In one of my previous posts, I did a quick comparison of the social media sites that many of the Twitter diaspora had moved to and BlueSky was the one I liked best out of those places. A few months have passed and my assessment of those sites hasn’t really changed, other than I’ve pretty much settled on using BlueSky exclusively.
One of the things I wondered about was whether I could import a BlueSky user’s profile into my FreshRSS as a feed. I knew you could do this with Mastodon, but if I could do this with Bsky, then I could compile those accounts into an OPML file and read their posts in my RSS reader.
You may be asking why I’d do that instead of just going to BlueSky and read my Following feed? It’s a long and complicated answer, but I’ll try to explain:
Because I want to
But seriously, I prefer pulling information to me rather than going out to several different places. Part of my routine is waking up, making some coffee, and then checking my RSS feeds. If I could incorporate a good selection of Bsky feeds into my Reader instead of going over to the site or app to find them, then all the better.
It turns out that each user’s profile can be used as an RSS feed. I went to the browser’s menu bar, copied the address and then imported it into FreshRSS and it worked, but there were some quirks with this method.
The user’s profile URL in the browser barAdding the URL to FreshRSS
While the feed imported just fine, it wouldn’t display reposts, pictures, or external links. Every item was just the text of the post, which was itself a link to the post on BlueSky.
The post as it appears in FreshRSSThe post on Bluesky itself
I scratched my head and knocked around about looking for solutions. Was it the theme I was using for FreshRSS? Could I perhaps alter the CSS to display the elements that were missing? The answer to both was “No”, but I remembered that I had a browser extension the allowed me to look at RSS feeds from my own site to ensure they were formatted how I wanted them to look.
It turns out that what I was seeing was the output provided by BlueSky for a user’s RSS feed and FreshRSS was actually rendering a better version of the raw feed:
BlueSky’s RSS Outputin my browser extension
The solution turned out to be something that is a bit of a bodge, but works well enough. Instead of copying the plain URL, I need to use OpenRSS.org as an intermediary to display not only a user’s posts, but also their reposts, images, and external links:
The URL with “openrss.org” added at the frontThe revised output in my browser extension
Using “openrss.org” at the lead of the URLs presented the reposts, as well as images from the original post on Bluesky. I imported this version of the URL into FreshRSS and it formatted it almost exactly as it appeared in my browser extension:
The revised feed post as it appears in FreshRSS
While this is definitely an improvement over the raw RSS feed, there’s still some quirks. Secondary links from a repost sometimes aren’t formatted as clickable links, while sometimes they’re not.
In the image above, the BlueSky usernames and YouTube & Twitch links aren’t formatted. The text itself is only a link to the Bluesky post itself. The image isn’t a link and neither is the “repost”. The only way to see the original post to access its links is to click on the date, which is the link to the original post.
The image below shows a standard repost that links to a news article, which does format the outbound link:
I think the way this works is that if the original post is only an outbound link to a news article, website, GIF, etc, then it will format the outbound link. If there is any other text in the post besides the article link, then none of the outbound links will be formatted; only the links to the repost or the original post will be presented.
I’m not sure if BlueSky will improve its own RSS formatting or not. It’s such a niche thing that most people aren’t even aware of these days, so I imagine any kind of effort or priority is low or non-existent, but for now this seems to be the best way to get user posts into an RSS reader that I can find.
Perhaps someone else will find an explain a better method or devise some other way to do this without relying on a third party to “interpret” BlueSky’s output.
I’ve been playing Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, which is a fantastic new game that was just released. The sound design and Foley work in this game is insanely well done — crisp, clean, immersive. Just pitch-perfect. There is a level of detail and execution with regards to sound that’s very much appreciated.
Among many other great things in this game, you can hit Fascists in the head with various objects, so I’ve been cracking their skulls with various objects to see what they sound like. Here’s a few that I’ve tried so far:
A Crutch:
When I watched Luthen Rael’s big speech at the end of Episode 10 of Andor, my immediate takeaway was this is the moment when the character revealed himself to be a deluded egotist. I would’ve laughed in his face after that load of self-serving nonsense, but I was surprised to find the Rest of the Internet absolutely adored it and suddenly I’m taking crazy pills here. I realize I may be a lone voice crying out in the wilderness here, but I’ll try to explain my feelings below.
