Bye-bye, Fear of the Walking Dead. I seem to be easing out of pop culture.

I get the whole grand metaphor going on here- people need a way to think about the unthinkable, a way to mentally prepare to some extent for the worst-possible-scenarios that the future might hold, but they don’t want to have to mentally deal with those scenarios in raw form. They need to mull over the issues but at a certain remove.

MGTOW – Response to “Opinion: MGTOW”

“In many ways you’re right, it is “essentially the same ideology”, but I think your are more right than you realize. It is not just a mirror-image ideology with the genders reversed, in many ways MGTOW and feminism are the same phenomenon…”

“MGTOW is the success of feminism. This is what that success looks like. So long as non-participation is increasingly the most rational reaction to the situation for males the movement will continue to grow, whatever the label, visible or not.”

MGTOW – The Red Pill – Australian TV, not Cassie Jaye, is determined to miss the point.

It’s time we stopped thinking like metaphorical lemmings, following the herd to whatever destination they lead us to without objection or dissent, and start thinking like human beings instead, with some compassion for other humans regardless of gender, even in the face of societal or media disapproval.

Damn… Fitbit number 2, RIP

Just this morning I noticed that it was dead. Nothing comes up on-screen, the green LEDs that monitor blood in the wrist don’t come on. I didn’t think I could have let the charge go that low without noticing, but as I say it’s hard to be sure. I put it on a USB charger, no immediate response, so I put a little USB volt/ammeter in series with it, and it showed 5.01 volts and .05 amps. Seemed like a good sign, at least it was taking a charge… but after a while the amps dropped to zero, usually indicating a full charge, and the wristband is still very dead.

Survival: Mini Life-Lessons: A bald spot is a helluva thing to have to deal with.

Some years back I rented a convertible for a week in Maui, the selection of vehicles at the rental place being almost entirely convertibles or Jeeps. That’s when I was forced to come to grips with one of the hard realities about growing older.

A bald spot is a helluva thing to have to deal with.

Tech – Element 14’s new Pi Desktop- This One Might Be Important – Update: utter disappointment

The Raspberry Pi is very I/O bound, always has been. The latest processor is a four-core and amazingly capable for the price, the 1 mb of memory is pretty scanty but enough to run Linux well, the memory access is plenty fast enough, but of all the “storage” access, the micro-SD card socket, the USB ports, the Ethernet jack, the on-board Bluetooth and Wifi, the fastest is… the USB ports. USB 2.0. That’s just sad, and really, really hampers the user experience. Anyone who has upgraded their main machine from a hard drive to a solid-state drive will tell you that it’s the single most effective thing you can do to improve the entire user experience, short of upgrading a whole machine… and the Raspberry Pi is sort of in the opposite direction, with storage being slower rather than faster.

Happy Straw Hat Day!

Generally, I observe this stuff to some degree. Sort of. That is, I usually don’t wear straw hats (or reasonable facsimiles) until after Straw Hat Day, but the reverse doesn’t hold true much, because they’re silly in the rain, and I won’t go bare-headed in the rain by choice, so I end up wearing felt hats on occasion all summer. Also, some outfits just scream out for a felt hat rather than a straw.

Survival – The Heels-Down Squat. You May Want This.

Put another way, how enabled, how independent and self-sufficient can you possibly be if you cannot get into a comfortable, non-reclining resting position without the aid of a wooden or steel framework that is designed and built specifically for that purpose? We are handicapping ourselves with what has become an actual medical dependence on chairs, just as though we were dependent on any other medical appliance.

Survival – The Importance of Fire

While I was being told about this, standing around in our kitchen, wearing only shorts and a t-shirt since I hadn’t gone out yet on a Saturday, I reached in a pocket, pulled out a lighter and flicked it into life. No, I don’t smoke, I just understand that fire is really that important. I could have just as easily produced a knife or a flashlight, and I have an electronic compass in my casual watch and another in my phone. That’s lounging around the house, not going anywhere. When I’m leaving the house I carry more. If I’m driving or walking more than a block or two, much more.

MGTOW- More Blither Against It, this time from Down Under

This ends with the statement that the “greater good” doesn’t actually exist, which I happen to agree with. Look at hive insects, which are a huge success as an evolutionary strategy, seemingly satisfying the “common good” concept, but don’t provide a single individual life worth living… but then in the very next sentence we get:

“Start looking into this “manosphere” and it’s like going down a rabbit hole — happiness here is supposedly freedom.”

Um, wait… am I missing something here? Is there evidence I’ve missed that happiness is actually slavery?

Survival – I Carry Too Much Stuff

When I go out the door on a typical out-and-about day, I have my wallet (with some unusual items inside but no cash), a folding knife, a lighter, spare car key, money clip with bills, a Chawley Changer pocket coin dispenser (okay, that’s a little weird, but it’s fast, convenient, and I hate having loose change sloshing around in a pocket), a full-sized multi-tool, one of may folding knives (occasionally two), a lipstick-sized flashlight around my neck on a stainless dog-tag chain .. and of course my phone. That’s not counting the stuff on my key chain, miscellaneous keys, a tiny titanium peanut lighter, the tiniest ferrocerium rod I’ve ever seen (Boy Scouts of America, smaller than a house key), a photon lighter, a P38 can opener, and the car-door opener/alarm remote control.