Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
A year ago I asked my boss if I could work remotely from Arizona for a couple months and she said yes, so I am picking up Joelle on Christmas Eve in Pittsburgh, going to her mothers in Poland, Ohio on Christmas Day, and on the 26th packing up the truckster and driving, with Thurston Howl, to Tempe. We’re going to take our time and break it up over five to six days, and I am still debating the wisdom of telling you fuckers our exact itinerary.
I am tired, depressed, demoralized, angry, upset, and off kilter. Everything feels unmoored and supposed allies are all screaming at each other when there is an obvious big bad that needs to be dealt with. And I have a sinus headache. It’s not even 8 pm and I am going to bed.
Does anyone know how the blackout worked today? Any anecdotal evidence?
This is Jack, aka the farting bandit. Last night, as I was going to bed, he came in, came over, made me scratch his ears, then turned around, passed gas, and left the room. Other than that, he is a very, very good boy, and he loves car rides and dinner and never once has given a nazi salute.
Trump has already done a number of unconscionable things. I intend to discuss none of them. It’s not going away, and there is no point spiraling on day one.
Off to watch some fantasy tv- the West Wing.
And I really can not say this enough, this is the first inning and we have not even been up to bat. Nothing is served if you spiral or self-harm or burn out. We need healthy soldiers, so take care of yourself.
If you have ptsd, anxiety, depression, you are not required to watch the events of today. You just aren’t. Do something else. Go swimming. Clean the house. Read. Immerse yourself in a tv series or fantasy game. You do not need to sit there paralyzed with fear doom scrolling the internet while watching the shitshow. You just don’t.
And if you have a drinking or substance abuse problem, these motherfuckers are not worth your sobriety or mental health. Reach out to someone for help if you need it. Talk to someone here. Email me.
Take care of yourselves.
Joelle and I had a productive day, getting the house organized and cleaning and what not, and we rewarded ourselves by a little jaunt to a phoenix dive bar called Harvey Wineburger’s. Joelle has been so miserable from being cooped up for the past month that she was just dying to go do something that was not physical therapy, so off we went:
As usual, Joelle was happy as can be and I had resting bitch face and looked like a hostage in a proof of life picture, but that’s just how it is. We both had gut bomb burgers and fries and she had a mini pitcher of beer which was fun for her because Nurse Cole has not let her drink while she was on painkillers. Not that she drinks a lot, she doesn’t, but I am kinda strict about that shit. I treat pain pills like they are blasting caps that could blow up at any time.
Best part of the whole date (and the food was great) is that we were back home by 6:30 pm. Nothing good happens at night out in public for olds. That is for the drunks and the young.
The fact that Donald Trump is already fucking his hardcore supporters before he is even inaugurated is giving me life. First, all the MAGA fuckers who traveled there for the inauguration are now screaming for refunds because he moved it inside and they have NOTHING to do. Like nothing. They can’t get into the balls or parties because they never could because Trump and his ilk view them as trash, so you have a bunch of racist douchebags from all over the country who spent money they don’t have to travel there and now are just, I dunno, drinking in their Best Western. Fucking love it.
Second, he rolled out a new pump and dump cryptocurrency, and the fleecing is going to be fucking brutal and I am fucking here for it:
President-elect Donald Trump late Friday launched a cryptocurrency token that exploded in value overnight, potentially increasing his net worth by tens of billions of dollars on paper just days before he is set to be sworn in as president.
Trump launched the so-called memecoin — a digital token with no intrinsic real-world value that is traded on a digital ledger technology called blockchain — with posts on his social media site and X after 9 p.m., prompting the asset to soar in value. Its market capitalization was above $5 billion as of 2:30 p.m. Saturday, according to data from CoinGecko, and it has seen more than $11 billion in trading volume.
Give it to them good and hard, Donald.
In other news, Thurston Howl has been such a fucking asshole that Joelle and I were scheming today to try to get an animal shelter to take a couple hundred dollar donation and keep Thurston in general population at the pound for a few days. Kind of like the old scared straight programs when they would send teen-agers to prisons to have the inmates try to scare them.
We cancelled this idea when we realized Thurston would probably just pick up more bad behaviors in jail.
That’s it for me. Keep safe.
Not much going on here, just watching Deadwood.
There were a number of enraging news stories today, and I think I just got to my limit on bullshit around 3pm and now can’t remember what they were. That means i get a temporary reprieve but will unfortunately have to go through the same god damned thing tomorrow.
