Started listening to the Altered Carbon series of audiobooks this evening. Been a while since I have done any cyberpunk. I got through Neuromancer and Count Zero but couldn’t find a clean version of Mona Lisa Overdrive last year so I sort of stopped.
After that A Song of Ice and Fire sort of became what I was listening to for something like nine months.
After Netflix picked it up as a series last year I decided to give it a read/listen. I snagged all three ebooks and should have all of the audiobooks now. We shall see how it goes.
Walked into work today knowing it was either going to be 40 degrees inside the building or 90 degrees due to the AC being either left on or turned off over the course of the long weekend. I was hoping for 40 since it is easier to warm the place up than cool it down.
You would think that DVDs that I have kept in the case (granted, it is a rather bizarre cardboard book sleeve thing) would stay nice. I've watched the majority of this television series twice on DVD and my step-mother watched it once.
But no, some of these discs are pretty scratched up.
Does something need to be done to curb this? Yes. Most certainly yes. Have we hit on the right answer yet? Unlikely.
I know that the answer lies somewhere between "a polite sign" and "federalize the National Guard, and post armed soldiers in every school and federal building" to "ban all guns...Ban them right now!"
This is the United States we live in. We have this wonderful(ish?) government that is supposed to roll with the will of the people. Problem is the people don't actually do a lot of voting for the offices that actually matter so we end up with, for lack of a better term, lifers who are in it for the money.
That is a problem. A problem that only we can change!
Early Twenties (Experimentation) The woman behind the counter raises an eyebrow and scowls as she hands you twelve ounces of syrupy lavender-mocha latte buried under whipped cream. You don’t have time to figure out why baristas are such judgmental jerks. You have a midterm paper to write. You take a sip and think, hey, coffee’s not that bad. Now grab some sugar packets when no one’s looking and cram them into your pockets. Late Twenties (Regular Use) “No sugar,” you declare. “I take it black.” Shoot a side-eyed glance at that kid over there with his blended-ice drink—amateur hour. Sorry they don’t serve Shirley Temples, geez. Give the barista a knowing nod as you step out into the street with your cup of shade-grown glory. You can definitely taste the shade. Anyone who knows anything about coffee knows that the shade is, like, really important. Early Thirties (Risky Use) Arise at 4 A.M. and take some whole beans out of an airtight but never refrigerated container. Roast each bean individually over a wood-burning fire. Now grind those beans by hand with a mortar and pestle. Finally, pull the glass pour-over from your cupboard and whisper your dreams into the funnel. On your way past the coffee shop next door, shoot a side-eyed glance at the barista—just look at those suckers! Then at the fancy imported-goods market, take out a crisp twenty-dollar bill and buy a pound of coffee. Receive no change. Late Thirties (Dependence) It’s 3 P.M. You’re so tired. You wish there were a faster way to consume coffee than drinking it—like, maybe bathing in it? You don’t care how you roast the beans right now. It could be a grease fire as long as it yields something caffeinated. It’s typing time, baby. Gotta crank out those reports! Wouldn’t it be great if you could fill one of those novelty beer hats with coffee? I mean, not bad coffee—shade-grown coffee—but, like, a gallon of it? Your pupils dilate at the thought. Should you cut back on your coffee consumption? Probably not. After all, you’re sotired. Early Forties (Addiction) At this point, the best part about going to bed is imagining the coffee you’re going to drink in the morning. You say it’s not an addiction—it’s just more important to your body than oxygen or your left kidney. How many pounds of coffee would entice you to sell a kidney? Two? No, grow a spine! Maybe four. As you lie there, you have an epiphany: coffee has more control over your emotions than you do. Say goodbye to any notion of independence and drift off into a blissful sleep, afloat on the dark waves of an endless sea of coffee.
Anderson & Co. Solicitors 4200, Saint-Laurent #910 Montreal (Quebec) Canada
Dear Friend,
My name is Barrister David Anderson, of Anderson Solicitors, Attorney-at-law; actually I got your contact information through your state Public Record while searching for a last name similar to my late client's name, a business tycoon who lived in Europe for over Twenty-One years; he lost his life in Middle East by the ISIS Militia group during a business trip in middle east while on short holidays visit to Israel his family members.
However the circumstances and urgency of this claim have prompted me to send you this unsolicited email, which I humbly apologize.
Can I present you as the beneficiary to the vault of my late client? Since you are bearing the same surname with him.
Honestly, Before his demised; He deposited a vault worth $10.2 (TEN MILLION, TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND US DOLLARS) with a security Firm here in my country.
As the attorney to the late client, the security Firm has mandated me to present the next beneficiary to the vault (heir/inheritor) to make the claims or the vault will be confiscated and taken to the Bureau as unclaimed.
Therefore on this brief notice kindly Get back to me or call me on (Tel: +1 (289) 801 3454 or Text: +1 (213) 533 9324) for more details and you will be glad you did.
