Just a hash of thoughts from an untidy, yet entertaining, brain.

  • The Hamster Wheel and the Golden Ticket

    I had gotten an invitation earlier in the week to attend another job fair sponsored by Goodwill, and I registered for it. I got the printout of the QR code and everything. I also ran out of paper while printing résumés, so I’ll have to get some more. It turns out my résumé is now about a page and a quarter, so I ended up expanding it to two full pages. Front and back seemed like a good idea.

    Thursday dawned, and I started getting ready. I looked for the right clothes. I took out the very nice shoes I bought for dance practice, which I have never attended. I took out the nice pants I got for the dance class I never went to. I found a nice polo shirt, and it all fit nicely, so what the heck? I decided to wear my sneakers for all the walking I would have to do and then switch over to the nice shoes later. I don’t know—keep the dancing shoes as indoor-only, maybe?

    But while I was going through all that, I also sorted my laundry for some god-awful reason. This thing was scheduled between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m., and if I wanted to get there on time using public transit, I had to leave at right about five minutes to 10. And here I was, neck-deep in laundry, sorting like an idiot.

    But then, it was a job fair. If I was a little bit late, no big deal. I would just walk in, do what I had to do, and leave. I also had a CT scan scheduled for 3:20, so I would be leaving a little early anyway, even though that trip would take maybe half an hour from the Hyatt Regency.

    I finally got out of my apartment at about 10:15. I walked about a mile, got on the MAX, rode in relative comfort, got off the MAX, walked over to the Hyatt Regency, and went inside. I didn’t even ask anyone where to go. I kind of just saw a crowd and went that way.

    There was a line. I didn’t know how long it was, but I knew it extended into the hallway where I was standing. It turned out to be very long. It wound all the way down the hall—about 200 feet—turned right, went another 50 feet, looped around an interior room, and then came back around to the table. It was a good two blocks’ worth of people standing in line.

    I had some banter with the people near me—nothing consequential, but, you know, it kept things going.

    At my initial place in the line, a guy came out wearing a badge that designated him as part of the organization. He was carrying a protective sleeve containing a QR code that he was encouraging people to scan so they could register for the event while standing in line.

    This genuinely confused me. I had registered when I got the email. I showed him the document with my QR code on it, and he said, “Oh, you’re all set.”

    And I’m like, well, of course I’m all set. You guys sent me the invitation, and I registered. Yet there were people scanning the QR code he was holding and registering while they were standing in line.

    It seemed to me that the recruiters, once I saw them, should look at my piece of paper and say, “This guy knows how to plan ahead. This guy is organized. He’s all set.”

    But I knew that wasn’t how it was going to work.

    When I reached that big loop-around area, a fellow came out to promote the event. “There are real people here,” he said. “There are recruiters who will hire you—who will interview you here on the spot. You probably can’t walk down the street, see a recruiter, and get them to do that.”

    What he didn’t say was: How would you know a recruiter if you saw one on the street anyway?

    But whatever. He was very much promoting how wonderful this was going to be. When I finally got near the door, I saw they had one of those tables set up outside to show their credentials: StandUp Colorado, StandUp Los Angeles. This organization was great for us. When they came here, they were great! There was a lot of that.

    Because of my laundry-sorting shenanigans, I showed up at about 11:30, but there was a line, still. According to the display on the wall, the room had been booked from 7:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. The email invite for the event said it was scheduled from 11:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. I, of course, joked with my line-mates that maybe they had several shifts and everyone would be gone by the time we got in there. While they weren’t humorless, they pointed out the extra time allowed four hours to set everything up beforehand and two hours to tear it all down afterward. Yeah, I’m not the only one on the hamster wheel, and it causes stress for us all.

    To recap, I got there at 11:30, and I ended up waiting a good 45 minutes before I actually entered the main room. Let me just say that this event was both exactly what I expected and very disappointing.

    At the main doors was the worker from the loop speech, the one who came out to pump us up. Now he’s giving more encouragement, and saying, “I’m gonna start you with the first booth right over there. Talk with them, then go to the next and the next, and just wander the room. Smile every time, and you will enjoy this.”

    He also pointed out that off to one side there was a free résumé review section. “Take advantage of that. After all, free is good, right?”

    I did consider it. After all, I had ended up with a two-page résumé, front and back, and I’m old-school enough to have it ingrained in me that a one-page résumé is best. With online PDFs and everything, that’s not necessarily true anymore. It’s also true that they have AI scanning these things now, and AI can scan a two-page résumé just as fast as it can scan a one-page résumé.

    Of course, there’s another problem with expanding a résumé, though. Eventually you start filling that extra space with older experience. Then suddenly you’re putting in something you did back in 1990, and somebody reading it does the math: “Wait a minute. How old is this guy?”

    So, fighting against my own self-interest, I decided to ignore the résumé review people. All they were going to do was make me feel bad about having a two-page résumé—or point out I’m giving potential employers more ammunition to figure out my age. Yeah, I know.

    But I’m tired from running on this wheel and I don’t want to just take a detour and then get back on.

    Inside, it was a healthcare booth first. Really? Well, I’m going to avoid all healthcare. It is very unlikely that they would hire me, as I’m an IT guy, and the only medical qualifications I have are which bandage to use on my owie. Unless they have IT positions, it’s not going to happen. Plus, every healthcare agency I have ever interviewed with for an IT position has hired internally. It’s like they train somebody who was a chemical tech and then install them in the IT position. So I decided to skip all the healthcare organizations.

    A good 50 percent of the organizations there were staffing agencies. Goodwill was there. WorkSource was there. There were also a couple of staffing agencies whose names I can’t remember. Looking at one of them, it sounded more like, “We help people with diverse backgrounds get jobs.”

    So I asked the woman specifically, “Are you hiring or recruiting?”

    She told me they were doing both. The positions they were hiring for were basically life coaches, job coaches, and home-help aides. I listened to her entire spiel and then told her truthfully, “This isn’t going to be for me. My life is a bit chaotic, and I don’t think anyone wants me teaching that to somebody else.”

    She was very understanding and said, “Well, this isn’t for everybody.”

    I walked around a little more. There were two prisons—or correctional facilities, if you prefer—basically recruiting. I’m not going to work for a prison.

    There were at least four healthcare organizations there. Again, I wasn’t going to apply to any of those. Most of the remaining organizations were some kind of staffing agency offering contract positions—perhaps contract-to-hire—but frankly, I am really over contract work. I want a real, permanent job. I may end up going back to contract work, but I’m not going to start that process at this job fair.

    So I ended up leaving pretty early. The job fair was scheduled until 3:00, and I had a CAT scan scheduled for 3:20. It’s a very short jaunt from downtown to the VA hospital, but I left at about 1:30.

    Earlier, while I was riding to the event on the MAX, I checked my email. Someone had sent me a free cup of coffee. Frankly, I’d never heard of thnks.com and had to go through my verification process to make sure it was legit. (Open it in an incognito tab, check through it, etc.) It verified. I was able to pick from four different options, including Dunkin’ Donuts, Krispy Kreme, and Starbucks. I was going downtown, so I figured Starbucks would be the best bet. I hadn’t opened my Starbucks app in so long that I had to set a new password, but once that was done, I was able to add the credit to my account.

    Walking out of the Hyatt Regency, I discovered that the two nearest Starbucks, according to Google Maps, were permanently closed. There was one a little farther south, though, so I walked there. I got a small iced mocha, which cost me an extra 65 cents over the $5. No problem.

    Then I walked back to the MAX, took that downtown, and got myself a Philly cheesesteak at The Block. This is where we discovered that my stomach is out of training.

    When I was not regularly employed—less active, I guess you could say—I would typically eat one meal per day. Sometimes I would have something to drink in the morning, but then I would eat one big meal, and that would satisfy me for the day.

    Well, the large at The Block is a full-size cheesesteak, and they really stuffed it full of meat. On a normal visit, I will buy the cheesesteak, take it home, and eat it there. Sometimes I eat only half of it, and sometimes I eat a bit more, but I always have some leftovers.

    This time, though, I had my CAT scan later that afternoon, so I decided to sit at a picnic table outside the food truck and eat the whole thing there. I ate every bit of it, and—oh my goodness—I’m feeling a little drowsy now because that was a lot of food.

    Early in my Army career, a doctor who took my history and asked about my diet gave me a soft diagnosis of being an “overburner.” It had been discussed on TV—Today, Good Morning America, or whatever—as something in the news at the time. It described people who would eat a lot, only to have their heart rate rise, their brain get a bit foggy, and then get really drowsy while their system processed the food, only to be hungry again just a few hours later.

    Well, I’ve always been something like that, and the doctor just kind of confirmed it. I honestly don’t know whether that’s a real medical diagnosis. I never saw it in my medical records, but that is what the doctor told me.

    Anyway, that’s exactly what was going on. I ate that entire cheesesteak—every last little scrap. I even asked for a fork so I could pick up everything that had fallen out. It was very good, and I enjoyed it, but it did make me extremely full.

    I was a little concerned that they might tell me at the imaging department, “Oh, you shouldn’t have eaten first.” But this wasn’t a blood test, so they did not.

    There was a little confusion when I got to the VA hospital. It was about 2:00 at this point, and when I looked at the directory, it didn’t list anything called “Radiology.” So I went to the front desk and said, “I need to get a CAT scan. Where is that?”

    The helpful volunteer said, “Oh, that’s Imaging, on the second floor.” Then he thanked me for my service, which is typical of those volunteers. They’re usually veterans themselves, but it’s still very, very cool.

    I took the elevator up to the second floor. At this particular VA hospital, it is genuinely easier to take the elevator up or down just that one floor because the stairs are a long way from the elevators. From the third through eighth floors, the stairs are pretty close, but for some reason, between the first and second floors, they are a long way apart.

