October 31, 2022
Bigger Than Watergate. Bigger Than Teapot Dome.
All those crazy-ass, black-pilled conspiracy theories about how elements in the U.S. government were targeting, cancelling, and censoring individuals just got put to bed, made comfortable, given a good rest, woken up, and fed 23 Red Bulls.
This is not really news, as we've suspected this for a while, but it's bigger and worse than many of us have imagined.
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It may be better than my suspicions, if and only if the apparent friends of Democrats were not working for the PRC's MOSS.
I think the leaks have not been an October surprise. Does not seem like enough lead time to matter.
I suspect that they are some sort of attempt at damage control in expectation of certain outcomes Tuesday.
I have no idea what is going on, or about what will happen.
Posted by: Pat Buckman at Sat Nov 5 14:48:37 2022 (r9O5h)
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October 29, 2022
Streamery Update: Halloween Edition
Tonight at 9:30pm EDT (01:30pm UTC) We will be having a Halloween themed "Follow-Thon" as my internet alter-ego hosts a selection of silent horror films.
Terror Island: a 1920 Thriller Starring Harry Houdini
The Haunted House: A short "Thrillomedy" from 1908
The Phantom of the Opera : The Lon Chaney Classic From 1925
The Portrait: A short horror film from 1916
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde The Classic John Barrymore version from 1920
A Page of Madness: A 1926 Japanese Horror Film that is oh so very much a JAPANESE horror film.
We'll also be doing a bit of video gaming for our intro and intermission.
Grab a drink and a snack and come by and visit us tonight for the spoopy festivities at
twitch.tv/brickmuppet.
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October 25, 2022
Even Susan Sarandon Gets it
Gina Carano smiles.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at
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Some of the most hilarious replies are lefties insisting she's talking about Republicans.
Posted by: Mauser at Tue Oct 25 20:56:07 2022 (BzEjn)
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I wouldn't care if she thought she was talking about Republicans.
Truth is truth.
And some tactics are bad no matter who it is you fear might use them, and no matter who you might wish to have use them on your behalf.
I could stand to be more diligent in remembering that.
What the evil men would offer us is never of value that surpasses what they cost us. Not even the evil of our own hearts.
Posted by: Pat Buckman at Wed Oct 26 21:02:39 2022 (r9O5h)
3
Red-pilled or stopped clock?
Posted by: Doug O at Thu Oct 27 15:51:09 2022 (T6enK)
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Adventures in Bloatware
These are the applications that came installed on Narmaya, my new Samsung Galaxy A42 5G.
Google
Google Chrome
G-Mail
Maps
YouTube
Drive
Google Duo
Google Photos
Microsoft Office
One Drive
Outlook
AR Zone
Wear
Samsung My Files
Samsung Health
Samsung TV Plus
Smart Things
Smart Switch
Call Filter
Verizon Cloud
Digital Secure
Message+
My Verizon
Calculator
Calendar
Camera
Clock
Contacts
Disney+
Galaxy Store
Gallery
Game Launcher
Internet
Messages
Netflix
Phone
Play Store
Samsung Free
Samsung Global Goals
Samsung Notes
Samsung Wallet
Spotify
Voicemail
YT Music
Apple Music
Candy Crush Saga
Candy Crush Soda
Capture
Facebook
Genshin Impact
Google TV
Meet
Moment
News Break
Pintrest
Pluto TV
Royal Match
Slotomania
Smart Family
SnapChat
Solitaire
Solitaire (again)
TikTok
Toon Blast
Wallet
Woodoku
Word Trip
Coin Master
Blocks
Note that this was an insurance replacement through Verizon via Asurion, note too, that the process was painless.
Now, this is just scrolling through the menu. Phone and Clock I guess aren't really apps in the usual sense and it's nice to have Microsoft Office on the phone. I might have installed Genshin Impact at some point since it won't play on my iMac, but LORD...I wonder what this Samsung would be capable of if I could get most of those apps removed.
Thus far, I'm happy with the phone, though it looks and feel...fragile. It certainly does not give the impression of being nearly as robust a piece of kit as Greya, my heroically departed Kyocera Duraforce Pro. That was a full fledged rugged phone that had survived immersion in seawater, being dropped off a roof onto pavement and day to day use It, sadly, has been discontinued. I'll not be carrying it outside the car until my shield, Otterbox and holster arrive.
