I'm trying to write a winter-themed song about loneliness, but without the awful, corny bits that have turned that beautiful piece I mentioned earlier into... a less beautiful piece. It's about time for bed, though, so I'm cutting myself off before finishing the second half of a verse. I haven't started the first half yet. Nor is this the first verse, though I've not started on that. My creative process is non-Euclidean, mm'kay? Anyways...

"...Returned at last, I find this hall of comrades
Abandoned to the dusk and chill and rime.
My place of rest has passed into the shadow;
Well, here's a bullshit verse about a mime."

So, that's my theory about awful lines in good songs; somebody throws crap in as filler to come back to later, then when 'later' comes they just say "ah, fuck it, good enough." More garbage later, if I get it done.

My hand has hurt ever since the... let's call it an 'accident'. The consequence of poor decisions. Well, a few days ago I jarred it good and hard; it happened so fast, I'm not even sure what I did beyond trying to catch a falling plate. The pain was so intense that for a moment I thought I'd broken it again somehow, but it faded in seconds. It was a few hours later that I realized that my hand didn't hurt anymore. Still doesn't. I guess I must have had a scar tissue adhesion or something, and, uh... undergone acute resolution? Hey, I'll take it.

On an entirely unrelated note, because I really want to say something but really ought not to on a commission artist's submission: What is it with commissioners who want their OC inserted in a disruptively sideways manner into an IP? "The 'NC Isn't Rape if She Likes It' Saga: Mary Sue Rescues Mai Waifu From a Life of Ennui Using Penis" Guh. I mean, I have my own fantasy crush, and I get the whole fantasy fulfillment thing, but the form it often takes in this fandom seems so cringefully shallow to me. I'd be pretty embarrassed to tell anyone my fantasies, and they're not really even sexual, let alone personality-hijacking. It's just so weird to me.

In an unusually melancholy place today, after spending my dreams marinating in a haunting piece of metal stuck on infinite loop in my head. Somehow, Wintersun's work always feels like the voice I can't find. It's like the narrator to the self image I fear is laughable in its melodrama. God knows I've been laughed at for allowing the world a glimpse now and then. Well, anyways...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIiZFpOQnd8

I just bought a couple bags of milk (yes, Canada), and the total at the checkout seemed suspiciously low. I was puzzled, but opted against arguing. Got home and checked the receipt.

...Seniors' discount.

=(

It irritates me just that much. 'Iron Lung' was a frankly dumb game, built on a foundation of papier-mâché spook. It's mystery with no answers, set in a universe of nothing and non-sequiturs. It's less than ankle deep, but I think it could be made better. Here's an alternate take on the premise:

A cloud of an unknown dust, which has the effect of blocking almost all electromagnetic radiation, has enveloped the Earth; light, radio, even cosmic rays are unable to penetrate more than a few meters. The planet is in darkness, and there's no way of knowing when or if the black nebula will pass. Many religious groups are calling this the 'end of days'; and if it lasts for long, they may be right. Temperatures are plummeting, crops are dying, and the black dust falls ever thicker on the land, and turns the sea to ink. The mass of this dust does not correspond to any known compound or element. X-ray diffraction returns no signal. Not even Fluorine will react with it. It absorbs ionizing radiation, neither transmitting nor producing any of its own. Strangely, the dust exhibits a behaviour similar to quantum locking; each particle attempts to maintain a specific distance from its neighbouring particles. As a result, sonar has been found to operate effectively through the medium where EM-based techniques fail. The media have dubbed the black dust 'Essentia Obscura': the essence of dark.

Contact with the ISS has, of course, been lost. The crew are presumed alive, but in grave danger as battery power dwindles. Essentially as a public morale strategy, a rescue mission is mounted to supply emergency power reserves and provisions for the station for two months; anything beyond that has been deemed pointless, as there will be no viable planet to return to. The rescue capsule has been retrofit with sonar, in order to contact and safely dock with the station. The launch proceeds according to plan, but as the capsule ascends clear of the atmosphere, the sonar begins to give navigation hazard alerts. Vignettes emerge from the Essentia Obscura; memories, regrets, and... something else.

