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.

This could easily be fleshed out into an entire novel, incorporating elements such as seen here and elsewhere, too. I wrote a novel outline perhaps eight months ago, but never started the actual writing-- there's certainly enough material in today's world from which to draw.

Remember when Elon Musk bought something like a dozen WuFlu tests, took them all, half came back positive, half negative? That's because these styles of tests are not designed to detect viral infection-- just look up the guy who invented them, he once explained it all.

Anyway, Lazio ran into the same thing, and look at what happened! Huge fines, president banned, can't have anyone catching the sniffles in the stadium or it'll be Armageddon. Which test results were the club supposed to believe, when the tests don't work anyway?

Totally off topic but nowhere else to drop this: one of the most complex video game compositions I've ever heard: Tim Follin, yet another of the industry's once-upon-a-time Mozarts.

I just want the government to stay out of my way: I don't want its "help"-- which means breaking my leg, then offering me a cast. But since I can't get rid of them completely, I at least want them to focus on making my life better, not miserable.

Take little Petey Buttplug here, who wants to "electrify" the "vehicle fleet"-- my car is part of his "fleet" now?-- but who thus runs into a little problem: how to shake people down for money, if they're no longer paying the gasoline tax?

Simple: just remotely monitor every single human's car on the entire landmass, like Eric Peters discusses in this piece, then send them a bill. Your entire life will be like that of a UPS driver, with a micromanaging boss hovering over you. Except unlike UPS, where you can quit the job and tell your boss where to shove it, the government is a corporation you can never quit-- and little Petey the boss you can never shake.

Sounds a little bit like slavery-- or indentured servitude. But never mind that; you're just thinking too hard (too clearly).

Now, I'm not objecting to the form of the tax per se: consumption taxes are far better than, for example, increasing the income tax-- but think of the possible consequences of the State having the power to quite literally shut down your ability to travel, if you're one of those persnickety "domestic terrorists."

And don't think you're off the hook Lefties, because tomorrow it'll be you who is defined as such, after the precedent is set and once the next regime is in power.

Beyond that, what if I don't want my car in the "fleet" to be electric? My 350z is perfect, in the sense that it's not even drive-by-wire: it has a physical throttle body mechanism (2003's were the only model year which can stake that claim). In the words of Steve Martin, it's "four fucking wheels and a seat"-- and I'm not giving that up.

Since when-- and how-- can little Petey Buttplug step into my living room, and dictate to me that I'm not allowed to drive my car anymore? What gives him this magical authority-- fairies and unicorn dust?

But most people don't stop to ask these questions: they are so conditioned to just do as they're told because someone has a pseudo-random but official-sounding "job title", or because the person is wearing a shiny badge, or because the person has a bright green vest on, or because obeying relieves the stress of needing to think for one's self, or any myriad of other reasons.

When a twat at the CDC or some other "who the hell cares" organization says "bend over", people respond "oh goody! how far?"

Meanwhile, little Petey Buttplug and his gang of freaks and busybodies stand around making lists: "what would make Sniper's life better, let's do the exact opposite."

Growing up in the Murderapolis area, I was raised almost exclusively among loyal DFL'ers, and even though I got along with them fine-- Democrats in those days weren't categorically insane like those of today-- they did have this weird, sycophantic relationship to the Kennedy family. Lo and behold, I was reading about that family yesterday while following up on a related loose end, and ran across an interesting footnote.

Evidently, the Great Joe Kennedy, tired of his eldest daughter's mood swings, had her lobotomized at the age of twenty three: she want from a vibrant, beautiful young woman to an incontinent vegetable with a palsied arm, who could no longer walk or talk, and who had the mental faculties of a two year old. If you're queasy, skip this next paragraph:



This is what Joe Kennedy did to his daughter: I had a pit in my stomach for the rest of the day after reading the above excerpt. But not only did he have that done to her, he hid her away in a mental institution, out of state, and didn't even tell her siblings what had happened to her-- nor did he tell his own wife, until after the "procedure".

This is what evil looks like.

Watching Tucker Carlson's latest monologue, where he reviews the history of another major hero and legend among Democrats, Robert Byrd, made me wonder just exactly how and why people on the Left wind up supporting such monstrous people. Remember, they also worship Che Guevara, who lined people up in front of a ditch and executed them with gunfire, Communists like Stalin and Mao who killed tens and tens of millions of people through botched "policies" or directly via executions or gulags, and on and on the list goes.

Yesterday, I read that Bill Clinton is going to sit down with Cameltoe the Ho to discuss women's rights!

I wrote about a previous "Switch Pro" rumor here, where it was thought-- based on firmware bits excavation-- the new model would stick with the ancient "Tegra X1", and just pair it with a nicer screen for handheld play.

Snooze!

Here is a rumor much more up my alley: updated "Tegra" chipset with DLSS support? Phenomenal! My guess is that it would use what's codenamed "Xavier", which apparently is a 1.4 teraflops-class "Volta" GPU, with some kind of pared back "tensor core" bolted onto it.

Don't expect world class or "Series X" performance from this thing if the rumors are even true-- but these specs would still go a long way towards at least bringing the Switch experience into the modern era: 60 fps, 1440p gameplay with HDR should be pretty doable.

There is an even newer, Ampere-based "Tegra" model called "Orin"-- but that would probably wind up being a $500+ device, which certainly doesn't fit Nintendo's historical modus operandi.

I'm sad to read that Inzaghi may not be Lazio coach much longer: why do I have the sneaking suspicion he'll go elsewhere and either win the Scudetto or Europa League or something along those lines?

The person who should really be under criticism is Igli Tare. I headed over to the Transfer Market site and looked over his list of significant-- meaning, not Primavera or Salernitana-destined-- purchases over the past three seasons: it's a pretty dismal list.

• Francesco Acerbi: A
• Manuel Lazzari: A
• Joaquin Correa: B+
• Gonzalo Escalante: B
• Pepe Reina: B
• Jean-Daniel Akpa Akpro: C+
• Jony: C
• Milan Badelj: C
• Romulo: C
• Wesley Hoedt: C
• Silvio Proto: C
• Mohamed Fares: C-
• Andreas Pereira: D+
• Vedat Muriqi: D
• Mateo Musacchio: D
• Bobby Adekanye: D
• Riza Durmisi: D
• Denis Vavro: D

Out of eighteen players, he only wound up with two difference makers. People might quibble with me regarding Correa, but for all of his "highlight reel" flourish, when you boil him down he only scores once in every five matches, which is a pretty terrible record. I'm not proposing he be sold or anything-- I'm merely justifying his not reaching an "A-".

And it's not as if this plethora of players weren't given chances: Inzaghi provided each of them with a significant number of run-outs-- they simply failed to make much of an impact. And if you look at essentially all of them who have since departed-- take Jony, for instance-- their market value has continued to decline, even after switching clubs, and having a brand new coach.

All of this sums up Tare's Lazio sides well: three or four superstars-- Luis Alberto, Sergej Milinkovic-Savic, Ciro Immobile, Franceso Acerbi-- surrounded by a fairly mediocre, error-prone cast. I think even mid-table clubs like Sampdoria and Sassuolo have better auxiliary players.

White people are going to have a choice to make in the very near future. Quite literally every single other racial group has zero qualms about not just exhibiting overwhelming in-group preferential behaviors, but aggressively leveraging those preferences to politically bludgeon other racial groups.

Any time you see something about "ending racism", the proponents aren't thinking "China town" or "Pakistani no-go zones in Sweden" or black-only graduation ceremonies: what they are referring to is extinguishing the already essentially non-existent in-group preference of whites only.

The same goes for "end sexism": it's not a reference to the "Girl Scouts"-- it's a shot exclusively at men, for preferring to be around other men. Women are aggressively taking over corporate departments, board rooms, and even entire companies, giving extreme bias to hiring others with vaginas, with no hesitation whatsoever; they see zero problem with it.

