I remember that Richard Stallman coined the term "anti-feature", meaning "something that the customer paid the programmer for to deliberately lock features out of software which were already written, followed by the same customer needing to pay more money to re-unlock said feature." Here is that concept being applied to external combustion engined cars-- yet another reason to avoid them like the plague.

Changing gears, I've been waffling on building a new PC. I've been putting IBM PC clones together since 1989, and I really enjoy it. But we're in truly bizarre, unprecedented times right now:

• We're at a project budget ceiling in terms of how good graphics can be in video games, and the current consoles can already run that level of graphics pretty well, sans ray tracing.


• The games coming from the West almost unbearably ram "The Message" down the players' throats, and are so buggy as to be borderline unplayable-- meanwhile games from the East do not target triple-A level budgets.


• Thanks to Global Regime, prices are exploding for everything, PC components included. I remember when it was 800 USD to build a PC from scratch, then 1100 USD. I priced a brand new system with today's prices, and came up with 2200 USD. Want a new motherboard? 250-500 bucks. New video card? 800-1600 bucks. DDR5? 200 bucks. And on and on. It's absurd.

Add all of that up and, as much as I'd like to put together a new PC, it's difficult to logically justify it. Add to it that I can't stand Windows 10 and 11, and well...

Changing subjects one last time, I heard that this year's Macy's parade was full of tranny choirs and propaganda phone calls to Creepy Joe, along with sexualized children on parade floats. Later in the day, my father-in-law had the Vikings game on: as I walked past, the announcer was proclaiming how it was so great that gridiron could "bring people together" when "everything is so divisive"-- as he was saying that, the kickoff was occurring with huge white "Stop Racism" text painted on the field. Remember, according to the Left's ideology, "racism" can only be perpetrated by white people ("prejudice + power"). Nothing divisive there!

The audiences for these events is probably 90+ percent white. So it's white people watching and thus supporting events which are calling them racist homophobes-- and they still watch!

Warning: This post has spoilers regarding the game "Snatcher"-- do not read any further if you plan to play through it!

Tonight I will be driving the kids to their weekly Faith Formation class. Rather than take two trips there, I just stay so I can sit in the church in front of the statue of Mary, and pray the Rosary. Then I move to the back and continue working my way through the Catechism. Tonight I'll be driving in the dark, silhouettes of moonlit trees illuminated in snowy fields all around me, along frost-coated roads. I have a little time to burn before we need to leave, and the idle time got me thinking about Snatcher's story, and where things are in general. Listening to Stratovarius's album "Desiny", I begin...

In the real life timeline, atheist Jews formed the self-proclaimed "Bolshevik" movement. They took over Russia, confiscating everyone's property, putting people on their knees, shooting them in the backs of the heads, or sending them on long exile marches to the middle of nowhere. Like all Leftists, even the more mild ones, they are preoccupied with power and have very little tolerance for other peoples' points of view. Once they'd conquered Russia and plunged it into their reign of terror, they turned themselves towards their greatest rival: the United States.

The best way to undermine an opposing culture is to rot it from within. So over time they installed Communist sympathizers in all levels of the American government, the media, the banks, and other positions of influence. It's interesting how McCarthy has a bad rap today, because as history has shown he was absolutely right: Communists were everywhere in the US. They took over the schools in particular, what's that famous quote, I think it was from Lenin... something to the effect of give me the children, and within one generation I can turn the public, or something like that.

And it worked. Kids today in America are indoctinated in Cultural Marxism from Kindergarten through college, and now even in their careers in giant corporations, where they are further infantilized. They are so fervent in their beliefs about literally, completely made-up narratives like "Gender fluidity", "climate change", "racism against blacks around every corner", and so forth, that they have formed their own religion, with its patron saints, scriptures, uniforms, holiday schedule, prayers, and so on. Like all zealots, anyone who questions this belief system is canceled on the spot.

The funny part about all of this? The Russian "Bolsheviks" who put all of this in motion didn't survive to see it work! The Soviet Union collapsed under its own weight in 1991! And this leads me to Snatcher.

In Snatcher's timeline, the Soviets created these robots, and intended to covertly install them into positions of power, particularly in the United States. But just like in real life, the original people behind the madness never got to reap the spoils-- in the game's version of events, Elijah Modnar deliberately caused a cataclysm which wiped Moscow off the map along with half the world's population. Either way and in both timelines, the Soviet Union was no more.

But here is where the two timelines re-converge: successors of the original perpetrators were standing by to pick up the pieces, and turn those pieces to their own advantage. In the game, it was Elijah Modnar himself but in real life it's, once again, atheist Jews-- the ones who control all of the media companies, the entire banking system, who provide over eighty percent of the the Democrat party's funding, among many other things-- who are on the verge of taking over the whole world, forcing the plebes into "Fahrenheit 451"-style stupidity and complacency, while they get unfathomably rich.

The WuFlu Scamdemic was the world's largest wealth transfer from the poor to the rich in human history. Expect more of the same, as these same people shove everyone into their "you will own nothing and be happy", "eat your bugs" model. Aside from isolated spots like Hungary and Poland these neo-Marxists have already conquered Europe. They have essentially succeeded in installing a uniparty apparatus in the United States, as the Republicans will probably never win another major "(s)election" ever again, between the rampant fraud and armies of brainwashed "Gen Z'ers". It's not clear to me how China will fit into that picture, as they are also seeking world domination, via national-level debt serfdom.

It's dark days ahead. Maybe even the final days? I've done all I can to keep my family safe, and into full love of Jesus. I pray that everyone else will also acknowledge Christ as their one and true king and savior, for the redemption of their souls.

The kids and I have been watching the anime series "The Disastrous Life of Saiki K.". Along with it being hilarious in general, it's also interesting to watch from an introvert's perspective.

All introverts go through sometimes elaborate planning on how to avoid people or uncomfortable situations: "Person A is always at door X around 15:15, while person B walks the hallway ten minutes afterwards-- so if I leave at 15:20, I should be able to go through the path without running into anyone." But in Saiki's scenario, he's a psychic with superpowers! So Saiki as a protagonist is both relatable on a personal level for introverts, but also serves as a sort of Superman for people with that disposition, in that he has a much wider array of tools to deal with others than a normal person.

