Max @max@smeap.com

Feel like it's not a great economy indicator when all the office supply stores in an area have gone out of business.

I'm my own admin
I'm my own admin
It sounds funny, I know
But it really is so-oo
I'm my own admin

An article is trending right now about the important "microclimate" impact of trees on their immediate surrounding area reminds me that I pragmatically determined the same basic principle walking through a suburban landscape where the surrounds of trees felt amazing and everything else terrible.

I stand by my unscientific, unpragmatic proposal: Ban cars and reforest parking lots.

So the evil Valeyard is said to have been formed by rejected bits in the regeneration between the Twelfth and Thirteenth Doctors. Which makes it canon now that the Valeyard is literally the Doctor's toxic masculinity right? 🤔

The new writing staff is working hard to avoid old foes for a while, but clearly this deserves an interesting story line, put decades of the show into a weird new perspective.

Tried reading a few chapters of Infinite Jest and it left a bitter dislike. I might be on the wrong side of the hype cycle for it. Felt like it answered a question I didn't actually have: What if PKD had been unconstrained by living month to month, developed a terrible logorrhea, and tried a really terrible Vonnegut impersonation with help from the cinematography stylings of Wes Anderson?

I don't think this book is for me.

I miss that season we used to have round here about this time. What did we used to call that? "Drop"? I think others of y'all prefer to call it something that sounds like "Automaton"? It's a shame we just have Hellfire and Fimbulwinter left as seasons. It's still 80s and 90s F outside in October and I want to murder things.

Second email I've got mentioning an old no longer used or honeypot password and threatening they have webcam footage of me watching porn and blackmailing for $1000 dollars or they will send to FB contacts.

A) I don't have a webcam on PC I use for porn
B) I'm not a puritan and I don't feel guilty that I use porn. (Though it's rarely the kind the email describes and often weirder, it's not some huge secret.)
C) A video of me watching porn is probably not that embarassing to watch, boring

Sony should hire D'Onofrio to be the Kingpin in a Spider-Man movie. Yes, I know that Marvel got cold feet about crossing the streams between Netflix and movies, but Sony has it's own weird rules anyway, and a good Spider-Man versus Kingpin movie could be so much fun. (And a nice change of pace from the mad science villains Sony seems to prefer for the franchise.)

My ship's on fire, how about yours? (That's the way I like it and I'll never get board'd.)

1. Barrel updates are great
2. Small sad that despite discovery theme and Cartographer commendation, ships map just shows everything. Slow reveal could have been interesting

Prior to the introduction of eunuchs servers, it was commonly thought the most compliant servers should be hard of hearing. For this reason, many early programming languages such as COBOL required constant shouting to insure the machines OBEY YOUR COMMANDS.

A leftover from this period is that many database servers remain hard of hearing. Though this is now considered a privacy feature if databases do not SELECT or INSERT just any data that they might overhear.

Realizing that one of the reasons I favor playing the same game on the Xbox One over the PC version: that sweet, sweet Rare Achievement popup. It doesn't feel right accidentally popping one of those on the PC and getting a boring PC notification.

(Admittedly, 4K HDR is the more acceptable reason to Xbox rather than PC, given my current hardware situations, but the Xbox team knew what they were doing with that Diamond Bling.)

When Telltale announced the marketing title "TWD: The Final Season" my brain immediately went to "writing's on the wall, huh? Studio doesn't have long?" That was a very odd marketing decision, and I noticed it at the time. It is not a gut reaction you expect to be correct though.

I don't have much to add to the eulogy of a flawed company that didn't do right by so many friends, and friends of friends, than what those friends themselves have said, or Mixnmojo commented.

That feeling when you've resigned yourself to not having berth on that big crazy vacation you love next year, and then you get a waitlist notification and a 24hr deadline to beat yourself up about the whole decision again. 😥