Addendum/epilogue: The black nebula dissipates as mysteriously as it arrived, revealing a Solar system scorched beyond any plausible survivability by a gamma ray burst. The Earth, having been enshrouded in Essentia Obscura for the duration, lives on.

Capitalism culture is no longer circling the drain; it's achieving relativistic speeds and shedding terrifying jets of intense cosmic radiation into the far reaches of the universe as it approaches the event horizon of absolute stupidity, from which no light may ever return.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3566834/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/danidi.....t-into-cinema/

Hey, lemme pitch a bad idea idea too: How about a movie about someone being punished for something or other by sticking him in a tin can and having him bump around blind in an unexplained blood ocean full of specious vignettes with no coherent theme or—

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27564844

Oh, fuck me.

Peaches. I love peaches. Fantastic flavour, but... the skin... Peach fuzz feels like eldritch sandpaper on my fingertips, and the feeling of abrasive wrongness lingers and lingers. And on the tongue? Have you ever licked R'lyeh brickwork? Oh, I have...

And speaking of dark horrors of the deep, you know how some lakes have a very organic muddy bottom? Unbearable. Candles and air fresheners overwhelm me with cloying petrochemical scents that are an ironic mockery, like olfactory orcs. Direct sunlight hurts, as though all of my skin is staring into the Sun. And I wish that all the vacuum cleaners and circular saws would stop screaming, and the lawnmowers would stop snarling at me.

I've just been thinking about how these things probably don't compute for neurotypicals, or necessarily even line up with the squicks of other neuro-spicy types. You may wonder how or to what this is pertinent. Good question.

A fire in Chatham yesterday destroyed 90 apartment units. A number of cats were rescued, and our primary animal rescue organization is swamped as they attempt to reunite them with their owners, who are currently homeless and have no supplies... it's a mess. We're donating what we can, which is a bit limited. If you have the resources and the inclination, there's info on the situation and how to donate here: https://www.facebook.com/pawr.org/

...And by "science," I mean "brewing." I am, however, venturing into the realm of "they said it couldn't be done!" They are very probably correct.

I'm attempting to make wine from dried fruit; specifically mazafati dates. The trouble with this concept is that dried fruit is typically sprayed with sulfites to preserve its vibrant brown colour, and sulfites are used to stabilize wine (read: stop fermentation). Apparently hydrogen peroxide reacts with sulfites and renders them... not-sulfite. So we're going with that. We'll see how it works out. Wish me luck; otherwise this is gonna be some weeeeeeeeeeird kool-aid.

If, during this past few days, you attempted a fresh login to FA, a hacker now has your credentials. Change your password.

If you use one password for all of your online accounts, and attempted a fresh login, a hacker now has all of your credentials. Change all of your passwords immediately, change them all to different, strong passwords, take appropriate action on any financial accounts, and stop being a cybercrime magnet. Seriously, a little black meatspace password book costs so much less than a drained PayPutz account.

If you sent or received any e-mails involving the furaffinity.net domain, a hacker now has all information contained therein, plus your e-mail address. Act accordingly.

If you are a second-rate hacker who has just simultaneously pissed off one of the biggest and most IT-oriented subculture communities and a band of borderline cyberterrorists that were too extreme for 8chan... good luck with that, you little shit.

Name: Sinha Extra Strong Beer
Nationality: 'Ceylon' (Sri Lanka)
Type: Stout
ABV: 8.8%
Reason for selection: Cheap. Bottle with shiny lion. Stout. Sounds non-Slavic for a change of pace.

