Shine on, harvest moon.

 I decided to take a little nap after my evening constitutional, around 6 p.m. or so. Unfortunately, I woke up about 20 minutes ago and it's fifteen after eleven. So this will, naturally, be a little rushed and jumbled and might not make it in before midnight, Country Standard Time. Especially since I have some cake to eat.

 It was a pretty decent week for the news. Mainly focusing on the passing of Joe Biden's $1.9 trillion COVID relief package, that was the story that dominated the news. People really don't grasp the implications of this, one of the biggest for-the-people pieces of legislation passed since LBJ's Great Society, one that enjoyed over 70% popularity yet not one single, solitary Congressional Republican voted for it. A number of them are trying to take credit for it already, naturally, while the rest are gearing up to use it as a point of attack in the 2022 mid-terms. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out.

 I really don't know what else I can put here. I stayed up most of last night playing yet another game of XCOM 2 so I spent most of the day sleeping it off. I have about three or four games going, both with the DLCs and without, and with various mods installed. This one, however, is straight vanilla. I'd say I was between a quarter and halfway through the main story. I haven't taken down any of the Chosen but I'm well on my way.

 I finished the second volume of those "Sherlock Holmes meets occult detectives" short story collections, and this one wasn't as enjoyable. Maybe it's a case of too much at once, but I really don't think it works as well overall. For one, Holmes was too constantly a faux skeptic and not willing to open his mind when the evidence proved no other option. There was also an appearance of Auguste Dupin, the hero of Edgar Allen Poe's detective stories, which were the first example of what we know as detective stories.

 Anyhow, it cast them as buddies when the original stories had Holmes dismiss Dupin as a joke. This one has them dogging on Poe and that's a sore point for me. I'm a fan and how his literary executor trashed his reputation for a century. It's an interesting story and worth looking into. Somehow, a guy named Rufus Griswold wound up being responsible for Poe's work and legacy after the latter's death. He loathed Poe and went out of his way to trash the author. He's the reason we all thought for so long that Poe died drunk in the gutter.

 One of the places I want to visit is Baltimore solely because of its connection to Poe. The Ravens are my backup football team after the Saints because they're named after one of Poe's creations. After Mark Twain, he was probably the first author I was obsessed with as a kid and one of the few I'm still sort of fascinated by. His work more than anything else influenced the kind of horror I like and is probably why I find splatter media so dull.

 Anyhow. Enough of that, I guess. Today's my brother's 44th birthday and that means next month I'll be turning 46. I talked to him on the phone today for a while and he seems happy and content with his life, and I'm glad. Most of my closest are doing well and have found what seems to be their bliss. I wish I could figure out mine beyond "being allowed to nap as much as I want."

 Okay, then. I got to word count with 10 minutes to spare, so I guess I'll post this. As usual, if something comes to me I'll come back to it. And, as usual, I doubt anything will.

I can't come up with anything clever and I'm too lazy to work on it.

  So the chromatic harmonica that got lost in the mail showed up today. What the hell, I got something free to play with. It was a mistake, anyway, as it only has ten holes when it's supposed to have twelve.

 Anyway, let's knock out the news. We stayed close to home this week, concentrating on Mississippi's legislators spending more time trying to usher in a stinker of a tax cut plan and banning trans students from high school girls' athletics. And though it's apparently getting better, Monday was as much a look at the absence of media coverage of Jackson's water problems as it is actual coverage of Jackson's water problems.

 Man, my internet connection is slipping in and out. This is going to be a pain in the ass. I don't know why it's doing it or what's causing the issue, and I'd almost rather it just cut out completely rather than do this on-off bullshit.

 Okay, I've lost all train of thought here. I am not, not, writing about "cancel culture" because I honest-to-God don't care anymore. "Cancel" is all, I don't care anymore. They - whoever "they" are - won't be coming into my house and taking my Warner Brothers Loony Tunes collections. If so, I have guns. I never read Dr. Seuss or had a Mr. Potato Head, and everyone is misunderstanding the whole "Muppet Show" situation.

