Month: September 2023

Posted on

What? Brain rebooted….

Yesterday while I was on hold with Apple, I was scanning news articles and one from Bloomberg caught my attention. The headline was a jaw dropper.

Is it me, or are the titles of officials sounding more and more like the stupid titles of drooling inbred Barons and Dukes who were 6th cousins to the king from old Europe?

Here is the persons’ title, “White House Special Presidential Coordinator for Global Infrastructure and Energy Security”  what the fuck? The translation of this title is, another cocksucking bobblehead yes person.

I’m gonna call him “Bobblehead” Amos Hochstein.

This person actually said publicly, “one reason why oil prices have surged and gas prices is that Bidenomics works.” Then started blaming OPEC for decreasing supply.

WHAT? 

OPEC wouldn’t have the ability to fuck with global oil prices if Biden hadn’t within days of his inauguration screwed domestic oil production and caused oil prices to jump, not due to constraint… but due to Biden’s actions destabilizing oil futures.

As I theorized before, Bidenomics may indeed be working exactly as designed. Bidenomics isn’t to help the country, it’s to help the filthy rich and punish any and all Americans who might not be marching in communist lockstep with the Democrat party. A.K.A. all those who disagree with the direction the country is moving in, and are therefore domestic terrorists.

I’m predicting it here and now. It is going to be a very cold expensive winter for the average American Family. Because Biden’s energy policies will continue to drive up fuel prices. Don’t forget it’s not just gasoline.

Diesel fuel is what runs the container ships, the 18 wheel trucks, the farm equipment, the construction equipment, and petroleum byproducts go into almost everything else throughout our product and supply chain. So when fuel gets or remains expensive… the average American Family takes it in the ass.

An Interesting side note, Biden and his bobblehead staff all say repeatedly that The President is very concerned that the American Family doesn’t have undue hardship.

When you run that statement through the Democrat/Biden translation matrix… You get “The President want to make sure the American Family is hungry and cold.”

After all if you keep people cold enough, hungry enough, poor, and hopeless, long enough, then offer them free shit and relief if they vote for you, or if they’re asked to offer up their first born to be slaves, most of ‘em will say “yes”.

There’s a story about Vlad Țepeș of Romania inviting the poor, homeless, and destitute, of the town to his castle for dinner. He asked them what they wanted of him, they replied, “give us money, give us food, end our suffering.” At which point he ordered the palace guard to slaughter everyone in the dining hall.

VladIII

He ended their suffering right then and there.

I don’t know if that is a story that actually happened or if it was a teaching tale.

I do know, that every time I see people with their hands out to receive “Free” stuff. I always think of Vlad Țepeș and his “Solution”.

“Free” in politics is just a word that obfuscates the actual price. If more people knew that, politicians would have a lot less power.

Vlad Țepeș actually Vlad III,  had quite a life. Wars, imprisonment, loss of a throne and regaining it.

Stories about his “Unheard of cruelty” were circulating in his lifetime. Note we’re talking in the fourteen hundreds. By todays standards just living in that time would have been considered cruel and unusual punishment. This guy was considered unusually cruel then.

… Turkish messengers came to [Vlad] to pay respects, but refused to take off their turbans, according to their ancient custom, whereupon he strengthened their custom by nailing their turbans to their heads with three spikes, so that they could not take them off.

— Antonio Bonfini: Historia Pannonica

The pope was informed of Vlad’s methods. A Poem about him was performed at the court of Frederick III, Holy Roman Emperor during the winter of 1463.

While the story of him slaughtering all the poor from the town near his castle might be apocryphal, given the other stories about Vlad III I wouldn’t be surprised if he actually did it.

Interestingly, stories about Vlad III were some of the first best sellers to be printed with moveable type.

Bram Stoker did a great job of romanticizing Vlad III. As the source of all the vampire myths, in my Goth phase I was curious about Vlad III so I found out a about the real person.

I think he was an Arch Villain. This is certainly true through the lens of todays standards. It’s probably true through even the lens of the fourteen hundreds. But there was a lot of political intrigue and a lot more involved in keeping his kingdom together. Perhaps his cruelty was justified, perhaps not.

For some reason, Vlad III always pops into my mind whenever I hear Biden or his bobbleheads speaking. I think Biden and his administration are cruel and they call it “kindness”. They call failure, “success”. They call crime and criminal behavior, “Righteousness”.

By the way…. 

I did not preorder the new iPhone after all. 

Apple wouldn’t allow me to preorder it and use their interest free financing without me declaring which cellphone carrier I was going to use. In other words they wanted me to buy a carrier locked phone and I won’t do that.

