claycle

I understand the sentiment, but I reserve that disgust for this country - or more specifically for our national parties and their apparatchiks. If these geriatric nincompoops are seriously the best we, as a country, can put forward to lead us, when we are simply voting on degrees of shittiness, we are probably too far gone to recover.

If you’re not holding your nose when voting for someone, you’re in trouble. The two go hand-in-hand. Be suspicious of any politician who seems so good you don’t feel the urge to hold your nose when you cast your vote for them.

As a person who has had (in the last week) three shots and a series of oral antibiotics because of a small-looking but very angry infection in my index finger from a splinter(!) that has required two trips to the doctor to (NSFL) squeeze out the pus, I can understand this. Sepsis ain’t no joke and can come from the most minor wounds.

I don’t eat fast food much at all, but a couple of months ago we went into a nearby Shake Shack to get 2 burgers, 2 iced teas, and a shared order of fries.

The bill was north of $30. Not surprising when, apart from the fact the burgers were about $10-ish each, the iced tea costs $3 each for a small. 8oz of Iced tea. That’s criminal.

Needless to say we learned our lesson and don’t eat out fast food anymore. I can sling a mean burger at home on the stove top in my cast iron pan.

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I worked for a medical imaging company that got acquired many years ago. The CFO was a nice enough guy, with the perfect blonde wife, huge suburban house, matching Lexuses for him and missus, and his son was the handsome, curly-headed quarterback with the giant fancy pickup truck (that no teenager NEEDS unless they’re the spawn of cattle ranchers…) at the best high school in the county.

But, as I said, we got acquired, and the new company sent over a junior-junior (ie, just out of school) accountant to do the boring duty of running the books. Poor kid tried and tried but he just couldn’t get the numbers to add up, so he went to his boss and apologized for not being able to do his first assignment. Boss took a look, cocked an eye, patted the kid on the back for doing an excellent job, and took it to legal.

Seems the CFO was just writing himself $50,000 checks once a month to fuel his lifestyle and “nobody knew it”. He ended up in the prison, divorced in a hot second, and his former wife and kid skedaddled out of town before the thing even went to trial.

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).

Sorry for being late:

https://filedn.com/lghoT7mSAQwSJ1ej9qTGJxL/My Recipes/Recipes/Granny’s Greenbean Casserole.html

I don’t mean to polish my knob, but I am doing a vegetarian menu this year that blows those insipid recipes out of the water. I guess I should start a foodie website and rake in that sweet-sweet ad revenue from click-bait.

(Totally being sarcastic)

Here’s the menu:

• Velouté de Châtaignes (creamy fresh chestnut soup)
• Spanish tortilla with homemade saffron aioli
• My grandmother’s green bean hot dish (excellent, not your basic beans+soup+canned fried onions mess at all)
• Roasted root vegetables with garden herbs (rutabagas, etc, with sage and rosemary from the garden)
• Winter salad with buttermilk dressing (updated Waldorf)
• Fresh corn soufflé
• Onion-Mushroom-Roquefort-Walnut tarte tatin (centerpiece dish)
• Fresh homemade pickles
• Fresh homemade baguettes
• Risalamande (Danish rice pudding for dessert)

(Preface - I’ve not yet picked up Starfield, though I have hundreds [far too many] hours in other Bethesda games; Cyberpunk 2.0, though, has thoroughly captured my attention.)

I hear what you’re saying, but the YouTube commenter apparently loves Elden Ring, which I found to be an awful game and painful to play. Man, I love complex, deeply explorable games, but I played Elden Ring for 8 hours and never felt like I was making an inch of pleasurable progress. The commenter complains about games being a chore, but what about games like Elden Ring that aren’t chores, but are literal punishment?

I guess I had trouble accepting the commenter’s point of view after he rah-rah’d for Elden Ring…

I waited until CP 2.0 to play it. I can wait for SF 2.0 to play it. I am not a unicorn in this regard.

Yup.

One of the best FPS games I ever played. Marathon I and II. This was on a Mac in the early nineties, I guess.

