Author: sean

Twenty-five

I was a day off in what I posted last night. Once again, good discussion with friends about various youthful exploits, and what’s happening in the tech world.

I am seeing others arriving at the same conclusions as I have about the theings you must do to be an IT practitioner in good-standing.

I’ve probably said here before, but it’s worth repetition — before my vision really started going, I was a shitty Minesweeper player. I did do marginally-well on the SAT when I was a kid, but that wasn’t the sort of tests you commonly see these days — multiple choice, but there’s an unknown nummber of correct responses. On Question One, there’s six answers provided, and only two of them are correct. If you only select one, you get the entire question wrong. If you select the correct two answers, but also select a third incorrect one, you miss the whole question.

With barely-functional eyes, and a brain that’s slightly affected by MS, it often just ends up as an exercise in frustration.

But I have to do those things if I want to keep working. Along with paying the certification agency’s protection racket fee.

Fuck that. I really don’t need to do it anymore.

I also don’t want to do it anymore.

But on to what I promised to do — news.

Portland sounds absolutely insane at this point. I am paying attention, though not terribly closely. I heard Andy Ngo on a podcast or radio show. I started following on Twitter. Incredible.

I also saw something, last week maybe, where these “peaceful protesters” beat the living hell out of an East Asian guy because they thought he was Andy Ngo.

There was widespread outrage early this week that there were Federal officers just arresting people wearing no ID, and travelling in unmarked vehicles. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that these are the same folks who spent two years talking about how the President worked with the Russians to be elected.

So what to do? I don’t know. Governments are established to protect individuals’ rights to life, liberty, and property.

Government is failing in Portland.

That’s the biggest thing I see. I am biased, and I admit that. Still, shit’s burning, and people are getting hurt.

How do you stop that, who does it, and when does it happen?

Flashbacks

Playing around in Jitsi with friends, and remembered I’d seen this looking through my archives the last few days.

Nervous – 7/25/2002

Going to a gathering of geeks this evening and I’m quite nervous. I don’t normally do well at these types of thing…..

I think one of my friends is going, so that should help some, but I’m still antsy. Will give a full report later.

Went down to Hatteras last night austensibly to go fishing. Didn’t even make it all the way down there, actually. I turned around in Kitty Hawk…..I was bored, and decided that standing around on a beach, barefoot, with a 9′ graphite fishing pole in a lightening storm probably wasn’t a great idea…..

Twenty-four

Not a lot of desire to do this today. I was actually thinking early this morning that maybe it’d be easier to just quit.

I’m not going to do that, because I want to finish what I started.

So. News. The team with the formerly-offensive name is now just the “Washington Football Team.”

I still think they’re missing out on the moniker I thought of.

So. News. There’s this.

It’s almost amusing to see all these “icons” getting torn down years after their deaths. Was he a racist? Probably not nearly as much as Virginia-born Democrat Woodrow Wilson, but….

I asked on Twitter, and got a funny response:

Was he a slave-peddler? Nothing that I’ve seen really indicates that. Did both good and bad things pop up because this Italian guy did the bidding of the Spanish monarchy? Sure. Do I support the Spanish monarchy? No. Do I support eliminating every mention? No. It happened. Some people are happy about that.

Whatever.

You’re not going to hide it.

Some people in the past drew inspiration from what he did, and erected monuments to those things. Fine. Let them stand, and remove them when they don’t serve any purpose anymore.

Should the Wilson bridge have been renamed when it was widened? Yeah. Should it happen right now? I’m very conflicted.

Is “Redskins” offensive? Yeah, at some point it was. For me, someone born during the Carter Administration, when I hear it, I think of George Allen, and the “Over The Hill Gang,” Joe Gibbs, John Riggins, Mark Rypien, and the Posse. I don’t think of anything racist.

Hell, I’m young enough that when someone mentions “Earnest Byner,” I think of the 1991 Redskins, not “The Fumble.”

Somebody from Cleveland probably thinks differently.

I also, as a Saints’ fan, think of the Saints losing to the Redskins on Sunday Night Football to a Redskins Team that’d started the season 0-5, and led by Tony Banks after they’d released their starting quarterback (Jeff George) something like three games.