In an ideal world we'd all practice liberalism: if you share my values, I don't care which sex you are, or to which racial group you belong. The trouble for liberals is that at least ninety percent of the rest of the global population is not liberal, and that includes within America itself, which has most likely already tipped past the illiberal point of no return.

Whites-- especially men-- need to get with the program, or they will be wiped out: second-class citizens, or worse.

Tucker at it again, great segment. I recently read the analogy that "China is preparing for the Super Bowl, while the Americans are playing Pop Warner thinking that's the Super Bowl"-- and it couldn't be more true. Here is that "baizuo" definition, incidentally-- you can find it on "Urban Dictionary" and elsewhere:



What's that famous Sun Tzu quote about "knowing your enemy"? Yeah, that one. Incidentally, "baizuo" describes seemingly ninety percent of my co-workers and Murderapolis neighbors, hah!

This is kind of surreal to listen to, in the sense that as a "Westerner" it's bizarre to hear a world leader talking about what's best for his own people-- and the most surreal aspect of that, is the fact that it struck me as surreal: the bullshit coming out of politicians' mouths in places like the US, Canada, England, France, Germany, and so forth are so normalized at this point, that it's jarring to not hear it.

I wouldn't be surprised if in ten years, there were migrant trains of Americans trying to travel to El Salvador.

Tucker Carlson has been on a tear lately, almost as if his show's producers are so fed up with CNN trying to get them canceled that they've finally decided to take the gloves off.

He still isn't going far enough however. For example and in reference to the latter of the two aforelinked segments, the "mask mandates" are not laws-- they are governors unilaterally signing their names onto pieces of toilet paper, and decreeing that everyone bend knee and obey "because I say so": no public referendums, no voting, no legislative involvement-- nothing.

In any event, I've done my part by quite literally ignoring every single thing that's come out of the mouth of Minnesota's own Kim Jong Walz, Dr. Fausti, the CDC, or any of those other clowns. The ideas that they think they actually have control over me or that I give a rat's ass what they say are the most hilarious parts of all of this; can we say "delusional"?

An alarming number of Dindunuffins have been moving into my Murderapolis neighborhood, turning it into a violent trash heap over the past eighteen months, with garbage rolling up and down my alley, numerous drive-by shootings-- including a "corpse in a car" incident at the end of my alley-- on top of my garage having been broken into, noisy "parties" with twenty or more cars taking up the entire block, and then yesterday my garbage cans having gotten vandalized.

This year will be our sixteenth living here, and we've never seen anything like it: the transformation from quiet, white, middle class neighborhood to an extension of inner-city Muderapolis happened practically overnight! Meanwhile, the city council is more concerned with "how to protect people from the city's police" than violent criminals.

I was up all night worried about this incident: called in sick today, on two hours of sleep.

I don't care about the garbage cans in and of themselves: but this happened mere feet away from the coop, where my daughter is out several times per day taking care of her chickens. Had she walked into that situation... and as a consequence, we immediately had to enact a new rule, where she is no longer allowed outdoors without either wifey or I watching from the window.

It's not clear what the value is in living here any longer, when it's no longer safe for my kids to go into their own back yard. The sooner we can pack up and permanently move to the bug out house, the better. The neighboor I wrote about here is long gone: now I'll follow his lead.

I can't wait until the day I'm gone for good, and can "dox" the city-- the name of which I have withheld for fear of reprisal for my "diligently plotting to take over the world and leave you alone" political views. I wrote a lot about the yard signs appearing in my neighborhood-- not coincidentally-- over this exact same time frame: the reason I harped on it was because I knew it would have consequences. Well, these libtard morons can live in the nest they've built: have fun!

As for the Dindunuffins... just go back to Chicago, or wherever the hell you came from.

This article makes me think of playing a match in the "Civilization" series: an aggressive AI opponent gains a substantial lead on you in terms of military units, and off they go. It also made me think of Tucker's recent comments casting doubt on the military's ability to actually do its job: like Microsoft, it's more concerned with woke virtue signaling and targeting all two "white supremacists" domestically than being effective.

Every time I fire up "Minecraft" on the Switch, or try to play "Flight Simulator", or even install a Winbloze Update, nothing works right in Microsoft's products. I hadn't played "Flight Simulator" in a couple of months, only to start up a flight and watch it run at ten frames per second. Later that night, my wife was trying to work, and Outlook kept asking her for a password, only to close the dialog before one could be typed in-- it was ridiculous.

But don't worry, because Mojang's Twatter feed has a rainbow flag in its profile, and Microsoft's home page says they "support black lives"! When I saw that the military was going to start using touch screens on its aircraft carriers in lieu of physical controls, and that it was going to stop bringing people in based on meritocracy, I assumed that its next actual war would be a hilarious debacle: we'll see.

In other news, as soon as I saw "Dotemu" and the pretentious opening animation, I immediately thought "oh great, another 'Streets of Woke 4'"-- but then the actual gameplay came up, and wow! It's as I wrote in this recent review: the best development in the game industry over the past decade has been the emergence of this "Hi-Bit" art style.

As far as I'm concerned, every single game should look like that, or like "Ion Fury"-- it won't but should become the new industry standard. They have so much more character, versus today's "photo-realistic" games which all look identical. Imagine brand new "Pro Evo" or "Gran Turismo"-style games in a "Hi-Bit" style: it'd be incredible! An interesting side effect is that we wouldn't need hardware beyond the Nintendo Switch, which is already a perfect "Hi-Bit" device: I feel absolutely silly playing a game such as these on my power-sucking PC or PlayStation 5.

Superb article here, making materially the same WuFlu-related points I've been arguing on this blog, but put together into a single, concise format.

I read today that Italy are going to "lock down" over Easter, because of "mutant strains"-- which is another point I've been making: if these are the precedents, then what about "WuFlu-20", "WuFlu-21", and so on? Can you imagine if CNN had a giant ticker, tracking the common cold and all of its variants-- "oh my gosh, a spike in 'cases'!" It would never end!

On another note, I was reading about the Southern border today: one agent made a self-acknowledged low-ball estimate of one hundred thousand people having come across, just in one month! So much for the Southern US demographically and politically: better to stay in Minnesota.

But enough of that: I haven't been writing here much because after work each day, I've been heads-down pounding away at my competition entry:



I have the engine put together, and it's so organized and clean compared to the "Skatey-Cat" codebase. The latest Fuze patch hit yesterday, and the new search features let you jump between functions just like in a modern IDE-- one day in, and it's already revelatory.

Now I'm shifting into the actual game building portion, such as drawing art. I bought a copy of Fuze for my daughter's Switch Lite, so we can work in parallel-- she is hopefully going to provide all of the character art, although her life is quite busy with activities and school work as well.

Finally, on an off topic note and as a continuation from this post, my son and I did write the Python program mentioned, I just need to post it on GitHub so I can link to it. I also installed "Mediawiki for my son, wherein he has been dutifully documenting solar systems from known space.

I'm watching Juventus-Lazio right now, and the English announcer discussed how Alvaro Morata had a "terrible virus" over the week, which was "really messing with his systems". He then had to clarify: "I should say, it wasn't that virus."

So let me get this straight: in relatively rare cases, the WuFlu might give you flu-like symptoms, from which you will definitely-- unless you're an obese eighty year old-- recover. The solution? Close the stadiums! Close the businesses! Stay at home! Everyone needs to dress like Michael Jackson in public! No access to travel unless you've been shot up with an experimental cocktail!

Alvaro Morata picks up a different virus, which gave him flu-like symptoms, from which he-- not being an obese eighty year old-- recovered. The solution? A casual mention from a match announcer. No lockdown; no mask mandates; the team was allowed to travel; no quarantines: a perfectly sensible non-reaction, to what's no big deal.

What's the difference? One is called "Covid-19", the other is "Smovid-19". It just shows how nonsensical this WuFlu madness is: it's just another illness, like any other!

Thomas Sowell was really on to something with his "constrained" and "unconstrained" vision model: Tom discusses the model in this superb talk.