I really dug the music in CP2077 (and, especially, Phantom Liberty). The use of leitmotifs lifted the score. More so than in a similar game (GTA5), I really enjoyed the radio stations, too.

I also fondly recall the soundtrack of RDR2.

Does all the great music in Fallout4 count?

Just finished CP myself yesterday, with a 9 hour push through the “final day”. I had previously in my run rejected the (possible) helpful offer at the end of Phantom Liberty to find my own solution to my problem and, after spending far too much time debating over a single dialog choice, I settled on one that lead to a satisfactory, if bitter-sweet, conclusion.

The sense of finality was quite profound and pleasing. I have no wish to play my V anymore, as I think their story is done. While this means I may never revisit NC again (which makes me a little sad), I can live with that. I guess I can look forward to CP: Boston in 10 years :-).

Same, my friend and I gave up on Baldur’s Gate and will let the developer “finish” tweaking it. I like what Larian tries to do in its games, but I really, really despise the need to mash the quick save button after anything representing even minor progress because you might stumble into TPK combat while exploring. This happened to us in Divinity and when we got a whiff of the same in BG3, we wrinkled our noses and left the game.

I subsequently went on to play CP2077 v2.0 and really enjoyed myself, which I just “finished” yesterday with a satisfactory, bitter-sweet ending.

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.”

And here I am deliberately working my way though Origins->Odyssey->Valhalla so that I can completely ignore Starfield for a while until the hype train settles down and some bugs are fixed :-). I keep my eye on NMS (I was a Day 1ish player) but I feel it is soooo wide and soooo shallow it would just bore me to tears now.

Really enjoying Valhalla…

I’ve lived in Texas all my life and while it is far from a “shithole”, I am unapologetically disgusted by my home state’s current political climate.

When I was growing up (in DFW), I got a liberal (as in the tradition sense, not as a political spectrum) public education which I look back on to fondly. We were taught about sex (starting in 5th grade) and encouraged to be aware of racial issues and the root causes of hatred and encouraged to be friends with all our peers and egalitarian towards people of any color. Gayness was not mentioned, but also not condemned, and I definitely had gay friends and knew at least two gay couples in high school who were open, supported by students and teachers, and happy.

My own childhood outside of school was one of amazing freedom and self-responsibility. My parents’ rule was “be back for dinner”. We all had bikes, and we would range dozens of miles a day on them. We did crazy, stupid, amazingly fun things all by ourselves as children. We got in trouble, we got hurt, but we learned how to be self-reliant and entertain ourselves and we never did anything “criminal” nor were we ever threatened by anyone.

I saw my state elect a liberal female governor who was amazeballs and famously stuck George W Bush with her barbed tongue.

But what always existed, underneath, was what we called the “Old Boy Network”, which really was just code for white, wealthy, privileged, bigoted men. Clayton Williams, who infamously ran for governor, was a prime example of the type.

So, while Texas was - and I think still will be - on a grand trajectory towards being an enlightened, liberal, egalitarian state in my childhood, it got twisted up and corrupted (I point my finger at Reaganism and Religious Extremism as the starting points, at least in my awareness) until we now have a hateful little troll as governor, a shitbag full of cronies, and voters who think Donald Trump represents the ideal American who should be president (again).

I love Texas, or loved it, but now I am dismayed by it - by the hatred and the ignorance that it just seems to be oozing now. I hate the fact that this has happened to my state and after spending my entire adult life voting and speaking against this trend, I now just want to leave.

Unfortunately, I can’t think of any other state in the Union I would leave to. They all have problems. The symptom of Texas is just one of the most visible of the disease that affects our entire country.

Hatred and fear of the other, the least American value I can think of, has finally blossomed, nurtured by people who would rather see this country descend into war than dare teach that the powerful people in this country have treated the powerless people in it very, very badly for a very, very long time.

Although I delight when I hear Keith David in Mass Effect or any game, I can reach farther back in time memory: Keith David will always be this wonderful man to me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dN8Z7y_QcwE (slightly spoilers)