Castle Magus

Have I mentioned just how much I hate this time of year? Well, I loathe this time of year.

Just had to go out, in the rain, to replace the empty propane tank with one of the other ones (of the three we have) that I'd just taken down to Dan River Oil to get refilled, this past Monday. The empty tank that I replaced today had only just, a week ago, been hooked up, full, to the gas line that connects to the "gas log" heater that my sister has been apparently running way more than she ever has in previous years. Because this is the third time I've had to fucking replace the tank hooked up to the gas line and twice now that I've had to lug two empty tanks to town and get them refilled. All in just this past month or two. And it hasn't even been all that cold yet, aside from this past Sunday, when it got down into the 10s (°F) that night. Like, right fucking now it is 48°F outside. We don't fucking need the gas log running right now. And yet... it's running (now, after I replaced the tank). *weary sigh*

Oh and we've already had the first power outage of this time of the year. (Though it apparently wasn't weather related?)

It's not even literal goddamned winter yet.

Hot steaming shits all over everything about this dumbfuckery, except for the initial catalyst of this dumbshit moron getting the terrible grade she wholly deserved, because she wrongly thought it was a good idea to barf irrelevant religion all over a school paper.

Would rant more, maybe, but it's almost 6am and I'm pecking this out on my phone, so nope.

After mentioning it in a previous post, I have finally completed my dire slog through Wuthering Heights.

All I will say about it right now (because I'm pecking this out into my phone rather using a proper keyboard, and it's already becoming vastly tedious) is that it may as well have been titled Darkness Induced Audience Apathy/Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: The Book. Or, at least, the first 95% of it was that. The last 5% of it was, at least for me, a bit of "Yeah, fuck you, Heathcliff! Eat shit and die!" catharsis, via Gothic horror.

I started this book because I wanted to, and I finished it out of "trainwreck, can't look away" morbid fascination. I feel the utmost sympathy and pity for any high school or college students who may have been in the past or may be in the future forced to endure having to read this book by some sadistic English teacher.

(I might edit/add to this later, when I'm back at my computer proper.)

(EDIT, back on my comp now)

There were no likeable characters in this story, as far as I'm concerned. Even the supposedly more sympathetic characters (e.g. Lockwood, Nelly Dean, Isabella Linton, Catherine Linton [the daughter, I mean, not the original Catherine Earnshaw]) too often acted like complete morons and gullible dupes, and, in some ways, could be just as hateful and duplicitous as the more outright villainous or, at least, incredibly assholish characters (e.g. Heathcliff, Joseph, Hindley, the original Catherine).

I'll just mention one other thing. At some point as I was reading, I just started envisioning Heathcliff as looking like BOB from Twin Peaks. I'm not sure when it happened. Probably after he came back from having run away for several years and started being a true dickhole to everyone within a hundred mile radius.

(/EDIT)

"Hi. In today's episode, Katy, Cody, and Jonathan talk about the targeted attack in Boulder, Colorado, Elon Musk's uneasiness talking about ways he disagrees with the Trump administration, and the embarrassing MAHA report that had made-up citations."

---

Speaking of Elon Musk...

Well, they talk about other stuff besides just Elron Mustard.

The worst thing, actually, is probably that asinine bitch being all like (to paraphrase) "well, healthcare isn't that important because we're all going to die anyway, so just accept Jesus Christ and live forever in the next world" or whatever the fetid fuck. If she's so blasé about dying, she might as well just go ahead and fucking do it, then. The sooner, the better.

Oh, and just to note: Jesus Christ, as a deity, is just as "real" as the tooth fairy, you cretinous cow.

...if you ever run a news website or a video game blog or something like that, and I ever even once see you hold your content hostage behind a paywall, then just know that I'm going to go out of my way to make sure that I never see your website or blog show up for me again, whether that's in Google searches or in my news app or whatever. It's actually worse when you have it set up to let people read two or three articles/entries for free, before throwing up the paywall. ("FiRsT oNe'S fReE" says the skeevy drug dealer or the scummy casino barker.) Your content is not something I can't do without, so don't even try to act like it is. Your content is not that valuable to me.

(Then again, for the most recent site in question [which I won't even name here, so as to not give them even that much more traffic], I suppose I should have heeded the earlier red flag that was them trying to get me to sign up for a monthly or yearly subscription just because I happened to hit reply on one of the comments under one of their articles to see if I could make a comment without having to make an account [since some rare few websites still let you do that]. Merely having to sign up for something for free is bad enough, and I usually don't bother with even that much. Being faced with an option select for a $7-$99 monthly/$70-$999 yearly subscription is on a whole other level entirely[1] and is a "fuck right off" moment.)

Find less obnoxious, insufferable ways to make money.

[1] - And even for that link there, I had to replace the original one with an archive.is variant, because the original one was, yes, partially behind a paywall.