~~~Spoilers from here on out~~~
So Luthen’s big speech takes place in the same episode as Andor’s prison break, as well as Mon Mothma’s meeting with the shady banker wishing to make a devil’s bargain with her. In the run-up to his reveal to the ISB mole, Luthen lies about his involvement in the Aldhani Heist and like any good mob boss, he subtly lets his asset know that he can harm his family should he wish to do so.
After the mole’s tension-filled elevator ride, the doors open and Luthen is revealed in all his flair for the dramatic. It’s a power move to intimidate a young & impressionable ISB asset and it works. They have a brief conversation, and the mole asks the pivotal question: What have you sacrificed?
What follows is a powerful performance by Skarsgård reciting an evocative monologue that’s also one of the most self-serving, empty, and ultimately meaningless string of words a character has vomited out on this show. Anyone who has ever pulled a trigger or seen a comrade fall in battle; anyone who has actually sacrificed anything in their life would’ve at first been taken aback by the delusional rant, then laughed at him before possibly killing him right there on the spot.
Yet apparently, if you say something poetic with a lot of conviction, people will believe you. In the aftermath of the episode, there were articles and videos talking about what this man has sacrificed, and yet I’m still sitting here asking the same question as the mole: What has he actually sacrificed? Just because he says he has doesn’t make it so.
This is a series that doesn’t shy away from showing its characters making sacrifices, so when someone tells you that they’ve sacrificed without any evidence to back it up, there should be a little warning light flashing somewhere.
There is literally nothing tangible in his speech about sacrifice. It’s all metaphor and egoistic tripe. The team on Aldhani spent months isolated in a remote location, constantly fearful of discovery as well as anxiety over accomplishing the mission. They’re thrown a wildcard by Mr. Sacrifice a few days before the operation and told to deal with it, further throwing more chances for error and failure into the mix. Half the team dies during the operation, but this man shares his dreams with ghosts. Okay. Sure.
He says that he’s “condemned” to use the tools of his enemy to defeat them, yet mere minutes earlier, we saw men condemned to literal death in a slave labor camp rise-up and use the actual tools of their enemy to defeat them, at great cost to their own lives. Many don’t make it out. Those that do escape have no idea if they’ll be successful. They don’t know what future awaits them on the distant shore. For all we know, Andor and Melshi are the only ones who made it, but Luthen burns his life to make a sunrise he’ll never see. Sure thing.
We see Bix, his contact on Ferrix whom he abandoned for fear that he might be put in actual peril, continuously tortured by the Imperials for information she doesn’t have. She’s subjected to the screams of dying children from a race that the Empire eradicated because they opposed the building of a fuel depot on their world. These screams have the effect of causing extreme emotional distress that drives humans insane and she’s subjected to it multiple times to the point that she’s nearly disassociated from the reality around her. But Luthen has given up all chance at inner peace. His mind is now a sunless space. Oh dear, dear. The poor thing.
Mon Mothma is an Imperial Senator and a person with a high profile in the Empire, under constant surveillance not only due to her position, but also her opposition to many of the Emperor’s edicts. Even with this level of scrutiny brought to bear against her, she’s been able to fund rebel activities throughout the galaxy right under the Empire’s nose.
When the raid on Aldhani results in tighter monetary restrictions, she finds out that Imperial auditors will soon discover that there’s 400,000 credits missing that she can’t account for. In desperation, she reaches out to a shady banker from her world who offers to help out, in exchange for an arranged marriage between his son and her daughter, a custom she finds odious. Plus, she would be allying her family with a man who’s merely seeking legitimacy and increased influence in the Imperial government, and who could presumably sell her out if he caught wind of her true actions. But she’s truly desperate and has nowhere else to turn, so she swallows her pride and goes through with the deal, throwing her husband under the bus in the process. But Luthen laments that he will never see the light of gratitude.
It’s that last bit that’s the most telling. In a show–in the same episode–where we see what all of the other characters have sacrificed along the way, we curiously only have the word of someone whom we’ve never seen sacrifice anything except the lives of others to protect himself. Look at that line in full:
The ego that started this fight will never have a mirror or an audience or the light of gratitude.
