Afterlife Afterthoughts
A couple of weeks ago, I dreamt that Jim messaged me via Discord. He didn’t have much to say, only asking, “How’s it goin’?”
In the dream, I remember being confused, wondering if a friend or family member accessed his account, or if it was really him, either returned from the dead, or maybe he even faked his own death! Then I woke up…
Perhaps this was the ghost of Jim looking in on his old friend. Or perhaps it was just my subconscious replaying an old memory fragment in a misguided attempt to give me some closure. Or maybe I just missed my friend…
McPublicity Stunts
On a lighter note, the current McCEO of McDonald’s decided to make a video of himself pretending to eat a Big Arch Burger. It reminded me of the time McCEO Steve shot down the McWhopper collab; it turns out he was later fired for McSexting using his company’s McEmail address, and paying female employees for limey McDick suckings (probably) with McStock Options (I get a lot of mileage out of McJokes)…
A lot of people are shitting on the video, and for good reason…
- His apparent inability to hold a hamburger properly
- The awkward little bite
- Declaring his intent to eat this burger for lunch (you’re not fooling anybody!)
- His use of corpo-speak phrases like “beef notes” and referring to it as a “product” as opposed to, oh, I don’t know? Maybe…Burger…or Sandwich?
Now I’ve had my share of McDonald’s (and then some)… so I actually wanted to try this fucken thing and see what all the fuss is about. I was unimpressed, here’s why…
- The reason the Big Arch is so fucken hard to hold is that it’s basically a Double Quarter Pounder, but with Big Mac fixins; the thousand island drenched onions and lettuce create a viscous barrier between the patties, causing them to slip, and makin’ a fucken mess all over the place.
- The Big Mac solves this by including a middle bun for structural integrity. Seriously, look it up! They can’t do this with the Big Arch because the goddamn thing is already 1,100 calories, so you’re basically adding another 100 calories on top of that, not to mention the Mc Brick you’d excrete later…
- While the Big Arch contains a slightly different lineup (i.e., white cheddar instead of American cheese, crispy onions, and a slightly more thousand-islandy McSauce – i.e., it has ketchup in it) than the Big Mac, I struggled to taste much of a difference, and still prefer the Big Mac or a Royale with Cheese (I learned that this was a real thing when I lived in Sand Land).
All in all, it’s just another out-of-touch, expensive McShitwich. These fads come and go (anybody remember the Clear Cola Craze© of the early 90s?). But once was enough to learn my lesson :).
FPS Fuckery
Last month, I decided to prematurely upgrade the PC I had built about 3.5 years ago. I’ve been going 4-5+ years between upgrade cycles, and truth be told, didn’t quite get as much PC as I wanted for the money I spent.
It started with an RTX 5080 GPU, and followed by a new motherboard (mine only supported DDR4, even though DDR5 had been out for a couple of years prior), and hell, why not go all in and get a current-gen CPU while we’re at it?
I’ve typically been team Intel, but with the price of RAM being through the roof ($885 for 64GB of DDR5-6000 CL36), I got lucky with a NewEgg bundle, only paying $939 for an AMD 9800X3D (arguably the best gaming CPU on the market at the time of writing this), a mid-range motherboard, and 64GB of DDR5 RAM. They also threw in a free mid-tower ATX case and an AIO!
So I took freebies and built a second PC out of my old spare parts, picking up an Intel B580 GPU (slightly better than the one that came with the PC I bought for Jim).
“I’ll bet those golden tickets make the chocolate taste terrible.”
– Charlie Bucket
I cranked every graphics setting to 11 and could still eke out 240+ FPS (albeit with 4x frame gen), but what I didn’t count on was how distracting all the bloom, volumetric fog, and the like would be. Charlie Bucket once speculated that the golden tickets would make the chocolate taste terrible, and I think I finally understand what he meant.
The game is most enjoyable when stripped down to its purest core – the window dressing isn’t just superfluous, I’d argue that it’s a net negative. FPS is a big fucken lie – what really matters is local latency, and with the frame gen overhead, I was pushing 55-65ms whereas ‘good’ is somewhere in the 25-45 range… Perhaps I’m just jaded?
The Really Real World
“Cinco De Mayo,
Fed Up With Politicians,
They are All Liars.”
– A Haiku by Joe Jim, 5/05/2026
I’m not a Democrat, nor am I a Republican. The last presidential election seemed like the difference between hot dogs made from lips and assholes, or ones made from foreskin and gallbladders. Neither party has my best interests in mind. So the question becomes, “Which one am I likely to survive with most of my freedoms intact?”
My Blue-Blooded Blue No Matter Who™ friend seems to suffer from a brand of TDS, characterized by Tourette-like ticks where he must explain his disgust whenever any right-wing associated figure (or Catholic) appears on screen – or at least that’s how it appeared to me at first. Having gotten to know him better, I think what he’s exhibiting is more of a Pavlovian stimulus as always seems to look to me for a reaction, which I fail to give, partly because I just don’t care that much, and partly because I’ve come to accept a simple truth; Left or Right, it’s all the same, and I’m tired of pretending otherwise.
I only go into the office a couple of times per week, so I don’t need to fill the tank more than once a month. The last time I did, I noticed the price of gas was the highest I’d ever seen it here by about a dollar/gallon. It’s funny what it takes to manifest an abstract concept, a war being fought 7,150 miles away into reality. Only then did it become ‘real’ to me.
