Category Archives: FearMongering Propaganda

– Duh – It’s 2019 & They Haven’t Blown Up Our Planet Yet —> {{ Or is this our delusional “AfterLife”? }}

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{ “It’s 2019 & The Planet Hasn’t Blown Up Yet {{ Or is this our delusional AfterLife? }}  }

July 25, 2019 by Jim |

{ This is an edited version of something I tried to post earlier in our very old “Aerendel” blog hosted by wordpress dot com. }

Thursday, July 25th, 2019 – +25˚C / +76˚F —> With quite a few interesting clouds in the otherwise blue sky @ 3:40 pm in Atlantic Canada —

– These are the interesting clouds in the Eastern Sky – I couldn’t add this to the original post unless I gave them my credit card numbers etc. and agreed to their upgrade demands. – Schnarr! –

— Yay! I think that worked .

– Our Smoke Tree from the South West – With the corner of our porch behind it. –

—Well, this is schnarr – I spent – I don’t know – several hours the other day trying to find the old password to this here blog { “Free blog” – hosted at –wordpress.com– } and it just told me that if I try to upload more than 1 more MB of photos I will have to start paying WordPress for an upgrade. The also don’t want me to be able to be able to add, edit – or even think about trying to do anything else with the plugins. grrrrr-

— But anyway – It’s a Mercury Retch { aka ‘Retrograde’ } et ‘Mon Amour Fou’ is on the West Coast –  🙁 – But – life sort of goes on I guess – She’s dealing with corporate snafus and I’m dealing with beedy grastardly folks who offer freebies and then try to hit you up for more and more bux every time you turn around? – Ehh- WordPress is not the beedy-est  of the beedy grastards out there – and the stuff you can get for free from them is still really good compared to most of the others trying to prey on people they probably believe belong to the ‘great unwashed’  – But I’m still not looking forward to watching them go down in flames – too many innocent bystanders will get burned in the process.

-This is the same Smoke Tree – photo taken from the North West At About 12:30m – same time as the above photo – Funny how the lighting changed –

— Sigh

~~~~~ Jim

Posted in “UpDates”, Schnarr, Uncategorized

Saturday Morning – & We’re Missing Another Weather Bomb –

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Saturday, March 5, 2016 — //  -10˚C / +14˚F — overcast and damp in Atlantic Canada @ 7:43 am — // — My Friend Lyn’s Birthday —

Weather Map

This Morning’s Weather Map from the Canadian Weather Network.

Parts of Nova Scotia and a lot of Newfoundland are supposed to be clobbered by a nasty Nor’Easter today, and here, we are just outside the storm’s reach –

I’m pretty happy I won’t have to shovel over a foot of snow [ 30 cm is just about a foot ]

~~~~~ Jim

 

Positive Directions ?

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Sunday, February 21st, 2016 — +3°C / +37°F — Dark & Overcast in Atlantic Canada @ 3:22 am — I think it’s my not-so-old (ex) neighbour, Dana’s Birthday today —

Stone houses built against cliffs along a river or a lake.

Draelen’s been finding a lot of beautiful landscapes and city-scapes being re-tweeted by Artists he’s following on Twitter- Here’s one of them. — Makes me want to be there – This one was posted by “@MarionSpekker” and re-tweeted by “@huskorkut”

— I was just looking at things that Draelen (he’s part of our web game development team) has re-tweeted lately. Some of the photos and art work he’s found is absolutely inspiring. Kinda Makes Ya wonder how anyone could be given a wonderful, incredibly beautiful, and just plain breath-takingly amazing planet like this one and want to destroy it for a little bit of temporary profit.

Puppy with a pink Valentine's Day Heart.

In the past I might have winced and rolled my eyes about something this cute, wondered how the photographer manipulated the puppy, and maybe even commented about pictures like this possibly sending someone into diabetic shock. But I saw this at the right time, I guess, and thought, – I wish I saw this in time to copy and paste it into a private message and send it to the woman I love. –  Sigh, Maybe I’m just getting sappy in my, ahem, old age?