Also bought a bike trailer off craigslist for the purpose of traveling around with my children. I managed to make it out with all of my organs intact and the boy loves it, so calling it a win all around.
Today we ventured not too terribly far across the world, but enough to be exhausting. Went to Rushville. Drove out of there with the bicycle I got for my 13th birthday and also my sister’s bike. She hasn’t riden it in years, and forgot she even owned a bicycle. Bought some parts to fix them up, and they should be arriving sometime next week. Also! BIRDS!
Got everything that I have down. Going to need to get a few more things.
Since we live in a Pintrest Perfect world, I am going to make some fancy tags here in a bit, send them to work and have my co-worker print and laminate them for me to pick up while the wife is working.
That is a game. I played it kind of regular like in the mid to late ‘90s and then it sort of fell off my radar after I got a job.
I briefly picked it up again for a couple of months in ‘12 and ‘13, but once again it only lasted a short while. I was playing it with my roomate whom I didn’t really care for so when we went our seperate ways it fell by the wayside again.
Anyway, the reason I’m even writing about this now is that I’m still trying to keep up with the cards and rules. I’ll snag a deck or a starter kit or something a couple of times a year and add them to the collection for the time that I decide to take up playing again.
I did, however, recently discover that The Dollar Tree is selling random packs of 20 cards for a dollar!
Which is nice considering a 15 card booster pack costs about $4.95.
Wedding planning crap has been at the forefront of my wife's family's lives right now. One of her sisters is getting married in July (*Edit - Looks unlikely as of 5/16/2018*), so there has been dramadramadramadrama.
We just got the shower invitations out in the mail, and while they are not going for a barn wedding, the invitations were definitely barn-theme inspired...
Why? Because Pintrest!
But here is an article I read today that struck me as being very interesting:
It’s early May. Which means it’s wedding season. Which means a whole lot of Americans will soon be partying in a barn.
Millennials, in staggering numbers, are choosing to start their married lives under high eaves and exposed beams, looking out over long, stripped-down wooden benches and lines of mason jars. According to an annual survey from The Knot, an online wedding-planning platform and magazine, 15 percent of couples chose a barn, farm, or ranch for their wedding reception in 2017, up from just 2 percent in 2009. Meanwhile, more traditional wedding locales are losing their appeal. (The number of couples choosing to celebrate in banquet halls dropped from 27 percent in 2009 to 17 percent in 2017; similarly, hotel receptions dropped from 18 to 12 percent.) Even if a couple isn’t actually getting married in a barn, there’s a good chance they’ll make their venue look like one, said Gabrielle Stone, a wedding planner based in Boston, Massachusetts. “There is this term that people use now: rustic chic.” Typically, that means couples will fill the space with homemade chalkboard signs and distressed, vintage furniture. “And wooden water barrels,” Stone said. “Lots of water barrels.”
When I asked my first question—are barns popular because they’re cheap?—Gwen Helbush, a wedding planner from San Francisco, laughed. “Don’t we wish it were so,” she said. While there are, surely, many relatively inexpensive barn weddings thrown in actual barns, by couples who actually live in rural areas with easy actual-barn access, anecdotal evidence suggests those probably aren’t what’s driving this trend. (Data is not available broken down by race, class, geography, or anything else—a level of granularity that would surely add to the picture of who is buoying this trend and why.)
Over the last few years, a wave of faux barns, designed exclusively to host weddings, have popped up across the country. Venues like Virginia’s Pippin Hill Farm, built in 2011, offer an experience that its owner Lynn Easton Andrews called “expensively understated.” “We’re not seeing bales of hay in the middle of the barn,” Stone said. “No one is wearing overalls, per se.” The tarnished brass lamps and faded couches are generally hauled in from boutique vintage rental companies—another business booming with the barn-wedding industry—more akin to props than random, leftover farming accoutrements.
Like earlier generations of Americans, Millennials want a beautiful (read: expensive) wedding. According to one widely cited set of statistics, the average wedding cost has been steadily increasing, from $27,021 in 2011 to $33,391 in 2017. But, despite these price tags, many young couples today don’t want to be showy about it. Happier at a brewery than a fancy restaurant, accustomed to wearing jeans to work, many Millennials are proudly casual. There is a certain social capital that, as a 20- or 30-something, comes with being labeled “laid-back” and “chill.” “You’re going to be putting yourself out there in front of everyone you know and love and you don’t want to be judged harshly,” Helbush told me. The trappings of a traditional, formal wedding in a hotel ballroom—a fancy fish dish, a black-tie dress code, trays of champagne—are seen by many as stuffy and old-fashioned: chill’s antithesis.