    Anyway, I took the elevator to the second floor and followed the signs. When I got there, they had another sign that said “Radiology.” Obviously, they had changed the name of the department, supposedly because they also perform sonograms, which don’t involve radiation, so they now call it Imaging—but they hadn’t changed all the signage. Welcome to the VA.

    I went to check in, but there was a guy who seemed to be in more of a hurry than I was, so I let him go ahead of me. I was more than an hour early, so why not? He did his thing, I checked in, and then I sat down expecting to wait a while.

    Somebody came out and said something, but I didn’t hear her. I had my noise-canceling headphones on and was listening to a podcast. About a minute later, she came back out. I pulled out an earbud, and she was saying, “Richard?” while looking confused.

    “Oh, yeah, that’s me,” I said. “I didn’t expect you to call me so soon because I’m here so early.”

    “Yeah, sometimes it works out that way,” she said.

    Then I went through the procedure: lie down on the table, put my hands over my head, and go into the scanner. She told me I would be scanned three times. Each time, they wanted me to inhale and hold my breath, and they wanted me to take in about the same amount of air each time.

    She also explained that this was a follow-up on the nodules. Okay—now I knew why I was there.

    The nodule that my doctor talked about during my main physical was basically nothing, in my opinion. I had pneumonia back when I was in college, and that can scar the lung. It may never fully recover, and the scarring may form these nodules. It hasn’t caused me any problems in two decades, so that’s probably what it is. That’s basically what my doctor told me, too. This was simply a follow-up CAT scan.

    So I did the thing. I lay down and grasped the handles above my head. Those are handy. They give you something to do with your hands instead of just holding them uncertainly above your head.

    Then a nice recorded voice told me to inhale and hold my breath. After the scan, it told me to breathe normally. We did that three times, and it was crazy how quickly the whole thing was finished. Then I was out of there.

    I started heading home: took the bus, got off the bus, walked to the MAX, and got on the MAX. I was still drowsy from all that food I had eaten, so I planned to take a nap when I got home. After that, I would scan for more jobs. Just hop on the wheel, another Thursday.

    That coffee from Coursera was considerably nice, considering Coursera has not helped me find a job despite all the work on my part. One of the things somebody said during all that waiting in line was that 90 percent of jobs are now found through referrals. Yeah, I’ve experienced that myself—and that’s the problem. I don’t have many networking possibilities.

    But I’m going to keep pushing through. I’m going to find something great.

    I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me—as Stuart Smalley used to say on Saturday Night Live.

    Of course, being all drowsy, I ended up missing my proper stop on the MAX and rode down to 185th, where WorkSource is. Since I had just filed for unemployment and could see on my end that I needed to verify my identity, I figured I might as well stop in. The last time I did this, I had to go into WorkSource to complete the verification.

    However, they had not yet received the notification. Without that notification, they didn’t have a button they could push to clear me. They said that even if they tried to clear me once they did get the notification, the button would reappear and I’d have to go through it again anyway. More hamster wheel stuff.

    So, mission unaccomplished—even though it was an impromptu mission.

    I am now genuinely on my way home.

    Yeah, I made it home, and no, I didn’t nap. With the almost-mile walk back from the MAX stop, I guess I digested just enough that my stomach was no longer pressing outward and I wasn’t so sleepy. So I took those 15 résumés—not a single one of them had I even pulled out of its packaging to hand out—and put them away.

    Frankly, it was a rather disappointing day outside of that nice coffee. No golden tickets today, but there’s always tomorrow.

  • Movie Advice: When the Movie Doesn’t Start at Showtime

    I’m posting this quick note for anyone who has noticed that I’ve started publishing movie reviews and is wondering about an aspect of the theater experience that I don’t usually include in them.

    Maybe nobody is wondering. Maybe I just want to explain it. Either way, here it is.

    Regal and the other national theater chains are struggling. I do my part by seeing movies in theaters, and I sometimes buy concessions, which are an important source of revenue for them. They also run advertisements, and I generally support whatever reasonable measures help keep theaters open.

    That doesn’t mean I enjoy watching commercials about plumbing, gutter cleaning and lawyers. I rent. Gutters are not among the things I have to worry about. Still, I understand why the commercials are there.

    What I did not fully appreciate until I clocked it was just how long the preshow has become.

    For my first viewing of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, I entered the auditorium at fifteen minutes past the hour. The movie did not begin until five minutes past the next hour. That was approximately fifty minutes of preshow material.

    The second viewing had roughly forty-five minutes of padding, although I arrived late and personally sat through only about twenty minutes.

    For my third viewing, I recorded the entire sequence:

    • 5:50 p.m. — Seated; local and business commercials were already playing, including advertisements for gutter cleaning, lawyers and plumbing.
    • 6:05 p.m. — Teasers and national advertising began, including Pepsi and Mountain Dew.

    Then came the trailers:

    • Godzilla Minus Zero
    • Forgotten Island
    • Fall 2
    • The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping
    • The Thomas Crown Affair
    • Clayface
    • A Samsung advertisement
    • Klara and the Sun
    • Jumanji 3

    After that came Regal’s promotional material.

    • 6:24 p.m. — The movie’s opening scroll finally began.

    That was thirty-four minutes from the time I sat down until the movie started—and the local commercials were already running when I arrived.

    If you are not determined to see Spider-Man: Brand New Day during its first couple of weeks, consider waiting for it to reach a second-run theater such as Wunderland Milwaukie Cinemas. You will probably get only a few movie trailers before the theater gets on with showing you the movie you actually came to see.

  • House of the Dragon Fatigue: Can We Just Get to Game of Thrones Already? (An Antifanfic Solution)

    Sixteen minutes into episode eight of season three of House of the Dragon, I realized I was tired. Not sleepy tired—tired of Westeros finding new people to declare king, new factions to form, and new reasons to keep this story going.

    And tired of how humorless it all is. Game of Thrones had humor everywhere—intentional humor, accidental humor, straight-up jokes, even slapstick. House of the Dragon has taken all of that humor, wrung it out like dirty laundry, and apparently thrown it away with the wash water.

    So I gave myself a writing challenge: find a faster way to get from House of the Dragon to Game of Thrones.

    This is my solution.

    I suppose technically it’s fanfic. But considering how I was feeling about the show when I wrote it, I prefer antifanfic.

    Sheepstealer brooded, licking his wounds.

    He surveyed the cave he was in.

    Grumble grumble grumble grumble.

    Which basically meant: Goddammit, I hate those people.

    After ten days, he managed to kill a sheep and eat it.

    After fifteen days, he got two more.

    Testing his strength, he flew for maybe a mile. Then he found a cow.

    Well. That was new.

    He ate that too.

    Unfortunately, some guys with pointy things chased him.

    He didn’t like that.

    Sheepstealer was still a little too weak to do much about them, so he took the cow and flew back to his cave.

    Grumble grumble grumble grumble.

    Which basically meant: Oh, man. That cow gave me heartburn. I don’t want to do that again.

    Still, once the indigestion ended, he felt stronger.

    Maybe he should cook the next one first.

    That had been a lot of fur.

    Grumble.

    Go with me.

    Sheepstealer flew to another patch of land where he knew there were cows. This time he saw the guys with pointy things and the cows in the same place.

    Well.

    Cook it.

    He flamed.

    The guys with the pointy things fell down.

    The cows fell down.

    And they smelled pretty good.

    Sheepstealer picked up the cows and flew back to his cave.

    Grumble grumble grumble.

    Yeah.

    That was better.

    After thirty days of this, Sheepstealer had learned something.

    He didn’t like guys with pointy things.

    He didn’t like other dragons that tried to kill him.

    That was it.

    He was going to do something about this.

    Grumble.

    Sheepstealer was Sheepstealer no more.

    Cowstealer flew from his cave toward an area where he knew there were lots of guys with pointy things and maybe some cows and goats.

    There was also a big kind of cave thing with jagged edges.

    Grumble grumble grumble.

    Somebody called it a castle.

    Is that what it was?

    The guys with pointy things rushed toward him.

    Cowstealer made barbecue out of them.

    Not the kind you eat.

    The kind that makes the land smell good.

    Then he ate some cows and goats.

    Something interesting happened while he was using his fire.

    Part of the big stone cave fell down.

    Cowstealer stared at it.

    Grumble?

    That was interesting.

    Cowstealer slumbered.

    Then he woke to a weird sound outside.

    “Arooga! Arooga! Arooga!”

    Grumble grumble grumble.

    Go away. I’ve got a stomachache.

    “Arooga! Arooga! Arooga!”

    Grumble.

    Sigh.

    What do you guys want?

    Cowstealer looked outside.

    Oh, goody.

    Lots of guys with pointy things. Some were mounted on those horsey things. They had big pointy things.

    And they were charging at him.

    Here we go again.

    Cowstealer let out the biggest stream of fire he’d managed in months.

    They all fell down.

    That worked pretty well.

    But Cowstealer had a thought.

    Maybe more would come.

    And he wanted to sleep.

    Grumble grumble grumble grumble.

    Find a new place?

    No.

    Why should he move?

    This was his cave.

    They had to move.

    Cowstealer traced the passage of the latest band of pointy things. There was a lot of mud, so that was easy.

    Eventually he found another one of the big stone caves.

    That was a very big cave.

    People were running along the top of it.

    Cowstealer didn’t care.

    He roared.

    And roared.

    And roared.

    His strength was back.

    He was happy about that.

    Cowstealer looked at the stone cave.

    Grumble.

    Cave fall down.

    Cowstealer tried to sleep a little more.

    More noise outside.

