A Retrospective on being 30 the day before turning 31

Since turning 30 last year, it’s been one long barrel of suck with some very brief highs before landing back on Shit Street. I probably should have known this when, going to my birthday dinner put on by her family, my mom decided to drag along her current boyfriend, who I regard as a bit of a twit after her widow’s pension. On the way to dinner, the tire popped off its rim, and AAA had to be called.

I probably should have taken this as a sign to just put myself in a medically induced coma for a year, but I was too busy waiting for the AAA guy to work his magic on the tire and get us on the way to the Chinese buffet we were heading to.

The next few months of job hunting after my birthday turned up absolutely nothing.

Zilch.

Nothing but emails saying “Thanks but we’re looking at someone else” or “The position has been filled” from my birthday until early November.

Being poor didn’t help matters much as well. They say not having money leaves you without food and you lose weight, but in actuality, you don’t truly starve. You just reach for the cheapest things off the store racks and eat them, despite being loaded with fat, sodium, cholesterol, etc. As a result, the weight loss I had the year prior was erased and then some. Despite a comeback during the holidays, I’m at 293 lbs. at present. At 6’2″, that isn’t anywhere near healthy. I don’t even want to know what my cholesterol is.

Eventually, I found ways to keep myself busy. My podcast over here as well as a couple events I organized for them helped keep me from going stir-crazy. Also, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk thingummy helped to give me some semblance of pocket money.

Family’s starting to help as well. Caring for my mother became unbelievably difficult the past year due to her emotional and mental issues, coupled with health issues that are causing her to hit the prescription coverage gap. Fortunately, my older sister is around now to help out. She’s got her humors and health issues, but she’s a lot less of a stone-cold psycho bitch than my mom. Her husband’s okay so long as he doesn’t go off on a rant about how Obama fucked him over.

In conclusion, being 30 sucked ass, despite the few lone highlights, I hope you lot who read this will join me in getting thoroughly soused to forget this monstrosity tomorrow.

(Tl;dr: 30 SUCKED ASS!)

P.S.: This is also my first actual post (not counting Twitter weekly feed digests) crossposted to Google+. Welcome Google viewers.

On e-PoliticalCorrectness and Sudden Change

Swear bubble

Recently, I was going through my usual wekday routine of watching videos in between job application and such, and I was watching for a second time, the Zero Punctation review of “Brothers: a Tale of Two Sons” and “Papers Please” (both fairly good indie games on XBLA and Steam/GOG/HumbleStore, respectively). During the re-watch, I noticed how one parts of the interview of the former of these two games was changed from…

I’m not gay, I only suck off pre-op transsexuals.

..to..

I’m not gay, I only suck off pantomime dames.

…despite none of the visuals being obviously changed

I also noticed how much of a furor there was about the subject from transsexuals and corresponding rights groups about alleged transsexual bashing in the review, and that it should have been more politically correct in the first place.

I am a gay furry. I also live in southeast Texas, which is a generally conservative, fairly family-oriented place, and one of several places in the US where being and open homosexual carries the same result as walking around with a sign saying, “I molested your seven year-old child, please viciously curb-stomp my ass.”, despite the passage of the Matthew Shepard Act in 2009. One of the main things I do to deal with the stress of being a closeted-off-the-internet gay furry in one of the most conservative areas in the US is be as politically incorrect as I can get away with. I say that things are “so gay”, I use the terms “faggot”, “butch”, “queer”, “homo”, “dyke”, “fag”, “tranny”, and other such slurs regularly. I used to feel upset at myself, but now I do not feel shame about it, mainly because most of the non-white people I know use slurs in their daily speech between themselves. I’ve seen and heard numerous instances of two black people at the local Walmart using the N-word in their conversations, and I came to the resolution long ago that as long as blacks and other minorities use slurs among themselves, I would continue to use these slurs and I would actively encourage gays I know to just let it the hell go.

That goes ditto for the furor over the aforementioned review.

