I'm taking the plunge! I'm going to gear up for VR and build a little VR studio in my new apartment. The core purchase for this will be an HTC Vive VR headset, pictured on the right below.
The Oculus Rift headset on the left and the HTC Vive are the main competitors in the early Holodeck market. Pricey toys! Oculus goes for about $700. Vive goes for $800! And, I'll have to buy a new PC with a powerful enough CPU and graphics card to run the VR software programs. Total investment of around $2,500.
Frankly, it's too early for the casual user to get into the consumer VR toys. The tech is still in its infancy. Best to wait a few more rounds. All the gadgets will function better and be cheaper in the future.
I'm getting in now because I'm thinking about becoming a content developer in the VR medium. Exactly what type of content I will develop... I haven't decided that yet. I want to find out early in the game what works and what doesn't.
I'm going with HTC Vive for simple reasons. The player in the VR space can stand up as well as sit down. That's because the system includes a couple of locator beams that define a play space in the user's room. I'll design a space in my new apartment to be used solely as a play space for my Holodeck.
As might be expected, the early leading content genres for VR headsets are porn, war and other type of shoot 'em up games, and environment building games, just as they were in the 2D environment of PCs.
One of the reasons a casual user might want to wait a couple of years to get into the VR game is that not enough programming content has yet been built for the VR market.
As I said, I'm getting in early so that I can start to work out where I fit in as a developer. As with all tech innovations, particularly ones with great promise in the consumer market, there's a ton of money to be made in VR.
I don't yet know how my skills fit in. I don't know what works and doesn't work.
After I move, I'll set up my own little Holodeck in my apartment and start answering these questions.
Like everybody else, I thought Donald Trump's performance at the first debate left a lot to be desired. Yesterday, CNN published this story. Trump's microphone was cutting in and out throughout the debate.
I cannot imagine how this can happen at a major event. Sound crews routinely check and double check sound systems for an event of this magnitude. A mic cutting in and out cannot be explained except as sabotage.
My opinion of the debate has been blown to hell by this. No speaker can be effective when his mic is malfunctioning.
Black Lives Matter is a rent-a-mob of the Democratic Party, organized, funded and controlled at the highest levels of the Obama administration. The goal of BLM is to drive law enforcement out of black communities so as to turn over the streets to black gangs. This is all a rerun for me.
I lived through the epidemic of gang violence in Brooklyn during the crack era. The city of New York turned over the streets to black gangs. Same sort of agitation in the 60s by leftists led to this surrender of the streets to thugs.
It was a nightmare which I will not describe in detail here.
I find it almost impossible to believe that we're headed toward a repeat of this nightmare. How is it possible that people did not learn from the last go round?
60 years of constant weeping and gnashing of the teeth over blacks has driven us all nuts. We've beatified blacks, simultaneously exempting them from any responsibility for their own lives and problems. White kids have been taught for generations to devise the most tortured explanations to pin the blame for any problem blacks might encounter on whites. That's what nice white people are supposed to do.
This shit has devolved into insanity and farce.
The ideological foundation for this attempt to drive law enforcement out of black communities was already in place when I was a kid in the 60s. I was taught in my undergraduate courses by white lefty professors that cops were an "occupying army" in black communities. What was supposed to take the place of a police presence was never quite explained.
But the cops were evil and racist... that was for certain.
My college indoctrination also taught me that white racism was responsible for the fact that black men dominate the prison population. In fact, I was taught that holding blacks responsible for their lives was a form of racism.
BLM is the expected outcome of this indoctrination of our kids. Several generations of black kids have been told that whites are responsible for all their problems. White kids have been beaten down into apologists and flagellants. Nobody has the courage to say to blacks: "That's enough. Back off. You don't get any more."
I'm not a political activist. I'm not going to do anything more about this insanity than write this bit. But, I want to be the first to say this. I'm retired, financially secure and I don't have to fear blacklisting.
The time to say No! to blacks has arrived. Blacks are responsible for their own problems and their own lives. They must obey the law, and humble themselves before law enforcement, like everybody else. Injustices happen to members of every group. Blacks don't have some special claim here.
The outcome of this capitulation to the rent-a-mob BLM will be black gang control of the streets of many of our major cities. I know because I lived through the last episode.
I live now at the end of a dirt road on top a mountain in the forest. The violence and chaos is unlikely to reach me or my family. What the hell! I will only be an observer as New York City sinks again into the madness of black gang control of the streets.
