What is this?
NeverKink...hmmm, that doesn't sound like any fun. Why would anyone want something that never even gets a little bit kinky? You gotta live a little, right? Where's the fun without at least a little bit of kinkiness? I don't know what kink-resistant technology might be, but it sounds Orwellian and dystopian. I can't imagine what might possibly be better completely kink free.
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Oh, I guess if it's a hose that makes sense. Whoops!
Recognize this flag?
While we were in Canada, we stopped in at a Dollar Store. In the Canada-themed stuff, we found a flag that I could buy that I wouldn't likely find in the USA. I have a collection of flags, but I strictly limit it to flags of states I've lived, countries I've lived in...or countries that my family members have lived in.
My wife suggested that I might like the flag, though. It didn't strictly fit my criteria, but it kind of did. It was a flag for a state (actually a province, but it's the same thing) that my family members have lived in. So, I grabbed it.
That's the Alberta provincial flag. Not a terrible flag but also not great. It's not a seal on a bedsheet, bit it looks an awful lot like one.
Funny thing was the price of the flag. We were in the dollar store, but the thing cost $15. I guess dollar stores in Canada are just like the ones in America. A dollar can't get you anything anymore. It's basically worth what a quarter was worth when I was a kid.
Luckily, the American dollar is worth a little more right now than the Canadian dollar, so the exchange rate lowered the price for me. That's one of my favorite parts about visiting Canada.
My flag collection, which isn't supposed to be growing unless I move somewhere new, is growing. Now I wonder if I need flags for the states where I lived in other countries. I don't think I'll go there, especially since the flags would probably be impossible to procure, but I don't need them. I do like flags, though.
I had to go to the auto shop this past week, and while I was there, I saw this:
That's not just a toy car. That thing is the mouse for their computer. When I saw that, I was immediately jealous. I didn't want a car, however. I find cars perfectly useful, but they don't get me excited. It only took me a second to figure out what I would like for a mouse, however. If there was a spaceship...say a Millennium Falcon...like that, I would jump on it.
I went home, and looked it up, and was sad to find that there wasn't any. If I wanted something like that, I had to get a 3D-printed one, and assemble it myself. I guess I can hope that somebody else sees a mouse like this and gets one made that I can purchase in the future. Or maybe I'll do the 3D-printed thing one of these days. We'll see. But man, isn't that cool? Wouldn't a mouse be so much better if it looked like that?
I got to make another appearance over on the Rish Outcast this month. A while back, Rish, Marshal, and I recorded a sketch that he'd written about a group of folks being asked about how their clinical trial on the new drug was going. The drug is known to cause a few side effects, and they wanted to know how badly any of us were experiencing them.
Eventually, Rish got up the nerve to ask a woman to play the one part written for a woman, Tena Kolokowski got him the lines, and now he has released it on his show. As usual with a Rish Outfield sketch, hilarity ensues. Hopefully you enjoy my performance as the beligerantly paranoid guy. Typecasted again.
To listen to the show, find it on the Rish Outcast feed or follow the LINK back to Rish's blog. You can also just click the play button below if all that other stuff is too much work for you. We aim to please here!
I used to read Dean Wesley Smith's blog all the time years ago, but I haven't done it much for a while now. These days, I only look at it when his wife, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, reposts it on Facebook and calls my attention to it. I saw her post on Facebook the other day the following:
Of course, rather than pay enough attention to what she wrote to follow the directions to find what she was actually referring to, I just clicked the link for Dean. It took me to the main page of his blog, where the post was not sarcastic at all, but just discussing some workshop he was putting on for writers.
I scrolled for a bit, and then found this post. It made me smile.
Apparently, I'm not the only one who wastes his time writing a blog post every day just to be able to say that I have. Then again, Smith probably makes tons of money off his blog, so he's not doing it for nothing. I have about six regular followers, so it's nothing more than a vanity thing for me...just to be able to say that I did, I guess. I haven't even been at it for a full year yet, I don't think. Let me look back at when the first daily post started...looks like it was October 8th of last year.
The funny thing was that I was close to daily before, and all I had to do was put in a slight amount more effort and I could have been there for years. I also learned to pace my posts more judiciously. I don't actually write a blog post a day, I publish a blog post a day. I usually have them written well ahead of publishing now. I sit down and write several at once, and set them to publish one a day off into the future.
For a while, I would just publish things when they came up, and then I would have two or sometimes even three posts in one day, and no posts for several days in a row. Now I just space them out more. That way, I've been able to publish something every day, even while gone on vacation and the like. Sometimes it's silly, like all the posts I did about my Harry Potter books for the last couple of weeks. My vacation was going to be so long that I just didn't have enough posts to cover it, so I had to stretch to fill the space. But usually, I'm about a week ahead anyway, so it's no big deal.
Of course, I have a long ways to go to measure up to a real pro. Scrolling down Smith's blog a little further, I found this post.
Yeah, I don't think I can nurse the neurosis for that long.
Speaking of neurosis...I was scrolling through my posts to verify that I'd actually been going for as long as I thought, and I found a missing day on February 9th. Dammit, not even as far along as I thought. Well, that's fine. I guess what I'm trying to say is that, if you want, you could make a visit to my blog a daily habit. There should be something new to see here each time you come back.
When I went to the At Home store the other day to look at Halloween decorations, I saw this, and kind of laughed...
Yeah, that's a Christmas tree. But I guess it's actually a Halloween tree. It's a pure black tree with a sort of bluish-purple lights strung into it. I guess the Christmas tree manufacturers are trying to expand their market or something.
I think it would be more fun to use it as a Christmas decoration. I saw several different kinds of ornaments with ghosts and pumpkins and crap around the store as well. Wouldn't it be fun to put up a black Christmas tree in December and then sit back and wait to see what people's reactions were?
It makes me think of back when Covid started up, and some people thought, even though it was the middle of the summer, that people needed cheering up, and they encouraged people to put up their Christmas decorations. I joked with a few people that were willing to hear tasteless jokes at the time that I wanted to pitch in and help everyone feel better, but that I didn't have much in the way of Christmas decorations, so I was going to put up my Halloween decorations early. Surely everyone would enjoy to see all the skulls and skeletons that I have to put outside my house, right?
