Remember when Colin Kaepernick voluntarily chose to terminate his own contract with the 49'ers? Fast forward to today, when I read that he was offered a professional contract in the AAF, but held his nose-- probably while sipping champagne with the other hand, CNN blaring in the background-- and proclaimed in a nasal voice, "Eww, I won't ever play under a contract worth less than twenty million!"

I'm seriously getting annoyed at Clarkson's obnoxious anti-Brexit jokes during this current series of "The Grand Tour", to the point where I'm considering just not watching the show anymore. If I wanted to listen to Hillary Clinton talk, I'd go look up her coughing-fit campaign speeches. It's sad when I can't tell my Jeremy's apart-- Corbyn from Clarkson.

James May as well threw his weight behind "Remain". All this tells me is that they are idiotic empty-headed celebrities, just like those in America's Hollywood. Interestingly, I can't find any quotes from Richard Hammond-- maybe he's kept his brain while the rest of Britain's metropolitan limousine liberals lost theirs.

I've seen this phenomenon many times with so-called "fact checkers", where they "disprove" an argument by either being ridiculously pedantic, or by offering some kind of non-sequitur.

One of my favorites was their response to Trump saying that "dangerous criminals" come over the Southern border. "That's a false statement", the "fact-checkers" pronounced, "because, did you know that crime is lower on average in border cities than some other cities in America?" Which, of course, has nothing to do with what Trump actually said-- and who is to say crime wouldn't be even lower in those cities, if border security were stronger?

If you're going to end the whole model of the "nation state", fine by me! But then that means no more welfare state, since there won't be... a state anymore! Duh! I swear that these mobs of crazy American Leftists, chanting like a bunch of brainless automatons, haven't thought these concepts through for even thirty seconds.

What they want is almost everything status quo, but increased, not eliminated: the huge multi-trillion dollar American state apparatus funded by its current monopolistic banking cartel, with its present-- or even higher-- rate of confiscatory taxes, combined with mass-censorship, and unparalleled-in-human-history wealth redistribution via this so-called "Green New Deal". The only part of "America" which they no longer want are the borders-- specifically, the Southern one. This is so that as many third-world welfare single moms as possible will come in, because that group will reliably vote Democrat.

So when they stand around and shout that they want "no America at all"-- no nation state-- what they actually want is more America, amped up to eleven, except the actual borders. Clear as mud?

As I wrote in yesterday's review, playing an EGA DOS game on the Switch hardware is positively surreal. I wasn't kidding in the review when I said I've already had more fun playing this than "Super Mario Odyssey".

I especially love how Tom Hall and his programmer friends futzed with the aspect ratio, so that it's a good compromise between viewport size, and not having enormous black bars along the sides of the screen. It makes 4:3 gaming on a 16:9 display palatable!

Can you imagine if this release paves the way for similarly adapted ports of games like "X-COM: UFO Defense", "Ultima Underworld", or even other genres such as "One Must Fall: 2097" or "Aces of the Pacific"? One can dream!

Leftists love to constantly try to poke holes in markets, showing how "imperfect" they are if they show any signs of "monopoly", accumulated power, "asymmetric information", or any other number of economics buzzwords.

So I'm going to play the game the other way: here is an example of a lack of intense competition leading to the world getting better innovation than it otherwise would have in a more balanced market: hardware-based, real-time ray tracing technology!

If AMD had been neck-in-neck with Nvidia, there is no chance in heck the latter would have taken that risk-- what became the RTX 20x0 line would have simply been more of the boring old same: using the silicon budget just to push higher framerates. Instead, Nvidia's execs said, "Because we have a bit of a lead, why not try something different?"

Of course, there are lots of other examples of "imperfect" markets providing phenomenal services and prices to consumers: in fact, these markets are "imperfect" because one player has done such a fantastic job! One example which comes to mind immediately is Amazon: where else can one buy pretty much any consumer good, for the lowest price around, and have it arrive on his doorstep by the next morning?