I was informed today that I have entire conversations with Steve and Maxwell while I am working and that some days I talk to them more than her. I knew I talked to them but I did not realize it was that much.
In other news, Vivek is about to learn just how fucking racist a lot of Ohio is, so that is funny.
Here’s one for you- name a performance in a recurring character as good as Ian McShane in Deadwood.
I’ve been in a touch of a mood the past few days, and this article goes a long way to explaining why:
Whether I am engaging with the news, or with Musk tweeting constantly like a man with no job or friends, or with Zuckerberg sending out weird videos and appearing on Rogan, I am in pain. Not just because I don’t like what they are doing but because they are so incredibly, painfully cringe.
I knew that one day we might have to watch as capitalism and greed and bigotry led to a world where powerful men, deserving or not, would burn it all down. What I didn’t expect, and don’t think I could have foreseen, is how incredibly cringe it would all be. I have been prepared for evil, for greed, for cruelty, for injustice – but I did not anticipate that the people in power would also be such huge losers.
I’ve always been someone who cannot tolerate embarrassment. I hate being embarrassed more than just about any other emotion and I’ve always skipped content based on cringe humour like Meet the Parents, Borat or Nathan for You. It makes my skin crawl and it makes the contents of my stomach try to crawl out of my mouth. But I cannot skip world events.
I just wish they would give us a fucking number. How much money do you need until you will fuck off and leave us alone. Go buy an island and do ketamine and disappear.
I’m just so fired of being fucked with by these guys. Meanwhile, this fucking jackass:
It’s clear that more time is needed to find an American buyer for TikTok.
We will continue working to keep TikTok alive, protect content creators’ livelihoods, protect against CCP surveillance, and protect national security.
I will work with the Trump Admin to find a solution.
— Chuck Schumer (@schumer.senate.gov) January 16, 2025 at 1:06 PM
Man, if only you had been in charge of the Senate and could have done something to stop it from being banned. Fucking dipshit.
Look, I am not here to debate the merits of the tiktok ban for national security reasons, and the reason I am not is because I have no information. The reason I have no information is because these motherfuckers decided not to tell us, just that it needed to be banned. So they rushed and banned it, and now, with Americans saying fuck you and leaving tiktok before the ban to flock two Red Note, an actual Chinese app:
As a TikTok ban looms, hundreds of thousands of Americans casting about for a new video-sharing app have migrated to Xiaohongshu, a social media platform that translates as “Little Red Book,” the American nickname for a classic compendium of quotations from Chairman Mao. It has all played out like a global practical joke on the American government: Threatened with exile from TikTok over concerns of Chinese interference, its users have simply scrolled to a different Chinese app, one whose name evokes the Chinese Communist Party.
If, in fact, tiktok is doing all sorts of illegal data collection, the thing that would have made sense to me is to state what they were doing that was so bad, and then ban those methods and apply them across the board to ALL apps. But they didn’t because what they wanted to do was to just rush it through, ban it, and give a boost to domestic apps, which have been every bit as abusive with your data as anything the Chinese want to do. How do I know that? Because actual functioning government bodies have proven it in Europe.
Has anyone at FB paid a price for the Cambridge Analytica stuff in 2016? The Russian disinfo campaigns. The Covid bullshit? The militia organizing. The targeting of lgbtq+ and POC? Fuck no. What about the crdit agencies and their weekly data leaks? And on and on and on.
So, yeah. You played yourself Schumer and the rest of you dipshits. When people ask “What can China do with my data that you fucking already haven’t let Zuckerberg and Musk and Google and the rest of these chucklefucks already do?” and you have no answer, it speaks volumes. And you deserve to be ignored. And this isn’t even getting into the crypto bullshit, the AI bullshit, and the NFT nonsense.
Fucking hell. Even fucking apple in their latest update turn on AI learning on every fucking app and gave no way to turn it off without individually going to every app on your phone. Fuck them all.
Like I said, I am in a mood.
Very frustrating day. In every aspect.
I am glad I am here and not enduring the storm back home, although I did remark to Joelle I miss snow. But I don’t mean an inch and shitty slush and grey for weeks on end. I mean real snow. I miss that.
On the other hand, as Joelle replied, “yeah, but look how much easier life is when you don’t have to plan around the weather every day/”
And she is right. Obviously you just survive for four months here, but for the rest of the time, it’s pretty much the same every day. Some days it looks like it is going to rain, but then it doesn’t.
It will have to do.