when, very late in 1996, my father finally broke down and bought Win95.

In "Quake", people would append their clan tag to the end of their name, ensconced in brackets. You always knew the hardcore players by which ones were in a clan. One day I kicked the butts of these guys with "[ASN]" suffixes, and I exchanged email addresses with their leader, a dude named "Raistlin".

Turns out the clan was called "The Assassins", and he invited me to a tryout on their own server! Unfortunately, I wound up being late, because I didn't know how to resolve a server name to an IP address: everyone kept telling me to type "ping", but it took me a while to figure out about what they were talking.

I finally connected, and they watched to see if I knew how to do things like circle strafing, rocket jumping, and how well I'd memorized the maps: I showed them how in a given map "A", if I heard water followed by an elevator followed by an ammo crate sound, I knew exactly where the player was and which way they were going. In fact, I could deliberately do things out of order, to fool other advanced players, so I could sneak up behind them!

Needless to say, I got into the clan, and immediately became the top player for them.


Bossman

One day, Raistlin made an announcement: due to other commitments he had to "retire" from the game, and he was handing over full control to Sniper-- me!

I immediately created a new web site for the clan, themed black and camouflaged forest green, complete with framesets and cool animated buttons which would "light up" yellow when you'd hover over them. I embedded a MIDI file of "To Make the End of Battle", as I'd made it the official clan theme song. I found out decades later that the song was written by Yuzo Koshiro, who was my favorite video composer at the time based on his work in "The Revenge of Shinobi" and the "Streets of Rage" games-- mind blown!

But back on topic: I grew the clan from twenty members to over fifty, broke them into sub-squads based on skill level, and managed all of the match and practice scheduling. The clan was almost exclusively college guys in their twenties: one of them once asked me, "Sniper, how old are you?", and he was astonished when I replied with "fourteen". "Our boss is just a kid, holy crap!"

I remember being disappointed with myself, because I would "choke" in matches against other big clans: I'd still be the top player between both teams, but not by as wide of a margin as I should have, and sometimes we'd add up the scores afterwards and wind up having lost by literally two frags-- if only I'd played better! But, over time I got better at harnessing the nervousness in order to focus, versus letting it control me-- something which continues to serve me well in competitive settings to this day.


Quakeworld

One day Carmack made a big announcement on his .plan file; paraphrasing: "I invented this cool thing called 'client side prediction'-- instead of having to wait for your player to move, the player will move instantly on your side, and sync up with everyone else in the background. It'll sometimes make your player jerk around a little, but it'll be way better than what we have now."

This updated network code was included in a brand new "Quake" client, which id named "Quakeworld": it had a refreshed menu, the ability to have custom player skins (I quickly got used to playing against skeletons), a built-in server browser (!), and even a global ranking system.

Incidentally, the ranking system was putting so much pressure on people that Carmack yanked it just a few patches due to complaints. Meanwhile, the server browser was quickly superseded by a neat external application called "Quakespy", which eventually got renamed to "Gamespy" after "Half-Life" came out. All the same, those were neat, novel features, even if they didn't wind up catching on at the time, in the form they were in.

But I digress: the clan and I did extra practice sessions to adapt to this bizarre sensation of instant feedback, which almost felt like single player!


GL Quake

At some point I saw screenshots of "GL Quake", with transparent water, and knew I had to experience it. By this point I'd finally built my own PC, a Pentium 166 MMX system. I bought my first 3D accelerator, the cheapest thing I could find in the form of a "Matrox m3d" and dropped it in. I still have that card, in a box behind me as I type this.

You would pre-bake the transparent water by feeding your map pack files into a "vis BSP" DOS command. As early as "Quake 2" that "m3d" card had this weird issue with "tiled" lighting, where the game world would look like a giant checkerboard-- but in the original "GL Quake", which was all I wanted it for, the card worked great-- and I think it only cost $60 or something ridiculous like that.


Other Anecdotes and Aftermath

Over time, The Assassins started to peter out as players-- even myself-- moved on to other things. On my account, John Romero had made the shocking announcement that he was leaving id: I couldn't believe it! Then the "Quake 2" shareware hit, and I just couldn't get into its sci-fi atmosphere like I did the Lovecraftian stuff from the first title.

Nonetheless and by now well into high school, my friend Cake-O-Demon and I still played a lot of this new sequel: we'd sit up all night at his house on his father's Pentium II 300 in their unfinished basement drinking soda, alternating matches, and taking breaks to play on his dad's foosball table (I became a very good foosball player during high school and college), using their wonderful ISDN line (meaning I was an LPB'er on those nights). I recall one incident involving this major trash talker-- Cake randomly fired a rocket upwards from beneath the opaque water, and nailed the guy as the dude was running across a bridge-- we only knew so from the terminal message along the top of the screen. What were the odds of that happening! But I never loved "Quake 2", and never got particularly good at it.

As the 3DO was dead, I'd also bought myself a PSX in early 1997, and games like "Crash Bandicoot", "Battle Arena Toshinden", and "Tekken 2" were consuming a lot of my time, on top of a myriad of other DOS and Win95-based PC games. Eventually I folded the clan, and essentially said goodbye to all of the friends I'd made.

On top of that, in 1998 my favorite game company (id was second), Epic Megagames, released their own first-person shooter in the form of "Unreal". I could write an equally long blog post about that game, and you can even find some of my old, crappy ".unr" map files on the web if you search for them. "Unreal" finally and definitively ended any desire I had to play "Quake" ever again. Just a year after that, "Shogo" hit, and added story telling to the genre in a way I found positively mesmerizing, further removing me from "Quake".

To drive the point home for good, observe how "Quake" doesn't even show up on my top games of all-time list: as huge a part of my life as it was when it was bleeding edge, I viewed and view it as completely superseded by newer games, such as "Unreal Tournament" (from 1999): the single player in "Quake" wasn't ever very good anyway, and in general it's simply not one of those titles I revisit like I do "Wolfenstein 3D" and "Doom", which have better stood the test of time.

But back to the main thread: looking back on it, to think that all of the above happened in probably only eighteen months is startling, considering how later in life I went from ages 30 to 40-- ten whole years!-- in the blink of an eye. To this day, I almost get misty-eyed when I think back on "Quake", and everything it brought to me in eighth and ninth grades.

I'll leave with two final anecdotes: being a huge Bobby Prince fan, I entered into a raffle on his website at bpmusic.com to win one of only four autographed "Doom Music CDs", where he remixed Doom music on fancy Roland hardware, and set up the track order to "make sense" while playing "Quake". Lo and behold, I won one of those, and still have it!

The other tidbit is that as I entered high school, I was hard at work writing a deathmatch guide in a notebook. I recall one segment being, "if someone is shooting rockets at you, close the gap as quickly as possible-- that way even if they hit you, they'll take themselves out as well from the splash damage."

Continuing my chain of Winbloze posts, after having taken a break it sounded like fun to give repairs another shot. I found some additional "DISM" commands which apparently "repair corrupted files"-- I'm not sure which ones, or how it does that exactly, but I nonetheless dutifully ran them.

Winbloze still wouldn't boot.

My next stop was my motherboard's UEFI BIOS settings, and I observed that a Winbloze-specific boot section was set to using "CSM"-- whatever that is-- instead of UEFI. I flipped it to UEFI, and... Winbloze once again booted. Strangely, I then flipped the setting back to "CSM", and Microsoft's buggy operating system still booted-- so I'm not sure which thing I did actually fixed the problem.

My next step was getting Windows Updates to install. The mainline one would not install, giving me one bizarre error after another. However, right in the middle of that process the "May 2021" update magically appeared-- not sure why right at that moment, coincidence?-- and that did install.

But my journey wasn't done yet: the subsequent post-update reboot revealed that audio was broken-- just a big fat red "X" over the Winbloze mixer tray app. The legacy "Device Manager" showed my RealTek and Nvidia devices, claimed they were working, yet the new Winbloze 10 half of things said no devices were installed.

After about two hours of trying different things, I found a workaround, which needs to be performed on every single Winbloze 10 boot just to have functioning audio:

1. Go to the new control panel's sound section. Flip the advanced settings to use mono.


2. Go to the legacy control panel's sound settings, where you set up sound effects. Step 1 will have unlocked the "Test" buttons for those sound effects-- click "Test" on one of them, and you'll actually hear it play, even though Winbloze claims there are no audio devices.


3. Flip your sound back to stereo.


4. Now the legacy control panel will show your audio devices! But, the Winbloze 10 side still won't see them, and you'll still have no audio devices, and a disabled mixer. Click on one of them, select "set as default", then click on the one you actually want as default, and set it as so.


5. Check out the Winbloze 10 mixer now, and you'll have one hundred percent functioning audio again in the operating system, as if nothing was ever wrong to begin with.

As I mentioned above though, reboot and you're right back to square one. I'm not sure how testing playback of a .wav file or switching to mono would cause the whole audio subsystem to behave differently-- makes me think it's a bunch of spaghetti code back there.

As a follow-up to my previous post, I did a half an hour of investigation, and here is what's happening: occasionally and for reasons no one can discern, the old DOS utility "chkdsk" will pseudo-randomly re-assign "drive letters" when it runs, on systems where dual-booting is leveraged. I booted to a "safe mode" DOS prompt, and confirmed with "diskpart"-- that is indeed the issue.

I tried re-assigning them, only for them to flip back again-- in other words, Winbloze still won't boot. I found some commands which can be run via a USB "safe mode"-formatted stick, but at this point, how can I trust Winbloze 10-- is this going to happen every time there is an update from here on out? It's not even worth the effort, since I've barely played games on my PC over the past few years anyway.

In general, I've been playing PC games since the mid-80s, but this might be the end of that road: Microsoft is incapable of putting out a usable, non-bricking OS, and publishers don't make many games for GNU/Linux.

And unlike those heady days of the 1980s and 1990s, PCs simply share their entire libraries with the dedicated systems, so why not just play on those? I'm tempted to hand my RTX 2080 to the wife, put the old GTX 1070 back into this PC, sell the whole works on eBay, and buy a cheap non-gaming laptop: as long as it can run Manjaro and RetroArch, that's all I need.