The end goal isn't to have competition: rather, it's to have good and innovative products and services, at low prices. Those goals can and are almost always achieved by diverse sets of market conditions, no matter how "imperfect" they may appear to "equality means everyone has the same stuff" closet-or-otherwise Marxists.

In this interview, an "advisor" to "Crazy Eyes Cortez"-- we'll call him "Wig Man"-- says that we needn't worry about the creation of the trillions of dollars needed to enact the so-called "Green New Deal", because "inflation is just a ratio", he explains, between the amount of goods and the amount of money. As long as lots of "stuff" is created with the money, general prices won't rise!

In all my years of listening to Leftists and studying economics, I'd never heard this one before! Unfortunately, there are one or two problems with it.

"Inflation is just a ratio" implies that there is no upward bound. So, why stop at trillions, and just shoot for the heavens and lots of prosperity by printing ten quadrillion dollars, which will give each American a government constructed and paid-for Earthen home-- or a deluxe-sized igloo for those in the Northern climates-- in communities totally free from such unpleasantness as farting cows? Heck, why not throw in a bonus $150k Tesla Model X for each family too? Or three or four? I mean, if Uncle Elon doesn't deserve to be rewarded for being a man ahead of the times, then who does?

Of course, what happens when the appetite for dollar foreign reserves begins to reach its limit? That appetite is significant still which is what enables people like "Wig Man" or the "MMT" fellows to come up with ex-post-facto, pseudo-academic "explanations" as to why infinite or near-infinite government profligacy, in fact, doesn't matter. It would be a bit like a small child saying that gravity doesn't exist, when in fact a parent is holding the back of their shirt, preventing them from tumbling over a high precipice.

I think the thing I'm most excited for with these alternative gridiron leagues is the possibility that they become just popular enough to warrant attention from video game makers-- can we say "AAF 2K20"?-- but not so popular that EA just moneyhats them like they did with the NFL.

To put it another way, if we can't have more NFL games, then maybe we can just have more NFL-like leagues, each with its own game. I took a look at the "Monster League Football" reboot, but I want something a bit more serious.

I've always had the strong suspicion that the moral philosophizing-- if you can call it that, since the arguments were usually very poor-- in support of "abortion" was merely a front for women simply wanting the removal of consequences for their actions. I've held these suspicions, because very nearly every person I've encountered who supports "abortion" uses moral relativism for every other aspect of their belief system: why should they suddenly become absolutists for this one, single issue?

Lo and behold, my suspicions were correct. Listen to a Democrat suddenly try to use the moral absolutist "it's the woman's body" argument regarding a baby who isn't in the woman's body anymore! It's clear now that this argument was just a smoke screen, as I'd always thought, because here it's still being employed when it obviously doesn't apply.

The other telling thing is that it's painfully clear that the changes in this bill-- only one doctor needed before the baby can be put down like a dog at the vet, that the woman can initiate the murder by claiming "mental" difficulty, and so forth-- are designed for no other reason than to make it easier for a woman to not have to raise the child she spread her legs to have. Because if the woman really is about to die, you don't think the hospital would be able to get three doctor approvals lickety-split?

What kind of bonkers country with a total population of 350 million people, lets in so many immigrants that a whopping 15% of the country's populace is foreign born? Oh, that's right: it's the United States.

Of course, blaming worker's wages for not keeping place with inflation on immigration and not the Fed is kind of silly too. I'm sure the immigration thing has made a negative impact, but probably to the tune of one person pouring a bucket of water into a ship, which has a hole in its hull.

I saw this article in my feeds today, and thought: "Here is my chance to get inside the minds of one of these pretentous hipsterville assholes who have ruined my hobby!"

