And:
Not much has changed, has it?
Month: September 2025
System Update
Got a new laptop. Lenovo. (Hello, my little yellow friends over in Beijing! Enjoy what you read here! You fuckers.)
Busy re-installing my entire life, which may take a while.
Blogging will be light today… and maybe even tomorrow.
I haven’t broken anything yet, nor have I felt the urge to throw the thing in the pool; but the day is young. At least all the keys respond when pressed, and I don’t need packing tape to keep the power cord plugged in, to mention just a couple of benefits.
Quote Of The Day
Whiny little Commie bitch TV interviewer: “So just bottom line, Mr. Secretary, do you acknowledge that these tariffs are a tax on American consumers?”
SecTreas Scott Bessent: “No, I don’t. You’re quoting Goldman Sachs… I made a good career of trading against Goldman Sachs.”
Random Totty
The only reason to watch morning TV in Britishland: Cat Deeley.
ASUS Delenda Est
Quick recap of my laptop woes:
- Several weeks back the thing bricked on me. One minute typing, the next thing black screen, totally dead and unresponsive. All efforts to revive are fruitless, including long chats with online support staff. Off to Best Buy (an ASUS repair facility).
- The Geek Squad informs me that they don’t do any warranty repairs on ASUS machines that they themselves have not sold. Nice. So I send the thing to ASUS, imagining fondly that since I only purchased this POS in January of this year, that it is still under warranty.
- It isn’t. [50,000 very bad words redacted] So I tell ASUS to return the brick to me, because I’m not comfortable having repairs done at a remote location (Indiana, incidentally) when, if I’m going to have to pay for the fucking repairs, I’d prefer to have the job done locally. So off I go to Micro Center (Dallas). This was yesterday (Monday) morning
- Micro Center gets on it right away — I mean, I got a sitrep text message only an hour after I got back home. That’s about the only good news.
- Apparently, the motherfuckingboard is kaput. On a brand-new computer. Cost to replace: $380 (part) + $150 (labor). For a machine that cost around $500 new. But:
- None of Micro’s vendors have the board in stock, and ASUS themselves are looking at a 4-17 week resupply time.
My options seem to be:
- Grit my teeth and have the repair done, continuing to stumble along for the next 2-4 months on my old HP laptop with its occasional freezing-up, malfunctioning keys and broken chassis.
- Buy a new replacement machine* from Micro Center — average cost for a similar-to-my-ASUS machine, about $600-$700 which I don’t have.
- Try to reinstall my whole fucking life onto some other (secondhand) laptop, of which a couple of you generous souls sent my way, but which I cannot get to function. (I have the best Readers on the Internet.)
- Migrate to New Wife’s desktop PC, which is tucked away in a dark corner of our tiny apartment, and has NONE of the features of any laptop, and by that I mean a decent keyboard, sufficient power and storage, Win10 (okay, I can live with that), all while I’d have to sit on an ancient office chair which will cause me to have back problems, guaranteed.
To say that I am angry does not begin to describe my mood right now.
And oh, by the way: if anyone out there is thinking of buying an ASUS machine in the near future; DON’T.
*New Wife has okayed this option, but it still sticks in my craw.
From Comfortable Heritage To Modern Banal
We’ve all seen how modernist logo design has turned the proud familiar into simplistic trash:
…and of the recent Cracker Barrel rebrand we will not speak, as they’ve been forced into a U-turn.
Now if one thinks of modernistic Philistines and Wokery Gone Mad in the civic sense, it’s hard to imagine a better example than that “blueberry in a bowl of tomato soup”, Austin TX. Who have “progressed” from a traditional city seal to… well, a 1970s-era representation of a homeless person’s tent shelter:
Bloody hell. It’s an encapsulation of everything that’s wrong with the Left: ahistorical, simplistic and ugly.