For fun, I booted into Winbloze for the first time in several months to get it patched up. After reboot, I'd found that it'd bricked itself! So, I shrugged my shoulders and booted back into Manjaro, laughing as I did so. A quick search reveals that Winbloze 10-- the worst version of Windows I've ever used, including "ME"-- is going backwards, as apparently every update is causing major issues.

This mirrors what I've seen from other Microsoft products like "Minecraft" and "Flight Simulator", the former of which is nigh-on unplayable on Switch while still running at 1080p on the Series X, and the latter of which was unplayable for weeks at a time for half of the install base due to sub-10 FPS levels, even for people with RTX 3080s.

The Series X itself has seemed very stable so far, but it's also running the ancient-- but very mature-- Xbox One dashboard and underpinnings: maybe I should not be wishing for a new Series interface? Not surprisingly, Microsoft is the company which has most heavily employed non-meritocratic "woke" hiring practices, and which has also engaged the most strongly with "Agile".

Also worth noting is that with GNU/Linux, a non-booting installation is trivial to take care of: you just boot into a single user runmode, check the logs-- which always tell you exactly what's going wrong-- fix the problem, which gives you uber verbose output back as you're working, and reboot back into multi-user mode. With Winbloze, it doesn't tell you jack-- "we're repairing your computer", whatever that even means.

Fun interview here with Brenda and John: the latter has been a hero of mine since I was eight or nine, when "Invasion of the Vorticons" hit, while I've always thought that he finally met the perfect complimentary companion in the mature and thoughtful Brenda.

The only thing in the interview I disagreed with was her overall take on character representation in video games-- that somehow not having a protagonist who "looks like you" means you "don't belong". We don't apply that standard literally anywhere else: could she not connect with "The Grapes of Wrath" or something just because she wasn't a male farmer? Did she not like "Sonic" because she's not a blue hedgehog?

To me this is an imagined problem, just like "systemic racismus", as Vee would call it: it's just one of those "virtue signalling du jour" things which people are parroting right now, and which will probably be forgotten ten years from now.

To be fair, even as a highly hormonal teenage boy, it actually annoyed me too that all of the women were bikini clad while wielding broadswords in combat, mostly because it just didn't logically make any sense. I never detected any kind of malice, or that game designers didn't like women-- rather, the designers were just trying to sell software, and the perception-- largely based in reality, in fact-- was that the primary buyers of games were adolescent white males.

On the same note, the "every protagonist is a square-jawed white guy with stubble" phenomenon during the "naughts" was something I made fun of on this blog many times back then: even as a square-jawed white guy with stubble, I thought it was silly: again, who cares if the character looks like me (or doesn't), if it's bad art?

She remarked that "thank goodness things are better now", but in my view they've gotten worse: we've shifted from one stupid archetype, the dudebro white guy, to another stupid archetype, lesbian-looking trannies-- except this time the archetype is motivated by malice, as the designers are deliberately taking revenge on (imagined) perceived past injustices done by evil whitey men according to their hateful "Cultural Marxism" ideology.

I think I'd get along with Brenda really well overall, lots of what she said I found highly relatable-- but she would definitely need to be one of those people where discussions about politics would need to be off the table.

While this undoubtedly is one of Inzaghi's biggest shortcomings, to me it's not the "killer issue", since the fact is our Primavera squad is simply not very good: even Raul Moro, in the bit I've spent watching him, doesn't look first-term ready from a tactical or maturity standpoint; the Pedro Neto comparison doesn't seem quite right to me, as Neto was and is undoubtedly much more talented. Perhaps-- hopefully even-- I will be proven wrong next season, should Moro and others get more playing time.

For me, the fatal flaw with Inzaghi is that every single Serie A coach has known for about a year and a half how to shut down Inzaghi's system: employ a deep line forcing Lazio to play in front of you, don't turn the ball over in the middle third, and limit Luis Alberto's ability to face goal. I've been waiting that entire period for Inzaghi to adapt-- to come up with a "Plan B"-- and it has just not happened. It makes me question his intelligence, frankly: how many times can someone lose a chess match in the exact same way, and not pick up on how it's happening? Either that or Inzaghi is absurdly stubborn: "My system will come through in the end, you just wait!"

Yes, Tare is the primary fault behind this team's struggles: Inzaghi is a borderline miracle worker getting any kind of success out of many of these players. But the latter's complete lack of ability to adapt tactically over such a vast chasm of time is a critical problem: if this were a murder trial, it would be the damning piece of evidence.


Subaru Forester

On to a totally different topic, I drove my mother-in-law's "still new car smell" Subaru Forester between the two houses over this past weekend, and as I'm apt to do anytime I drive a new car, I jotted down a few notes. But first, a disclaimer: I am super grateful that she borrowed me her car, and indeed its interior space with back seats folded down is one of the car's major strengths: in that transformed state, it's very nearly like a small pickup bed with a topper. Additionally, while she likes the car on the balance, everything I'm about to write below are also things she dislikes about the model-- so I'm not ungratefully slagging off her beloved vehicle, or anything along those lines.

Let the positives come first-- as mentioned above, the car's interior storage space is very useful. The seats are also very comfortable, with reasonable visibility as well. Aesthetically, for being copy-and-pasted "Cute Ute Number 4672" on the market, it's probably the best looking one I've seen: funky tail lights aside, it eschews the bizarre and off-putting, very angular "whoops the designer's hand slipped on the easel", "Transformers" look of most contemporary vehicles, and instead adopts curves married to just enough of the trademark Subaru utilitarian "ugliness" to be pleasant on the eye. This particular color catches the sunlight in a really pretty way too.







Power-wise, the Subaru hallmark 2.5 liter boxer engine, putting out about one hundred and eighty brake horse power in this implementation, did a good job during my drive of letting me merge onto the freeway comfortably and even execute a couple of passing maneuvers, while hauling probably two hundred pounds of boxes and furniture. The transmission is the first CVT I've driven which didn't require me to adorn a barf bag, as it artificially mimicked the fixed gear ratios of a conventional automatic. I'm not sure if this was a toggleable setting or not-- it's merely how the car was behaving during my drive. It's about the slowest responding transmission I've ever experienced as well-- so bear that in mind.

In terms of handling... there isn't any: the body lean is immense for a, let's say, post-1990 car, and the OEM tires only contributed to the very poor response time on steering inputs, as the car wallowed when slung around a wide looping corner. The flip-side of this is that the car is very comfortable over bumps, which in this class is really what matters. While no one buys a car of this type for athletic cornering to be sure, I suspect the handling is worse-than-average in class, which is the only reason I mentioned it at all.

Gas mileage seemed good for a vehicle of this girth: I got nearly thirty miles per gallon on the essentially all-highway commute according to the car's trip computer-- good enough for me. It also runs on regular unleaded, which is a nice bonus. Another benefit is that the base model of this car can be had, brand new, for about $25k; I haven't extensively comparison shopped in the class, but off the cuff this seems like a very reasonable price given how expensive cars are these days.

But now to the negatives. Let's start by taking a look at the steering column:



I counted nineteen discrete actions available just from the steering wheel. The center column has a further eight actions, and-- like an airplane-- even the ceiling is filled with buttons and switches, to the tune of a further eight actions available:





That's thirty five operations, and we haven't even gotten to the heating and air conditioning knobs yet, much less the touchscreen which runs "apps", sort of like an integrated iPhone. I didn't even open that Pandora's Box, and just pretended it wasn't there. Whatever happened to a car being designed for driving versus endless tinkering?

It would be one thing if all of this complexity could simply be ignored-- but it can't: my mother-in-law had to quite literally walk me through a pre-drive checklist of all the things which need to be disabled, using these wide varieties of knobs and dials: "first you need to shut off 'ASS' so the engine doesn't die at every stoplight; then you need to shut off the thing which automatically swerves you into concrete barriers sometimes; after that, don't forget to disable the thing which automatically slams on the brakes if it thinks you're too close to another car."

And these are supposed to be safety features!

I found out the hard way that I'd missed the latter-most button-- which needs to be held down incidentally, as if the car's designers only reluctantly let you shut it off at all: at one point I executed an overtake-- yes, those are required in America due to all of the horrendous lane discipline on display-- and the car brake checked the vehicle I was overtaking, because it deemed that I'd gotten just that bit too close to the vehicle ahead of me in my exiting lane. Caught completely unawares, it took me a few seconds of being dazed, my heart racing, to figure out what the hell had just happened.

On that note, if you get "too close" to another car, the display console shows a giant flashing red circle and starts buzzing at you. On top of it, there is a large animated "fuel economy" section right at the bottom of your field of vision, constantly changing the entire time you're driving-- causing you to continuously battle the urge to take your eyes off the road to see what the car is heckling you about now! Heck, the vehicle even lectured me to check the back seats when I'd turned off the ignition!

Even something as basic as cruise control-- you know, a technology from the 1970s-- has been rendered useless: it changes your speed depending on the next car forward in your lane! Doesn't that defeat the whole purpose of the function? One time I flipped "cruise control" on as a car was getting out of my way, like I've done ten thousand times in dozens of other cars, and the Forester slammed on the brakes, nearly giving me a heart attack, as I'd enabled the function a split-second too soon before the lane-changing car had completely gotten out of my way.

Every time the "cruise" control flipped between constant speed and "I'm going to change the speed all the time" modes, the car emitted an audible beep. I lost track of the number of times the Forester buzzed and beeped at me, all told. I wonder if this "adaptive cruise control" is why the lane discipline issues seem to be getting worse-- people just sit in the passing lane in a line, drooling on themselves like unthinking meatsacks, with their cars driving themselves?

When you put the whole Subaru Forester package together, I never felt like I was in control of the car: rather, it felt like flying one of the giant airliners in "Flight Simulator 2020", where you just sort of guide the craft towards the destination, with the autopilot handling most functions. But unlike an airplane in the vastness of the three-dimensional sky, a car operates on two dimensions, and is doing seventy miles per hour within mere meters of other four thousand pound pieces of motorized steel, glass, and plastic.

