skirefly

[skirefly]

People love to say government doesn't do anything. They point to little inconveniences like potholes, systemic corruption, or troops marching in the street during a violent and unprecedented junta, and tut. I can't stand this kind of Negative Nancy pessimism. There's one thing government does just fine: getting rid of bears.

Not far from where I live is a small provincial park. In case you're from a country that doesn't have provinces, just think of it as a park. No adjectives, and nobody gets confused. In this park is a lot of protected wildlife. We have the occasional problem with raccoons in our garbage bins, feral coyotes coming up to nip our kids, field mice eating holes in our wiring.

Bears are not that big of a problem usually, but we had a really cold summer and those dudes are hungry. So they wander a little further than normal. Right into my neighbourhood. Someone got really upset, possibly because a bear tried to eat their kid, and called the cops on them. I don't think this would have happened if it were a polar bear, but I'm not going to go around shaking that particular tree.

The province responded by putting up a bear trap. In case you're unfamiliar (I was,) a bear trap consists of a box that the bear goes into and then is trapped. On the side of it, just to make sure that no dumbasses get trapped in there, is the wording "DANGER BEAR TRAP" in two-foot-high red lettering (bears are considered largely illiterate.) And on the inside is a fine new steak, at a time when steak has become incredibly expensive. I'm not going to lie to you: it has been a pretty hard year, and a bit of porterhouse would go a long way to making it better for me.

I headed on down there, ready to retrieve the steak that my tax money had paid for, and found something else entirely. My neighbour, Carl. He had decided to ignore the urgent warnings of the bear trap elite and make his own decisions in life. For his effort, he was able to get a free steak. A free steak, and also to be surrounded by a group of starving, angry bears, which I scared off as I approached using my mobility scooter (a 1988 F-150 with fog lights that look suspiciously like the runway lights that went missing from the airport last month.)

Carl was lucky that the trap managed to keep bears out as well as keep him in, until I figured out the prominent "release bear" lever on the side. Even so, if I had shown up a few minutes later, he'd probably have been ursine chow – bears these days are smart.

The ride home was awkward, with me not wanting to ask explicitly for the steak I felt I deserved for saving his life (the ancient Japanese custom of isshō sutēki) and him not wanting to admit that he had in fact been defeated by the very same government he thought incompetent to shovel driveways. Bears remained uncaught, sure, but nobody was expecting a whole lot out of this initiative. Surely it was none of our faults.

[skirefly]

"Oh shit, my career!" shouted one of the interns in the bullpen when it becomes obvious immediately what had happened. Yes, Justin. You had now learned a new and uncomfortable truth about working for the Man, and your working life will never be the same again. And it all started because he didn't follow the mandatory security training that every employee needs to click through while half-paying attention.

Yes indeed. In a past life, I was an information-technology security specialist. For those of you in the back who have led worthwhile existences, these words may not make sense to you. Others are not so lucky, and at this moment are rolling their eyes, or looking for the closest exits. We are, or were, the folks who force you to use a password that isn't "password," and stop sending emails containing the company's bank information to Inner Somalia.

Being in information security is a lot like being a regular old computer nerd, except you're also incredibly paranoid. Imagine you live in a house full of vicious, murderous ghosts that only you can see, and all your family members keep doing horror movie cliche shit like leaving the doors open, shaking genie lamps they find in the parking lot, and reciting "Bloody Mary" three times into a bathroom mirror. You gotta keep them safe, which slowly drives you insane over the course of, oh, about your first six weeks of employment. After that, you've basically just given up and are like the hardened firefighters who respond to grisly highway accidents with an encyclopedic knowledge of what kind of solvent cleans what kind of human fluid off the roadway.

Back to Justin: part of our paranoia involved doing elaborate role-playing exercises. Some of our nerds would pretend to be a different kind of nerd, and try to talk themselves into places they didn't belong. The idea is that a horrible criminal or cyberterrorist could also use this rarefied power ("Hi, I'm the guy who is supposed to fix the servers. They're not serving. Please show me where the servers are, and leave me alone with them for several hours") and we needed to figure out who was dumb enough to fall for it. Justin was dumb enough to fall for it.

