Adaptive Curmudgeon

The weather sucks and it’s screwing up my camping plans.

Seven months ago, I woke up in a tent and thought “this is good for me, I should do this more”. The decision was made, nature is good for the soul, therefore I would increase my camping time.

I have done less “more” than I’d like but more “more” than none. Life is the compromise between your intentions and your actions.

As the snow flew, I parked my dirt bike and spent an insane amount of money on a hot tent. Alas, there’s winter and there’s winter. This winter was not messing around. It was brutally cold for months at a time. (I spent my money replacing burst pipes instead of ice fishing!)

I set up my hot tent three times and spent a few nights “testing it” near my house. Where I live you don’t toy with winter until you know what you’re doing. It was less adventurous than I’d planned but I did ride out a genuine blizzard. In so doing I assured myself the tent is a fabric fortress. In my defense, the few brief “tests” were more winter camping than I’ve done in years.

Winter is not shifting easily into spring and at best it’s spring breakup; a time that’s neither winter nor truly spring. The forests are a wet muddy snow covered sponge and everything sucks. Remote travel was possible a month ago (if properly equipped) on frozen ice and it’ll be possible in a month-ish (when the land is dry). For now, like the log trucks, I’m temporarily grounded.

Note: In case you don’t know what the “log trucks are grounded” thing means, there’s a season in northern states where heavy trucks cannot legally (or practically) travel. This starts when the iced roads thaw and lasts through a soft muddy phase. Heavy vehicles can inadvertently tear the shit out of the soft vulnerable roads. Restrictions are lifted as the mud evolves back into dry roads. Even when travel is legal it’s impractical. Sometimes even small light vehicles are limited. Mud will mire a light jeep in the right conditions and a jeep can nuke a road quite handily if misused. Even foot travel sucks. Similar limits apply to ATV trails and (I think) horse trails; with a bunch of variation in practice and regulation. Lake ice still exists but it’s no longer sound. If you left your ice shack out there… it’s either already gone or will be soon.

To pass the time, I’m acquiring equipment for the summer. More on that in my next post. Stay tuned.

Because nothing is more fun that creepy vinyl cowboy costumes!

For a totally non-political laugh, I offer this documentary of my time in college. Enjoy:

I’m deliberately posting lightly for a while. I planned for this during a walkabout. Good  walkabouts pull me out of the orbit of everything; up to and including indoor plumbing (Something I very much appreciate… the reduced social interaction thing… not the shitting on tree stumps thing.) This walkabout went off the rails so I remained regrettably within reach of what once was (but is not currently demonstrably) civilization.

Bravely, I left my computer in cold storage but then I got some “motivation” via Patreon and scheduled PayPal donations. THANKS! Y’all gave me enough optimism to pop my head out of the foxhole and post a quick analysis of “life as we know it”. After this I’ll go back into hiding a little longer. As for both the circus and the monkeys; neither are mine.

If you’re looking for a time to check out for a few weeks, now is as good as any. Nothing real has happened for weeks and not much will happen for several more. Current events have gotten so dense as to create their own gravity of dumb. They’ve varied from spastic to panicked for years but the convolutions right now are impressively content free. Keeping the masses in perpetual alarm so they don’t notice that Biden has sunk to sub-Carter polling numbers while drifting past incompetent into aggressively senile has crossed the “stupid event horizon”.

The “stupid event horizon” happens when new stupid is generated so quickly that it overtakes old stupid before you even have a chance to determine if the old stupid has the slightest chance of being real. You can recognize it when some stupid happens and is forgotten (because it was stupid and everyone now tacitly acknowledges it as a stupid thing) before you even hear about the creation of (rather than the resolution of) that particular stupidity.

Almost nothing real is happening. Just ponder the stupid leaking out of the black hole that has formed around a diseased society:

Disney is pissed that publicly employed groomers must consult with parents before they explain dildos to second graders. The Supreme court nominee who was explicitly chosen based on genitalia and skin hue can’t define “woman” because she apparently missed the class. All this is pointless because nobody sane gives a shit what Disney thinks and nobody expects a person selected based on genitalia and skin hue (explicitly!) to somehow happen to be reasoned and wise. Why would we expect that? Do you Google “black human with vagina” to find thoughtful expositions of complex legal issues? If so can I please see your browser history? Also, to anyone willing to notice, Disney has been evil for decades. It was fun when we were toddlers many decades ago but that shit’s long gone. We are no longer in second grade, Walt’s head is in a freezer, and public schools desperately want to have dildo class because explaining fractions and spelling is too much like a real job.