Whatever.

But FedEx and Nike are on my no-buy list..

On to digging through the past….

I want a beer – 7/24/2002

It’s 4:39 in the morning, I’m at work, and I want a beer.

WTF?

Tfffftbt. I wanna go far, far away from here.

I get off at six, and don’t have to be back at work until 9 saturday night.

Hmmph…what to do what to do…

I’m not sure what was going on around this time. I’d graduated from college, and was still working in radio. My time off, still, wasn’t really fun nights to do things. I didn’t have a lot to do. It would have been hot outside, so maybe that was it.

Twenty-three

Again. This is my second attempt at writing this as I sit in the Clinical Research Unit at Georgetown with Tysbri flowing through my veins.

I’d started in on a very long bit about writing. Today is the twenty-first anniversary of when i started writing on The Open Diary.

But instead of elaborating on my compulsion to write, I’ll just ease back into what I’d said I was going to do.

News story. Oh, right. Things are crazy as hell in the US right now, but they actually manage to get crazier from time to time.

I guess the people who spent three years building a Cold War-style Soviet conspiracy story are probably loving this.

(No, I don’t support the President, but the Russia collusion narrative is just batshit crazy. The politicians and media who fostered it should delete their accounts.)

But with all that finished, time to go do something more productive.

Twenty-two

As I promised, going to do a news story, and free-write.

For the news story, there’s this.

Obviously, with my tenuous health, and the state of the economy, these sorts of things have been of great interest lately.

I’ve been dumping money into my 401(k). And what I wanted to write about just now I deleted, because I might not be allowed to disclose.

I will say that I’m not old enough to qualify for any of the “catch-up” provisions in tax law, so it’s kind of forcing me to do things on my own apart from the “normal” ways of doing things.

As if there’d be anything different in my life.

I have a chunk. I’m not sure how long I could ever hope to live on it. I think probably some sort of long-term disability is more likely, honestly. What I have now would be more than I was earning not terribly long ago.

Even before the MS diagnosis, I was probably only looking at a lifespan of 65 years. MS, when you take a look at the actuarial numbers, takes ten years off your life. So that puts me likely dying before I’m able to tap anything without significant penalties.

Oh well.

I did listen to something interesting a few weeks ago that really changed my way of thinking about “investments.” Putting money into stores of value is not trying to get growth; it’s just trying to keep the value from going away.

In other words, I’m not planning to get rich off Tesla stock. Maybe next week, that’ll have appreciated a lot more than an ounce of gold or silver; what will it be worth ten years from now?

The same can be said for other things like real estate. Even if a big crash happens, it’s not going to be worth zero.

I can’t say the same for the Flooz I bought in 1999.

I’m also interested in buying stock that’s not publicly-traded. If I put, say, $10K into an apartment management/ownership group, maybe it’s a smaller payout than it was when I bought it. Maybe not. Maybe the Federal Reserve will juice the currency so much that it’s worth a lot more.

Even if it goes bankrupt, I’d be an unsecured creditor, and would get something back during the liquidation.

This is rapidly turning into the free-write I promised.

But I’m going to stop, as the weather’s nasty, and I’m worried about the power going out.

Twenty-one

The motivation to do this is waning quickly. I did write to my doctor when I decided to embark on this session.

I found in my archives an entry I’d written almost twenty years ago, where I beat myself up for being lazy.

Mind you, this was when I was working basically full-time largely overnight, along with taking something like seventeen hours in college. And I was beating myself up over it. I’d spend my two nights off per week largely out driving around, listening to the radio, smoking way too many cigarettes, and trying to figure out what I was going to write.

Yeah. That was lazy.

Notsomuch. But that’s where I was, mentally.

As far as this goes, I was going to go on with what I suggested yesterday, and just find a random news story, and write about that.

Today, instead, since this wheezing PC decided it was going to flake out while I was trying to find where I write, I flipped over to the TV input.

The station I’ve been watching lately was talking about this. Even the reactionary mayor was in full maybe-this-is-really-fucking-stupid mode.

Because it is.

Is it the stupidest thing I’ve seen proposed in the past few years? No. That it’s not says a lot about the pols who’ve been put in office lately. Yes, that extends to the current occupant of the Oval Office.

