It's easy pickins, ain't nobody here but us chickens.

 Otis threw up again. This is Momma's first experience with an inside dog in over 40 years, so it's difficult to get her to understand that if he eats cat poop just before he eats assigned food, bad things may happen. It is a journey, however, and not a destination.

 Got a programming note before we get too into it. I have some Actual Paying Work due Thursday morning. How this will affect the News or even this Gibberish, I don't know yet. I may skip a day or I may swap Wednesday out for Thursday. Or since this Actual Paying News is supposed to be a COVID-19 update, I may just re-purpose it. We'll see.

 Whichever it is, I'm going to try to make sure it's the one with the least amount of labor required. Since getting XCOM: Chimera Squad I've had turn-based strategy games on the brain. The previous XCOM's, Hard West, Rebel Cops, Phantom Doctrine, Invisible Inc., Distrust, and the Desperadoes series. I couldn't tell you what I find so attractive about them. Maybe it's how the game plays out after you make your choices. You're going to get from Point A to Point B, but the path always changes thanks to the Random Number Generator.

 I don't quite get the appeal of speed runs, or more specifically, playing one game to the point you can do a fair-to-middlin' speed run. Once I beat a game I'm done, especially if it's more linear than wide-open. That goes back to the Nintendo days. I don't get the appeal of Let's Plays, either, so it's probably not for me and that's okay.

 Moving on, I had sort of an interesting experience in what I can only call marketing. The Pentagon released videos yesterday of actual flying objects they couldn't identify or, more officially "unidentified aerial phenomena". I wrote about it, how although it was indeed a thing, it wasn't anything close to an admission of aliens from the deepest space coming by for a visit. Furthermore, the videos have been acknowledged as legit since 2017 and had been released to a private agency in 2018. The Pentagon just released them yesterday, probably trying to get the "truth is out there" ding dongs to settle down.

 All over Twitter, people are cracking that 2020 is so screwy the government owned up to UFO's and no one blinked. Well, I'd respond, I blinked and gave a link to my News. Then I went to bed and didn't think more about it. I woke up to over 30 hits and currently am sitting on 67. No comments, positive or negative. I don't know what I'm supposed to learn from all that, but I'm sure there's something there. I do wish I couldn't figure out a way to promote what I do - third-rate Will Rogers shtick that it is - and feel comfortable about it, but hey ho.

 If nothing else, I didn't get an earful "you're so arrogant if you don't believe in aliens" booshwah I usually get when I express the least bit of skepticism about aliens visiting Earth. To put it in a nutshell, I'm sure the infinite universe is teeming with life and I'm sure that given the space given for lightning to strike twice there is something we would recognize as "sentient life". And since we're just now coming to term with the sentience, even rudimentary, of cetaceans, cephalopods, canines, felines, other primates, and not a few birds, I wouldn't be surprised is there'd be more than a few that we wouldn't recognize as sentient. At least at first, anyway.

 I've just not seen any conclusive evidence they've been here or anywhere close to us. The distances are just too great and the physics are just too restrictive best I can tell. If we ever move out into space - and I'm not sold we ever will - I doubt we'll ever get past the gas giants if we get that far. Inexplicable actions by people lost to time, like the Nazca lines, may remain inexplicable since they didn't leave notes. Doesn't mean they were pretty pictures for aliens. I've long joked that the WOW! Signal was Elvis being called home, but when it was recently concluded by them that study this sort of thing that it was little more than space static, I wasn't too disappointed.

 People have a lot invested in the idea that "the truth is out there," when the truth isn't quite what they think it is. Being a skeptic doesn't mean one dismisses the possible nor does having an open, inquisitive mind means you swallow every goofy stroke that comes along. It's like ghosts, people are more upset than anything that you doubt them when it doesn't have anything to do with them, and shouldn't.

 For the record, I don't believe in ghosts. I've done way too many hallucinogenics to accept that human senses are that infallible. Seriously, take a heroic dose of LSD and you'll spend all night talking to dead country singers. Trust me, I know.