Meanwhile, the Ukraine is selling T-shirts at a sporting goods store which proves it’s totally kicking Russia’s ass (just like it has every millisecond of the last several weeks). This awesomeness is so complete that every Russian soldier on earth has been vaporized. Except something is still happening. Either Russia is still in the game or sentient marmosets have attacked Kiev. In terms of actual evidence of anything, the media has clammed up so much I can barely verify either Ukraine or Russia exist. I assume they’re shooting at each other with guns and shit but knowing “who’s winning” this particular cage match of the retarded eludes me. You may think you know “who’s winning” but you don’t know jack. You’re not there and the press telling you what to think hasn’t told a true thing in years. If you are there, you probably read this blog on a smart phone. This means you’re a dumbass who sent a traceable signal to an antenna array specifically capable of locating your position. A missile is probably headed for your bunker before this sentence……….. ends.

Also, Elon Musk bought Twitter. I’m supposed to be either happy about it or sad; because a place that banned Trump but not the Taliban is a good source of… what exactly? This is a big deal in political circles because nobody useful cares about Twitter and nobody in politics is useful. Some 70% (?) of Americans don’t have a Twitter account and the 30% that do are heavily weighted to drooling morons. Meanwhile F***book is still giving unsolicited Covid advice to the last geriatric Boomers that pay attention to that venue. Everyone under 30 is doing God knows what on TikTok and that shit’s so creepy it won’t even be covered in second grade dildo class.

All this means opening the strategic oil reserve in an attempt to fix prices didn’t help; which is what everyone who took any economics course not taught by Paul Krugman already knew. Therefore, Chris Rock failed to dodge a bitch slap from the Fresh Prince of Bel Air. What’s the take home lesson of the slap heard round the world? Nothing. Well I’d advise Rock to keep his guard up next time. Beyond that, who cares? Nobody in that entire show was anything but irrelevant.

Go on a reduced stupid diet from time to time. Don’t worry, you’ll catch up on your annual intake of propaganda when election counts “unexpectedly” go into overtime this November. After all: Joe Biden got more votes than any other president in American history. This massive undeniable unquestionable totally-legit record-breaking win makes complete sense for a man who’s less popular than whale-shit fifteen months later.

Pull out of the matrix. You’ll find yourself unwilling to fret over the dirty diapers of the fools still in the matrix. That is to say choosing the exact opposite life path of anything you’ll see in the “press” will serve you well. Though you can enjoy watching the “elite” discover they’re choking on failures they themselves created.

It began when two years of Covid hysteria didn’t prompt assholes like me to spontaneously die. How rude of us! Fauchi has a lab coat, a fat paycheck, and talks on TV. He’s the trinity: “The Science”, God, and the infallible word of The Narrative. He said deplorables would die en masse. What happened? Why aren’t we in a depopulated hellscape? Where is Fauchi now? What to make of the heretics who rode Harleys to Sturgis and lived? Bearded bikers happily frolicked in a big hairy mosh pit while masked Karen cowered alone with her eleven cats and ate vegan meals delivered by an Uber driver. The Uber driver also inexplicably lived.

Witness the digestion of the fact that she’s not smarter than Neanderthals on motorcycles. Or Uber drivers. Or me. You can almost see the rusty wheels starting to turn.

What about the “vax hesitant”? Those bastards just keep on living! The Amish? They had God on their side and it wasn’t Fauchi. Why not a fifth booster? How about another stimulus check? Lets tinker with the economy until inflation and expensive gas… oh, never mind.

TV Armageddon didn’t happen in real life. Unwanted observations have begun percolating through dense reality-resistant craniums and the steady drip drip drip is intruding on a make-believe world.