Of course, this array of tools also gives the writers lots of latitude for putting Saiki in complex, challenging fantasy scenarios-- oftentimes self-inflicted-- that a normal introvert will never face. Seeing Saiki critically think and problem solve his way out of these situations is a huge part of the show's charm.

Read the below on a gaming forum this morning, it's so good I wanted to make it visible here:



I've been going through a bit of an identity crisis lately. The number one thing I've always identified with has been video games, but the industry has almost totally lost me by this point: since Minecraft in 2009 and Flight Simulator in 2020, I've been totally unable to find even a single game which trips the novelty part of my brain: "Wow, this looks really cool!" The above quote pretty much sums it up. Combine it with the death of aesthetics in the medium.

Interestingly, old games bore the heck out of me too: I'm sick of playing the same games, or the same types of games, over and over. Such a shame. The past few nights I've gone to bed at times around 7:00pm, simply because I have no idea how to even fill my time. I guess it's a "first world problem" to have all of this idle time.

I've been on a pretty bad streak with gaming lately. With every passing day I lose more and more confidence in modern game development. Looking for a fun brain dead action game with contemporary graphics, I installed "Guardians of the Galaxy" via Game Pass, and it was such a stinker that I couldn't even be bothered to review it. The writing was funny, but you barely got to play! It was a game of cut-scenes, and when combat did occur, it was so bolted on that it was almost worthless. It felt like a prototypical example of a game made by Hollywood wannabes or rejects, who said as an afterthought "Oh wait, we need to make this interactive somehow..."

Then I turned to my self-granted monthly allowance, and purchased "Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes." It's also so bad that I don't know if I can even bring myself to play it long enough to review it properly: non-stop cut-scenes and tutorial interruptions. When there is gameplay, it's chugging along in the low twenties or teens on the Switch's pathetic hardware. The writing seems to be targeted for a "Teletubbies" age-range audience: war going on, army incoming, and here the characters are all smiling, "Thanks so much for your help!" in these really exaggerated tones of voice... it's totally incongruent, I can't take it seriously at all. The game also prominently features this totally androgynous character, for the life of me I've no clue if it's male or female.

Yikes.

I have been enjoying a second attempt at playing through "Cyberpunk 2077" at least, so much so that I may re-review it, except this time for the Series X. A lot of the visual goofiness and constant bugs I encountered the first time around are gone, and the game is quite the looker now, even without the ray traced reflections and global illumination I enjoyed in the Windows version. Maybe things will pick up overall for me soon: the Atari 50th anniversary collection comes out on November 11, followed quickly by the new Pokemon titles on November 18. Siralim Ultimate comes out in early December for Switch, finally-- a game which happens to have the best video game song of the past twenty years, incidentally.

On the balance though, I'm not only seeing nothing moving the industry forward, but it's actively regressing on top of it.

Difficult to believe I hadn't written about this yet, but my brother just asked, and I thought "A-hah, blog post material": with what am I replacing my Z? Many weeks ago, I put down a grand on a GR Supra manual transmission pre-order. I'm numero uno on the list at that dealership. I've been crossing fingers ever since that I'll be able to actually land one within a reasonable time frame. The sales manager told me that if it gets to be twelve or eighteen months, we'll abandon ship and he'll give me my money back. However, he did vet things past his distributor before taking my money, and got a "Yeah, we can probably land you one of those"-type responses.

On that note, if I do get one I've no clue what color it'll be, or which of the two trims. My sales contact recommended keeping things wide open, since just getting one of these period is going to be a challenge.

A logical follow-up question is, why did I pick this over the new Z? I listened to tons of reviews of both cars on YouTube, and it boils down to me wanting something different this time. The consensus on the new Z is that it's not a serious performance car from the factory: it has worse weight distribution than my current car, the stock exhaust is pretty poor, the brakes fade really quickly, the stock tires are rubbish, and it has a pretty tepid engine note, which many reviewers compared with "a Toyota Corolla". The Supra, by contrast, is a sort of bonkers crazy car: pretty tail-happy, serious handling credentials to match its ballistic power, and nutty styling.

I've been doing the "Japanese pony car" or "Japanese Camaro" thing for thirteen years already. I want something with a different personality this time around.

On a totally unrelated note, I was bummed to hear that Rieko Kodama passed away sometime recently. Tons of my favorite Genesis games as a kid-- Sonic the Hedgehog and Phantasy Star II in particular-- had some variation of the name "Phoenix Rie" in their credits. The family hasn't stated the cause of death, but I wonder if she's a clot shot victim? I've never seen this many prime-age people dying in such numbers before, nor have coroners or insurance companies.

Human lives are short, and their memories even shorter.

Take a quick skim through this Eric Peters piece, then reflect on critiques of the WuFlu in general: it could not be isolated, wear three masks even though studies show they do nothing, get the clot shots even though everyone who gets "inoculated" keeps getting the illness, and so on and so forth. Remember the hilarious Tom Woods charts? "Here are the cases, I want you to guess where the lockdowns, mask mandates, and mass 'vaccinations' started." A huge schism thus formed between the medical establishment with their fake news, and a small group of brave heterodox doctors and scientists who spoke the truth. All sound familiar?

What if I told you that this exact same pattern also applied to every other major virus throughout history, from the Black Death to Smallpox to Diphtheria to Influenza to Measles? In other words, scientists, doctors, and medical historians were doing the "Tom Woods charts" exercise over a century ago, only to be called every name in the book, as these types of people are today? A few days ago a friend of mine steered me towards this documentary, and my goodness-- virology as a field is a complete pseudo-science. It reminds me exactly of leeching-- it's on that level of quackery. The documentary is behind an $11.99 paywall, but maybe the aforelinked trailer can convince that it's worth the money.