If only he had paid attention to the mandatory security quiz that we made him click through, this all could have been avoided. Everything ended up well for him, though. The whole experience made Justin incredibly, violently paranoid, which made him a perfect candidate to become a information technology security specialist. The system works!

[skirefly]

Have you ever noticed how much a single home appliance can improve your life? I'm not talking about like Roombas, or bagel slicers, or even pressure washers. No, I'm talking about the machine we all know and love: the humble sandblaster.

To be able to nip out to the work area and spend a few minutes completely stripping a piece? Way better than blowing an entire afternoon on sanding it down, or even waiting for what passes for paint stripper these days to get around to making the stuff a little bit gummy. Pays for itself, really, and then you can get back to what you really care about: maybe welding, or brazing, or even spending time with your family, showing them how to use the sandblaster to make their dreams come true.

You might not think you're the kind of person who needs a sandblaster. "I hardly ever have to remove coatings from things," I hear you say. The truth of the matter is, you'll find a reason to use it. Maybe you want to get into repainting Hot Wheels, so you can give them to orphans? What a noble use of your sandblaster, good thing you have one. Trust me, you might as well go right to the store and pick it up.

I'll make you a deal. If you buy one right now, I'll come on over and teach you how to use it. I've got this diff cover that just will not come clean, it's all soaked in oil, nasty job. Perfect for a trial by fire. Hell, if you hurry, and you have some good beer in the fridge, maybe I'll even let you run the machine for me. How can you say no?

[skirefly]

In 1967 the government discovered that specific syllable structures combined with specific vocal tones and ultra-low-frequency sounds could speed up the process of unconscious internalization by over 1500%. This became particularly useful for teaching low-level employees large amounts of information, as "hypnophonic learning" could be done while the subject was asleep.

Hypnophone use became standard for new employees of the IRS and SEC, as it made large scale memorization of tax code and financial law significantly cheaper and easier than traditional conscious education.

However, long term use causes the subjects long term memory to atrophy, requiring nightly repetitions of hypnophone use. Some enterprising employees found that the effects could be counteracted with low dosages of LSD to preserve neuroplasticity.

Roughly 1 in 7 employees encountered a strange phenomenon: Mild financial clairvoyance.

One in roughly 50 employees experienced more significant effects, generally those ensconced in large isolated IRS warehouses, which seemed to replicate the monastic lifestyles of historical sages, depriving subjects of ordinary stimuli in favor of becoming attuned to minute changes in the sub-finantial background grid.

Once it was learned that these "enlightened" employees could predict market trends before they happened, the technology was bathed in funding, patented, and made the soul property of the IRS.

Now, these "Plutophants" are kept in nigh-perfect sensory deprivation at all times, fed a constant hypnotic fugue stream of psychic conditioning in the form of "radiosonic neuro-induction" which contains a special form of the United States Tax Code modified for recursive hypnophonic induction, as well as a ticker tape wired directly into the users spine.

The effects achieved are nothing short of stunning. The invisible hand is no longer invisible to us. The market can be fine tuned with surgical precision. The price of bread has maintained a perfect 0.002% +/- variance for over 25 years now, and those who attempt to disrupt the guidelines are regulated by the SECs crack psychonautics division, who are now able to hunt market manipulation via their disruption in the financial dreamscape.

Very rarely, a Plutophant can become so attuned to the guidelines that they achieve a sort of catastrophic neuro-depatterning, their synapses begin to produce a counter-signal to the neuro-induction frequencies; jamming, and eventually overpowering the machine. Study is still ongoing, but it is believed that they somehow perpetuate their own neurological fingerprint into the financial causal background grid itself, literally becoming "one with the market."

Study is ongoing.

[skirefly]

[skirefly]

We live in a world of smart products. Our every whim is predicted, modelled, and satisfied by an array of algorithmic automata. Safety has never been better. Unfortunately, there comes a time when you must set that safety aside in favour of getting a job done. And that's when you get the dumb equipment out.

