Month: April 2022

So ~$37k for a manual Integra. Their big selling point was the stick, and it puts the price at almost $40k. Purchase cost, including taxes, registrations, etc. is going to be well over $40k.

Okay? I don’t understand the logic behind that.

The manual Supra now will exist, and it’s clocking around $60k.

Inflation is a step function, and it keeps on stepping.

My life is sort of ridiculous.

I got distracted while drinking coffee. Something went down the wrong pipe, and I started hacking.

Now, since I was around other people, I tried to stop coughing while I ran to the next room. That made the incipient coughing worse, so once I got to the next room, I was really hacking up a lung. For maybe ten minutes after that I’d have a stray cough or two. Eventually things settled down.

So obviously I might have covid. Coughing is a symptom!

And I sitting there, listening to my brain, and one side is very tired.

That side said, “You had coffee in your mouth! You felt yourself try to talk while drinking. It’s obviously the coffee.”

And the other side said, “Maybe it’s caffeinated covid. Very dangerous. Hmm?”

And I sit there, hearing these two thoughts, and I know one is absurd. Yet I wonder. It’s my thought, after all.

I’m cautiously optimistic about Amazon Vella, but I can’t get a read on it. It’s serial fiction, and the most popular serial fiction currently available is comic books. But Vella doesn’t pubilsh comics. Likewise, kids picture books are basically serial fiction, because there’s, like, 400 fairie books. But you couldn’t publish them on Vella. The medium looks interesting.

I may need to stop reading Matt Levine for a little while. He needs to take it down an Elon-Musk notch.

Stopped reading Jalopnik. That website is just a sea of negativity and hate.

I got qualifying exams in two weeks, and I’m frankly panicking. This isn’t a bad time to panic, as I have plenty of time to study up. But I’m going all in prepping for these stupid things.

Given some uncertainty in my situation, I may not be able to retake them. As such, I really need to pass. It’s doable, just hard. It might not matter, but I’m going to make sure that if I do have to walk away from the program, it won’t be because I dropped a ball.

Anyway, updates sporadic until May 1st, if they happen at all.

I get a text, ‘Are you okay’ out of the blue from a friend I haven’t spoken to in years.

I was startled for a moment. That’s an odd first contact. But we were reasonably good friends for a bit, so I say, ‘Yes, how are you?’ She answers but doesn’t say much.

Hasn’t said anything since.

So weird, right?

Except as I thought about it, I bet that message was sent years ago and just didn’t get delivered until now. I bet from her perspective, I sent a random cold text and she’s wondering what’s that about.

Life is weird, but when you understand why, it’s anticlimactic.

Would be a fantastic slogan for a rebellion.

If you buy a vehicle from David Tracy, you really should know what you’re getting yourself into.

By all accounts he’s a likable, friendly human being, but his collection of cars is….less than factory-new.

I would donate $5 to a pay-this-nice-lady-back fund, but only because I will laugh very hard the entire time.

A few games I play are sunsetting. It’s oddly sad.

I play three games on my phone consistently.

In terms of time, the top two are Shproty and Antiyoy. I’ve been playing Antiyoy since 2017, and have ported it along between phones ever since. It’s a hex-map, turn-based stategy game. Shproty just came out, and it’s a puzzler. You fit shapes into bigger shapes and obey certain rules.

The other one is Exponential Idle. It’s a pure math incremental game, but it seems to be done. If I had more time, I’d make a custom theory, but alas.

I also play, ‘Suppose I win the lottery and could buy a house. Where would I move in Denver?’ But that’s not nearly as rewarding.

Do we all know Dracula is a don’t-have-sex book?

The stranger, tall, dark, and handsome, but also foreign and exotic, comes to London to visit. He sneaks into the maidens’ bedrooms at night, there’s a lot of neck kissing, and he takes their fluids. They die. First they give it, vampirism, to other people including an infant, but they die.

John Harker, who visited Dracula in his run-down castle, was delayed by Dracula’s three wives in their bedroom. He wasn’t doing that in Victorian London. The castle is full of towers, but broken and tumbled.

I was talking to someone about Dracula, and I mentioned it’s a sex-book. The sex is subtext, but it’s super obvious once you realize it’s there. The other guy looked at me strangely. It’s a don’t-have-sex book, but that’s like slasher movies. A bunch of sexy teens have sex on a beach, and they die. In Drazula, a bunch of sexy people have sex in London, and they die.

Ninety percent of you are reading this and thinking, yeah, of course. But for the someone who never really thought about it, that’s what it’s about. Also, vampires.