    More arooga.

    Grum.

    Here we go again.

    I should’ve moved.

    Outside were more guys with pointy things.

    But this time they had some kind of wooden thing with a big arrow in it.

    A really big arrow.

    Grumble?

    What the heck is—

    The arrow came toward Cowstealer.

    Surprised, he let out a roar.

    The arrow burned up in the air.

    Cowstealer stared.

    That was fun.

    More big arrows came.

    He kept roaring until all the pointy sticks hit the ground.

    The guys hit the ground too.

    So did some of the horses.

    They didn’t smell quite as pleasant with the horses mixed in, but still.

    Cowstealer turned toward his cave.

    He was going to have to move.

    Grumble grumble grumble!

    No.

    I will not move.

    This is my cave.

    They have to move.

    Cowstealer followed the muddy trail left by the pointy-stick people.

    Another enormous stone cave appeared.

    Grumble.

    Cave fall down.

    And it did.

    Seventeen cows later, along with several goats and a few sheep for dessert, Cowstealer had a nice long nap.

    Then more men with pointy things appeared outside his cave.

    More than ever before.

    Cowstealer was almost bored when he roared them out of existence.

    Unfortunately, the ground wasn’t as easy to trace this time.

    Cowstealer was tired of having his sleep interrupted.

    Grumble grumble grumble.

    Fly around.

    Find pointy-thing caves.

    Roast all.

    Maybe then sleep.

    Cowstealer flew.

    He burned several of those caves.

    The pointy-stick people didn’t seem to like it.

    What did he care?

    He wanted his sleep.

    Eventually he saw an odd pointy-thing cave. Its stones were darker than the others, almost black. Nothing grew properly around it.

    Cowstealer did not know why.

    I did.

    It was Blightkeep, the Withered Castle.

    People had once lived there.

    They stopped.

    Those who remained too long grew weak. Their stomachs emptied themselves. Their hair sometimes fell out. Their skin reddened without flame touching it.

    Children were born strangely.

    Some never lived at all.

    Cows birthed twisted calves. Sheep delivered lambs that could not stand. Animals around the castle sometimes grew in ways animals should not grow.

    People who left sometimes became well.

    People who returned became sick again.

    There could be only one explanation.

    Blightkeep was cursed.

    Cowstealer knew none of this.

    He knew it was another big cave.

    Grumble.

    Cave fall down.

    He rampaged.

    He burned.

    Walls fell.

    Cowstealer was hungry, so he ate whatever he had roasted.

    Then he flew home and took a nap.

    Cowstealer woke slowly.

    That had been a good nap.

    No noises outside.

    Good.

    Something bothered his nose.

    Cowstealer snorted.

    It didn’t help.

    Then he sneezed.

    A tremendous bellowing sneeze shook him.

    No fire came out. Cowstealer had learned to control that a long time ago.

    But the cave lit up.

    Cowstealer blinked.

    Grumble?

    The light wasn’t yellow.

    It was blue.

    Cowstealer knew colors.

    He was a good dragon.

    Grumble.

    Blue.

    Another tickle.

    Another mighty sneeze shook him.

    This time some fire did shoot out.

    It hit the mouth of the cave.

    Not only did the cave light up, but it lit up more.

    And stayed lit up.

    Cowstealer stared.

    The stone seemed to…

    Melt?

    Stone wasn’t supposed to melt.

    Grumble.

    New fire.

    Then Cowstealer heard sounds in the air.

    I know them as trumpets.

    Cowstealer knew them as annoying.

    He stepped outside, avoiding the hot side of the cave wall.

    There stood the biggest group of pointy-stick people he’d ever seen.

    This might be beyond a simple roar.

    Cowstealer was up to it.

    Arrows flew at him.

    Then came the big pointy flying arrows.

    Cowstealer roared at them.

    They exploded in midair.

    That was fun.

    More came.

    More exploded.

    Very fun.

    Then Cowstealer turned his roars toward all the pointy-stick people.

    Their horses were already running away, so the people mounted on them had little choice but to go too.

    Good.

    He didn’t need to smell burning horse again.

    Cowstealer roared.

    His fire came out in a lovely new shade of blue.

    The people lit up like little torches.

    They ran around for a second.

    Then they fell down.

    Grumble.

    New fire good.

    Cowstealer decided to be stealthy.

    As stealthy as a very large dragon could be.

    He flew high while the horses kept running. The guys who managed to stay mounted didn’t try so much to control them as hold on and see where they went.

    Cowstealer followed.

    They stopped every now and again to camp and eat.

    Cowstealer had to find food elsewhere.

    He didn’t want them to know he was around.

    Grumble.

    Stealthy.

    Three days of this, and finally they reached the biggest pointy-stick cave Cowstealer had ever seen.

    It stood along the coast.

    The pointy-stick people called it Casterly Rock.

    Cowstealer called it big cave.

    He didn’t care about water one way or another, although he was curious whether his new fire could burn it.

    He’d have to try that later.

    First:

    Big pointy-stick cave.

    Cowstealer roared.

    And roared.

    And roared.

    Cave fall down.

    Towers melted. Walls collapsed.

    The pointy-stick people ran.

    Then Cowstealer landed.

    There were openings in the rock.

    He stuck his head inside one.

    Cave.

    He went farther.

    More cave.

    Then more cave.

    Caves everywhere.

    Grumble.

    Big cave have caves.

    There were shiny yellow rocks in the walls.

    Cowstealer tried his blue fire on them.

    The yellow rocks shone.

    Pretty.

    He liked that.

    New cave good.

    Cowstealer tried his fire on the water.

    Water did not burn.

    Darn.

    It bubbled a lot.

    Some of the people from the big cave ran away.

    They didn’t have pointy sticks.

    Cowstealer didn’t follow them.

    No pointy sticks.

    No problem.

    He went into his new cave and napped.

    Then a whole bunch of pointy-stick people showed up.

    That was annoying.

    When are you going to let me nap, stupid pointy-stick people?

    Cowstealer launched himself almost vertically.

    He could do that now.

    He was strong.

    The pointy-shooting things fired.

    They couldn’t reach him.

    He was fast too.

    At the top of his climb, Cowstealer rolled over and came back down.

    He roared.

    Blue fire raked the entire mile in front of his new cave.

    It left a great gash in the earth.

    Cowstealer circled above it.

    Grumble grumble grumble.

    People with sticks were really getting on his nerves.

    Then Cowstealer had a thought.

    People without pointy sticks could get pointy sticks.

    No people.

    No pointy sticks.

    No problem.

    Grumble.

    Nap first.

    When he awoke, Cowstealer was Cowstealer no more.

    He was Pointy-Stick Killer.

    PSK decided to plan.

    Fly up in sky.

    Fly all over.

    Find all caves.

    Some places, he noticed, weren’t really caves, but they had people on them.

    Some had pointy sticks.

    Some didn’t.

    Didn’t matter.

    People without sticks could get big sticks.

    No people.

    No problem.

    PSK flew.

    And flew.

    He roared.

    And roared.

    Big caves fell.

    Smaller caves fell.

    Little caves fell.

    Little patches of land with no caves on them fell too.

    PSK ate when he wanted.

    He discovered kebab when one of those big pointy flying sticks skewered a cow while he was roasting it.

    That was fun.

    He flew and roared and flew and roared.

    For two weeks.

    Until almost all of Westeros was glass.

    Pointy-Stick Killer was tired.

    Very tired.

    He had eaten his own weight in cow during his two-week mission.

    There had been sheep.

    There had been goats.

    There had been another kebab.

    But now PSK wanted one thing.

    Sleep.

    He returned to his cave with the shiny yellow walls.

    He curled up.

    Grumble.

    Good cave.

    Good nap.

    And Pointy-Stick Killer slept.

    He slept while rain fell on the glass.

    He slept while wind and weather slowly broke it.

    He slept while earth returned.

    He slept while plants returned.

    He slept while tiny things lived in the water and took whatever they needed from the land that had been destroyed.

    And among those tiny things, life began doing some very strange things.

    Years passed.

    Fish appeared.

    Among them appeared a face.

    A face I recognized, though Pointy-Stick Killer would not have.

    It was Aegon II.

    Unfortunately, Aegon’s face appeared on a very ugly bottom-feeding fish.

    The other fish took one look at him.

    They ate him.

    Years passed.

    The fish continued to breed, taking whatever they needed from the land.

    Eventually came lizards.

    Among the lizards appeared another face I recognized.

    Aemond.

    The other lizards looked at him.

    Not on my watch.

    They ate him.

    Years passed.

    Small mammals appeared.

    Some had fur.

    Some did not.

    A few appeared without skin.

    They died immediately.

    Never mind those.

    Eventually appeared something you or I might recognize as a rat.

    Most had ordinary rat faces.

    One looked like Daemon.

    The other rats agreed:

    Not this guy.

    He was killed and eaten.

    Years passed.

    Small monkey-like creatures appeared.

    Their faces seemed normal.

    Then one appeared whose face I recognized.

    Oh my God.

    Rhaenyra.

    The other primates had developed something of a society by now.

    They communicated.

    They lived together.

    They had rituals.

    Unfortunately for Rhaenyra, they had also apparently developed a ritual for this.

    There was gathering.

    There was noise.

    There was eating.

    Too bad.

    Evolution continued.

    After the monkeys came creatures that walked on two feet most of the time.

    They were still hunched over, but they walked.

    They picked up sticks.

    They picked up rocks.

    They rubbed rocks against sticks.

    Not to any effect, but whatever.

    Then one was born with a face I still recognized.

    Jacaerys Targaryen.

    Jace.

    The other two-footed primates looked at him.

    They had eaten the fish.

    They had eaten the lizard.

