Closing the week out with some memes...

QotD: This Ain't Sportsball Edition

"In the 2024 Presidental election, more people voted for Donald Trump in Los Angeles than voted for him in Arkansas or Oklahoma. This nonsense about "red America" vs. "blue America" ignores the reality that we all live in purple America, a bit redder in some places and bluer in others, and when bad luck falls on Texas or New York, Oregon or Florida, it falls on millions of people who voted the same way you did and hold similar values, no matter how you voted or what policies you favor. We're all in the same box."

Bobbi responding to the "HuRr dUrR LiBrULs R bUrNiNg Up iN kOmMiEfOrNiA"* idiocy percolating around the sewers of the blogosphere.

*Los Angeles County cast 1,189,862 votes for the Trump/Vance ticket last November, compared to 759,241 from Arkansas and 1,036,213 from Oklahoma. More people voted for Trump in the five boroughs of NYC than in the entire states of Kansas or Mississippi.

Brr-rrr!

Last night was one of those wintertime joys that seems to get less fun every year: Dragging the trash can to the curb in the snow.

Temps were in the high teens by 10PM and part of the walkway down the side of the house was rock-hard glare ice, but by sticking to the shoveled walks rather than going straight across the lawn, I didn't get any snow in my boots, so I got that going for me, which is nice.

I'll admit that I towed the trashcan down the sidewalk to in front of the neighbor's house and followed the path he'd dragged to the street through the snow in the devil's strip with his own trash can, rather than wade through most of a foot of snow in ours.

The street did not get plowed, but it's all pretty well packed down by four days of traffic...although we're supposed to get another three to four inches of fresh powder today.

At least it's scenic as dammit out there.

Meme Dump...

Tab Clearing...

• An entire virtual D.C. lobbying outfit staffed by chatbots working for the Pakistani military.


• Looks like this weekend it'll be the South's turn for snow.


• AI Boom or AI Bust?

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Alert!

1/200th, f/6.3, ISO 200

A wary eastern fox squirrel observing me on my walk to lunch on Saturday. I had the Olympus OM-D E-M1X and the M. Zuiko Digital 12-200mm f/3.5-6.3 zoom lens with me.

The upper photo is the straight-out-of-camera monochrome JPEG*, while the lower one is the same shot, processed from the RAW file and lightly cropped.

*On a Micro Four Thirds sensor the raw aspect ratio is, as one can surmise from the name, 4x3. I have the camera currently set to record a RAW file and a 16x9 JPEG simultaneously.

Sig Electro-Optics Recall...

There's a product recall for the SIG SAUER ROMEO5 electro-optical red dot sight. Apparently the button cell battery compartment is not secured in a fashion that is considered child-safe and therefore the button cells pose an ingestion hazard for small children.

Of course, if your carbine with a red dot sight is stored in a fashion where your kids can get at it and eat the batteries, you have a lot bigger problems going on in your life, my friend.

(I will point out that any battery cap that can be unscrewed by a toddler has other problems.)

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Sickos.

Weirdos on the internet are using AI to edit various well-known snuff videos to make them look like they were filmed using animated characters from Minions movies instead of the actual, you know, human beings who died or were maimed.

The future is terrible and the internet was a mistake, Exhibit #4,291,870

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Midweek Memes...

Privacy Nightmare

Technically you don't have any reasonable expectation of privacy while you're just driving down the open road, on public thoroughfares.

I don't know that the Founding Fathers had thought through the implications of license plate readers, though...

Matt Brown of Brown Fine Security made a series of YouTube videos showing vulnerabilities in a Motorola Reaper HD ALPR that he bought on eBay. As we have reported previously, these ALPRs are deployed all over the United States by cities and police departments. Brown initially found that it is possible to view the video and data that these cameras are collecting if you join the private networks that they are operating on. But then he found that many of them are misconfigured to stream to the open internet rather than a private network.

ALPR being "Automated License Plate Reader", of course. These cameras are common enough tech that you can buy a variety of them on Amazon.

You may recall the fun I had with a botched license plate read back in the early days of this blog if you've been around long enough.

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O, Fortuna?

Rooting around for a USB mouse for my iBook G3 I stumbled across a bag of coins, mostly Roman, that I'd written off as long gone over a decade ago.

Of course this happens when I have a two-digit balance in my checking account and a ton of invoices outstanding that could show up any day now.

This is fate playing chicken with me.

That 1/12th stater from Miletos got lost in history's sofa cushions 2½ millennia ago and I thought it had disappeared again.

But it isn't art.

The hot garbage people are calling "AI" produces laughable results so frequently that "People with too many teeth and fingers" has turned into a trope.

In case you were wondering what the automotive equivalent to "too many fingers" is, then check out the AI-generated promo splash pic for Amazon's F1 racing documentary. It's super cheesy.

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Writing Elsewhere...

• Cold Weather Carry


• 2000 Jaguar XJR


• Player B Has Entered the Game


• 1964 Oldsmobile F-85 sedan

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Memes! Getcher memes here!

Archaic...

Setting up the new Mac mini finally.

Hooked up my trusty old cabled Logitech gaming mouse* and was reminded of one of Apple's idiosyncratic control ideas: "natural scrolling". Apple seems to think that pushing your finger away from you on the scroll wheel should make the scroll bar move down, which is just the opposite of intuitive for me. Fortunately you can turn that crap off.

It's right up there with their perverse insistence that mice only need one button. No, Apple. It should tell you something that the Logitech company was basically built on selling 2+ button mice to Mac users, but nobody sells one-button mice to Wintel customers.

*Apparently the G600 MMORPG-oriented mouse got discontinued some time back and is really cult-y now, with NOS examples bringing stupid money on Amazon.

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Monday Memes...

Snowmageddon '25

As predicted, it started snowing in earnest yesterday around lunchtime and it didn't really let up much. It's been cold enough the last few days that it started sticking almost immediately, too.

A little after noon on Sunday.

Peeking out the window, it looks like somewhere between six to eight inches of accumulation, and it's still snowing. The weatherman on the TV in the next room says to expect another 1" to 1.5" before it tapers off.

I'm waiting for daylight before I suit up and start shoveling. This is enough snow that I probably won't be able to open the gate from the back yard, so I'll have to shovel the walk to the garage, come back inside, and go out the front door to sweep the porch clear and shovel the front walks.

It's been a few years since we got this much all at once. The worst part is that it's not supposed to get above freezing at all until early next week, so it'll be with us for a while.

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Have some memes...

Memes, Memes, Memes...

Player One was not, in fact, ready...

Just...wow.

Imagine being able to afford a limitless expanse of grass you could be touching and instead spending your Friday night getting dunked on for being embarrassingly online and not even good at it.

"Richest man in the world gets stuffed into a locker on a Fortnite livestream by a Zoomer playing a video game" is a thing I could not possibly explain to my 20-year-old self.

This is some straight up Bruce Sterling Neal Stephenson shit.

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