 This is why being a country music fan before anything else makes life a little bit easier. Way before my politics took its hard left turn, I knew Hank Williams Jr. is a bit of a shitass. I understand perfectly why the Seuss people wanted to pull those books or why "The Simpsons" did whatever they did with the Apu character. I'm just tired of honkies think this is more important than a state capital going without water for nearly a month or a whole party going out of its way to screw over voters.

 I don't know what else. I've talked all I can about XCOM 2 and I'll probably spend a bit more time with Star Control: Origins and Outward before the weekend's over. I'm lazy. Not gloomy or depressed or even angry, just lazy and I really don't feel like I have much to look forward to. I don't mean that in a bad way, either, if that makes sense. Just one day after another and that's... okay?

 I mean, I'm having fun with my harps and my guitar and my accordion. I'm enjoying my books and playing the same three or four computer games. I've developed something of an obsession with Steve Marriott which will keep me busy for a couple of days. I've enjoyed this collection of "Sherlock Holmes meets Occult Detectives" short stories but I think I'll move on to something else. Maybe jump back into Many-Worlds books.

 So I guess that's about it. I just need to fill out the word count at this point. I may go back to sleep or I might mess around with a game, I don't know. I ought to go ahead and finish XCOM2.

How many travelers get weary bearing both their burdens and their scars.

  I've been trying to ignore today. I don't know why, really. I don't feel bad, physically, nor is the black cloud hanging around. I'm a bit on the cranky side, but I'm always a bit cranky. My settings are permanently set on salty, that's just how it is.

 And it was a lovely day outside, too, warm and full of sunshine. It's going to be like that at least through the week, we'll see some rain and colder weather by the weekend. Hell, I've also been digging on some mods for XCOM 2, which make it not quite a whole new game, but definitely expand the play.

 But some days I have to hide, and no one seems to really get that. For much of my life, I'd go to work or some other obligation wanting nothing more than to be allowed to lay down in a cool, dark room. It had nothing to do with the job or whatever it was I was obligated to do. I just like doing that. Just lay there and think, slipping in and out of lucid dreaming.

 Today was a day like that. Woke up, let Otis out, looked at the news (such as it was), and packed it in for a couple hours. Woke up again, let Otis in, read for a while, and then packed it in again. That's how I spent my day. Some people might disapprove but screw 'em and feed 'em cornflakes.

 Anyhow. Anthony Warner. We're learning a bit more about him, namely that he was into conspiracy theories and apparently spent time hunting "lizard people" in and around Nashville. He's also supposed to have told a neighbor that he'd have a fairly interesting Christmas, though not going into detail about the what's.

 I'm not sure how this changes things, exactly. "Terrorism" has been tossed around, but I'm not going there just yet. I remember the Bush Jr. Administration when everything from protesting with the Iraq War to not agreeing with the president's education policy was considered "terrorism," so that word - like patriotism - has been worn pretty thin.

 There is something to the racism aspect, though. It's like whenever some asshole decides to burn down a black church or shoot up a gay nightclub, and we have to hear about what a sweet kid he was. If Warner was black or brown or the wrong religion, we wouldn't be hearing a thing about his concerns of an alien invasion.

 Well, this is interesting. New information from The Tennessean says Warner's girlfriend reported to authorities that he'd been building bombs in his RV but he wasn't considered worthy of being "on the radar." The cops knocked on his doors to investigate, but he never answered and they never followed up. Of course.

 I need to go ahead and wrap this up, I reckon. The only bad thing about days like this is my brain becomes a sponge, in that it absorbs a lot but won't give unless it gets squeezed. That's an unnecessarily tortured metaphor, but it puts it over word count. The year's almost over, so let's see what inane madness tomorrow brings.

I'll come up with something clever later. Maybe.

