I honestly got tired of the “Xbox vs. PlayStation” BS they were pushing well over a decade ago. I actually bought a Nintendo Wii during that generation’s console war, because Nintendo was the only company just doing their own thing and not trying to compete for best graphics, processing power, etc.

But Nintendo consoles were limited in themselves. Nintendo doesn’t like to share their properties, and they very rarely port classics to modern systems. So if my Wii ever broke, the only way I could play my games again was to find another Wii. Even if they stopped making them; is have to find a second-hand shop and buy a used console.

I almost gave up on the gaming world, until I found Steam. Any games I buy there stay in my library forever, even if they’re removed from the store. And they emulate the original supporting hardware, so even classic games are still playable on a modern Windows 11 PC.

Thanks to Steam, I have a renewed interest in gaming and have built up a library of nearly 4,000 games over the last decade and a half.

I don’t bother with console gaming anymore. If I miss that style of gaming, I have a Razer controller plugged into my computer that I can use instead of my keyboard and mouse. If a game is exclusive to console… Oh well, maybe I’ll catch it if/when it ports to PC. But until it does, that’s a lost sale for that developer/publisher. I’m not going to feed the exclusivity BS by buying games while they’re only available on one device.

I’ve been saying, I’d really like to play Alan Wake II, but as long as it’s an Epic Games exclusive, I can’t buy it. If they want my money, they’ll have to allow it on Steam too. And since it’s owned by Epic Games, not just published by them, it’s gonna stay exclusive. So I guess I’ll never get to play that game. I don’t agree with Epic Games’ predatory practices, so I will never give them a penny of my money.

In the US? Democrats vs. Republicans.

According to the rest of the world, the US doesn’t have a left party. Democrats are right wing and Republicans are extremist right wing. The left is completely unrepresented in our government. Both major parties lean conservative (from a global perspective) and care more about helping major businesses and the rich elite than actually representing the people.

That’s why there’s a whole movement centered around “no war but class war.” The American people are not actually represented and are instead pitted against each other in this fake “red vs. blue” distraction so we don’t actually go after our political leaders, or weed out the source of the money behind the scenes that dictate their actions.

I mean, I am the source. This was my personal experience while serving in the military.

But if you want official reports to back up what I experienced, here’s you go:

Intelligence officials withheld sensitive information from Trump while he was in office because they feared the ‘damage’ he could do if he knew.

I was working in an Intelligence unit when Trump was president (not the one directly briefing him) and it’s all anyone talked about at the time. They had to be extremely careful what information they shared with him because he would just go and post details on his social media accounts.

My unit had to change a lot of their missions and coordination because Trump would expose our secrets online. It ruined a lot of ongoing missions we had planned, and we had to scrap and rebuild a lot of our programs after he blabbed about them.

Trump fires top US general in unprecedented Pentagon shakeup

This was more recent, after I retired. But he basically fired our top military leaders, then made his own suggestions for replacements, completing ignoring the official promotion system we have in place.

He didn’t want people with years of experience and exemplary service to lead our military, he just wants his own loyalists in charge so he can control the military. He nominated highly unqualified people for the positions, with the only seemingly common quality being that they were loyal to Trump.

He was also annoyed at how hard it was to replace key people and wanted to circumvent official processes so he can hire and fire people at will, like his old businesses.

I retired from the US military 3 years ago. Yes, they can refuse unlawful orders. If I was still serving, I’d be abusing the hell out of that regulation right now.

During Trump’s last presidency, our intelligence community actually held back a lot of details in his intelligence briefings because we knew he couldn’t be trusted to keep his mouth shut. He has a top secret clearance, not because he could be trusted with it, but because it was a requirement for his job. And he also reversed our decision to withhold clearances from sketchy members of our government, so a lot of untrustworthy people also got access to our sensitive data, and thanks to that, we had a lot of compromised missions during his first tenure as president.

But we also had a majority Democrat government, which kept him in check. This time around, he’s attempting to replace everyone he can with his “yes men” so he gets no push-back. He’s even been trying to replace military generals with his own loyalists. If he can control the military, he can basically stage a coup overnight and no one will be able to stop him.

Things are getting really dangerous right now, so that regulation about refusing unlawful orders is very important, and I hope our current military members are willing to exercise it as needed.

SQL is the language. Its name is also an acronym, for “Structured Query Language.”

They’re both acronyms, so yes? You always write acronyms in upper case.

Structured Query Language (SQL)

HyperText Markup Language (HTML)

Some exceptions to the rule exist, like “Database” is usually abbreviated as Db in acronyms. For instance, IMDb (Internet Movie Database).

Although considering database is a singular word, it makes sense to lower-case the middle letter of the word, as it wouldn’t be capitalized in the spelled-out word anyway.

EDIT: On a related note (and one that will really show my age), I always capitalize the i in “Internet.”

When I was a kid, and before the Internet was publicly accessible, we referred to a collection of internetworked computers as an “internet.”

Then the “World Wide Web” (WWW) became a big deal in the mid-'90s, which was the first publicly accessible internet of computers and servers. It was super primitive and took like 10 minutes just to load a small image on a mostly-text webpage. We referred to this new global internet as “The Internet.” This was the biggest and most ambitious attempt at building an interconnected series of computers, so we called it The Internet (capital “i”) to differentiate it from a regular internet.

Fast forward several decades… for so long, the Internet has been such a commonly used term to refer to the World Wide Web. It’s completely taken over the word; we don’t really refer to small computer networks as internets anymore. So there’s no point in differentiating between the two.