There is way too much content packed into the many hours of footage for me to recite it here, so let me just share an anecdote which was so disturbing to me that I had to pause my watching, and go for a walk outside. In the documentary, they explain in gory detail how "viruses are isolated": from a super high level, they take secretions from a sick person, apply it to tissue-- usually kidney-- then add an insane cocktail of biological elements-- used to be milk of all things, now it's cow uterine fluid and the like-- complete with antibiotics designed specifically to break apart the cells of the tissue. They then starve the tissue, put it in a centrifuge, then under a microscope.

You can just imagine what this disgusting garbage looks like by then: the kidney tissue has been positively destroyed, turned into a soup of billions of random particles, all slurried together with the DNA and biological information from the other stuff they'd added to the mixture. Under the microscope then, they examine the particles, pick one which is randomly frayed around the edges, and say "A-hah, there is the virus!"

No joke.

As silly as the recitation was to this point, I wasn't bothered yet-- it was merely amusing. It was the next statement which got me: "And that is where they get their live virus vaccine." This cocktail slurry is what they inject into your bloodstream! I may not be a scientist, but I am highly analytical, and after seeing "how the sausage is made", I can pretty much guarantee you this medley soup isn't going to inoculate you against anything, except good health. As much as I regret to say it now, my kids both had the "childhood schedule" shots, and both of them-- my son in particular-- were not themselves for many days afterwards. Now that I understand the toxic mess they'd been injected with, I'm not surprised.

I'm not necessarily saying that viruses don't exist, in the same way that I'm not discounting the existence of fairies. But the onus of proof is on the people putting forth the supposition. And based at least on this documentary, I'm more apt to think people get sick rather due to environmental or psychosomatic factors.

Human memories are short. Every time there is some kind of "viral outbreak" we follow the exact same thread. But because humans don't live that long, they can't remember or aren't aware that the exact same battle had already been fought along the same battle lines, numerous times in the past.

All of this talk about Lotito trying to repurpose the Stadio Flaminio for Lazio use has gotten me curious as to where exactly that stadium is. What better way to find out than... Flight Simulator! As a bonus, I also flew to Formello. The flight plan thus went LIRU -> Flaminio -> Olimpico -> Formello.



But first, my adventure began via a take off at the Rome Urbe Airport, ICAO sign of LIRU for those who want to follow along:



The two stadia are so close you can get them in the same view from the air! Flaminio is on the very left of the picture, Olimpico on the very right. From a more direct view, you hop in your car from Flaminio, hook a left, drive across a bridge, and you're at the Olimpico. Second picture below is the Olimpico closer-up, third one is Flaminio, with the Olimpico in the distance.







From there I flew just a bit Northwest and found their training grounds at Formello. I matched them up via Google Maps satellite view just to be sure I had the right place.



After that, I kept going Northwest and landed at a small grass runway called Poggio Ellera, ICAO LIYA. Fun trip! All of these Lazio-related locations are short drives from each other, as it turns out. Even Formello wasn't too far away-- you just follow the twisting highway North out of Rome proper.

I've been running speed tests using 5G on the iPhone 14 Pro Max lately, whenever I think to do so. Here are some comparisons versus physical internet connections I've had lately:

• Gigabit Ethernet in Murderapolis: ~950 Mbps.
• 5G in nearby rural town: ~500 Mbps.
• 5G in family's Murderapolis house: ~300 Mbps.
• ADSL line in my boonie house: ~90 Mbps.
• Cable modem in Murderapolis: ~87 Mbps.
• 5G in my boonie house: ~85 Mbps.

It's so sensationally fast that there will probably come a point where people will just get some kind of 5G home router, and dispense with the cable modems and DSL connections altogether. Even in my house in the middle of nowhere, I'm getting comparable speeds to my DSL connection.

In other news, there really isn't any. Just been working, and playing Madden NFL 23 on PlayStation 5, and Xenoblade Chronicles 3 on Switch. Started making graphics for a new Fuze game, but haven't made a lot of headway-- just haven't been in the mood.

I have this exact mouse, just in a dark gray instead of white. I'm using it right at this moment via my M2 MacBook Air. Incredible mouse: horizontal scroll wheel, the vertical one can scroll fast or slow, it's comfortable to hold, and it's really high resolution, so it moves very smoothly. If I were to buy a separate keyboard, I'd go for this new Logitech model-- I'm sure it's very nice.

Fuze have announced that you can now export games to eShop! If you come up with something super polished, they will coordinate between you and Nintendo to get the game pushed out there. In exchange, Fuze takes a royalty cut-- fee TBD. This is huge news, because previously Fuze games have been "trapped" within the runtime environment-- no longer. Of course, wouldn't you know it, USB keyboards don't seem to be working with my OLED Switch-- I tried them for the first time last night. They work on PCs, and I even plugged one directly into the Switch-- so it's not the dock, or the keyboards themselves.

So if I do make another Fuze game, it'll have to be on the unit itself, with a stylus. Maybe I need to take another shot at Godot Engine. My direction isn't clear to me at the moment.

I just wrapped up my first regular season with Jaguars in franchise mode! Here is a video montage I made with sample gameplay from a handful of matches. I also grabbed some of the statistics, for posterity's sake.




Here were my final stats with Trevor Lawrence. Admittedly, without my custom sliders I probably would have thrown fifteen interceptions instead of two. Still, my 61 touchdowns were pretty legit-- I got good at reading coverages, and audibled on almost every play it seemed.




I was just shy of leading the NFL in rushing with James Robinson. I don't like his lack of breakaway acceleration. I might trade him for a first-round pick or something if I can either get a faster back, or think I can rely on Etienne full-time (with whom I did break a 71 yard TD run in the last game of the season).






I did so well with CeeDee Lamb that I nearly led the league in receiving, with Lamb having missed two games due to injury! In fact, I set the all-time single season touchdown receiving record.




Devin Lloyd led my team in tackles with 93-- he was a machine! Obviously he was way off the NFL totals, given I was playing with six minute quarters.




