Keyrock

For no reason whatsoever here's a marmot eating corn:

I went to see the Charlotte Knights host the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp (tremendous team name). I guess it's no longer BB&T Ballpark, now it's Truist Field. Anyway, it was a nice evening and night, minus the rain from the bottom of the 6th until the top of the 8th. Knights won it 3-2 in the 10th inning on the ol' suicide squeeze play. Once I got a beer and a half in I got to heckling the 1st base umpire, as you do. Good times.

Overpriced Carolina dog (chili & slaw), overpriced pretzel, and overpriced hefeweizen at the ballpark.

Yeah, that's faulty logic for allowing more surveillance and control. I'm willing to bet that most people have at least 1 or 2 skeletons in their closet. I, myself, may need a bigger closet in the future. For the sake of argument, let's just assume that Janet, a 17 year old student I just created out of thin air, is squeaky clean. She gets good grades, she doesn't smoke or do drugs, she's friendly to everyone, and she goes to church every Sunday. Janet has no problem with people snooping on her data and having control of her money, plus the current administration legitimately has our best intentions at heart (a likely story ). Their goal for snooping on data and installing systems to control money is to find suspicious activity, for example people buying lots of weapons, ammo, and chemicals that could be used to make explosives, that could be an indicator of a terrorist group. Janet supports centralized digital currency and the measure is pushed through legislature and instituted. Fast forward 10 years. Janet has made some mistakes in her life, this is a thing that people do. She got in with a bad crowd went down a dark road and did some things she now regrets. She's mostly back on the up and up, but she now has some things in her past that don't exactly portray her in the best light. More importantly, the administration has changed and this new administration has different views and is much more authoritarian. Janet is not a fan of this new administration and is part of a group speaking out against them. Said new administration now has the ammunition (mistakes in her past) to paint Janet as a dangerous individual and the tools (CDC) to freeze her bank account, the very tools she supported a decade earlier. This authoritarian administration has no qualms whatsoever with using flimsy arguments, or even fabricating "evidence" as an excuse to use the tools they inherited to their full extent to stamp out political dissidents. People don't think these things through. They're fine with giving the government tools of control when people they like and agree with are in control because those nasty people from the other side can be silenced with them. What happens when the people from the other side come into power and inherit said tools? Oops. Anyway, sorry to get political in this thread. I'm going to a baseball game today.

As far as conspiracy theories go, I think this is a rather plausible one, give that data has become one of the top, if not THE TOP, commodities of the internet era. The data doesn't necessarily have to be used for nefarious purposes, it could just be companies trying to asses spending patterns for sales strategies. Still, I'm not cool with it.

There's that, plus the conspiracy theory angle is that digital purchases are easy to track whereas cash purchases are much harder to track. So if somebody wants to know what people are buying, when, and how often, whether it's the government doing the snooping, corporations, or whoever, that's easy to do if everybody buys everything digitally.

If they lose in the first round then they don't have to travel at all after that. #LightTheBeam

The hasn't been any major advance in firearms in well over a century. There were 3 big breakthroughs in firearm design that caused a paradigm shift that all happened within 10 or 15 years of each other at the tail end of the 19th century: Smokeless powder, self-loading action, and spritzer bullets. It took some 20 or 30 years for people to figure out how to best implement these advances, but since then not much has changed. The biggest improvements have been in optics, but there's nothing stopping anyone from mounting a modern optic on an old gun. It might be inconvenient because old guns don't come standard with picatinny rails, but it's doable. Other than that, the use of polymers has allowed guns to be lighter, but beyond that not much of anything has changed. You could put a Sturmgewehr from WW2 into action right now and, ignoring the logistics of supplying your troops with 8mm Kurz ammo, it would be a perfectly serviceable combat rifle today. Similarly, the Mosin Nagant's biggest downside is, as you stated, that it's bolt action. Other than that, it's a perfectly functional gun.