— And, after reading through a page of Draelen’s recent re-tweets I thought I should tweak a few settings on this blog and then went ahead and changed the Title that appears at the top of the page as well as the smaller ‘description’ that follows. I hadn’t realized that the header photo wasn’t as wide as the blog since we ‘stretched’ it to add a second column of ‘wigets’ to include Drae’s Twitter feed. I also moved that column to the right side and moved the stuff that used to be on the right – moved it over to the left. I don’t know, it just looks better to me this way.

Bird

Since I came to Canada as a visitor and liked the person I came to visit so much that I’m still here – I learned to appreciate birds a lot more than I did before Cathi captured my heart and all that – And I saw my first Bald Eagles, not in Alaska when I was up there, but here, in the Fredericton, New Brunswick area. I’m not sure what species this guy here is, but that’s quite a striking photograph.

— I do believe I’m richer for all the ‘eye-opening’ images Drae found and shared with his small circle of twitter followers.

City Scape

– For a long time, I had completely lost my wanderlust – It made no sense to me that I might spend a whole lot of time and energy – and probably lots of money too – to get to some exotic place and discover that the reality didn’t look half as good as the photo-shopped image in the travel agency window. I also dreaded finding myself halfway around the world and lonely because somebody I wanted to be with was thousands of miles away, and I didn’t want to discover that paradise was full of nasty – biting bugs and mean, bullying, or just plain evil or psychotic people. But I really wish I could teleport to this spot and see if it feels as magical in person as it looks here.

— Yup, so instead of me getting all upset about evil manipulating elitist pigs lying to us through their bought-and-paid-for ‘main stream media’ – I’m sitting here working on my novel, thinking about ways to make the game world we’re still working on, still making progress —

— Funny when Photos or Art can touch you and change your outlook from ‘I’m Mizzuble- Right?’ to, “Wow – This really is a beautiful world, isn’t it?” [ And I’m not even going to growl, “Let’s keep it that way!” ]

— Thanks for putting up with me? –,

~~~~~ Jim

 

Saturday, Snow, Then Rain, Then Snow Again ? — From “Latest News from Aerendel”

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Copied & Pasted from “Latest News from Aerendel” :

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Saturday, February 20th, 2016, —ƒƒ— +2˚C / +36˚F & raining at the moment in Atlantic Canada @ 1:11 pm  —ƒƒ— Kathy Krafchick’s Birthday ( & Patty Heart’s too) —ƒƒ—

light dusting of snow on trees and stone wall

– Um, I took this photo about an hour ago. It was still snowing then, but lightly. –

— “Yooks Yike another weird weather day in Atlantic Canada” It began with a light snow falling, the Weather Network expects we might get a centimeter – and then they expect rain ( they were right on that ) And then they expect the rain to turn back to snow –  I don’t think they wanted to guess how much snow we might get on the second round of white stuff, but they thought we might get “≅ 10 mm.” [ almost 10 millimeters ] of rain – But they only expected the temperature to reach 0˚C / 32˚F and we’ve already gone past/above and beyond that.

Crow in a tree against a grey (snowing) sky.

Two Crows were scolding me – When I picked up the camera and aimed at them, one flew away. If you can see the crow in this photo we’re both lucky. Yeah, I think I got him – Upper third & Right third of the photograph. I know what I was looking for.

— Yeah, Crow is one of my ‘totem animals’ – but I’m not about to call myself “Jim Crow”, or ‘Jim Mountain Lion” or Owl or Wolf or Turtle or Swan or Skunk – There’s a Dog in the mix too, and I think Possum shows up to protect my inner child by deflecting threats away – You can read all about that in “Medicine Cards” – don’t google it – go to smartpage dot com and protect your privacy –

Dusting of snow on a stone wall.

And This is the part of the stone wall that caught enough of this morning’s dusting to look interesting, at least to me.

— And while I was uploading photos from the camera’s SD card I realized I hadn’t uploaded the couple of photos I took during our latest visit to the north side’s Pizza Delight, ether on Maple Street or St Mary’s (street or road?)

Cathi in our Pizza Delight restaurant.

I might have mentioned this before, Cathi had some modeling experience as a teen-ager And she looks like a slightly different person in almost every photograph I’ve seen of her. I egged her on to pose for this one, Don’t know whether she’s putting on a modeling face of thinking I’ve lost my mind again for asking her to tip her head forward and look up at me. Almost every model I’ve ever talked to wished that professional photographers were a lot more human than they pretend to be.

— Yay? I should quit while I’m ahead –,

