Ugh.

Imagine me showing you a photo snapped out the window just now showing snow blowing around after yesterday afternoon’s sunny seventy degrees and captioning it “What fresh hell is this?”

That’ll save me the effort of walking over to the window.

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Memes for a Monday Morn!

Danger Avocado

Someone referred to this Level 1/2/3 severe weather warning graphic as a "Danger Avocado" and now I can't unsee it.

Commercialized Holidays

The Ides of March has gotten so commercialized lately.

Remember the real meaning of the holiday: It's not just about stabbing people, it's about getting together to stab people in groups.

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Nostalgia Ain't What It Used To Be

Did you know you can get lots of TV for free? It's streaming through the air, all you need is one of these things. It's silly to pay a cable or satellite provider to get local network channels when antennas still work.

The cool thing is that in the age of digital broadcast television, every station gets a handful of additional channels, and they stock these with a host of channels very reminiscent of the old local UHF stations that played reruns and syndicated shows.

My favorite is MeTV and not just for their Saturday morning cartoons. They also have a great Saturday evening lineup* that kicks off with Svengoolie, a classic b-grade monster movie show with a cheesy host character.

Last night they showed the original Friday the 13th, which I hadn't seen since it was still fairly new.

I was in eighth grade, spending the weekend at a friend's house playing Dungeons & Dragons (Module B2, if you must know), and my friend had an older sister who was so cool because she was in college and drove a late '70s Firebird, and she asked us "Hey, do y'all wanna see a scary movie?" and of course we said yes, so we watched the camp counselors at Crystal Lake get massacreed on HBO.

Friends, it scared the pee out of younger me. Like, nightmares and stuff. Put me clean off horror movies... especially of the slasher genre ...for the next decade.

Looking back now, no wonder Stranger Things was right in my wheelhouse.

Funnily enough, that salaciously scary movie I watched in '81 or '82 took surprisingly little editing to be okay for broadcast TV in 2026. They blurred some boobies and might have cut some dialog, but it looked like most all of the gruesome stuff was still there.

Also, it really wasn't scary at all. I didn't jump at the jump scares and the slasher stuff wasn't very gross by modern standards. It was all kinda cheesy in fact. Ah, well.

*After Svengoolie, you get the Adam West Batman, Star Trek (TOS), and Adventures of Superman. If you're a night owl, those are followed up by Lost in Space and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.

Memes For Sunday!

Meme Dump!

Point, Counterpoint...

There's one view of social media that goes something like this...

Even back in the days of dialup and Usenet, when most debates were reasonably polite, nerds kept yellowing dot-matrix printed lists of logical fallacies taped to the side of their CRT monitors, and there was a thing called "netiquette", there were still plenty of flame boards where you could go and let it all hang out. Given the anonymity of a keyboard and an internet handle behind which to hide, some people can't help but turn into giant offensive twatwaffles.

But, y'know, bathing yourself in a giant boiling vat of argument juices is not good for your temperament, long-term. It warps you over time. Gives you a negative outlook on life. Turns you into one of those people.

Learning to just say "okay" and then actually leave the conversation has really improved my overall mental well being. Just leave and don't go back to see what, if anything, they replied. You do not owe them your attention. You don't have to give their negativity a room in your mind palace.

In the words of the great warrior-poet and Ayatollah of Rock and Rolla, Lord Humungus...

Friday Memes!

Tab Clearing...

• Mimetic v. Agentic: The weird new mutation of grind culture.


• Gulf allies frustrated by lack of warning.


• Microsoft files for a patent on an AI agent to play video games for you.

Meme Dump!

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #262...

At the range yesterday wrapping things up with the Daniel Defense H9 Compact for an upcoming review. It was plenty warm, but the sunny skies I was promised failed to materialize. Instead, there was a misting drizzle that made me glad that Marion County Fish & Game installed those shed roofs over the rear of the pistol bays.

If I'd still been using the old Shooting Chrony Beta, I would have had to trudge out into the wet after each ten-shot chronograph string, but the Garmin Xero C1 meant I could just load up three magazines with ten rounds each and sit there in the dry while making notes on each string. (The data on the screen there is from the Federal 135gr HydraShok Deep, FWIW.)

Of course, if the weather had been really vile, I could have used the Garmin indoors at Indy Arms Company, unlike the old chronograph.

Memes for the Middle of the Week!

Balmy, then Not So

78℉ on Friday and 75℉ yesterday, both record highs, so it's been an unseasonably early and balmy spring. On the other hand, the front moving this way from the west heralds a cold front and we'll be back below freezing come Monday, they say.