This is at the end of his monologue, and I think it’s the most revealing line of all, seeing how it comes after a litany of self-serving “sacrifices” that are largely metaphorical and entirely intangible. Combined with his penchant for the theatrical and his need to kill off anyone who may be able compromise him, a picture of his character comes into better focus. He sees himself as the King; the indispensable keystone of the entire rebellion. Everyone else is expendable except him. They are tools for him to manipulate and maneuver to execute his grand scheme. If he were to fall, so would the nascent rebellion. This is the narcissist. This is the ego. This is Luthen Rael.
Like most elites, especially ones who enjoy a level of affluence that those they exploit will never attain, he sees the inconveniences that he endures as actual sacrifices. I’m sure he believes every word he says, and I’m certain he believes he’s actually sacrificed something, but these are empty words spoken by a delusional egomaniac. At least Saw Guerrera wears his eccentricities and faults on his sleeve. Luthen is far more dangerous, because he can mask his under a face of stoic conviction.
At the end of his speech, he reveals himself in a way he may not have intended:
No, the ego that started this fight will never have a mirror, or an audience, or the light of gratitude. So what do I sacrifice? Everything.
Luthen Rael has sacrificed nothing except the lives of others and his chance to face a defeated Emperor, throw back his hood and yell, It was me all along! to the worshipful adoration of the galaxy.
The jolly old elf known to many as “Kris Kringle” and to the United States government as “Threat Vector 19″ crosses into American airspace at 0520 Zulu just north of Duluth, Minnesota. A pair of F-22 air superiority aircraft silently slide in behind him and maintain station a few hundred meters away.
This is new, Claus thinks.
Suddenly invigorated by the presence of high-performance aircraft, he lets out a right jolly old laugh as he takes the rare chance to perform close-quarter aerobatic maneuvers, thinking the pilots of the fighter craft behind him will relish the opportunity to do the same.
It’s a fatal error.
Just as the tiny red sleigh completes its barrel roll, the pilot of STARFISH 3 yells, “FOX 1!”
Santa barely evades the AIM-7 Sparrow missile and dives for the ground as the missile’s contrail glistens above him in the moonlight.
Just a few weeks before, the US Government informed Kringle that he was required to appear at an FAA facility for vehicle inspection and a flight competency test before he would be permitted to operate in US airspace. Always willing to help out the good people at the Federal Aviation Administration, Santa appeared as instructed in his trademark sleigh drawn by eight flying reindeer.
The FAA inspector approached with a clipboard in one hand and a shotgun in the other. Santa was alarmed, but you know, America.
The FAA inspector noticed Santa’s discomfort and smiled as he boarded the magical craft. “Listen, I’m not supposed to tell you this because it’s your test, but” he nodded his head toward the reindeer, “you’re going to lose an engine in flight.”
It was a joke, but Santa isn’t laughing now as he evades dozens of 20MM rounds zipping all around him. He jukes to-and-fro in a mad dash for any type of haven from the onslaught as tracers leave ghastly after-images in his eyes. The trees whip by in a blur as he increases speed, but Kringle’s mind recalls a heretofore unneeded fact: these aircraft are ungainly at low-altitude and low-speed. Santa promptly pulls-back on the reigns, decelerating so rapidly the inertial dampeners can barely compensate. A quick check of his magic sack reveals none of its precious cargo has been lost as the F-22s speed overhead and pass quickly out of sight.
The old Saint removes his cap and wipes his brow. He chuckles to himself at the near escape from almost certain doom, but unbeknownst to him an RQ-4 Global Hawk UAV has been monitoring his movements from 60,000 feet overhead and relaying his precise coordinates back to NORAD. Even now, as Kringle speaks comforting words to his frightened reindeer, electronic signals are forming an invisible net around the elf from which there will be no escape.
With a wry smile, Claus snaps the reigns and begins to rise once again into the night just as a pair of AH-64E Apache helicopters appear above the tree line, their cannon trained directly upon his sleigh. Santa looks over his shoulder to see another pair of Apache approaching from behind. Above, he can barely make out the silhouettes of two MQ-9 Reaper drones circling overhead, each armed with AIM-9 Sidewinder and GBU-38 JDAM munitions. He briefly considers making another run for it before spying a black cross slowly diving toward him.
Kringle’s blood runs cold. It’s an A-10C Thunderbolt, the same beast that took out Jack Frost years before on Alaska’s North Slope with its deadly 30MM GAU-8/A Avenger autocannon.
The gig was up.