~~~~~ Jim

Ground Hog Day – 2016

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Tuesday, February 2nd, 2016 — -6˚C / +21˚F — Sunny & bright, clear, and colder than yesterday in Atlantic Canada @ 9:11 am — Birthdays today: Close Friend Lisa and Cousin Lyn in Connecticut 🙂 & I think our friend Angie ( née Shean ) up here has a birthday too – 🙂 —

"Icebergs"

I don’t know if this will be readable – but a friend impressed me by doing this on an obsolete computer with an obsolete operating system and an obsolete photo program.

— Draelen Shantivarta ( ‘Somewhere out west’ -) managed to download a screen shot from the game that several of us are still working on, and, using a G5 Mac running OS X 10.4-something which supports OS 9 “Classic”, where he used Photo Deluxe, a program from the early 90’s, to import, trim, and write every line ( one at a time ) then drag and resize the text (one line at a time). & to tell ya the truth, the screen shot looks like icebergs are floating close to shore somewhere.

Bernie and Barbara.

Barbara Walters interviewing Bernie Sanders before anybody had any idea that he could do so well in Iowa

— A lot of people were buzzing this morning about how well Bernie Sanders did in the Iowa Caucus yesterday. He started out polling in single digits and ended up in a virtual tie with Hillary Clinton, who is backed by big money and a powerful political machine.

Caucus Results

Hillary received 49.9% of the Democratic Votes tallied in yesterday’s Iowa Caucuses, Bernie received 49.5%? That should scare a lot of the wrong people. And six of the delegates were awarded by a coin toss?

— Hillary’s supporters were tweeting up a storm yesterday while Bernie had Michael Moore and a handful of activist celebrities ( including Susan Sarandon ( “Dammit – Janet!” ) and Wil Wheaton? – ( Wesley from Star Trek Next Generation? ) Plus a lot of dedicated grass-roots people. Exit polls cited by the BBC said 84-91% of voters under 30 years old voted for ‘The Bern’

California Bridge over shallow water stream

– This is in California? Wow –

— & As for me, I think I’d like to be in a nice warm place like the photo above right now. The person who tweeted it said, “California”? Must be upstate, north of San Francisco?

Water falling lazily around an old castle somewhere?

– And I have no idea where this is, but I do believe I could live there and love it. –

— Looks like the inspiration for the Elven City of Rivendel, as portrayed in The Hobbit & The Lord of the Rings Movies.

Bridge over a river somewhere.

– And this is another beautiful, intriguing place that I think I’d like to at least visit –

— I think my friend, Draelen, knows more about where this photographer/Tweeter is from, I think he told me she’s from Germany – But wow – what a beautiful world we live in. I think somebody tweeted a photo of Leonard Nimoy as Spock with a quote that went something like, [ understatement alert ] “Anybody who would destroy their home planet – is illogical.”