During the whole experience I felt like I was wrestling for control of the car, from the car itself. The vehicle was doing absolutely everything possible to distract, nag, harrass, and otherwise divert my attention away from actually driving.

I'm a driver who is never phased by anything: I've driven through raging snowstorms in my rear-wheel drive 350z, picked my way through near-zero visibility darkness, and even done some amateur motorsports, all without breaking a sweat. But this single trip in the Subaru Forester was non-stop white knuckling the whole way, my heart jumping at every beep and buzz, or every time the display readout changed, as I was flat-out praying I'd get to my destination in one piece.

Can you imagine if I'd had all of the "safety features" enabled? I can't, and don't want to either. It's no wonder some people are clamoring for "self driving" cars-- because "driving" a modern car yourself is so complicated, mentally taxing, and scary!

It was a huge relief after that and on arrival to hop into my own car, with its giant tach, manual transmission, actual cruise control, and nothing else-- and just drive. I am more curious than ever now to test drive some of these incoming Japanese sports cars, including the new "Z", to see where on the spectrum they fall between this Subaru Forester, and my current vehicle.

I know Michael Snyder can be a little tiresome, but this is a pretty good summary of the state of the country at the moment. Cross-reference this with that early 1980s Yuri Bezmenov interview, and you can see that this is all by design.

Back in 2009 when I was shopping for a cheap used sports car, one of the models I looked into was the Mazda RX-8, my interest mostly derived from the "cool" factor which its spiritual predecessor, the RX-7, had in the mid-90s.

But I quickly backed off of that notion: you see, the RX-8-- like its model forebears-- was powered by a rotary engine. And these motors could not be safely restarted until fully cooled down-- so forget taking the car grocery shopping. Or using the car at all, in practical terms. These rotary engines also burned oil by design-- which means the owner needed to remember to routinely refill them with oil, no small thing in the average person's busy life.

Even by 2009, there were very few RX-8s of the early model years left: the finicky motors meant that, again in practical terms, they were shot by 75,000 miles, totaling out the whole car. Since then, I haven't seen a single Mazda RX-8 in probably six years. There was and is no such thing as a "ten year old RX-8": the whole fleet has essentially been junked by now, the last production model year having been 2012.

So, I bought one of the RX-8's myriad competitors in the form of a Nissan 350z for $15k, instead. Eleven years later-- so, an eighteen year-old car in total-- and it's still going just as strong as the day it rolled off the assembly line. Good choice then! Especially versus the RX-8, which I would have long-since replaced, maybe even with a 350z ironically: two cars-- cars are expensive!-- required over the given timeframe, versus just one.

See those Teslas and other electric cars driving past you while out on a walk? Not a single one of those you see on the road is still going to be on the road ten years from now: their owners will all have been forced to buy yet another car since the $10k battery packs will have all gone bad by then, totaling out the vehicles-- just like the RX-8 rotary engines.

In other words, in this "all electric" future you keep hearing about, every car is going to be a Mazda RX-8. This is a real problem for the average American, who can't afford an electric car in the first place on their median $36k annual wages-- much less a new one every decade! That's why the average age of a car on the road today is twelve years. Remember: that means half of those cars are even older.

Unless I get bored with it, in ten years I'll probably still be driving my by-then 28 year-old 350z-- and it will have out-survived not just the entire fleet of produced Mazda RX-8s, but generations of electric cars to boot! I'll have spent $15k on car purchases over 21 years, versus the Tesla snobs and "New World Order" Ford customers who will have spend at least $80k over that same time period. That $65k difference buys me a lot of gasoline!

Electric cars are like this: "Hey Sniper, I invented a new toaster, want to see it? It costs twice as much, can only toast one slice of bread at a time, and you can only use it once a day. Pretty sweet, huh?" The only reason you'd exchange your superior conventional toaster for the new one-- to make all of those trade-offs-- would be if you thought it was somehow going to "save the planet". Which, unfortunately, seems to be what a lot of people have been brainwashed into thinking.

I've written a lot in the past about the rapidly dropping testosterone levels in men, and how it's manifesting in men not just looking like women, but acting like women, adopting traditionally female values like safety-over-all-else, and in the most extreme examples even thinking they are women.

I've been catching up on Jonas Hansson's skating videos, and I found a perfect example of this phenomenon. First, here is a video of a skater named Richie Eisler: he is nine months older than me-- so, a fellow "Xennial". Second, here is a video of another skater, Eugen Enin, who was born exactly ten years later-- 1991, versus 1981.

I cropped photographs of them side-by-side. 'Nuff said:



Judging by the aforelinked video, Eugen Enin is a world class skater-- but as is the case with modern footballers, who almost universally look extraordinarily effeminate, how much better would they be if they married modern-day training and diet, to higher testosterone levels?

Ex post facto reasoning is when you try to explain something after the fact, which makes what was in reality an irrational position seem rational in hindsight. This is a common face saving technique, and is also often used to gaslight people for political purposes. I saw a funny example today:

What really happened: Rand Paul called out Dr. Fausti regarding the latter's direct connections to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Not forty eight hours later, the CDC did a complete u-turn, telling people to not wear masks, which in turn caused Minnesota's Dim Tim Walz to loosen the state's WuFlu restrictions.

Local establishment's explanation (italics are mine): "In Minnesota, we are continuing to see a loosening of restrictions as vaccination rates increase and COVID-19 community spread decreases. As a result, we have decided to begin our partial reopening... on Monday, June 7, approximately one month earlier than originally planned."

This doesn't really impact me anymore as I only have three days left of living in Murderapolis before I permanently relocate to the rural-- formerly known as bug out-- house, where virtually no one followed the WuFlu Burqa "mandate" in the first place. But, it's still fun to muse.

I wrote about my restaurant experience in this post already-- what I didn't mention is that I also went into the local "Cub Foods" grocery store; probably ninety percent of the customers still had them on! However, less than half of the employees were wearing them.

Speaking of relocating, this server might be down for a few days over this upcoming weekend as I physically relocate it to the rural house: I'll have a lot of moving to get done, so I may not get around to setting it up on the network right away.

In 1926, a young Russian woman named Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum moved to the United States. She had just got done with the Bolsheviks confiscating her father's business, crushing his soul in the process, then sending her and her family on a long march with nightly threats of rape and murder. Her parents scrounged up just enough money to send her overseas, and to the day she died in 1982, Alisa had no idea whether her parents had survived or not.

Shortly after her time arriving in the United States, she started to see the exact same ideology and warning signs which preceded the Bolsheviks, happening in America. "I need to warn people", she thought to herself. She picked up a pen and started to write, following in the long Russian tradition of escaping censorship through the plausible deniability of literature. She also adopted a pen name: Ayn Rand.

Bad ideas are almost always wrapped in "feel good" rhetoric, which even allows the proponents of evil ideas to take the moral high ground. Others don't then fall prey to the concepts because they are bad people-- they are just naive: they haven't yet lived through the consequences of these lousy concepts, and they don't read enough history.

I've met a lot of people through the management of the addition project up North, and one of them-- a white male, Republican-voting conservative-- has said a few alarming things to me in the course of conversation. Similar to what Ayn Rand must have felt, "This is how it started in the urban areas", I thought to myself.

The first eyebrow-raising remark was about how "out here, it's almost entirely white, unfortunately." I've said, over and over, repeatedly across both blog posts and videos, that if offered the chance to live in a society full of Ben Carsons, I'd take it in a heartbeat-- when it boils down to individuals, I don't care what race someone is: if they share my values, we're all good.

I'm friends with and have worked with some wonderful black people, a few of whom might even read this blog. Unfortunately, most black people are not Thomas Sowell. If you chart the presence of hispanics and blacks across the United States, there is a very strong correlation between their presence, and murder. You can see the exact same pattern globally. People often try to dismiss statistics like this by saying that it's poverty-related-- but nope.

I also have seen this pattern anecdotally in my life: blacks are like locusts-- they shift from area to area, leaving wreckage behind. Ask anyone in Minnesota over the age of sixty what North Minneapolis used to be like: it was essentially all-white, crime was very low, the area was clean and orderly, and kids could safely roam anywhere. Drive through North Minneapolis today, and tell me what you see.

Ask any Minnesotan over the age of thirty five about a city called Brooklyn Center. When I was a kid, the city was almost all white, it was clean, and the local economy supported a large mall called "Brookdale", at which I spent enormous amounts of time as a kid. At some point in my teenage years, large numbers of blacks migrated from North Minneapolis to Brooklyn Center-- over the span of less than a decade, the city became filled with trash, the mall closed and everything nearby was shuttered, and crime soared. My uncle was actually shot at in that city, as some black gang banger opened fire on the Metro Transit bus he was boarding!

I don't know if it's excessive amounts of testosterone, IQ, some kind of combination of genes, or what: more research is required-- but which won't happen, because it's not politically correct to even mention the topic.

To be clear, cue disclaimer four hundred and sixty five, I would never judge an individual black-- or hispanic, for that matter-- person prematurely, assuming that they are violent just because of their race. That's the definition of the word "racism". But in aggregate, you do not want large numbers of blacks to move into your neighborhood: it's an easily supportable position, grounded in fact. I'd be saying the exact same stuff if it were my racial group having these unfortunate statistics: I'd be trying to figure out why, and how to get away from them, and to people who share my values!

On that note, I don't support racial segregation, but I do support values segregation: if you're a peaceful, smart, respectful black or hispanic person, try to make your way to a rural area-- I'll gladly welcome you as a neighbor. But don't then encourage everyone else in your racial group to do the same-- move, but don't broadcast it, or brag to them about how nice it is once you're there.

It's easy for the aforementioned rural guy to make himself feel good and sound egalitarian, because he's naive and hasn't had to live with the consequences like me and many other people I know. When you've lived literally your entire life in a 95%+ white, low-crime low-violence population where people don't even lock their houses or cars, it's easy for such a person to not understand cause-and-effect: what made and makes that rural area have the attributes it has?