What is Swish? Regarding banks, it is worrying when some of them start going under then the fed has to bail them out. Oops, that's right, the current administration has assured out that they won't bail out banks any more, so instead it's an "injection of capital" or whatever flowery synonym for bail out they're using these days. Then they feed us the hilarious line that taxpayers won't pay a cent for this. Bull****, taxpayers ALWAYS foot the bill, one way or another, they'll just get creative in how they disguise and distribute said bill. Far more worrying than that, though, is the potential for our government to leverage this and use it as a scare tactic to get people to buy into a centralized digital currency. We MUST reject any and all attempts to institute a CDC or any steps toward that end at all turns because a CDC has some terrifying dystopian implications. Even if the current administration's aims for instituting a CDC are completely benign (a likely story) that doesn't mean a future administration wouldn't abuse the power and control it would inherit over people's money. Once we allow the government to take away any of our liberties in the name of "security" they will never give them back (see also: Patriot Act).

Unmasking the Idol (1986) - The adventures of debonair spy/ninja Duncan Jax and his baboon partner Boon. Duncan and Boon must stop the sale of nuclear weapons to terrorists and stop the mysterious and deadly Scarlet Leader. This is an unashamed James Bond ripoff with a baboon twist with what looks to be a medium-ish budget. It's a quality B movie that entertains throughout, even if it's extremely derivative. I got the blu-ray from the fine folks at Vinegar Syndrome and the quality is superb, as usual; the restored 2K visuals are terrific. Included is a two-sided poster: The top is the new VinSyn artwork, the bottom, I assume, is the original 1986 artwork. Hopefully VinSyn gives this treatment to the sequel Order of the Black Eagle. Supposedly, it's the superior of the 2 movies, largely due to higher Boon screen time. The man playing Duncan Jax, Ian Hunter, isn't bad, but he has barely more charisma than notable charisma black hole Robert Ginty. On the other hand, the screen lights up any time Boon is on it. Seriously, Boon is the best. Vinegar Syndrome is an awesome company. If you like B movies, cult classics, and weird foreign films, support VinSyn. Their releases cost more but you get the highest possible version of the movie with any and all extras they can throw in. They're the Criterion Collection of B movies.

That Lakers vs Wolves game... That sure was a game, alright.

There's a lot of "if they stay healthy" in these playoffs. I guess that's true to some degree every year, but it seems magnified this year. If they stay healthy, the Lakers can do some real damage and possibly even make the finals. Do I trust Anthony Davis to make it a couple months without landing wrong and going down? Nope. If the Suns stay healthy they're my pick to win it all. Do I trust KD to go 2 months without some weird injury? Nope. Factoring in health probabilities, I'd say my pick is the Bucks. With a healthy Khris Middletown I think they would have won last year, but that sort of what if could be applied every year.

I can't count the Dubs out given they're the defending champs and they still have Steph and Klay and Draymond. However, they're almost certainly going to be the road team in every series and they've been ABYSMAL on the road this season.

Easter Feast Mode Activated

Happy Easter folks!

I thought A Scanner Darkly was quite interesting and that was a drug movie. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas featured a metric ****ton of drugs, not sure if it's strictly a drug movie, but that definitely wasn't dull. In other news, Without having seen anything beyond the trailer released, I'm already convinced that Cade - The Tortured Crossing will be the greatest movie in the history of cinema.

The Singleton 12 year old Speyside Scotch whisky. Remarkably easy drinking with a sweet-ish fruity flavor. I can definitely taste apples and toffee.

I made sałatka jarzynowa for Easter.

If nothing else, the art style is great.

Do the rule changes only apply at the major league level or have/will they apply to the minor leagues as well? While I'm not one to watch baseball on TV, I do like going to the park. I make at least one, often more, trip per year to BB&T Ballpark to watch our AAA Charlotte Knights play.

After a break where I played no vidya games whatsoever, part of that was a weekend trip to see my parents in southern Florida, I'm back to AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative. One thing I'm quite happy to report is that they keep adding new twists to somniums (the main gameplay element of the series, an Inception-like dream world puzzle). The first game already had a decent variety of how things worked, but now they've added in new elements like reversed and/or inverted controls to increase the stress level. Somniums have a time limit, but they also have a function where time (almost completely) stops when you don't move, giving you ample time to think things through. Once you start moving again time flows normally, and, outside of the first 1 or 2 tutorial-esque somniums, the time you have to work with leaves little room for mistakes. Adding in borked controls and/or shifted perspective further heightens the tension of trying to complete the somnium in time. Of course, you can lower the difficulty and give yourself more time to work with. I'm not going to do that because puzzles are my jam, so I want them difficult.

With all these changes to MLB rules, I'm almost curious enough to watch a game on TV. Almost.