I’m at the Old Bar, as I’ll call it, owing to the role it played in my previous residency in this town. Back then, it was a little bohemian bar where you could sit and smoke and block like a man. And I did, pretty much every Sunday night. Starting about 9PM I’d wander in from the cold, plop my laptop or a dog-eared notebook on the table and order a beer. The outcome was predictable, and can be seen oozing down the right-hand gutter of this site, itself a giant gutter.

The Old Bar has changed many times over the last twenty years, as I’ve previously mentioned. The first time I experienced its current incarnation was a bit of a disappointment. I had wandered in with a friend, and was pleasantly surprised to see that at least the old, familiar furniture remained. I have a certain attachment to some of the these tables, having done some of my best work while getting grievously overserved at them.

Taking our seats and waiting on the terrible service (also held over from the old days), my friend became quiet. Looking around nervously, he seemed to be inspecting the other clientele, a worried look starting to paint itself on his face.

“Does everybody look sick and sad to you?” he asked.

Understanding immediately what he was thinking, I looked around frantically until I found a current menu. Ripping it open, I scanned the contents urgently: cafe latte*, milk* chai, salad. I looked down for the asterisk meaning, and had my worst fears confirmed. Goddam bar had gone vegan!

I know, you’re asking yourself: Wut? A vegan bar in Germany?? Afraid so, lads. Despite all the best meat products of the world at their fingertips, these dorks had gone for the Globohomo line. They’ll be serving cricket burgers within 3 years, mark my words.

In the old days, this was a Finnish bar, so they always served shitty food. Who the fuck eats Finnish?

Welcome to the end of 2023, and the beginning of 2024. The outgoing year wasn’t exactly a masterpiece of a year for humanity, from what I gather, but personally I did alright.

After living in England for 16 nice and easy years, I’ve moved back to southern Germany. Mainly this is to be near my wife’s family. During the godforsaken lockdowns we were completely cut off from both our families, stuck on an island while assclowns like Boris and Merkel decided who we could see and when. God damn, it still pisses me off.

Now we can flout the rules with impunity, whether sneaking a cheeky Mother’s Day hug in while the cops are looking the other way. Or taking the dog for two walks in a day instead of the allotted one. Being a rebel is not what it used to be, let me tell you.

Moving back to Germany feels sort of like coming home. Not all the way home, to be sure, but probably closer to moving your way from Limbo back up to the Snow Level, or maybe even to the Hotel Level. It’s a big adjustment, but I don’t really feel it every day. I slipped back into most of my early-2000s habits quite easily. In fact, I’m writing this while sitting in the same pub, at the same table even, that I sat in while I wrote the majority of my posts up until 2007. The bar has changed many things, but the furniture is not one of them.

It was pretty easy going immigrating this time around, much easier than my first trip. I already speak the language, have a job, and am married to a German lady. This year I chatted in an easy manner with the immigration officials, got all my stamps, and had a proper visa within weeks of my arrival. I was here for ten years back in the day, eight of which were a tense Mexican standoff with their version of ICE, gruff bureaucrats looking for the slightest excuse to ship my ass back to America where I belong.

While 2023 might have been a catastrophic mess for most of humanity, I wouldn’t have noticed personally — that is, were I not addicted to social media shitposting and getting into political arguments with my parents after binge-drinking. That is my own personal Information Superhighway, one that is paved with bad habits and hurtful intent. So from that lofty perch, I gathered that humanity had something of a rough one.

Well I tell you something, Bucko: The solution to the 2016-2023 problem is not going to be 2024. Things are going to get worse before they get better. I miss the days when everybody just worried about things in America being batshit crazy. This time around, shit is hitting the fan all around Europe as well: France, Germany, even normally reliable Poland are all gearing up for a knockdown-drag out year. They don’t do it often, but when white people start getting all up in each other’s business shit can get crazy.

Damning probes find Instagram is key link connecting pedophile rings

UMass Rescue Lab director Brian Levine told Ars that it took his team minutes to uncover pedophile rings operating on Instagram after identifying “simple tags” used to help connect buyers and sellers. The Wall Street Journal reported that the hashtags researchers identified could be obvious, like “pedowhore,” or rely on code words, like “cheese pizza,” which shares initials to allude to child pornography.

This is a typical media move. Spend unimaginable energy covering up the truth, then wait until everybody forgets before admitting it was true. But we knew about this shit 10 years ago. I guess it takes them that long for really egregious shit like this.

Summary

This old favorite is the OE Atari 5200 High Score Club game for April 2023. Zylon, in her sadism, has deemed we play it on game 7 (YGTBK mode), which features 100 dreadnaughts and I’m assuming is impossible to beat.

I’d never done more than a dreddie or two on game 7, so it was fun to push myself. I probably won’t play it again, because it’s basically a stress test for me and the controllers.

Expectations

I expect I will set a new record for this game, and kill 10 or 11 dreadnoughts doing it. Then again, I am right because that is exactly what happened last month.

Note

Pages like this may receive updates as the year progresses, so feel free to bookmark.

The end times are upon us. There can be little doubt. We hear it from all sides, though no one seems able to reach a consensus on the form of our destructor.

You might feel powerless, unable to stave off the inevitable. We have become complacent and weak as a species, fat with our 160 character attention span.

Not me, though. I’m made of steel and glass and rubber. I stand proud where others cower. I’m a special breed.

I’m a blogger.

Facebook didn’t finish me. Twitter didn’t kill me, though it damn well tried. Nuclear war is coming and Net Zero will get us good.