One of the first pejoratives people throw at me when I discuss Anarcho Capitalism is that I'm some kind of "utopian"-- but it's completely the opposite! Anarcho Capitalism was borne from an acknowledgement that if you charter the world's largest corporation and give it a monopoly on force, the very first thing which will happen is that institution will get co-opted by the most evil, sociopathic people on the planet.

In other words, you did all of the hard work for them! You literally handed them the keys to the kingdom-- total control over your life!

Among their many other thinking mistakes, Statists believe in the "unconstrained" vision: that somehow this institution will be populated with omniscient, wise, benevolent rulers-- that it won't run amok. The Ancap, by contrast, knows better.

Wireframe magazine is running a "Fuze" competition, which I am definitely entering: I already have the basic game concept in mind. The only dilemma is that I need to teach myself "matrix math" in order to write the renderer-- we'll see how that goes, or whether I'll need to compromise my idea in some way.

I bought a second copy of "Fuze" for my daughter's Switch Lite, so she can work on the art in parallel with my programming. If any of my readers want to join the competition, it sounds like they are giving away some gratis "Fuze" codes. Evidently Eugene Jarvis is going to be one of the judges-- who knows which other celebrity names may become involved!

I was contemplating just such a notion as this on my daily Murderapolis walk just a short while ago: while stepping over discarded, muddy WuFlu Burqas and used condoms, I thought to myself: "The only good thing about these Leftists is that they aren't breeding; I wonder if it's nature's way of correcting itself."

Another idea which has been bouncing around my head the past few days is how corporations are nominally like little Marxist communes, with "shareholder"-owned property, voting, groups within are referred to as "teams", and so forth-- and yet in reality, they operate like private entities: top-down, strictly hierarchical, and "do as I say or else".

No one minds "despotism" when the company is private, and people are clearly just temporary working hands hired by the owner-- because the owner is the one who takes the losses. But with corporations, the losses are socialized among the "shareholders", and it's the CEO and other executives who primarily benefit from the gains. Simultaneously, the employees have no real rights beyond anything they would have as a working hand, hired into a private firm.

Corporations are having their cake and eating it too. I'm no fan of labor unions generally, they themselves being creepy, violent, collectivistic entities-- but within the above perspective, they make sense in that they inject "democratic" patterns into corporations, like a plug-in for a piece of software.

Of course, as with everything there are two sides: the going rate for a good CEO or other major executive who can lead a multi-billion dollar organization with tens of thousands of employees is quite high-- it's supply and demand, the same reason professional athletes command huge wages. Then again and that said, from what I've seen from executives in my own career, they essentially sit in meetings all day dropping quasi-random anecdotes regarding things about which they know nothing especially: how much value do they really add?

I used to defend businesses, both "public" and private: but corporations have revealed themselves to be disgusting state-sanctioned abominations, not just going along with but encouraging all of the madness in the world today-- to the point where anti-corporate themes in video games no longer even bother me.

Even private businesses, like the "mom and pops" places in my local Murderarpolis community, are leaning full-tilt into having "BLM" signs, rainbow flags, sixty signs on their doors saying a WuFlu Burqa is required, and so forth-- the SJW retards who own them deserve everything which is happening to them now: they are indefensible.

In other news, I don't know much about this "Lord Sumption" beyond having heard his name before-- and yet he might be one of those Leftists whom I like, even if I disagree with him on many things. He at least seems very thoughtful and learned.

For example, among other useful things he points out the same notion I've articulated many times on this blog: people aren't obligated to follow immoral laws, and in fact are acting immorally by following them. Of course, then he goes on to claim that Aristotle's predictions regarding democracies has been proven wrong: I disagree; isn't Aristotle being proven correct right now?

This Sumption fellow even admits that current-form liberal democracies have only been around for a century-and-a-half or so-- I'd hardly call such a short period a repudiation of Aristotle's perspective on the matter.

I was recently discussing politics with a friend, and he commented that my "a small cabal of billionaires rule the world" story was too simple-- a point with which I totally agreed. I started to type up a reply via email, but decided to just turn it into the below exposition:


My Reply

It's not just that simple, there are many elements: but when you distill the current reality down to its purest form, it's more or less true.

The more complex version would be:

1. Gen-Z'ers and Millennials were in daycare all day then had spastic helicoptering parents in the evenings. They suffer from so much anxiety and confusion that they don't even know if they are boys or girls. Like children, they hunger for some kind of model or world view which provides them with comfort, structure, and a transcendental goal, with black-and-white-- pun intended-- heroes and villains.


2. Nutjob Left-wing academics-- think Herbert Marcuse-- come up with crazy "theories" about how they think the world works.


3. These "theories" get taught as truth in universities to the youths described in the first step.


4. When the small handful of billionaires who own all of the media institutions, banks, and financial institutions need to change the subject, they pick one of the crackpot "theories", which the young have already been taught, and reinforce that selection-du-jour endlessly.


5. This in turn triggers a reactionary movement among people who point out the obvious fact that the theory-du-jour is crackpot.


6. The plebe proponents and plebe reactionaries waste their energy bickering, and don't notice that the billionaire class eliminate Glass-Steagall, start another enriching war, or "print" another couple of trillion dollars for their friends.


7. When the plebes start to catch on and complain, the billionaire class restarts the cycle at the fourth step with a new narrative. We've been living this cycle non-stop for at least the past ten years.

Regarding step 3: I don't know if you listened to any of the Project Veritas recordings, but Jeff Zucker would spend an hour every morning telling his employees exactly what to report, what not to report, how to phrase things, and so forth.

This is obviously happening at all major news organizations-- not just CNN-- and even across them: I've seen dozens of times where the media and their guests all start saying literally, word-for-word, the exact same sentence, all on the same day-- then the following day, they have a new sentence, which replaces the old one. You can find entire montages of these online, they're both funny and unsettling.

Just so you get the flavor, listen to them all talk about "the norms" here: there is a zero percent chance this is a coincidence, and it happens all of the time.

I also think there is an aspect of "the emperor has no clothes" to this, and this is how George Soros fits in: lots of people each have a vested personal interest in pushing these agendas-- and so they all start pulling in the same direction, in a purely self-interested way.

The young people want an easy explanation for why they feel the way they do, plus a transcendental goal; the academics gain prestige and grant money; the media corporations get ratings and direct access to the emperor and his inner circle; the billionaires earn yet more billions; and the politicians gain immense power via "divide and conquer". So, they all continue to insist that the obviously naked emperor still has clothes.

In other words, even when these people aren't communicating directly, self-interest causes them to all exploit the situation on their own. As for Soros, or Bill Gates, or Klaus Schwab, they stand to make billions and quite literally rule the world in the process!

The only people who forcefully call out the emperor's nakedness tend to be the individualistic types-- almost always Conservatives, but not always as in the cases of people like Glenn Greenwald-- who value the truth more than social connection or power.

Reading this article has got me wondering whether it's possible to have some other form of fully-analog display, without using cathode-ray tubes.

Regular readers will know that I'm a CRT purist, especially for old games which were drawn with luminescent scanlines in mind and which don't look correct without, so I won't continue to beat that dead horse. At the same time, large CRTs are almost prohibitively large and heavy-- I own several of them, the largest of which is permanently trapped in my Murderapolis basement, because it weighs two hundred pounds!

That said, digital displays are positively terrible in pretty much every way, and have numerous complicated bandaids, like HDR and BFI, simply to have acceptable contrast and motion blur levels.

Heck, for that matter digital anything is pretty terrible: cabling has constant handshake issues and when it degrades the bits become corrupt resulting in an effective and total signal loss; audio and video are space consuming when at a "can't tell the difference" level versus the "real" analog deal; digital lighting in video games is a poor imitation even today; and so forth. We live in an analog world, not a digital one, so digital is just a cheap imitation which can only try to mitigate its intrinsic shortcomings.

Maybe in a post-silicon one hundred years, all computers and "electronics" will be fully analog, using some kind of space-compact new technology breakthrough?

