Alistair Young @cerebrate@schelling.pt

The Day We Were Raided By The Feds -

https://noiseinmysignal.substack.com/p/what-the-hell-happened?sd=pf

(I wrote this up to attach to the yard sign mentioned in previous toots with a QR code, and have something to pin to avoid telling the story over again.)

Before following me, you should be aware that if you have a political ideology, I probably despise it, even if it's mine.

🤔​

No, actually - especially if it's mine.

This is my favorite piece of Christmas music, bar none:

https://open.spotify.com/track/0BuxMM3zfgmIOJLbsWAk6V?si=878ac076b14d4484

All I want for Christmas is the power to banish people to universes which *actually* work in the way they *think* they work.

The one silver lining in prominent murders is that they infallibly reveal who among one's acquaintance is an absolute shitclown of a human being, and that they can be banished to howl in the outer darkness without fear of any value being lost.

Me, paging through C# source:

“Down, down, down the code…”

#manylinesoftricksandtrials

https://eldraeverse.com/2024/12/09/eldraeic-words-of-the-day-3/

For the forests are both dark and light.

#eldraeverse #sciencefiction #writing

Unproblematic Armor - https://eldraeverse.com/2024/12/07/unproblematic-armor/

Well, hopefully so, anyway.

#eldraeverse #writing #sciencefiction

I am also entitled to bitching about being surrounded by these incompetent fools, for that matter.

Hence the thread.

(Neither rain nor snow nor heat nor gloom of night MY ASS.)

- they are taken back to the sorting office where you can, in theory, pick them up the next day.

Thus adding a minimum of one, maximum of three days to the delivery date which you were actually told.

Yes, I do feel entitled to deliveries arriving on schedule, because, goddamn it, I *am* entitled to deliveries arriving on schedule. Don't make promises you can't or have no intention of keeping, fuckers.

These blocks contain parcel lockers for packages, but only small ones. Larger ones do not fit. You would think that they would know which parcels fit in lockers which they supplied, but evidently that would require competence.

In the absence of such, all large parcels are loaded on the truck and carried out to the parcel locker, where it is ritualistically determined that they do not fit and - unless you have the rare mailman with a sense of duty and/or a Ring of Invisible Scary Dog Immunity -

I have few requests for Amazon, save that they give me an option which lets me never have any of my deliveries touched by the USPS, ever; and I have no requests for the DOGE, save that they recommend firing the USPS. Out of a cannon. Into the sun.

Let me explain. No, is too much. Let me sum up.

Due to the hordes of invisible feral dogs in this neighborhood, the USPS does not deliver mail to houses any more. They instead deliver mail to a block of post boxes located every 4-block, or so.

So, I've finally got around to going through the spare hard drives the Feds returned to us after their raid last year, only to discover that the first one I picked up isn't actually one of ours.

It's one of theirs, filled with their "crime scene" photos and analyses of our suspicious computers.

Should I have that? Probably not, even now, but hey, free hard drive and they owe me a damn sight more than that.

(Our nation's finest, ladies and gentlemen.)

Sometimes I catch myself thinking how convenient it would be if my ethics had exemptions for dealing with terrible people, before I remember that having those exemptions themselves is _why_ they're terrible people.

One day I will learn that sitting down to write my own version (with blackjack! and hookers!) is not a viable response to _every_ instance of "Christ, I could eat a handful of iron filings and _puke_ a better solution than this!"

I'm kinda hoping it's this day.

It perhaps says something about the declining state of literacy that there are multiple excellent media library apps, while every e-book library app is absurdly horrible in its own unique way.

“It would be terrible if humans ever conquered death, or even lived a few decades longer! Society couldn’t cope!”

“THEN PERISH.”

- me, carefully avoiding political arguments over Thanksgiving