Doesn’t matter to me, though. I fight with pingbacks and blogrolls and open goddam comments. I’m a beast from the First Age, and I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.

So enough doom scrolling! It’s time to produce some content again, friends, so get off your asses and reset those blogspot passwords.

At this rate, we might even resurrect mu.nu ffs.

About 10 years ago, they moved everyone from blogs to Facebook and Twitter. Where we had had free and emergent interaction, we now had likes. And maybe Farmville.

Before that, we traded in comment and pingback. We fought spam while appreciating the funny-as-shit quips and truly irrelevant trolls from our friends we had made out here.

I think it’s high-time that blogging made a comeback. It’s pretty obvious, to me a least, that the move away from blogging is the single worst decision that the web has ever made.

I won’t change the world or rescue its citizens, but I will resume blogging.

Not here, though, there’s way too much racist old shit floating around. It will be elsewhere.

A few years ago, I was suffering a bout of what the doctors refer to as Hemiparesis. In my particular case, the right side of my body was about 30% paralytic, with the muscular degeneration and tingly weirdness you would expect from such a condition; i.e., enough to make everyday functions uncomfortable, but not enough for unlimited visits by the Stranger.

As part of the diagnosis, a crown-to-waist MRI was requested by the head neurologist on the case. He suspected a slipped disc in my neck or upper back, and wanted to have a look around the works. He was confident, and probably would have preferred vivisection judging by the smug expression and little round glasses he wore, but the fools in the myopic scientific community would have called him mad, mad, so went instead with the MRI.

Elisson describes the process as pleasant, at least to people of his philosophical bent. I cannot say that I enjoyed it. It started innocently enough, with the warnings about being in a gigantic magnet and the effects it could have on your body. Things like ripping a pacemaker right out of your chest, dragging with it the attached heart, still beating as electric jolts continue, the device none the wiser that it is only pumping air.

Before they fed me to this monster, I was allowed to pick some music to listen to during the process. Figuring I would come across as more intellectual, and that Hank Williams probably was not one of the options, I asked for classical music. The headphones they give you obviously can’t be conventional headphones, as those are based on magnetic impulses being transferred along metal cables; the twirling magnets would spin the cables around you, pulling tight until your body was crushed, shooting blood out your ears and nostrils and fingertips as you spun around in circles and nurses screamed and your loved ones banged on the glass until they fainted at the sight of what remained of you.

As I slid into the tube strapped to a table top, I found myself wondering if I had forgotten that I had metallic hip implants, or if the metal fillings I have in a few molars might be ferromagnetic. I could see my teeth getting pulled out of the gums and right through my cheeks, clacking against the tube enclosure, swirling around as they chased the giant magnetic loops that were twirling behind the plastic walls.

The table top locked into place, and everything was quiet. Then the music started. MRI headphones sound different, transferring the music as they do through a long tube, which is attached to little paper cones next to your ears. The result is unsettling; scratchy, distorted carnival music heard from a great distance, distorted by echo. The deep, bone-rattling boom, boom, boom coming from the machinery spinning around you shudders beneath it, out of sync with the music and causing a low-level unease that grows until you’re spending all of your energy not to freak the fuck out.

The whole thing last either thirty minutes or a thousand years, depending on whom you ask. The output was a little animated slideshow that started from the top of my skull and ended at the sacrum, neat cross-sections of all the vile giblets that fill us and keep the meat moving. It showed no blockages to the network cabling, so the neurologist sent me to have an electromyogram. I can only assume this was done as punishment for debunking his original diagnosis.

EMGs are weird, mad-scientist puppetry best left undescribed.

I hate being ignored more than just about anything. Anything besides the sound of fingernail clippers, that is. Not nail scissors, mind you, those I have no issue with. But nail clippers drive me right up the fucking wall. I literally can’t even be in the house when someone is knips knips knipsing away at their nails. When I hear that noise, it feels like my spine is trying to slither out my back and down my leg, looking for a hole to hide in until the coast is clear. But I digress.

I really try to listen when people are talking to me. If someone walks up to my desk at work, I’ll acknowledge their presence; and if I’m busy or talking on the phone, I’ll make awkward head tilts, hand gestures, and otherwise contort myself just to make sure they understand that I see them there, waiting to talk to me. If I know there’s an SMS or iMessage waiting on my response, it weighs on me like a ton of bricks. I have no peace until I read it, respond to it, and get it off my back.

Maybe my hatred of being ignored is simply jealousy. Perhaps I’m affronted by the fact that other people can knowingly have my message sitting there in their inbox, them not giving a moment’s consideration to something that would drive me to distraction.

If I walk up to someone who is on the phone, and they don’t so much as look in my direction, maybe it’s the admiration that I feel for their sense of utter detachment that makes me want to strangle them where they sit, preferably with their own telephone cord, should there be one. This is a downside to the ubiquity of wireless technologies: the absence of ready-made garrotes in everyday situations

So yeah, being ignored and using nail-clippers. Oh, and blowing your nose loudly in public. Fuck people, they do vex me so.

I opened a bottle and in I strode.
Now nobody can find me.
I’ve left my chair, my house, my road,
my town and my world behind me.

I’m wearing the cloak, I’ve slipped on the ring,
I’ve swallowed the magic potion.
I’ve fought with a dragon, dined with a king
and dived in a bottomless ocean.

I opened a bottle and made some friends.
I shared their tears and laughter
and followed their road with its bumps and bends
to the happily ever after.

I finished my bottle and out I came.
The cloak can no longer hide me.
My chair and my house are just the same,
but I have a bottle inside me.

With apologies to Julia Donaldson: that last part is a little creepy.