Ow, my gimpy leg.

That's not how that works.

Acting like they're really breaking some big story on Pentagon waste in the Hegseth era, The New Republic emotes:

Some of the frivolous September purchases made under Secretary Pete Hegseth’s stewardship include a $98,329 Steinway & Sons grand piano for the Air Force chief of staff’s home, $5.3 million for Apple devices such as the new iPad, and an astronomical amount of shellfish, including $2 million for Alaskan king crab and $6.9 million worth of lobster tail. (Lobster tail is apparently a favorite of Hegseth’s Pentagon—the department spent more than $7.4 million total on the luxury item in March, May, June, and October.)

In other pricey food purchases, the government decided to drop $15.1 million for ribeye steak (again, just in September), $124,000 for ice cream machines, and $139,224 on 272 orders of doughnuts.

They make this sound like it's for lavish orgies at the homes of generals or whatever, but look...

Grand pianos are expensive. That one goes with the Air Force Chief of Staff's house. It's not like General Wilsbach gets to take it with him when he leaves. Also, it's probably replacing a previous, worn-out piano.

As far as the lobster, crab, and ribeyes, the donuts and ice cream machines? That's for the DFACs. Surf & turf is a treat we give to the people we ask to risk getting all blowed up for their country. At least let 'em have a nice meal on Fridays.

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Meme Dump!

Tab Clearing...

• When you go to war, you need a why.


• Military officials question fortifications at site where U.S. troops were killed in Iranian strike


• The first phone call was 150 years ago. Where did we go wrong?

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War News...

• Norwegian police still searching for suspect in bomb detonation at US embassy in Oslo.


• Synagogue in Belgium bombed, and three in Toronto shot up.


• Iranian missiles attacking Israel increasingly using cluster munitions.

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Memes for Monday!

Top. Men.

Info is coming out around the lawsuit regarding the DOGE cuts to National Endowment for the Humanities grants and... wow. 

Federal grants that had been approved after a full application and review process were terminated by some random inexperienced DOGE bros based on whether ChatGPT could explain—in under 120 characters—that they were “related to DEI.”

That’s what the newly released proposed amended complaint from the Authors Guild against the US government reveals about how DOGE actually decided which National Endowment for the Humanities grants to kill.

Apparently this posse of barely post-pubertal broccoli-haired incels were just feeding grant text into an LLM and asking "Chat, is this DEI?" 

Which, I guess, made sense since this merry band of Einsteins seems unclear on what "DEI" even is. I could only take a minute or two of this guy talking in circles in his deposition video trying to avoid admitting he has no idea what he's talking about.

This is how Indianapolis lost a federal grant to restore urban trees. See, if the trees in your city are, like, mostly elms or ash and Dutch elm disease or ash borers come through, that would be bad. So biodiversity in your city's trees is good... but whoops! The word "biodiversity" contains the word "diversity", and Chat-GPT says that's a no-no.

Or say you're at Duke University and you have a federal grant to study, oh, something involving disease transmission or transgenic genetic material... well, all the LLM sees is "trans" and bye bye disease research! 

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Memelight Savings Time!

Meme Dump!

Friday Memes!

Piercing the Veil

Way back in the mists of time, in the autumn of 2005 when this blog was still in diapers, there was a minor kerfuffle about the virtues and vices of blogging anonymously.

Since the sort of people who start blogs do so because they tend to have opinions on frickin' everything, it was no surprise that lots of people had opinions on the topic.

It's popped up here and there since then in various online spaces where I participate, like forums and certain corners of social media.

I'm pretty ambivalent on the topic. I don't blog anonymously because for me there's hardly any point in it. I've gone by my government name all over the web since the days of dialup but I respect that other people may not want to and, to rifle through Thomas Jefferson's desk drawers for an appropriate aphorism, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. You want to blog anonymously, knock yourself out.

But I do think it's chilling that one thing LLMs seem to be good at is sussing out anonymous posters and tying them to their wallet name via language use analysis.

Anonymity ain't what it used to be.

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Meme Dump!

War News...

• IRIS Dena, an Iranian frigate, has been torpedoed and sunk by US submarine off the coast of Sri Lanka.


• White House arranges evacuation of some social media influencers from Qatar.


• The Royal Navy is dispatching the HMS Dragon, a Type 45 destroyer, to assist in the defense of Cyprus from drone and missile attack.

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Hump Day Memes!