In the future, only the lucky ones get to keep their bones.

It’s to hold lizards and acorn caps.

This is why I stick to opaque footwear that you can’t see through unless you’ve got special powers like a superhero or you’ve got special equipment, if you know what I mean.

This is why I love living in a place that has more than 2 seasons.

Spring is short, but features temperatures in between 90 and 9, increasing daylight into the evening, blue skies and sun, moderate temperatures that don’t require that much in the way of bundling if at all, very little (if any) wintery precipitation, all the nature stuff at its earliest pristine moments, lovely parks, and the beach never goes away around here regardless of the season.

Okay, so limited to no swimming in the spring because most water is still kinda chilly.

We also have Fall. It tends to be longer than the Spring, but with fewer of the benefits.

Where are all the edgy contrarian scorpions aggressively stinging at their ankles?

If my little social sphere is any indication, lots of people in general are avoiding the news for various reasons.

Not that I’m a young people, per se, but the thing I’m finding is that more traditional news sources have destroyed their value and self-limited their reach.

News on local TV stations is positively dystopian. One moment they’re telling us about six orphan children burned to death in a bus accident, and then seconds later, everybody is all happy and smiling and giggling about last night’s game. Happy smiling cheery faces telling us “in these unprecedented times” and then following up with a presentation about whatever random show “TONIGHT ON LOVE ISLAND XXL” as though that’s actual news and not just a blatant advertisement for their corporate owners.

All the local news websites are locked behind paywalls (3 free articles per month, subscribe for $8.99 a month to view more) and absolutely plastered with scummy, scammy ads that make the whole thing illegible. Obviously some of us know how to bypass all that, but sadly in 2026, it feels like we’re but a tiny minority. Most people view the workarounds as more trouble than its worth, and I honestly can’t blame them. Besides, did you know that the new Star Wars Marvel Baby Groot versus Baby Yoda Season 4 is coming out July 17th, and it’s bigger news than the power rates going up 18% starting this fall?

So, what folks are left with, the easiest news to catch, is the stuff that’s practically forced down our throats, for free. It may not be accurate. It may actually be purely false and opinion only. But it’s a short form video from a fitness influencer with so much filler in her lips that you can’t help but stare and you don’t actually have to pay attention to what she’s saying and besides she’s got Charlie XXXXCSSCCCSSXXXXXIEE’s latest hit playing in the background and she says cool shit like “Girl Same”.

And anyway, my observation is that all these people who say they don’t keep up with the news are actually still getting exposed to it, it’s just that the news is coming from their friends and neighbors and church members and so on who got their info from the totally reliable and unbiased sources of … Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and TikTok. So, not only is it poor quality, it’s gone through a game of telephone. Yay!

It’s 2026. They’re going to pick an already poorly aged, no longer relevant, and entirely age inappropriate song like WAP and you know I’m right.

I don’t spend a lot of time on there, so some of the “new to me” stuff is probably fairly old.

But, I hopped on this weekend searching for videos on a specific topic and I was inundated with “Shorts”. Brief clips that from what I gather contain no valuable information and which require you to be on crack or meth to keep up with? I dunno?

Then I noticed that an old account I used to watch way back in the day showed up on my subscriptions page, so I clicked in to look at that, and now they have accounts or videos that you have to pay to watch/subscribe to? Is this OnlyFans without the sex stuff now?

Then to top it off, the close captions are apparently 100% AI and every sentence displayed is something like “Gum potion trial and barrier for job put chin”. Like I thought this stuff was supposed to be intelligent, it’s basically right there in the name, or am I missing something?

You shouldn’t doubt Valve would do that. You should know they absolutely would never do that.

Steam Machine is (or will be) a PC, so I’m not sure how they would/could make HL3 and not have it be compatible with PC. Or am I missing something?

ONLY GOD CAN JUDGE ME

Neat-o.

Hilarious to think about how this video is now considered ancient history, one of the oldies.

But also, you live in America where health insurance doesn’t cover vision, so a lot of us just go without corrective measures we’d need to be able to see all the work you’re doing or not doing.

Realistically, very little actually happens “fast” in my life. For me, things are more like the concept of punctuated equilibrium. Stretch of sameness, sudden life altering changes coming fast and heavy. Get used to the change. Stretch of sameness for another while. Sudden life altering changes coming fast and heavy again. Reduce. Reuse. Rinse. Recycle. Repeat.

Looking back, those stretches of sameness when life was relatively peaceful, calm, safe, etc tend to melt into each other, mentally compressed, then archived. Those sudden changes grow and balloon, warping my memories of the past, taking over seeming like they just kept coming. To the point where, it’s like just yesterday I was starting college.

But then on top of that, life just gets more and more complicated without even necessarily trying. Harder and harder and harder. Best of plans, greatest of hopes. Smashed to pieces. Most of it, I didn’t make complicated or intentionally bring upon myself. Much of it, in fact, was unavoidable even if it was predictable. And it keeps coming.

I know. I was expecting issues, though. Steam pretty much always has issues with their site at the start of sales and new hardware launches, so this was entirely predictable.

On the flip side, every time this has happened when I was around to notice, there were obvious signs the site was failing from the get-go. Slow page loads, error messages, pages just not loading at all, etc. This time around, the site loaded up fine. Page navigation was quick as normal. Buttons worked. Cart worked. Checkout seemed to be working.

Then BAM. Error message when paying. I tried a few different payment methods and even checked on other devices.

So, I stepped away for a bit. Came back and I was surprised that the controllers were still in stock. Figured I’d try again. That time, I got a different error message when I attempted to pay. I thought maybe there’s something fishy with my cart/session so I removed the controller from my cart, expecting to re-add it and try checking out again. Only, when I went back to the controller page, it had flipped over to out of stock. It was literally only a matter of maybe 20 seconds since I’d last checked the page when it was showing as in stock. Missed it by that much.

Sounds like Sony cheaps out on batteries with their PS controllers and has for some time. I have had battery issues with my PS 4 controller (that I barely use) and that’s part of the reason I was looking forward to the steam controller – battery life.

WHERE DEM NUGGETS AT?

All that technology for reporting and billing systems and they still cannot quickly and easily tell me how much treatment is going to cost, aside from the initial “co-pay”. USA of course.

Last time I was in, the provider recommended I get a specific blood test. I asked her if she, or someone at the office, could find out approximately how much that was going to cost me out of pocket. It was around a 30 to 45 minute circus show of a process and at the end, the best they could tell me was “this test is usually in the $800 to $1,000 range, and we don’t know how much of that your insurance covers.” So, at least I got an upper bound of cost (kind of), I guess.

This is why I stick with short-haired breeds, like instead of a girlfriend I just have a boyfriend. No hair pins anywhere in the house that I know of, just short and curly body hair everywhere, cause we’re hairy dudes and all. But definitely no hair pins.

Oh, so it’s like having a teenager in the house.