Before I proceed, you know those 1960s drug-addled hippies, who barf out meaningless word salad in an attempt to sound enlightened? "The unicorn grass shines like a shimmer on the rainbow trees, crying glass tears into the soul of the universe! Yeah, man!" Well, that's how this game designer talks. Incidentally, his name is "Jason Rohrer", and he makes exactly the kind of shit which I despise the most:

• "Intentionally throughout my career, I’ve been trying to make things that are real games."
• "None of the games you’ve ever played by me have character dialogue or cutscenes or back story or blocks of texts that show some poem."
• "Like if you wanted to get a message or a sort of meaning or some sort of aesthetic feeling the nature of life's passage, the only way to get it is to play it.."
• "I was just laughing out loud at the joy that I'm feeling from weird little things like that. And thinking it through."
• "You do have this sense of living a whole life, and you do have that bizarre immediate connection to these people. And in so many games that is lost immediately, and that would be 'gg bro.'"

All this time I thought this locust swarm of hipsters had flown over from the 1980s punk rock scene-- angry, and desperate to be accepted. But now I'm starting to wonder if they're actually the spiritual woodstock mystic successors? "Far out, man!"

The article ends with, "For more on Rohrer's intentional method when creating games and to hear how having a maternal figure in the game heavily impacted his feelings..."

Uh, no, that's ok, I think I've had enough "insight" for now (or forever!).

A couple of funny five year-old Duncan stories: Ellyn was checking his math work a few days ago, and noticed that during complex addition or subtraction problems-- let's say, 384 minus 215, or 85 plus 123-- he was only sporadically notating his "carry" digits, or when he would, they would be wrong, despite his having formulated the correct final answer.

She lectured him about not erasing his work, whereupon he replied in a frustrated tone, "I'm not!" Not believing him, Ellyn decided to covertly watch the little rascal resume his math, and much to her amazement, she discovered that Duncan was doing the work in his head, only writing the "carry" notations after the fact just to placate his mother! Because he wasn't in fact using the notations during the work, he was merely tossing a few ones above the numbers, hoping she wouldn't confirm their accuracy.

A second incident involving Minecraft also happened yesterday: Duncan runs the Java version of the game, on GNU/Linux, using the "old" launcher. Every so often, the login token expires, and he doesn't know the password. I realized that he hadn't asked me for said password recently. And so, watching over his shoulder, I saw him somehow bypass the login form, launching the game anyway. "How did you do that??", I asked. He explained his discovery: the launcher displays the "run game" form for a fraction of a second before it verifies the login token-- so, if one positions the mouse cursor in just the right spot, and clicks at precisely the right moment, the launcher will run the game before it has a chance to swap forms!

Joe Rogan really is an idiot, and I'm not just saying that because of this one instance. I've tried listening to the guy's podcast on three or four occasions, and couldn't make it past the ten or fifteen minutes in any of them, so much did I see how emotionally-driven-- i.e., irrational-- are the guy's "reasoning" skills.

For a fellow whose opinions I'd put at about a three out of ten on the "logically sound" scale, it's amazing he has the following which he does. He also gets bonus negative points for being one of those annoying "I'm a libertarian" people, who is actually just a straight-up Lefty who simply wants to legalize pot smoking.

Hah, if this isn't the truth, then I don't know what is.

It extends past just women though: I once saw a similar image, with guys storming Normandy-- "we're saving the West!"-- alongside a typical photograph from Walmart.

This article reminds me of this past summer, when the kids and I were tinkering around with the cross-platform play in Minecraft.

The first screenshot shows my Xbox Live friends list on the Switch. And if that isn't surreal enough, the second picture shows Duncan and I playing split-screen on the Switch, with Henrietta joining us via the Windows 10 Edition on her PC!





But this could be just the beginning: will Microsoft begin creating graphically scaled-down Switch ports of their popular games? Who knows! There is a precedent for cross-company console-handheld cooperation, such as with the Dreamcast and Neo Geo Pocket Color.

Incidentally, I'm curious to see what the next "Xbox Scarlett" looks like. With the streaming focus, it wouldn't shock me if they allowed both streaming from an Xbox to a Switch-- ala the PS4 to Vita, like the Wii U's gamepad-- and perhaps even allow the Switch itself to connect directly to their cloud streaming service.

