claycle

It constantly makes me smile, whether it’s being smart, the actors are giving perfectly calibrated performances, or the action suddenly goes wham-bam VATS over the top.

3 eps in. Happy.

Perhaps, but middle-schoolers genuinely stink to high heaven, especially after P/E. I think one can imagine more obvious/less conspiratorial reasons for showers being mandatory.

If I have to pick one drink to take to a desert island, it’s the classic Sazerac.

That is what I will want most of the time when I want a cocktail. However, I will allow a few others to enter rotation, depending on mood, time/temperature, and place:

1. Margarita.
2. Vesper.
3. Pastis.

And, finally, my embarrassing guilty pleasure (which I never order except when I am in company I know well or I am on a Caribbean island): piña colada.

When looking for my last vehicle, I still needed a midsize very-light-duty truck for my business (film production), I drove the Chevy midsize truck (Colorado?) first on my checklist of trucks to drive. It was a piece of garbage (and this made me sad because I was [trying to be] open to finding an excellent US-made midsize truck). The sales guy was super-enthusiastic, of course, to the point of pushy obnoxiousness. When he asked me “HOW GREAT IS THIS TRUCK???!!!??” I was like “I wouldn’t complain if someone gave one to me, but I have other trucks to test.”

After test driving four other competitors, I ended up with Honda Ridgeline (which beat out my second favorite from Toyota), that I have now had for 4+ years and absolutely love it - it is a great midsize+ truck. It’s kind of a unicorn in Texas (so many Fords and Dodges), but I saw a ton of them in Arizona and other Western states. Great vehicle, and it has CarPlay. Sadly, it’s in the shop at the moment (I, uh, backed into a bollard, cough) and my rental is a brand-new Dodge Charger which drives like a lead brick on wheels compared to the Ridgeline. Interior finish isn’t bad though…and the UI, while not CarPlay, is polished).

Every single day, when I am out walking my dog, a jogger comes by smelling of like a shit-ton of soap/perfume/deodorant/body spray - I nearly gag. These guys (and sometimes girls) are so terrified they might smell sweaty when doing something, you know, sweaty, like jogging a couple of miles…it boggles my mind.

Who taught people we have to smell like artificial bouquets of flowers all the time, even when exercising, ffs?

We swap between two movies each year.

Even years it is A LION IN WINTER, an amazing film with insanely quotable dialogue. (EDIT: Why? On “star power” alone, this movie is outrageously cast.)

Odd years it is A CHRISTMAS STORY, which is equally quotable (perhaps more so). (EDIT: Why? Because so many things in this film ring true to my own childhood - having to have last-minute dinner at a Chinese restaurant because of a disaster, for example, or begging for a b-b-gun…)

Soap: a bar of unscented oatmeal-based soap

For deodorant: I have had very good experience with “Thai stone” style salt-based deodorants. These work simply by making your skin inhospitable to odor-causing bacteria while not causing you irritations. You need to apply it liberally (after slightly wetting the stone, I just count out 8 strokes under each arm), but a single stone will last you … a very long time … and it does really work for a whole day. It has no scent, per se, so you will just smell like you smell without the sulfurous bad smells caused by BO bacteria.

Or so I gather…

Steel-cut oatmeal is super-easy, set-and-forget (1 cup water, 1/4 steel-cut oats, pinch of salt, Bring water to boil, stir in oats, salt, lower to bare simmer, uncovered 30 minutes, flavor as desired, eat).

But that can get boring. For something a little more exciting, super-nutritious, and almost zero-prep, do a sort of Norwegian-style open-face cracker (no, you don’t need “the tubes”, but if you can find them, knock yourself out). For this I take a tin of fish (usually smoked salmon or trout, but sardines, mackerel, or even tuna would work fine), a piece of cracking toast or a Scandy flatbread cracker (Wasa, knekkebrod), and some kind of “schmear” (a thin spread of cream cheese, sour cream, yogurt, or - my favorite - Trader Joe’s Everything But the Bagel Yogurt Dip/Spread). I can get all these ingredients both cheaply and well-made at Trader Joe’s (TJ Smoked Salmon in a tin, TJ Norwegian seeded flatbread, and the aforementioned dip). For a little additional oomph toss on tomato or cucumber slices.

I just finished my CP2077 (first) play-thru. I had no fore-knowledge of game or outcomes. When I play RPGs, I abide by a strict “choices matter - there are no mulligans”, in that I won’t fish reloaded saves for “better” outcomes. If I make a bad choice, I live with it.

About a week before I finished, I was having dinner with some friends who had played it already and they were probing me to see how I think the game would end. I said, matter of factly, “Oh, I think my V is doomed, like Arthur [RDR2] was doomed.”

