Drones over Jersey

There’s been a lot of buzz about swarms of drones over New Jersey. The government’s initial response was that they pose no threat and they don’t belong to our military or any foreign adversaries.


Some days are just bad, and that's ok

I have this delusion where I feel like everyone should be happy all the time. That’s what I was chasing the better part of a decade ago when I was battling with addiction and it’s the illusion I put on every day as a salesguy.

It’s not polite to tell people what you really think or how you really feel. At least not in rural America. It’s easier to pretend like you’re always happy and nothing ever goes wrong. Social media is excellent at amplifying this.

It’s pretty good at rage baiting and pitting us against each other too, but it’s mostly a place where you only show the best parts of yourself. Your best camera angle, the highlights of your vacation, the new promotion you just got.

It’s easy to forget that life has phases and cycles. Everything comes and goes in waves.

It’s okay to be pissed off sometimes, or depressed, or anxious. Everyone does it.

It’s about yin and yang right? You can’t have peaks without valleys.


More on echo chambers

It dawned on me today that the kind of people who criticize others for “living in an echo chamber” online are the kind of people who think everything should be ridiculed by anyone who disagrees, whether it’s right or wrong. The kind of people who bend first amendment rights to support knowingly spreading misinformation because wE hAvE fReE sPeEcH.


About those UFOs over DC...

The UFOs over the the US Capitol definitely contain artifacts, just not alien artifacts.


Our house tried to kill us

We’ve had this water leak coming from our furnace for probably a month or two. It was just a slow drip at first, so we didn’t notice it right away. I figured it might have been something simple like the humidifier clogging up and not draining properly.


The indie web is crucial for me right now

When I started blogging earlier this year I wrote a lot about the indie web. The social web, small web, or even the IndieWeb, if you’d like.


Being a skeptic is boring

Last night my partner and I got into a silly little debate about ghosts. Earlier that day, we watched the Demon House documentary and then followed up in the evening with a Netflix movie based on the same story: The Deliverance.


USSR: The United States of Sudden Regression

I was in the middle of writing this post about how, pretty much until the middle of the 20th century, people took the law into their own hands if they saw fit. And they probably got away with it too.

Like this photo I saw on Reddit:

Auto-generated description: Several men stand over a person lying on the ground next to a sign that reads, THIS IS EXEMPT PROPERTY FROM SEIZURE. THIS IS A WIDOW'S HOMESTEAD.

That’s a feel good ACAB justice kinda story, right? I’m not sure of the source or legitimacy of it; I mean after all it was just a random Reddit post, but OP had a little blurb to go along with it:

Farmers “arrest” the sheriff for trying to evict a woman from her farm on behalf of the insurance company. Michigan, 1952.

So basically the sheriff came to evict this sweet little old widow and some farmers from around the way stood up and (violently) stopped the him from going through with it. Back then that was just the end of it, right? There were no records logged in a police database, the cop wasn’t wearing a body cam; it was the 50’s.

…and I was just going to ramble on about how easy it was to get away with crazy shit back then compared to nowadays.

But then I actually thought about it. It was only white guys who got away with everything. If you were some old Sam Elliot type with a cowboy hat and handlebar mustache, you could get away with murder. Literally. If you were black? Or a woman? Or a black woman?

Different fucking story.

Segregation wasn’t that long ago. Women didn’t have fuck all for rights until pretty recently. White men ruled everything until pretty recently.

What am I saying; they still rule everything.

And that’s what MAGA wants to really hone in on and refine. That’s the “great” America they’re working around the clock to bring back. The US is a great melting pot alright. One made of racism, sexism, misogyny, and LGBTQ+ phobia hate, “but for a brief moment in time”, we’ll say in our future history books, “we were actually making some progress.”

What else is there to say?

All you have to do is open any news app you like and the screen populates with headlines too stupid to even be satire. If anyone would’ve pitched some of Trump’s concepts of plans ideas for the movie Idiocracy, they would’ve said it’s too unrealistic and in bad taste.

Who would joke about the kind of shit Donald Trump is about to do?


I really like Reeder 5 on iOS but I use Linux on my desktop so I’ve been constantly syncing OPML files between that and different web based RSS readers. I used Inoreader for a couple years but it’s so expensive for something that constantly suggests features to try and upsell you to the next tier. I switched to Feedbin a couple weeks ago and I think this is where my feeds will live for now. $50 a year and easy sync between iPhone and random Linux box.


So about those MrBeast allegations...

A few months ago I wrote about the drama surrounding MrBeast and his former co-star Ava Tyson.


I'm obsessed with this terminal emulator

Never thought I’d feel so strongly about a terminal app but I’ve been obsessed with Warp Terminal for the last week. It has built in AI so you can use natural language when you don’t know where to go next. I wish they had this kind of thing circa 2009 when I installed Ubuntu on my old HP Pavilion.

I’ve spent so many nights trying to install some obscure program, screwing something up and ultimately installing dependencies for dependencies for dependencies and breaking stuff to the point where I throw in the towel. Just used it a little bit ago to help me figure out how to get VS Code running on Wayland.

On the free account you get 100 queries per month, which isn’t a heck of a lot but if you go easy on them they can really bail you out when you need it. Lots of extra features on top of that, especially for coding and collaboration. I’m just lazy and like having the option to let AI do the work when I’m in over my head with everyday Linux stuff. Worth checking out if you spend a lot of time on the command line. I don’t think I need yet another subscription just for a terminal emulator but it’s so shiny and new and fancy 🤩


I like my cozy little echo chamber

I try to live in an echo chamber. I’m not into debates. I’m not a fan of confrontation at all, really. Some people thrive on it, I shut down and retreat into a sweaty shell.