If you don't read Ann Althouse's weblog, you probably should. She's a law professor at the University of Wisconsin. I worked at the most powerful and important corporate law firm in the world for 5 years, so I know a great legal mind when I encounter same. Althouse is a brilliant legal analyst. She's also a hideously spoiled brat and whining, nagging bitch. The problem here is that she's a feminist.
This woman pulls down a $150,000 salary, has enjoyed tenure for 45 years and has not really had to work much in those 45 years. She absented herself from the hard work, long hours and the need to hustle for clients that most lawyers face to live this life of idle pleasure.
But, she can't stop bitching about how badly women are treated. Everything about her life demonstrates that her bitch has no foundation in realty, but she can't stop bitching. She seems determined to prove that the widely held stereotype of women is true... that nothing you give a woman will stop her from bitching for more.
I actually enjoy reading her blog, until I run into the inevitable bitchery. Once I get to that, I just want to kick this fucking spoiled brat in the ass. Her daddy obviously spoiled the hell out of her. She was cute when she was a kid, too, and she undoubtedly enjoyed manipulating men with this bitch act. She's an old woman now and she's still carrying on like some fucking 20 year old spoiled brat bitch.
Althouse got started on this bitching back when she was a kid, joining in the feminist fable that women were treated just like blacks under Jim Crow. You'd think that the circumstances of her life would have caused her to abandon this stupid lie decades ago. No, she's only embraced the "cause" more fiercely as we've dumped wealth, leisure and privilege in her lap.
Here's how bad things are. She and her colleagues purged the faculty of the University of Wisconsin Law School of anybody we might think of as "normal," that is Christian, conservative and oriented toward traditional family. The law school is now entirely in the hands of far leftist feminists, critical race theorists and other such pieces of shit. She and her colleagues get paid to prosecute their bitch, and she still can't stop bitching like a rotten cunt.
It would be interesting to know what we could give this rotten spoiled bitch that would put an end to her whining and bitching.
We spoiled women rotten in my lifetime. It's been 60 years of bitching and whining for more. And, yet, we've given women everything they've asked for, usually within moments after they've asked. The results of this stupidity should have been predictable.
As any daddy knows, you have to say no to your kids or this is what you get.
I really do enjoy Althouse's legal analysis. The bitching and spoiled brat whining, however, drive me away. I go away for a couple of months and then get drawn back in... and she's still whining and bitching.
Althouse seems determined to prove that our fathers and grandfathers were on the money when they said that women will bitch about anything and everything and there's nothing you can do to stop that. She's certainly convinced me.
Why worried? Dunno. Maybe because I'm moving. Certainly not moving back into the urban ghetto. Moving into another rural paradise... a garden apartment on top of the mountain.
Leaving behind my home for 26 years. Leaving behind just about everything left of Myrna. Which is a good thing. It's time to let it all go.
In a couple of months, I'll be getting un-Woodstuck!
When you sell a house, the buyers all negotiate as if they intended to do a gut renovation of the house. My house was designed, not so much to be a showcase, but to be a cheap place to live.
My house started life as a cinder block hunting cabin in the woods. The trappings of a house were superimposed in a couple of different renovations. Aluminum siding... what a great idea!
You could just sit out here in a cheap house, let it crumble around you and enjoy life.
I've never been much into home improvement. The girlfriend has been nagging me for several years to replace the windows in the back and, in theory, she's right. The decrepitude never bothered me.
Admittedly, my laissez faire attitude toward home maintenance has added up over the years and the house could use a redo.
Maybe I'll get into home improvement at my new digs, the in-law apartment with my daughter and son-in-law. Of course, I wouldn't have to do the work. My son-in-law has his own little crew.
I'm burrowing deeper into being a retired grandpa.
Some days, I feel as if I'm being slowly roasted alive. Rosacea, arthritis and elevated body temperature. Inflammation is what ultimately kills most of us.
What is it that goes wrong within our bodies as we age that causes our bodies to consume themselves?
Among my many age related chronic conditions, I count rosacea and arthritis. Both are caused by systemic inflammation. As I understand it, the buildup of bacteria and detritus in the tissue causes the body to launch an inflammation attack as a method of defense. In other words, the body thinks it is defending itself when it is actually destroying itself.
My dermatologist has treated my rosacea with antibiotics, both internal and external. The results have been mixed. This has slowed the spread of the disease, but it hasn't stopped it. I see no hope for reversal of the condition.
I treat my arthritis exclusively with yoga. Yoga makes the most obvious symptoms disappear. I'm not in pain and I can engage in normal physical activity and sports. But, yoga does not stop or reverse the gradual hardening of my body caused by inflammation.