Along with CeeDee Lamb, Jeffery Simmons was another major player I ripped off of the CPU via trades. He led my team with 7.5 sacks. It's tough to get sacks manually in this year's Madden, with the changes to bull rushing.




Jaylon Johnson is another player I ripped off of the AI. Over the course of the season he's developed the "Superstar" development level. But it was actually Shaquill Griffin who led not just my team but the NFL in interceptions, with 11.




I didn't kick many field goals, but I did (barely) nail a 61-yarder with Austin Seibert at one point.






My team was top-ten on offense, and numero uno on defense. Again, the numbers are skewed by the six minute quarters.




I was able to force an unrealistic number of turnovers. I had a +54 ratio on the season. A couple of the crappier quarterbacks, like that Davis Mills guy with the Texans, threw five interceptions against me!


Now that the regular season is done, it's on to the playoffs!

Haven't really had much to write about lately. I went through a ten day stretch where I was only getting three hours of sleep per night-- that certainly didn't help my energy levels. But, I've been experimenting with drug dosages, and may have reached a sort of balanced equilibrium between project passion and the need for sleep.

The five projects I have in mind, if I can ever muster the energy to work on them, are as follows:

• Create a game in Godot Engine, complete with my own musical compositions.
• Do piano lessons in GarageBand on my laptop.
• Make a CRUD-oriented "dApp".
• Create an ARKit demo app for iPhone.
• Write a tech website in Blazor Server.

Speaking of Blazor, I'm having an issue on both my laptop and the "installed" version on my phone, where the service-worker.js file gets erroneously cached by the browser, resulting in a hash check failure when attempting an update-- meaning I can no longer push application updates to those impacted browsers. I put a condition into the index.html file, apparently telling the browser to never cache that file-- but I'm not convinced it's working. Unfortunately, if you are using Gassy Girl you might need to wipe its data, clear browser cache, and basically "start over" to get my most recent and future updates. Check the "About" menu item, see if the app is version 1.1.

Blazor is a very young framework, I think this is just one of those kinks you'd expect, especially coming from a Microsoft product.

In other news, my iPhone 14 Pro Max came in on launch day, and it is phenomenal. Now I'm totally in the Apple camp, with my M2 MacBook Air and the new phone. What I appreciate so much about both devices is that you don't need to think about them while you're using them: "Ok, I'd better open this in just a certain order, or I'd better do these actions in just a certain sequence so things don't get wonky."

There is none of that on Apple products. I just flip the lid up on the MacBook, everything is just the way I left it, nothing ever breaks or acts strange-- it's like the laptop is just a seamless part of my life, versus something I'm wrestling with. The phone is very much the same way-- everything "just works". I press the side button, it recognizes my face, and I'm productive instantly. Any time I write a file to either device, it's almost instantaneously mirrored on the other: again, I don't need to think about it, "gosh how am I going to get this data over there now".

Not to mention, the iPhone 14 Pro is the fastest mobile GPU on the planet. My daughter got me into "Genshin Impact"-- a game I'll be reviewing eventually-- and it looks like a PlayStation 5 release running on the device's display: it almost creates cognitive dissonance, "how can this be running on a cellphone?" I even flipped on the game's 60 fps mode, and it runs flawlessly. I hopped into the game and took a quick screenshot just now-- which then magically appeared on my laptop in "Photos", without me doing anything-- just to give some idea. Click for the raw file, as dumped by the game.



For my upcoming birthday, the wife and kids ordered me a pair of the brand new AirPods Pro. I've been using Apple Music-- another phenomenal Apple product, incidentally-- on both my phone and my laptop, and it's super annoying jury rigging the audio with my headset back and forth. I'm expecting these new headphones to be typically Apple: I want to listen to music, the headphones won't care which of the two devices-- a simple tap on my ear or something along those lines will flip devices. I'll write about them in roughly a month's time, post-birthday.

Since I'd been having so much fun in Pro Evo, I decided to pick up Madden NFL 23 on the PlayStation 5. The game itself is sort of a train wreck, as I detailed in my review-- but that't not stopping me from tweaking the heck out of its gameplay via "sliders", and from having fun with the front office management. Observe this screenshot for example:



Because my team-- Jacksonville-- had finished in last place the prior season, the game's AI treats that club's next two batch of drafts as also having the same position. This is obviously not going to be true, as with my sliders all tweaked I'm most likely going to make the playoffs, if not win the Super Bowl. Yet the game will still treat these two picks with "pick number one" trade value!

Returning to the above screenshot then, I'm trading up in the first round-- not down, up!-- plus getting the other team's 2024 first round pick, and one of the best receivers in the entire game, all in exchange for a third rounder! It's total daylight robbery, and I did a ton of clever trades like this, using even my lower-round picks to accumulate good players, and additional draft selections. Also, rather than cutting players to get down to the 53 man roster, I bundled up and traded those players for even more picks.

By the time I was done, my team's overall rating went from the high 70s to the low 80s, I'd freed up cap room, and accumulated something like 14 picks in each of the next two drafts. So now instead of starting with the stock crappy Jaguars team, I have a few genuine superstars to build around-- and I can do that building via tons of 1st-3rd round picks over the next two seasons.

Here is a fellow who predicts that after "the cloud", the next phase of enterprise application hosting will be in blockchain. I experimented a bit with what are called "dapps", looks like that knowledge may come to good use over the next several years. I wonder if "web3" will be the next "cloud", in terms of word popular usage among IT people? Also from the article, a warning, bold emphasis is mine:



Blockchain would be nice, because you won't cede sovereignty to a tech giant, who will shut off your infrastructure if you have a political view they disagree with.

In other news, researchers are en masse finding pieces of graphene in the blood of people who got the clot shots. Those before-and-after pictures of peoples' blood reminds me of the ads I'd see as a kid in the 80s: "your lungs before smoking, and after smoking". Cross-reference this research, with the 84% increase in excess mortality among the 25-44 age group as soon as these shots hit.

Hearken back to all of the pressure, the Democrats an inch away from essentially mandating these shots nationally in order to have a job... someone needs to be held accountable.