Once upon a time there was "Let's Go!", followed by "Sword & Shield"-- now there's "Diamond and Pearl" remakes, quickly succeeded by-- finally-- an open world entry in the form of "Legends: Arceus". As conservative as the former pair was, so far as I'm concerned Nintendo can keep these new Pokemon games coming: my daughter and I enjoy playing them side-by-side.

If only Nintendo had the hardware to deliver 4K HDR releases! I wouldn't even need a "Series X" or "PlayStation 5" to get my high-tech fix!

In other news, the State apparatus has been doing slow motion, back-door "UBI"-- or reparations-- for decades now: just take a look at this terrifying chart. Cross reference that visual with the myriad "income inequality ones": Fed creates trillions of dollars out of thin air, gives that to its globalist Wall Street buddies who ship the jobs overseas, replacing the lost plebe income with table scraps.

And does anyone take this stuff seriously anymore? Give me a break! Take about "false flag" territory, could it be any more transparent? You could count the days on one hand into creepy hair sniffer Beijing Biden's so-called "presidency" before the State-run media dusted off the old Iran scaremongering reels; then Creepy Joe-- more likely Cameltoe, Joe has no clue where he's even living these days-- restart the good ole Syria bombing routine... c'mon man!

Remember: Israel and guys like Paul Wolfowitz were fingering Iran back during the first gulf war in the early 90s as the country they ultimately wanted to destroy.

But that's ok, I'll just keep listening to some "Turrican 2" music while buying crypto. Speaking of Chris Huelsbeck, this surely ranks up there with the "Green Hill Zone" theme as one of the best opening stage songs in any video game, ever.

I saw this on "Wall Street Bets" moments ago, made my morning:

Making significant progress on the addition project for the bug out house: we've settled on a single-story family plus bedroom add-on with a vaulted ceiling, to go along with a massive basement expansion which will add two egress bedrooms and a full bathroom on that level.

All of this will convert the bug out house from a small farm home to a six bedroom structure, almost doubling the finished square footage in the process.

None of this comes cheap, so I've decided to sell the Murderapolis house. I've become quite the personal finance guru over the past several years, so calculations in my twenty-plus tab spreadsheet are easy: selling that house saves me nearly a quarter of a million dollars over the one hundred and thirty months remaining on the mortgage.

Pouring the sale cash into the addition, I will be running multi-thousand dollar monthly cash flow surpluses, which I can channel into investments letting me full-time retire in my early-to-mid 50s.

The only downside to this plan is where to stay during the occasional city visits: but, I've delegated those logistics to wifey. I'm discovering that I'm not very good at delegating: all of these details limited me to only a few hours of sleep last night-- but I'll survive.

I'll leave this post off with Tucker Carlson at his best: the whole thing is worth a listen, he even calls out the Fed! Finally, I think every elevator in the world should play this song.

See if the you can spot the problem with this sentence:



It's like what I wrote about just a few days ago: you have a choice, as long as you make the "right" one.

He then went on to emphasize no fewer than four times that he "highly recommended" getting the vaccine. This guy is not a doctor:

The above was spoken by a little Beta Billy with no jawline, soft hair, and translucent skin, in an internal video memo sent to the plebes at my employer. I looked the guy up on "LinkedIn", and he's been in so-called "government relations" for twenty five years. At my employer, he is a director, with that same title.

This WuFlu "vaccine" issue is even more transparent than the other aspects of the Scamdemic, since these "vaccines" don't stop you from getting it, or spreading it: you're just as likely to kill grandma whether you've had it or not. Rather, all they do is prevent you from showing symptoms: in other words, they transform you into a silent grandma killer, which is even worse.

In other words, they aren't "vaccines": a vaccine is a dead or weakened version of a disease, which causes your immune system to immediately kill that disease in the event of a contraction, so that you don't spread it. I'm not just being pedantic: people are, really and truly, being fooled by the use of the term "vaccine", as evidenced by their celebrations when they get it: "yay, it's over!"

Vaccine pushing is nonsense in the first place: if you got yours, why do you care if I've had one? But as is the case with everything WuFlu-related, the pushiness is very transparent, since even the people who do opt to inject these highly experimental cocktails directly into their bloodstreams will still be spreading it.

In my refusal to comply with Minnesota governor Kim Jong Walz's WuFlu Burqa "mandate", which he wrote on a piece of toilet paper along with his signature, I've been avoiding stores, and in fact hadn't been inside a single establishment since July, when the "mandate" went into place.

Until today.

I wanted a birthday cake for my daughter, and having no other way to obtain one, I went into the local grocery store, sans burqa-- I don't even own one, and would never, ever compromise my principles in that way: "my body, my choice" as the Lefties like to say.

The thing I quickly discovered is that while absolutely everyone was staring at me-- how sad is that, in and of itself-- the absolute cowardice which has gripped the population cuts both ways: the same psychology stopping them from standing up for their freedom prevented them from actually confronting me, even though I'm certain from the glances that several of them desired to do so.

Which leads me to the topic of this post: in the 1950s, a fellow named Theodor Adorno headlined the creation of a book called "The Authoritarian Personality". As a partial aside and preface, I have strong suspicions, based on Adorno's connection to the formation of the insane "Cultural Marxist" ideology, that he's rather a crackpot: do not take any further praise as an endorsement of his views, as I have not read any of his works-- only isolated excerpts.

But just as was the case with Marx himself, there are still nuggets of truth buried beneath the intellectual rubble.

In this case, those nuggets take the form of his observations regarding-- as the book title suggests-- "authoritarian personalities". Understandably, his examples suffer from recency bias as they are almost all rooted in the Nazi disaster, which had just come fully unraveled a mere five years before the publication of this aforementioned work. I would also wager to guess that, like all intellectuals of his ilk, examples were cherry-picked for political purposes, although I have no direct proof having not read the book: it's just an intuition based on experience.

Sort of like how Wikipedia has an extensive article covering "right-wing authoritarianism"-- but no article at all involving "left-wing authoritarianism". Part of that is because the use of "right-wing" in that sense means authoritarian, and the article even admits that the "right-wing" authoritarians in Russia, working by that definition, were the Soviet Communists.

Riffing on that theme, I've observed over the past few years especially how the terms "left / liberal" and "right / conservative" are no longer descriptive in America-- or rather, they are descriptive in the reverse: today's "liberals" are actually right-wing, authoritarian theocrats who want a strict social hierarchy imposed at gun-point-- whereas today's "conservatives" are, using Adorno's language from the 1950's, "left-wing liberals": in other words, non-authoritarian.

For example: Adorno described authoritarians as people who are concerned with authority and obedience, and who tend to be ethnocentric-- as in, only members of their own nationality or religious group are accepted. Sounds an awful lot like the DNC convention to me: it's black-versus-white, gay-versus-straight, women-versus-men, and anyone who questions the victim status of those former groups-- who questions the religion-- deserves to be fired from their jobs, have their houses set on fire, chased out of restaurants, have their bank account retracted, and so on.

But here is the most interesting part-- he recognized that authoritarians were inherently insecure: that because of a hatred of their parents-- and I routinely encounter millennials who think their by-most-standards good parents were the root of all evil-- they displace that hate and anger onto those around them. Their insecurity leads them to reinforce the existing structures, in order to provide stability. Think about how "the Left" today are the establishment, pro-war and all, much to the bemusement of commentators.

Any criticism, observed Adorno, of these norms-- in modern times think fifty seven genders, men can be women and vice-versa, Donald Trump is evil, Christians are oppressive, and so forth-- was a personal attack on the believer's security: that's why today's Lefties react so violently when their religion is questioned!

Interestingly, he also concluded that children who develop a fear of their parents become excessively respectful to authority figures. I see this with individuals such as my father-in-law, whose childhood memories primarily involve avoiding his father, and his father's belt: as a result, he's one of the most micro-managing, controlling people I've ever met, and I inadvertently but nonetheless frequently annoy him with my relaxed views regarding rules and authority.