It took me two months to conclude “this virus ‘aint the end of the world”. Self-declared geniuses spent two years failing to reach the same conclusion. Why? What has this mistake done to their self image? Wearing a mask to display superiority and implementing “final solutions” that would make a Bond villain blush can’t be forgotten. I have done nothing which I regret. They have. They nuked the economy, the rule of law, democracy, society, and themselves… in that order. Their orgy of fear and social degradation feels stupid and destructive in retrospect. Gibbering about a war in the heart of Hunter Biden’s kickback harvesting territory isn’t going to fix that.

They’ve run low on denial. It’s all used up. They threw enough tantrums to get every piece of power they wanted. They got exactly what they wanted… good and hard. How’s it working out for them?

Bitching that you’d do the whole world better than the one that exists is not the thinking of an adult. The painful realization that their fake shit won’t create a new land of Unicorns is a small unwanted awakening.

Meanwhile, there’s another aspect. Shame. People like me have been laughing at them all this time. They can tear the internet down bit by bit and folks like me will just laugh harder. They’ve always been dipshit failures that nobody likes or needs. I knew that all along but now they know it too.

There’s nothing like unearned self-esteem to lead to the hollow realization that you suck.

Speaking of self esteem on the Richter scale (or should I say Rectum scale?), Trump remains alive, loud as ever, and massively more popular than the semi-coherent meat sculpture usurper which was built out of spare parts and planted in the presidency. I think God has a huge sense of humor because Trump got a hole in one. His Orangeness does golf just for fun. The nefarious halfwit illuminati and their fucktoys in the press pushed aside a popular dude who just loves to excel and replaced him with a decrepit being that can’t speak in complete sentences. The funniest part is that the golf game has more real world evidence than anything CNN has reported in decades. Think quick, which has more evidence; Trump’s golf score or Russian collusion? Damn that’s funny!

To destroy Trump and bring about Utopia was their whole reason to burn the world down. So, did it work? The defeated guy is winning golf tournaments. The “winner” has the stink of failure so bad that you can smell it thorough your TV. How’s that “deep state”, 4D chess, “fortification” of elections working out in the real world?

What a red pill! They can cling to their psychosis but reality happens no matter how hard you believe your own bullshit. Pretty much everyone now sees how badly things went astray. Ultimately, a lot of red pills are getting delivered in suppository form. That which was wantonly destroyed was better than the collapsed reeking cesspool of of failure hastily assembled in it’s place.

Fate looked into the fire and pronounced its decision. Learn to code bitches!

Also, a t-shirt in a sporting goods store is precisely how one wins a land war in Asia.

Decades ago, most Americans assumed (incorrectly) the American press reported true (or mostly true) things. In theory, you could read the newspaper (remember newspapers?) and have a basic idea what’s going on. In general, it sorta’ worked. If the press reported that the president was in Tallahassee or that it rained in Baltimore, it was reasonably likely to be more or less true.

In the same era, the Soviet Union emitted a steady stream of propaganda. Nobody, not even Soviet people, thought the propaganda was true. Nonetheless, people carefully studied the propaganda (which was known to be false) in an effort to figure out what the Kremlin wanted people to believe.  This is one aspect of what was called Kremlinology.

If, for example, there was an article about the glorious people’s tractor factory exceeding production quotas for the zillionth time, perhaps this meant steel production was actually happening… or maybe the Soviets were telling us they’d die of starvation before they’d buy a John Deere tractor, or maybe it was Tuesday. This was all taken very seriously.

One day the Soviet union collapsed; it happened very quickly and (thankfully) without massive bloodshed. American “intelligence” agencies had not the slightest clue it was going to happen. Honestly, they seem a little unclear of the difference between the Soviet Union of 1990 and the Russian Federation of right now. Clearly, “intelligence” agencies were wrong then and likely wrong now.

American “intelligence” agencies that couldn’t figure out that a massive globe spanning empire was on the brink of economic collapse in 1990, now spy on Americans in 2022. Individuals once referred to as citizens and now referred to as civilians. We reside in a massive globe spanning empire which is on the brink of economic collapse. Meanwhile, our “intelligence” agencies pick sides in domestic politics and federal law enforcement agencies seem as likely to cause crime as they are to detect and thwart it.

Regardless, the concept of Kremlinology persists. We can’t help it. We are monkeys evolved to seek patterns and try to understand our environment; even one awash in lies. Many of us in 2022 read propaganda in hopes of ascertaining the intent of incompetent, illegitimate, clueless geezers who are still clinging to power despite long ago demonstrating they haven’t the shadow of a hope to govern wisely or even interact logically with reality. Just as Russian people read Pravda in 1990. What are the lies trying to trying to say?

