Stormy night.

Bulletin boards (BBS’s) were the dialup precursors to internet websites. People shared files and heavily pixelated images across telco lines and dialup modems. At the time, a 386 PC was the standard, before Pentium 1,2 and 3 arrived. The first version of Windows gave rise to Windows 95 and the rest is history. It’s cool that anyone in their 50’s nowadays has witnessed the entire lifecycle so far of personal computing and the rise of the internet. And are among the last people in the west to remember what it means to play outside for the whole day as a kid.

I miss BBS’s, my 14.4 modem and my 386 PC

Cassiopeia

How do we stop incrementalism is the question.

gn

We are about 420 miles north of the 49th parallel, and right at the eastern edge of this time zone. (Mountain)

This town:

54.267801, -110.739722

Northern latitudes at summer solstice. Hard to believe this is 10:20 PM

Night homeslice

Dumps like a truck

A huge benefit I’ve gotten from the Natural Reader app is to be able to simultaneously read the print AND hear the audio on any book at any speed. It really improves retention. I’ve ripped through more books this year than the twenty before it.

I don’t advocate for violence but this has been on my mind lately.

A lot of people have forgotten how absolutely paralyzed one state and the political class became when one man and his brainwashed protege started randomly shooting people from the trunk of a modded Chev Caprice in the DC area twenty one years ago. A motivated group of twenty men could do the same thing to the whole country. Just sayin’. No innocents. Just anyone and everything connected to government and corporate media.

Would it provide justification for further government overreach on second amendment rights? Yes.

Would it get these fuckers’ attention? Yes.

Welcome. And GFY. (Don’t worry you’ll understand what I mean soon. It’s how Nostriches say they love and support one another).

This is great content.

Natural Reader is great because you can import any text, website or pdf into the app and simultaneously read AND hear the audio, massively upping your retention.

God damn these SteelSeries Arctis Pro wireless headphones rock. Neodymium magnets, amazing bass and microphone response, with simultaneous ability to play music or vids from your phone, hear the audio from your game console or PC, accept and make phone calls/voice texts, and hear in-game voice comms from your friends. All at the same time! And no bullshit built in battery that eventually loses charging capability like so many other manufacturer’s crap. And so comfortable even after hours of use. Pricey, but so worth it. Just don’t drop them, leave them within reach of pets or let your kids use them, as the plastic mount for each earpiece is a single point of failure that can require some pretty tricky repairing if you break one of them. Replacement rechargeable batteries available cheap on alibaba to have on hand for when the two that ship with them start getting tired. Full EQ control, HDMI input from any TV, console or PC. Solid.

Might be phished

I totally recommend the Natural Reader app and the pdfdrive website if you’re a voracious reader. All the free pdf version books you could ever hope for, importable into Natural Reader for easy listening or reading, and of course also save them onto a thumb drive and your Start9 file server for your post apocalyptic library. Let me know and I can give you temp share access to my library. I have a ton of amazing books.

The only solution I can see that has worked historically (and not without bloodshed) are mass work stoppages aka general strikes a lá the Polish Solidarity Movement. And the results of that uprising/social movement still took three decades to yield any meaningful results like free and fair elections. My point: We aren’t fixing this in our lifetimes. Encourage your kids and other young people to avoid the combination of traditional employment and any consumer debt for as long as it takes to develop some skills and a market for their own “thing” that enables some tax free earnings and maybe the purchase of a little piece of land and a small home. Even if it’s cutting grass, cutting hair, fixing things for people, anything. Once you get a 9-5 job “on the books” and a mortgage, and people relying on you for three squares a day and a roof over their heads, activism and opting out gets a lot more costly.

And the coup d’état is the policy enacted some twenty years ago in our country that denies workers access to employment insurance benefits if they quit or are fired from a job. So even if you are being totally screwed over for inflation indexed raises, your only choice is to move on to the next similarly exploitive position for another rich fuck who will be more than happy to capitalize on your initial couple years of enthusiasm. This policy, and at source income tax deductions together have effectively enslaved a whole generation of Canadians overnight. Just have to make it to the finish line, stack Sats and try to find what happiness we can. And resist anything and everything that reeks of authority.

As an arborist I climbed and hand pruned an oak tree in 1993 that was brought to Canada as a gift from Queen Victoria in the late 1800’s. This was 10 years before I eventually met my current wife. The crazy thing is that tree is still now a centrepiece of the landscape at the lakeside resort that has sprung up around it, and my father in law of 20 years is now a strata councillor living at that very resort, and currently engaging the services of the same tree company I worked for over 30 years ago, to prune the same tree. In that time, I’ve been through 2/3 of my career across 6 different industries, had days of glory and days of despair, lived in 35 different places, nearly died a couple of times, been married twice, and been blessed with kids. And to that tree, only a handful of days have passed. As a side note, my buddy Brent and I did a Ponderosa Pine takedown a couple of miles away from that site, at a winery that was expanding their facilities. The tree was only about 16 inches in diameter at the stump, and growing out of pure rock. We counted the tiny growth rings on the stump and learned that that tree began its life not long after Columbus reached America. We are but a blip in geological time.