ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝

Not now and not 20 years ago.

He only likes the white ones.

#NotAllTicTacs

I am very laid back (my Dad always said I was nearly horizontal) and I never get angry, I rarely even get flustered or impatient. My Dad was a very good man and I try to follow his example as much as possible. As his health declined and I started caring for him (a real privilege as he helped so many it was only just that he got help in return when he needed it, even if it couldn’t possibly fully pay him back) and, as I picked up some of his slack I did wonder where he found the time or energy. Since he died, I have felt like a sheepdog without a flock and have found myself adopting various people - I helped a friend through her cancer journey and her son start university, I took another friend to hospital sufficiently often that she just told the staff I was her “hospital husband” (which did stop them asking questions, usually with a roll of the eyes) and, as I don’t drink, I ferry people home from the pub.

However, I can be… thoughtless and this can be really annoying, especially to the easily angered - I’ve lost a friend over it and my brother isn’t exactly my greatest fan (the other year, my niece asked if I wanted to know all the nasty things my brother said about me and I declined - if we knew what people thought about us, we’d tear each other apart). I can also be rude to people but just where it’s funny, you just have to know your audience (it can appal any bystanders though). I’m also not very emotionally expressive and I suspect at least one friend thinks I’m a sociopath.

So am I nice? Although it might depend on who you ask, I’d say no. However, I try to do as much good as possible - if anyone needs help, I’ll drop what I’m doing and pitch in.

What I do when I have spare time: write. I just don’t seem to have had any spare time recently.

They Live.

The Thing but not The Thing From Another World.

Most things based on the work of PKD.

A lot of Lovecraft adaptations have to be a bit loose (because his stories tend not to lend themselves to films and he wasn’t a good person) and are all the better for it - Re-animator, From Beyond, The Color Out of Space, Dagon, etc. plus quite a few fan films.

Flash Gordon film.

The first two Blade films - they struggle to make great Blade comics.

The Legion TV series.

It wasn’t even a book, more a sketch, a joke even. A lot (most?) of the adaptations of PKD’s writing are better than the original. And yet, the core concepts, about the nature of humanity and reality, break through and inspire some truly great work.

I have also since this post purchased MMwave sensors. But they’re worse for picking up the cats.

You can fine tune some and the Aqara FP2 seems to do a good job ignoring pets.

I ended up making binary sensors for each room in Node Red. Did I leave the room? Who else is there, nobody? Ok mark it clear…

Why not use mmWave presence sensors?

It’s okay to generalise about people who generalise about people.

That’s me.

I just have everything in a drawer with morning on the left and evening in the right.

My Dad needed a lot more pills on an intensive schedule but most pills were morning and evening, so I had 2 seven day pill boxes that I’d refill as they emptied and a system of alarms on my phone (that included the dose) for the other pill that he needed at intervals through the day.

So you should be able to find the right box for your pill regime and then you just get used to sticking to it, so you know if you missed one because the slot still has pills in.

“If the Trump campaign doesn’t see this as a concern, then they’re delusional,”

🤔

I’d be interested to know that myself as I’ve usually been so out of it quite what happened is unclear.

Gone are the days of vast conquering armies and conventional military confrontations between two parties.

I’m sure they thought the same before the outbreak of WW2 as The-War-To-End-All-Wars had been so destructive.

I’ve heard other analysis that suggests the current state of play in the world resembles that in the run-up to WW1 and WW2. It would only take something like North Korea escalating aggression for the Trilateral Axis/Axis of Evil to become emboldened by the hope that the US is too distracted elsewhere and they could make their play for Taiwan, the Baltic states and/or Israel in the hope that they can radically change the status quo into one that better favours them going forward, shifting the balance of power away from the West. That could get messy very quickly.

This is the right answer - you go where the people are.

I keep in touch with friends and family on WhatsApp, do gaming stuff on Discord and most of the Lemmy/Fediverse chat is on Matrix (partly helped by some degree of Matrix integration to provide secure messaging). I am in XMPP but no-one else I know is, so it just sits there unloved.

Sometimes, you have too much nonsense for just a single book or even two.

Death Star

I genuinely believe that God exists and he is evil, like a toddler who fries little ants with a lens.

That could describe the Demiurge in Gnosticism.

“Your poo will be back, after this word from our sponsors”

And the answer was not very far.