The second troubling thing he dropped in a conversation was support for race and sex-based hiring quotas-- i.e., Cultural Marxism. Again, it makes him feel good to sound egalitarian and well-natured, because he hasn't been personally denied a job because of his race. The answer to "racism" isn't "racism", to "sexism" isn't "sexism", clearly. What he and everyone needs to understand, is that the people pushing this terrible, evil concept also have ulterior motives.

I think the rural area to which I'm moving is fairly "hardened"-- after all, this is just one person from whom I've heard support for bad ideas and foolish notions. But at the same time, if he's thinking these things, then there may be other naive people there with the same beliefs. And we all know what happened to Russia after the Bolsheviks took over...

In any event, enough with this distasteful topic: I had to write the post, but it leaves a bad flavor in my mouth.

I'm already having fun with the WuFlu Burqa mandate lift: I went into my favorite restaurant for the first time since Dim Tim Walz put the "mandate" in last July. The cashier-- with whom I used to be on quite friendly terms-- was visibly nervous as I entered, to the point of knocking a big stack of cups onto the floor.

She queried, "It's been a long time", to which I replied, "Ever since the mask nonsense-- been almost a year. But the 'mandate' is gone, so here I am!" She gave some kind of terse response, clearly not onboard with my attitude-- so I rubbed it in: "You know, I literally haven't worn a mask even once-- I made it the entire time!"

It was also deeply satisfying walking past all of the domestic terrorist "BLM" yard signs, and saying to myself: "I beat you all: you threw unconscionable levels of misery at me, and I not only came out, but stronger for it. Never forget: I'm a winner, you're all losers-- I stuck by my principles, you didn't, and here we are on even footing at the other side, me with my dignity intact, while yours is in irreparable tatters. Eat shit, morons."

So now that the tables have turned, dear readers, here is the gameplan: go anywhere you want, with your head held high. If a Karen or Ken questions you, smirkily laugh at them and say, "What, are you some kind of science denying blue anon conspiracy theorist? I think I trust the experts at the CDC more than you!", and just walk away.

If asked whether you've been "vaccinated", simply respond with an ambiguous, plausible-deniability nod, and say "Who wouldn't? They're highly effective!" Remember: after what the Karens, Kens, bureaucrats, and complicit normies have put us through over the past year-plus, you are under zero obligation to be honest.

Take a page from Saul Alinsky: don't hesitate to hold them to their own rules by liberally whipping out the "science denier" and "conspiracy theorist" pejoratives! Use any dirty rhetorical tool or sophistry you can come up with: rules only apply when the other side is also following them.

I arrived back in Murderapolis for possibly the last time as a denizen of the area-- I'm making my permanent move to the bug out house over this upcoming long "Memorial Day" weekend-- to the very-next-day news that Minnesota's own Dim Tim Walz has gotten rid of the WuFlu Burqa "mandate"!

Of course, the underlying sickness-- no, not the WuFlu, but rather the hysterical mysophobia among "Joe and the Hoe" voters-- is not cured: the only reason the "mandate" was eliminated, was because the CDC's "Wheel of Fortune" dial happened to land on the "Alaska" vacation tile. Tomorrow when the CDC spins it again, it could just as easily land on "Bankrupt".

Because the science, amirite? "Put your right foot in, take your right foot out, put your right foot in, and shake it all about..."

Tomorrow, they could decide that there are "new strains!", and in goes the Burqa mandate once again. At least once I'm permanently relocated, veritably no one follows the "mandates" there anyway, which is one small part of why I'm moving. Hopefully some Millennial will come buy my Murderapolis "fixer-upper" house very quickly.

My only issue will be regarding access to health care, since I've heard that in other states which no longer require Binky the Clown noses, such apparati are still "mandated" in health care settings: you know, chicken wire held up to the face while walking through a cloud of mosquitoes. If I do need to see a doctor, I'll try walking in with no abasement, and will resort to the hilariously terrorist-looking Balaclava as a worst resort.

That said, I found my new rural dentist office, and I just walked right in! No Burqa, no one mentioned it, and I got my teeth cleaned for the first time in a year-and-a-half. Also got into an almost hour long conversation with the hygenist about home schooling: evidently, even the public schools there have been subverted by Communists, so she was picking my brain with the very likely intention of quitting her job, so she can home school her grandkids.

Her grandson, like all young healthy boys, wants to be running around, building stuff, and climbing trees-- so focus is an issue for him. In a traditional school setting, he falls way behind. When she was forced out of work-- Minnesota shut down dental clinics for several months at one point-- she essentially home schooled her grandson, and got him all caught up. Now, after being in the public school again, he's regressed from where she'd left him!

She also said that the schools, even there, have become hopelessly politicized. Subversion! So she's desperate to get her grandchildren out of there.

But back to the WuFlu, did everyone read that there are dozens and dozens of "cases" now-- including the New York Yankees starting lineup-- who are "testing positive" for the WuFlu, even after having had The Holy Jab? How many women have potentially been sterilized, or how many people will develop God-knows-what ten years down the road, for protection against getting a cold, but which isn't even turning out to be that protection anyway?

This is why people need to use their brains.

And just an update on my own status regarding having been infected by the WuFlu: a scant couple of days after the aforelinked post, and I was already one hundred percent over it! On a spectrum of dozens of colds I've had, this one wound up not even being in the top quarter "most annoying". A couple of the symptoms, like a back rash, were strange-- but only stuck around for a few days.

Overall: a nothingburger.

The other funny part about all of this is that normies still don't seem aware that the "PCR tests" are not intended to be used this way-- so, a positive test doesn't even mean you have the WuFlu, while similarly a negative test doesn't mean you don't have it. Someone once gave a "PCR test" to a grapefruit, and it came back positive. In the case of the Yankees and others, it could very well be one of the countless thousands of other endemic coronaviruses that they've got-- but let the Democrat freak-outery commence anyway.

On tap for today: pick up food from my favorite Murderapolis restaurant, wash my car-- got the lawn mowing done last night-- and play some serious "Yakuza: Like a Dragon" on Series X!

This gave me an enormous laugh: "The data shows that the 'average' cryptocurrency owner is a 38-year-old male making approximately $111k a year." Meanwhile, I'm a 39 year old male, making $120k per year. I'm often an outlier-- like a time I picked up some firearms from an FFL, and they said they'd literally never had someone show up in a sports car-- but in this crypto case, I'm as typical as they come.

Speaking of crypto, I see that my Ethereum has been going nuts.

Switching gears, the thing which jumped out to me about this article wasn't the obesity or the criminal records, but rather this: "Gen Z flips through social media like it is an Olympic sport, and in order to get them to stop their thumbs for a few seconds, you've got to surprise them." Do you really want someone in an armed conflict with the attention span of a gold fish?

Finally, I bought my first new router in a gazillion years, so I'm getting ~93Mbps down from the bug out house's ADSL connection. It's nowhere near the Gigabit fiber line at the Murderapolis house, especially up-- but it's still plenty of bandwidth down, especially for an obscure rural farm house.

The price inflation discussed in this article is relevant to me in three ways.

First, I added four thousand dollars to the cost of the bug out house addition just by putting the project on freeze for two weeks. Such an act was absolutely necessary in my case and I don't regret it-- I bring it up just to lend some credence to the lumber price phenomenon. Yesterday, I was also chatting with a member of the family who does his own construction, and for the first time in his sixty-plus year life he had to store his own lumber on some flat ground, under tarps, because the lumber yard couldn't guarantee him prices or even availability.

Second, the food price increases are major-league showing up in my grocery bills-- however, once I get permanently established at the bug out house, I'm planning to commence some gardening operations, and in the next several years I might become a full-on farmer, if we're able to expand onto adjacent property, which is looking pretty likely as the current owner ages. I should be able to weather the food price storm better than most.

Third, I'm expecting to get a phenomenal price for my Murderapolis home. Initially I was assuming I would make thirty or forty thousand on it, now I'm wondering if that number will be more like seventy or eighty thousand. It's a tiny house which needs a new roof, garage siding, kitchen cabinets, and a bathroom remodel-- but even with those faults, I've seen mold-infested, literally collapsing homes in the area go to house flippers for insane prices-- and my house is in mint condition compared to those!

It's not clear to me whether this price inflation is permanent or not: on the one hand I could see global supply chains kicking into overdrive as the WuFlu insanity fully subsides-- on the other hand and unlike last time major monetary inflation was created, this time checks were sent directly to main street, as opposed to before where the inflation sat on foreign bank reserve balance sheets, and bidding up Monet paintings and Ferraris.

I'm calling B.S. on the router stuff discussed in this video, with regards to the county not wanting to hand them over. I'm reserving the right to change my mind of course, as maybe I'm misunderstanding something here-- but based on the knowledge I have right now, their argument doesn't make sense.

My understanding is that the reason the auditors want the routers is to get access to the routing tables: one of the key concerns across the country was that the voting machine traffic was being redirected to out-of-country networks. The routing tables would clear that up, one way or the other.

In other words, the auditors aren't after traffic data on the routers-- they are after configuration data. The county says it can't hand over images of the router file systems because the traffic data is too sensitive-- which leads me to a second point.

Since when are routers configured to literally record all data flowing through them? Normally that's something you enable temporarily for debugging purposes-- not on a full-time, permanent basis. Wouldn't retaining traffic data with social security numbers and who-knows-what-else on network routers be an enormous security risk for crackers? Do routers even have the kind of internal storage required to house potentially terabytes of historical records?

But even if the routers really do have sensitive data on them for some bizarre reason, images could be provided where the directories containing that data are deleted, leaving only the configuration elements present.

In any event and on a totally unrelated note, I probably won't be posting much over the next several days, and definitely won't be making any videos: I'm headed to the bug out house to have contractor meetings regarding the addition project, and I'm not going to be bringing my PC with me.

I did put up a video this morning though, discussing my complains about "Agile" software development-- so everyone can enjoy that until I return to Murderapolis.

