9 hours ago, Guard Dog said:

Hey everyone. Hope you guys are all doing well in this crazy f---d up world we find ourselves in. I was unaware of Charlie Kirk until this morning. Gwen and I have been exploring Zion National Park since August. We've been staying at Watchman Campground mostly but we did backpack out to Lava Point and primitive camped for a few nights. This is by far one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen. 

Hanging out in Salt Lake City now. Then taking a trip down I-40 to Tennessee. I have some business to wrap up there bore heading back to Wisconsin. Life has been pretty good. We had almost no cell coverage in the park and almost never turned the radio on. The world is a wonderful place if you can just divorce yourself from all the negativity. 

 

Hope you guys are all ok. It's been a while. 

Sounds like a great life, nice one GD

 I cant imagine not being connected to news but it clearly can be done and it sounds very healthy 👌

14 hours ago, Hurlshort said:

Zion is one of my favorites. Hiking the Narrows with my wife and kids was just magical. Glad to hear you are doing well.

Zionist.

On 9/17/2025 at 4:47 PM, Hurlshort said:

Zion is one of my favorites. Hiking the Narrows with my wife and kids was just magical. Glad to hear you are doing well.

Yes, Utah has some really beautiful scenery. I never appreciated it until we took a photography tour down there. It's a terrific place for sunset lighting. Of course, the geologist down there blamed us up in Washington for "stealing" all their rain.

Edited September 19, 20251 yr by rjshae
TYpo fix

Time moves faster every day, but I woke up this morning and it's apparently still Trump (and Trump-think)-era, so it's not moving fast enough.

I occasionally still watch docs re: international/S. Korea adoptees (60's-80's, culture, psychology, trauma), because it's interesting/explains a lot, at least for many of us. I mean, it doesn't mean tons to me personally at this point, but it's still extremely relatable. I still feel like an alien sometimes, in that "I don't belong anywhere", culturally, social-class/status perception, other.

Anyway, hubby and I the usual, he took today off, we're going to go waste the day somewhere for a while, spend some cash, eat some good food. Then probably come home and nap.  😛

Got fed up squinting at file names on the 27" 1440 etc so I replaced it with the earlier LED 40" 4k TV (and its heavy swinging-stand, argh). Since it'll only be used for program monitoring and browsing, don't care about uber clarity and put the windows app scale sizing at 125%. That+bigger screen size works better. But -

OLED and this LED are both LG. Meaning the remote/s work on both at once. Which is fine when I want to turn both off for the night. But trying to adjust other settings has everything popping up on both TV's rather randomly. Or if I only want to turn off the LED to reduce monitor light (film watching).  Have to hold remotes super close to TV and at an angle to prevent it.

Oh well - at least I can read stuff from sitting-distance and still have more windows visible etc.  😛

Edit: also having both be 4k = less dual-display resolution/positioning issues.

Edited September 22, 20251 yr by LadyCrimson

When you get one of those emails telling you you received money and all you need to do is check the attached file, 

then you hover over the sender - out of curiosity - and the address is @ troy

The file comes from Troy?

So it is by definition a Trojan file?

In a way I don't even begrudge them any money they swindle out of people.

I went to a 30th anniversary showing of ghost in the shell.

It still holds up 

I noticed something interesting to me...we flew back from Mexico last weekend and this time O'Hare customs didnt even ask to see my wife and I passport! It turns out the process for US citizens has changed from a human being physically checking your passport and comparing it to you standing there, to completely biometric facial scanning. It was awesome and reduced what is normally around a 1.5 hour process to mere minutes! I was pretty impressed that it took the software less than one second to recognize me and put a little green check mark next to my picture. 

Mission impossible masks here we come. 

On 9/29/2025 at 12:19 PM, Gorgon said:

Mission impossible masks here we come. 

My brain went to the Minority Report "surgically change your eyeballs" stuff, but same difference.

Tech grew faster than I expected for my single lifetime, but at least I'm still pretty sure I'll be dead before walking down a street/in a park = Minority Report levels of digital/commercial recognition bombardment. Right? Right.

Edited October 1, 2025Oct 1 by LadyCrimson

4 hours ago, LadyCrimson said:

My brain went to the Minority Report "surgically change your eyeballs" stuff, but same difference.

Tech grew faster than I expected for my single lifetime, but at least I'm still pretty sure I'll be dead before walking down a street/in a park = Minority Report levels of digital/commercial recognition bombardment. Right? Right.

It's all happening right now I'm afraid, With AI powered facial recognition.  American law enforcement wants what the British have had for decades already ; eye in the sky cameras on every major road.

Of course they would rent out your data for targeted advertising as well, why not. Money is nice. 

^ All the more reason to not leave the house (since I'm lucky enough to have a house) and stay under cover of the patio deck roof.  

I got myself a Lumix micro 4/3 pocket camera a week ago with the intent of just keeping it in my jacket and taking the opportunities for shooting things that might present themselves during the day. 

Today I decided I would go hunting for Russian drones on my bike ride.   No luck yet.  On a whim I ordered a tele lens,  doesn't arrive for a week though. I'll have to hope "peace" doesn't break out before then.

For context 

The Russians are running a hybrid campaign where they are pretending not to send in military drones over our airports and pretending not to threaten our coastguard helicopters and pretending not to attempt to  hack and take down critical infrastructure. It's like the cold war all over again. 

 

Drone flight paths near Kastrup airport. I bike past there all the time.

There's been reports about hacked hospitals here again as well. Very likely that we know who's causing this.

I just watered my peach trees

Nothing important, but running around crankily doing stuff in public (ugh) today, I was once again reminded that I am so glad that mind-reading isn't an actual thing.

 

Edited October 5, 2025Oct 5 by LadyCrimson

I'm considering changing my forum nickname to CrabbyCrimson. It might be more appropriate these days. 😛

 

Today I slashed my wrist.

 

I was cutting custom tiles to make a table with my art. On the very last tile the cutting line hadn't been deep enough so the tile snapped badly and went straight for my wrist.

Good thing the pharmacy is only a minute away, so they patched me up.

 

Lesson to be learned from this:

When the internet says "wear gloves, accidents happen", wear gloves, accidents happen.

 

Of course when it comes down to it, it's a win win situation:

I got an awesome table and I can impress the ladies with my bandages hand

I thought I experienced the worst a dentist can offer, but removing a tooth is a new low. The snapping sound of tooth and bone is going to stick with me...

My newest low in experiences today was going for lunch, and as I got up to leave and was checking that I wasn't accidentally knocking into the guy seated behind me, my gaze swept across the screen of his phone just as someone was sending him a *short for Richard* pic.

Men are pigs.

really dread the day one would be forced to switch to windows 11

should never moved on from xp

1 hour ago, uuuhhii said:

really dread the day one would be forced to switch to windows 11

should never moved on from xp

Windows 11 is great, you shouldn't have have any issues and the upgrade from 10 is online and works well and its free 

5 hours ago, uuuhhii said:

really dread the day one would be forced to switch to windows 11

should never moved on from xp

Win11 at work is strange, right click menu needs time to load.

Win11 is ok-ish most of the time if you change some config stuff first (like bringing back the original right-click menu and changing explorer tree view). However, it's still a terrible experience compared to 10 or 7.

Im going Linux whenever they decide to force always online for logins, which might be soon.