Month: March 2025

Nope

Done. Nope. Not. Nope.

The device is called i (phone). That’s a nice marketing ploy but the phone part of the device is the least useful aspect of the thing. The number of phone calls that include a smooth, easy to have, back and forth dialogue are damn near zero in this year of 2025.

The phone is not a phone. It’s a computer with software that simulates phone calls of yesterday.

Does anyone remember full duplexing?

I do. It was what a fucking telephone used to do and it was amazing. I have not done any research but my gut feeling is they it’s as dead as a dinosaur. When was the last time anyone talked to anyone else on this stupid pocket computer and had a real dialogue where both parties – especially if there were only two people talking – could hear all the words spoken?

Maybe it was Y2K. Or thereabouts. Full duplex communication doesn’t exist easily in our wifi world because it’s cheap. Cheap as in it doesn’t include the necessary technical layers to enable full duplex comms. So. We get voip and chop and drop and sure call from anywhere but don’t expect to be able to have a real dialogue.

Well, that’s weird.

No. No it’s not at all weird that the calls drop or sound weird or exclude a packet here and there so you cannot hear properly.

It’s weird that this shit works at all. It’s very rickety and very insecure.

No full duplex. Only half. And no COBOL is not just an ‘archaic programming language’, it’s also extremely hard to break into which is why your bank – yes, bank – has it running in their systems too.

They’re everywhere

These guys wrecking all the things in the so-called administrative state are the same ones who have funneled money into our payment processing systems so insidiously that there really is no escape and no extraction.

Parents and schools need to be able to connect and communicate with each other. It’s a problem as old as schools and humans. What happens when a government is starved for money because tax breaks go to the super rich guys? An example is a for profit entity funded by the guys who took the tax breaks and then used their money to make more money for themselves while integrating their tech into schools around the world.

I won’t name names for the sake of black listing myself. Who knows at this point maybe I’m already on a list. At this rate it won’t be long since nothing is private and hasn’t been for well over a decade.

It’s too little too late. There is absolutely no one coming to help the people. The overlords have the keys to almost every room of the kingdom with one massive and crucial exception. The hearts, critical thinking and souls of the people who see the truth and will not be told they don’t.

Keep some cash in your fireproof box and fine, you can keep calling me chicken little but you should be calling me Cassandra.

Directions

Can’t find a way there

Being the nerd that I am, I wanted the exact mileage based on googles default route from here to there. I’ve never seen this result before.

The day the music died

I mindlessly snacked on Honey Nut Cheerios while the end of the world started. I’d already read all the things, understood all the realities, warned and whined, donated and drowned myself in independent media. The end of something should mean the beginning of a new, maybe even hopeful stage but not this ending. The one I watched during the last decade was – and maybe historians one day will deem it so – a brilliant and horrifying convergence of efforts from a few factions who do not believe in the common good or any of the things that help to create a functioning society.

The technofascists. The white supremacists. The christian nationalists. The but-maybes (but maybe it’ll be ok when…). And all the other hangers on who make justifications for their aggrieved state while the system kicks their ass and the other hangers on who have stolen all the wealth from the rest of us. There are no rules they really have to follow even if a judge says what the rules actually are. How do you hold the unaccountable to account when nothing has worked?

So, I watched the music dying and the Senators kibbitzing on the stately, blue carpet feeling both helpless and grateful. The gratitude for my personal world being relatively calm at the moment is real. So many Americans do not understand how bad things can get. I want to rewind but wishing and magical thinking is not my strong suit.

I am desperate in my nightmares to stop the horror from coming but it has been here all along. Now it’s just building up strength like a tsunami powering from one side of the ring of fire to all the other shores. There will be a reckoning. What shape it takes and how or when or if it comes at all is unknowable. Meanwhile, even if Cheerios don’t help, they’re a decent pacifier for this exasperatingly sad day.

Time heals

The platitude ‘time heals all wounds’ doesn’t work for me and never has. It’s been five years since CT’s been gone and it still hurts like it did before. Maybe it kinda feels even worse because others have gone more recently. I don’t know how grief works but I feel like it’s been intertwined in me since before I was double digits years old.

There is rain today / I really don’t mind at all / The sun is still there

Winter-turning-to-spring-sky

How to deal with facing something big

Observe. Do the pros and cons lists. (Things within reach with lower overhead. Managing environments.) All the things. Write it all down.

Orient. Using all the observations👆🏻get comfortable with what it’s saying. Be both as objective as possible and use the emotions to inform by observing intentionally.

Decide. Feel what has the biggest influences and then…decide. Once a decision is made, move on.

Act. There’s a lot to this part and it boils down to making real whatever’s been decided upon.

Rinse. Retro. Repeat. Remember. (OODALoop is not something I invented, I did add the R’s)

Having the time for making things – that might even someday be sellable – is in the ‘feels good’ category