Imagine moving to China, and broadcasting to everyone there that "Chinese people are evil". Simultaneously, you start putting only Japanese people in all of the advertisements, to drive home the point that Chinese people are too evil to even look at anymore.

How long do you think the Chinese people would put up with that? My guess is that the marketers would find themselves in a gulag or ejected into the middle of the ocean very quickly.

So why do white Christians put up with it? They are passive to the point of being suicidal!

Any time you've got a double standard, you've got an error in your thinking. Related to today's Mark Dice video, I just got done playing and reviewing a literal Black Supremacist video game, which even has "black power" symbology, and even a "black power" suit with accompanying cut-scene! "He's our Spider-Man!", is the game's mantra-- I'm not even joking.

But some Mexican guy driving a truck with his hand hanging out the window is the country's big issue.

Another double standard example from today comes compliments of Boeing. You see, it's not hateful to wrongfully accuse a cop of being "racist", to call your white employees "racist", or to fire white people because of their skin color, and replace them with black people. None of that is hateful. What is hateful at Boeing is saying, "You know, I don't think the knee thing is what killed him." That will get you fired.

I've kicked off a new video series, where I'll be playing through some of my favorite games of all time. Check out the BitChute and Rumble links above to see the first game on offer!


The WuFlu Strikes Back

In other news, back when I was a school kid, or when I worked in an actual office, or when my daughter was in school, or myriad other periods of my life, it was almost an annual event that I would pick up either influenza-- especially as a child, one time in particular I was delirious with fever-- or some Coronavirus or another, of which there are probably infinite varieties.

In my working adult life, it would usually take me about a month, or slightly more, to recover from those Coronaviruses, to the point where it was a joke in my house: "Here comes papa's annual sick month!" They tend to linger in my body, which is annoying. Eventually, I would just wake up one day and realize: "Oh, I don't feel sick anymore! Nice!"

These viruses are no big deal: they make you feel a little lethargic, there is a mild fluid buildup in the lungs leading to a cough; sometimes I would get little aches and pains, maybe a very mild fever. Elderly people can certainly die from them, but for everyone else they are annoying-- nothing more.

What people for sure don't do is get shot up with non-FDA approved, never-before-tested-on-human cocktails with totally unclear long-term side effects including potential infertility in women and permanent cell DNA modification, from multi-billion dollar Big Pharma corporations with 100% waived legal liability, promoted by people like Bill Gates, who experiments on children in Africa and who is an active proponent of eugenics to reduce the world's population.

If all of that sounds like the evil plot from a Bond movie, that's because it basically is. Rather, when people catch a cold, they just let their immune system handle it.

But back to the topic at hand: all of my getting sick ceased when I started working from home, and we started home schooling our kids: I went probably three whole years and didn't get sick even once. Glorious! However, a few weeks ago the company who puts on Spacemario's swimming lessons let us know that a kid-- with whom he was face-inches-apart for a half an hour-- had the WuFlu. Yes: they literally called us to say that a kid had a Coronavirus.

Sure enough, Spacemario got sick for about a day, followed by wifey for a few days, followed by... me.

And yes, the WuFlu is exactly what I thought it'd be: it feels precisely like having any other Coronavirus I've ever had-- lethargic, lingering, mild fluid build-up, and so forth. I've felt sick for maybe two weeks now, so given my usual pattern I'll probably feel vaguely ill for another couple.

The only slightly unusual symptoms I've experienced involved a rash on my back-- I've never had one of those from a cold before-- and now fluid buildup in my always-problematic right knee-- the one I messed up while inline skating-- which makes standing slightly uncomfortable. On an "annoying factor" spectrum, I would rate the WuFlu in the top quarter of all Coronaviruses I've had: not even close to the worst, but still enough to make concentrating in work somewhat frustrating.

A nice side benefit has been that I've been sleeping like a baby: best period of sleeping I've had in years! In net, I almost feel better with the WuFlu than without it, because I'm actually rested every day.


Next Plans

Spacemario and I are planning to do a video about some cool solar systems he's discovered. I'm also tinkering with how to get 1080p output from Rumble, which isn't going so well so far, unfortunately. As well, I plan to do a "Super Turbo" 3DO video soon, perhaps even today!


The Addition

One last note: the bug out house addition is back on, for good this time! I've decided that it is the best course of action, when all factors are considered.

The kids and I recorded a video of us playing "Dredge" in three-player, check it out!

• Rumble
• BitChute

Also, this is superb news: hopefully more companies come to the same conclusion!

After yesterday's intro piece, I have my first real video up:

• Rumble
• BitChute

I also want to clarify a post I made earlier, where I was discussing managing an intern this summer, how my life is at a crossroads, and so forth: I'd actually forgotten all about that post until a friend at work emailed me about it today, at which point I just went and deleted it.

I'm sure you can easily find it archived if you want to read it, I'm not trying to hide anything-- I only removed it so it doesn't cause confusion in the future; the post isn't relevant anymore.

Why?

Look at all of the button links on the top of this site-- I've put in motion the very steps I wanted to take! As for work and after having talked to tons of family members and friends many days ago, I'd decided to just focus on the positive portions of my employer's mission, and my coworkers' shared interests.

At least until I can quit. I legitimately don't know how much longer I will be working there: if this video stuff takes off, or alternately if I do go ahead with the bug out house addition, then my departure will be sooner-- if not, then I'll need to hang on a little longer.

As for the intern, this person has a number of very redeemable traits too, and after all is very young: I will provide technical guidance as asked, but otherwise let them "sink or swim" on their own. I think that's more than fair, and it's the advice my co-worker friend and others have given me.

Regular readers will probably have noticed that this site now features a series of buttons in its header-- from left-to-right: "CoinPayments" for donations, this site's "BitChute" content, its brand-new "Rumble" channel, and its "Gab" feed. Here is what I'm going to try as an initial streaming and recording setup:

• Camera: NexiGo N930AF
• Microphone: TONOR TC-777
• PC: Ryzen 3600x, 32 gig. RAM, Gigabyte RTX 2080 OC
• Operating System: Manjaro Linux
• Editing Software: OpenShot
• Recording Software: OBS Studio

I've recorded a video explaining exactly why, after over twenty five years of exclusively "blogging"-- dating back before that term was even invented-- I've decided to branch out. Check out the BitChute and Rumble links above to see my "Introduction" video.

As for video hosting, I also took a look at "Odyssey" since I hear that one mentioned a lot, but its "terms of service" has nonsense in it, similar to "MeWe", a site I covered in this post. From my experience, red flags like this are essentially foolproof. Versus Rumble, which has a sentence in its terms to the effect of "you will find 'offensive' stuff here, that's your responsibility."

This morning I was thrown an anecdote that "some people" in South Dakota think Kristi Noem is a "nutcase": hundreds of thousands of people live there, so I'm sure it's undoubtedly true that a subset of those-- 47% voted against her when she ran for governor-- don't like her. But to call her a nutcase seems pretty strong-- in fact, I'd argue she's far-and-away one of the most sensible of America's governors, by some margin. Here are her views.

Preface: I didn't tackle every single bullet-- there are just too many issues out there for me to know enough about them to formulate an opinion one way or the other. Both lists have only issues about which I'm already familiar:


Kristi Noem

• (logical) Wasn't born yesterday: saw through the WuFlu nonsense, one of the best "responses" in the entire country.
• (logical) Pro-Life.
• (logical) Wants to audit the Fed.
• (logical) Wanted to curtail spending if debt limit reached.
• (logical) Protects anti-same-sex marriage as free speech.
• (logical) Later, desired to end bulk data collection under "Patriot Act".
• (logical) Thinks that porous borders and illegal immigration are threats.
• (logical) Voted to allow compensatory time off for working overtime.
• (logical) Member of the Tea Party movement.
• (logical) Wanted to ban armed forces in Libya, absent Congressional approval.
• (logical) Repeal Obozocare reporting requirements for small businesses.
• (logical) Use tax money to encourage abstinence in public schools.
• (logical) Wants to open up continental shelf to oil drilling.
• (logical) Wants to ban the EPA from "regulating" carbon dioxide (lol).
• (logical) Desires no expansion of EPA-regulated waters.
• (logical) Condemned China's organ harvesting from Falun Gong prisoners.
• (logical) Prohibit IRS audits targeting Tea Party political groups.
• (logical) Essentially a pro-second amendment absolutist.
• (logical) Wants to get rid of nationalized healthcare laws.
• (quasi-logical) Desires a US balanced budget amendment.
• (quasi-logical) Use State block grants for training.
• (illogical) Supports ban on same-sex marriage.
• (illogical) Supported Paul Ryan's "budget".
• (illogical) Extended the "Patriot Act's" roving wiretaps.
• (illogical) Extended the "renewable tax credit".
• (illogical) Opposes private retirement accounts.
• (illogical) Did not want to remove military from Afghanistan.
• (illogical) Wants to "prevent" Iran from getting nukes, rather than "contain".

I agree with her on most things, but on the critical side she seems like a mild war hawk, and also a mild Christian theocrat.