The pilot of the Apache directly in front of Claus signals him to land immediately as a long line of black SUVs approach along a simple dirt road from the north. They encircle the sleigh as Claus descends to the ground in a clearing just off the road. Men in cheap suits empty from the vehicles by the dozen, guns drawn just as Santa touches down.
Kringle holds up his hands but Comet, sensing danger, bolts and makes a run for the tree line. He staggers and falls as his body is riddled with hundreds of bullets. The muzzle flashes from the massive array of small arms fire form a constellation of death in the dark night. With a gargling moan, Comet breathes his last.
An enraged Prancer charges a group of agents directly in front of him and manages to connect head-on with one of the anonymous men as small arms fire again erupts under the moonlit sky. Though mere inches away from a withering barrage of gunfire, Prancer is a credit to his name as he spins about, kicking here and there with his massive hooves. Viscera hangs from his antlers and human bones crush beneath his bulk during his mad dance of death. A direct shot to the head finally fells the great beast, whose momentum allows him to crush one more suited figure before he, too, expires. In all, half a dozen men lay dead or dying in a circle around the doomed reindeer.
An inconsolable Santa tries to make a run for it, but without the extra lifting power of Prancer and Comet, he can’t achieve take-off speed. Agents board his sleigh and forcibly toss him from the still-moving craft. As Kringle lands on the ground, he rolls and comes to a stop. He looks up to find a dozen guns pointed at his head.
The government agents, inexplicably wearing aviator-style sunglasses even in the dead of night, strip Claus of his famous red suit and cap, leaving him shivering in just an undershirt and boxers in the snow. He’s handcuffed by an agitated agent who makes sure to tighten the cuffs real tight, restricting blood flow to Santa’s hands. Numb from the cold and likely in shock, Santa doesn’t notice. He winces as a boot hits him square in the back and plants him face first into the snow. The agent grabs the jolly old elf by his magnificent white mane of hair and drags him to one of the waiting SUVs.
Through his tears, Kringle sees his magical reindeer punched, kicked, and rifle-butted, their moans of agony piercing the silent night. It’s the last thing he sees before a black hood envelops his head.
As the line of SUVs snakes off into the night, they leave behind a scene of utter horror. All that remains are a few tufts of fur and chunks of meat in massive pools of maroon blood against the purest white snow. By morning, the wolves and other carrion will have removed the remaining evidence of slaughter, leaving only the blood behind as silent witness to the night’s deadly events.
Santa is never seen or heard from ever again as his workshop is destroyed by drone strikes, leaving no survivors. Rudolph, it is rumored, is an unwilling test subject at an undisclosed Department of Energy facility somewhere in Utah.
In a short memo released with no fanfare during the doldrums between Christmas and New Year’s, the Defense Department announces that Threat Vector 19 has been neutralized, but it garners little attention as the world’s attention is laser-focused on Pete Davidson’s apparent root access to reality after rumors emerge that he’s dating the First Lady.
UPDATE 20241212:
The onions as yet thrive, with another plant that I forgot about bursting through the soil at least two weeks after planting. The birds still show no interest in the plants and the plants continue to grow and produce multiple stems. I read up on these and one of the key things is to do your best to prevent these from flowering, because that will make the bulbs smaller, so I haven’t been watering them to any real extent at this point.
I bought one of those self-watering raised beds over at Lowe’s earlier this summer and planted some peas and radishes in it. To my dismay, the peas were pilfered by a gang of morning doves and the radishes succumbed to the heat of summer, so there was no joy in the raised bed.
With autumn and winter coming, I found the one seasonally appropriate vegetable that I could plant — onions. I figured what the hey and planted a few in the bed and then let chance decide their fate.
I got one green shoot about a week after planting and it remained the lone sprout as the days passed. It grew like a weed while the rest of the bed remained eerily silent. Was there a surfeit of water? Was it too cold? Were they bereft of sunlight? As days past and the lonely little sprout grew what seemed to be inches a day, I wondered and waited.
The Lone Sprout
A little more than a week later, I found several green tips just at the point of breaking through the surface. It turns out I just had the Usain Bolt of onions in my bed. The remaining bulbs grew just as quickly as the first, though a couple still remained in silent slumber under the soil.
Those holdouts finally burst through and now I have all the onions bulbs sprouted and growing, so my attention naturally turned to the Dove Gang, who had been mysteriously absent for months until my onions started growing. A few days ago, I spied four of the miscreants hanging out near the raised bed, but none seemed interested in molesting my juvenile alliums. Could it be they aren’t partial to onions? I hope so, since throwing a net over them doesn’t seem practical for these plants.