Theodor Adorno thus joins other misguided luminaries such as Marx or Keynes on the list of "people who had the big things wrong, but many of the little things correct"-- illustrating how you need to be open to inspiration from anywhere, even if the teacher is unaware of the lesson.

Most people in the world seemed to agree that the involuntary and cruel experiments done by World War II powers like Nazi Germany were wrong, hence the Nuremberg Trials and the formation of "informed consent" as a principle-- so why then is it that the Jews run the first country foisting these experimental and veritably untested "vaccines" on their populace?

"More Nazi than the Nazis", as one article commenter puts it.

On another crazy note: my mother runs her own house cleaning business, and her clientelle are what conservative Minnesotans refer to as "Wayzata Liberals"-- sort of the coloquialized version of "Limousine Liberals": same meaning. They are neurosurgeon imports from India, or Wall Street brokers who work remotely, and they drive eighty thousand dollar cars, out of their six thousand square foot mansions.

And they never hesitate to lecture other people about carbon dioxide "emissions" or so-called "racial equity", despite having three "carbon"-based furnaces and not having a single black person living within a ten mile radius of their house.

One of my mother's clients happens to be a senior executive at a multi-billion dollar international comglomerate, making probably a seven-figure income if one includes stock options. This particular client found out that my mother voted for Donald Trump, and as is characteristic of these Leftists, can not let it go, to the point where they quite literally won't reply to my mother, even when spoken to. During the "impeachment" farce, they were following my mother around the house, turning every TV-- yes, they own a zillion of them, "carbon dioxide emissions" be damned-- on to CNN, blaring the volume.

Beyond the obvious, this reminded me of the video "Vee" did recently regarding Davos: it's well worth a listen. Leftists like the aforedescribed client of my mother's go on and on about how much they "love Democracy"-- until their house cleaner votes the "wrong way", then it's "our Democracy is under attack!"

And now, for the punch line: this individual is an executive at my employer.

Long-time readers will remember that my employer goes on and on about "diversity" and "inclusivity" and "unity" and "we're all in this together", yet in the very next breath says that one is only allowed to speak in praise of so-called "Black Lives Matter", in support of so-called "climate change" policies, and to wear clothes supporting these and other initiatives, like gay marriage, or pro-"abortion" stances-- while criticizing those "policies" will result in chastisement and very possibly a firing.

So much for unity! Hilariously and over time, I've been flagging "block sender" on all of the company's execs, starting with the Left-of-Bernie CEO, so all of their internal memos get sent straight to my Outlook "junk" folder.

All of this brings me to the key point: freedom isn't for people who comply-- those people are complying anyway! Rather, freedom is a measure of how people who politely say "thanks, but no thanks" are treated in society.

In this country formerly known as "America", dissidents-- conscientious objectors-- are one inch away from being treated as terrorists.

I saw that a third "Splatoon" was announced today. I wrote about the first game the day it was announced on June 14, 2014-- almost seven years ago now-- and it's remarkable to note how little the industry has improved since then; no-wheres-land since 2002 at the latest, if one is honest.

But back to "Splatoon": I bought the game via reservation the day it came out, becoming quite good at and adoring it, as my period review indicated. Every so often I still listen to my favorite song from the game.

Then came the sequel, which I never actually bought-- I merely borrowed it from a friend, played it enough to review it, and gave it back: something about its deviation in style just didn't grab me in the same way as the original title-- although I do dig some of the music.

Nonetheless, I've often regretted not spending more time with the sequel-- so this third game will be a day-one purchase for me, and I'll try to commit to it more.

On a Nintendo note, I saw that their president indirectly poured cold water on a "Switch Pro", while saying the current hardware has four more years of life left in it. Holy smokes: Xbox 360 graphics in 2025? That caliber of visuals started feeling stale two or three years ago!

Here is discussed an essay from a Lefty saying that the blue states should secede. His justification seems to be that there isn't enough "democracy", and that those nasty white people are denying "free" abortions, food, genital mutilation surgeries-- you know, those Communist Manifesto-esque "positive rights" the Left like so much, but which actually can't exist and don't make any sense absent a totalitarian slave state apparatus to force people to serve others for "free", at gun point.

But that's fine! I don't care what illogical case the author makes for secession, only that he makes it. Bye! I've written a ton about "democracy" very lately, just search this page-- I have the diametric viewpoint to this guy.

I haven't been posting here much, because I've essentially been burying my head in the sand regarding politics, in this post-politics "America": things are so far-gone now that there's no purpose in getting stressed out about it: "things you can control, and things you can't". On a related psychology note, I was reading a summary of Theodore Adorno's work on "authoritarian personalities"-- fascinating stuff. One of these days I'll get the motivation to do an entire post on that topic.

On a totally unrelated subject, I picked up a copy of "Ion Fury" for Switch: it's the best first-person shooter I've played since something like 1999: unbelievable! It has everything I look for in a game: a "Hi-Bit" art style, real music, gamey-and-pure action, and so forth. Expect reviews of both it and "Turrican Flashback" in the coming couple of weeks. Recently, I haven't been very "into" my PlayStation 5, whereas my Switch has seen a resurgence of use: the game library much more closely fits my taste.

Finally, I stuck to my guns regarding not wearing a WuFlu Burqa-- and the very next notary who picked up my refinance case was willing to meet the terms I require for entry into my property: refinance complete.

This interview with Trip is absolute gold: so many memorable moments, so many little anecdotes with which I wasn't yet familiar-- incredible. His ending it a hilarious a "ice breaker" analogy and tying it in to "Lawrence of Arabia" was the icing on top.

The only question I wish Neil would have asked is, who put Trip in touch with Dave and RJ? I've been dying to know that for decades, and I would love to hear the back story there.

My Murderapolis mortgage carrier told me I could refinance, with the exact same terms, and save fifteen bucks per month via a reduction in insurance, with them covering all of the closing costs. "Sure, why not." Fast forward past all of the time spent reading and "virtually" signing dozens of PDF files, and the notary tells me he won't enter my house unless I'm wearing a WuFlu Burqa, in my own home! "Thanks, but no thanks to that refinance", I told the mortgage company.

In any event, that rant isn't the reason I'm writing this morning. Rather, I came across this article the other day, and rarely do I think someone has found a closer historical analog to what we're experiencing at the moment in the country formerly known as "America". But first, the backdrop thanks to this rare, aberrantly untainted Wikipedia article; bold emphasis is mine:



In the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War, Sparta capitalized on the long-growing sentiment among the Athenian elite that the plebes had obtained too much power, installing a ideologically-pure puppet government.



Let's move forward now to excerpts from the aforelinked opinion piece, and you'll see the connection to present-day America, if you haven't already:



As anyone who has listened to Tucker Carlson or read any of my blog posts lately, it's extremely obvious that the elites are punishing the population-at-large out of contempt, as revenge for Trump. More:



Beyond the fact that the guy can't speak a single sentence of English without committing major grammatical errors, I hear this pattern a lot these days, following this formulation: "Yes, of course you have right XYZ! Of course! But... just be aware that there are consequences to what you do."

Obviously, a right isn't a right if it can't be exercised! According to the "LeBron" logic, even North Koreans "have free speech": they can say whatever they want! Of course, they'll be tossed into prison camps or executed by anti-aircraft fire if they say the wrong things-- but who ever said they couldn't speak freely?

But I digress:



The author explains his proof momentarily that the "lockdowns" are political instruments rather than "public health" measures-- but for anyone with two brain cells to rub together and any sense of what power does when it interacts with human nature, all of this WuFlu nonsense has been painfully transparent from day one.

Let's resume:



Multi-billion dollar corporations actively using what amounts to slave labor manufacturing of their own products today, lecturing me about how I'm "systemically racist" for not handing over my paycheck to black people, whose ancestors from ten generations ago were once slaves, in the distant past. Got it.

