Morrissey Recording an Album with a Polka Band
1970s Hippie Computer Programmers Eating Junk Food
I think the hippie in the second picture is a little too cute. Also, he’s not from the 1970s, he’s probably an extra from that awful Black Panthers sequence in Forrest Gump.
P.S. Forrest Gump sucks
Alfred Hitchcock Lifting Weights at the Beach
It generated four images, but the last one looked more like Winston Churchill. smdh
Centaur in a Tracksuit?
NO. No no no no nonononononono..
Magic Robot, Please Make Me Robot Pictures
I know there is a lot of conversation about A.I., about the future of it, its utility and/or uselessness, the ethics of untalented bozos training it on enormous collections of uncompensated artists and writers. There’s a lot to talk about. I am not qualified to talk about it, currently at least.
I just tried using an online image creator to create melancholy images of robots.
Enjoy! ( or don’t!)
Carports and God Bless Your Night, Fan of John Prine
Things obviously change with time. For some reason, I thought it would be fun to download like 10-15 images of carports and just post them.
I have done that before w/ laundry/funerals/etc.
I tried searching for Carports and just got this super-depressing result.
Bunch of commerce. Maybe searching for candid pics of carports is a bit esoteric. Maybe everyone just wants to buy one, and no one wants to gawk at them.
I don’t know. I’ll be logging my periodic disappointment at the state of internet affairs on this site.
That being said, I am going to also look around for vestiges of amateur hobbyists such as myself expressing themselves, talking about experiences.
Here, this is a person who is excited about meeting one of their heroes, John Prine, in Peoria IL in 1997.
How the hell can a person
Go to work in the morning and
Come home in the evening
And have nothing to say?
Mildly Interesting
I miss blogs. I miss people that wrote about things important and inconsequential in their own lives.
I am tired of the walled gardens of social media. I am tired of tech bros. This is a short post because I don’t want the unreasonable desire to have a perfectly-crafted longish post preventing me from saying anything at all.
I don’t want to be popular, I don’t want to be famous, I want to be mildly interesting and want to interact with other nice and mildly interesting people.
Love,
Me
Making a Gnu Gif
It’s not a gif of a Gnu. I mean “new”. Sorry, I have been told that using the word “Gnu” is great for SEO.
I made a GIF from the film The Ninth Gate. It’s a very enjoyable movie. It has a pretty good performance from Johnny Depp, an even better performance by Frank Langella, and a wonderful score by Wojciech Kilar.
For years, I have thought a part of a scene introducing the main character Dean Corso would be a great GIF, but never had the energy to make it. THAT CHANGES TODAY.
Please feel free to use this to taunt your least favorite shitposter and/or grifter. Tell your friends! Tell your friend’s friends!
Love, Splotchy
BitCoin and Laser Eyes
Hi, nice to see you. I’ve been there and over there and over over there, but very rarely here.
I’m going to try and write more HERE. So, BitCoin. I don’t know an awful lot about it.
I’m going to try and just throw my very meager brain/knowledge at a wall based on what I think I know right now. I’m not going to link anything, I’m not going to do any amount of research now that I have started this post. This is the beauty of blogs that I have missed.
Okay, what is BitCoin? I think it’s the concept of a decentralized currency, something that is theoretically universally accepted and usable by anyone, anywhere. There’s a ledger for each transaction (called a blockchain) which you can trace the journey of this new kinda money.
My understanding is that it’s really energy-intensive maintaining the blockchain, lots of CPUs necessary due to cryptography being used to, I dunno, make sure it’s not tampered with, not faked, etc. Somehow, devoting gobs of energy to help calculate/verify transactions on the blockchain ends up maybe(?) minting new Bitcoin pieces? I DO NOT KNOW FOR SURE.
Uh, there’s a concept of a “sats”, or a “Satoshi” which is the smallest unit of a Bitcoin (BTC). It’s like a billionth or a gazillionth of a BTC or some other shit. Satoshi is named after “Satoshi Nakamoto” who wrote a white paper in 2008 that proposed the concept of BitCoin. At this point, I think the consensus is that this was a pseudonym, and no one knows who he or she really is. They went silent around 2010 and haven’t been heard from since and BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAHBLAHBLAH.