Here’s a bit of propaganda I recently noticed. I’ll leave the conclusion up to you. What do you think the lies are trying to say?

Some vacations are more adventurous than others. This one has taken the left turn at Albuquerque.

I’m tapping this message in the offices of an emergency dental clinic that doesn’t have WiFi. Don’t fret. I’m fine. Mrs. Curmudgeon will be fine soon; for some definition of “fine”.

I may even live out the day and post this.

Mrs. Curmudgeon is a human ray of joy with whom I’m deeply in love… but she is neither a shrinking hothouse flower nor a fan of dentists. After several hours cruising down the highway with a werewolf in the passenger seat slowly boiling over, I convinced her to seek care… which she did. This may have saved my life.

In her defense, she stuck mostly to swearing and deadly stoic glares. Her pain tolerance is high. But toothaches don’t self correct and I had about 12 hours left before the pain built until it was intolerable… at which point jumping out of the moving car would be my safest course of action.

I’m glad it’s a dentist in the room with her instead of me.

Time for a break from the bullshit. Uncharacteristically, I’m not going truly off grid with tents and trailheads. Instead I’m wandering about America like a normal square but deliberately ghosting most of online society (and otherwise) for a while.

For example, I’ve noticed flags at half mast in a couple of different States. I haven’t a clue who bought the farm. I have a few candidates I’m hoping for. Alas, one is never that lucky. I’m sure ten minutes exposed to America’s Pravda (NPR) would inform me, but it would also dump a metric ton of propaganda into my soul and I’m in no mood for that. For now I’ll just enjoy the beauty of not knowing… I assume whomever kicked it will still be dead when I resurface.

I’ll check in from time to time. In the meantime you’re welcome to talk amongst yourselves. I’ll approve comments whenever I find WiFi.

I’ve survived Biden’s winter of death, and so have you. Spring has returned… as it always will. Relax and I’ll see ya’ later.

Check out this post at Maggie’s Farm. It’s a discussion of smartphone cameras and the single use device they’ve largely replaced. From there you can go to Smartphones vs Cameras: Where things stand in 2022 and what’s to come.*

It all boils down to this:

“Other than professionals with specialized needs, or the most serious hobbyists, does any ordinary person need a camera anymore?”

If you read through them you get a great overview of camera capacity, lenses, what they can do and not do… and logically, for the normal non-hobbyist it becomes clear. Dedicated cameras are toast.

I disagree! Smartphone cameras are just fine but they left out the part where smartphones themselves are built and programmed specifically and irredeemably as snitch-machines and dedicated human manipulation devices. My phone takes excellent photos, it’s quick and easy and pretty idiot proof. But everything it does with the otherwise fine imagery is a hassle or privacy violation.

If I take a photo with my iPhone it gets paired with all sorts of metadata. Then it goes through what I can only call “the great NSA funhouse of human management and creepy domestic spying“.

To begin with, the smartphone that took the image knows the time, date, location, identity, and a great deal of other information about the photograph and the camera owner. No matter how diligently you turn off your GPS, you can’t trust that it’s off. You can’t take a photo that doesn’t have time and date attached. There’s no such thing as a photo that’s “just a pretty sunset”. It’s a piece of data about who was where at what time and it can be added to a whole study of how this image fits in with thousands of other images.

The phone that took the photo is as good as a personal tracking device. A photo taken by Curmudgeon’s phone can be reasonably assumed to be taken by Curmudgeon… who was present at the scene and probably wielding the camera. If he’s in the photo you can ask who was holding it. If he says he wasn’t there you can ask him to explain how and why he was not in the vicinity of his phone. Most phones are protected by a passcode so there might even be a legal basis to assume Curmudgeon consented to the photo. Isn’t it presumed that he unlocked the phone that has the camera? Gotcha!

Put on your tinfoil hat and think about where the file goes. Does it stay on the phone? Maybe. But it also migrates to the cloud. The technical definition of “cloud” is “data storage you don’t control”. The photo wanders around the ‘net, gets touched inappropriately by the NSA, and invariably winds up in some sort of online shared access database. Your “photo” database probably also propagates to your other linked devices… such as an iPad or just your Apple account.

