Sure as Kilimanjaro rises like a leopress above the Serengeti.

I genuinely thought well into my 20s that “leopress” was a female leopard because of this fucking song.

I glanced at a porterhouse for sale at my local grocery a few weeks ago. $54. The fuck? I’d balk at paying that much at a steakhouse, cooked and with sides and a couple of beers.

I drive a roadster and people assume I’m incredibly rich. I bought the fucking thing nine years ago for $8000 – tell me what new car today costs less than $1000 a year to own and operate.

I only get steak if it’s close to expiration and marked way down. Ironically it’s better at that point anyway since it’s been aged (as long as you eat it right away). Otherwise I’ll buy top or bottom round and hammer the shit out of it with a tenderizing mallet and flash-seer it; taste is quite good and you let the mallet do the work instead of your teeth.

My mom for this last year had a home helper who was making around $21 an hour. She would order lunch every day through Grub Hub, usually $15-$20 just for the food and then another $10 for the delivery. She was willing to work for an hour and a half just to pay for her lunch. And she would always complain about how shitty and cold the food was. Even weirder is that she was a great cook herself, I provided whatever groceries she wanted, and she had plenty of time to cook whatever she wanted, and she still did the Grub Hub shit. I just do not get people.

Coffee is / was the big one. I used to stock the cheap, store brand stuff for when I needed a morning lift. That was pre-tariff $9. I’d also stock the good stuff, the brand and variety that I really like a lot, usually around $12 a bag. Tariffs kicked in, the “cheap” stuff went to $20 per lb immediately. The good stuff went to $22 (but only like 12 oz or something). So, no more name brand, and I cut way back on coffee consumption. Fucked up part, tariffs are done and the prices dropped, but nowhere near the old price. The cheap stuff is still $14, so $5 more than 1.5 years ago.

Holy hell, where are you buying coffee? I still get most of my coffee at TJ Maxx / Marshalls where they often have 12 oz. bags (on clearance) for $5 or so. Even LiDL coffee is only $6.50 for a 12 oz. bag.

My cat had an enlarged heart near the end of her life and when I took her to a chain vet they quoted me $3500 to do what they could and she still would have been in pretty bad shape. I could tell the vet didn’t really want to do it and when I asked about euthanasia instead she immediately said “that’s the right thing to do” and went off to get the process started without asking me again about the expensive treatment. I will always be indebted to her for this.

I used to take my cats to my sister-in-law’s mother, but she had to sell her practice (to this very same chain, in fact) in order to have something for her retirement. The chain told her quite openly that they were buying her practice to shut it down and remove local competition. Corporations are such a fucking cancer.

I got lunch for my mom and myself at Five Guys the other day. Two burgers, one order of fries, two fountain drinks, $44. I wouldn’t even have minded the price if it had been, y’know, fantastic food, but it was just mid. Burgers were bland, fries were limp and greasy – so greasy that the bottom of the bag broke open when I got it home – and even the drinks were watery. For $44!

I tried Taco Bell yesterday for the first time in years. At least it was “only” $11 for a mexican pizza, two tacos and a large drink. Unfortunately it was utterly disgusting, everything tasted like stale wheat flour which was weird because I don’t think the food actually had wheat flour in it anywhere.

I used to eat lunch at Taco Bell in 1991. They had a fifty-cent menu so $2.50 could get you rice and beans, two hard-shell tacos and two meximelts, which was a more than adequate amount of food for lunch.

Last week I bought lunch for my mother and I at Five Guys. Two burgers, one order of fries and two small fountain drinks came to $44. The fries were so greasy that the bottom of the bag broke open in my car.

Drax the Destroyed.

in the first couple years iPhone was the smartphone

Blackberry was the smartphone in the first half of the '00s. And circa 2005 even Windows Mobile smartphones were gaining some traction (by “smartphone” I mean devices that are essentially handheld computers that can run apps and do a lot more than just calls and texting). They both got swamped by the iPhone because RIM and Microsoft were short-sighted idiots who failed to see the potential market and saw no need to improve their devices much, until it was too late. The iPhone wasn’t the first, it was the best (at the time at least).

I think one of the main reasons Blackberry was swiftly killed off by the iPhone was that their devices had tiny non-touch screens that used 16-bit color, and RIM were unwilling to move on from that until it was far too late. The other reason is that the Blackberry app development environment was orders of magnitude more atrocious than anything else I worked with in my 25-year career. The development environment for iPhones was the second-worst but still massively better than Blackberry; even if RIM had moved to upgrade their devices, they never could have gotten anyone to develop apps for them.

You put Basil in the ratatouille?

actually quite well built

Windows 11-like Acrylic design

Lol, that’s the lede defense.

Something I never see mentioned in discussions about privacy and “deleting your data”: all of these websites store information in databases, and databases are (usually) backed up on a regular schedule. This means that the databases in their entirety are written to tape or optical drive or whatever format, in a form where they could be remounted/restored in their entirety if necessary. Even if your data is “deleted” from the current active instance of a database, no company goes into all (or any) of the backed-up copies of that database to delete that same data there (and even when you delete something from the current active instance of a database, the deletions are logged in the audit tables and so are never truly “deleted”).

So it is impossible in a practical sense to truly delete your personal data, regardless of what any law says. It’s not even possible to make it inaccessible to AI, since most likely when websites sell their data to AI companies, they are selling database backups that predate AI.

My capybara theory is that they’re so friendly and cool because the creatures that tend to surround them act as an early-warning system to protect them from predators.

Utter rubbish. They’re acting like no bands have keyboardists any more.

My dissertation chair wrote a book partially on this subject. He pointed out that the Qamranites (like John the Baptist) preached that everything in the holy land belonged to god and nothing belonged to caesar. In that vein, “render unto caesar that which is caesar’s and render unto god that which is god’s” translates to “fuck caesar”. Personally I have no dog in the fight, but this interpretation is a lot more fun.

C’mon now, we haven’t overthrown the governments of every country in this continent. I think.

I do believe there is some end game these tech billionaires believe is on the horizon

I think it’s just a variant of the standard republican “Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter”. They think financial wealth is something they can just create out of thin air using AI (the way that government creates wealth out of thin air by printing money, allegedly), so as long as they acquire the data centers to fuel it, by whatever means necessary, they’ll be all right in the end.