I've been working really hard to stay away from political news, but this is too much. I get that he's just trying to appease the radical Leftists in his voting base before a midterm election period in which his party will probably suffer historic losses-- but the danger of catering to these people is that the rhetoric can turn into action on a dime. To compound the speech and last week's interview, you have this first-rate whackjob doubling down.

The Saul Alinsky is so strong with this stuff that it almost hurts my brain: accuse the other side of exactly what you're doing, from election theft to radical Democracy-destroying agendas to shoving fringe minority opinions on everyone in the form of policy.

Never forget the Steele Dossier, the Mueller investigation, the fish thing in Japan, the constant video and image editing by CNN and others, the Maricopa County audit and audits elsewhere, which party wants to eliminate the filibuster and pack the Supreme Court, Trump getting spied on while he was President, January 6th peaceful protesters getting thrown into prison and beaten with no charges pressed, the Fentanyl Floyd riots being encouraged, all of the lies regarding Russia and the Ukrainian war, and on and on and on.

On top of it they have single-handedly devastated the American economy by backdooring the "Green New Deal", which was so extreme and unpopular it could hardly garner a vote in Congress. And if that's not enough, they are all-consumed with sexually grooming small kids and chopping off their genitals.

We're dealing with black-hearted Atheistic Jewish Communist billionaires pulling the strings on the second-echelon-- like Creepy Joe-- followed by their nearly endless army of well-meaning but naive and unthinking brainwashed college grads, running HR departments in large corporations, putting "pronouns" in their email signatures, one hundred percent not even remotely understanding the big picture, or even understanding that there is one.

We just need to hang in there. I hope these establishment hacks-- and there are a lot of Republicans among their ranks-- can get the Liz Cheney treatment, and lose their positions in the State-proper. There is a massive rising tide of people, like this lady in Minnesota I really like named Michelle Fishbach, who appear to represent what we need: a pendulum shift back towards the family, decentralization, and Christian values.

I made a tech demo in Godot Engine showing off what could be done with digitized sprites in the modern era.



Download the Windows .exe here. Arrow keys move, Z and X rotate the camera. I only spent a few hours on it, so it doesn't have much collision detection, and everything is a "billboard", so you'll see some spinning trees. And the walking animation turned out hilarious, I only used a few frames and spent basically no time on it.

The point I'm trying to make with it is, why in the heck does "Links 386" for DOS from 1992 or whatever look more realistic than modern golf games? Imagine how absolutely crazy something like "Road Rash 3DO" could look with contemporary 2048x2048 sprites? And that's exactly how I made this demo: I walked around taking pictures of trees, grass, and so forth, quickly cleaned them up in The Gimp, and plugged them right in. The character is obviously me, my daughter took pictures of me against the "green screen" of a white garage door.

Incidentally, I created the song myself in Apple's "GarageBand" in about an hour using my MIDI keyboard. That was a lot of fun.

But back to the topic: I know this approach would chew up VRAM like crazy, but still: for certain genres or elements, imagine the kind of photorealistic, absolutely mind blowing looking games which could be created with digitized sprites by modern development teams, with their hundreds of members? Custom silicon could even be made to do interpolation. Instead, zero research whatsoever has been done in this area that I can find: it's a totally abandoned approach.

I've read through Unreal plus Unity tutorials, and I'm plugging away at the Godot Engine ones-- I just don't find working in these environments to be fun. They emphasize doing as much as possible without code, whereas I find code to be the most readable, consistent, and enjoyable part of game programming.

They remind me of Dreams on the PlayStation 4, where you're using configuration to set up all of these connectors and things.

The most fun environment I've ever used has been Fuze, but the problem with it is that you're locked to the Switch. It's a shame they don't have the staff to port that platform to personal computers. But back to the main topic: the only thing keeping me motivated on these game engine tutorials is the "eye on the prize" aspect of, anything I implement can run anywhere-- even on mobile or in the browser, in the most extreme.

On to another topic, part of what hurts my enjoyment of things in general is what I'll call "OCD thinking": I'll be playing PlayStation 5, and think I should be playing old games instead because they're better; I'll play old games and wonder why I'm stuck in the past; I'll be outside with the kids and think I should be teaching myself piano; I'll be teaching myself piano, and worry I don't spend enough time with the kids. And on and on and on, to the point where I can't just live in the moment and truly enjoy anything.

In this case, if I were working in Fuze I'd be thinking I should be operating in a "real" game engine, for portability; now that I'm working in a "real" game engine, I think I should be using Fuze so I can enjoy myself more. All of this makes it difficult to know half the time what I actually like and don't.

I've restarted therapy, this time with someone who is willing to help me unravel myself versus telling me to pat my legs and breath. This counterproductive circular thinking will be the first thing I take up in my next appointment.

I'm a couple of days into my M2 MacBook Air experience, and it's been so positive that I think the IBM PC and its ilk are in big trouble.

Imagine the convenience of a slate smartphone, either Android or an iPhone: you can toggle its suspension state instantly; it's only a few millimeters thick; it's passively cooled; it has extraordinary battery life; it has a user interface with the world's best designers behind it; it has a large, beautiful AMOLED screen. You can use it without thinking about technological idiosyncrasies.

Then take an IBM PC clone from the 90s on the other extreme, right when they introduced advanced power management for the first time: remember "plug 'n pray" and such? I remember putting a 486 "to sleep" involved taking life into your own hands. Today's x86 devices are a little better in that regard, but even then compare putting a PlayStation 5 into "rest mode" versus pressing the power button on your smartphone: the PS5 beeps, it wheezes, fans whirl up then down, and the whole process takes several seconds. Same for starting it back up again.

But you deal with the trade-offs because you need the power that a "real" computer brings to the table. Well, what if I told you that it was possible to have the full power of a "real" computer, but with all of the advantages of a smartphone or tablet? Enter: modern-day Macintoshes.