I know I've written this before, but it struck me once again today while testing one of Duncan's new "Super Mario Maker" levels: I vastly prefer the Wii U to the Switch.

Every piece of hardware has its own "feel", like the way it looks cosmetically, the way the controller feels, the way the game outputs visuals, tactile elements which might be present, and so on. There's just something about the Switch which is extremely off-putting to me, where it seriously distracts me from enjoying games on it. It's just not fun to play games on the Switch, and I'm not altogether sure why. I feel the same way about some other systems too, like the Super Nintendo.

The Wii U has the opposite effect on me. Its white casing looks great sitting beneath my TV. I really like the feel of the gamepad, and even the looks of it, again in white. Having a second screen on the controller is fantastic for maps and added HUD elements, not to mention when it's integral to the gameplay, such as in ZombiU. I really like the tactile feel of the buttons, and how you can-- and I have-- a hard drive plugged into it.

I even prefer the user interface, even given the fact that it's basically totally broken ever since Nintendo took down Miiverse. Speaking of Miiverse, that was my favorite feature of any console, maybe ever. I remember sitting on there during launch week, looking at all of the cool "I wonder how you get over there?" screenshot-filled posts from the aforementioned ZombiU.

Of course, isn't this the story of my life: pretty much everything I like-- music, choice of movies, electronic gadgets-- everybody else hates. And everything which other people like, is pretty unappealing to me. It's not even me being contrarian either: I didn't know metal was a niche genre when I fell in love with it, and for all I knew, things like the 3DO and Wii U were going to be huge successes at the times which I'd bought them!

In any event, my next two game purchases might be Wii U games: "Deus Ex: Human Revolution Director's Cut", and "Donkey Kong: Tropical Freeze". The latter is even available on the Switch, and I'd rather buy the Wii U version! I also might pick up a Wii remote, and re-play through "Metroid Prime Trilogy", which was the only Wii game I'd kept way back when I'd sold that system.

During 2015 and 2016, I spent quite a few hours researching so-called "climate change". You can see examples of my output on the topic here, here, and here, just to list a few places.

Today, I skimmed a Delingpole article where he gives concrete examples of many of the same phenomena which I found during my investigative time: namely, scope-misleading graphs and statistics, tautologies, and lots of hyperbolic fear-mongering.

I don't know what those crazy dudes from Alpha Centauri did with the real Manny, but... I don't care, let us keep this one!

Opara is hands-down the best defender in the league, not only in terms of pure defensive capabilities, but in terms of attacking contributions as well: he's extremely dynamic.

Looking at Lazio's squad, the team-- between the culture, the coaching, or whatever it may be-- simply can't be getting the best out of many of their players.

Let's take Valon Berisha, for example: he had several trials with English Premier League clubs as a teenager, but didn't want to leave home at such a young age. He's worth 7.5 million EUR-- 10 when he joined us-- and he has 257 European club appearances since he was not even 20 years old, to go along with a plentiful 46 goals! On top of that, he has 34 international caps. And yet-- he can't get a game in, even when our midfield regulars were struggling!

Another example comes in the form of Riza Durmisi. 147 club appearances, 51 of those in the Spanish La Liga, to go along with 10 goals and 22 caps for Denmark. He was only left out of the World Cup Finals squad in a shocking and bizarre coaching decision, which left all of the media and fans in Denmark scratching their heads. Can he get any playing time at all, even with a struggling and aging Lulic? Nope!

Then you've got other guys like Caceres, who is still good enough for Uruguay and Juventus but can't put a foot right in Rome, or Jordan Lukaku who was making his way into one of the best national teams in the world until he joined Lazio. Or what about Milan Badelj, who very nearly lifted the World Cup trophy as the lynchpin of his side, yet looks totally out of sorts in the biancoceleste shirt?

