Punkie

I was out of sugar, so I tried to sweeten Kool-Aid with honey. Nope. Just god-awful.

One revolution I have realized in baking is the recent trend to start talking about weight and not volume in recipes for certain dry ingredients like flour. Three cups of fluffy sifted flour is a lot less flour than three cups of densely packed flour. Same with brown sugar, or wondering if you need a “flat teaspoon” vs. a “heaping teaspoon” of something.

Someone did a study at MIT about tin foil hats, and found that not only do they not screen radio interference, in some cases, can actually magnify them.

Conclusion: The helmets amplify frequency bands that coincide with those allocated to the US government between 1.2 Ghz and 1.4 Ghz. According to the FCC, These bands are supposedly reserved for ‘‘radio location’’ (ie, GPS), and other communications with satellites (see, for example, [3]). The 2.6 Ghz band coincides with mobile phone technology. Though not affiliated by government, these bands are at the hands of multinational corporations. It requires no stretch of the imagination to conclude that the current helmet craze is likely to have been propagated by the Government, possibly with the involvement of the FCC. We hope this report will encourage the paranoid community to develop improved helmet designs to avoid falling prey to these shortcomings.

Pro Cavity Creeps agenda:

1. Things like CNC machines and proprietary interfaces to TOL equipment, like bus fare systems, message boards, etc.
2. Don’t connect them to the Internet (most can’t, anyway, but some systems use a run-of-the-mill PC, so…)
3. Don’t install anything on them that wasn’t supposed to be installed, even wallpaper as this could fuck up the resolution of a small 240 x 180 screen

“The price of being right” enters into this as well. It can be very frustrating when you let something go because the minor details do not matter, but being 100% technically correct has hazards of its own in a social narrative.

About 20 years ago, I used to keep Lego Bionicles at my desk, but had to stop because pranksters would do this, and then HR would make negative comments.

When I was 19, I had friends from high school who were still younger, and one of them was my friend Julie who had helicopter parents (she would have been 17-18). I was doing security at an event where the radio headsets we had were super-shitty, and the guy running security was a dumpster fire on his own. Julie’s parents forbid her from going to the event, and grounded her to her room. Then her dad called the hotel where the event was being held, was told Julie had “run away” to this event, and that I was somehow responsible. Given she was a minor, the event runners were understandably concerned, although they were frustrated that Julie’s dad was unable to describe her in a way that was useful: “Asian, wearing black, or a tee-shirt, or something. Ask Punkie where she is.” So they contacted the head of security to find me on my rounds to see if I knew what this crazy man was talking about. The head of security said “okay” and did nothing.

At some point, the head of security was fired for a variety of reasons, and this increased the level of miscommunication. Meanwhile, Julie’s dad was calling every few hours, demanding to know where his daughter was. And soon there was a concerted effort to find me, which was complicated because of the communication issues. By the time someone found me and the connection was made, my response of, “I have no idea, Julie said her dad forbid her coming here,” was not what they wanted to hear, and met with skepticism “You’re not hiding her, are you? Like she ran away with you in some tryst? She’s 17 and you’re 19, that could have legal ramifications!” No. We’re platonic friends, I don’t know where she is. if I tried to bonk the poor woman, she’d clobber me.

Meanwhile, Julie’s dad finds Julie in her bedroom, right where he left her. Julie later told me that she was ignoring her dad calling for her, and didn’t “come downstairs” like he demanded because she assumed it was a trap to get her punished for leaving her bedroom while she was grounded. So naturally, her dad assumed she wasn’t in the house. Because he called for her and she didn’t answer.

Poor Julie. Her parents were crazy-nuts.