— I spent yesterday doing carpentry stuff, reinforcing the wobbly legs to a computer desk, and then brought an overheating iMac back from its most recent ‘near-death-experience’, caught up with a couple of friends on effbook and twitter, and watched ‘Supergirl’ and ‘X-Files’ before making sure computers were still okay and hadn’t blown up yet and forgot to take one of my medications. ( And No – I’m not one of the people doug otterson cited as needing to self medicate after seeing the photograph of an upright black cat playing a guitar – 😉

— And – I’m still wracking my brains over how to handle difficult passages in a novel that I’m trying to finish.

— Happy Ground Hog Day!

~~~~~ Jim

Found a box we hadn’t opened since we moved here :)

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Sunday, July 26, 2015 -( 15˚C / 59˚F & raining in Atlantic Canada @ 9:59 pm Atlantic Time 🙂 )-

2nd Prize for Comic Short Story 'published' on GEnie in 1991.

Cathi stumbled upon a couple boxes we hadn’t opened since we moved here in 2013 – I found this 🙂 in one of them.

— And this:

3rd Prize certificate.

3rd Prize Certificate for another story I ‘published’ on GEnie

— So, yup, I won second and third place in ‘Comic Short Stories based on Multi-player Games’ that were interactive and live on GEnie in 1991. (( “No brag, just facts-” ? )) 😉

~~~~~ Jim

Weekending-

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Sunday, July 19, 2015 -( 16˚C / 61˚F @ 10:45 pm in the dark and damp here in Atlantic Canada )-

Messy office.

This ‘Office’ is technically transitioning from ‘completely freaking messed up’ to ‘I just might be able to find something I’m looking for in here’.

Yes, we had a weekend. Of course it rained, but- We got things done, and moved forward into a more optimistic state of mind, no matter how many idiotic bits of political lies and rule bending b.s. the current administration is bombarding us with constant commercials on just about every station in Canada, and maybe especially New Brunswick and a couple other target areas. If it wasn’t for the fact that they are so obviously lying and trying their damnedest to get away with immoral bull [ chips ] by playing their propaganda clips before the election has actually been scheduled – which is unethical, immoral, not quite fattening, but should be illegal, and will probably help convince the majority of Canadians who are not brain dead to vote the morons out of office that much more quickly… I might be able to shudder and shrug my way through it. But the evil sonuvaguns are trying to convince vulnerable people that if any of the other parties get to form the next government they will steal the candy out of their babies’ mouths, take away their pensions, and, in general, peel the skin from their bodies as painfully as possible, and set their private parts on fire. The politix of fear are alive and well and Canada.

Pallets, lumber & garbage can cover.

Pallets (& plywood) R us. I got a little bit done, pulling nails out of interesting pieces of lumber that used to hold three decent pallet together to form shelves for plant sales at a nearby chain type hardware and lumber store. They do have Home Despots up here, but this is a more local franchise. The thing on the far left is something I built out of plywood and 2x2s to discourage the local racoons from messing with our garbage. That’s my white hat reflected in the window.

We got out and about on Saturday afternoon after a pleasant brunch. & After grabbing a couple necessities (like food?) at the nearby supermarket, we stopped off at a ubiquitous hardware chain store and stumble upon a couple goodies, like stain for our projects on sale. 🙂 And we were checked out by one of the most friendly and pleasant young cashiers we’ve ever encountered there.

And then I convinced Cathi to check out the free pallets one company leaves out in the hopes that they won’t have to pay somebody to haul them away or whatever business they’d have if nobody came along and took advantage of the free pallets.

What we found there this time was three surprisingly good pallets and one smaller pallet with split pieces but a couple good two by fours. So Cathi said she was happy we checked. We also found the last of the season’s small potted herbs for sale for $.24 each. I think we got two small plastic square things of lemon balm and a couple other intriguing plants, one was peppermint? some kind of mint and the other had tiny light purple flowers.

This morning Cathi went around and planted the herbs along with the ivy she brought home a couple days ago-

Ivy surrounded by grass, climbing a fence.