"It's all interchangeable to them. It's all the same slop"

There's already too much slop in vidya gaem jurnlizm as it is. The very last thing anyone needed was for two of the actually halfway decent video game industry news sites to be destroyed and replaced with more fucking slop.

Oh well, time to remove Polygon and Giant Bomb from my Google News feed, I guess.

(Assuming I can figure out how to actually fucking do that, since it doesn't fucking work on the Android app. If I remove a source I had been previously following, it stays removed for all of about two seconds, then it just pops right back into the list again. Similarly can't rearrange sources up or down the list, either, because they just pop back to their previous positions almost immediately. [EDIT] It seems to be the case that I can remove sources via the actual desktop website version of Google News, at least. I still can't fucking rearrange them, though, because even on the website, they just reappear back in their original positions on a page reload. The ones I removed seem to stay removed, though, at least. And then they also appear to be gone if I check the phone app version as well. [/EDIT])

Look at the first posts in these two threads, and then look at their last posts. It's bullshit, and Valve (along with the entire rest of the Internet) needs to stop doing this bullshit.

But then, I've already made my opinion about "necroposting" known, and obviously it's never going to change because the Internet has become increasingly enshittified.

I heard at least part of this story on the car radio yesterday. It's the story of an old woman who was scammed out of over half a million dollars by savvy con-artists pretending to be law enforcement agents fighting against fentanyl drug cartels. One of the things that they kept repeating was that it was not this woman's fault that she was scammed, how it is kind of ridiculous to expect an 80 year old to catch all the "red flags" (such as how the emails she was receiving from the scammers came from a spoofed "USA.com" email address, rather than anything with ".gov" at the end), and how scammers like this have been perfecting their technique for decades.

And...

...

...(you can probably already see where I'm about to go with this if you've read my blog at all for the past decade)...

...

( Obviously incoming Trump rant behind cut )

Okay, let's go over this bit by bit, with a preemptive, hearty "Piss off" to Lindsey Graham.

( Ranting behind cut )

Unless things miraculously swerve somehow between now and when the fuck ever I happen to lurch out of bed tomorrowlater today, it looks like the United States has probably collectively brainsharted, yet again, and elected a brainshart-in-human-shape, yet the fuck again.
Fuck Donald Trump.

I will not stop saying that just because he has, somehow, almost assuredly become the goddamned President of the fucking United States of shitsucking America yet again, no more than I stopped saying it after the last time this living nightmare came to pass. The "bitter, unvarnished rage" I felt back then pales to that which I feel now, because we should have known better this time. (Too few, apparently, of us did and do know better, for what fucking good that has done.) He belongs in a prison cell or a fucking grave, not in the goddamned White House again. So yeah, fuck Donald Trump to hell forever.

Also, keep in mind, if Trump does somehow fail to make it through the next four years, JD Vance becomes President.

Oh, and the GQP have apparently also taken the entire Congress, both House and Senate, now. That, combined with the SCOTUS already having been stacked by Trump with dumbfucking assholes, along with the fact that Trump will likely get to appoint even more dumbfucking assholes to it, well, just goes to show that this country is utterly fucked up broken now, possibly irreparably.

As for the rest of the world... let's see... well, Ukraine is proper fucked now. I'm sure Putin is tickled pink, now that his puppet is back in power again. And anyone who has a problem with the way Israel is doing business in that part of the world is in for an even bigger world of hurt now than they already were. No telling what other fresh hell will come about as a result of Trump being POTUS again, either here or abroad. The dumbass is nothing if not unpredictable.

I guess the very thinnest silver lining to this is that this is the last time Trump can ever be President. You know, unless he wrecks the government so horribly to the point that the GQP becomes able to install him as dictator for the (hopefully very short) rest of his life. It's not like he hasn't floated the idea of being more than a two-term POTUS before, after all. You know, assuming he doesn't end up killing us all in a nuclear hellfire. That's still a very much not insignificant possibility, too, after all. "Destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion," and all that shit, perhaps literally.

So yeah. Pleasant dreams, everyone, for the next four years of utter hell on Earth. Oh, and 2024-2028-plus are going to be far worse than even 2016-2020 were, of that I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever. After all, there were at least a few guardrails in place back then to prevent Trump from just doing whatever the fuck he wanted. Not so much the case, this time. Trump and his army of lickspittles made sure of that.

(Speaking very selfishly here, I guess I can say, for once, that I'm glad I'm a cishet white male, because things are probably going to be very, very shitty for anyone who is not that for the next four years. But, then again, I also am neither obscenely rich nor a [hypocritical or otherwise] Christian, so... *shrug*

Well, no matter. Things are going to be shitty for everyone, even those who stupidly think that SCROTUS IMPOTUS Trump II was a wonderful idea. I just hope they live to regret it.)