But the disappointment that they won’t be able to execute him for treason could be amusing if I could bring myself to be amused.

Instead, it’s just disgust.

If I keep talking about it, I might turn into what I’m calling one of my Fantasy Football teams this year. Since Redskins is no longer okay, I think there’s a nice ring to “Washington Wokescolds.” My fantasy teams is the DC Wokescolds, because using the proper city name was too long.

Do I plan to keep doing this? Yes. Why? Because I started it, and it gives me a reason to pick through my archives to see what I wrote once upon a time.

So, from this day in 2000, I found this.

See, I believe in big miracles – 7/21/2000

It’s an inside joke, and if you haven’t seen the Robert Tilton Spiritual Flatulence bootleg video, you wouldn’t understand. (I have a copy somewhere, if you’d like a copy, drop me a line. I might be able to oblige).

Anyway, I just thought I’d say that I miss Art Bell. Mike Siegel sucks hairy goat balls.

The reference is to something that was much shorter than the YouTube find here.

Obviously it was incredibly funny to a seventeen year-old boy.

More tomorrow.

Twenty

I’m doing this, though the temptation had really waned after I started in on it yesterday.

No prompts this time, just free-writing, and reaction to news that hit me on first scan of a news site.

Today’s news? This.

Everything touching the Epstein story just evokes a what-the-actual-fuck response.

Somehow it seems totally appropriate that there’s photos of both Trump and Clinton with him.

What’s happened with the story I linked is that the judge who is handling the case’s family were murdered. But they think it’s another issue, altogether. Or something.

No, I don’t think electing Crackhead Joe (hattip to Michael Malice on that one; he’s not the crackhead, that’s his son! And there’s the point….) will fix this.

Now to dig through very old writings, and find something I wrote on this date in a previous year.

Nope. Not that one. Or that one. On to 2013. Nope, not that one, either.

Better luck tomorrow, maybe.

Resistance Is Futile

Thirty-one days of writing ahead. It’s happening, despite my attempts at fighting it.

So what am I not going to do?

Pick prompts.

If I’m not free-writing, I’m going to just look through the news, pick a story, and shoot out a few lines.

July Eighteenth is Hot

I have two friends, and a relative who’ve got birthdays today. *does quick math* Halloween parties? All Saints’ Day? Armistices Day?

It is incredibly hot outside; 99 Fahrenheit here right now. Though there’s a taco truck visiting my ‘hood, I’m resisting the urge to go outside.

Fighting the urge urge to write again this summer, too. I did find some interesting prompts, but the weird Creative Commons stipulations made it too difficult to really consider using them. Whatever.

So what do I do on this hot day? Listen to the Peddling Fiction Podcast, look at some of the idiocy on Facebook, and stay inside.

Just No

Well, today’s been spent trying to figure out how to pay my protection racket to a professional organization that shall remain nameless.

At least the guys in the fancy suits actually provide something worthwhile.

And the restaurant suggestions they give generally turn out to be worhtwhile.

I’m also having major reflections on the NFL after seeing what the post-Awokening mob have done to the Redskins, and seeing this on Twitter this morning.

Can I support a league that is so closely tied to the company that employs him as a spokesman? Should I?

This line of thinking was certainly feeding in to my back-and-forth with Robbie “The Fire”. on Twitter yesterday:

He’d been talking about starting a corporation, the “F You Corporation,” that sells things apart from the woke mob.

But I’ve been quietly doing that sort of thing, on my own, for years. I used to not need to advertise it.

Can I say, “no,” to Nike, and the NFL?

Yeah, I actually probably can.

Would it make a difference?

I have no idea.

But I can leave, and live my life as I choose.

(And, see, this is where I start in to the whole bit about how if you disagree, well, shoot me, because I don’t deserve to live if me living is not up to your standards….)

Some people, about whom I care, might be disappointed, and that’s something I have to weigh.

But, regardless, at this point, there’s absolutely no way I’ll purchase a single thing from Nike if they continue to employ CK.

If someone asks me why, I’ll explain.

Otherwise, it’s for me to know, and just walk away. (And take my dollars with me.)