And if there was a magic happy ending in Phantom Liberty, as there seemed there might be because Sol pointedly asked V twice “Are you sure you don’t want it?”, my V had given it to Songbird.

When I came to the pinch at climax where Jonny presents you with your options and you have to pick what to do, I probably sat on that dialog wheel for 15 minutes. I’d vacillate between the options presented and listen and watch carefully how Jonny reacted and think things through. I had played a V who was never comfortable with the loss of his autonomy and desired, more than anything, to live his own life his own way. This V was also sort of a mensch, too, inclined to empathy and sympathy. He had pity for Jonny’s situation. After much contemplation, V reached out to Panam - I would say almost desperately as it seemed the only path that really gave V any hope - and events ensued and they arrived at what I called “The Sunset Ending” (which I considered a great success).

I felt I had arrived at a very satisfactory conclusion for this V and I really have no desire (in a good way!) to play CP more - the story was over, if bittersweet.

The feeling of completeness matched reaching the Sunrise Ending in RDR2, which kinda devastated me.

all’y’all is the plural second person form.

Sheriff, speaking to a number of bandits: All’y’all just put yer guns down and come out with yer hands up so we can end this all peaceful like.

True story: in the early 00s, my company was acquired by a Large Silicon Valley Company. LSVC sent a “business integration” team across the country (to Dallas, Texas where we were at the time) to welcome us into the fold. At these meetings, these Perky Northern Californian Women - they were all Perky Northern California Women, for whatever reason - opened with the following sentence:

“We’d like to welcome y…ya…y’y’y’y’y…YA UL(!) to LSVC.”

Repeated throughout the meeting, the integration team kept stumbling over “y’all” instead of just saying “you” when talking to us. Clearly, someone thought that - being Texans - we wouldn’t understand them unless the did.

At one point, one of us spoke up and said something like, “First, thank you for attempting to use our local dialect to talk to us. But, we can understand you perfectly well when you speak your native Northern Californian. Second, by way of correction, the word is just “y’all”. Also, if you want to use the plural second person, like vous in French, you may say “all’y’all”, but it is optional.”

#1.

Don’t you just know it?! I work in media and I have pitched commercial projects to business executives many times only to see them completely choke on the costs. They say things like “Can’t we just film the commercial on an iPhone, I see that on YouTube all the time?” FFS. I’ll be like “Sure, we can. What’s your budget for that? You realize I still have to pay the cameraman, the makeup artist, the writer, the producer, the director, the gaffer, and the talent. Do you want music with that, too? Oh, you want a Credence Clearwater Revival song in the background? That’ll cost you.”

I’ll pull out some sheets explaining what they see on YT that they think is so cheap… I mean, sure, it’s less expensive than other options, but crew and talent gotta eat and pay bills, too.

People have no idea…

To be fair, Wheel of Time may be one of those garbage in, garbage out scenarios.

Though I only speak a minuscule smatter of Italian - and none is necessary to enjoy these videos - I really like anything with Giorgione in it, for example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1q5i5C35ISE

OR even better

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WLMm08P-u8&t=9s

Just dive down this wonderful rabbit hole.

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Counter-point. I have used Maps over the past 8-ish years exclusively on three thousands-of-miles cross-country (US) excursions on my motorcycle, I use it to locate unpaved/off-beaten path roads to take, and I use it regularly as my local way finder and when I am in unfamiliar cities. Not once has it lead me astray…

Don’t you mean: Statistically speaking, you will die.

I am surprised no one yet has posted the infuriatingly worthless expression of affectless sympathy:

thoughts and prayers

All great advice, but I personally cannot urge people towards pCloud. I have one of the permanent tiers, but I found the service frustratingly buggy and, when contacted, support was rude and unhelpful. There are so many little odd limitations on the pCloud file system it was frustrating. I also worry that their buy-once business model is not sustainable.

Sync.com provides an even more secure service (zero-knowledge across the board) with similar (better than US anyway) privacy protections in the host country (Canada) that has been, so far for 2 years of use, rock solid (I couldn’t go a week without pCloud farting out some error). The subscription model is affordable and generous and the customer-facing pages for sharing files are very professional looking (important to me, because I professionally share files and pCloud looked like a hobbyist page in this regard AND leaked private information).

EDIT: Regarding iCloud. Not only is iCloud end-to-end, but you may turn on zero-knowledge encryption now, as well (Advanced Data Protection I think is what they call it) so that Apple doesn’t even have the keys to decrypt your data, making it quite similar to sync.com now.

UUCP