The battery life thus far is amazing. I have not charged it since it was activated Saturday morning and it still has a 45% charge. I've made multiple calls and watched over an hour of video on it as of 17:00 Tuesday evening.
It is a remarkably thin device, looking kind of like the Obelisk from 2001 and fits in the hand nicely, but it is slick, really slick, like its made out of teflon and dipped in bacon grease slick. I set it on the bookshelf and set it to vibrate and when the phone went off its vibration propelled it off the shelf with considerable speed onto the (fortuitously carpeted) floor. I now have it in a tray, lest it attempt suicide again.
I'll need to toy with it a bit but aside from its almost surreal thinness and the lack of covers for its USB ports it seems pretty nice thus far.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at
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I play Woodoku a lot. Although it's kind of wearing too, to have a game that inevitably ends in failure.
Posted by: Mauser at Tue Oct 25 20:57:58 2022 (BzEjn)
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Your phone's named Narmaya? I didn't know you played GBF.
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Tue Oct 25 21:27:54 2022 (6/aLK)
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A lot of those apps can be disabled in Settings, so they don't run. Usually, even a lot of the ones you can't get rid of from Settings, you can disable via adb, if you're willing to do command-line stuff from your computer.
Posted by: Rick C at Wed Oct 26 08:35:02 2022 (kbV78)
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Disney now counts you as subscribed to Disney+, in their subscription numbers. Because the app is on there.
Posted by: Suburbanbanshee at Wed Oct 26 14:40:03 2022 (sF8WE)
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October 24, 2022
Be Careful Not to cut Yourself on That Edge
I have never had Netflix, and I was not inclined to give that company any of my money. However, my cellphone recently saved my live, preventing me from being impaled with an 80 pound steel bar...and in the process sent me down the rabbit hole of cell phone replacement via insurance. After activating Narmaya, my brand new Samsung Galaxy A42...I noted that it had a Netflix trial on it. I decided to check out that new Cyberpunk series that's currently streaming. I looked forward to a good laugh at the expense of the 'Netflix Adaptation'.
Now I've given Netflix $19.95 US of my monies...but I got to watch the whole series.
I do not regret this purchase.
Cyberpunk Edgerunners is excellent. Studio Trigger stood by their guns and took no nonsense from Netflix and provided Unadulterated Cuberpunkery. For fans of the recent CD Project Red video game, or Mike Pondsmith's old pencil and Paper RPG from 30 years ago, this is a breath of fresh air. This show is extremely respectful of and faithful to its source materials canon. As such, it is a pretty good representative of the genre.
That is to say, it is Dystopic as hell. It's also an astonishingly bloody show that does not flinch away from the genre's more gruesome implications. Edgerunners is also quite possibly the most non-PC thing made in the last few years, at times straddling the line between an "R" rating and "NC17" with regards to both gore and nudity and is a passionate middle finger at the censorious scolds of all stripes.
It's also, in its perverse way, a Shounen show, but one that is really well done.
This is not an upbeat or happy show, but it follows desperate, broken people who maintain a sense of dignity and honor in spite of being in the most Hobbesian of environments. It also features excellent writing and top notch voice work in the English dub.
Studio Trigger has a remarkable reputation as is, but they have outdone themselves with this one.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at
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"However, my cellphone recently saved my live, preventing me from being impaled with an 80 pound steel bar."
Way to bury the lede. Glad you're still kicking.
Posted by: Rick C at Tue Oct 25 10:35:18 2022 (kbV78)
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Glad to hear you're okay!
If the company is still around, I bet they would appreciate a thank you note/recommendation. That kind of thing makes an engineer's day.
And maybe they'd re-continue that product line.
Posted by: Suburbanbanshee at Wed Oct 26 14:42:31 2022 (sF8WE)
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October 19, 2022
Oh.
One of the Brickmuppet's Crack Team of Science Babes brings us news from the world of epidemiology.
"I have thoughts on this matter. Let me spell them out for you:
Pound sign, lightning emote, question mark, star, treble clef icon, poop emote, "at"symbol, exclamation point."