Moving on…

A while back, you noticed my blog stopped updating to its various social media services for a time. This was because of a botnet stemming from several thousand IP addresses in Asia going after installations of WordPress to get login credentials. In an effort to stem the tide, my web host decided to create a system-wide block of all access to all wp-login.php files hosted on his service, via an Apache Basic Authentication login. Unfortunately, the block was put in place without anyone hosting a WordPress blog on his service being given warning, so I had zero notice of what happened until emailing him complaining. As far as I know, the block is going to stay in place until he is satisfied that the botnet has moved on, but I have zero intention of waiting. The only saving grace that is keeping BiafraRepublic.ME here is that the block mentioned above is override-able in .htaccess, so I punched holes through for several major ISPs in the US, as well as for Twitter, Tumblr, LiveJournal, and WordPress.com. Hopefully, service will be restored to these mirrors. Granted my host does not recommend this, believing that anything that goes through wp-login.php (read, almost every WordPress plugin there is) is doing it wrong, but unfortunately, I also believe that springing a block to defend against a real threat without at least sending a system-wide email is even more wrong.

So, tl;dr…

  • I liked the original ZP video review better
  • I am a politically incorrect twat and a RL-closeted gay furry
  • Webhost needs to learn to communicate with his users, rather than fix and answer complaints later.

My Twitter: A Retrospective

Picture of Twitter for Windows 8

After taking a look at @SilverSonic having a conniption over reviewing his early tweets, I decided out of morbid curiosity (and a rainstorm overhead) to read some of mine. Unlike most people I know with Twitter accounts, I didn’t use mine all that much for the first year, mainly because I only was able to use the web interface. At one point I actually didn’t bother with it much for six months. After that, I got the text interface working I started posting at least 1 tweet monthly.

Probably some of the most memorable shit on my Twitter was

• The rise and fall of the old u.nu URL shortener
• My tweets from back when I worked at Walmart (not my finest moment)
• My lack of tweets around the time my stepfather passed away in 2009 and my mom’s subsequent battle with breast cancer
• The first tweets of Summer of Sonic, back before Truman Brewery became home of RinseFM.

Through it all, I could find three major point when I really picked up tweeting:

• When I first discovered the text Short code at 40404
• When I got my first smartphone (Looking back, I wonder what I ever saw in BlackBerry) with Twitter app capability.
• When I really got acquainted with the guys over at this place, especially Nemain the Incomparable.

Looking back, there are moments when I tweeted something that now I can see look very childish, boorish, or even borderline bigoted. Fortunately, almost all of those tweets (including all the borderline bigoted ones), are all replies without any context, leaving me to assume that I was right and the other party was fucked up.

This is probably not the case at all, but I still like to believe the better angels of my nature telling me this.

More cross-posting madness.

In my ongoing effort to cut down the amount of places I have to log into to post, I have finally added the capability to cross-post to Tumblr from my WordPress blog. I have also re-enabled cross-posting to my old and decrepit WordPress.com blog mirror that I created as a fallback when Windows Live Spaces died a couple years ago.

Also, I have utilized my control over my DNS to add in a new custom URL for my Tumblr, which is now tumblr.biafrarepublic.me, as well as setting my LiveJournal URL to livejournal.biafrarepublic.me. I considered doing the same for the aforementioned WordPress.com blog mirror, but they want $15/yr/blog for the privilege of accepting a fucking CNAME. Screw that.

On the new Spiral Knights Battle Sprites choice

Spiral Knights

To be honest, I’m having a hard time deciding to go though with my likely choice of battle sprite in the new Spiral Knights update. While my likely pick for one seems to be the most popular choice, I really don’t like making decisions where I’m locked into a given choice. It just feels… constraining, I guess would be the word…

Okay, rant over children. Time to go back to class.

BiafraRepublic.ME + Cloudflare

The DNS for BiafraRepublic.ME has been moved over to CloudFlare. The site is still being hosted by Gushi Systems Site Hosting, however.

The main reason for this is the desire to have the site mirrored through Cloudflare’s CDN and providing a speed boost, along with full IPv6 capability.

There should be no change to how Erratic Foxboy is being hosted and such.

-Biafra

Name two new moons in the vicinity of Pluto

Apparently the people who discovered them using the Hubble telescope can’t pick a decent matching name for the two new moons. So now they’re crowd sourcing for the better ideas.

 

Go to www.plutorocks.com and pick what you want to name the two planets.You can also suggest names they missed as well.

 

-Biafra