You probably can’t tell with a casual glance, but there is some newly transplanted ivy in the center of this photo. I told Cathi I’d like to see some ivy and she found some in the bargain/closeout section of one of the stores she frequents. We had nine little pots of English Ivy, which I hope really likes the climate here, and when we set them on the outside porch they thrived, sort of said, ‘thank you’ and now there are something like 4 plants around Jassper’s fence and a couple more in not so easy to spot places. But Yum- They should enjoy the rain we’re supposed to get in the next several days.

And, beyond my usual feeling like I’ve lost my mind, we did okay. – It had rained overnight, and it’s supposed to rain every day for the next four days? At Least?

— As long as you don’t dwell on the fact that, for a promised interview with a local Author I was trying to get an old mac computer to work with the old free version of ProTools and when I struck out with the best computer I still have here for that option I tried to wake up an older G3 (“cute”) MacBook and which, for all its 640 megs of RAM started up and charged the nearly dead battery really well, but when I tried to restart using Mac OS 9.2.2 the hard drive with that operating system had a coronary and played dead. I tried another external Hard Drive with a similar Operating System, but it was even worse. — When I took the worse HD into the office here and connected it to another Mac, that other Mac saw it long enough to know it was there, but when I tried to ‘verify’ and then repair the danged thing, it disappeared and said it was beyond help, but I should back up what I could and then it wouldn’t mount the danged thing and reformat it. But if it ain’t mounted ya can’t back anything up- bluddy idjits- so I tried repairing it again a couple times with the disk utility and it finally gave up trying to tell me it was too far gone (or too old, or too riddled with planned obsolescence???) to fix- well, surprise surprise, it fixed it enough so it would mount. I then tried backing up files. First the routines thought it might take an hour, then a couple hours, then 16 hours. So I went to bed & when I woke up and checked it, it looked like it had been backing up nicely for several hours and then hit a bad file with a name that was about two miles long and full of heiroglyphics- and the only thing it had actually backed up was a stupid icon. grrrr. So I spent most of today manually backing things up one file at a time.

All the time I was gnashing my teeth and backing up stupid files etc. Cathi got up quietly and went outside and transplanted things, thinking it would be raining later.

Garden gnome hiding in ferns.

I wanted to upload a photo of Cathi on her Gazelle, but I need to straighten it out so I’ll upload the photo of a gnome hiding in the ferns by our stone wall.

— And there a very interesting story at https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/stop-greedy-companies-making-products-that-break that says France has a law against planned obsolescence. 🙂

~~~~~ Jim

Friday the 13th is a Monday this week.

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Monday, July 13th, 2015 -( 21˚C / 70˚F — Sunny & Pleasant @ 10:45 am in Atlantic Canada )-

odd things on a blue background.

It took me forever to scan this stuff into the form you see here. After installing the software that came with the scanner the scanner refused to work with the computer it worked with fine before we found the disk and installed it. So I scanned it to another Mac, and the pictures kept trying to tip to one side or another and the other little things kept moving. Finally I just said the ‘heck’ with it an kept the last scan.

Yeah, it’s been a tough morning. I woke up aching all over, put the garbage and recycling out, had problems with the scanner after installing the software it came with on a computer that it worked fine with before I installed its software. Fed Jassper, fed Moe, fed me- Sighed a couple times-

I think my graphics/workhorse computer should be officially pronounced dead. It craps out without doing anything now. Planned obsolescence? May those who plan such schnarr things suffer from everything they ever need in the future falling apart when they need it the most. And if those morons manage to re-incarnate in the past, may the same curse follow them there?  Okay, now that I’ve voiced my ire, I can probably forgive them. I don’t think you’d want to be Bill Gates at the Pearly Gates if St. Peter called me over to consult on whether you could go to Heaven, or be condemned to the other place. I’d have to think long and hard about that one.

— Sigh–,

Cathi’s back to work. I ache all over. It’s a Monday.  and yes, to quote Pogo “Friday the 13th is a Monday this month.”

~~~~~ Jim