From Science Daily, a definition of the problem:
As animals age, their immune systems gradually deteriorate, a process called immunosenescence. It is associated with systemic inflammation and chronic inflammatory disorders, as well as with many cancers. The causes underlying this age-associated inflammation, and how it leads to diseases, are poorly understood. New work sheds light on one protein's involvement in suppressing immune responses in aging fruit flies.
Knowing what causes systemic inflammation doesn't do much to solve the problem.
The only general advice I've received is that I should live like a nun. Avoid red meat, liquor and spices. I figure I might as well be dead as follow that advice. I've cut down a lot on drinking because the negative outcome, i.e., pain, is immediate.
Folks on FB have suggested everything from antihistamines to steroids to slow the process of systemic inflammation.
Maybe we're just meant to die. We live by transforming energy into heat, a destructive process.
I'll be visiting my general practitioner soon and I'll have a lot of questions to ask him about systemic inflammation. If you have any suggestions, please let me know.
Back to work now that I'm fully recovered from surgery and no longer in pain. A rather sparse doodle.
We can now apparently add sexual inadequacy and a tiny penis to the causes of disagreement with a leftist. Racism, of course, is to be taken for granted. Below, a nice sketch from DeviantArt.
I've been encountering this theme with some frequency on Facebook and other web sites. Some lefties become so obsessed with the size of my dick that they can't talk about anything else.
Feminists online have been obsessed with this issue for years. My loathing for feminism is, of course, proof that I "hate women," a hatred which must have been borne in my fury over the size of my member.
Racism pimps joined in with the penis fantasies some time ago.
"You wouldn't be talking that way if you were face to face with a black person!" lefties like to say. "You'd be too afraid. Your problem is just that you've got a tiny dick."
Telling the lefties that I'm not going to show them my dick doesn't do a bit of good. I'm not the kind of guy to take a dick selfie and put it up on the web. I'm not sure that that's really proof anyway. How would I prove that the dick in question is mine?
Lefties have always enjoyed imagining that their ideology is proof that they are free spirits with wide ranging and hot sex lives. I've lived in Woodstock long enough to know that that is mostly bullshit. Lefties get divorced, experience failure in relationship and change partners frequently. No doubt about that.
Drama and failure give an illusion of spicing up one's sex life. The toll from that sort of life adds up over the years. By one's 30s or 40s, a constant parade of partners ceases to seem glamorous. It's simply dreary failure.
I guess this "tiny dick" thing is an elaboration upon the "angry old white man" bit. My backward political thinking, so this theory goes, originates in my fury over my obsolescence and minuscule dick. Eat shit and die, old white guy!
I've always been happy with the size of my dick. Perhaps I'm fooling myself, but I can't recall spending any time fretting over this issue.
And, no, I won't show the damned thing to you either. You'll just have to take my word for it. The damned thing is YUGE!
"I am never sure whether I should lament the state of the world or be complacent about it. For on the one hand everything is going to the dogs and on the other I am a happy man." Theodore Dalrymple, writing in Taki Mag.
I still support Trump. My reasons have not changed. I did my civic duty and wrote up a long winded essay explaining why I support The Donald a while ago. Go read it if you're so inclined.
I volunteered to work in a presidential campaign once... the Gene McCarthy Kids' Crusade in 1968. Anti-Vietnam war candidate.
Nobody seems to notice that Trump is, relatively speaking, the anti-war candidate in this election. Yeah, I know... how in the hell can you tell what a candidate is really going to do once he assumes office?
Trump has suggested that we might pull back from policing the world and invading other countries to focus mostly on self-defense. I'm down with that. Hillary, on the other hand, has already knocked over a couple of foreign nations... the Ukraine and Libya.
I'm still trying to stay out of the fray. My life will continue to be fine, no matter who wins or loses. I think. Each side keeps trying to tell me the End is Near if their loathed opponent wins.
I'm an internet idiot like anybody else. Catch me on a day when I'm tired, or tired of being lonely, and I'll tear some Hillary supporter a new asshole and fight and bitch for hours. I regret it later, but what can I do? I am but a sinner.
Life is too good for me to get caught up in the histrionics.
I'm just a retired Mr. Mom Grandpa. I never wanted to run the world. Shit, I never even wanted to be a manager in an office. On a few occasions, I somehow found myself fulfilling that function. Be damned if I know how or why that happened. I failed as miserably as I could and got out as fast as I could.
Life is pretty damned good. Getting ready to move into my Mr. Mom Grandpa in-law apartment. Cleaning up the house and getting it ready to go on the market. Health returning to normal.