Only an idiot would think that destroying the phone after the file has wandered to the cloud will eliminate it. Wiped the file? Like with a cloth or something?

There are a lot of idiots out there. Don’t be one.

Once a photo is on the cloud, you can never know who gets to see it. If you delete it you can never know if it’s deleted. If you lose the device which took or stored the image, it will simply respawn. In some ways that’s super funny. It’s precisely how we got this bit of comedy gold:

It’s about more than privacy violation. It’s about manipulation. If I take a photo on an iPhone it is one click to post on social media (with all sorts of privacy violations included) but a huge slog to remove it from the sandbox where it lives. If you take a photo on a smartphone, you and your photo become the smartphone carrier’s bitch.

Your photos become their property and a good reason for you to stick with Corporation A or Corporation B. This is a bigger issue than you think. How many little old ladies continue loyally using phones from Carrier A or B because they’re afraid to lose photos of the grandkids? Furthermore, when the connection is severed, your images, which were their property are gone forever. You’ll never find a dusty old smartphone in dear departed grandma’s belongings and pull up ten year old images of little Suzy on the swingset. That image was “data” and it was no longer available six weeks after granny died… in accordance with the “user’s agreement”.

Whole generations of photos and memories can, will, and have, gone away with time. In the old days they’d reside in shoeboxes and fade gradually. Now each photo is instantly available until it’s totally gone; in the blink of an eye. Do you think a modern Apple account will last longer than a former generation’s shoebox full of black and white wedding photos?

I wonder not “if” but “when” it’ll be another step on our current ongoing cyberwar. (Yes, it is current and yes it is ongoing.) If you can lock a Canadian trucker’s ATM card, can you lock Gammy’s photos of the kids? Suppose, Gammy voted for the wrong party and once bitched about Medicare services, due to her wrongthink she’s a terrorist. So why not lock her Apple cloud account so she can’t see her photos of her long dead corgi? Serves the bitch right! Go ahead and ask some Silicon Valley twit if they’re worried about Gammy’s old corgi. Am I wrong? Is what I said less likely than any other weird thing that’s happening in 2022? (Vladimir Putin is at war right now and still has a Twitter account. Donald Trump was deleted from Twitter during his actual presidency. Nothing is too stupid and irrational for modern times.)

I’ve been present many times when someone took a photo on a phone and will gladly text it to me but it has to be within a system. They would have a cerebral implosion if I asked them to e-mail or print it. They don’t really control the photo at all. They don’t understand even the concept of controlling their own digital information.

Apple, a pox be on their soul, stores shit as *.HEIC. I don’t know that this file format does other than piss me off but I know it pisses me off. If I want to yank one or fifty photos from the Apple cloud and stuff it on a thumbdrive in a non-Apple location, I have to go through an elaborate download process. I have to go to my “real” computer (i.e. running an OS that I actually, if barely, control) and log on to Apple. Apple could, if it wished, sever that connection at will. Then, after I’ve given ritual submission to Apple, I am granted the ability to download from the cloud to local. From there I can get it into *.jpg or some other less proprietary format.

If I want to scrape off metadata (and I want to do so with every fucking photo by default) it’s another few hoops to jump through… and I’m never really sure it’s clean. Unless you’re a hell of a hacker, you aren’t either. Like me, you can only click “remove the following forms of metadata” in a third party application and hope for the best. Did it work? Who knows?

The point is, if I take a photo of a squirrel’s ass with a smart phone and want to post it with some modicum of privacy on this little blog… I’ve got to navigate a shitstorm of traps. All this to produce a *.jpg of a damn squirrel.

Fuck that.

I have a cheap knockoff GoPro. If I take a photo of a squirrel, you know what I’ve got?

A photo of a squirrel.

That’s a huge selling point for a dedicated camera. It will take a photo without getting all up in my grill.

The GoPro can’t spy because it doesn’t know shit. It doesn’t know where I was. It doesn’t know which GoPro took the image. It doesn’t know that A. Curmudgeon of Bumfuck Egypt owns the camera. No part of the device knows my banking information, my political affiliation, or what I ate for breakfast.