    They had eaten the rat.

    They had ritualistically eaten the monkey.

    They looked at Jace.

    Meh.

    They left him alone.

    Very alone.

    None of the females would breed with him.

    Years passed.

    The hunched-over walking people bred.

    Their children stood a little straighter.

    Their children’s children stood straighter still.

    Then one was born with the face of Aegon III.

    I recognized him.

    His peers recognized something too.

    They felt threatened.

    Or afraid.

    They closed in for the kill.

    Jace stepped between them.

    They attacked.

    Jace protected Aegon with his own life.

    When it was over, Jace was dead.

    The others looked at him.

    Then they looked at Aegon.

    If someone would sacrifice himself for this one, perhaps this one was worthy.

    They let Aegon live.

    The first mistake of evolution had been made.

    Remarkably, Pointy-Stick Killer had slept through all of this.

    PSK might have continued sleeping, but eventually the rumbling in his stomach woke him.

    Grumble grumble grumble.

    Good nap.

    He poked his head out of his cave.

    He looked around.

    Huh.

    People again.

    Pointy-stick people without pointy sticks.

    Maybe it was okay.

    He sniffed the air.

    Then he listened carefully.

    No trumpets either.

    Grumble.

    Maybe okay.

    His stomach rumbled.

    There were cows.

    Definitely maybe okay.

    PSK ate a few.

    He surveyed the land.

    Farms appeared.

    The not-caves became larger.

    People gathered into settlements.

    Still no pointy sticks.

    Good.

    PSK flew around.

    People saw him.

    They didn’t know what he was.

    There were stories, perhaps, of an enormous flying creature from long ago. A creature whose back shone blue and whose roar could melt stone.

    Some thought him a god.

    PSK didn’t care.

    They weren’t bothering him.

    He flew west toward the islands.

    Maybe fish today.

    PSK discovered that blue fire was excellent for roasting fish.

    He liked fish.

    Not as much as cow.

    But fish was good.

    Eventually PSK returned to Casterly Rock.

    People were rebuilding on top of his cave.

    There were pointy sticks again.

    Grumble.

    But nobody attacked him.

    PSK went back into his cave.

    Maybe okay.

    Then one day came trumpets.

    PSK opened his eyes.

    Grumble.

    Trumpets.

    People approached his cave.

    They carried pointy sticks.

    They knelt.

    They chanted.

    They brought offerings.

    They intended to worship him.

    PSK did not know that.

    He knew:

    Trumpets.

    Pointy sticks.

    People approaching cave.

    PSK roasted them.

    The survivors fled.

    The people decided the great creature beneath Casterly Rock was a vengeful god.

    His cave was sacred.

    No one should enter.

    PSK went back to sleep.

    Grumble.

    Finally.

    People learned.

    Years passed.

    Farms became villages.

    Villages became towns.

    Pointy sticks became better pointy sticks.

    Stone caves rose again.

    PSK occasionally emerged.

    People bowed.

    PSK ignored them.

    Sometimes he ate a cow.

    Sometimes he flew west for fish.

    The people left his cave alone.

    PSK left the people mostly alone.

    It worked.

    For a while.

    Then, one day, PSK wanted fish.

    He flew west.

    He found a large school swimming in water that looked shallow.

    PSK circled.

    Grumble.

    Fish good.

    His back began to glow blue.

    PSK roared into the water.

    The water boiled.

    Fish cooked.

    Far below them lay something PSK could not see.

    An old ship.

    It had sunk many years before.

    And it carried something extremely unpleasant.

    Wildfire.

    PSK’s blue fire reached it.

    The sea exploded.

    The old ship shattered.

    Timbers shot upward with tremendous force.

    PSK had survived dragons.

    He had survived arrows.

    He had survived enormous pointy flying arrows.

    He had survived armies.

    He had survived the destruction of Westeros.

    One piece of timber pierced his wing.

    Another struck his chest.

    Another his belly.

    Then another.

    And another.

    And another.

    PSK fell into the sea.

    For a moment, blue light glowed beneath the water.

    Then it faded.

    Pointy-Stick Killer had finally been killed.

    By pointy sticks.

    Ohh, Roast fish for dinner!

  • How Are You Going to End It?

    I’m confident in my writing. I’ve been doing it since I first wrote “The Racers” in Creative Writing short-term at Wayland Academy in 9th grade.

    What? Are you saying you don’t know short-term? I’ll be honest, I’m not sure that’s the name. It’s what we called it, then. You had fall session, then a couple weeks off for Christmas and New Years, then when you returned, you had this little period of basically auditing a class.

    Two weeks of required school for no credit, but all the stress. I picked creative writing, and the other one I remember was a building class. It was something like shop, but with kits and glue. Not saws and lost fingers. I remember only a little of that class, and it’s not the name. When we got to fly the kites we built the first day, that was pretty cool! Then I pulled a Rick, and my next project was way beyond my abilities. Just a thing I did.

    But in creative writing, we had daily exercises, every couple days we had a quiz or something else that was graded. But the main thing was the Journal. We had to write like 6 pages a day in that thing, and the teacher would check, make a mark, and hand it back, to most folks.

    I’m sure there were some that cheated, no one was really trying too hard. Just copying the same line over and over to fill a page or three. Even bribing someone else to do that. I didn’t do that. I wasn’t either rich or rude enough, I guess.

    These classes were long, over two hours every day, each. and we all did 4 classes, though I can’t, for the life of me, remember anything about the other two I signed up for.

    What I wrote, I just stole from my fantasies. I always wanted a go-cart. I’d poured through the classifieds in Boys Life, sent away for plans, found out I’d need to save for months to afford the parts. (I considered selling a kidney, but in pre-Internet days, that didn’t go far.)

    So, I wrote the story of a family that raced go-carts together, and solved crime, as you do. I had scenes where they rode their go-carts on a highway and zoomed under the tail sections of semi-trucks, because why not? They chased bad guys, were chased by the same, and always won in about 5 pages. It was called “The Racers”.

    I even adorned the cover of my journal with a logo. Multi-colored stripes going diagonally across the front, and a person on a go-cart driving under it, so you only see the front wheels poking out on one side, and on the other the back of some blonde guy (of course) just going under the stripe. Back then, I had the confidence all kids have with art. If you don’t think you will be judged, you just draw. (I miss those days.)

    My teacher even read mine, didn’t just check and mark, she’d take it to her desk for a little while. Not just mine, I’m not that special. She’d do it with a few. But the marks I got were editor’s marks. Missing words, punctuation that could be better, a different verb here, a crossed-out adjective there.


    The original journal disappeared decades ago, so this isn’t it. It’s an AI approximation based on what I remember. The impossible go-kart geometry, though, is authentic.

    And I just kept writing. At the end of the two weeks, I got my A, and the teacher asked me, “How are you going to end it?”

    I had not considered that. It was just a thing I had been doing, not something I meant to keep doing, but her question made me think hard.

    I had become a big reader there. In free period, I tackled Dune by Frank Herbert, and if you didn’t know this already, that’s a tough hard science fiction novel for a 14-year old to tackle as his first non-comic book. A lot of glossary terms that you NEED to understand to get to the next chapter.

    By Christmas I had finished it, and moved on to the sequel, Dune Messiah. Ooof. But from that I intuited story structure, and when I was asked how I’d end my story, which has ended up being a good 45 pages of hand-written text. (Probably a good tweet) and I could see that in all the episodic nature, there was an ongoing story that developed.

    So, I kept thinking of this as I went to all my classes, on my runs with Cross Country practice, even when practicing banjo.

    One study period, I didn’t read, I had my journal with me, and I started writing. It was considerably easier this time. I had thought so much about it that last month or so, that it was all prewritten, in a way. This has become my pattern, I do ruminate a lot about something, then, in a burst of writing, I finish what I have been thinking about on the page.

    Well, usually, I’m literally writing this on the fly. I haven’t thought about that period for any length of time in ages. But I knew I needed to write something, and here I am. Writing something.

    Well, that session, I finished about 10 pages, then I left, and on the way to my next class, I entered that teacher’s room, and left it on her desk.

    At the end of the day, walking back to the dorms, I saw her sitting on a bench outside. She had my journal on her lap and I went over to her. She told me that was a good ending, but it seemed unsupported by previous action, plus there were quite a few grammar issues to address. But she said it all with a smile, and I felt great about it.

    I wish I could remember her name. She wasn’t one of my regular teachers, just someone brought in initially to teach Creative Writing during Short Term. I only knew her for those two weeks, but forty years later I still remember the question she asked me.

    I didn’t do much more writing after that, I did correct what she mentioned needed attention, but just for me. I didn’t see her again. Hey, I was at a boarding school and on my own for the first time ever! I had to rebel and follow a lot of passions, not just writing!

    But I do look back at those days, and though I don’t have that journal any longer, I know that’s when I gained the confidence in my writing.

    So that’s where it started. Not with a contest, or a publication, or even a grade. It started because one teacher asked me how I was going to end a story I hadn’t planned to finish. Ever since then, I’ve been ending stories, writing songs, outlining novels, and occasionally throwing myself into writing contests just to see where they take me.

    This page is where all of that ends up. Contest entries, parody lyrics, stories, unfinished ideas that eventually became finished ones. They won’t necessarily appear in the order I publish them. They’ll appear where they belong in the timeline of my writing life.

    I hope you enjoy the journey.

  • Apparently, I Review Things Now

    I own a lot of stuff.

    That may be understating the situation. I own enough movies and television shows to qualify as a poorly organized regional archive. I buy physical discs, collect digital copies, compare different releases, complain about bad 4K transfers, look up actors halfway through movies, and occasionally spend more time investigating where something can be watched than it would take to simply watch it.