Between aging eyes and a dark colour scheme on the bottle, I honestly had very little idea what I was buying here; all I could make out was "Sinha" and "stout." I was definitely not anticipating that kind of abv, and after the Faxe incident, it might have given me pause if I had. Sinha is produced by the Lion Brewery, and is not actually their regionally best-selling flagship product. Which is Lion Lager. The company got its start as the 'Ceylon Brewing Company', as a result of British colonial imperialism and, apparently, the thirst for something besides tea. I might be tempted to perverse pride in that, if my sister's geneologic sleuthing hadn't turned up that I'm actually less British than previously thought, and predominantly a Highlander. Well then. As for the actual beer... Aroma has sweet floral notes with underpinning mango, moderately heavy malt, and an odd but not unpleasant dash of freshly showered lady bits. Flavour is sweet and warm, with an indistinct bitterness that cleverly disguises the considerable alcohol content as cacao. Pleasantly sour finish, with the suspicious scent confirmed in a way I am probably not allowed to accurately express here because you can't mark journals as 'NSFW'. Monty Python would know what I mean. Following this review, I may feel inspired to go and admire the gallery of trinityfate62 for a while. Everything may be terrible lately, but one can daydream, and there's worse ways to get a broken neck.

The bottom line: Fairly simple but effective flavour profile that manages a high alcohol content in a way that appeals, and on more than one level. Faxe, you are officially on unofficial notice. 4.8/5 snek butts

You ever go to check the spelling of something totally innocuous, and end up discovering that not only does everyone spell it wrong, but also the entire background of that thing is really weird?

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/q/blog/mah.....song-1.5375722

Not an original piece? Bip Bippadotta? Softcore Italian porn about Sweden???

Dude. 'Mahna Mahna' was wild before I knew this stuff.

So, I do have a SoFurry.com account, also with the username FeO2.

(and Fe3O4 on Fetlife, but that's another can of worms.)

Washer's fucked. Dryer's been fucked for ages. 'Improved' electronic controls mean the new ones will be fucked in a handful of years. Just got home from picking up a $50 document to tell the government that I'm fucked, only to find that the water heater's fucked, its output line is fucked, and its supply line cutoff is fucked. In spite of flooding, the floor is probably no more fucked than it was beforehand. So I've got that going for me, which is nice. We're incurring ever increasing debt to maintain a house which was built before building codes or household electricity were a thing, and which has been remodeled by generations of people who weren't skilled enough to know that they weren't skilled enough, but who still had a sufficient share in society's common wealth that they could handle the problems their incompetence created. We don't get to make mistakes anymore, but the vintage fuckups keep coming home to roost.

Capitalism doesn't mean freedom, or the right to own individual property; it means that if you aren't obscenely rich, you are chattel. And if you're reading this? You, just like myself, are chattel. Serfs up, dude.

And, of course, there's the... family issues. I don't know how long my Mom has, and I don't know if... I can be prepared. There's so much cold preparation, to the extent that a lawyer is nearly baffled by the research. That's not even getting into the future possibility of our being saddled with a reverse mortgage we had no say in. I don't want to die, but I'm awfully goddamned tired of living, if you can call it that.

I know, more moments of joy and bliss. I'm sorry. Things are really hard, and I swear the clouds are shrinkflating their silver lining.

Rest in peace, Dragoneer. Don't think I'm qualified to say much more than that. Uh, I guess... let's try not to disintegrate from here on out.

Okay, hear me out: 'The Time I Got Reincarnated as an Office Worker in a Mundane World'


...Shit, I just reinvented 'Miss Kobayshi's Dragon Maid'. This is hard.

I'm just echoing and cannot individually confirm, but it seems that Taral Wayne has passed. Did he know who'd miss him, I wonder? That there were those still standing quietly by? Seems like the elders of this fandom tend to fall into obscurity as it moves on without them, putter around for a time trying to remember who they used to be, and then they're gone. Well. Go out like a shooting star, Taral, Saara, et al.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taral_Wayne

The Monty Hall problem. You are on a game show. Before you are three doors, and you must choose one to receive the prize behind it. Behind one of the doors is a car. The other two conceal goats. Whichever door you select, the show host opens one of the two doors you did not select, and reveals a goat. He then asks you if you want to switch doors. What should you do?

