Category: General

Monday Links – Lots of Links

June 12, 2023 / / 0 Comments

Sit back, this is going to be a long one this week.

First, let’s start out with a bunch of Reason links.

Here’s an article on the recent Trump federal indictment.

No, Adam Smith was not a progressive.

Critics of lockdowns were muzzled.

Firing professors for the political views is unconstitutional – left-wing views edition.

SPLC is still overcounting hate groups.

Finally, the Biden administration is still refusing Second Amendment rights to cannabis users.

In other gun news, the deadline for pistol brace owners to submit the proper paperwork or be considered felons as passed. According to The Reload, only a quarter-million did so. In the best case, that’s 250,000 out of 3,000,000 – or about 8%. However, using industry numbers, it’s more like 250,000 out of 40,000,000 – or about 0.6%.

Now that the serious stuff is out of the way, let’s go on to our light items.

First, here’s some teasing that there’s a new Macross animation in the works.

Speaking of Macross, here’s an article that AnimEgo is going to crowdfund a release of the old Macross II anime from the nineties.

From The Brother, we have the top 10 finalists for Illusions of the Year.

Also from The Brother, we have an Ars Technica article about Redditors using Stable Diffusion to create working anime QR codes.

Monday Link Time

August 22, 2022 / / 0 Comments

First, just in time to celebrate the feds for passing their crony corporatism for the semiconductor sector, comes this article from Bloomberg about a coming bust in that sector. The semiconductor market enjoyed a massive run-up in orders during the pandemic, sending sales and stock prices to new highs and triggering a global scramble to find enough supplies. There was hope in some circles that the boom could be sustained for several more years without a painful pullback, but chipmakers are now facing a familiar problem: growing inventory and shrinking demand. [Snip] But fortunes have turned swiftly for the biggest chipmakers. Companies like Nvidia Corp. are reporting more that 40% annual declines in their core businesses, while Micron Technology Inc. warns that demand is evaporating fast in many areas. Well, this feels familiar. Particularly those of us who have watched the boom and bust cycles in the firearms industry.

The joke was that the lamentations of enlisted soldiers who couldn’t poorly spend their enlistment bonuses or sign up for bad loans on Dodge Chargers and Challengers, because the automaker is discontinuing them. Dodge will be putting an end to its iconic Charger and Challenger lineup real soon as the company teases a new era of mystery cars to come. The electrified future is slowly creeping into Dodge’s ICE-ladened inventory. It sounds like the lamentations will be short-lived as the young men will have electric versions to make bad decisions about.

At least, it will be cheaper in the future to hear better as the FDA approves OTC hearing aids. Come October, instead of being forced to visit an audiologist and shelling out thousands of dollars for the added expense, hearing aid users will be able to purchase FDA-certified hearing aids from any major retailer like Amazon, Walmart or Best Buy without needing a prescription. IMO, we will see some good, generic hearing aids, but the best will still require special testing and fitting. Kind of like electronic ear pro we have now.

In the life-saving category, we have an article from Active Response Training on the best tourniquets. You really need to RTWT. And take a Stop The Bleed course. And don’t cheap out on your tourniquets.

Finally, our light item (courtesy of The Brother) is on the proper method of peeling off Post-It Notes. The article is amusing, but the TLDR is peel side to side, not down to up.

Fixing the Formatting

March 31, 2022 / / 0 Comments

For my frequent visitors, you probably noticed issues with the formatting. Namely places where quotations should be are a small string of symbols. Apparently, this is caused by so-called smart quotes. Fecking hell.

Anyways, The Brother found a fix. At least for the ones I’ve done in Scrivener – aka Badmoon and ZS. I’m going to fix those first. Then I’ll look at how to do the others. Please be patient.

Edit 1: Finished with Badmoon

This Is THANKSGIVING! (Punts Bad News Into The Pit)

November 25, 2021 / / 0 Comments

I first saw the story of the teen accidentally invited to Thanksgiving a couple of years ago on the Book of Face. According to this USAToday article they are keeping the tradition going.

What started as a text to a wrong number has led to years of friendship and shared Thanksgiving meals for Jamal Hinton and Wanda Dench, a holiday tradition born from a happy mistake that’s gone viral every year since.

In 2016, Dench sent a text to a number she believed belonged to her grandson to invite him to Thanksgiving dinner at her home in Mesa, Arizona. Turns out, she accidentally texted Hinton, a complete stranger at the time.

Hinton asked who the number was and when Dench sent a photo of herself to him, he replied, “You not my grandma. Can I still get a plate tho?”

“Of course. That’s what grandma’s do … feed everyone,” Dench replied.

Since that text mixup, Hinton has received an invitation to celebrate the holiday with Dench’s family every year.

It was a very tearful to see last year’s picture, as Dench’s husband had passed. Yet this story gives my optimism a shot in the arm. These small acts of kindness, these small acts of family building, are what make humans human.

I look forward to seeing how the tradition continues.

Tri-Link Wednesday

October 27, 2021 / / 0 Comments

The Brother shared a NY Times article on glitter. Yeah, I was surprised about how cagey people were about how glitter was manufactured. I still maintain that glitter is the herpes of the craft world. And I detest how endemic it is on girls clothing.

Miguel (via Lawdog) brings us a helpful hint. BTW Miguel, great job on the weight loss!

And on a more serious note, Reason has an article on the Firearms Policy Coalition filing in opposition of Texas’s new abortion law. They assert that turning the citizens against each other to stop abortion can be done to stop the citizens from exercising their Second Amendment rights.