/end terrible, misinformed explanation of Bitcoin
One thing I have noted is that lots of BTC enthusiasts have LASER EYES. The following pictures in the image below were pulled from Twitter profiles, all of them acting in some capacity as evangelists/ambassadors for BTC.
Look, Laser Eyes Tony Soprano at A3! Salvador Dali at G1! Look, there’s a Gandalf at C5!
The guy at A1 is named Michael Saylor and is apparently very rich and very important and balls deep in BTC. If you look at his Twitter feed, it’s mostly him making posting stylized BitCoin “brand” images of trains, vaults, fireworks, toilets (haven’t seen a BitCoin toilet pic yet, but fingers crossed), etc. Note that he has laser eyes AND lightning eyes.
I thought as a project I would start asking the ppl with the profiles “why the laser eyes?” and see what they said.
My wife asked if me if I was being snarky, and I said, well, 45% snarky, but 55% curious. Anyways, I only asked a few of these guys and only one person answered me, saying “yeah, this one guy added the lasers to my pic, this other guy added the flames, and this other other guy added the bear” (see if you can figure out which pic it was in the collage!). It was an answer, but a very literal one.
What I want to know, is “what does having laser eyes represent to you”? I feel like it’s a form of braggadocio, but I think it’s a bit simplistic to just chalk it up to that. I feel like there is some “visionary” vibe going on as well. Like, these people think they are seeing beyond, I dunno, our financial system as it has been for years, at least since the abolition of the gold standard, and are aware of THE NEW WAY. Do they think of themselves as simply smarter than everyone else? Do they think of themselves as saviors to the rest of us? I don’t know.
It seems like BTC is quite a bit of commotion over something that really doesn’t seem like it’s going to make humanity happier or healthier.
Oh, during a recent vacation break from work, I puttered about on this newer protocol called “nostr”. It’s an attempt (I think) of having a decentralized social media, an alternative to everyone feeding at the same corporate trough at places like Twitter and Facebook.
In the nostr space, people are rushing to write clients etc., and many people are (or were) excited when I was poking around there. Right now it seems to have a kind of high bar for less technical people. I actually offered one of the nostr developers my help, but I have a Mac from ten years ago and I can’t develop anything on my stupid computer.
Anyways, as I was on nostr the thing that people were SUPER excited about was including the use of lightning wallets via nostr. Oh, I forgot to say, BitCoin has all this digital wallet crap. As far as I know, lightning wallets are just a flavor of a BitCoin wallet. As people excitedly posted “invoices” of a long alphanumeric string for what amounted to be a few cents, then another person replied “PAID!”, they were proving that they could pay and get paid via nostr, but for me, it just kinda bummed me out. It seemed like that the whole payment thing was the most important aspect of nostr to all these people, and I couldn’t really understand why it would make me or anyone happy. It wasn’t my tribe.
One thing that was very surprising to me was Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, was present on nostr, and not only that, he regularly interacted with lots of people on nostr (he answered a question or two of mine, for example) when I was there. I wouldn’t be surprised if he continued to be very active and present, but I just kind of ducked out with all the lightning wallet stuff. He seemed to feel really positive about the whole thing.
I really don’t have an opinion about Jack Dorsey. I have not “done the research”. I know many people are probably annoyed by him, other people praise him, whatever. He seems to feel like BTC is something special and wonderful. He seems to have his heart in the right place, but what do I know?
But look at his profile picture! It’s his EAR! And no lasers are coming out of it! I find that somewhat encouraging and comforting, but I don’t know if I should.
I don’t know about a decentralized social media, but things were are lot more special when we wrote blog posts and didn’t use some billionaire’s website to express our thoughts and feelings.
I liked it more when we were all points of light, and think it is something we can be again, whether we pay each other invoices or not.
XOXOXO
Why Am I Running?
Hey! It’s been three years since my last post. Let’s get on with it.
