brucoe

Legends was a fun series as long as you didn't try to take it seriously. I kind of liked the episodes where they get all involved in ridiculous events of the past that played on the laughs. When they started to go into the episodes about the characters themselves, I'll admit that those weren't my favorites. But I'd still watch them nonetheless.

About three or four weeks ago, my kidneys collapsed and I ended up in the hospital. That was such a rough period of time, but now that I'm behind that (of course, I'm now doing dialysis 3 x a week), I'm actually feeling pretty good about my life. Oh, I hate dialysis, but I've lost 50 pounds and for reasons I just can't really fathom, I'm feeling a lot more positive than I have in quite some time. Got back to work, and I'm starting to notice that far more people seemed to care about my health than I ever did.

Yep, kind of sums it up for me, too.

I signed back up to the Elder Scrolls Online (subscribed for a year and bought all the expansions I didn't have) mainly because I need a game that I can play while going through dialysis, which can be four hours three times a week. I had recently bought a powerful laptop that's designed just for gaming, and my understanding is that the center I go to has wifi access for clients. Figure I'll install it on the laptop tonight, and hopefully I'll be up to speed by Friday's session.

It turns out that all of Zucker's Facebook data has been filtering directly into my backyard. I checked earlier today and about 197 billion documents have now been dumped into the landfall we here have been calling Facedump and all calls to the authorities have been ignored, even though we kept reporting the fact that we don't know what to do with all this stuff. Okay, that's not completely true. We did find out that one girl down the street really likes hula hoops. I mean, REALLY likes hula hoops, is all I'm gonna say.

Out of the hospital finally. I would never wish this experience on anyone. Now, I'm focusing on making sure I don't make any such mistakes ever again and take advantage of the fact I got through this thing.

They're going to put me on a kidney waiting list, but unless your name is Clinton or Trump, getting one is kind of like winning the lottery.

Let's just chalk this one up to the "do as I say, not as I do" category of life lessons. Over the last few weeks, right about the middle of the whole Ukrainian war thing (thanks, Putin), I started to notice a real problem with my weight control. I was gaining massive amount of weight, and it didn't make any sense. So, doing what I normally do, I changed my eating habits massively and started losing some of that weight off. And then it continued shooting back up again (except now I was barely eating). So, not thinking rationally, I figured I would just exercise more and started running more often, right before realizing that I was having trouble doing that. So I tried long walks, and then I found that I was having difficulty doing that. Turns out, my kidneys have completely collapsed and didn't have the courtesy of at least explaining to me what was going on. After some quick blood testing, my doctor has decided to admit me into the hospital (decided to wait until Monday because over the weekend would mean no doctor could actually see me until Monday anyway). I can't even begin to describe the pain I've been going through (and I've been shot before). So, take this as some brotherly advice that if you suspect something's wrong, pay attention to it. I probably ignored too many warning signs and really wish I hadn't.

Great book. I read it back when it was just a Richard Bachman book, and I suspected there was something weird about it while reading it (there were a lot of clues that I kept catching that just seemed too obvious). Right after I read it, it was revealed that it was Stephen King who wrote it. It was still a great book.

I find it somewhat relevant that I had stopped following Musk a few days ago, slightly before he decided to buy into the platform. I suspect there's a connection there somewhere. I've been finding Twitter to be less and less relevant every day, and if he starts to try to make decisions, even less so.

My representative since 2018 has done absolutely nothing and has done nothing to distinguish himself. The previous one was forced to resign because he was a moron. I feel very well represented.

I don't think they really care if they get caught lying. They're playing from the Trump playbook all the way, in that they lie all the way through and could care less what anyone says in response. We've hit a new era in information these days where the truth is completely subjective and almost tied to what side you like better than the other.

Most weapons have a "war crimes" versus "no war crimes" toggle on them. It's so easy to forget to switch to the right one after cleaning your weapon.

I try not to think about it because not a single thing I do will ever make a difference concerning it whatsoever. Unfortunately, people who probably shouldn't be the ones making decisions on this sort of thing are exactly those people, they don't listen to anything someone like me has to say (or care), and they're going to do whatever they think is appropriate regardless of how it affects me in any way. It's part of what makes politics so awful to me because that just translates to an atmosphere where people who are good at popularity contests end up becoming the instruments of power to control the rest of us, even though that popularity rarely translates to either the smartest person in the room or the most compassionate.

I just managed to finally score an XBox Series X through Amazon. As mostly a PC player, I've been pretty good on PC games, but am curious if there are any games that are XBox only that I should start looking into.

I liked the first episode. I know absolutely nothing about Moon Knight, so it's kind of a twisty type of show to watch and enjoy.

It depends on whether or not they installed anti-tamper devices. Some mines have them automatically built in. Some don't. And some you can add to them.

Yeah, at least you can see them all above ground. Usually, we bury them under ground, which means you're screwed no matter what you do.

Nope. Not driving through them. And this coming from a guy who used to sleep on mines during deployments.

Seriously, I've NEVER been in a situation where I've been in so much of a hurry that I'm just going to drive slowly through a minefield to avoid going around it.

I'm sorry to hear this happened to him. I have zero desire to look for the video to see it actually happen.

One of the first lessons you learn at the Academy is about the NCO corps, in that when you're in the middle of battle, quite often the ability of an NCO to make a split decision at a very specific time can turn the entire battle so that the officers making the higher end decisions can react and bring the rest of the units back up to speed. One of the strongest points of the US military is that officers brief their NCOs on what needs to be done so that an enlisted leader can immediately switch to plan B or C in the middle of a crisis situation. Other armies, not willing to give that type of command to enlisted personnel, are basically only capable of standing still, retreating or surrendering when they haven't been trained to continue whatever the overall objective is. I'm not surprised that Russians are stuck in Ukraine right now; that's what they were taught. Take out their command structure, and they're just a bunch of soldiers standing around, waiting for orders.

The show has been hitting on all cylinders this season, and it's made me proud to say that I'm a Star Trek fan again. Discovery just hasn't done it for me (and I finished season four). For me, the problem with Discovery is that the crew is just filler. Practically every solution has to be handled by Burnham, and then when they get to the point of solving something, it usually involves a long, over-melodramatic arc that takes forever to get through as we're all sitting at home watching them be all touchy feely and just wishing they'd conclude like normal people do and not spend four hours of close-ups where they cry and babble about how much they love each other. And I'm fine with all of Kurtzman's woke garbage; I just want it to move on and get to the stuff that makes Star Trek be Star Trek. Picard, on the other hand, is pushing the story along at a speed that makes you happy to be along for the ride, and all along they add tons of fan service content that you can easily miss (like revisiting the punk from Star Trek The Voyage Home in a fan service cameo that actually brings a smile and doesn't bog down the story). What's funny is that in season one, I hated Rios (the ship pilot/captain). In season two, he rocks and it's hard to believe it's the same character. And narratively, they're doing a great job of red herrings, where they seem to be moving in one specific direction only for us to find out that that's not where they're going. I'm four episodes in, and I'm actually anxious to see where they story takes us.

Usually, a naval officer above the rank of captain.

During the Gulf War, we used to camp out near enemy positions and wait to see which tents were visited most often. Then we'd follow the communication cords they laid out and then in the middle of the night hit the tents that were centrally located. Took out the command and control structure constantly throughout the conflict. Without secure communication equipment, targeting the command structure is easy as long as the opforce is quick and maneuverable. From what I understand, Russian infrastructure is very similar with crappy communication. Fortunately, for the Ukrainians, they don't even need good commo equipment like the US had in that war; they just have to know how to find the lines being used by the Russians.