Simultaneously, the hosts of the popular Minnesota conservative radio show "Justice & Drew" throw similar epithets at Tim Walz-- but Walz is very moderate in fact compared to the DNC proper: I only call him "Kim Jong Walz" because of his radical totalitarian reaction to the WuFlu, the most pressing civil rights issue since the 1960s-- otherwise, I don't find the guy to be particularly objectionable, compared to most Democrats. Here are his views:


Tim Walz

• (illogical) Completely botched the WuFlu: last state in the area requiring Burqas, making my life miserable.
• (logical) Wanted to ban job discrimination based on sexual orientation.
• (logical) Desires to eliminate the death penalty.
• (logical) Wants prisons to expand rehabilitation programs.
• (logical) Supports medical marijuana.
• (logical) Wants to open continental shelf for drilling.
• (logical) Opposed NAFTA and CAFTA.
• (logical) Wanted to repeal automatic Congressional pay raises.
• (logical) Supports concealed carry permits.
• (logical) Desired to ban gun registration laws in DC.
• (logical) Did not want to expand "Patriot Act's" roving wiretaps.
• (logical) Wanted Congressional oversight of CIA interrogations.
• (logical) Ensure an achievable mission in Iraq.
• (quasi-logical) Supports vouchers for public schools.
• (quasi-logical) Wants so-called "path to citizenship" for illegals.
• (quasi-logical) Voted to curtail business resistance to labor unions.
• (quasi-logical) Wants to let shareholders vote on executive compensation.
• (illogical) Did not want to terminate NPR.
• (illogical) Did not want block grants to be used for training.
• (illogical) Wants anti-male sexism, Kool-Aid drinker on phony "wage gap" myth.
• (illogical) Wants to ship money to Mexico to "fight drugs".
• (illogical) Wishes the EPA could "regulate" carbon dioxide.
• (illogical) Supports every "green" energy tax payer boondoggle under the sun.
• (illogical) Liked the "cash for clunkers" program.
• (illogical) Wanted to send money overseas to Pakistan to "support democratic institutions".
• (illogical) Does not want to cooperate with India because they have nukes.
• (illogical) Wants Washington DC to have electoral votes.
• (illogical) Other than not wanting a GM and Chrysler bailout, has not met a single increase in debt he hasn't liked.
• (illogical) Openly endorses anti-white racism in multiple contexts.
• (illogical) Desires "green" public schools.
• (illogical) Wants the US to have a health care "system" like in Canada, or the UK.

In fact, the gap between Walz and Trump is not as wide as one might think.

They both love Keynesian-style big spending, and debt; they both have pronounced populist streaks, with a distrust of so-called "trade agreements" and globalization; they are both pro-Second Amendment. To me, they are both "center-moderates", with Walz being slightly Left-- he's a "anthropogenic climate change" Kool-Aid drinker, and also at least somewhat has bought into the "Cultural Marxism" nonsense-- and with Trump being slightly Right, for example in being "pro-life". Heck, they even agree about the WuFlu: Trump stood day after day after day right behind Dr. Fausti, as the latter spewed his incoherent nonsense: Trump could have shitcanned the guy three days in for being the actual nutjob Fausti is.

In general, I give Noem something like a B+ in terms of her views, and Walz a C-- I don't think either one of them are "nutcases".

The kids and I are finally ready to take the wraps off of our "Wireframe Magazine" Fuze competition entry-- check out the BitChute and Rumble links in the site header above to watch me play through it in single player.

My webcam and microphone are supposed to be here tomorrow, at which point the kids and I will record a three-player session-- then you'll also get our remarks and commentary as we play, which will be fun.

You know that usual deal with politicians: "are they evil, or stupid?" In Sadiq Khan's case, I think he's just an idiot.

When Breadline Bernie visited the Soviet Union in the 1980s, he came back ecstatic about how great the place was. Meanwhile, other people who visited during that same time-- who were perhaps part of the same entourage even-- were laughingly remarking behind his back, "What in the world is he on about? I've never seen a more dilapidated dump in my life!"

Bernie was looking at the same scenes, but seeing them differently, through his Commie Red-tinted glasses: he could see, but was blind.

So it is with Sadiq Khan. He's so deep into having drank the "diversity is our strength" Kool-Aid, that he's incapable of questioning the totally and obviously wrong mantra, or even of producing evidence to support it as he promulgates it!

"Our many identities don’t contradict each other, rather they make us stronger", he says. "That's why...", he goes on, "...we must reject those who claim to be patriots by trying to narrow what it means to be English as a way of excluding others."

How does it make "us" stronger? No evidence is forthcoming: he merely drops these unsubstantiated statements, and moves on.

This is such a backwards take on things it makes my head spin. Try dropping a practicing Christian into Sharia Law, and see how long it takes for them to wind up getting executed. Similarly, take a strict adherent to Sharia Law, and see how long it takes them to wind up in jail in a Christian nation-- or not wind up in jail, since this is England we're talking about... but that can be a topic for another day.

In my own country, the Left believe in Cultural Marxism, while I'm an adherent to Classical Liberalism. The two world views are literally "contradictory", to use Khan's word-- they are diametrically opposed! They, again quite literally, can not co-exist at the same time! Take a trip to North Korea and try not worshipping the "Dear Leader"-- let me know what happens, if you can get a communication out before the anti-aircraft gun discharges in your direction.

I could go on and on: the examples proving my point-- and proving Khan wrong-- are nearly inexhaustible!

Getting now to his table-flipping sophistry about how the common Englishman-- born and bred-- is somehow the aggressor: other people-- foreigners-- have come into their country, and codified into law values which are not compatible with their own.

How many times do you need to be told you're a racist because your ancestor ten generations ago went across the ocean and beat up a Native American, before you start to get frustrated-- right after you were nice enough to let the very person making this absurd claim into your country? Is not the totally logical and rational response, "Fine, then go back to where you came from!"

Even the word "pluralism" is a contradiction: the only way it "works" is if everyone shares that value-- which means it's no longer a pluralistic society-- rather, it's a monoculture, of shared values!

The mistake the English whites made was buying into this "pluralism" myth in the first place, propagated by sophists like Sadiq Khan: "Sure, we'll just let everyone in, our values aren't contradictory!" As I've written before, "diversity" is a weakness, not a strength. Brexit was a great step in the right direction, but now the world needs about one hundred more such events to transpire.

One would have to be crazy to be a cop in America today: here were black people kicking in each other's heads and trying to stab each other, and somehow it's white people's fault. Hah!

They could have put Derek Chauvin up for execution through quartering via first degree murder in cold blood, and he would have been found guilty.

If I went to a bus stop let's say and started trying to stab people, I too would get shot by either a cop, or one of the people at the bus stop-- obviously the outcome would have and has nothing to do with race. But also obviously, that's missing the point: Marxists gonna' Marxist.

Cops should stop going to black neighborhoods: let them knife and shoot each other. The non-problematic blacks would then flee and migrate into civil society.

There is a game I've been playing on my Murderapolis walks which I call "Man, or Woman?" At the bug out house, it's easy: the men have masculine gaits, ruddy thicker looking skin, actual muscle mass, and a variety of other traits which makes them easy to pick out.

But in the cities, the "men" move like women-- pronounced hip movements, with their palms out-- and even dress in extra tight pants and shirts. Sometimes they are riding little bicycles, with dorky helmets, like small children.

Even with frontal looks, like when a pair of people are walking towards me, it's difficult to tell until I get very close: pointy chins, pudgy skin, narrow faces, and the prevalence of lesbian-like buzz cuts among the women means that the two sexes are almost indiscernible in metropolitan areas.

If T levels continue like this, I won't be at all surprised to see "men" sporting actual breasts in the next ten years.

The image headlining this article is hilarious-- it's what cuckface looks like with a WuFlu Burqa! They also sort of remind me of these dudes from "Resident Evil 4"-- and just as blind, albeit figuratively!

On an unrelated note, I could go to web sites like "Limited Run Games" and order just about everything on them. I've got this and this in my crosshairs at the moment.

I've been thinking recently that rather than hide who I am, I need to lean into my identity: why not start a full-on recording studio, from where I could run an exclusively "new tech"-- as Styx now calls them-- video channel, covering video games from the perspective of a "Xennial" right winger? I could also go full-bore on GNU/Linux tech tips, politics, football and Lazio more specifically, and so on?

My daughter is also getting interested in politics, plus I could bring her in to cover animal and art-related subjects. My son could do some videos about outer space phenomena. I have a brother-- well, a brother plus a "virtual" brother of sorts-- who are both big time into motorsports, that could be yet another subject.

I know that streaming and videos are an oversaturated market-- but outside of the "Video Game Critic" dude and someone like "Metal Jesus Rocks", almost all game-related material is from soyboy "Gen Z" and "Millennial" types. And I have never seen a single person who has the mix of super vocal right-wing politics, with a heavy coverage of video games; "Vee" sort of does that kind of thing, but focuses more on the politics, less on the actual game design analysis.

Besides that, people often tell me that I'm a pretty funny guy. I have the most bizarre voice I've ever heard-- in a normal setting it's kind of grating, but in the right context it flips into a positive: many people over the decades have told me I should go into radio. I also have one of those "rubber faces" which famous comedians often have. I'm certainly no professional in terms of talent or imagination, but I could definitely play into a bit of a schtick, and get viewers that way.

Imagine then "John Linneman" meets "Metal Jesus Rocks" meets "Video Game Critic" meets "Don Adams" meets "Styxhexenhammer" meets "Richard Hammond"-- a sort of fusion of all of those people and their subject matter.

I might start asking around to see who would be interested in this kind of thing. The biggest dilemma is where to set up: the obvious choice is the bug out house, but if the law I mention here came to pass, then I quite literally couldn't live in Minnesota anymore. Further, there are rumblings Keith Ellison might run for governor: he's like one of those central African warlord-cum-dictator "el presidente" types, who institute "land reform" and oversee tribal slaughtering civil wars. There is no way a white person could be safe in Minnesota with him in charge.

My mom and I were debating state viability this morning, and while she favors Florida, I've been looking at Mississippi: Florida is attractive in the extreme short run, but has a significant enough libtard percentage in it, that once the retirees start to die off I wouldn't be surprised if the state government completely turned "woke" and began abusing the rural indigenous whites, like what's happened in Minnesota.

Texas will be completely lost in less than ten years; I think Florida could be the next big domino to topple, after that.

The reasons I like Mississippi are that it has the lowest percentage of libtards in the entire country-- 13%!-- and also the lowest cost of living. Another "feature" is that the entire state basically looks like a giant trailer park: no metrosexual soyboy or Karen would have any reason to touch the place with a ten foot barge poll-- what in the world is there in Bible-belt Mississippi for people like them? The entire place is filled with metal pole barns and barely-paved roads.

If the states fell one-by-one, Mississippi and Alabama will probably be the very last two left standing. In the Northern territories, South Dakota is probably the best choice: again, no libtard would ever want to go there.