"I...uh...concur with your analysis"
Well... it seems that Boston University has taken the highly vaccine-resistant and super-contagious Omicron variant of Coronachan/The Pinko Pox/ Winnie the Flu/The Commie Cough/Kung-Flu-of-Dying/The 2020 Gain-Of-Function-Award-Winner/...better known as COVID-19 and crossed it via gain of function techniques with the original Wuhan variant and developed a strain of Xi's Disease that kills 80% of it's victims (at least in mice).
For further thoughts on the matter, let's go to one of our crack team of science bobcats...
Thank you Busby.
According to the Live Science article, Boston claims that this was not "gain of function research" and that they made the original Wuhan strain slightly less lethal by giving it the higher transmissibility of the Omicron variant, and that they successfully discovered that Omicron's spike protein did not cause a lack of lethality.
This seems to be quite the semantic argument, at least from a layman's perspective. While the original, hyper-deadly variant was indeed made slightly less lethal by this research, the much less dangerous but far more transmissible variant was made vastly more so.
An argument can be made that there is a need for this kind of research, but the place for that research is not in the middle of Boston (or Wuhan) it's in a secure facility in a dry valley in Antarctica, or preferably, in a crater on the moon.
I can't imagine, after the disaster we have been through the last three years, what combination of addle-mindedness, arrogance and autism compelled some of the smartest (albeit obviously not wisest) minds in the country to perpetrate this act of asininity.
There is a hubris and lack of self awareness that seems to permeate our expert class, one that may well be our downfall if we don't reign in these over-credentialed ding-a-lings.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at
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Don't hold back, tell us what you really think... so I can agree wholeheartedly.
Posted by: Mauser at Wed Oct 19 23:06:12 2022 (BzEjn)
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Yeah, I've been salty as all on this for at least a year, when I figured this out.
Mostly, at a local to me university. "Okay, you have to endorse all of this stuff, and force employees, for 'public safety' and 'public health'. But, for some reason your medical school employees have decided that teaching a bunch of humanities and social sciences to kids is an essential economic activity. That looks like fucking the rest of the country over, and only caring for your own business activities. If we /need/ such extreme measures because of one pathogen, there are legitimate questions to reconsider about whether university medical schools, and hospitals in general, are trustworthy to handle the pathogen samples that they currently do."
The fundamental issue is, blindly enforcing whims tied to federal funding is a bit totalitarian. Totalitarianism is really really bad for industrial safety. For real quality of industrial safety, you need the workers with hands on, who have the most information about what they are doing, to have the initiative and intelligence not to do stupid stuff. This does not hold where totalitarians have squashed the initiative and thought out of the work force.
The public should not be trusting the credentialed 'experts' to do any handling of pathogens, so long as those 'experts' are enthusiastically ruining any possible industrial safety at the work places of those 'experts'.
If we had any thoughtful decisive people any where in formal power, we should have had some very pointed public questions about whether the medical professionals should be prevented from collecting blood, stool, or urine samples, for fear of compromised industrial safety practices.
And, the tertiary schools are a pretty concerning area of activity. International graduate students very often come from much more totalitarian nations than the US, and combined with the wild overconfidence of professoral and administrative tyrants, do not have a good feel for not pissing off the American public.
Posted by: PatBuckman at Thu Oct 20 12:13:42 2022 (r9O5h)
3
...so, work proceeds well on project "Captain Trips" ?
Posted by: Doug O at Thu Oct 20 12:18:39 2022 (T6enK)
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October 16, 2022
Um.....
I am on record as saying that I think there was a lot that was sus about the 2020 election, but that it probably wasn't stolen. Furthermore, even in the event that it WAS, there's no way to prove it, because the more lurid claims about software issues are, INHERENTLY unprovable in the absence of an opening up of the voting machines code. And the more lurid claims frankly are pretty retarded....no way in hell China was running the voting machines for instance.
The best that could be done is to adopt paper ballots and strict ID requirements in the future so that concerns, wether they come from Stacey Abrams, Al Gore, Or Donald Trump can be swiftly put to rest one way or another.
This has been my position since about February. While the second paragraph is still solidly my position, my faith in the wisdom of the first turns out to be at odds with one of the most important rules of political discourse in current year.
To Wit:
So.... the polling firm Rasmussen, has produced
this twitter thread, which was linked to by
Ed Driscoll over at Instapundit the other day, and I've just been walking in circles pulling what's left of my hair out for the last few hours because this thread and the stories it links to are, frankly, crazy-cakes.