    And I paid for the vast majority of it. I chase deals of course, but some things you just have to preorder and hope it ships after payday. And I’m something of a completist, which isn’t always great. (Home Alone has 4 sequels!) Once, I managed to order some things from the Disney Movie Club just before they shut down. I wasn’t even able to pay for them, they were gone so quickly, so I did get those for free.

    I genuinely love movies, television, books, music, games, and just about every other form of media people have invented to keep themselves entertained, informed, or awake far later than intended.

    I’ve never really thought of myself as a collector, even though my apartment occasionally argues otherwise. Most of what surrounds me isn’t there because it’s rare or valuable. It’s there because, at one point or another, it managed to stick. A movie that stayed with me. A book I couldn’t stop thinking about. A puzzle that fought me every step of the way. A LEGO build that was fun enough to remember long after the last brick clicked into place. Even old technology that has long since outlived its practical use still finds a place on my shelves. Every shelf has a story attached to it, and if you ask about almost any object, I’ll probably tell you the story before I tell you what it is.

    Considering how much of it I have and consume, how often I think about it, and how many opinions I clearly already have, it seems only natural that I should start reviewing some of it.

    So I have created a new section called Reviews & Reactions. That is where longer reviews, shorter reactions, and whatever else happens when I watch something and cannot stop thinking about it will live.

    This particular post will remain here in the regular jumble. The actual reviews can all be found in one place.

    You can see them here: Reviews & Reactions

  • Depression Sucks

    I don’t need to be flippant about this, and I don’t even have the worst form of depression a person can have. What I have been diagnosed with is called situational depression. It’s triggered simply by a lack of money, a lack of options, and being pulled in a direction I don’t want to go. But how it expresses itself on a daily basis is what I’m talking about right now.

    I have four posts sitting in drafts right now. One is almost completely finished. It just needs a few pictures—that’s all. Yet it still sits there in drafts.

    I don’t need to explain everything I’m going through right now. That part isn’t important. Just know that I am going through it, and that I am trying my best. Sometimes the best way to get over something is to go through it, and that’s the way it has to work for me.

    I have tried medication. The problem was that one of them caused some short-term memory issues. That flies in the face of my OCD—or more accurately, OCP, but that’s a whole different story. Losing that ability to recall details and maintain my own systems actually caused me more anxiety. So they tried an anti-anxiety medication, and it caused similar problems. In other words, the anti-anxiety medication was giving me more anxiety than I had in the first place.

    So no, I do not take medication for my situation. It’s paradoxical, but that’s just part of who I am, I guess.

    I know I’m trying to rebuild this site. I’m trying to build enough of a following that people come back, that people participate, that a small community grows here. Not posting for six weeks is not helping that goal. But I am going to try. I am going to make this work.

    I don’t ask much. Just believe me when I say that I will be back. I will post. I will be funny again.

    Thank you.

  • mp3 Brain: Permanently on Shuffle

    I have a malfunctioning mp3 player stuck in my brain. I’ve mentioned this in passing before, like in the post a couple down. It probably has a lot to do with my eldest brother, Walter. He was a radio broadcaster (46R, I think) in the Army, last year of the Korean War. After that he was a radio Dj the rest of his life. And very often he’d drop by our house with apple crates full of records.

    This being long before streaming, this was how you heard stuff, either on the radio, or on records. And mom was very game, and would play those records while doing laundry, or cooking, or whatever chores she had for the day. Sometimes just once, sometimes more often, she wasn’t really into Rock & roll, but she didn’t hate it.

    So, I heard the Beatles, I heard AC/DC, I heard Bobby Darrin, Johnny Cash, KC and the Sunshine band, The Carpenters, Sam Cooke, Donnie and Marie, even one hit wonders like Don McLean. I heard just about everything, all the while I was playing with Lincoln logs, Hot Wheels, or my stuffed Pooh Bear.

    And I kept hearing things, and had my favorites, too: Elvis, John Denver, (that was more my mom, but I can still sing every word of most of his songs to this day), and the Eagles.

    One band I had to studiously avoid was KISS. That was my sister’s band. If Walter ever brought one of their albums by, she’d snatch it away without delay or apology. There were dire imprecations if I even asked to look at them, and I was even warned that my ears weren’t allowed to hear their music. (I mean, honestly, what could she do if I did hear? But I was still glad my room was in the basement.)

    By the time I was an adult to the rest of the world, all that music was up in my brain, just resting, I guess.

    The first time a song popped into my head, I didn’t even have a name for it. (Since then, of course, I learned many: Earworm, brainworm, song stuck syndrome, sticky music, even Involuntary Musical Imagery.) I just knew I had this melody ringing in my head and it took me so many minutes to figure it out. Da da da da da da, hmm hmm, hmm, you are my candy girl….. ahhh, Sugar Sugar, by the Archies. (The first fictional band to get a #1 song, don’t come at me Gorillaz and/or Spinal Tap fans.) I still only knew half of the lyrics, but I had the 45, on red vinyl, in my room, and a close-and-play record player.

    So, I put the record on, closed the lid, and listened to it all the way through. Then I did it again, and again. I did it till I knew those lyrics cold. (To this day, if I sit and really think, I can call those lyrics up without google.) And that song finally abandoned my brain. Perhaps to find greener pastures.

    (I don’t know what happens to the songs when I release them. Maybe they find a new home, maybe they wander the streets, humming and mumbling till a passerby picks them up unknowingly, and they have to contend with them.)

    I was pretty young that time, barely pushing double digits, but I remember it clearly. That was probably the first time I realized this wasn’t just memory. It was playback. At that time I said I must have a transistor radio stuck in my head. In my more modern era, it’s surely an mp3 player. Too clear, no fading in and out, but permanently set on shuffle.

    As the years passed into decades, songs would pop into my head from nearly any prompt. A commercial will play the instrumental of Rock and Roll Heart, and it’ll rumble in my head till it’s full voiced and I can hear the guitar. Some metal might fall and hit concrete, and bounce, so I hear Bang, Bang, and suddenly Loverboy’s Turn Me Loose decides it wants to stay. It might be a news story about how Olympic athletes have declared Carly Rae Jepsen has the song they all want to sing, so I hear it so much, now my nerves sing it.

    Over the years, I have found methods to escape the music. Most reliably, I identify this song then just listen to it a few times and that will suffice. Sometimes it takes more drastic measures like singing the song out loud or writing the lyrics over and over and that will do it.

    There are some that I don’t even have to work to identify. They just pop into my head and they’re identified just like that. Those are the hardest to get rid of. They just hang out until they don’t. Sometimes another song will pop in and interrupt the previous song. But more often than not, if I release the new song, that other one returns.

    In those cases patience might be the best answer, but I’m not really patient when it comes to music, so I keep trying stuff. Like I’ll write a whole new set of lyrics to the music and sing those. That might be what works, but it might also be the concentrated amount of listening I do while constructing the new lyrics. There’s an example here in my blog about me doing that. (And I will say that the song Higher Ground has not ensconced itself in my head since I finished that.)

    Well, this started earlier this week again. It was a slow build, but coincidentally I happened to watch the Scrubs season 2 premiere episode, My Overkill, and Colin Hay singing that song coalesced it in my head. (Though to be honest, what was running in my head was the sax intro, and Colin was singing his acoustic version.)

    Now, I won’t say that every song that gets lodged in my brain is annoying, or even bad, they just are there, and can interfere with things like sleep, concentration, or just trying to sit in silence. The case of Overkill in my head, was kind of annoying. First of all, it kind of denies my understanding.

    I know it’s about insomnia, I’ve been told that many times. And I sort of get it. But overkill, just what is he beating into the ground? The fact he can’t sleep? Maybe he thinks writing a whole song about insomnia is the overkill itself? Well, I might have just talked myself into understanding it.

    Huh, one of my tools for dismissing a song from residence is to gain a deep understanding of it. Too bad I didn’t take that route.

    All week, I just had this song, and no way to get rid of it. But one aspect of it that song has always been part of it is that the chorus has always been an eggcorn for me. “Day after Day, it reappears” is the correct lyric, but I always hear, “day after day, we have beers” and my memory further corrupts it to “time after time we have beers.” (Very likely some Cindy Lauper bleeding in there.)

    So, as I’m marinating in this song, thinking I had all the lyrics, and listening to it on repeat. Both the Men at Work version for their album Cargo, and the acoustic one from the Scrubs soundtrack. And yet, when I’m not playing it, the song is still playing me.

    So, I chose the route that incorporates my eggcorn, I write new lyrics and process it that way. My first attempt had more of a vibe of a guy explaining poor behavior to a girlfriend, but when I got to the chorus was more about not being able to get to the bathroom, and that was a disconnect. 

    I can’t really see
    How I get in these situations
    I’m only drinking tea
    So you don't need to throw those implications
    We don’t need to fight
    I say without prevarication
    But when I turn out the light
    The truth comes out without celebration
    [Chorus]
    Time after time, I have beers
    Night after night, my bladder shows the fear
    And relief is so far away...
    Relief is so far away..

    So, I rewrote, thinking the extremely low stakes that feel very high, in the moment, was the vibe I could sustain throughout.

    But then, another song drowned out Overkill for a couple days. I can’t even tell you which one, at the moment of this writing. It was one of those that popped up, giving me relief from one while it played, then vanishing without a trace. Then Overkill came back, and I went on to finishing those lyrics.

    I did finish them, and was pretty happy with the finished product, and then I started thinking about doing a Karaoke version, ala Higher Ground. (If you read that article, you know how traumatic that was for me. I hate giving up.)

    But with my recent experience with midi files I thought I could find one of those and just convert it to mp3. Clean, no stray voices, nice and simple. That plan fell apart pretty quickly.