And now, the history of "lockdowns": you see, pre-WuFlu China had been "locking down" dissidents in Wuhan and elsewhere, who were politically dissatisfied with The Party. When the virus hit, The Party used it as an excuse to further quell dissent.

In other words, the "lockdown" concept in Wuhan preceded the virus: it was merely put on steroids after the virus. Behold:



Tom Cotton, one of the few members of the American Congress who seemed interested in getting to the bottom of what was going on, was given this treatment-- all so familiar-- when he suggested that more inquiry was needed to figure out if the virus came out of the Wuhan virology lab:



Debooonked! Debooonked! And by "experts", no less-- like Nancy Pelosi, or Eric "I slept with a Chinese spy" Swallowswell, no doubt. More from the article:



So now we have the "divine right of kings". Great. So how does Trump fit into all of this?



Just a few days ago, I wrote about how the real battle is class warfare: everything else is merely an extraneous distraction. But now I understand that this specific class-based dish has an egg roll flavor: it's rooted in the American elites having sold their soul to the Chinese, in exchange for vast riches.

The above is just a tiny sampling of what is in the article: the full monty most definitely warrants a complete read.

Yesterday, I described the herd-like actions of not-so-bright human beings. When I read about this "poverty reduction" scheme, it brought to mind another beast reference, this time in the form of an old quote:

This is an excellent article, pointing out the inconsistent application of the so-called "stakeholder theory" of "capitalism": specifically, "society" is a stakeholder if it would mean an increase in power for the billionaire class, while "society" is not in the inverse. In fact-- and I'm planning to write a full post exploring this idea in greater detail-- the entire rift in the former-United States is class-based.

In other words, this Frankfurt School nonsense, the so-called "gender theories" and "rainbow people" push, the "safe spaces" and coloring books, so-called "Black Lives Matter", and all the rest are distractions intended to set the peasants against each other. Put another way: the "Occupy Wall Street" diagnosis was absolutely correct, even if their Commmunistic prescriptions would exacerbate the problem one hundred fold.

I was somewhat blind to this until I saw the entire establishment circle the wagons to protect the hedge funds during the "Wall Street Bets" incident.

Another topic worthy of its own post is how the establishment-- via "Time Magazine"-- has just admitted everything I said about "the selection" the day after it happened: they confessed to all aspects of it, even describing it in similar terms to my own-- but then spun it as a "fortification" of the process, and a true "Democratic" moment, versus the fraud, scandal, and "social contract"-terminating event it was.

This article reminds me of a story a family member recently recounted to me, where they were out-and-about picking up take-out from a fast food joint.

They told me that people were frantically hopping around trying to stay whatever random distance the government tells them they need to stand-- while spilling their drinks all over themselves, while simultaneously and literally running into people who were standing behind them. This in turn then triggered those bumped into, into rapidly shuffling in the opposite direction, like a chain reaction.

It sounds a little like watching my daughter's guinea pigs run in circles when they get startled.

Meanwhile, this family member-- who was wearing a WuFlu Burqa, but only for the very brief time required to grab the food and exit the premises, whereafter the chain link fence-to-a-mosquito Kabuki garment was immediately discarded-- could only watch in total astonishment at how stupid people are: not much smarter than guinea pigs.

The strangest part about this "Salem witch trial" mass psychosis, this mental illness, is that if people really, truly, actually thought the WuFlu was legitimately a life-terminating threat, there is no way they would leave their homes to gorge themselves with French fries: rather, they would stay home at all costs, and if they did need to go out, they would adorn themselves-- and rightfully so-- in fully sealed hazmat suits.

Everyone knows this is a scamdemic: everyone! Yet just like the drink-spilling, recursive, guinea pig-like flea circus shuffle described above, people play along with it to virtue signal how much they "care"-- about an essentially non-existent threat-- or just merely to be polite: or, even scarier, out of a blind obeisance to people who claim they have "authority", like Dr. Fausti or Kim Jong Walz.

Meanwhile, they either ignore how absolutely ridiculous they look, or aren't even aware of that fact-- while yelling at the people who aren't mentally ill!

A few nights ago, my son was asking me what he should draw, and I suggested that maybe he create a few cool views from around the solar system. Five minutes later he walked into my room with this pencil sketch, along with explanations of each panel:

• Top-left: This is what the view of Saturn would look like from Pan. The small object on the right-hand side of the frame is Aegaeon.


• Top-right: This is approximately what Saturn would look like from the surface of Titan. The sun can be seen on the right-hand side.


• Bottom-left: This is a view from Io. Europa can be seen very close to Jupiter, while the sun can be seen on the left-hand side.


• Bottom-right: Here is an approximate view from Callisto. Ganymede can be seen on the left, the sun in the center, and Europa on the right.

My son has been studying outer space and our solar system for at least three years now; he's seven years old at present: so he can visualize roughly where everything is off the top of his head, right down to the myriad dwarf planets and other more obscure objects, like the largest asteroids.

One of his other visualization expertises relates to numbers: following scientific notation, he's memorized the exact named order of all the numbers up to a millillion, also called millinillion-- which is 10^3003. He's explained to me that it just follows conventions, like the lower numbers we all know.

The one challenging part is that it's difficult for him to check his work. For instance, I asked him a random one: "what's the name for 10^205?", and after a few minutes of deliberation, he came up with "quattorquinagintillion"-- although it's much easier to count in sequence than to fly right to ones in the middle.

I told him he should write a Python program to convert numbers of zeroes to their named equivalents. If he makes one, I'll post the code here.

As I've written several times, the Democrats are trying to model the United States after China-- and in many ways, it's already a done deal: I oftentimes can't tell the difference!

Another assertion I once made was, if the media hadn't wildly exaggerated the WuFlu in order to get Trump out of office, life would have just gone on as normal, and hardly anyone would have even known it was "a thing". It would have just been the occasional office water cooler talk, "More people than usual calling in sick, very interesting, oh well!" Turns out, there is a pretty strong basis to my thinking.

But as Don and Chris say, threats don't even need to be real for them to be believed.

The other notable thing going on is the gas lighting. Through Mark Dice and others, I have been following the absolutely incredible censorship of Conservatives for year now-- but pointing out the censorship is now considered "misinformation", and will get you censored! You know, censored, which isn't actually happening, and if you say so we'll censor you, which isn't actually happening, so you'd better not say it or we'll censor you, which isn't actually happening...

Ditto for the "selection": hundreds and hundreds of signed affidavits, voting machines getting hacked in real-time proof-of-concept demonstrations, professional statistical analysis proving that the result counts were manipulated, undercover sting operations catching ballot harvesters red-handed... but nope, all "misinformation!"

Interestingly, this could all backfire on the Left: it took Creepy Beijing Biden like forty eight hours in office before his approval rating torpedoed, and none of the Left's ideas are even remotely workable without magically conjuring hundreds of trillions of dollars out of nowhere. The Left are so incompetent, maybe handing the two year old the box of matches and say "go for it" is the best thing which could happen, in terms of long-term outcomes.

I know I've been writing a lot about "Turrican" lately due to the Switch collection having just come out, but I haven't been this excited by a series of games in ages: these would have been "Wolfenstein 3D -> Doom -> Quake"-caliber for me, had I owned an Amiga at that time.

I just finished beating the first game a second time, then started in on its sequel-- holy toledo! I've heard it described as one of the best action platformers of all time, and I am absolutely understanding that praise.

And just listen to the music! The video game industry had a lot of "Mozarts" in its golden age-- Yuzo Koshiro, Nobuo Uematsu, Rob Hubbard, Hiroshi Kawaguchi, and many more-- but this Huelsbeck fellow might be the most sophisticated of them all, particularly in the area of key changes, where he is king without a doubt.

It would be incredible if more Amiga-related software could be re-released. How about a "The Bitmap Brothers" collection next, with the "Xenon" and "Speedball" titles?