A GoPro names the file something logical like 2022-03-14-XXX.jpg. Theoretically, it knows the date, but it only knows whatever date I tell it. I can set it up to take photos dated to the war of 1812 if I wish.

Once the file is created it’s just a file. I can copy a *.jpg from the GoPro to anywhere else. Without genuflecting at the memory of Steve Jobs. I can take out the memory chip and stuff it in my pocket. I can stuff the memory chip in my computer. I can throw the camera in a lake. I can feed the memory card to my cat. I can, if I so choose, copy the photo for safekeeping on any cloud I want or I can keep it local or I can delete it.

When I delete a photo from a GoPro, it’s gone. If I drop the camera while I’m fishing and a gator eats it… the photo’s gone. That’s what I want of my photos. I want them to be just a photo… not a small piece of a greater database called “Curmudgeon’s NSA Dossier”

Each time I take a smartphone photo, some small piece of my independence and privacy was just eroded. That’s why I use a cheap ass GoPro whenever I can.

Incidentally, none of this implies I have some dark secret double life. Most photos I take are of the “which order do these washers go on the bolt” variety. I take lots of photos of part numbers and stupid shit like that.

Being circumspect with privacy is just basic human mental hygiene. It doesn’t mean I’m a corrupt asshole like Hunter Biden. I don’t don’t have to worry about photos respawning from the cloud that show me passed out in a room full of Ukrainian hookers with a crack pipe in my mouth. Why? Because I’m not an idiot crackhead who does freaky shit.

Personal privacy can and should be boring. It doesn’t imply you’ve got illegal behavior to hide. Maybe you’re just a fully realized adult who wants to be left alone. Unlike Bit Bleaching Hildabeast who ran her own State Department shadow communications network I can use a GoPro to take a photo of my cat with a clean moral conscience.

I want to enjoy the level of privacy formerly associated with human dignity. I intend to be that way until I die. If you could crack the story behind every photo I took all you’d get is the secret location of some of my favorite fishing holes. And a lot of pictures of bolts.

Privacy and free movement of your own images; that’s reason enough to have a camera that does nothing but take photos. I suppose I’m the last guy, or at least the last generation, to think that way. That doesn’t mean I’m wrong.

A.C.

*I notice the article about 2022 has a 2020 byline. I’m going to assume it’s a typo. If it’s the work of a time traveler it’s a very boring one that missed far bigger events in the last two years.

Google is the “go-to” search engine if you want to be spied upon while hearing the talking points of a generic DC sycophant. If you want to evaluate actual information like an actual adult, Google is shit.

I’ve been using “Duck Duck Go”. I switched years ago. It’s not perfect but I’ve generally been satisfied. I planned to use it forever.

Yesterday “Duck Duck Go” announced it would down rank sites based on their opinion of the Ukraine/Russia situation. Within the hour, I switched to another search engine.

I don’t care what position they chose in a political arena. I only care that they chose a side. They intend to manipulate results on behalf of one side or the other. That’s exactly what they said. There’s no beating around the bush. “We’re going to down rank X and up rank Y.” That’s manipulation; it’s also lying.

Lying serves only one purpose, to manipulate me. What self respecting adult would voluntarily engage with a manipulator?

If a company goes woke it’s dead to me; instantly if possible. Every minute you engage with liars is a minute they’re either messing with your perception or mistreating you. I’m not going to be the victim of their abusive relationship.

Dump ’em and forget about it. Easy peasy. Do it without hesitation.

They’re corporations; You owe them noting. They have no soul, they deserve no loyalty, they are remorseless, and (especially when woke) they’re evil. Don’t get angry with woke corporations. Don’t wring your hands about their loss. Don’t wish they’d perform their duties honorably. Dump them and move on; right away. Never look back. You’ll find you don’t miss them.

I don’t miss the decade of Google’s bullshit that I evaded. I won’t miss the future bullshit of the now inferior Duck Duck Go.

Go woke, I’m gone. It’s an instinctive and perfect reflex. It’s always the right decision.

This is simple basic self care. You’re an adult. You’ve got a mind and soul. You can and should make your own decisions. The minute anyone in your realm chooses to put politics over truth, is the minute they’ve decided to lie to you. From that point forward they literally mean you harm.  Act accordingly.