A Thriving Bed
As long as those birds steer clear of my thriving onion bed, I should have something that I can gather and use here in a short while. We’ll see how it goes.
The Big Thanksgiving Blowout Spectacular Week is ended and thus begins the most wonderful time of the year. It was my favorite when I was a kid for obvious reasons. My anticipation for Christmas Eve between the ages of 7 and 10 was off the charts. I even created a countdown calendar one year that started in October (I had no idea Advent calendars existed, they weren’t a thing in the lower working class circles we inhabited).
But more than presents, I was into it because unlike all the other holidays which were just a single day that came and went like that, Christmas occupied an entire season. It was the only holiday people really decorated for at the time, so seeing all the lights going up in the days following Thanksgiving and then heading over to the local shopping areas and malls to see everything suddenly festooned with candy canes, wreathes, ribbons, and Christmas trees for two or three weeks was a genuine treat. It was like the world was in technicolor at the end of every year, before returning to drab monochrome on January 1st.
Beyond all the commercial trappings of the season, it was also the only time we did a lot of baking at home. It was the season of cookies, pies, and chocolate. Our little place would be almost constantly filled with the aroma of gingerbread, sugar cookies, and popcorn right up until the big day itself.
Everything about the season was warm, inviting, and friendly. And for a kid living in a world that was decidedly not that, I welcomed and reveled in it like a warm blanket on a cold night.
Speaking of Thanksgiving, I had a busy day. I ran a 5K turkey trot in my town that morning. It was my second 5K since taking up running a earlier this year and it was nothing like the first one. My first 5K was on a relatively flat course and I had a pretty decent run. This one, however, was designed by someone who didn’t want anyone to have fun on this run.
We Have Such Sights to Show You
Since I’m no dummy, I went the day before and drove the course and for the first 2.5 miles, I was like I can do this easy-peasy. There would be a slight elevation climb on one of the legs, but nothing spectacular. But as I made a turn onto the last leg, I was suddenly climbing a hill that made me had to go into a lower gear to finish the climb and crest it.
Diabolical.
So now, all I’m thinking about prior to this run is having to go up this hill toward the end, leading to a dark foreboding amidst the general revelry prior to the run. The Hill loomed large in my mind and I ran slower than I normally would, keeping me in groups of people that I’d normally scooch on past. I constantly looked at my watch to keep an eye on my heart rate. I had a cardiac event last year that actually precipitated all of this stuff I’m doing, so I try to keep my heart rate below 180bpm during these runs as much as possible, and I kept re-calibrating my speed based on what I was seeing, knowing that The Hill was approaching.
A little past the third mile marker, I made the turn and began the gentle incline presaging what was to come. Those around me saw the sudden verticality in the distance for the first time and let out several exclamations of disbelief. I felt sorry for the parents who were pushing those big three-wheeled stroller things, because they were going to have a tough time of it. They came out wanting to do a fun thing on Thanksgiving morning with their family and suddenly discovered the course designer cared not for their mirth.
I was also thinking of the older folks that had been milling about in the pre-race crowd before the starting horn blared as well. Forget running, this thing was going to be difficult to simply walk. I remembered their good humor and laughter in the starting group just 25 minutes earlier and I wondered what their mood would be upon seeing this cruel joke that had been played on all of us. I hope they’d make it up and over all right, as the course designer clearly desired to make the news with the unfortunate demise of a senior or two.
I was maybe a third of the way up the hill when I had to admit to myself that wasn’t going to be able to run this whole course. I wanted to keep at it, but as often happens more times than I care to admit, the voice of Sean Connery from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade came into my mind and said to me, Let it go.
So I did.
I started walking and noticed that I was going faster than I had been “running” at that point, but it was still tough going. Luckily, people younger than me were doing the same thing so I didn’t feel too bad about abandoning my goal of running the entire course. The incline was sharper than a steep set of stairs and there was a point where I could’ve easily put my hands down and gone on all fours if I wanted to go beast mode for the last bit. But I resisted and maintained my bipedal mode of locomotion.
I finally crested the hill and began running again, finishing the last half-mile at a decent pace and coming in 7th for my age group, which felt good. Despite the challenges, I didn’t feel wrung-out or that I’d pushed myself too far. I actually felt like I’d put in a good workout. After stretching and milling about for a few minutes, I went home and immediately started on Thanksgiving dinner.