But I remember, and I still keep up the old habit of capitalizing when I’m referring to THE Internet, versus a smaller network of computers.

I’ve been paying for Proton VPN for a couple years now and I’ve never been blocked by YouTube.

I’m also using uBlock Origin and Firefox as a browser. YouTube takes like 5-10 seconds to load videos, thanks to their built-in delay timer when ads can’t play, but otherwise it works fine.

Honestly, I’d gladly wait 30 seconds staring at a black screen than watch a 10-second ad. So their delay timer is pointless.

Yes! The Two Towers novel ended with Frodo supposedly dead from Shelob, and Sam picking up the ring to finish the journey. It was almost halfway into Return of the King that we find out Frodo is still alive and Sam needs to rescue him!

That was such a great plot twist. I was kind of sad they didn’t follow that chain of events in the movies. The whole Shelob thing was resolved really quickly, about halfway into Return of the King.

After reading the books, I felt like the movies were rushed (yes, even the extended editions). You just didn’t get a sense for how long and arduous their journey was. It took Sam and Frodo a month just to get to Rivendell alone, and you truly felt like you were out hiking and camping with the hobbits for all that time.

In the movies, they just bump into friends and allies, spend a night at Bree (plus a couple nights out camping in the wild), run from the Nazgul, then they’re magically there at Rivendell. Doesn’t seem like it took more than a few days tops.

The whole journey to Mordor and back took a whole year. Imagine spending a whole year walking and camping across America and you might get a sense for how long it took them.

Honestly, The Lord of the Rings should’ve been a miniseries to properly flesh out the long journey. Even the extended editions cut lots of story and rushed the pacing to keep the story moving forward.

when I went to France I wanted the opportunity to practise it.

My wife’s biggest frustration in France was that she wanted to practice her French, but everyone picked up on her American accent and immediately switched to English. She rarely got more than a sentence out.

My experience being stationed in Germany with the US military, about 30 mins from the French border:

A coworker of mine complained about his visit to Paris because every single French person he tried to speak to either ignored him, turned their nose up at him, or was just rude to him. He only spoke English and they all seemed offended when he tried to get their attention in English.

My wife and I took several years of French in high school, and whereas neither of us could hold a proper conversation, we knew enough to ask directions, order from a menu, or request help.

Every time we started off a conversation in French, the French people would immediately switch to English and help us out. They were very kind to us.

We learned that if you make an effort to speak their language, most French people are very helpful. But if you just assume they’ll speak English, they’re likely to be offended and won’t help you out.

One time in Berlin, my wife tried to speak German to a guy at a tourist shop and he immediately switched into French. Apparently, my wife has a heavy French accent to her German. She was able to finish the conversation in French.

Reminds me of this article I read yesterday:

Adopt a Red State: How Democrats Can Expose Republican Cowards

Glad to see Tim Walz is taking this approach.

No Android version?

My first car was a 1991 Honda Ascot. I bought it in 2003 in Japan, when I was stationed there with the US military. I bought it off a fellow service member who was leaving the country, for $1,000. I gave it to another service member for free when I bought a better car a year later.

Back when I was a teenager (~25 years ago), I had the worst time waking up every morning for school. My dad would have to come drag me out of bed, then I would be sitting in the shower dozing for a while before I actually started cleaning myself. Like, literally sitting - I would sit on the edge of the tub while in the shower and just slip in and out of consciousness for a little bit until I was awake enough to shower.

Of course, this made me run late every morning. My dad always poked his head into the bathroom to yell at me that I’m going to miss my school bus if I don’t hurry up. I rarely ever missed the bus, but I also barely caught it most days, which always made my dad anxious about my morning routine.

As a healthy young teenager, I always had morning wood that wouldn’t quit. I had gotten used to it, so getting ready in the mornings with a raging boner wasn’t unusual. But I was generally pretty good at keeping it hidden from others until it went away.

One particular morning, I had gone through my shower-sleep routine and finally got around to cleaning myself. I had lathered up my entire body with soap and was scrubbing all the cracks and crevices thoroughly (I was a bit OCD when it came to cleanliness).

This day, my dad had finally had enough and decided to see what took me so long in the shower every day. Out of nowhere, he whipped open the shower curtain and opened his mouth to yell at me.

I was standing there, frozen in shock, both hands gripping my soapy raging boner. My dad glanced down, then back up at my face, then gave me the goofiest smile I’d ever seen him make. Then he wordlessly shut the shower curtain and walked away.

It took me a minute to realize why he changed his mind about yelling at me; it didn’t process at first what the situation he walked into looked like. I was just washing my body, after all.

My dad never again yelled at me to hurry up in the shower.

For some reason, this just sparked an ancient memory of the Geek Code, which was a sort of signature block you could append to your emails and online bios to show off how much of a geek you were in the geekiest fashion possible.

Goddamn I’m old.

Living the dream…

I officially feel old now. I know Lisa Kudrow from the TV show Friends. It blows my mind to see someone reference her in a modern voice acting role instead of her most well-known acting role.

I use a VPN that won’t load catbox images for some reason. If I turn it off, catbox starts working again.

Ken Cheng is a satire account, poking fun at the ridiculous “business first, personal welfare second” bootlickers on LinkedIn.

The fact that people can’t tell if he’s satirizing or being serious is kind of a sad glimpse into our capitalist society today.