They didn’t make me declare my carrier when I purchased my iPad with cellular capability. Nor did they ask for me to declare a carrier when I purchased my Apple Watch. Yet I was allowed to put those items on their interest free financing.

For some reason, they wouldn’t allow me to do the same with a new iPhone. 

I’d actually filled out the Pre Preorder forms that was supposed to make the preorder easy this morning. I stopped when I realized that for me to have the phone I’d have to put it on my card at whatever the interest rate is. Since the Apple Card is among the highest interest rate cards I have, that was a big RED NO GO!

Who am I kidding? All credit cards have nightmare interest rates these days!

The Apple Card is convenient, but it’s not something you carry a balance on unless it’s interest free. To be honest, I’m questioning keeping the Apple Card moving into the future. I don’t like the way they handle some things. The question is, does my dislike outweigh the convenience? It’s about neck & neck right now.

I’ll wait on the new iPhone. Maybe, I’ll wait until the next iPhone, or the next… I can wait, the battery on my phone isn’t that weak yet.

Sure there are things I’d like to have, but do I need them?

Maybe not…

Posted on

Today is the day

Preorders for iPhones began at 5am.

I’m still deciding if I want to plunk down the cash for a new phone. Indeed I’m wondering if I want to pre-order one instead of seeing it in the store in person. 

I know I want blue. I’m pretty sure I want the smaller of the two phones although the telephoto abilities of the iPhone Pro Max are intriguing. I just don’t think I could get comfortable with the size of the Max. I still like being able to put my phone in my pocket.

Sacrificing that ability for 5x telephoto versus 3x doesn’t seem like a good tradeoff for me given how little I use telephoto in general.

My current phone is 512GB. It’s served me well at that storage level, I do take photos regularly and with the resolution of the new iPhone being 4 times that of the current iPhone I wonder if bumping the phone storage up would be a good idea. Or is that something I can kick down the road a bit? It’s $200 extra. 

That pushes an already expensive phone into the stratosphere. Then again, at these prices? What’s another 200 bucks? It’s improbable that this will be my last iPhone, given that I tend to replace them every 3 years. My estimated remaining lifespan is 10+ years so maybe there’ll be 3 more iPhones in my future. 

My perspective on that kind of thing is changing. The other half made choices that meant he had what was just barely serviceable in the last 5-10 years of his life. I was the one that forced him into buying better things than just “serviceable”. He fought me on his Apple Watch and flat out refused to get an iPhone that used facial recognition.

Because he played harp, his thumbs and fingers were always torn up a little. As it turns out, just enough, that fingerprint scanners in iPhones and iPads more often than not, wouldn’t work.

It wasn’t anything he complained about, but I couldn’t help but notice he made his life more difficult than it had to be. It saddens me that the last few years of his life, he might have been more frustrated by devices and tools meant to make his life easier. When I bought his last iPhone, I should have gotten the one with facial recognition like mine.

Thinking like this has changed my perspective some. I’ve always gone for nice things within some kind of boundaries. Now, I’m looking at things from the perspective of does this make me smile, does it make my life easier or reduce frustration? If it does, then It’s worth it to spend a little extra cash. Especially since I’m aware, the road ahead of me is shorter than the road behind me. Why shouldn’t I enjoy myself?

The computer I’m typing on right now, is a marvel. It’s small, powerful, and has great battery life. In low power mode, the battery life is crazy long. Most of what I do these days is completely unaffected by running in low power mode. So yes, I spent a bloody fortune on this machine, but it meets all the requirement stated above, and probably will not be replaced in the next 5 years and possibly this is the last computer I’ll have.

I’m usually startled at how fast this computer really is when I plug it in. Low power mode turns off when it sees incoming power. Mostly it’s the speed of some applications loading. But when I’m using something like Final Cut, or the Affinity Suite of applications, I really notice. I’m sure I’d notice the speed using Photoshop if I could afford to use Adobe products anymore. $55 a month for access to Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and the other Adobe products seems excessive. If I was a student it would be $20 a month, but if I was a business it’s $85 a month. Wow! Must be nice… 

I miss the days of being able to purchase the Adobe Creative Suite outright and deciding if I needed to upgrade year over year.

That being said, Affinity does a great job of replacing Adobe. I just noticed that most of the benchmark tests aren’t referring to Photoshop rendering speed anymore. I hadn’t thought about Adobe for at least a year, maybe two. That’s a pity, I used to use their products all the dang time. I haven’t even looked at the Adobe Font catalog for more than 5 years. I used to always be shopping for some cool unique font. 

Ahhh apparently Adobe is doing subscriptions on fonts too. Guess What? The subscription is obscenely expensive!