I went to the doctor in 2018 for a physical and didn’t have a health scare. My bad cholesterol was on the high side. I was overweight. I weighed around 260 pounds, and being around six feet tall, that’s not a good weight to be at. I wasn’t scared, but I wasn’t complacent, either.
I decided I needed to lose weight. I started dieting, tracking the food I ate. No lie, I dropped ten pounds the first week, mostly because I have stuffed garbage into my face hole for my entire life, and actually refrained from doing that. No more sugary pop, no more icing-covered brownies. I would get a brownie pretty much 5 days a week. That’s not healthy!
Anyways, after dieting for a bit I decided I should start exercising. While going through a divorce 8 years ago, I started my first extended regimen of exercise, but I mostly did the elliptical because I thought running was 1. Crazy and 2. Hard on my knees. Oh, I was also really sad. True story!
I divorced, started dating, met a nice person, got remarried, had a kid. My exercise regimen slowly sputtered out, as things do when life gets in the way.
Considering what kind of exercise would be relevant to my current state, I knew my wife ShesAllWrite (link forthcoming to her blog!) had always liked running, so I guess I sort of gravitated toward that. I started out running on a treadmill and did a “Couch to 5K” program on my phone. It started out pretty easy, then I was horrified in the middle of the program when I had to run EIGHT UNINTERRUPTED MINUTES. What the hell?!
I kept on with it and eventually was running for a solid 30 minutes, keeping my pace around a 10 minute mile. I get confused, how are we supposed to talk about this? I was running a 10 minute mile, or running 6 mph? I guess the # minute mile is more common. I digressed!
I ran the Rock ‘n Roll 5k in Chicago last July, ran the Bucktown 5k, ran the Day of the Dead 5k in Pilsen. The *first* time I ran outside was right before the Rock ‘n Roll 5k. It was harder than the treadmill, and my speed suffered and my body complained, but not too much. Despite still trying to get used to outdoor running, it was nice running with other people! People cheered! They had fruit and energy bars afterwards!
I did a total of 3 races before it got unpleasantly cold out. When winter hit my dieting slid a bit, as did my running. Oh, I forgot to mention, I lost like 60 pounds with all that dieting and running! Holy shit! And, I gained 15-20 pounds back over the winter. I guess this kind of thing happens.
With the return of warmer weather, I’m back running again. I’m doing less treadmill running and more jogging outside. Initially, to get back into the swing of things, I re-did the Couch to 5K program, but increased my pace by 0.5 mph (so I was running a 9:34 min mile or so?).
I’m planning on signing up for the Chicago Bears 5k that’s happening later this month. I’ve already done two races thus far in 2019, and am beating my times from 2018, getting around a 9 minute mile. I have no idea if I am going to get faster, or am going to basically plateau at that pace.
ShesAllWrite said there are speed training programs I could try out to goose my speed, but I’m kind of lazy about that at this point. I could also choose to train for longer distances, but I think 26.2 miles is an arbitrarily stupid long distance to run. I’ll take my arbitrary distances a little shorter, thank you very much.
So, why do I run? Oh, that’s not the question. Why am I running? If I ask, “Why do I run?” it seems to give it some kind of gravitas I don’t know is warranted. Am I a runner? It doesn’t feel like it. I feel like I have to be inducted or something. Why am I running? Well, it feels kind of cool that I can get from Point A to Point B on my own steam in a relatively short amount of time.
I like running in those races. You get a t-shirt! Holy crap, that actually is part of it! You get a t-shirt! Every race! A t-shirt!
Another thing that appeals to me is I feel like running was something I used to think I could never do (though it’s not as though I was wistfully dreaming about it or anything) but hey, I can do it after all.
For whatever potentially dumb reason, I don’t consider myself a runner, but I am running. How long am I going to run for? Is my 48 year old body going to give out in the near future? Is my knee going to explode, or will my thighs be irreparably chafed, or will I suffer some other such calamity? Am I going to just get bored and lazy?
I don’t know. Maybe I won’t run forever, but I like it now.