Another 5K medal
This year, I decided to forego cooking an entire bird since we weren’t having anyone over. I cooked a turkey breast in a crock pot using my sister’s recipe, as well as a sweet potato casserole, garlic and bacon green beans, and mac and cheese in an instant pot that are also my sister’s recipes. The cranberry sauce, as per tradition, came from an Ocean Spray can.
All of it turned out great. We feasted and spent the rest of the evening relaxing and watching football. The Bears and Raiders lost and the Packers won, so all in all A Good Day.
The week prior to Thanksgiving can be a doozy, especially for work. After leaving the service and moving around in the civilian world, I’ve found an amazing consistency no matter the industry I deal with, especially with white collar jobs — a lot of people take the entire week of Thanksgiving off, which means the week before can be hectic as people try to get everything knocked out before they’re out of the office for the week.
When I was in the service, Thanksgiving in many ways was just another day, as nearly all holidays were. The chow hall would have rolled turkey & gravy along with a few other holiday staples, but for the most part it was just like working any other night on the flight line. The only difference may have been fewer planes coming in or launching, but that was about it. Nobody talked about it being a holiday or would really reference it, which was par for the course in the aircraft maintenance world.
The one holiday that you really felt was Christmas. If there was a holiday where people made an effort to shutdown, it was always for Christmas. Maybe I’ll talk about that later on in the season.
At any rate, I was ping-ponging all over California and Ventura counties, including a brief sojourn to downtown Los Angeles. It was an amazingly clear day with a deep blue sky, plus the weather was perfect, which took some of the edge off having to be downtown. I was over by the Angel’s Flight rail thing, which I hear is popular with tourists for some reason.
In the Things are Falling Apart department, I had to get a new HDD for my main PC since it became clear one of the drives was failing and I felt a sense of urgency to get a replacement and clone it before it was too late. Luckily, Newegg is right over in City of Industry, so I could grab one quick and relatively cheap. It took awhile to get the cloning process completed, but just having done it for the SSD drive, it was painless.
We also put up the Christmas tree this weekend and started in on the interior decorations. I also got a new train for the tree as well — a Bachmann HO scale train set that I got on sale. It’s a fantastic train and it’s nice to see that quality standards haven’t slipped as much as they have seemingly everywhere else. The cars have a nice heavy feel with solid construction and the engine itself is fun to watch go around the track. I had that thing going around the tree for about an hour and the sound itself was so mesmerizing that we kind of zoned out like it was the pre-smartphone era. Pretty cool.
I’m always wary about model trains, since they’re the exact sort of thing I would really dive into. The mix of collecting, landscape design, and model-building are the perfect siren song, but they’re also expensive — a dangerous combination, and I can only afford so many of those kinds of hobbies.
I finished up the week by heading over to the The Shops at Santa Anita, which is a mall right next to the horse track in Arcadia. We headed over there to check out a Japanese-focused book & stationary shop, and since it was in a mall I figured it would be dead.
Oh no, quite the contrary.
We arrive and the parking lots were nearly full, as were the parking garages. I’d never been to this mall before, so I didn’t know what to expect, but I wasn’t expecting this. It seemed like it took longer to find a place to park than it did to drive over to the mall, but we finally found a cluster of spots that people seemed to miss, and headed in.
It was like being transported back to the ’90s-’00s, to the age when malls were packed, everything was maintained, and the aisles weren’t lined with cell phone repair kiosks. I kept expecting to turn a corner and see a Suncoast or a Waldenbooks.
They had a Sbarro.
They had a Sbarro!
The food court, and indeed the entire mall, was like the ’90s, ’00s, and the early teens were all compressed together into a seemingly successful and popular mall. It was a pleasant surprise, as evidenced by the fact that we found the store, Kinokuniya, early on but just kept walking around and checking everything out instead of immediately leaving like I would most any other mall these days.
What a way to cap off the week with an unexpected surprise. I even bought a Hallmark keepsake ornament of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-B from Star Trek: Generations. Listen, I’m old and I loved the ’90s, so I will indulge in a little sentimental nostalgia and buy something I couldn’t afford back then. Especially when I seem to have entered an alternate dimension where they still live in The World That Was.