It's tempting to say that there is lots of driftwood in this Lazio side-- which is a common phenomenon in the Lotito era-- and that's why they're struggling. But unlike those deadweight-laden squads of the past, this time I see several players who should be making significant contributions, but who aren't. And that points to some kind of present systemic issue with the club itself.

To show that I'm fair, some of these guys do just stink: Wallace has a paper-thin CV, including a year's end "worst of Ligue 1" recognition, but seemed to be a pet project of Jorge Mendes, which is why he has a crazy value of 8 million EUR. Bastos is a wonderful footballer-- at the level of Angolan football, where he even captains the national side; he has a big heart, but isn't Serie A-level. Patric, Murgia, and Cataldi are all youth players-- the first for Barcelona-- who have probably already hit their ceilings.

There is also the opposite case of Luiz Felipe, pseudo-fraudulently bought as a Serie B player for Lotito's Salernitana, but who has developed so rapidly that he's our second-best central defender, after Acerbi. It's just too bad there aren't more of these positive cases for the club to rest their hats on.

Go ahead then, professor: kill yourself! If humans are so terrible that they should go extinct, then why don't you lead the way with the one human life over which you have direct control?

I'd forgotten all about good ole "MMT", so leave it to Zero Hedge to re-publish Bob Murphy's phenomenal take.

Having done my own research into it several years ago, I arrived at the same conclusion I did nearly fifteen years ago, when I first studied both Keynesianism and so-called "econometrics": you have to be really careful with abstract pure math models; always give them the "common sense" check, because the conclusions can be extremely misleading.

Or, you can let one of the article's comments explain this same notion, another way:



Or to put it yet a third way, the world is way too complicated to be summed up by an algebraic equation.

In all of my years following the NFL, this is my favorite period of quarterback play. You have the wiley veterans like Tom Brady and Drew Brees, grizzled scrambler "supermen" like Russell Wilson and Cam Newton, and boat loads of exceptional first and second year guys, like Baker Bayfield and Mitchell Trubisky, just to name two out of many!

It's a shame I can't name Kirk Cousins to any of those lists; he has elite skills for sure, as I've written about before, but the personality of an accountant rather than a superstar athlete. Maybe he'll prove me wrong, but at present I don't see the heart of a champion there.

And in completely unrelated news, I'm with Jerome Powell's original "QT is on autopilot" statement: that's how it should be. Be a man, like Paul Volcker was-- don't back down, do the right thing! Instead, it looks like he's buckling under political pressure. The balance sheet needs to get back down to what it was, come hell or high water, and it needs to stay there, for good. The system inevitably needs to liquidate its bad investment and debt-- the longer that is delayed, the worse it will be. Slowing down "QT" is pure cowardice.

I once heard Stefan Molyneux say, in response to what causes so-called "generalized anxiety disorder", that from his experiences it's usually rooted in "someone else who is taking advantage of you." I filed that away, and didn't think much of it at the time.

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago, when I did some "pruning" among my personal relations... after a couple of difficult days wherein I wrestled with, and successfully un-did, some strong conflict-avoidance childhood programming, I noticed my sleep gradually improving, and my anxiety levels dropping off to virtually zero.

Today, it hit me: my chronic insomnia of eight years is gone; I've had nine straight days of excellent-- which I rate in my log as either an "A" or a "B"-- sleep, to the point where I go to bed, fall asleep with a sense of well-being, and stay asleep through the entire night. That kind of streak has, quite literally, never happened in all of my many years of logging my sleeping patterns. Not even close in fact! I'm just about at the point where I may even start weaning myself off of the trazodone.

Chalk that up as something else which Molyneux got right!

In other news, I finally beat "Valkyria Chronicles 4". Final time was 58 hours and 48 minutes-- which is a mind-numbing amount of time for any video game, much less one in that genre.

Like pretty much every modern game, half of this one was clearly designed to artificially pad the length: I enjoyed the story overall, but the absurd amount of silly plot twists really had me laughing by the end. Even the ending credits kept interspersing video into them, I wondered if it'd ever end! Overall, easily half of the chapters could have been left on the cutting room floor, and it would have been a more air-tight experience for it.

