2FA

Friend of mine got her FB account taken over this morning. I noticed it because I got a message from her with a link so I sent a quick warning.

Anyway I thought this would be a good opportunity to warn everyone not to click on links I message you or post to Facebook. Not because I think my account got hacked, just because if I post it, it's probably something pretty fucking horrible.

Also, you spend too much time on Facebook. Stop doing that. Here's 10 hours of relaxing ocean scenes and fish and stuff. Put that on in the background and go read a book or do something useful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgpWX18dby4&feature=youtu.be 












Be honest now, how many of you fucking idiots, clicked on that link, right after I told you now to click on stuff? Nah, it's cool, that really is 10 hrs. of fish swimming around. Still though, go do something better with your time. And change your passwords once in a while. Maybe setup two-factor auth like you're not some kid riding the short bus.

UPDATE: Oh and of course it would be just like the Japanese to go and one-up the BBC. Here's 12 hrs of the main tank at the Osaka aquarium set to some new age type mood music. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0ZQU2gq_J0https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0ZQU2gq_J0 Seriously though, don't reuse your passwords across multiple sites. Use a good password manager, setup complex unique passwords and get a good 2FA setup because you should make the NSA have to work for it.

Tom Cruise scares me.

By no means am I saying he should retire, but Tom Cruise is 56 years old. At some point, the insurance premiums on a Mission Impossible movie become a non-negligible part of the budget.

Just for reference, some other famous people who died at 56
- Hitler (I mean, yeah, okay, that one kind of escalated quickly. Sorry)
- Abraham Lincoln (if just to act as a counter-balance to Hitler)
- Beethoven (in all fairness he died of cirrhosis and I don't know if Scientologists drink so this may not be the best comparison) 
- Ian Fleming (which I guess might mean something if James Bond was a Mission Impossible spy instead of a Time Lord)
- Rick James (Yeah, that Rick James, bitch.)
- Steve Jobs (I'm getting tired of writing these little asides)
- Warren Zevon (if you're reading this and don't know Warren Zevon, unfriend me on Facebook, right the fuck now)

yeah, okay, I'm done. I could spend more time on Google but I feel my time might be better spent masturbating furiously to videos of pigeons flying into windows or something like that. I got off topic here for a bit. What was my point? Oh yeah, look, it's not like I'm saying Tom Cruise needs to switch to narrating stuff, Morgan Freeman still needs jobs, I'm just saying, at some point even Jet Li and Chuck Norris, started taking roles that were a little more chill. 

Canada's Mexico

Every day of the Trump presidency, the United States more and more becomes Canada's Mexico.

Cyberbullying my child

“I swear to God, your fucking generation” has become something of a mantra of mine recently. In part because I’m old, but mostly because in very short order my kid and his classmates will be able to vote and I’m a little worried that Senator Samurai Jack may be coming down the pike.
I’m stuck in that weird middle ground. My dad is traveling and needed me to book his flight and car because….because his computer is broken is going to be an easier explanation than the truth, so let’s go with that. Anyway, I get that done and give him the confirmation numbers but as a backup I made PDFs and printed the hardcopy to mail to him. But I gave the paper, envelope, stamps and return address sticker to my kid who subsequently failed FIVE TIMES IN A FUCKING ROW to properly address an envelope. The first time, he put the destination address in the upper left corner of the envelope where the return address should be and the return address sticker right below the stamp. Which okay, let’s chalk that one up to an age where everybody emails stuff. Fine, take your mulligan. There’s a basket full of my unopened mail right there you can check to see how it should be done, but okay, you get a do over.

Second time he gets the return addresses right but then doesn’t put the name above the destination address. To be fair, it’s going to one house, I’m sure they can figure out who it’s for, but how fucking hard is it to put a name on an envelope? Pretty hard apparently. Because the third time, he put the name right under the return address sticker so graciously provided to me by the Heart Association or Cancer Society or whatever charity it was I donated to in the hopes that they find a cure before I get whatever it is. If my child’s classmates are going to be taking over this research in the near future that was a bad investment. I’m going to have a stroke and the valedictorian from his class is going to try to give me cough syrup.

So the fourth time he’s nearly got it, except the street number and the street name usually go on the same line. But not when he does it. Number, new line, street name. At this point I was kind of surprised he managed to lick the envelope closed. Until I realized that it was one of those sticker envelopes so all he had to do was peel the thing off the back and press down. Which is probably a good thing because I don’t imagine that glue stuff makes you smarter when you lick it and at this point we’re working with a limited number of neutral connections already dwindling faster than the glaciers.