But enough rambling: here's a funny stock image-- a multi-racial thot on her phone not paying attention, obligatory crazy-haired black lady, former-Tyrone-turned-middle-ager, new Black Panther-styled college graduate, two white thots, and the single white male in the room, who has lower T levels than a Buzzfeed employee. Notice the absolute zero representation of the average, every day indigenous white person, and the absolute zero-alignment to actual, real-world United States demographics.



When I see advertising, I think I'm living in Nigeria half the time, and in "Cyberpunk 2077" the other half!

Remember: "anti-racism" means "no whites"; "feminism" means "no men"; "have the discussion" and "just listen" mean "you're only allowed in the room if you agree with us": white males are ok only if they are cuckfaced soyboys-- white women are ok only if they are brainless urban e-thots or corporate suburban lapdogs.

I like Styx, but this is the second major event he got totally wrong: he thought Trump would be in office for a second term, and he thought Chauvin would get acquitted. He's also frequently creating commentary like, "well in the mid-terms this-and-that, and in the next Presidential election, so-on-and-so-forth".

Simultaneously, he makes fun of people who are "black pilled".

I've been writing a bit about Ancient China lately as I've been studying that topic, and what happened over and over again on that landmass was that some political and social structure would take root, be in place for maybe two hundred or-a-bit-more years-- sometimes for far less-- then slowly melt down and transform into some new set of structures.

These transitions often took place over many decades, and it's not like the landmass sunk into the Earth's core when they did. For most people living there, their lives probably didn't radically change from one day to the next, like is presented in overly dramatized Hollywood movies and video games.

In terms of a background of civilizational sophistication, North America is where the Chinese area was a few thousand years ago: until Europeans arrived in this zone, people were essentially living in huts, eating tree bark-- in other words, the North American landmass is only in its "first cycle" of the kind of change I alluded to in the previous paragraph.

This "first cycle" is now complete-- the "United States" as the entity we've known it to be, is kaput.

Historians and their students two thousand years from now will observe that during the current period, the election system completely collapsed and was no longer functional, there was a mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of people from Central America to the North totally changing the demographics of the area, the culture became prone to hysteria and paranoia, the policing and judicial outcomes became controlled by violent mobs, and that the indigenous whites mass-migrated and consolidated to rural areas or certain states, away from the increasingly dangerous urban areas.

Since North American has not been through a transitional period like this before, it seems like the end of the world-- but as I stated above, it's not like the continent falls into the ocean or gets sucked into a black hole: the soil will remain, and the people living on it will continue to do what they've always done-- live life one day at a time, and dynamically make the best of life as they can.

For some people-- namely, those cheering on the current persecution, such as my co-workers-- life won't change at all: they are on the "winning team", so they will be left alone, at least for now. For the people on the receiving end of the persecution, such as myself, life will be altered more significantly, as we're forced to physically relocate in order to live life according to our values.

People like Styx can call this whole perspective "black pilled"-- fine by me. But in my view, it's simply an objective reflection on the larger-context state of affairs, and an acknowledgement of reality.

I've never been a baseball fan, from hating "tee-ball" as a kid to trying to watch the sport as an adult-- but boy can I sympathize with the sentiment here. Via a quick search I found this article, which corroborates their complaints.

The sport is even toying with having a machine call the balls and strikes! This is what you get after you allow the precedent of NFL-style instant replays, "VAR" in football, and so forth, all things I was opposed to on day one. Why not just replace the players with robots? No more injuries! No more mistakes! No fatigue! Inch-perfect play, every second!

The quotes about the inexperienced people coming into the sport mirror my reflections about the greater society as a whole.

If you're under the age of thirty five and went to college, there is a ninety-five percent chance you're a complete idiot (if you're reading this odds are I'm not referring to you, to be clear). If you're a Lefty, there's almost a one hundred percent chance you're an idiot (again, if you're reading this, probably not you I have in mind). So why is it that young Lefties, the worst of all combinations, are the ones being handed boxes of matches and gallons of gasoline? They ruin everything they touch.

On that note, I finally finished my "Wireframe Magazine" Fuze competition entry, which freed me up to get back to my game backlog. I started "Miles Morales", and I don't know if I can keep going.

It's not so much that the game is woke per se-- it's more like it's just dopey Millennial values; multi-racial families filled with "Mary Sue" characters, obvious villain arrogant white guy, NPCs with environmental dialog lines like "I need to buy gifts for 'Kwanzaa'", and on and on. The whole experience is drenched in this "written by IGN Twitter blue checkmarks" vibe.

I might just write my review and move on.

Here is why I regularly listen to Vee: he's a genius. He once pointed out, "the perpetrators won't change their behaviors until it impacts them personally." In the aforelinked video, he prescribes the means of doing so: don't protest Delta by pointing out their wokeness-- they'll just take that as a badge of pride: "We like that a bunch of racists Nazis don't like us!"

Rather, take a page from Saul Alinsky's playbook: protest in front of their headquarters by holding them to their own rules: "Don't fly Delta! They are racist and exclusionary by requiring an id to fly on their planes!" The reason Alinsky correctly saw this as a useful tactic is because the target organization or individual can no longer use their principle as a defense: the people attacking the organization agree about the principle! In fact, they are holding you to account for not taking it far enough!

The only way out from there is to throw the principle under the bus-- "game over"-- or try to live with the principle, which is also "game over" because the notion was never intended to be realistically practicable in the first place, as it was only being promoted for propagandistic purposes.

The local Murderapolis newspaper-- "The Red Star and Tribune"-- ran a supplementary piece which just showed up in my mailbox, "asking Minnesotans" what it will mean for them when it's said that the "pandemic is over".

One guy said "when I can stop wearing masks in public". Gee, that's funny, I'm not wearing them now. A woman said, "when we can stop telling people they must be 'vaccinated'". Well guess what lady-- you can stop the behavior, right now! "I hope we can stop burning witches soon", as she pours gasoline on the pyre...

How about this one? "When political dissidents are allowed to see a doctor again." No one in the article said that. And here all this time the Left was telling me that "healthcare is a right"! Not when you disagree with Joe Bi Den, Kim Jong Walz, and Dr. Fausti I guess: some animals are more equal than others.

One thing which is very striking to me right now is how authoritarian everyone around me is. Outside of a dwindling few, almost-totally-censored voices to which I go out of my way to listen-- Eric Peters, "Vee", and a couple of others-- it's automatically assumed by everyone that Fascism is the "correct mode".

Process that for a minute: we're not even eighty years from the fall of the "Third Reich", yet every single idea I hear proposed today is very literally a fusion of State and corporate power-- enforced by Stasi tactics like snitching, destroying dissident's livelihoods, institutionalizing racial inequality before the law, and so forth.

Great ideas! I bet they've never been tried before!

Especially with young people: I just about never meet anyone under the age of thirty, or even thirty five, who isn't a flaming libtard. I get the sense that they have quite literally never had a single influence in their lives who has said, "hold on a minute-- you're making a lot of assumptions there, have you thought those through?", or "did you know there is another way to look at this?"

It's especially annoying being a computer programmer, since from my experience software developers are predominantly in their twenties or maybe early thirties, before then moving on to management-- which means an old hat like me with kooky ideas about, you know, individual liberty (whatever!) being continuously surrounded by complete inanity-- inanity which can be undermined via simple reasoning in about thirty seconds, but which can't be said out loud, or the monoculture purge operation will go into overdrive (destroy the infidel!).

I once fell prey to the thinking error John Linneman mentions here: for a long time I had to fight urges to smash my Switch into the blunt corner of the nearest desk surface, not because I didn't enjoy the platform, but because I couldn't shake the association between the hardware and the culture surrounding the system-- it took me years to get over it.

I also had a friend growing up who loved "Pink Floyd". Over time I noticed he wasn't listening to them anymore, so I asked him why: "I don't want to be associated with their fans." Same mental mistake: just because some obnoxious people like something shouldn't preclude you from liking it too.

On a Switch-note, I'm so close to finishing my "Wireframe Magazine" Fuze competition entry that I can taste it. I think the game is coming out really well, I will be fascinated to see what the judges make of it. It's not the most incredible game I've ever played, but given its extremely short development timeframe and the fact I've been chipping away at it in evenings after my day job, it's certainly not a bad effort.

Changing topics and as a continuation of my "cringey SJW yard sign" series, I took a slightly different Murderapolis walking route the other day and saw this house:



The yellow one reminded me of Steven Crowder's "I'm a poor black trans single mother with rickets" schtick. The middle one is... Black Supremacist John Travolta impersonators donning WuFlu Burqas?! I'm also curious as to why this person is flying the flag of a foreign country in their window... I'm sure Australia or whatever would just love to have them back, I'll pay for the one-way plane ticket!

One flew over the cuckoo's nest... incidentally, I'm sure everyone saw that the primary "BLM" founder did what all self-proclaimed Marxists do as soon as they get power: become totally bourgeoisie, buying a multi-million dollar house in a neighborhood without a single black person within one hundred miles.

Shocking.

On yet another topic, I hardly use my Android phone-- I probably touch it once or twice per day-- but on one such occasional a few days ago I noticed that the "Google Play Services" daemon was chewing through battery like there's no tomorrow. Then yesterday, I got this message:



Apparently, this is malware which Google itself back-doored onto everyone's Android phones. It can't be (easily) removed, and can only be shut up by turning off all notifications from the aforementioned daemon.

And "daemon" is just about the right term for this crap. Next thing you know base Android system services will be spamming me with CNN headlines.

Android as software was really cool back when it came out over a decade ago: totally libre and minimalistic. Now huge components of it are "closed", to the point where I've no clue if turning off Bluetooth, LTE, or "location services" actually turns them off, or keeps them off: I'd need to get specialized equipment to intercept the signals and packets emanating from the dumb thing over time, to make sure it's not snooping on me.

Probably easier to just buy one of those metal cases that doesn't let any waves in or out. Or toss the phone into a lake and re-buy a "Nokia N-Gage". I wonder if GSM service still exists?

With just a couple of exceptions, every person I routinely interact with at my workplace has very vocally signaled-- as in, virtue signaled with lots of smiley and clapping "emojis", obnoxiously broadcasting their personal and private health choices to as many people as they can-- that they are getting shot up with the experimental WuFlu injections.