Once H and I wrap up "Pokemon", I think the Switch is going to join my PlayStation 4 Pro in the box in the basement, so I can get back to my real passions: classic DOS games, the Atari ST, the Game Gear, and a sustained string of Saturn "repro" purchases, which people are even now selling in the original hard cases, with re-printed manuals!

I'd originally packed the PS4 away as a temporary, couple-of-weeks measure, just to clear desk space in my room for a project-- now it's been down there for like eight months, and I don't even remotely miss it. The Switch will probably follow the same path: it'll go into the Roach Motel-- downstairs, and never back up again! Modern gaming is another long-overdue pruning from my personal life.

This episode is an example of Tom Woods at his best; his eloquent guest, Alex Epstein, cuts through the so-called "Green New Deal" like a hot knife through butter, giving a wonderful, holistic examination of the thing from just about every possible angle.

He also ties in an overarching discourse about "when we have a problem, is the best way to approach it with totalitarianism, or freedom", which struck a chord with me. I remember reading that when the Soviet Union finally imploded due to totalitarianism, they brought in Western economists to save them with freedom, by implementing free market reforms. One of those men had a story about a Russian "economist" who visited a supermarket in America, and literally could not grasp how it was "decided" what went on the store shelves, even after supply and demand was explained to him several times.

Not only is that the level of economic illiteracy we're dealing with here, but the lessons of "bureaucrats sitting around a big mahogany table mandating five year plans via magic fiat wands", versus the "invisible hand" of profit signals (interest rates) guiding millions of individuals' investments, are totally lost on this "environmentalist" crowd. We've already figured this out!

The other thing which blew me away-- excuse the pun-- and which really exposes them for being nothing more than ideologues: they are not only opposed to nuclear-- which is nonsensical enough, since it's one hundred percent renewable-- but hydro! Hydro and wind are the same damned thing-- they are just naturally-moving molecules pushing a turbine; the only difference is the temperature and pressure of the molecules: are they thus in gaseous or liquid form?

According to this article, "becoming more diverse" is a goal of the NFL. Right now, nearly 80% of NFL players are black; just scroll through the article's "playmakers" section, see how many white players there are: is the NFL starting "initiatives" forcing teams to consider white players before black ones, to try to get closer to 50/50 player representation?

The article also states that the league will continue to make more rule changes "whatever this season's [injury] numbers show". The NFL rules people always claim to be "data driven", yet I can't remember the last time I saw someone injured on a kickoff versus other situations, like offensive linemen getting rolled over from behind, or running backs hurting knees during jump cuts. Like most institutions today, they seem more concerned with perception ("at least it will look like we're doing something") and virtue signalling, than reality; it's easy to change the touchback line (even if it doesn't help a darned thing or is even counter-productive), but difficult to outlaw jump cuts.

No one really wants now-so-called "retro" games: those are cargo cultist effects, fruitlessly chasing the feelings that one had when playing those games originally. What made those games and the hardware which ran them so special was that they took risks, and used technology in ways previously unimaginable. Why not do that again?

• Make a new RISC-style system with totally custom silicon, which has a nearly exclusive focus on procedural texture generation, and ray-traced lighting.


• The imagery will be rendered not on a monitor or television, but using table top "holograms", possibly via augmented reality glasses.


• Two-to-four players can sit at the table, playing games against each other, like those screen-built-into-the-face tables Nolan Bushnell used to have. Except in this case, each player sees the game world erect-- like a hologram-- from their own perspective. Players could even physically move around the table, to see from various angles.


• Game audio will be generated exclusively with a modern-day FM chip, to give the games more character-- like the Sega Genesis', but with much greater sophistication and richness of sound. One channel of PCM will be allowed for sound effects or digitized voices.