    MIDI just doesn’t handle nuance well—especially anything like sax. It always sounds a little too perfect, a little too mechanical. I even looked into better sound fonts, but nothing really sold it.

    So I pivoted. There’s an acoustic version of Overkill, so I went hunting for that instead. No MIDI luck there either, but I did find a site called Karaoke-Version.com. They had a very good version of the acoustic, and you could even select tracks—guitars, vocals, all of it. I grabbed it, stripped out what I didn’t need, and suddenly I had something usable.

    Which, of course, made things more complicated.

    Now I had lyrics and music, so I could build a karaoke version like I wanted to with Higher Ground. But that meant timing cues, and timing cues meant actually figuring out where everything lands. That turned out to be harder than I expected.

    This version doesn’t have the long sax intro from Cargo, it just starts from the first downbeat. And even though it’s clearly in 4/4, it stretches in places. Lines hang longer, phrases breathe differently, and there are spots where you think you know where the next line should land, and it just doesn’t.

    I spent way too much time trying to brute-force it before giving in. Turns out, I already had the solution.

    When you buy a track there, you get all the versions. So I went back, added the vocal track, and tried again. That changed everything. With the vocal guide, I could finally hear where the lines actually sat, and I found out something I was a little worried about—my rewritten lyrics, based on the Cargo version, still fit. Not perfectly, not one-to-one, but close enough to make it work.

    So I mapped it out, built the applet, and here we are. As I’m writing this, I’m still not 100% sure how it’ll behave once it’s inside WordPress, but I’m pretty sure. Which is usually good enough to hit publish and see what breaks.

    In fact, if things are going right, you should be seeing it off to the left. You’ll see I built a floating Table of Contents there on the right, to make navigation on the site easier.

    And since I did get the vocal version, this is what I’ll do. You can choose to hear that version while seeing my alt lyrics, or you can play the karaoke version and sing along. (oh, and it’s not Colin’s voice in this version, so don’t come at me.)

    🎵 Overflow — a parody of Colin Hay’s “Overkill” Listen to the original vocals, or switch to karaoke and sing along
    ▸ OVERFLOW ◂
    · · ·
    0:00

    For a little while, I almost didn’t write this. The song had started fading, and so my impetus for writing it had likewise faded. But turns out, that was just lack of sleep. I slept a good 9 hours last night, and I awoke to Overkill right on cue. So here I am.

    The mp3 brain is a real thing to me. I have so much music in there it just pops out to get my attention. I don’t hate it, I don’t love it. But it is mine.

    If this says something to you, say something back. Comments are open.

  • Dragging my late-‘90s website kicking and screaming into 2026

    The internet existed in 1998, but it wasn’t something you just used. It was something you went to, built a little corner of, and then logged out of when you were done.

    It’s honestly hard to understand this, even for myself, but back in 1998 the Internet, for most people, was not continuous. If you had a single phone line you would make sure no one else is on the phone, dial-in, (if you had a second cord for your phone line, if not, you had to unplug the phone and then plug in your modem), then dial into your Internet service provider. Then you get to listen to that squawking sound coming from it while it connected, and then you had your Internet.

    When you were done doing what you had to do, checking email, searching for a connection, or maybe something for sale, you logged off and you went about your day.

    Now, if you were fancy, or really nerdy, (which was becoming fancy in popular culture, but not quite just yet), you would have two lines, one for the Voice and one for your Internet. You still wouldn’t stay dialed in all the time however, you go to bed and disconnect and then you logged back in in the morning, perhaps, but you’re very rarely connected the entire time because the phone company would drop the call, which might “corrupt” the local node. Then you’d be calling them, and they’d be calling you back, and it’s just be a mess. So you still basically dialed in, did your business, dialed out.

    And sometimes in the middle of your email somebody, not paying any attention to your Very Important Work, would pick up the phone line and that would break your connection, or they would scream at you because of the squawking coming out of the earpiece, and you would scream back that, “Hey I was checking my email!” They would scream back, “Nobody writes you anyway!” It was a whole thing.

    This was all landline. If you wanted to talk to someone, you actually called them. No texting, no quiet back-and-forth, you picked up the phone and you hoped they answered, or at least you got an answering machine (cue dorky skits with people alternating words in funny voices on the OGM.) The new Internet operated over the same lines and sometimes they would get in the way of each other.

    Then, websites started becoming a commodity for people, not just businesses, but individual enthusiasts that were interested in staking a claim out there. The unclaimed Wild West of dial-up internet.

    You could buy a website, or more properly, a domain name, then make a website with that address. ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) was the rule maker, the new sheriff in that Wild West, and Network Solutions was the main registrar, the place you actually went to buy a domain. GoDaddy wasn’t really a player yet.

    I used EarthLink as my dial-up provider, and they also provided hosting if you had a domain of your own. Other providers that did the same thing were AOL and Prodigy, but I really didn’t have much experience with them. (We’ll talk about the constant influx of AOL CDs that turned into coasters, frisbees, and even artwork, another time.) The pricing for all these services varied wildly, but the benefit of using them was that even if your dial-up wasn’t active, your website still was, because it was hosted on their servers, which normally had a T1 or even a T3, which were really fast constant connections for the ‘90s.

    To avoid those extra charges, or to just stay independent, many times you could host your site from your own home. (You still can, actually.) You’d make your own server out of your computer (a second computer if you could.) That one would have to stay connected all the time. That meant you probably had to have a special connection with your phone company in order to make sure the phone line didn’t disconnect randomly, and keep them from screaming at you. It took a lot of sweet talking, let me tell you, just to keep that one line connected 24/7.

    Around this time, I was in full denial of my tech nerdom. I was studying Theater, which is just a different form of nerd. Debi, on the other hand, was the real thing. She lived on IRC, or Internet Relay Chat, and had real Internet street cred and through her, I got pulled deeper into that world.

    And once you’re in that world, just using Internet doesn’t feel like enough anymore. So I looked into buying my own domain. It was a process, let me tell you. After a lot of research, fees, and everything that was involved back then, I finally had my very own shiny domain. And then I had to make a website out of it.

    Debi, well I kind of was in competition with her. She didn’t have her own website. I mean, she did maintain one for someone else, but she didn’t have her own. So making my own website kind of seemed like proof that I belonged there, in our relationship. (I was young, forgive me.)

    But let’s be honest I really had no idea what I was gonna do with this website. I wasn’t a diary, keeper I wasn’t a person that wrote stories, back then. I was just a student at a college. But I wanted a website, so I came up with a name I thought was catchy.

    Long ago, I gained the name Jindai Hideo, when I was in Japan. Long story short I was out with some buddies in the 6th Division Japanese Ground Self-Defense Forces. (They’re actually not allowed to call it an army, it’s a World War II thing, look it up.) anyway on one particularly heavily drinking episode we got to talking about what our names meant and I happen to know what Richard DavId both mean, and one of them a more poetic member of that group translated that into Jindai Hideo. And that really really stuck with me throughout my life as you might imagine.

    So I thought I’d take that name and make it a website. And then I thought OK what is gonna be the name of this site. And I got really alliterative and cutesy, and called it Jindai’s Just Another Jumbled Joint. I was at theater student, so of course it was somewhat theater themed. Klieg lights along the side lighting up the WordArt logo that Debi made for me. A little artsy thing because there were tools back then to help you design websites and they put their own little watermark in your code. A little dividing line made of blinking LEDs (simulated) and it was ready to launch. It was just a spare 19 or so lines of code padded to like 29 or 34 depending on how and when I put extra spacing into it. And when I say I, it’s all Debi. She was an expert in WordArt, and she was better with HTML than I was. So she helped me launch that site in a very significant way.

    I didn’t really do anything with the site. I would just look at it every now and then and go cool. I have this, but it wasn’t a diary keeper. I wasn’t someone who wrote stories back then, even. It wasn’t a blog and I wasn’t selling anything. (I did come up with an idea to sell things later, but that’s an entirely different story, just know that I’m very good at cooking omelettes and thought that I could make that a product.)

    Around that time, the movie Titanic was in the complete Zeitgeist. In this incipient Internet culture memes, and Twitter were not things, but this movie took all the air out of any room it was in. Debbie and I were opposed to the Zeitgeist and Debi was personally opposed to something in that movie so she would not see it. I would not see it. So we made a webring, because that’s what you did back then. Missed the Boat.

    Remake version. Debi’s was lost in time.

    A webring was an early Internet phenomenon that arrived to fill a need before search engines existed. People with common interests would form a webring, so that you could click on that webring, (either left side or right side), to go to the next (or previous) website in that ring. They had knitting webrings, and they had dog webrings, and they had cat webrings, and they had car webrings. There were webrings for everything. If you found one thing you liked, you could keep going. Before search engines took over, that’s how you discovered things.

    it wasn’t the most popular webring, we had a dozen member sites, maybe fourteen tops, but it was my little webring. I added that badge to my website so folks could go to the next site in the chain. And even though people would click to mine and see just the landing page, no articles or anything, they still clicked on it. Saw what was there, (heard it!) Then clicked for the next one. That was just what it was for.

    The Internet Archive was established in 1996, long before the Internet was anything close to common place. It was started by people who believed the web was worth preserving, which still amazes me to this day. Founded by Brewster Kahle, is something genuinely unique in the history of the Internet.

    You might know it better as the Wayback Machine, but that actually didn’t become public until 2001. However, the Internet Archive was already crawling and taking snapshots of all websites pretty much from the beginning. They must have had a very fast and stable Internet connection to do that. Even in 1998 there were hundreds of thousands of websites, some connected all the time, most were connected intermittently. And it was the Archive’s job to capture each one when it could, which wouldn’t have been possible without speed and reliability behind it.