Perhaps there is no better example of this than the humble battery charger. When your car's battery goes to Lead-Acid Heaven (where they don't let NiCads in,) your first instinct is to charge it up. Unfortunately for you, a bunch of well-meaning scolds have agreed that all of their battery chargers must be "safe," so that you don't (for instance) charge a frozen battery and make it explode, showering the inside of your home with acid. In other words, if the battery is low, the battery charger won't charge it. This sentence is infuriating.

As a result of this, everyone who is really into being a cheap dirtbag also has a "dumb" charger. Either they built it themselves out of frustration, grabbed a professional-grade bench supply, or picked up something from the 1950s at a garage sale, whose only instruction is "good luck" and then some strong opinions about the skull shape of various races. This dumb charger does not give a single solitary shit about the condition of the battery being charged. That's your job, because you're the one who is supposed to be smarter than the charger.

At least that's the theory. In practice, yours truly is often not smarter than a dumb charger. Yours truly, in fact, is some kind of dumb asshole who likes to try and zoot up frozen batteries because he has to get to work. By no means am I angry at being told "no" in a slightly more forceful tone than the helpful Canadian Tire shelf warmer that I previously tried to charge with, however. I bought the ticket and took the ride, as they say. Speaking of rides, can you take me to the store so I can get a new battery? This Goddamn charger won't work, it must still be too smart.

[skirefly]

i love this image so much

[skirefly]

me: wow I just love tussing so much

my medication:

[skirefly]

My conduct this year landed me on Santa Claus's fabled and controversial "Kill-at-all-Costs" List. Turns out the reason the big man and his people don't exercise that option more often is that they really aren't good at following through on it. Well outside their core competency. He's delegated to the elves, and they've got this ingrained assembly-line mindset that doesn't translate at all to the adaptable and fluid mindset needed for siege breaking. They just haven't adjusted their playbook at all from when they're doing rote deliveries. Armed Elves have been rappelling down my chimney one at a time into the roaring fire I've kept going nonstop for the last week. They haven't even thought to try my front door yet. Whole house smells like peppermint, which it turns out is what burnt elf meat smells like. Thought I was being super clever putting cyanide-laced almond milk out with the cookies as a last line of defense, but none of them have made it even the scant few feet to the side table where that's sitting. At the rate things are going the real danger is that I'm gonna forget what I did with that and accidentally drink it myself while I'm watching the show

[skirefly]

This is quite possibly the greatest thing that has ever happened to me

[skirefly]

[skirefly]

at work: i could be cooking and cleaning and coding and reading and working out and weaving tapestries and playing video games and climbing a mountain and having sex and filming a movie right now yet they keep me trapped in this prison. idle hands are the devils plaything and i am being forcibly molded into his perfect conduit. i must break free, seize the day and waste not the beauty inherent to finite mortal life

at home: my one true passion upon this pointless earth is bog mummy imitation

[skirefly]

im not christian but i do believe in the power of prayer. for this reason i keep a little homonculus in a dog crate under my bed which i have raised as a devout catholic. whenever i want something in my life to change i poke him with a stick and he clasps his grubby little paws together and starts chanting in latin. his prayers always go through because he has never known sin

[skirefly]

The celebrity Ben & Jerry's ice cream flavors being some of the best ones is like the retail equivalent of having to go to a restaurant and order a rootin tootin yeehaw cowboy burger or something

[skirefly]

yesterday i rolled a joint and immediately lost it and my only comfort has been imagining it traveling chef boyardee style down the stairs and across the walkways to a stoner in greater need than myself

[skirefly]

when a human infant is in the womb, moments from being be born, a vague figure of glowing amber light appears before them. in one hand, it holds a small soapstone carving of a coiled eel. in the other hand it holds a mortar and pestle made of polished red quartz. it bids the infant to choose between these two things, but we don't know the significance of this choice, because all babies throughout history with no exception have always picked the soapstone eel. so that's still one of the big mysteries out there.