Link's good, I just can't seem to be able to embed Tweets anymore.
Joe Biden is President.
There is no constitutional process for a do-over of a U.S. federal election.
The implications of all of this on the last and upcoming election are, while troubling, unclear.
Everyone is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
Ranting, raving, and, God forbid, rioting will only play into the Democrat's hands, as it did on January 6th 2021.
So, don't go off half cocked.
But do follow this story. I'm not sure what to think of it.
But I've got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach...much like I did about some lurid stories coming out of Wuhan in the last few days of 2019.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at
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Gretchen Whitmer is the pond-scum sucking governor of Michigan, not Minnesota.
Posted by: cxt217 at Sun Oct 16 16:59:27 2022 (2tHvf)
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Gee, I hate to say I told you so, but.... wait, did I? I certainly thought it, but I've got this issue with being called a paranoid lunatic for going "lots of smoke --> fire"
It's not just the machines; it's the mail-in/drop box ballots.
Posted by: ubu at Sun Oct 16 19:42:47 2022 (UlsdO)
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@ctx217: One of those 'M' words.
@Ubu: Yeah, but the paper ballots are at least physical.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sun Oct 16 20:31:19 2022 (rjbMB)
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It is only physical until they destroy the paper ballots after they 'count' them, which was the excuse Pennsylvania used to explain why there were no ballots that could be recount.
Posted by: cxt217 at Sun Oct 16 22:52:54 2022 (2tHvf)
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Yeah, I went essay mode on this again.
Thing is, Republicans have been pretending that Democratic election 'victories' were fair and binding for a very long time.
It takes careful tapdancing to go with the current popular historical narrative on the evils of the confederacy and of Jim Crow, and to then fail to draw certain conclusions about whether Wilson, FDR, JFK, etc., were really necessarily legitimately elected.
Thing is, Americans in general could at least trust that JFK was not a communist, and would not be carrying out a mass murder. Rape sisters, wives, and daughters, sure, but they didn't know about that, and such is much easier to conceal than plans for mass murder.
Biden and Biden's backers should have taken the L instead of compromising confidence in election outcomes when it was so apparently likely that the communists would be pushing for complete control and mass murder.
The blatantness of consistently insisting that electronic voting machines can be and must be secure in the current environment is the most reliable grounds for an inference of fraud, that anyone can study to be point of being confident of. But, there are only 300k electrical engineers employed in the US, and most of those are not security people, so the specifics of the a) hardware security matter in combination with b) the PRC being a hostile state and c) politicians warning us that hostile states may be meddling in US elections may be not be obvious to a general audience. PRC has hardware fabs, and the lawyers prevented us from being able to have any confidence from physical security that local collaborators had not temporarily replaced the hardware internals with PRC gimmicked hardware.
My first reason to infer that the PRC and Democrats were working together was 2016-2020, the breadth of the accusations made against Trump, and the noticeable absence of accusations that he was a PRC crony. He sells real estate to rich people, and the PRC has/had a lot of rich people hedging risks with real estate outside of the PRC.
One answer is that the DNC, or at least Pelosi's California faction of Democrats, was a subsidiary of the PRC. Another answer is that the Democrats calculated that it would be safe to annoy Putin, and it would not be safe to annoy the PRC.
I am fairly resolved that treating elections as illegitimate until we get a comprehensively secure election process can potentially be done by peaceful means. Screw the claim that future presidents will have any obligation to respect the legacy of Biden, or any other similarly apparently fraudulent 'presidents'.
Posted by: Pat Buckman at Tue Oct 25 08:07:32 2022 (r9O5h)
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October 15, 2022
Surprise Saturday Stream!
No stream was scheduled tonight because I had planed to go visit my folks this weekend.
This afternoon, on the way south, I called to see how they were doing. Turns out, they were doing great. So great in fact that they were on the outskirts of Raleigh NC, well on their way to the mountains for a nice relaxing weekend observing the foliage.
After a long drive back I saw some friends I hadnt seen in months and find myself at home in time for a 9:30PM stream.
Come by, say "Hi!" and laugh at me as I grind through PHANTOM BRAVE this evening. .
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October 06, 2022
Nexon Replies to the Scolding Puritanical Anti-Fun Committee: "Go pound sand!"