Friggin' Cubs are going crazy this year.
Who could ask for more?
The real estate agent told me to get rid of all the piles of stuff before he shows the house. So, my son-in-law towed the dumpster over, dropped it off in my driveway and I'm filling it up.
I've owned my house in Woodstock for 25 years. So, the junk is piled high.
Stuff I absolutely had to buy has been gathering dust under my bed for a decade or more. Guitar stomp boxes, computer cables, etc.
I have a couple of bookcases full of programming and software manuals that are obsolete. At least I made money reading those books.
Twelve years after Myrna's death, I'm finally throwing away the last of her affects and possessions. Her pics will be stowed away in boxes. Time to close the books on that chapter in my life. You can't mourn forever.
Well, you can, but what the hell good does it do?
I might put one of our couple pics up on the wall in my new in-law apartment.
I'll be cleaning out my closets and tossing all the clothing that doesn't fit me that I'll never wear again. Might drop that stuff off in the Goodwill box instead of dumping it.
I'm finally free from the pain of surgery and I can lift heavy objects again. Trying to slowly get back to my exercise regimen.
I'm deep cleaning the house as I toss stuff out. Lonely old widower that I am, I've fallen into the usual male trap of settling for superficial cleaning. My girlfriend nags me constantly on her weekend visits to adopt her standard of cleanliness, but lifelong habits are difficult to change.
The attic is the tough hack. Spiders take over any space not regularly swept clean and I don't go up in the attic often. Out here in the Catskills, spiders constantly threatened to take back any human encroachment on their territory. I routinely sweep the walls and ceilings of their webs.
That stuff in the attic is the really old junk. Some of it even predates buying my house. I don't know why I dragged that crap up there. Should have simply tossed it.
I'll still be living at my house for another 3 to 6 months. The real estate agent thinks my house will sell quickly. But, it still takes a while to go through the process of showing it and dealing with the legal and financial issues of selling.
Female children tend to suffer from being over praised and over loved. How can a daddy or grandpa help but be smitten? I've raised girls and boys. Toddler girls are so huggable, so determined to please. Toddler boys suffer from what I call the "squiggly wigglies." Try to hold and comfort them and they'll use you as a trampoline.
What daddy does not adore his little girl? She wants to dress up like a princess. Mommy buys her princess outfits and tutus. Kisses and hugs all around.
When the little princess turns 3, everything changes. Once a little huggy doll, the girl begins to refuse to accept all that affection. She often becomes pretty pissy about it.
"You hug me too much!" she'll say when daddy tries to give her a goodbye kiss. "Leave me alone!" And daddy can see that she's studying him to gauge the effectiveness of her rejection of his affections.
What happened?
She's demanding recognition of her dark side.
We all have our dark side. We are all sinners. In our intimate relationships, we want both sides to be recognized and embraced. If only one side is encouraged and recognized, and that's usually the light side, that dark side will become a monster fighting for attention.
This pattern gets replayed throughout a woman's life, particularly if she's pretty. Men project all sorts of compassionate virtues onto a physically attractive woman. I was no different when I was a young man. Took a long time to recognize that a pretty woman with those doe eyes and fluttering eyelids might be a vicious, holy terror.
We become contemptuous of anything that we obtain too easily. Men are too damned easy to manipulate. Piece of cake for a young woman who's a piece of ass.
Feminism has amped up this dilemma. We've spent the past 50 years literally elevating women to sainthood, blaming men for everything and weeping over the slightest scratch life might inflict on our little princesses.
And, at the same time, we've told those little princesses that they suffer from systematic "oppression" and that they are being cheated and abused.
The dark side won't be denied.
The wave of correction has already begun, and I expect it to accelerate.
When I talk politics with women, who are almost always hyper liberal, on the web, I find that the first thing I have to do is abuse them of the notion that I will kneel before them in acknowledgement of their compassionate virtue. I have to tell them that they might be rotten, no good brats. That their motives might be mean and vicious and self-interested.
If the woman in question is really mired deep in the myth of female moral supremacy, I might even have to tell her that she's "just a rotten cunt."
You'd think that this would drive said woman away. It never does. She'll spend hours bitching and arguing and hurling every epithet at me that she can imagine. But, she won't simply detach and go away.
Why?
Because she's relieved that a man finally recognized that dark side in her. She has been fed up for years with the unearned praise that men have heaped upon her. She wants to finally be seen for what she is.
What's the moral?
I think we're about to see women's dark side emerging as a sinister monster in our national political and intellectual life. How that will manifest itself, I do not know.
Recent Comments