  I really need to get my sleeping schedule back on track, whatever that happens to be. I stayed up most of the night getting my Actual Paying Work done and in good shape, followed by a quick round of XCOM 2, and went to be at what was a normal hour for me, around 4 a.m.

 It was almost noon before I rolled out of bed, and then I went back down for another four hours by 2:30 p.m. Granted, it rained all day and there wasn't much to do beyond that. Wasn't even a hard, driving rain, just more of an all-day shower, one of those types of days that almost demands you play Charles Mingus or Dave Brubeck.

 So this is the second day hand-running that I really haven't paid attention to the news. There were protests a-plenty over the murder of George Floyd by some cops in Minneapolis. Perhaps reading the room, the local PD shit-canned the four officers in question and it looks like the FBI's getting ready to stick their nose into this one, a la the cover-up by the local law of the Ahmaud Arbery murder. Of course, the cops still sprayed chemical irritants at protesters to break them up, unlike the kid gloves they use when heavily armed nutjobs storm the capital and demand the Olive Garden reopen for lunch.

 It's important to remember that in cases like this, the police aren't our friends. They work to protect property. I don't know about what individual cops think. I've known enough that there is a variety of thought among the men and women in blue, and not everyone is happy with how things work out. That being said, their set up is like the set up with the Corporate Media; that is, the reporters do all the work and getting all the hate, but if you think the owners and publishers aren't the ones pulling the strings and calling the tune, well, you've been drinking some bad buttermilk, neighbor.

 Like saw during the WTO protests in Seattle or the Occupy Main Street or anytime Native Tribes protests the ongoing despoiling of the land we stole from them, we see just who they work for and what they're really supposed to protect. In short, it ain't us and the lower down on the totem pole your "property" is, the less important it is. You can dispute this all you want, but history bears this out. It's where police come from, where the Pinkertons come from, and on and on.

This is why I think the Fourth Amendment is maybe the most important one of the Bill of Rights. Definitely more so than the Second and maybe the First, if the Fourth falls all the following amendments are rendered meaningless when the authorities can kick down your door whenever they wish and convict you with whatever you want just because.

 Thing is, the "protesters" who were actively threatening cops in Michigan and elsewhere are doing more or less what the people who actually run things want the plebes to do. Look at it this way, a bunch of people protesting an unnecessary oil pipeline running across tribal land run the risk of costing someone some profit. The people acting like complete saps screaming that work is the only thing that makes their existence worthwhile or, more specifically, hair salons and restaurants are the only things that make their existence worthwhile? They're doing exactly what the Powers That Be want us to be: good, loyal little consumers. Die for your boss, in other words. You're just capital stock, barely worth considering as human. You should consider yourself blessed for having a job.

 Okay. That's word count and my head's still fuzzy. Funny, I never felt this out of it this often when I was staying at Cheech Marin-levels of stoned. Yesterday's News was sort of light, as well, and I have some APW due come Friday. So, yeah. Anyhow, really digging the Leviathan Wakes book and XCOM is still great, so roll with that, y'all.

Like a bird without a nest. Like a stranger in the night.

 EDIT: I completely forgot to add links to this week's News. I'm particularly fond of Monday's piece, since I got to write about UFO's instead of the epidemic. The Tumblr site was pretty quiet, so here we go.

Monday

Wednesday

Friday


Two days and two days into the coronavirus novel epidemic. A lot of states are "reopening", though Mississippi isn't, and we're all going to find out just how bad an idea that was or wasn't. Georgia and Texas have both seen spikes in cases, the very thing that caused our governor Tate Reeves to slow his roll.

 Well, life is an adventure, is it not? Maybe all those AstroTurf "protest" groups complaining they can't get haircuts or go to their favorite restaurants will take their gun nuttery and cheap Nazi cosplay somewhere else. People are wondering why gun-toting neckbeards screaming at cops don't get the same reaction as, say, Native tribes protesting unnecessary and dangerous oil pipelines across tribal lands. Simple. The "let us work" protesters aren't shaking any boats or upsetting the Natural Order.