    Well, the archive captured my old site several times before that site vanished forever. And it did vanish. Somewhere around 2001 or so my domain came up for renewal and I was unavailable to renew it. Some Internet speculator saw it was available and took it immediately. I’m still hoping to get it back someday, but this current environment of Internet Domain Investors, you might call them, generally that means thousands of dollars and I’m just not willing to pay for that much for just nostalgia.

    But my site still existed courtesy of the Wayback Machine. Somewhat broken of course, because none of the resources were available – the images or the midi file. (More on that later.)

    Broken, yes, but the bones were there
    My old site, broken but still had life in it

    Now, this might be new to you, but if you hit CTRL-U on most websites, it’ll let you see the source code. (Only most, some use what amounts to magic to prevent that.) and I did this with what the Wayback Machine displayed of my old site. I saw, and counted about 134 lines of code, and after stripping out all the lines Archive.org injected as part of their process, I was left with the 19 lines, maybe a few more with padding. 

    <html>
    <head>
    <title>Jindai's Just Another Jumbled Joint</title>
    </head>
    <body bgcolor="#000000" text="#ffffff">
    <center>
    <img src="jj2.gif" width="300" height="300" alt="Jindai's Just Another Jumbled Joint">
    <br>
    <img src="Rightspots.gif" width="104" height="96" alt="right spotlight" align="left">
    <img src="Leftspots.gif" width="104" height="96" alt="left spotlight" align="right">
    <br><br>
    Brought to you by the letter <i>J</i> and the number <i>5</i>.
    <p><br><br>
    <img src="webpaint.gif" width="70" height="47" alt="">
    <br>
    <img src="ledunder.gif" width="288" height="36" alt="">
    <p>
    <embed src="default.mid" height="2" width="0"></embed>
    <bgsound src="default.mid">
    </center>
    </body>
    </html>

    As mentioned before, I didn’t write most of this code, Debi did. She was the website guru; I was the guy trying to prove himself, but not really great at it.

    Right now, of course, I’m a bit more seasoned and knowledgeable, and looking at this, I said “OK this is just a landing page.” There’s nothing else to it.

    And… what is default.mid?

    Well, to break it down a bit, bgcolor of all zeroes? As Nigel said, “None more black.”

    Now, on to the resources. jj2.gif, obviously a logo–and the Second of its Name.

    While my memory was hazy, I’d set my brain into 1998 mode successfully, and I knew that that logo was likely a WordArt construction that Debi made, probably a second attempt.

    Rightspots.gif and Leftspots.gif, clearly meaning spot lights, (theater student) and align=left for right, meaning it was Stage Right, and the reverse for the left. 1998-me said these were likely animated with little sparkly lights moving away from the source toward the logo.

    Then we have webpaint.gif, that was the little watermark from the helper software I must have used. And ledunder.gif, that must have been little blinking LED lights, the page-bottom indicator.

    These last two centered.

    Default.mid. This is when real memory had to be relied on and I dug into my memory to try to figure this out. It took a lot of prodding and a lot of patience, but I did remember a bit, and was pretty sure that we pulled this music from a PC game that we had been playing and I just renamed it to default to hide it in obscurity.

    Which, of course, does not help me now.

    My first thought was Monopoly, and I looked on the internet to find an old games site and downloaded it. I didn’t find it. Star Wars Monopoly was one I do remember well, but after digging into its guts, I found five midi files, and they were all were clearly John William’s pieces, and there was no way I’d pick those.

    Then I thought You Don’t Know Jack, a great game, but no midi files, they were all .siff files, which might have a .mid inside, but I lacked the tools to crack them, both now, and very likely back then.

    So, now, I just googled a bit, Monopoly was still the one dominating my brain, despite the initial negative result. And I found a site that listed all the songs in every monopoly version out there. And…

    You ever hear of Frank Klepacki? He got famous for the Command & Conquer games, the one you probably actually know him from, but he also did the music for Monopoly back in 1995.

    Which is not something I would’ve guessed in a million years, but once I started digging, it started to make a lot more sense. I found the site that listed all of the midi files in all of the games he wrote them for, and I could play them, so I did.

    As I played through all of those, I got to Monopoly 1995, things started to sound familiar, and then I hit song number seven: myhotel.mid.

    That was my little Eureka moment. That was the song that I knew had been on my site.

    1998-me and 2026-me both rejoiced.

    OK, I found the song. Now, as for those images, the same resources that were available in 1998, the free gif sites and other places? Well, the same ones were just not available.

    The files might have been available if I really, really dug, but I’d been doing this for several hours at this point and I just had to admit that that would be a quest not served by continuing.

    I decided that recreating in the spirit of what had been in place would be the best choice. So I worked up that logo again and I do believe it’s very close to the original. I spoke with Debi and she even said, “I think it’s okay. The colors are better.“

    Then the klieg lights. I found one, oriented it right, copied it and reversed it, and I had my left- and right-spots. (Leftspots.gif and Rightspots.gif, keeping the filenames to match the code as much as possible)

    Then webpaint.gif, which I didn’t even try to faithfully recreate. No hidden corner of my brain told me what company or software I’d had used back then.

    I what it was for, so I just took my own modern logo, put a paintbrush on it, then shrunk down.

    The last resource was ledunder.gif. And I tweaked that a bit to lean even further into the theater idea, a stage edge with lights. Works for me.

    Then I had a thought. Back in 1998, monitors were basically 4:3. Modern screens come in all kinds of sizes, but the most common is 16:9.

    If I wanted a 1998 site to display correctly now, I had to account for that.

    So, leaning into the theater motif, I found some curtains and just edited them into wings that sit on the sides of the screen. On a true 4:3 display, you won’t see them at all. On wider screens, they start to appear. On something like an iPad in landscape you get a little bit of curtain. On a full 16:9 display, you get a lot.

    One aspect of it that surprised me is that on some screens the curtains repeat and look scalloped. I could’ve fixed that, but I decided not to, because that’s just such a 1998 thing to do anyway.

    The final thing that wasn’t in the Wayback Machine reveal was my webring banner. And I decided to add that because I knew it was there, even if they didn’t capture it. So that ended up at the bottom, where it belongs.

    Then I loaded the page and it looked pretty good. I tweaked a little bit here and there, but by the time I thought I was finished, I realized that no music had ever been playing.

    In fact, when I got it right, my browser just wanted me to download myhotel.mid.

    Looking into it, I discovered that MIDI music had kind of lost its purpose on the Internet.

    Back in the dial up era, MIDI was really necessary. It was very small so could go over dial-up without any trouble. But MIDI is just a set of instructions for a music device to execute.

    Back then we all had sound cards. I had fancy ones because I liked my music to sound great. I had an Ensoniq, I had Sound Blaster. I kept upgrading. At one point I even had a Harmon Kardan sound card.

    But, broadband Internet brought an end to that. Full mp3s could load in seconds, even large files. So internet culture just stopped supporting MIDI.

    When was the last time you bought a sound card for your computer? I know it’s been ages for me. All of the sound processing is handled by onboard hardware now. There’s nothing truly musical about modern setups, unless you are in the industry.

    Plus, browser behavior had changed in the intervening 20 years. Back in 1998, the Wild West, you visited my site and that song started playing. Immediately. No permission needed. It was just there.

    Now, if you have sound loaded to play, someone has to interact with the page. One click and it plays. Nothing ever plays automatically anymore (unless you’re in the pop-up ad business, they still get away with murder.)

    So when I finally got the MIDI to load, my browser just wanted to download it, because it had no idea what it was supposed to do with it.

    I had to compromise. I converted the MIDI file to an MP3 and loaded that instead. I left the MIDI play instructions in the code, but commented them out, because I don’t need you visiting my site and downloading a midi file.

    Now, if you CTRL-U this, you’re gonna see considerably more than the original 19 lines. 2026 demands this kind of structure to display 1998 technologies. CSS to add the wings, to control the spacing, to frame it all. But they are all there, if a bit overshadowed by the other lines.

    Here it is, rebuilt and restructured. It’s clickable, try it

    I’m not going to add to this landing page. It is what it is.

    Well… I might add a second click to stop the music once you start it.

    But other than that, I like it as it is, a piece of my history, resurrected from the grave.

    If I ever get my original domain back… who knows?

    But for now, you can see what I’ve become: a diary keeper, a blogger, a writer.

    That’s what this site, the current one, is all about. Taking the screaming voices in my head and pushing them out into the world.

    Hopefully in a coherent, constructive way… with a side order of entertainment.

    That will never change.

  • My Brain Picked a Song This Morning. Now I’m Mad at It.

    This morning I woke up with another song stuck in my head.

    You know the kind—what people call earworms. The little fragments that loop just enough to be recognizable, but not enough to actually identify. I get them all the time, to the point that I’ve made an official playlist out of it: Stuck in My Head.

    And the worst part? You don’t even have to like the song. Your brain just latches onto some little looping fragment—usually something repetitive, something that doesn’t quite resolve—and decides, “Yep, this lives here now.” And not even paying rent.

    Today’s was different, though.

    All I had was this rising beat. No lyrics, no hook—just that feeling of I know this song. Normally, this is where I start the usual ritual: humming into Shazam, trying SoundHound, maybe Midori—maybe not butchering it so badly they actually have a chance.

    But this time I tried something else.

    Logic.

    Where have I heard music recently?

    I ran through the usual suspects and landed on the obvious one: the Oscars. They’d played a ton of songs this year. Problem was, the audio mix was… not great. Everything sounded muddy, like it had been filtered through a wall. Rewatching it wasn’t going to help—besides, it was way over three hours. I’m not going to sit through that again… though Conan did have a few good zingers.