The M2 processor in this laptop is quite literally faster than the Ryzen 3600x in my current PC, and it's passively cooled. By contrast, my PC weighs probably forty pounds, and the CPU has a massive tower-style heat sink with two fans hooked to it. It sucks hundreds of watts of power under load. It doesn't have a battery, but if it did the charge wouldn't last very long. In terms of usability, this laptop is just like a smartphone: you hit a key, it comes to life instantaneously, you can sit anywhere and casually use it, the battery lasts what feels like forever, and it generates basically no heat whatsoever.

But it also has a full keyboard. Plug a mouse into it and sit at a desk: it's simultaneously a full-on desktop system, with a complete desktop operating system. It's the best of both worlds, in one device. I even got 3DO emulation set up in RetroArch, and the screen is so beautiful that it has the same "sprites look almost 3D" optical illusion that the Switch OLED's display has.



And here is the real embarrassment: I was skimming over some benchmarks and impressions, and realized that Boot Camp runs old x86 software faster and more reliably most of the time than actual modern PCs. Meanwhile, I've tried Rosetta on a couple of Intel-oriented Mac applications such as The Gimp: they run so seamlessly you don't even realize any translation layer is operating. So here the PC is dragging forty years' worth of instruction set baggage… for what exactly? Contemporary Macs are better PCs than PCs are!

I've basically lost all interest in building a new gaming PC. ARM is the future. What I'd like to see one, two, or three years down the road is for Apple to catch up to Nvidia and AMD in terms of GPU gaming performance, then release some kind of desktop— or laptop, heck— that can play triple-A games via some kind of compatibility layer. Or maybe even via a Boot Camp Windows installation. I think it will happen: Apple Silicon is only a few years old, and this M2 GPU is already capable of 3.6 teraflops— almost as fast as a PlayStation 4 Pro, in a device which weighs two pounds. Give them another couple of years, and I could see them hitting the thirty and forty teraflop level in a top-end product.

I should also compliment the security mechanisms in modern-day MacOS. Holy buckets does this thing err on the side of warning me about stuff: I'll open a file in the browser, and "hey, the browser wants access to your Documents folder, is this ok?" I'm continuously getting prompted for passwords. It's great. Social engineering aside, I bet this operating system is virtually impervious to malware. Of course, that doesn't protect you from Apple themselves: this is a proprietary operating system after all. But I find it unlikely that a company whose mantra is "privacy is a human right" is simultaneously asking its engineers to build in back doors. Anything is possible, but I doubt it.

Do I have any nitpicks with the laptop so far? Sure. I'm finding the window management paradigm in MacOS to be a little fussy early on. I discovered "Mission Control" yesterday, and it seems like that will be indispensable. I'll get used to things I'm sure. I also think they could have doubled down on the "character" aspect of things: this computer already has a lot more personality than an IBM PC, feeling like a spiritual successor to the 1980's Macs, with its Finder and Apple icons, and desktop sound effects. But they could have really doubled down on that aspect, without being tacky or annoying. But on the balance, this is the best computer I've ever used, by some margin.

Some day in the far-off future, once the dust has settled and Leftists who weren't even alive yet and so have nothing about which to be defensive, they will make a Hollywood movie out of this: a small cabal of highly privileged scientists who destroyed the lives of hundreds of millions of people globally-- suicides, business obliterated, opioid epidemics, retarded childhood social development, you name it-- by funding and engineering a virus, which got loose from a lab in China, at which point they completely shit their pants and did everything they could do save their own hides. "Guys, if we don't control this narrative, we're going to jail."

One of my daughter's atheistic friends was testing her yesterday: "Why do you go to church?" "Why do you feel like you have to go?" "Why do you go to church?" "But why?" And so forth. This got me thinking: why do we go to church? Five responses immediately came to mind.

1. God wants us to be pleasing to Him. There is perhaps no better way than showing our commitment to Him in such an actionable way-- metaphorically putting our money where our mouths are.


2. We want to feel closer to God. No better way than to go to the church, which is His own house.


3. We know that the only way to enter into communion with the other members of the church, both living and passed, along with the saints, is to partake of the Eucharist. Church is where we do so.


4. Why do we stop at red lights? Because as part of society or any organization, there are certain rules we follow, because things work better that way. As members of the Catholic Church, we stop at right lights-- we observe the Sunday Obligation.


5. Every time I've seen someon fall off of God's path, things go sideways for them. Conversely, studies and my own observations show that people on God's path are happier and more at peace. If you are on God's path, you will want to go to church. If you are not, you'll ask questions like "Why do you go to church?"

I discussed these things with my daughter, and she agreed yet replied, "But I get bored in church." I gave her a metaphor: "Which would you rather eat: a quadruple bacon cheeseburger, or a bowl of broccoli?" She immediately grasped the point.

Satan is often presented in the Bible and elsewhere as a beautiful figure. He often tempts us with shiny objects. But too many shiny objects and a hedonistic lifestyle do not pave the way to God's kingdom, nor do they confer sustainable happiness.

I'm teaching myself Godot Engine via their tutorials, and it's weird how similar it is to Megazeux. Just like in MZX, you create boards (scenes) and define robots (nodes) which can then send messages to each other (signals). In both pieces of software you define the component bits, and they all interact with each other using what's essentially an observer pattern. This versus game creation systems like STOS or Fuze, where you're writing loops all over the place, checking for collisions and coding interactions by hand.

Twelve years ago I published the Android gas mileage tracker "Gassy Girl", and how here I am all of these years later with a successor. Behold: the Gassy Girl Progressive Web App! Click the "Gassy Girl" menu icon above to try it out.

No, "progressive" doesn't mean the application has a nose ring, purple hair, and a Pete Buttigieg bumper sticker on the back of her rusty Prius: rather, it means that the web site can be installed as an icon on the user's-- your!-- phone or tablet, and can then be enjoyed in the same way as a native app-- even offline! If you don't believe me, install it in mobile Chrome, Safari, or Firefox on iOS or Android, then flip to airplane mode.