I guess Adobe really did cut themselves right out of the general public’s awareness when they got too pricy for individuals to maintain copies of their products. I’ll have to make sure that all of my previously purchased fonts are securely stored somewhere because I won’t be able to replace them going forward.

I’ve found some font houses are still in business. Of course, looking at the various font houses, I discovered two fonts that I really liked. At $200 bucks a piece They may be a bit too rich for my blood, but at least I could buy them without a subscription. 

Screenshot 2023 09 14 at 10 27 38 AM

From Typography.com, is a very beautiful typeface. As fonts go, it’s not inordinately priced. This is the problem I have with subscription services especially for fonts. It looks like paying one year of Adobe’s subscription price would greatly exceed the cost of purchasing both of the fonts that I’ve just found and liked.

As an individual, I might only need or want 2 fonts. So having subscription access to 1000s of fonts does me no good whatsoever. That being said, I know that I’m an outlier. Most people don’t think about the font they’re using unless it’s hard to read.

Being in the printer and printing industry for as long as I was, I look at fonts very differently. For example, Requiem (above) is elegant, and beautiful. There are features in the font that are very old school having to do with ligatures. I suppose I look at fonts as functional art. Moreover a beautiful font is art that I get to look at and use everyday on my computer.

I digress, I do wonder though if I still have any of the Adobe Type Manager 3.5” disks around that contained my font library. I’ll have to keep an eye out for those as I’m cleaning up.

This is how I lose entire days… One connection leads to another in my head, and then another and another until I realize I’ve learned a lot but haven’t gotten anything done.

I’ve decided that I’m preordering the phone… 

Hmm, apparently not! Something is very odd with the Apple site. Apparently, they’ve got another hit on their hands…

Posted on

OMG! I don’t know… I’m so conflicted…

A CIA whistleblower has come forward describing payola to 6 analysts to change their findings about the origin of COVID-19. 1226905 Wallpaper2

It’s the freaking CIA, Can you say “Bay of Pigs?” How about Vietnam? Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq? How about shitty intelligence in every single war we’ve been involved in.

Can I have any faith in what the CIA says? They’re renowned for lying. 

Okay, maybe I”m being harsh. When the CIA gets it right, they leave no trace so we, the public, wouldn’t ever know what happened, or why, or how the CIA was involved.

My examples above are simply epic failures. I’d like to believe that the CIA is actually pretty efficient. Notice I said I’d like to believe

My problem is that over the past 3 years we’ve all been told so many lies! We’ve been told that even when we had it right, we were wrong, or conspiracy theorists.

To be clear… COVID-19 came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. COVID-19 was engineered, created by man, and released into the wild possibly by accident, or perhaps by design. That whole “Wet Market bat meat to pangolin to human,” evolution story was absolute bullshit. 

Those of us who called it bullshit were labeled as disinformation spreaders. We were called rabid MAGA racists. We were deemed dangers to society. We lost our twitter accounts, we lost our Facebook accounts, we were de platformed, our income streams were damaged… But we were FUCKING RIGHT! 

We’re all too intelligent to hold our breath for any kind of apology.

It begs the question, where are my reparations for the PTSD our lying government and media gave me?

LighteningWhen the hell is Anthony Fauci going to be dragged out of his home at 5AM by 25 FBI agents brandishing M-16s?

We know that will never happen!

St Fauci of the mask will never see justice for what he did to the American People.

Either on the front end, when he was financing illegal research into gain of function, OR when he lied for years about the source of COVID-19, the efficacy of masks, the efficacy of the vaccine, and lied to congress under oath when asked about his involvement in the destruction of colleagues careers who had dissenting opinions about how to address the COVID-19 crisis. Or indeed his direct involvement in the creation of COVID-19.

I know there will be no justice. One can only hope that Fauci is struck by lightening on a golf course.

Of course, the Russians might be pissed enough about Fauci having a hand in the creation of COVID-19, and the damage done to their economy to give him a polonium enema. In which case, I’d call it justice done!

Yes I know, they don’t give it as an enema. Polonium can be injected, put in a drink, or a small pellet can find its way into the victim. The Russians have used this method of poisoning quite effectively. It’s not quick, it’s brutal suffering until the victim is begging or praying for death. There’s no cure.

In Fauci’s case someone like me could torment him with a potential cure but remind him that double blind placebo trials had to be executed before the experimental cure could be given to him. I say like me, because I’m evil, and that little gnome deserves punishment. 

I look forward to what happens with this next if anything. I’m sure this news, like all the news that paints the COVID response as anything but reasonable, will be buried as quickly as possible. 

Maybe the D.C. machine will indict Trump for jaywalking as a distraction.