Nexon, is a Korean game developer that is responsible for the hit mobile gacha / cheesecake RPG Blue Archive, which has, heretofore largely dodged the nerfings and mastectomies that have plagued the game industry in recent years. Someone was bound to notice this lack of propriety and, sure enough, the Korean Game Rating and Administration Committee told Nexon a while back that Nexon was going to have to censor Blue Archive...or else. Nexon initially complied, but this past week the KGRAC informed Nexon that further censorship would be required
Nexon responded, not by issuing groveling apologies, denouncing 'toxic masculinity' and promising to be better at protecting the internet from the scourge of curvy digital babes, but rather by declaring that they were going to maintain their artistic integrity and simply raise the games age rating....and not only keep the curves, but restore any cheesecake they had removed previously when paying the Danegeld.
Now, this is probably not an example of conscience, artistic integrity or a Korean corporation's stalwart dedication to the first amendment of the United States Constitution. Rather, I suspect it is because that there is likely very little overlap between the individuals who will simp Gacha monies for a game that includes this piece amongst its official art...
I know there are much less SFW examples of official art, but I picked the one with the duck.
...and bitter, insecure harpies with A-Cup Angst.
So it's probably not a moral or ethical stand as much as a business decision.
And I'm OK with that, both because it is a welcome departure from recent trends, and because it does actually show a degree of courage.
Blue Archive doesn't look like my cup of tea, and is rather too cheesy even for me, but I probably ought to support them a bit on principle.
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It Woiked!
A few days ago I called Apple support and tried to find out why my efforts to get my PS-2 to stream through my iMac were coming to naught. The 3 very expensive pieces of kit I had obtained to facilitate this IT alchemy were very clear that they were compatible with Macintosh products.
After going through every step with them, giving them the product numbers and my iMac's stats, tech support informed me that what I was trying to do should actually be happening. I pointed out that I had already reset my iMac to factory settings while trying to sort this out, (WHICH WAS A MASSIVE PAIN) and the tech support brahmin noted that given my model of iMac (Retina 4k, 21.5inch) there was a possibility that ALL of my USBa ports had partially died. So he set me up with an appointment at the Apple Store. After work, I showered, packed up Gura, the PS2 and all the kit I'd bought, got in the car and drove 50 minutes to Virginia Beach.
When I unpacked the computer, they were like "Oh wow! A classic model!" (I bought it in 2019...admittedly, that was the tail end of the 'before time' but...) After some explaining, they agreed that I should theoretically be able to do what I was trying to do (stream on Twitch with a PS2 via an iMac ) and the tech began to test my machine to find out if the USBa ports were partially dead. (They seem to work fine for everything except the kit I got to stream) after some time they determined that the iMac was fine.
What it turned out to be was a MacOS update that made the machine incompatible with the non-Apple kit. After some searching one Apple Store employee turned up a software patch that countered the update.
I had run to the streamers room so I don't know if the patch required the use of TERMINAL or not and did not think to ask at the time. However, while I can't yet run the full streaming software that Elgato provides, I was able to perform a work around with Elgato's recording/editing software that came to some approximation of acceptable.
To my utter astonishment the service fee was $0.00.
Even better, I found out that my initial idea of how to do this was correct. Meaning that I can return $160.00 dollars worth of kit to Elgato, meaning that, aside from gas, a trip to the Apple store actually made money.
"Well, that's a sign of the end times!"
Tuesday night I set up everything at home and ran a 2 hr. test stream. Everything worked!
uh...
Except the PS2's memory card.
"I've got to play that whole dungeon AGAIN!?"
A new memory card is on order and is supposed to arrive today. Regardless, my internet alter ego will be streaming as scheduled this evening at 17:30 EDT/21:30UTC @
twitch.tv/Brickmuppet .
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Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thu Oct 6 16:28:59 2022 (PiXy!)
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You may want to find out what patch that was and how to install it in case you ever have to reinstall for any reason. Oh, and save a copy of it.
Posted by: StargazerA5 at Fri Oct 7 06:02:09 2022 (TxXrI)
3
Nice!
I played La Pucelle back in the PS/2 days but I never finished it.
Posted by: Rick C at Fri Oct 7 08:40:05 2022 (BMUHC)
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October 04, 2022
iMac going into the Shop
I don't know when I'll have a computer again. However I was very happy to get an appointment this afternoon at the Apple store for my Apple Potato.
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