I married my first wife when she was 18 and I was 20. We went through a lot of hardship. It should not have worked out: we were both poor, from broken homes, in an LDR from different worlds. She was the popular girl, I was a shy and awkward nerd. When we got married, we had only been in one another’s presence for a few weeks total. I went into the marriage not expecting a path or plan, as my parents were toxic which ended with my mother’s suicide, and my mother in law had been married 4 times before she became single for the last time. None of us had healthy marriages to draw from. At our wedding, her relatives even said, “I give it two years, tops.” We were desperately poor, and struggled most of our marriage with health and money issues.

But we made it work for 25 years. We’d still be married, but she passed away ten years ago. We became “foxhole buddies,” us against the world.

Yeah my childhood sucked, and knowing I’d have another 12 years of abuse with nobody taking me seriously because I’m a kid? No thanks. I could put $10mil to good use right now.

I got all of that except “shag ye x,” because it sounds like “shag (fuck) you x,” where “x” is the subject that is a bit vague. Like, “I’m trying to shag you, love?” or “Fuck your ex,” as in, the last person you broke up with?

My cat Hatsune Miku

Worked a job where I had to be a Linux admin for a variety of VMs. To access them, I needed an VPN that only worked inside the company LAN, and blocked internet access. it was a 30 day trial license on day 700somthing, so it had a max 5 simultaneous connection limit. Access was from my heavily locked down laptop. Windows 7 with 5 minutes locking Screensaver. The ssh software was an unknown brand, “ssh.exe” which only allowed one connection at a time in a 80 x 24 console window with no ability to copy and paste. This went to a bastion host, an HPUx box on an old csh shell with no write access to your home directory due to a 1.4mb disk quota per user. Only one login per user, ten login max, and the bastion host was the only way to connect to the Linux VMs. Default 5 minute logout for inactivity. No ssh keys allowed. No scripting allowed, was like typing over 9600 baud.

I quit that job. When asked why, I told them I was a Linux administrator and the job was not allowing me to administrate. I was told “a poor carpenter always blames his tools.” Yeah, fuck you.

Concussions. Especially when they are used as plot vehicles where someone is knocked out, and they wake up in a jail cell or whatever.

If you got hit THAT hard on the head that you’re unconscious and unresponsive for hours? You are going to wake up dizzy, nauseated, and disoriented with a huge headache, loss of motor control, and a disorienting tinnitus. Possibly permanently. Your brain swelled up and cut off blood flow. You might look like a stroke victim. You will not wake up, rub your head, then pick a lock in a dark room and construct a bomb with a gum wrapper and a smoke detector battery. You will weep, vomit, and be unable to walk straight until you get real medical attention.

Some action stars get knocked out almost every episode. I think MacGyver would have been mentally incapacitated after just a few shows.

• Panic at the Cisco

I used to troll my roommate: I have a Multi-Band wireless access point, and I would name other networks stuff to mess with them. They are from Louisiana, and are very proud of their culinary roots. One day, they came back from a trip with the relatives, and brought home some boudin, which I cooked and served with rice. I thought it was sausage, but it’s a blend of pork cooked down with onions, peppers, seasonings, AND cooked rice, so serving it with rice was redundant, apparently. They got SO ANGRY, that to this day, I am not allowed to eat it in front of them, so I have been trolling them for “boudin with rice” everywhere I can. When they still lived with me, I changed the “ancillary network names” shit like, “Boudin with rice,” and “Mild crawfish with ketchup,” and “Campbell’s New England Gumbo” and a ton of other culinary “bastardizations” of authentic Louisiana cooking. So every time they were on their laptop, I’d hear a “… Boudin corn dog–OH MY GOD PUNKIE YOU BASTARD!!! AAUGH!!!”

It is me.

Nope. Her death brought a LOT of people to the funeral, but mostly people she influenced through the anime and science fiction conventions she helped run. I won’t rule out her family showing up, but there were 250-300 people in attendance, and obviously I was distracted. She never wrote a book, but she did leave a some… let’s say artefacts… of her family. A tarot deck, a book about family life in the early 1900s, and stuff like that. I don’t know what to do with them, because I know some of them were stolen, and someone “outside the family” are not supposed to have them. She was never accepted as a “half breed,” and part of why her mother left was because of the abuse. I remember hearing about when someone in the family dies, people just “show up” without being notified. It may be apocryphal, legendary without much fact, I dunno. But it was one of those “psychic things” that her family supposedly possessed.