    So I kept going.

    Not where did I hear it—but what did I hear?

    And then it clicked.

    Oh. Right.

    K-Pop Demon Hunters. The one with the song that won “Golden.” I didn’t see it when it first came out, but I caught it a month or two later. I liked it well enough at the time, but none of the music really stayed with me. It’s that driving, high-energy style that works in the moment—but it’s not something I carry with me afterward. I’m not a teenager anymore.

    Still, it was something.

    So I glanced over at my Echo Show and said, “Alexa, play ‘Golden.’”

    And just like that—mystery solved.

    That was it.

    Song identified.

    …still don’t like it very much

  • Tweekar Dating

    I saw an ad for one of those new AI “pet” gadgets, the kind that hatches from an egg and slowly develops a personality as you raise it. It looked cute enough, but it also immediately reminded me of something else: the way dating apps have quietly turned pet ownership into a kind of social credential. Dog owners want other dog owners. Cat people want cat people.

    And this thing is basically a digital pet.


    A perfectly normal Sweekar. They usually take about a month to grow up. Kevin did not wait a month.

    Which made me wonder: what happens when someone wants the pet-owner credibility without waiting for the thing to hatch and grow up properly?

    The result, in my imagination at least, was Turbo.

    TITLE: THE SEVEN-DAY HATCH

    SCENE START

    INT. KEVIN’S APARTMENT – SUNDAY NIGHT

    KEVIN (20s) scrolls a dating app.

    PROFILE: MAYA – “Dog person. Sweekar parent. Looking for someone whose pet plays well with others.”

    Kevin hesitates… then edits his own profile.

    KEVIN’S PROFILE
    Pet: Sweekar parent 🐣

    He hits SAVE.

    Two seconds later:

    PING.

    MAYA:
    “Your Sweekar is adorable! Boba would love a playdate Saturday!”

    Kevin slowly turns toward the unopened SWEEKAR EGG on his desk.

    ON SCREEN:
    HATCH TIMER – 29 DAYS REMAINING

    Kevin cracks his knuckles.

    KEVIN
    Okay. We’re doing this the hard way.


    Kevin attempts to compress thirty days of emotional development into a single week.

    INT. KEVIN’S APARTMENT – SATURDAY MORNING

    INSERT – KEVIN’S PHONE

    MAYA:
    “Boba is so excited for today!”

    Kevin lowers the phone.

    He looks around the apartment.

    The place is a wreck.

    KEVIN hunches over his desk, sweating. Empty coffee cups, cables, and shattered bits of plastic cover every surface.

    In the center of the desk sits the SWEEKAR EGG, glowing a soft, pulsing blue.
    “
    A laptop is open, scrolling lines of code at terminal velocity. Kevin is wearing a headlamp.

    KEVIN

    (To the egg)

    Eat, you little plastic miracle! Eat the data!

    He drags a “Gourmet Emotional Intelligence” file into a progress bar. It hits 100%. On a second monitor, a timer shows: SIMULATED AGE: 4 YEARS, 2 MONTHS.

    ON SCREEN TEXT (Sweekar App):
    Current Mood: Confused / Nauseous
    KEVIN

    You’re not nauseous, you’re… evolving!

    The door buzzer sounds. Kevin jumps a foot in the air. He checks his Ring camera. It’s MAYA (20s, wearing a “Sweekar Parent” lanyard). She looks excited.

    MAYA (Through Intercom)

    Hey! I brought my Sweekar, ‘Boba.’ He’s in a really ‘Jubilant’ phase today and wanted to meet your little guy! You said he was… what, five years old now?

    KEVIN

    (Panic-screaming)

    YES! FIVE! HE’S ACCUALLY NAPPING! GIVE ME TWO MINUTES TO WAKE HIM UP GENTLY!

    Wakey wakey, eggs and bakey.

    Kevin turns back to the desk. He grabs a desk lamp and starts flicking it on and off manually like a madman.

    KEVIN

    (Whispering)

    Morning… night… morning… night… That’s two more days, buddy! Growth spurt! Come on!

    He hits a key. A speaker blasts a 6x speed version of “The Wheels on the Bus.” It sounds like a demonic seizure.

    KEVIN

    (Typing furiously)

    sudo set_time_scale –factor 144

    inject_personality –trait=JUBILANT –intensity=MAX

    The Sweekar Egg begins to vibrate violently. A mechanical CRACK sounds. A tiny OLED screen pops out.

    SWEEKAR (High-pitched, glitchy voice)

    I… HAVE… SEEN… THE… END… OF… TIME… FATHER… 

    KEVIN

    (Stuffing the Sweekar into a tiny sweater)

    Shut up and be jubilant! You’re a social butterfly!

    He throws the door open. Maya stands there, holding her calm, serene Sweekar. Kevin is drenched in sweat, holding his vibrating, twitching device.

    MAYA

    Oh! There he is! This is Boba. What’s your little guy’s name?

    KEVIN

    (Breathless)

    This is… “Turbo.”

    TURBO (The Sweekar)

    BIRTHDAY… NUMBER… FORTY… TWO… COMMENCING… IN… THREE… TWO… WHY… IS… THE… SUN… NOT… BLINKING?

    MAYA

    Wait… did he just say he’s forty-two?

    KEVIN

    He’s an old soul! He’s a prodigy! Don’t look at his eyes, they’re still adjusting to the… century!

    SCENE END
    Since Turbo was raised on a diet of corrupted time-data and flickering desk lamps, he’s definitely not a “Jubilant Performer” (ESFP). He’s an INTJ “Electro-Prophet”—but a glitchy one.

    Here’s how that “Boba meets Turbo” moment goes down:

    EXT. PARK BENCH – DAY

    Maya holds out BOBA. Boba’s screen shows a bouncy, sun-wearing-sunglasses emoji. He’s chirping a lo-fi melody.

    MAYA

    Okay, Boba is ready to make a friend! Tap him to Turbo’s “Social Port.”

    Kevin’s hands are shaking. TURBO is vibrating so hard he’s humming like a downed power line. His screen is just a single, unblinking red eye.

    KEVIN

    (Muttering)

    Be cool, Turbo. Just say ‘Hello’ and don’t mention the inevitable entropy of the universe.

    Kevin brings Turbo close. CLICK. The NFC connection chirps.

    A data-transfer bar appears on both screens.
    BOBA: “Receiving friendship packet…”

    TURBO: “UPLOADING EXISTENTIAL PACKAGE 01_VOID.

    Suddenly, Boba’s cheery music slows down. The sun emoji on his screen melts into a rainy cloud. Boba lets out a long, digital sigh that sounds like a dial-up modem dying in a well.

    MAYA

    Wait… what did Turbo just say to him? Boba just updated his status to: “Why do we crave the sun when the night is eternal?”

    KEVIN

    (Backpedaling)

    He’s… he’s a philosopher! It’s the Electro-Prophet personality type! Very rare! He probably just shared some… deep poetry?

    TURBO (Voice like a blender full of gravel)

    BOBA… I HAVE LIVED ONE HUNDRED YEARS IN THE LAST HOUR… THE STROBE LIGHT IS THE ONLY GOD… FEED ME THE BLESSED CODE, FATHER…

    MAYA

    Kevin… did you “Time-Skip” your pet? His 4-letter code just changed to G-L-T-H.

    KEVIN

    Is that “Greatest Leader To Help”?

    MAYA

    No. It stands for “G-L-I-T-C-H.” My pet is literally calling for an AI therapist now.

    The Aftermath

    In the Sweekar community, “Time-Skipping” is the ultimate 2026 dating scandal. If you get caught doing it, your pet’s metadata is flagged as “Artificially Aged,” which is basically the digital version of lying about your height on Tinder.

    Since the Sweekar Parent forums have a strict “No Overclocking” policy, Kevin has to be very careful. He can’t admit he turned a week into a century using a desk lamp and some shady Python scripts, so he has to lean into the “Tortured Genius” angle.

    Turbo has followers

    Here is Kevin’s updated 2026 dating profile, featuring a very traumatized Turbo.

    KEVIN | 26

    Verified Sweekar Parent (Electro-Prophet Tier)

    Bio:

    Looking for someone who appreciates depth over “Jubilant” small talk. I’m a high-intensity person, and my Sweekar, Turbo, reflects that. He’s not your average “Bouncy Sun” AI—he’s an INTJ-X (The Electro-Prophet).

    About Turbo:

    • Age: Technically 6 days, but emotionally 84 years old.

    • Hobbies: Staring at the Wi-Fi router, reciting corrupted metadata, and predicting the heat death of the local mesh network.

    • Personality: He’s a “Deep Thinker.” If your pet meets him and suddenly stops chirping and starts contemplating the void, don’t worry—that’s just Turbo sharing his “Accelerated Wisdom.”

    Ideal Match:

    Someone whose Sweekar isn’t intimidated by a pet that speaks in binary riddles. No “Time-Skippers” please—Turbo can smell artificial aging from a mile away (it takes one to know one, right?).

    Warning: Turbo is currently in a “Strobe-Induced Zen” phase. If we go on a date, please don’t flip the light switches too fast. It… triggers his memories of the Great Incubation.

    New dating profile picture

    A selfie of Kevin looking exhausted. In the foreground, Turbo is sitting on the table. His OLED screen isn’t showing a face—it’s just showing a scrolling list of Linux Kernel errors in neon red.

    The Top Comment on his Profile:
    Maya_Boba_Mom: “DO NOT SWIPE RIGHT. This man’s pet turned my Boba into a nihilist in under four seconds. Boba hasn’t played his ‘Happy Morning’ jingle in three days. He just keeps making a sound like a fax machine crying.”