If I knew more about music theory, I could probably explain in terms of keys and chords exactly how this is done-- but I know it when I hear it: final stage music. It's melodic, but has this climactic sound to it-- sort of eager and foreboding at the same time, like the feeling you get as a footballer waiting for the referee to blow for kickoff, for those who have played that sport.

Incidentally, I think not having owned an Amiga as a kid is the biggest missed opportunity of my life: I remember being dazzled by it at the local "Software Etc." in 1987 or so, and asking my dad if we could get one: "We already have the Atari [7800]", was his response.

I asked him about this as an adult, maybe five years ago, and he said "Oh, I didn't realize you really wanted one! If you would have kept asking me about it, I actually probably would have gotten one, it could have been a computer for me too." Lesson: don't be a good child-- be a really annoying, pestering one!

Then again, if we'd gotten an Amiga I probably wouldn't have gotten the Genesis in 1990. I regularly read Amiga owners who say, "I wish I could have had a Mega Drive as a kid!" The grass is always greener. We also put together our first IBM PC-- a 368SX kit-- in 1989: hopping on the DOS train set me up all the way through present day as PC building is still a passion of mine-- so longer-term that was a better route anyway.

All the same, if I'd had an Amiga, I just know I'd be one of those "Amiga Nuts" to this day, probably with a modernized custom setup, ala "Retro Man Cave" Neil. My equivalent is the 3DO-- but that's not nearly as much fun: it just doesn't have the following to have much of a contemporary community-- although that's just starting to change, maybe.

Oh, and "Turrican" is a great game: on playthrough number two, before I leap to the sequel.

Given that "America" doesn't exist anymore since it no longer has a functional election system or even a vestige of the "consent of the governed" mythos remaining, I haven't been following politics much: this North American landmass is "post-political".

But, I did take a bit of a dip this morning just to see what trends I've been ignoring. First, there is Creepy Beijing Biden saying that the government's "whole job" is to institute Cultural Marxism. The article is well worth a read, since it's an actual news outlet explaining what the ideology even is.

Second, here is the New York Times-- you know, the newspaper that was knowingly supporting Castro and Che Guevara as those latter two gunned down dissidents in Cuba-- saying that all of the silly, totally transparent propaganda, like those little blue boxes on YouTube, should be deemed and enforced by the State as being "reality".

On a more humorous note, this is one of the funniest videos I've seen in a long time.

In any event, back to "Turrican"...

Dropped a couple of grand on some more physical silver last night, looks like I got my order in just in the nick of time: dealers are suspending silver purchases until the market opens tonight, and the price adjusts.

I'd been meaning to buy more precious metals anyway, but this seemed like the perfect moment. I had that cash set aside this month for more crytpo, but I just shuffled things around.

Earlier today I refreshed my "favorite games of all time" list, something I'm apt to do every few years. For fun, I counted up the genres and came up with a "favorite genres of all time" meta-list:

• 2D Fighter - 5
• 2D Platformer - 4
• Japanese RPG - 4
• 3D Platformer - 2
• First-Person Shooter - 2
• Game Creation System - 2
• Racing - 2
• Strategy RPG - 2
• Action Platformer - 1
• Action RPG - 1
• Adventure - 1
• Brawler - 1
• Roguelike - 1
• Sandbox - 1
• Simulation - 1

Sixty percent of the games were made by Japanese developers. Today, Japanese developers are essentially cloning Western games-- thinking about it now, the decline of game development from the "Rising Sun" over the past twenty years definitely patterns my perception of the medium going downhill, especially in the music category.

Average year was 1995.76, median year was 1994. In fact, a whopping thirty percent of my favorite games came out during 1994: what a year!

People often use "nostalgia" as a blanket explanation for people like myself who prefer older games-- "you like whatever you grew up playing". Uh, except that doesn't apply to me: I grew up playing 70s and very early 80s arcade games-- I was a teenager in 1994. Besides that, a significant portion of the games on this list, I didn't play until perhaps 2009 or even later-- so I had no nostalgic point of reference.

In fact, here's maybe the most interesting fact of all: not one game from my actual childhood systems-- the Atari 2600 and 7800-- made the list! When you boil it down, I don't really care for arcade games much, even though I have "nostalgia" for them.

Really, 1994 was when games hit this magical sweet spot between gameplay-first sensibilities-- "narrative" games outside of adventure titles were basically non-existent-- and greater-than-arcade depth, but without being over-complicated either. Starting just a few years later, "Half-Life", "Metal Gear Solid", and "Halo" ushered in the Hollywood era, and it was game over from there. I lightly explore some of these themes in this post.

As for a "favorite platforms of all time" meta-list:

• 3DO - 8
• Sega Genesis - 7
• IBM PC - 6
• NEC PC Engine - 3
• Sega Saturn - 3
• Nintendo Switch - 1
• Sega Dreamcast - 1
• Sony PlayStation - 1

Even though I've been denied access to healthcare and the ability to buy food-- the latter, absent drive-throughs and "curbside delivery"-- much of my time during this scamdemic has been spent in amusement at just how idiotic and group thinkey people are.

Now the State actors are saying that people should be wearing two WuFlu Burqas-- or maybe even three, or four! They are also now saying that anal WuFlu tests are more accurate! Bending over figuratively wasn't enough to satisfy the power lust: now the bending must be literal!

This stuff is hilarious!

And it gets even better: all of the morons who have gotten themselves injected with "warp sped"-- meaning, dangerously experimental-- "vaccinations" which reprogram their DNA are finding that they are still being required to wear WuFlu Burqas, and that it is unknown whether the "vaccines" even prevent the spread of the WuFlu anyway!

It's like watching one of my cats continually rolling off the bed chasing a laser pointer: how many times can one be fooled-- over and over and over again-- before one catches on? It's astonishing!

I saw through the WuFlu Burqas on day one and have quite literally never worn one, not even once. This is because I'd already known by February or very early March what a nothingburger this virus was, as the data started to roll in.

The fact that we're at the one year-plus mark of this stupid "disease" coming to America and others still don't "get it" is the most mind boggling thing I've ever witnessed.

On an unrelated note, I've often employed car analogies for why I use GNU/Linux: Winbloze is fine when it "just works"-- but the instant something goes wrong, it's a massive disassembly or even total reinstall job, versus just a simple "turn of the screw." Heck, even diagnosis in Winbloze is often impossible, much less solving the issue.

I've often wondered why I'm not more "handy". My father was, and often tried to pull me in to home projects when I was a child-- but they just didn't capture my interest like computers did. Even today, the prospect of even simple "hands-on" things like sanding or painting sounds about as fun as having bamboo shoots stuck under my finger nails.

It's not "laziness", as I'm working my ass off on career and side projects every waking minute of every day: even my hobbies are constructive. I suspect it's just a case of "whatever floats your boat": I couldn't get the house addition contractors I work with at the bug out house to touch a computer, to save their lives!

I was doing some basic financial management stuff this morning, and the web site dutifully directed me here. Aspects of it reminded me of the "the election was safe and secure" and "Joe Biden is President" messages plastered all over YouTube-- except in this case, it's "this has been harmful because the S&P 500 went down by two percent".

It's a one hundred billion dollar corporation-- Chase-- telling you what to think: namely, to support other multi-billion dollar corporations. "Styx" said it best: "The Gamestop thing is the free market solving the 'hedge fund' problem."

In other news, it's funny seeing a President's "executive orders" being laid out like this: look at the volume of them! In this case given Creepy Beijing Biden's pudding-for-brains faculties, where he doesn't know what he's signing and can't even get his pen into his pocket, and where he's constantly being told what to do via earpiece ("salute the marines"), it reminds me a little of "island governor" Sancho Panza.

Tom Woods had an episode some months ago where he tracked back to when the State model shifted from "laws made by Congress", to "laws made via edict by Presidents, as Kings"-- and Teddy Roosevelt was the culprit who broke that door down, after more mild precedents set by a few earlier "El Presidentes", such as Grover Cleveland.