"Hey guys! I'm getting prostate surgery tomorrow! Yay!"

Most of these people are under the age of thirty: according to the CDC's own numbers, these young people stand a significantly higher percentage of dying from the seasonal flu or a car accident-- or probably by getting struck by lightning, or tripping over their dog while we're at it.

So why the heck would they get an "approved for emergency uses only, never before tested on humans" cocktail injected directly into their bloodstreams? Especially when I've now heard several of them complain that the shot itself gave them terrible, flu-like symptoms which lasted for multiple days!

As high as seventy percent of people who get the WuFlu itself don't ever get any symptoms-- how is getting a shot that makes you sick the superior choice over a virus you probably won't get anyway, and which probably won't make you sick at all even if you do get it?

Totally nonsensical-- until I read this article. The full piece is worth a read, but the short end of it is that young people have been systematically propagandized and programmed from day one to be deathly afraid of this thing, while simultaneously having the actual numbers and statistics either hidden from them altogether, or wildly misrepresented.

I suppose, the fact that my coworkers refer to these injections as "vaccines" is in and of itself a symptom of their programming. "Vaccines" are known things with long histories, and a positive connotation: it's a great term to use if you're trying to disarm someone to get them to hold out their arm.

You can always tell how close to the truth you are, by how frenzied your opponents get: Trump, Tulsi Gabbard, and Bernie going after the military industrial complex is a great example, and here we see-- after all of the myriad things Tucker Carlson points out on his show-- the Twitter mob going bananas over the "population replacement" operation underway.

It's worth noting that the thing the Left fears the most is collective "white" action: white Europeans after all invented pretty much everything worth inventing, have contributed the greatest artistic works ever achieved by humanity, and were even the best at combat, which is how they easily conquered other people who essentially specialized in brutal warfare, such as the "Native Americans", or the Aztecs-- not to mention the fact that white Europeans had the technology to get across the ocean in the first place.

You'd need about four hundred consecutive "white history months" to get through all of the accomplishments.

To be clear, I'm an absolute proponent of liberalism: living in a country full of Thomas Sowell's or Ben Carson's would be plenty fine with me, and beyond that there's so much cross-breeding at this point that the concepts of "white" and "black" oftentimes aren't clear anyway: I personally know two "50/50" people-- one looks totally "white", the other totally "black". There was once a study which asked people to identify faces by "race", and the results were hilarious.

To me nothing is about "race"-- but to the Left, everything is about "race", and to them the idea of "whites", specifically of the rural variety who can build houses with their bare hands, who provide all of the food the city dwellers eat, and who are the experts of both self-sufficiency and firearms, is terrifying. Collective "white" action is the hottest of the hottest buttons for them, because it's the thing which would put an end to their shenanigans. That's why they devote so much time to mocking rural people: it's pure fear combined with self-censuring feelings of personal inadequacy.

It's also why the Left's priority numero uno is importing as many non-white illegal immigrants as humanly possible, as quickly as humanly possible: it's their way of "stacking" the voter base, to as-rapidly-as-possible disenfranchise the hyper-competent, independent-minded, strong white rural base, which is the existential threat to their power.

On a slight change of note, I've continued my reading of Chinese history, and today's America reminds me a lot of the period following the collapse of the Han.

The Qin were so warlike that their entire civilization was built around serving in the army, from the top to the peasants at the bottom. The second wealth would start to accumulate, they would intentionally start a new war just to drain the coffers. The Han, while not as extreme, retained a significant military aspect, with access to government positions based mostly on competency.

But during the subsequent "Three Kingdoms" period, the pendulum finished its swing to the opposite side: society became very decadent, to the point where young men spent their lives serenading each other and reading poetry. Meanwhile, court positions were doled out not to those with the most substance, but rather to those who had the best conversational skills.

The parallels to present-day America are obvious: Trump has substance but not smoothness of words, so he's bad; Cuomo murders elderly in nursing homes but wins an Emmy for his press conferences, only put under pressure after the scandal becomes so large it can't be hidden; young men who don't know how to replace a light bulb sit around on the internet all day posting about racist freeways and obscure video game plot points on Twitter.

Heck, there was even a period during the Han collapse where the court was run by a bunch of eunuchs! Another parallel.

Excellent-- a hero! All it takes is a little bravery. Of course, he should refuse to play WuFlu theater himself under any circumstance, but I give him a ton of credit for sacrificing his job for his principles. I would have liked to hear the full, uncut audio that the reporter recorded with him-- but I suppose that's asking too much.

A partial aside: I don't recall if I've ever posted this before, but as it's been passed down through the family and relayed to me, I'm evidently a direct descendant of Severyn Nalyvaiko-- apparently, there are statues devoted to him in the very village from which my mother's family emigrated a few generations ago. I can't write my mother's maiden name online due to "cancel culture", but the name is very close to "Nalyvaiko", which lends further credence to the story.

It would also explain why my family is so filled with anti-authoritarian, independently-spirited people: my great grandparents-- my mother's father's parents-- were moonshiners during "prohibition", and my grandfather had many amusing stories of his parents evading the police during his childhood, one involving the flattening of a hot pie into the face of a cop entering the house; my grandfather himself was notoriously opposed to doctors, police, and other "authorities"; all eight of his children, my mother included, have strong libertarian or anti-authoritarian leanings.

And then of course you have me. It's too early to tell with my son, but judging by my daughter's "no nonsense" disposition and character, she's well set to carry on the family character.

Back to Nalyvaiko himself: it's too bad there was no concept of a photograph in his time, it'd be fascinating to see a picture of him. Interestingly, Fedir Mazepa, who was executed alongside Nalyvaiko, has confirmed descendents who look an awful lot like my own family, especially Anna Politkovskaya who in many photographs could pass as an aunt of mine: so minimally, the Ukrainian look runs deep in my blood.

This made me laugh, especially the bit about torque wrenches and air compressors being classified as tools not usually found at a home residence. I'm not even handy, and I not just own but routinely use both of those things. Can you imagine the gestapo enforcing this?



It sounds like they are trying to crack down on people running quasi-car shops out of their homes, like a Murderapolis neighbor of mine. But it's still absurd. Almost as absurd as getting one of these WuFlu-related injections. As often is the case, first comment nails it:



My workplace-- a multi-billion dollar "woke" international conglomerate-- keeps setting up "events" where you can get shot up with these cocktails. Evidently they are doling out this exact "Johnson & Johnson" one soon-- you know, the one which made that one guy's skin fall off.

Give me some of that! Maybe I'll even be like Team Rocket: "Make It Double!"

And just wait until birth, cancer, and who-knows-what-else statistics come out ten, fifteen, and twenty years from now. "It's funny, women of child bearing ages year 2021 and later have half the fertility rate of women before then... I wonder what was going on in 2021... having a tough time remembering".

Interestingly, my employer is always very careful to say that "we will not be requiring vaccination to work here....... unless it's required by local governments."

Now why in the world would they be so persistent with that disclaimer-- because after all, couldn't that sentence apply to anything? "We won't be requiring binky the clown noses... unless the government mandates it." Or, "We won't be requiring you to break dance nude in the lobby... unless the government mandates it."

But they only use that sentence when it comes to the WuFlu cocktails. Why? One obvious theory readily presents itself, but I don't want my mind to go there yet.

Or maybe it doesn't matter: I'll soon be out of Murderapolis for good, running a canning operation with a huge flock of chickens and who knows what else. I'll only need enough income to cover basic utilities-- electricity and internet access, plus the occasional septic tank emptying-- and property taxes. And we're going to be splitting those expenses across five adults.

There won't be much they can even lord over me at that point: I'll barely even be leaving my own property, much less traveling anywhere. What can they possibly even take away at that point? I'll be like one of those ascetics who existed in China after the fall of the Han, who lived "off the grid" sixth-century style, in protest of the decadence of the court and its society.

This is why I've refused to wear a WuFlu Burqa since day one: notice how despite their protestations, they all obeyed and left the church-- while wearing their Burqas!

My first reaction to this was, "why is a sports channel airing footage of Beijing Biden, Sniffer-in-Chief?" Then I remembered: ESPN is owned by Disney. Yeah, the company that censors black and gay people out of the Chinese versions of their films, while calling me a racist. Got it.

My family wasn't big into baseball while I was growing up, but my parents were avid Minnesota Vikings fans. Every so often I'll see a car with a vintage-90s Vikings bumper sticker with the older helmet design and subtly different colors, and it's amazing how wistful that makes me feel: back then, Vikings games were one hundred percent apolitical, and something wholesome families in the state all watched together, or even at the Met or, later, the Metrodome.

Today... forget it: I can't make it five minutes through an NFL broadcast, between the not just vacuous but actively disgusting advertising and pop culture, the kneeling players, the empty stadia, the effeminate cry-baby millionaire players, and the constant political circus. Along with movies, video games, motorsports, and television, the Minnesota Vikings are just one more thing which has been taken away; there isn't much left.

Tucker also brings China into the discourse, which is timely considering I'd just got done reading this piece, about what the CCP's hilariously-named "United Front Work Department" has been doing to Christians in what amount to literal torture chambers. Kind of sounds like Creepy Joe's "unity". Do you think we'll have those chambers in the country formerly known as America some day? A cuckfaced soy boy with a whip will swing his hips, "you will put on your face mask while swearing on a copy of 'White Fragility', you bigot!"

Another rhetorical tool Tucker masterfully employs here is turning the Left's own "disproportionately affected" "logic" against them: "well gosh, doesn't Coca Cola-induced diabetes disproportionately impact black people, and therefore isn't Coca Cola racist?" It's about time Conservatives flip the Saul Alinsky table.

Incidentally, the CEO of my employer-- another institution I can't wait to "dox" some day-- sounds just like the meat heads in the segment: total blithering morons, little talking sack puppets with CCP and HR department hands up their asses, flapping the puppets' mouths up and down in sync to the words coming from off-screen.