I do know that she found out that her father died (really died this time, not faked his death) around 2002-2003. She knew that her family wouldn’t want to speak to her, and if they did, they would probably do so for criminal intent. I remember that she encountered some of her extended family in public (one of the scams was an elderly woman with a small toddler, and an index card with “I am poor, and have no money to my grandchild”) and she would say “don’t interact with her. Look over there, there, and in that car: that’s family keeping an eye on her, and to warn her if things start to go down. Even if you say you know she’s a gypsy, yeah, don’t do that. They will find you, and hurt you.” Some of the men would see a dent in your car and say they could repair it for $200 or something. Hot women would approach you and stroke your hand while they had “visions.” She knew all the tricks. She was great at carnivals, too, like how things were rigged.

Getting gyped” Learned this one is about associating gypsies with getting screwed over, so people started saying they got gyped because something bad happened.

This one is hard for me because my first wife’s biological dad was from a family of … and I can’t even say it. My wife used to say “gypsy,” and her family all said gypsies, but I can’t say “Romani” either because they weren’t technically Romani. The family came from Europe via South America and are a large isolated family up and down the US eastern coast. Most of the rulers of this family clan are wanted by the FBI, and they are involved in everything from penny bunko scams to psychic parlors to carnivals and crooked contracting companies. My late wife’s family have been on a lot of TV shows since the 1970s, including 60 minutes and several specials on cable TV channels like Discovery. Everyone called them gypsies.

My wife died before the term “gypsy” started to be recognized as a slur, and I am curious how she would have handled it, because people used to ask her, “Oh Romani?” “No.” “Irish Traveler?” “No, they are the Ristick/Ely clan.” “… what?” But let me tell you, that family was very weird. Some of them still lived in vardas but most were circulating through private residences in common suburban neighborhoods. They were real hard to catch and pin down because almost all the top family members had multiple aliases, moved around a lot, and even my wife’s dad had several marriages, and claimed the kids on his taxes for decades, even if they were in their 30s (which is a problem my wife had to deal with, like having to tell the IRS, “No, I am 33 and married, I not 8 living with my dad in eastern Ohio.”). They have a very specific philosophy about their family as “chosen people” who were, as one story goes, forgiven by God because they stole one of the nails from the cross used to crucify Jesus. They don’t even consider what they do fraud or stealing any more than you or I would think a monkey owns a camera. I was married to her for 25 years, and heard all sorts of stories about that family, and why my mother-in-law ended up leaving.

Here’s an article from 1997 about them.

One of my wife’s friends lost her baby to COVID because her mom wouldn’t stay masked, and lied about having COVID when she visited shortly after the baby was born. The abject selfishness boggles my mind.

A lot of outsourcers do this. Here’s my experience with a few companies.

• The “team” you meet are competent, English speaking fronts. They are the demo models of the people who will work on your projects.
• After the contract is signed, these people are swapped out with randos of varying competence.
• In some cases, some of these randos are further hidden behind aliases: people with names that are actually more than one person sharing logins and passwords.
• They will string you along, trying to charge maximum hours worked without regards to product or services delivered.
• Most of these companies have a “bucket of crabs” mentality: the managers are horrible, the staff incompetent, and once the gain some skill, they leave for better companies. They backstab one another, hijack projects to fuck over coworkers, and lie and cover their tracks. Some of this is cultural, like a caste system, while some are just racist.

At one time, these people were pretty good, but they realized they had skills and left for other countries for better pay and better working conditions. The bids got more and more competitive, cutting costs until they were literally filled with low-skilled labor who can’t be promoted or leave for economic or competence reasons.