I wrote it in the Blazor PWA framework, and it is licensed under the GPL v3. If anyone wants to enhance it, ask for permissions to the repo and send me a pull request. I am currently trying to get it published on the Google Play Store, but the amount of hurdles they are making me jump through is so comical, I suspect this guy is right: Apple and Google don't want useless plebeian apps which don't sell devices in their stores.

"Make great experiences on the web!" Ok, fine, here I am!


Phone Screenshots








Tablet Screenshots

I backed this on Kickstarter many moons ago, and I finally got around to putting it together. Viola!



The Super NES controller port is functional, and the device also successfully syncs with the Switch Pro Controller, which is how I've primarily been testing it. I've tried three games so far: Doom has artifacts, but Doom II works, while Super Mario Bros. 3 is also perfect.

I'm not sure what I'll ever use this device for, especially since my CRT TV overscans contemporary stuff like this, and the RetroArch output from my PC is so perfect and configurable: but it's still nice to have a modern way to play actual GBA carts on a CRT or HDTV, even if I don't have a concrete use case for that right now.

After weeks of deliberation, I ordered my first-ever Apple product today: a 2022 MacBook Air in the "midnight" color, with the nicer chip, and 24 gig of RAM. It should arrive in the first or second week of September. After I sat down and made a concrete list of use cases, the decision to place the order became more clear.

First, as a development machine it gives me full-fledged Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, IntelliJ IDEA with the Android plugin, Godot Engine, and xCode all in one spot. Heretofore, I've had to very annoyingly jump between my GNU/Linux machine and my Windows 10 work laptop, exchanging files via GitHub pushes and Google Drive. That gets old, quick. And even with that hassle, I still didn't have access to the Apple ecosystem! Now I have absolutely everything, all in one spot. There is a reason why I see ninety percent MacBooks at developer conferences.

Second, I've been wanting a superlight-class laptop with long battery life, to have with me on the sofa or bed while playing games. I look things up frequently, and take lots of notes. Walking to my GNU/Linux box every time was really starting to grate on my nerves. This new machine will satisfy that long-standing itch. Also from a gaming standpoint, this will make a wonderful portable RetroArch setup with its bright, rich-colored screen. And I will also subscribe to Apple Arcade: I went through lots of games yesterday, and there are a good dozen or so which look really enticing, with their ads and gacha balancing removed.

Third, the bundled software looks so phenomenal that it will lead me to self-improvement and fun side-projects. I've been wanting to learn piano for probably twenty five years, but could never find the right software: this machine will have access to Apple's "GarageBand", which will support the MIDI keyboard I bought some years ago. Additionally, their "Movie Maker" software will be an enormous upgrade from the flaky and janky "OpenShot" I have been using.

Fourth, I adore Augmented Reality as a concept, and it's a worst-kept-secret that Apple is going to release prescription AR glasses. I wouldn't wear them full-time for privacy reasons, but for career and personal interest purposes, I want to be first in the door on the development side when those hit. I also want to teach myself native iPhone development. Now both of those doors are open to me. I can even start with their AR framework on the iPhone 14 Pro I will buy once they are available. I will keep my 2017 Samsung Galaxy S8+ as a Wifi computer to continue my development exposure to Android.

There is a Minnesotan gal named Emily Roberts, who started a YouTube channel some years ago called "Snake Discovery". Like former "Justice and Drew" producer and fellow successful entrepreneurial young woman, Sam Sansevere, Roberts grew her channel into a 2.75 million subscriber phenomenon. It's been so successful in fact that Roberts has opened her own zoo, where she hosts birthday parties and the like.

My daughter has been on the journey with the YouTube channel as it has grown, and Emily Roberts has been a bit of a role model for her. Fast forward to a few days ago when my daughter went to a friend's birthday party and got to meet Emily in person! Anyone who knows my daughter understands that this was a pretty big deal for her. My daughter even knows all of Roberts's snakes-- "The one in the picture is 'Doug'", she explained to me:




My daughter already cares for twelve chickens, two guinea pigs, and five cats. She is going to do some pretty heavy work on her bedroom over the coming months, re-painting and re-arranging so that a pair of garter snakes, with the entire setup that they require, can join the "piggers" and our elderly cat in her room. I'll have pictures in the future once she's done with the project.

I was talking about God calling people to vocations with my kids the other day, and my daughter sees this and a hundred other little events as clear signs of God opening doors for her, showing her the path on which to walk.

It's interesting how quickly things can fall into place when you put your faith in God. I've been praying to Him ardently every night, saying the rosary, haven't missed a single holy day of obligation in the entire time I've gone back to the faith-- and look at how my life has gone since then; every prayer answered:

• I was able to successfully relocate my family to the bug out house, full time.


• I was able to successfully deliver on the enormous addition project, on behalf of the whole family. On top of it, after some early hiccups, the family is getting along great.


• The heart scare He brought on me led me onto a hardcore mission to improve my health-- and it wasn't even a heart attack! I'm fitter than a fiddle.


• I've been worried about my prostate: not cancer. Not even remotely. Just a case of benign prostatic hyperplasia.


• The heart scare brought me to start real therapy, breaking down why I'm thinking the way I am, dating back to a tragedy I went through in my late teenage years.


• I was put on a drug called Abilify. Projects I couldn't get motivated to do for an entire decade? Three days on Abilify, and I'm knocking them out like gangbusters. I've never been so passionate about technology, and that's really saying something!


• That feeling that I lost twenty IQ points, which I'd blamed on "just getting old"? Three days on Abilify and I have greater mental acuity than I did at twenty five. And at forty I have four times the fitness levels I did back then.


• I don't even get upset about politics or the Cultural Marxist crusaders anymore: I pray for them instead, for God to have mercy on them, and for them to turn from evil and follow Jesus.


• My career is going gangbusters: I'm making quite a lot of money, my skills are in hot demand within my employer, my employer is very healthy, I really like my coworkers, and I'm feeling very engaged overall.

The only fly in the ointment is that Abilify has dropped my sleep down to quite literally four or five hours per night! Even more odd is that I don't care: no headaches, tons of energy.

