We’re home at last!

We’re back from our excursion to Madison — a day driving there, two days with Iliana, and a day driving back, but totally worth it. You may recall that I mention the distinct change at the border with Wisconsin (“adult novelty stores, billboards for cheese, and roadkill as far as the eye can see”), but we also saw something in common: so many “Pro Life Across America” billboard spread across both Minnesota and Wisconsin. They’ve gotten more condensed over the years, at least. Nowadays they’re just a photo of a cute, plump 6-month old babies with the words Heartbeat 18 Days. That’s all. Not even grammatical. We’re just supposed to leap to the conclusion they want.

I have a much more interesting statement: Poop 19 Seconds.

That’s from Bethany Brookshire’s Insomniac Academy of brief YouTube shorts with fascinating facts about anatomy. Check it out!

I would like to spider there

I’ve been having a grand time with the family in Madison, but I’m dreading the long drive home. Then, suddenly, in the newspaper, I get a wonderful suggestion for a better way to travel.

It doesn’t include a phone number for reservations. Does anyone know what it is?

This is not ‘cool’ or ‘edgy’, it’s just stupid

This is not an omen. This is just the brain of a 53 year old man-child raised on 4chan, who has somehow acquired more money and power than he knows what to do with.

Elon Musk has changed his X profile.
His avatar is now Pepe the Frog, a mascot adopted by white supremacists.
His name is a Latinisation of “Kek”, a phrase used by neo-Nazis.
Musk has also backed AfD in Germany, the political home for racists.
The man is telling us explicitly what he’s about.

Could someone please let him know his immaturity is exposed?

Also, haven’t all the cool kids moved on well past the “kekistan” nonsense? This is so 2015.

Woe! I failed to perform the ritual!

The Aztecs would rip out still-beating human hearts to honor the sun god Huitzilopochtli, so that the sun would continue to rise. I too have performed a ritual every year, in a tradition taught me by my father. On New Year’s Eve, we consume a root beer float to honor the passing year and propitiate the new one. Every year since I was a wee little tyke I have performed the sacrifice.

Until last night. I no longer have children at home, and my wife was at work. I was alone with the cat when I suddenly realized at 11pm that I had none of the sacred ingredients, neither root beer nor ice cream, it was -10°C outside, and even if I felt like taking a walk, no store would be open at this hour. I must confess I also didn’t feel much like saving the world this year.

I apologize if 2025 turns out to be a disastrously bad year — it will all be my fault.

The omens have already begun. The US Capitol building was struck by lightning last night, something that I’m sure almost never happens.

Brain permanently scarred, but pennies saved

The sale of my mother’s house is imminent — closing is on 3 January. I have spent my afternoons since last week trying to cancel utilities and various services to the house, and it hasn’t been easy. I’ve sat on hold on the phone for an awful lot of time, because, as it turns out, most of these services are reluctant to lose a paying customer, even if she is dead. Much of what I’ve had to do is call, wait for an answer, get told an email address to send a death certificate and letters testamentary, and then wait for a verification phone call. And then discover that the electric company had misspelled her name, which was not an obstacle when billing her, but becomes a problem when telling them to stop billing her.

But finally, it’s all done! The house goes dead on Friday, only to come back to life with new owners.

Next step is to go through a long list of annuities and get them cashed out. Also, a minor thing, I have 21 silver dollars that were in her bank deposit box, I’ll have to get those appraised. I checked out a few of them on the web, and they were selling for somewhere between $10 and $50 each, but I have to wring every penny I can out of everything before I’m done.

On Meta, nobody knows you don’t have a personality

It’s hard to believe they can actually do this, but Meta plans to make the Internet objectively worse.

Meta says that it will be aiming to have Facebook filled with AI-generated characters to drive up engagement on its platform, as part of its broader rollout of AI products, the Financial Times reports. The AI characters will be created by users through Meta’s AI studio, with the idea being that you can interact with them almost like you would with a real human on the website.

“We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do,” Meta vice-president of product for generative AI Connor Hayes told the FT.

“They’ll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform… that’s where we see all of this going,” he added.

Meta has already started dumping this crap online, allowing their bots to spawn on Facebook and Instagram. Isn’t Facebook already bad enough? Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t been good enough yet to explain why we need to give every yahoo who uses their services the ability to create more fake personas.

The AI characters aren’t a new feature. Meta has long invested in AI and has spent the past year stuffing all kinds of generative AI tech into its existing products. That included the release of its AI Studio in the summer, which quickly became a hotbed of virtual boyfriends and girlfriends.

Oh. You need a fake boyfriend or girlfriend? Zuckerberg prefers mindless bots to real human beings, I guess.

Another sign of the coming dark ages

I was running some simple errands this morning — I need a short bit of ethernet cat8 cable, something I figured I could pick up locally for $5-$10. I went downtown to what used to be the Radio Shack, that was my usual convenient place to get necessary bits of cheap tech. It was gone! The store had been cleared out and all the merchandise replaced with…Jesus crap. Well, I sure wasn’t going to get my printer connected with a prayer and some slogan praising Jesus silkscreened on it.

This is getting worrisome. A lot of the businesses around town have been gradually replaced with pious garbage that I will not shop at. This one, no, they’ll never get my business. Especially since the hours are 4-8pm on weekdays, longer on Saturdays, and of course never on Sundays. That doesn’t sound like a particularly good business plan to me, but what would I know? I’m not their market.

Anyway, if you’re in need some non-essential fluff and want to drive out to the middle of nowhere to pick it up, the place is called Kings Media & Merch. They sell nothing at all useful, and only at inconvenient hours.