 Ah, but I don't want to write about COVID-19. I've been writing about little else for the past six weeks. I'm making money writing about COVID-19 nowadays. We've become extremely stupid as a culture over this thing and refuse to act like adults. The same people who claim they're ready to take down a tyrannical government or the dissolution of society are losing their minds at having to be around their family for a couple of weeks.

 So stop writing about it, Matt, move on. After all, you'll have to come up with something interesting about all this hoo-hah all next week. I think I got too much sun on my afternoon constitutional with Otis and B.C. It's in the 80s and fairly warm. I've got me one of those "too much sun" headaches, I think. Probably need to look into getting some sunscreen if Otis intends to keep this up, and I've no doubt he will.

 Another problem is this isn't coming as easy this evening. I have been staying up too late playing XCOM the last couple of nights, as well as a couple other games. I picked up Robin Hood - The Legend of Sherwood on sale at Good Old Games for a sneeze yonks ago, and finally got around to playing it this week. It's pretty decent. Plays like Desperadoes or Shadow Tactics, strategy oriented but not turn based. Plus, I've always been keen on the Robin Hood legend. One of those days I should write about that, but today's not the day.

 Nothing is firing properly today. Maybe I should take a break, take a nap, and come back at it. Nah. Let's just get it done and if the Muse comes later, it's not like I'm getting paid for all this. I will say, just to get it down, that I've had an epiphany about my writing in the last couple of days. It's been driving my batty that I can't get any fiction going past world-building. I don't understand what other freelancers who don't do "straight journalism" are making their salt. I don't do Me Talk Pretty One Day-style gripping emotional journeys and neither do I want to. More power to 'em, but I'll probably never write that dark book of the soul about, say, my father.

 So instead of focusing on what I can't do, I decided to study on what I did do well. Two things came up. One, I'm good at making boring things that rarely change day after day interesting to read about. This is what saved my ass as a sports writer when I'm not really into sports, and the current iteration of Actual Paying Work is definitely that. The other thing I'm good at is explaining things to the common mind. That's where I was good as a music critic and when it works, that's what makes The News worth reading. I definitely need to find a better way to market the latter, because when I show it's out there, people do read it. They may not respond or react back, but what the hell.

 So, that's what I do and that's what I've always done. It's not that I need to embrace it, because I've never run from it and I do think there's a place for it. Whether there's a place for me to make money at it, well, we're still figuring that out. I'm not going to totally give up on my Weird Western or bank heist IN SPACE, but I won't sweat 'em anymore. Hopefully.

 Anyhow, that's the word count and then some, and I really am dragging. Maybe something will spring forth later or maybe I'll just take a nap and/or play more video games. Life in the fast line, indeed.

All caught up in a landslide.

 Man, what in the hell is going on in Michigan? Don't they know these "protests" were AstroTurf by not just conservative groups, but conservative groups tied to Erik Price and Betsy DeVos? Is it just an excuse to cosplay armed loonies or what?

 Before we get started, I want to emphasize one thing because ammosexuals are the most delicate little flowers on the planet and cannot handle anything uncomplimentary said about their precious shooty-bang penis extensions. You may not believe it, but I don't care enough about your opinion to argue it.

 I don't have a problem with gun ownership. I don't have a problem with any reasoning one uses for owning a gun. You hunt? Fine, that's where my guns came from. You want to protect yourself and/or your family in this mean old world? Fair enough, it is a booger out there. You're defending freedoms from a government that's always just far from going full tyranny? Sure, pal, whatever you have to tell yourself. You just like guns and the noises they make? There are worse obsessions.

 That being said, I don't give a shit why you have guns, how many you have or what you do with them. I'd say all I care about is you making sure you store them properly and operate them wisely, but as long as you stay away from me, I don't really care. If I'm so inclined, I will make fun of you because I don't have any special respect for you and you will just have to suck it up, buttercup.