When I’m reading an article or watching the news, while I do follow a lot of centrist sources, I try to stick with the farthest left publications I can find. I’m open to change; like if someone comes in and blows me away with mountains of evidence or a better take on something we disagreed on, I have no problem admitting I was wrong. I can change my perspective if it makes sense.


The Onion, InfoWars shenanigans

One [bid] was from the Jones-affiliated First United American Companies, which offered $3.5 million, the trustee revealed in court Thursday. The other, from The Onion, was lower but contained an incentive by some of the Sandy Hook families to forgo a portion of the sale proceeds and give it to other Jones’ creditors, the trustee, Christopher Murray, said.

[Judge Lopez’s] 20-page order on the sale procedures in September…gave broad authority to Murray to conduct the sale, including the power to reject any bid, no matter how high, that was “contrary to the best interests” of Jones, his company and their creditors.

Maybe I’m just an idiot but isn’t the point of this to liquidate his assets and pay the Sandy Hook families for damages? I get the part about the creditors but who gives a shit about Alex Jones or his company’s best interests? He’s showed absolutely no remorse for any of the misinformation he spread that got him here. He literally talks shit about the entire situation any chance he gets, as if he’s the victim and the families are just obsessed with him for no reason.

Murray had Infowars' website and studio shut down Thursday as he began the process of securing assets, a lawyer for the trustee said in court Thursday. But on Friday, Infowars and its websites were back up and running…Jones told listeners that Murray had told him it was wrong to shut down Infowars before the sale was finalized.

Why do I feel like he’ll somehow weasel his way out of this? The worst people get away with this kinda shit all the time. The judge says there are issues with transparency and the legality of The Onion being picked as the winning bid since it was for less money, and because there was no round of bidding after the initial bids were unsealed. Which the same judge said was optional according to his order.

I guess we’ll see how it goes next week at the hearing 🤞

Source: What happens next in The Onion’s effort to buy Alex Jones' Infowars


Re: Massive New Information on Aliens Just Came Out (penguinz0, YouTube)

I like Charlie’s take on this. Yes; I believe all of the people at the congressional hearing on UAPs were telling the truth, I just don’t think it means aliens. Whether they think so or not. There’s proof of strange craft flying around the skies and we don’t know who they belong to or how they’re able to do these seemingly impossible maneuvers, but that doesn’t mean aliens.

“Has there been to your knowledge any communication with a non-human life form?” Republican Eric Burlison asked. “The term communication is a bit of a trick word because there’s verbal communication, the problem is you also have non-verbal communication, and so I would say definitely yes,” Elizondo said. “When a Russian reconnaissance aircraft comes into US air space we scramble two F-22s, we are certainly communicating intent and capability. I think the same goes with this. We have these things that are being observed over controlled US air space and…they’re making it pretty obvious they have the ability to even interfere with our nuclear readiness.”

In Charlie’s video, he makes the point that we believed the “Wow!” signal from the 70’s was smoking gun evidence of life on other planets but it’s since been debunked.

I, too, believe the universe is far too vast for us to be the only intelligent life out here but that’s just it; it’s so vast there’s little to no chance we’re anywhere near any other life. We have satellites like Voyager and JWST venturing deep into space, snapping a bunch of photos and soaking in all the data they can and yet we’ve still not seen any signs of civilization anywhere but Earth.

I would absolutely love for a society of benevolent aliens to come save us from ourselves and welcome us into The Galactic Federation but that’s just wishful thinking.


I just bought the domain name worksucks.me. I think I’m going to start working on a silly little thing like Fesshole only instead of random confessions you can anonymously submit a post bitching about your job. No idea if it’ll ever come to fruition but I need something to tinker with. And before you say there’s already Glassdoor - that’s a professional website where you can actually find a job. Mine does nothing and brings absolutely nothing to the table aside from a stream of posts from strangers who hate their job.


Indie web escapism

Back in 2016 I didn’t have this community. I had Twitter and I think Tumblr? And definitely Facebook.

Facebook is already a shitshow. People fighting and ending lifetime friendships, a few Trump supporters being schooled on what tariffs actually are even though it’s a little too late now.

I’m glad I have a nice place to go and escape the noise and general insanity of the impending fascist regime, even if I am coming here to bitch about it.

I don’t know most of you very well but I’m glad we’re all here.


USPol: Election woes

I’ve been pretty quiet across social media and my blog the last few days. This close to the election, nothing else seems very significant. A week from now could be the beginning of the end or a new beginning entirely. I’ve never been so nervous about an election in my life.


Take two: giving Kagi another shot

A while back I tried out Kagi Search for a few months. It was a nice change of pace from Google, which is almost completely useless these days, and DuckDuckGo which is essentially privacy enhanced Bing.


We need each other

People, I mean.

I’ve always considered myself a bit of a loner. Definitely an introvert; I love hanging out with friends but I love coming home and decompressing while watching some TV or spinning a few records even more. My nights of staying at the bar until 2am and passing out at a buddy’s house are long behind me.


Recurring Strangers

So far, I’ve lived most of my life in a small town. My graduating class was about 120 people; it’s definitely one of those communities where everyone knows everyone else. It’s the kind of place where you feel like you’re in a decent sized city for about five minutes and then, next thing you know, you’re completely surrounded by cornfields and it feels like you’re about to star in the reality TV adaptation of Deliverance.