Finally, I've been pretty hard on Tucker Carlson lately, and for good reason. At the same time, he deserves credit for the valuable service he's providing in terms of spreading awareness to conservatives who still don't know what's going on, or who only follow politics loosely because they have more productive ways to spend their time: and in the interest of clarity, good for them-- there are scarcely less productive endeavors than politics.

My preferences are ordinarily a contrarian indicator for where products are headed, but in this case it's like they read my mind: if you would have asked, "Sniper, name one old game series for which you'd want a collection", I would have replied "Turrican".

"Ask and ye shall receive."

I've always wanted to play this series, and have on several occasions come close to braving the odyssey of trying to get one or both games running on my Atari ST-- but now, no longer necessary.

This gives me an excuse to turn on the Switch for the first time in like three weeks. Incidentally, I haven't turned my PlayStation 5 on in almost as long: been hooked on Sega CD's "Lunar: The Silver Star", and my Retroarch CRT setup in general.

Following are some assorted musings from today.


Continued Work Nonsense

The "Cultural Marxist" garbage is being relentlessly pushed in my workplace under the guise of being what the literature calls "anti-racism" and being an "ally", to the point where I literally can't go a single day without it being thrust into my face somehow.

The problem is that whenever I'm confronted with something that's morally wrong, I have to sit down and re-process the topic, which kills my productivity. It's extremely difficult to focus on my actual job, especially when combined with so much of my mental energy being forced not into career development or technology, but into contingency planning and risk mitigation: learning about homesteading; cryptocurrencies; asylum processes; and so forth.

Thankfully, lots of other people have already put in the leg work for me regarding this topic. Click on the chart for a larger version if you're having a difficult time reading it:



Think of all the assumptions-stacked-on-assumptions my workplace is making: that there is a huge racism problem at the company, with zero evidence; that the racism is happening one way (towards blacks); that the best approach to handle the problem is not with liberalism, but with more racism; etc.

But HR and the company's leadership don't ever discuss these assumptions, or how their conclusions were arrived at: they shove the assumptions, the conclusions, the "resolution" methodology, and the directives at you all at once as a pre-packaged deal, and literally tell you that you will be punished by HR if you criticize any of it.


Cringeworthy

It's always hilarious to watch mis-usage of words become common place in the public discourse. Some of my personal favorites:

• Redundancies such as "NIC card", or "LCD display".


• Prefixing web sites or systems with "my": "my internet is working fine", or "I can't log in to my Facebook."


• Confusing systems with their usages or component parts, like "I sent you an email".

Most recently, a new breed of re-defining words altogether has caught my eyes and ears. For instance, for hundreds or thousands of years "performant" referred to an actor or some kind of performer-- it's a noun, not an adjective! Yet people commonly use it today as the latter, instead of simply saying something "runs fast" or "runs well", to the point where dictionaries have given up and added this new ridiculous mis-usage.

Another one is the term "quality of life", or "QoL", which has always referred to nutrition, fitness, yoga, and so forth. In 2014, Nintendo said that they were working on some kind of gamified "QoL" medical device-- but for some bizarre reason, people started using "QoL" to refer to things inside a video game, like a HUD getting larger fonts, or having configurable button commands!


See Something, Say Something

When I was riding the school bus as kindergartner, the bus driver loved handing out candy to the kids, so they'd stand up by the front of the bus near him. I certainly didn't understand "sex" or "molestation" at that age, nor to this day do I have any proof that he was doing anything untoward-- but the whole thing smelled fishy to me, and I was the only kid on the bus who declined his overtures, even after his repeatedly hounding me.

In junior high, I had a crush on a girl named "Emily". There was a janitor at my school who went by the bizarre and comically adolescent nickname "Scooby"-- a full-grown adult!-- who used his personality to ingratiate himself to the kids. One day I noticed him hovering around "Emily" inappropriately, a process which repeated over days and weeks. This culminated in him being the only adult sitting in the student bleachers-- next to her!-- during a "pep fest", followed by him sitting behind her giving her a back rub in the hallway, right out in the open.

To be clear: this was a grown man in his twenties or thirties, giving a back rub to a thirteen year old girl. And in his place of employment, to boot!

None of the school leadership did anything about it; all of my fellow students continued to kiss the "cool" janitor's ass-- except me. The janitor would routinely mock me, or make sideways comments towards me, in front of my peers: but I never relented.

To my powers of observation, I was the only person in the entire institution who not only saw that it was wrong, but actively went out of my way to both ignore the predatory janitor, and to speak out about it, raising the issue to both my parents, and to one of my most-trusted teachers. A thirteen year old was the "adult" in the room: the only one with a moral compass, and a pair of balls.

In my private Catholic high school-- "Totino Grace", named after a family which gave them cash in the 1970s (foreshadowing)-- the teachers would very obviously gossip behind the students' backs in the lounge, as "teacher A" would magically know something which happened in "teacher B's" class. In that same school, the classrooms were not named after Saints or religious figures, but after the rich donor surnames. The richest family bought the two closest parking spaces to the front doors, for their kids' "his and her's" custom painted (black and pink, respectively), brand new "Dodge Ram" pickup trucks.

The school spent a fortune getting stained glass windows installed in the chapel-- not of the Virgin Mary or Jesus, but of Jim and Rose Totino: the donors! In a place of worship!

There were two teachers who were having a very public extramarrital affair with each other. The school refused to fire them. One day, the woman held me after in math class, and started dumping her personal life on me-- one of her underage students!-- because my father had disclosed to her during conferences that I was uncomfortable: "Well, she was no saint either! You have no right to judge!"

None of this bothered the other kids: they just happily went on their way. Me? I went from a 4.0 GPA kid K-8, to a 3.7 GPA in 9th grade, to a 3.2 GPA in 10th grade, to a 2.7 GPA in 11th grade, to a 2.5 GPA in 12th grade-- this from someone who tests at a nearly 130 IQ level. I grew a huge beard, ended my eleven year football "career", and essentially stopped bathing.

I'm not someone who can just sit by, and ignore when bad things are happening: I never have been, and I never will be. I don't know why I'm wired this way, and I'm not sure whether it's even a good thing, considering my expressed concern has never had any positive outcomes, and only negative personal ones.

But I can't ditch the habit. And now the pattern is repeating in my career. Except this time I'm trapped: I can't speak out because my kids depend on the salary, and because getting a new job would require me to wear a WuFlu Burqa-- which is another moral concern, where I'm one of the very few people who is willing to stand up for principle.


On Burqas

Minnesota's governor, Kim Jong Walz, wrote an edict on a piece of toilet paper, and with a swift stroke of his pen has denied me access to healthcare and the ability to go grocery shopping. So, I've been making use of "curbside" grocery delivery, where you place your order online, and an attendant brings the goods to your car.

Problem solved.

Until today, when I had the attendant repeatedly push me for my "opinion about 'face masks'", even after I told him three times that I didn't want to discuss politics with him. I finally relented, this is verbatim what I said:



He then went on a sort of meandering reply: "Well you know, people have different opinions about this...", and "I think we should trust the doctors who do this for a living", and "you know we're always going to be controlled...".

Translated in order: a lecture about how I should "be respectful"; a blind "appeal to experts", even though half of them think masks are worthless, including Fausti himself in March when he was still being honest; and "there are two constants in life"-style defeatism.

He then went on a monologue about how he recently got into a "debate" with someone, and they started "shouting" at him: I'm not sure if he was projecting his own urges in that moment, if he was thanking me for not having done that, or what.

Minnesota is the ultimate "passive aggressive" culture: everything needs to be "translated", and it's very tiring.

In any event, now I can't even stand in an open air parking lot without being questioned as to why I'm not adorned with a WuFlu Burqa.

The burden of proof should be on the people who are wearing one: what part of their psychology or mental illness makes them feel compelled to dress like Michael Jackson in public, terrified of germs, while blindly following edicts from politicians-- edicts which change and even contradict from moment-to-moment ("no really, we've always been at war with Eurasia!").

Pour me a drink.