At any rate, the inauguration of my favorite time of year is fast approaching and I’ve got a lot to look forward to.
It rained this week. It may have rained earlier, but this was the first meaningful rain of the season, not only because it had a bit of hail in it, but we got the first snow on the mountains this year on 11/16. This is always a big milestone for me, since while the harbingers of winter comes in fits and starts, snow on the mountains officially inaugurates the winter (re: the rainy) season for me. It might get warmer on occasion, but I’m not going to be running the AC for another 5 or 6 months.
There’s snow here I swear
This is also a great time of year, because we’re in that in-between period where we don’t have to run the AC but we don’t have to run the heat either. No HVAC = Big savings on the power bill. I’ll hold out on starting the heat for as long as possible. Hopefully I can make it to Christmas or after, but we’ll see. As soon as that unit starts, all I see are dollar bills shooting out of the place at a rate like they have at the bank.
I also hit upon a decorating idea for my garage. I hung flags in the hobby area that mean something to me — USAF flag, California state flag, and a Jolly Roger to add some color and visual interest on the walls. I liked it so much, I’m expanding the idea out to the rest of the garage. I’m going to decorate the bare walls with flags from everywhere we’ve lived so far. I just hope there’s enough space to fit everything. Most flags are either 3′ x 5′ or 12″ x 18″ so figuring out how to get everything to fit is going to be a bit of a challenge.
Ooh, the edge!
I also say the first green shoot of life from one of the onions I planted in my raised bed. I previously planted some radishes, but none of them turned out. I think I planted them too late and the heat likely killed them off, but I bought some onion bulbs that are season appropriate and I’m hoping for good things.
Come one little guy. Grow, grow grow!
Finally, in a bit of sad news, I went to Barnes & Noble recently because they had a 50% off sale on Criterion Collection movies and when I went in I found out why — they’re getting rid of their physical media. They’re keeping their CDs and LPs, but they’ve moved out nearly all of their Blu-Rays and DVDs and filled the area with board games, puzzles, and Funco Pops.
This means something
The funny thing is that I was all in at abandoning physical media and going full digital, but as the rights holders to many of these movies and TV shows have proclaimed their allegiance to onerous practices to increase shareholder value, I swang back hard to buying physical CDs and Blue-Rays again (and ripping them myself) just as brick-and-mortar stores chose to get out of the game.
I have no one but myself to blame, but it’s still sad to see the end of this era. I grew up with VHS tapes, then (very briefly) LaserDisc, DVD, and finally Blu-Ray in all its various varieties. That’s 40 years and it’s kind of sad to see an era ending. It’s not just the physical media itself, it’s the end of an era where you felt like you owned the thing you possessed and could do whatever you wanted with it. I could sell or give it to someone else. Or I could just keep it and it would always be there. Warner Brothers couldn’t break into my house and take my Batman tape away so I couldn’t watch it anymore.
But those days have slipped away into the remembered past and will soon be gone for good.
Week 45 has concluded and curiously, President 45 got re-elected, so Grover Cleveland no longer sits alone in the Non-Consecutive Club. It’s fitting, since Cleveland himself presided over an era of rampant graft, corruption, and a disgustingly wealthy elite who rapidly consolidated their power while exploiting everyone else as if they were disposable cogs in their machines. But they put their names on a couple of libraries, so it all balanced out. Welcome to the new Gilded Age, where we will spend the rest of our lives. Excelsior!
With that out of the way, winds and fires were the big news here this week. This is the time of year when the winds kick up something fierce, and combined with the dry vegetation, fires almost always follow. This time, the fickle finger of fate chose Ventura county to ignite massive wildfires, specifically around the Camarillo/Santa Paula area which I’m well familiar with. I’m going to be out there in a couple of weeks, but I’ve already made some calls and no one I know was impacted. As with a lot of these fires in Southern California, they begin in the hills. The hills are where the wealthy live. I don’t know too many wealthy people, so most folks I know mostly have to deal with air quality issues from the smoke and ash falling like snow over everything.
I had to deal with the winds out in Norco, home of the horse lords in the fabled land of Riverside; though unlike Rohan, the land and its people are bereft of any notion of quiet beauty and nobility. I was getting blasted by at least 50 mph gusts over there, which was a nice reminder of home when tropical storms and hurricanes came through. Unlike those events, I wasn’t pelted by rain but rather by sand and grit. I was still cleaning sand out of my nose a couple of days later and it took a few hours for the grit in my teeth to go away.