Five tries. Five tries it took a nearly-adult to properly address an envelope to send. It took five tries and a metric fuck ton of correction tape. (Don’t worry, I won’t make you do the conversion to Imperial). I started to feel sorry for the postal worker that has to read this address looking like it was scrawled by a five year old, but then I realized that I should feel sorry for all of us. This is the generation who will decide what happens in a few years. They’re entrusted with computing power surpassing all of NASA during space race, some of them are starting to drive, a few can swear in foreign languages and may be entering the Foreign Service. And yet, if required to do so today, he couldn’t properly mail in payment to keep the power from being shut off. I no longer feel bad for the postal worker trying to decipher an encoded envelope. I weep for us all. I weep for Western civilization. I swear to God, your fucking generation.

Healthy choices

Marijuana is still a plant right? That didn't change? How come all the weed products are unhealthy? THC brownies, cookies, gummies, candies. What if I was trying to diet? I mean, I'm not, but what if I was? Couldn't I get like a nice marijuana chicken ceasar with light dressing? Shouldn't that be a whole foods thing?

Advice

My kid is getting older. Whether out of a sense of paranoia or responsible parenting, my ex had me give him a condom. Which is fine. My problem is that I feel like it should come with a lesson. Not like the old health class banana lesson, but more like advice. Problem is, I don’t really have any. Most of my relationships failed. Badly. The rest just failed regularly. Not that I expect him to be using it any time soon, but the condom has been sitting in my medicine cabinet for a while and apparently it’s going to expire next year and I really don’t like wasting things. Look at how much plastic there is in the ocean. It would be bad for the environment to just see the thing go to waste. So while I’m not particularly enthused by the idea, it just seems appropriate that he put some forethought into relationships. I am the wrong person to give him any advice on that topic.

I mean there’s some obvious advice I can give – nobody ever needs to see a cell phone picture of your dick. Ever. Not even for medical reasons. You deal with that in person, not via a Google image search and WebMD. That kind of obvious stuff is pretty easy and straightforward. But beyond that, I don’t really have good advice. Find the clitoris? I don’t know, that sounds like I’m trying too hard to write an Indiana Jones prequel. So here it is, the only real advice I have that isn’t obvious and might be of use: Coldplay is not foreplay.

Independence Day

Last night I had a conversation with my kid with the question, if the Bill of Rights were abolished tomorrow, what rights would you no longer have? I came away with a pretty good sense that his entire generation thinks that today is a Holiday for Will Smith.

It's the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine)

See, the problem with the end of the world is scheduling and logistics. For example, say an asteroid was headed for us, ready to ruin the planet worse than Jurassic Park 2 ruined that franchise, we’ve got sufficient technology that we’d probably see it coming with at least a little warning. By comparison, the dinosaurs had it relatively good. They didn’t know anything until it was way too late to go around looting (a triceratops with a baseball bat in search of a new plasma TV can do a lot of damage to a Best Buy).

If we had even a few months notice, you just know there’d be a bunch of assholes who start looting on the first day. Then everybody starts looting and pillaging before all the good stuff is gone and sooner than you realize, there’s no food or plasma TVs left and you’ve still got like a month to go before the end of the planet. What am I supposed to do for that last month? Live off of ramen and listen to podcasts? End of the world and I’m suddenly back in fucking university? Screw that.

There’s a balance you need to strike with rioting at the end of civilization. I mean there’s only so much canned food out there, and don’t kid yourself, you don’t know how to farm. Sure you can maybe setup a small garden, grow a few tomatoes from a packet of seeds, but forced to grow and/or hunt your own food? You’d fucking starve and you know it. And for islands like Hawaii, so heavily dependent on shipping for food and basic goods, disruption of the normal course of business for more than about a week would be pretty fucking devastating. Not as much as thermonuclear winter, but if you’ve ever been in a Walmart watching people hoard toilet paper before a hurricane, you know the chaos of disruptions in shipping. If you go around looting and rioting early into the crisis, soon there’s nothing left and you’ve got months to kill before we all end up dead. But if you plan ahead, you can keep a modest supply of spam and rice and then still burn it all down just before the end of everything. Because it’s always nice to face annihilation with a full belly and a decent cup of coffee.

The sensible thing to do would be to act like everything is normal up until about a week before doomsday and then start looting. If you want to go all berserker, there’s a time and a place. That way if the giant space rock turns out to be an interstellar ship filled with aliens that look like Jessica Alba we still have some water and vegetables left and, if it just turns out to be a normal extinction-level event, then you still have the opportunity to crush in your neighbor’s skull in with a tire iron a few days before everybody else dies. You know what you did Dan. You know what you did.

Soylent Green

wait, wait, wait, so Soylent Green is people? So, really, guns don't kill people, Soylent Green kills people? Oh wait, that's not right, guns don't kill Soylent Green. Soylent Green kills Soylent Green.

Censorship

I was told recently that I swear too often on social media. That I might consider replacing some of the letters to make it more acceptable. And I can be reasonable. Henceforth I will be replacing the letter * in my posts with *. 

B*t yo* can still go f*ck yo*rself.