 I don't particularly care for people who decide they can't go to the grocery store without being loaded for bear, open or closed carry, but that's the world we live in. It's like knowing industrial companies will poison the environment for profit or that powerful men will use their weight to coerce sex out of subordinates. It's part of society and all we can do is legislation. Why we don't, I don't know.

 Frankly, gun worshipers, you pissed away your benefit of the doubt. The El Paso shooter, the Vegas shooter, the Sandy Hook shooter, all of them were behaving legally until they first pulled the trigger. And your reaction every time has been "don't take away my guns". Fair enough, that's what you care about. I'm just not obliged to respect you or act like you're anything but a joke. Deal with it and cry more. As the man said, you make no like it but you have to learn to love it. Besides, you're the one who's heavily armed, what are you crying for?

 Now that we've established that, I don't care about gun owners owning guns. The Second Amendment as interpreted by D.C. v Heller, I may not agree with it but it is the law of the land. Should there be more stringent gun control legislation? Man, we are way past the point of that in this country. When 20 preschoolers were gunned down by a guy mad at his mom and we had "serious political commentators" arguing that it was a "false flag" operation, that argument was done, son.

 I just don't understand why y'all get so butthurt about people thinking you bringing a high-powered instrument capable of dealing death on a large scale is a bit unhinged. If you're protesting the state's lockdown policies during this epidemic, why do you need to be heavily armed and wearing combat gear? And why do you get so pissy when someone suggests you're trying to intimidate your political opponents when there's no other reason to be so heavily armed for this fake protest designed mainly so rich folks can make even more money?

 You have the guns. Nut up, man. Quit your crying and convince me you're not a flea-brained dingbat. Or just deal with the fact that I'm going to point and laugh at you. Okay, well, enough of that. There are times when living far out in the boonies and fairly well set up so that I don't have to deal with the rest of this sick, twisted, pitiful, depressing culture. Glad I don't have kids, glad I don't have to interact with people to make my bread and salt, glad I'm not tied to anyone that would cause me to give more of a shit than I do.

 Yeah, I'm in a bad mood today. Sorry. Tried a new CPAP mask but still didn't sleep for shit. The weather's gorgeous, though, so me and my buddy Otis, the Jack Russell, had a pleasant constitutional. I've hit my groove with the XCOM games and have been thoroughly enjoying stomping a mudhole in it. I also just finished an enjoyable Weird Western called Skin Medicine by Tim Curran, which combined mountain folk magic with Lovecraft that worked very well.

 Anyhow. That's the night. Let's see what tomorrow brings. Keep the faith.

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.

You cannot win if you do not play.

 I have two assignments this week to get done by Friday. Since I'm still figuring all this out, I figure it'll take me two days to properly research and write about it. Luckily, the writing isn't really all that hard, either in mechanics or creatively. It reminds me of the day-to-day grind back when I did weekly newspapers, doing pages and pages of obits or classifieds or legal proclamations papers have to print. Dull as hell but easy to do, just put on some music and go.

 The downside is, of course, I don't know how much of this or The News I'm going to be able to get accomplished. This is easy, really, just ramble on for 500 words and call it "art". The News is a little bit more of a hassle, but even then, I could shmooze it if I wanted. Basically, the news is every day "people are dying from a virus we don't have a solid grasp of yet, we're not doing what we need to do and what we are doing we're not doing well, and the President is a big ol' tittybaby", if maybe not in that order.

 He really is showing his whole ass here the last couple days. Between losing his cool with Paula Reid and Kaitlan Collins just being reporters causing him to melt down before announcing that he had "full authority" over when states re-open, sounding awfully authoritarian in the process. It's almost every day at this point that he pitches one of his little fits, when he's not blaming everyone else to distract from his own fumbling.

 It's got to be chaffing him so many governors giving him the finger and doing it for themselves are seeing success, and the ones that do toe the line can't do anything right. It's been sort of entertaining watching the right-wing media twist itself in knots to keep up with Trump's almost daily changing of the narrative, especially when they can catch his pitched bitch as easily as anyone should they show disloyalty.