The rest of the week was spend zipping about the Southland and enjoying the milder weather. In between all that, I made a brief video inspired by recent events and the Rings of Power series. I got a kick out of the idea of the elves in the besieged city of Eregion looking up and seeing this dude enjoying his cup of tea while orcs assault their walls and fires burned down their fair home. Celebrimbor is obviously under the spell of Sauron, so he’s unaware of the situation as he only sees a Matrix of Sauron’s making, but it was a great juxtaposition of someone enjoying the peace of tea as chaos erupts around them.
I spent the remainder of my week working on my gundam model and decorating my little hobby area. I’ve added some flags to festoon the bare wall and began test printing some small storage bins for parts. The one thing I really need to do is organize and store the myriad cords that I’ve hoarded over the years. I’ve got HDMI, mini HDMI to USB, mini USB, USB C, and so on and so forth that I need to bring some order to and put them in labeled bins that I can easily access if needed.
I bought one of those self-watering raised beds over at Lowe’s earlier this summer and planted some peas and radishes in it. To my dismay, the peas were pilfered by a gang of morning doves and the radishes succumbed to the heat of summer, so there was no joy in the raised bed.
With autumn and winter coming, I found the one seasonally appropriate vegetable that I could plant — onions. I figured what the hey and planted a few in the bed and then let chance decide their fate.
I got one green shoot about a week after planting and it remained the lone sprout as the days passed. It grew like a weed while the rest of the bed remained eerily silent. Was there a surfeit of water? Was it too cold? Were they bereft of sunlight? As days past and the lonely little sprout grew what seemed to be inches a day, I wondered and waited.
In the Things are Falling Apart department, I had to get a new HDD for my main PC since it became clear one of the drives was failing and I felt a sense of urgency to get a replacement and clone it before it was too late. Luckily, Newegg is right over in City of Industry, so I could grab one quick and relatively cheap. It took awhile to get the cloning process completed, but just having done it for the SSD drive, it was painless.
We also put up the Christmas tree this weekend and started in on the interior decorations. I also got a new train for the tree as well — a Bachmann HO scale train set that I got on sale. It’s a fantastic train and it’s nice to see that quality standards haven’t slipped as much as they have seemingly everywhere else. The cars have a nice heavy feel with solid construction and the engine itself is fun to watch go around the track. I had that thing going around the tree for about an hour and the sound itself was so mesmerizing that we kind of zoned out like it was the pre-smartphone era. Pretty cool.
I’m always wary about model trains, since they’re the exact sort of thing I would really dive into. The mix of collecting, landscape design, and model-building are the perfect siren song, but they’re also expensive — a dangerous combination, and I can only afford so many of those kinds of hobbies.
I finished up the week by heading over to the The Shops at Santa Anita, which is a mall right next to the horse track in Arcadia. We headed over there to check out a Japanese-focused book & stationary shop, and since it was in a mall I figured it would be dead.
Oh no, quite the contrary.
We arrive and the parking lots were nearly full, as were the parking garages. I’d never been to this mall before, so I didn’t know what to expect, but I wasn’t expecting this. It seemed like it took longer to find a place to park than it did to drive over to the mall, but we finally found a cluster of spots that people seemed to miss, and headed in.
It was like being transported back to the ’90s-’00s, to the age when malls were packed, everything was maintained, and the aisles weren’t lined with cell phone repair kiosks. I kept expecting to turn a corner and see a Suncoast or a Waldenbooks.
They had a Sbarro.
They had a Sbarro!
The food court, and indeed the entire mall, was like the ’90s, ’00s, and the early teens were all compressed together into a seemingly successful and popular mall. It was a pleasant surprise, as evidenced by the fact that we found the store, Kinokuniya, early on but just kept walking around and checking everything out instead of immediately leaving like I would most any other mall these days.
What a way to cap off the week with an unexpected surprise. I even bought a Hallmark keepsake ornament of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-B from Star Trek: Generations. Listen, I’m old and I loved the ’90s, so I will indulge in a little sentimental nostalgia and buy something I couldn’t afford back then. Especially when I seem to have entered an alternate dimension where they still live in The World That Was.
At any rate, the inauguration of my favorite time of year is fast approaching and I’ve got a lot to look forward to.