When Easton Andrews asks couples to show her pictures of their dream wedding, the same type of image crops up a lot. “There are people sitting on long tables, clinking glasses, smiling,” she said. “It’s about how heartfelt it feels—people sitting together, breaking bread, sharing the experience.” Formality, for many Millennials, feels awkward. It adds pressure. If a wedding were clearly designed to be just-so—not a table setting out of place—Millennials, Helbush said, may find it hard to relax. Barns and farms, on the other hand, eviscerate that pressure with their inherent informality. A guest can knock over a glass. Life will go on.
Young couples today, more than their parents or grandparents, see a wedding as an expression of their identity. Because they’re choosing to get married later than previous generations, Helbush finds that her clients today seem to know themselves better than her clients 30 years ago. “They’ve come into themselves more,” she said. “They know what they like and they aren’t afraid to ask for it.” Couples gravitate towards locales that say something about their personality. By choosing to get married in a barn, Easton Andrews said, a couple might want to show that they’re “connected to nature.” Maybe they fell in love outside, hiking or camping. Other unique locales—historic homes and museums for history buffs, and vineyards for wine lovers—are also having a moment in the wedding industry.
“It’s about the couple—who they are, and what they want to represent,” Helbush told me. “More than ‘How do I want other people to see me?’ it’s ‘How do I want to see myself?’” Many, she said, live in urban areas and have a fantasy about a life that is “calmer and less complicated”: a life removed from the big city, where couples and their guests can be one with the animals (or—if none are available—at least the spaces they could theoretically inhabit). A barn wedding typifies a simpler life, Helbush said, “because Pinterest told us so.”
I understand why they didn’t tell him that his father was basically Space Hitler. That would mess up anyone’s childhood knowing that.
But having his life manipulated to the point where he ended up being the person who brought about the downfall of the Empire? That is still pretty messed up.
Then there is the whole “My nephew, Benny the Idiot, is wannabe Space Hitler and it’s kind of my fault!” That would be enough to depress most people. Although I really don’t see Luke as being the kind of guy who would up and quit.
Let us talk about Drinko de Mayo for a few minutes…
According to a paper published by the UCLA Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture about the origin of the observance of Cinco de Mayo in the United States, the modern American focus on that day first started in California in 1863 in response to the resistance to French rule in Mexico.[29] "Far up in the gold country town of Columbia (now Columbia State Park) Mexican miners were so overjoyed at the news that they spontaneously fired off rifle shots and fireworks, sang patriotic songs and made impromptu speeches."[30]
A 2007 UCLA Newsroom article notes that, "the holiday, which has been celebrated in California continuously since 1863, is virtually ignored in Mexico."[29]TIME magazine reports that "Cinco de Mayo started to come into vogue in 1940s America during the rise of the Chicano Movement."[20] The holiday crossed over from California into the rest of the United States in the 1950s and 1960s but did not gain popularity until the 1980s when marketers, especially beer companies, capitalized on the celebratory nature of the day and began to promote it.[31][32] It grew in popularity and evolved into a celebration of Mexican culture and heritage, first in areas with large Mexican-American populations, like Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and San Jose.[33]
In a 1998 study in the Journal of American Culture it was reported that there were more than 120 official US celebrations of Cinco de Mayo in 21 different states. An update in 2006 found that the number of official Cinco de Mayo events was 150 or more, according to José Alamillo, a professor of ethnic studies at Washington State University in Pullman, who has studied the cultural impact of Cinco de Mayo north of the border.[34] Los Angeles' Fiesta Broadway has been billed as the largest Cinco de Mayo celebration in the world, which it most certainly was at its peak in the 1990s when it attracted crowds of 500,000 or more. In recent years attendance has seen a dramatic decrease.[35][36]
On June 7, 2005, the United States Congress issued a concurrent resolution calling on the President of the United States to issue a proclamation calling upon the people of the United States to observe Cinco de Mayo with appropriate ceremonies and activities.[37] To celebrate, many display Cinco de Mayo banners while school districts hold special events to educate students about its historical significance. Special events and celebrations highlight Mexican culture, especially in its music and regional dancing. Examples include baile folklórico and mariachi demonstrations held annually at the Plaza del Pueblo de Los Ángeles, near Olvera Street. Commercial interests in the United States have capitalized on the celebration, advertising Mexican products and services, with an emphasis on alcoholic beverages,[38][39] foods, and music.[40][41]
Quentin Tarantino doing the Lord of the Rings movies…Let us let that sink in for a few moments, shall we?
For all of the grief I give Peter Jackson’s movies, at least he was given the freedom to do it his way and not condense the whole story into one (I KNOW, RIGHT!) movie.
So my talk of making booklets for my Jaguar games the other day was not idle conversation.
I have been slowly doing it for a couple of weeks now.
I set up my website downloader program and snagged them all off of the Atar Age website, resized them, and I’m in the process of coloring the outside covers before printing them and cutting them.
I have one done so far that I am extremely pleased with:
Hopefully they all look this good when done.
Did I mention that I have a printer that half-folds and booklet staples?