I remember Donald Trump saying that during his whole life he's only slept five hours per night, and that's why he's been so productive. I'll see if I can get it corrected via therapy-- but I wouldn't go back to my old state for a million bucks.

This is going to be one of the best times to build a PC ever: these new RTX cards are going to be so outrageously fast, that game budgets will never reach the point where this batch of GPUs would become obsolete! The CPU side is looking almost as crazy. I suspect my new PC will be a Ryzen 7700k with an RTX 4080. My plan is to have it run Windows 11 only, and to have it exclusively hooked up to my TV, like a quasi-games console. It'll be my last gaming PC ever, unless some paradigm shift like holograms comes along. Then I'll keep my current GNU/Linux PC setup for development, finances, RetroArch-to-the-CRT-TV, and all the rest.

I also wouldn't mind getting a MacBook and an iPhone at some point, just so that I can have some experience in their ecosystem. Eventually they will release AR glasses, and it'd be fun to tinker with those. I've been awake since 2:30 this morning getting a basically empty, Blazor progressive web app stubbed out. You can see what I've done so far here, including the steps I used to get debugging working in Visual Studio Code under Arch Linux. Once I finish the work, I'll wrap it up and publish it on the Google Play store. Then next year if I dip into the iOS ecosystem, I can cross-publish it over there too.

The whole clan, including me and the kids, went to an air show at Flying Cloud Airport this past weekend. There was tons of cool stuff there, but my favorite-- and my primary reason for wanting to go-- was to see my favorite airplane of all time, the Chance-Vought F4U Corsair. I recorded some short clips of it taxiing, taking off, and flying over-- check them out here.

Ignore the weird propeller speed-- that was due to the default shutter speed on my phone's camera, which I didn't know how to change. I could have also lived without the corny music and the dude on the PA system-- but what can you do. The average American's attention span is about two seconds, so they need all of the added B.S. or their minds stray.

As I explained to my kids, at the beginning of World War II, the US really struggled in the aerial department. The Japanese planes may have been made out of paper mache and cardboard, but boy were they maneuverable compared to the heavy, can't-climb-or-turn early US fighters such as the Grumman F4F Wildcat. The early-war US pilots could only compete through elaborate tactics, like luring Japanese Zero aircraft head-on into their wingmen.

This era was the most exciting in the history of aviation, because the world went from biplanes in 1939 to jet aircraft in 1944. Already by 1942 then, a second generation of US aircraft entered the war. These planes were not only heavily armored, but had fifty caliber machine guns, self-sealing fuel tanks, and they were faster than hell, could turn, and climb like crazy. The first of this wave of aircraft was the Corsair.

It had a 2000 hp engine and a massive thirteen foot propeller! They had lots of issues with the propeller literally scraping the ground. The final solution wound up being a funky wing shape, so they could position the landing gear just so. The Corsair could go over 400 mph, and had a whopping 11-to-1 kill ratio over its Japanese counterparts. During the slow fly-by in my video, I bet the pilot was at thirty percent throttle. The plane's only downside is that at low speeds it tended to stall to the left, unfortunately killing some young pilots-in-training, and earning the nickname "The Ensign Eliminator."

Just like many of my other favorite planes, such as the A-10 Warthog and the SR-71 Blackbird, the F4U Corsair had tons of custom engineering and improvised thinking, lending it tons of personality and character. It was also "best in class" at what it did.

I couldn't stop laughing when I first read that Gavin Nuisance was going to run for President. Gavin Nuisance! You need to go back to the late Roman Empire to find a leader worse than him! He's been an almost incomprehensible disaster for California! He's so bad, that even Commiefornians were inches away from throwing him out of office in a nearly unprecedented recall vote. Victor Davis Hanson has a great summary of the Nuisance Debacle right here.

In other political news, beyond undoing part of the Sodom and Gomorrah of modern-day America, the "Roe v. Wade" overturning has created other knock-on good news: it has accelerated the on-going, voluntary segregation between the Left and the Right. I used to be a huge advocate of secession-- but these days, I think the country might be better with a "soft" version, where enough pressure is alleviated by people just moving apart from one another.

I've been listening to Hibria's "Defying the Rules" a lot lately, what a phenomenal album! It shows up at number thirteen on my favorite albums list. It's amazing how they created their own fictitious universe from scratch, with these crazy dudes riding around on Harley Davidson-style motorcycles in battle. Like any great concept album, the story has a superb arc, and the compositions are top drawer, truly first order, and utterly authentic.

I've also been hooked on GamesMaster, positively marathoning it. It's so profound that it reminds me of when I discovered "The Computer Chronicles" many years ago. I had heard it mentioned many times before, but it wasn't until "Retro Man Cave Neil" did his Dominik Diamond interview recently that I decided to actually go check out the show. I figured I'd watch just ten minutes of the first episode, and wound up mid-way through series two so far. Incredible!

Finally, I think someone abducted Claudio Lotito and replaced him with a cyborg. While I've always been a huge admirer of his fiscal prudence, I've long thought he needed to do a better job of investing forward: spend money now, even if it involves a modicum of debt, to reap returns later. Now he's off spending upwards of forty million Euro, buying a bunch of sub-twenty four year olds. With Sarri running this refreshed ship, I wouldn't be surprised of Lazio challenged for a Scudetto this season, and that's no joke.

The joke: "What's the difference between a 'conspiracy theory' and fact? About three months." Here is example number one thousand. Absolutely everyone with a brain knew Beijing Biden was totally senile ages ago. Check out what I wrote here, in May of 2020:



But now, the Left are throwing the hair sniffer under the bus, so it's suddenly "ok" to talk about what's been obvious for years.

I also wrote this in October of 2020, seems pretty prescient, yes?



Naturally, my "contingency plan" was put into place immediately after The Selection, which of course all of you now know was the permanent relocation of my family to our country house. That plan was supposed to be employed if Trump won-- but I didn't anticipate just how rapidly the Democrats would destroy the country! So I put the plan in motion anyway.

Finally, take a look at this article, then cross-reference it with what I wrote here, bold emphasis is mine:



The article's author "gets it".