Common logic states that it doesn't matter which door you choose at this point. Common logic is also statistically wrong, for reasons that seem to boil down to "if you switch, then you have selected two doors." There's a bunch more about Bayesian inferences and statistics and stuff. This is all horse crap (I'm pretty sure).

Here's the thing. No matter which door you initially choose, one of the incorrect doors will be automatically eliminated. Two of the doors are a convergent path, so let's simplify the equation; there was only ever one right choice and one wrong choice. It was always a 50/50 chance, and changing your answer won't alter that probability.

So, just what fresh hell brought this on? I want to turn this ugly, weed-strewn disaster of a lawn into Chèvre, god damn it.

I expect zero response to the e-mail I just fired off at Leadnow, regarding an awfully sketchy campaign. So I'm going to throw it up here, where I expect it might at least be read by someone.

---

In regards to your campaign to regulate energy and water usage by cryptocurrency and AI, as initiated by one '█████':

"Cryptocurrency and data centers in Canada aren’t required to register or restrict how much water or electricity they use." Well, let me help you out here, because physics and Fermi estimates can give us an approximate but realistic figure. An average kitchen faucet has a flow rate of around 13 litres per minute. Assuming a high starting temperature of 20C and a reasonably low target temperature of 80C, heating 13L of water to this temperature would require 251400J, or 0.0698kWh. Over the course of an hour this equates to 4kWh/hour, or in other words 4,000W. A typical high-ish end PSU is rated for 700W, so we're looking at this flow rate supplying 6 crypto systems with about 2L/minute each. If we divide the claimed 127 billion litres of water by 2, that gives us a *conservative* estimate of 63,500,000,000 crypto-mining systems in operation, or roughly twenty times the total estimated number of computers on the planet. A Bitcoin mining calculator estimates a profit of $1.33USD/day per comparable system, so in a year that amounts to $31T, or roughly 54 times Amazon's total sales for 2023. Does this sound rational? What math did *you* use?

In retrospect, the flow rate of a faucet was only relevant to how many computers you could cool per kitchen sink, which isn't entirely the point, and only serves to complicate the equation. The rest of the math, however, stands.

...None of which addresses the fact that this isn't even how liquid computer cooling works; the liquid medium is just cycled through a larger heat sink than what would fit inside the case. Pouring it down the drain would be expensive and silly.

There is, of course, a very good argument for banning cryptocurrency entirely: it's a thinly veiled pyramid scheme. Of course, the stock market is also a pyramid scheme, and it has a much more broad and intense negative impact on our economy, politics, social structure, and environment, so maybe we ought to focus on codifying a value-based—or better yet, post-scarcity—economy? This campaign is nothing more than a tech-focussed moral panic. You even invoke the scare-word, "AI," without going anywhere with it. I'm sorry, I thought I'd involved myself with a *liberal* activist organization, not... this. I am one or two frivolous campaigns away from entirely divesting myself of Leadnow at this point.

Also, did you bother to notice that the headline of your Reuters source article specifically mentions "oil drillers" as victims of a water shortage? Producing crude oil from oil sands (please find your own figures for drilling, because I've already thrown considerably more effort at this than was put into your entire anti tech-fnord campaign) requires water at about a 10:1 ratio, which translates to one TRILLION litres of TOXIC waste water in 2022, as opposed to 13% that quantity of very hypothetical Centigrade-contaminated water flushed down a very hypothetical sewer, globally. Just from Canadian oil sands. Priorities???

---

Wait... Did I mess up a variable and run the entire 127B litres through the coolant system in one minute? Possibly. It's still a silly claim and a stupid, distracted campaign in the face of actual problems.