 Speaking of pitching fits, the Sanders dead-enders are in day two of their wail-a-thon. It's even louder and poopier after Bernie Sanders himself came out and said working against Joe Biden winning the presidency was "irresponsible". A small but loud contingent of Twitter, they do little more than prove how little they know about how politics works. Sanders would not have endorsed Biden if something he wanted wouldn't come out of it.

 Look, y'all. Politics is an ugly business but it's a serious business. It calls for deal making, and if you can handle that, leave it to people who can. Organize and agitate, sure, but recognize it's a different ball game. The more they talk about Biden's legislative choices from 20 years ago or objectionable things the Obama administration did, the more they show they really, really don't care about anything but the "bending of the knee". Which is just stupid, but that's what you get when people convince themselves that Twitter and Facebook was equal to a political science degree.

 Maybe the most amusing thing that's happened in the past 24 hours is Florida increasingly obsequious governor Ron DeSantis announcing that WWE was an "essential" business during the shut down. What that boils down to is they'll be filming wrestling matches in front of an empty auditorium in Florida. They already held their yearly homecoming Wrestlemania in front of an empty house. All this comes off the heels of Vince McMahon's XFL football dalliance declaring bankruptcy for the second time. It also comes just after Linda McMahon's announcement that her Super Pac was dropping a tidy $18.5 million into the "Florida For Trump" re-election push.

 Now, I used to dig wrestling as a kid but bailed out before McMahon admitted it was all scripted to save his ass during the 1993 steroid trial. And, for whatever it's worth, I was more a fan of the NWA stuff than the WWF stuff, which was decidedly aimed towards kids. That being said, I've long been fascinated with the history of professional wrestling and its place in American Culture. I maintain that it's one of this country's truly unique contributions to world culture and a full grasp of the American psyche is impossible without an understanding of how pro wrestling developed alongside the ubiquity of television. Later, it pushed closed-circuit television, pay-per-view and internet development, second only to pornography in its influence.

 People forget that up until the mid-Aughts, Trump was stuck in tabloid hell. His biggest cultural impact came from his feud with then-daytime talk-show host Rosie O'Donnell and nobody cared after they passed through the grocery store checkout line. This all changed in 2007 when he popped up on WWE television opposing the "Mr. McMahon" character in the "Battle of the Billionaires" as a baby face. That is, he was the good guy you rooted for against McMahon's heel character, or bad guy.

 Long story short, he "won" the conflict and soon after became the Twitter tumor we all know and loathe/worship. Again, study the history of pro wrestling. In the process you'll learn what kind of absolute bastard Vince McMahon is, both personally and business-wise. Given that, it's sort of understandable how the U.S. could degrade to such a point that we'd allow a bit of media fluff like Trump to be president. Inevitable, really.

 In any event, I got work to do so I don't know how it'll affect this. If nothing else, I'll post quick updates. But, for the most part, I'm a happy camper because I'm getting paid to write and there's a new XCOM game coming out by the end of the month. Sweet.

Sunday, November 17, 2019

 Spent another night trying to liberate the Earth from alien domination, and didn't notice the time until morning again. So, another day of being a zombie but I've already written all about XCOM I can think of. Ah, well, we'll do what we can.

Saturday, November 16, 2019

 You know, I was saying this weekend needed to be more relaxing and that the whole Impeachment business needed to give a poor boy a rest, but damnation, did I mustard that one up. It's my own fault, though. Like my friend and spiritual advisor, the Rev. Billy C. Wirtz, said, "what I used to do all night now takes me all night to do".

Friday, November 15, 2019

 Maybe this weekend will let up on me. I'd much rather write about XCOM or blues harmonica or the terribly interesting book I'm reading or anything else but this big ol' goofy world. Nevertheless, if reality insists on being silly, it's my duty to lay it out and make fun of it.