• Make the hardware so radically different and custom-- brand new instruction set-- as to deliberately make use of existing engines and middleware impossible; encourage bare-to-metal programming, even assembler. This will keep out the cargo cultist hipsters, and bring in the autists.


• Have strict licensing controls, emphasize quality of games over quantity: only games which purely use procedural textures, ray tracing, and FM synth audio are allowed. This will give the system its own flavor, different from everything else.


• The system will have zero networking capabilities whatsoever: there will basically be no "operating system" to patch anyway. Developers will physically ship games, with mandated standardized durable (like Genesis games) packaging, and paper manuals. Games must work as shipped.

A system like this would make video games interesting again, because it would deliver experiences literally not even possible from other platforms, including personal computers; it would be its own, crazy-ass thing, via which people would invent whole new feelings and emotions.

The real problem with incidents like this and other "fake news" events, is that the average Lefty never bothers to follow-up and get the real facts as they emerge later on; they see the initial lie, and in their minds that represents the only truth about the matter they'll ever know.

To give two examples, I had arguments with Leftists about both the George Zimmerman trial and the Michael Brown occasion, years after the fact, and the people with whom I was engaged still thought that the original "fake news" renditions of those stories-- "hands up, don't shoot!", in the Michael Brown case-- were actually true!

I suspect the "fake news" outlets, like BuzzFeed and CNN, know this: they realize that they'll be called out and corrected after the fact, but that the initial damage of their immediate propagandistic report will have already been done.

It somewhat astonishes me that, with his pedigree in the industry, I actually have an older, more rich history of PCs than Richard Leadbetter!

My first "gaming" PC was a 386SX with 4 meg of RAM, which my dad and I built in 1989. It even had a VGA card, although it did not have a sound card-- PC speaker audio was all we had.

Around '91, we replaced that PC by building a 486 DX2 66, with 16 meg of RAM, and an actual nice VGA card, which had good benchmark scores due to a fast RAMDAC speed. For audio, I remember that we had a crappy, external "Disney Sound Source" at first, but later bought a "Soundblaster Pro". It was on that PC which my most formative memories-- "Aces of the Pacific", "Wolfenstein 3D", "Doom", the various "King's Quest" games, and way too many others to name-- were created.

We then built a Pentium 133 system a couple of years later, with a Matrox Millenium. I built my own first computer sometime after that, which was a Pentium 166 MMX. Then it was on to the AMD K6-2 300 and my first 3d accelerator, a PowerVR PCX2. After that, an AMD Athlon 700 with an Nvidia RIVA TNT. After that, PCs started to get boring, so I won't go into the 2000s too much; Pentium 4 "Northwood" 2.53 GHz, Intel Core 2 Duo E6600, and so on.

Today it's an AMD Ryzen 3 1600 with an Nvidia RTX 2080.

I finally broke down and signed up for a dummy "Twitter" account, just so I could finally get my hundreds of screenshots off of my Switch; incidentally, thanks Nintendo for not just supporting sdcard standards from nearly twenty years ago, like Sony's competing products (even save files can be copied off of a PS4, trivially, with zero modding).

In any event, I've noticed that "Twitter" now spams my mailbox seemingly once-per-day with fake news from "BuzzFeed". Yes, this "BuzzFeed". And this is from one of those tech companies which wants to hire "fact checkers" so they can censor what news gets posted. Hah!

My recent visit to New Orleans reinforced the notion I've always had, that the city has phenomenal food. But what I didn't expect was that one of the biggest revelations in that department would involve fast food!

There is a chain there with the peculiar name "Raising Cane's". To keep costs down-- and because it was so absurdly delicious-- the family and I ate there several times. One of the first things I did when returning to Minneapolis was to look up this joint: upon which I discovered, they have recently expanded into Minnesota!

Today, I made my way to the Arden Hills location to get some "to go":



In an era of contraction, it's amazing to see a restaurant chain heading in the opposite direction, with explosive growth! I put this place up there with "White Castle" as one of those oddball, B-tier fast food places which everyone needs to try.