This site's right wing fringe went absolutely kancel krazy, and their inexplicable acute onset of morality in speech has resulted in the reporting and suspension of a lot of legitimately decent people who have just had it up to the eyeballs with rampant hate speech, slander, threats, and smug culture of oppression. Among these are two of the very few people who see fit to acknowledge my existence. Saw fit, I guess. I suspect that there was such an impossible tsunami of reports that it would've taken the staff months to confirm whether or not they were true, and they just started hitting the button indiscriminately. I do hope they'll have a peek at whether those reliable and trustworthy watchdogs of free speech filed an improbable number of complaints either from or towards certain accounts in an implausibly short span of time. Well, I'm sure there was no brigading, right? That would be immoral, and we've already determined that these amateur justiciars are Very. Very. Moral.

For the most egregious sanctimony, look to the most vile sinner.

Be careful talking about current events. People of a particular political bent are capitalizing on rules that they've complained are so unfair to them, and getting good people who disagree with their point of view just a little too vehemently banned.

That being said... I don't want to be the the kind of person that Trump was to Paul Pelosi. When we all go to hell in a hand basket, be able to hold your head high for the ride.

The custom keyboard lamp I made a few years ago started dimming on me today. Not having seen many LEDs burn out non-explosively, I figured it was an EOL type issue, and destructively ripped them out of the lamp to be replaced with... something. Oddly, everything I tried from my scrap electronics drawer seemed to be burnt out as well. It wasn't until I noticed that my laptop cooling pad wasn't lit up that it occurred to me to check the USB power block...

On the bright side, I've significantly sharpened my electronic soldering skills, and my keyboard can now be seen from Jupiter.

Name: Guinness Draught
Nationality: Ireland
Type: Stout
ABV: 4.2%
Reason for selection: Social-contractual obligation

It's Guinness, so I have to. They're the force behind Kilkenny as I understand it, so I think I can anticipate something at least marginally better than that high-octane atrocity from Faxe. As a nitrogenated beer, this is another one best opened while you're still reasonably sharp. Aroma is of lightly burnt honey, with a faint note of fresh urinal cake. Or possibly mango. I'm having a hard time deciphering this. The head is predictably creamy, and worth the frantic opening procedure. There's some richness to the mouthfeel, but not as much as I anticipated—this is my first time trying a stout, and I was half expecting a thin syrup. Not sure I'm disappointed by that. Flavour is sour-forward, almost a little excessively, but not quite. Strong cocoa elements, and a difficult to place fruitiness. Sharply bitter aftertaste, but not unpleasantly so. I'll bet I could get a similar overall effect with a raisin/cocoa nib wine, if I wanted to risk it. I just might.

The bottom line: Having a hard time deciding how I feel about the sourness, but I appreciate the depth of flavour and mouthfeel. 4.5/5 minutes of fame.

OPSEU, the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, has walked away from the bargaining table and started a strike, shutting down all LCBO (Liquor Control Boaard of Ontario) stores. This is in retaliation for the government legislating the legalization of canned mixed drinks being sold in grocery and convenience stores. As a result, beer, wine (and presumably mixed drinks) are currently available only through select grocery outlets, micro breweries, and vineyards. I see no possible way for this to ironically explode in OPSEU's face.

Here's one I prepared earlier.

Name: Velkopopovický Kozel
Nationality: Czech Republic
Type: Lager
ABV: 4.6%
Reason for selection: Random selection, but look: the can has a goat on it.

Kozel means "male goat" in Czech. Google Translate has no opinions on the meaning of "Velkopopovický,", but thinks that the full name of "Velkopopovický Kozel" means "grand." I remain skeptical. Kozel beer was launched into space and returned to Earth with a parachute as part of a viral advertising campaign in 2012, but sadly Felix Baumgartner from Red Bull never made the in-flight rendezvous due to conflict of interests and questions regarding the legality of 'falling under influence'. Scent is... acceptably tart, with an ominously strong hoppy tone. Flavour is wheaty and reminiscent of berries, but swiftly abraded into gastronomic sand by the bombardment of fragrant but (IMO) excessively bitter hops.

The bottom line: I mean, it's beer alright. More bitter than I like, but not bad. And not great. 3/5 screaming goats.