I had the bad luck of inheriting the early receding hair genes on my grandfather's side. My hair began receding already at 25 so I got a large forehead and bald top. Tried shaving my head bald for a while, then I got lazy and decided to just trim it.

Also like my grandfather I hate growing facial hair. I can't stand the itching. So no beard for me:P

I'm bald. I usually wear a hat because I had some sunburn up there when first going bald and I want to avoid that.
My hair started graying in my 20s. Now it's going all silver. With my curly hair it looks like steel wool. Since I have very dark hair, I went grey decades before my older brother.

I was pretty much bald by the time I was 21, which was a difficult thing to deal with during the late 1960s/early 1970s. Luckily for me, I learned to compensate that by growing a thick handlebar mustache.

Very distinguished and impressive facial hair!

——-

Something that has been on my mind is the phenomena of first impressions.
I thought my first impression instincts were absolutely terrible and not worth anything based on 3 experiences.
When I was doing model photography, in three seperate occasions over about 3 years my first impression instincts flashed me hard mental warning signs over 3 different women. Basically saying “Baaad news. These people are NOT to be trusted, Bad people,”

I was cautious but dealt with them anyway, and over time actually became good friends.
So I really thought bmy instaicts were basically trash and not to be trusted 😅

Fast forward to the future: all three people eventually betrayed me and hlwere really awful AND I learned from others that each one has a bad reputation for just doing that to people generally. All are well known for it actually 😮

So the moral of the story is to listen to your instincts and investigate. Because investing after they get you is too late

I feel like first impressions are so phony, and in a sense, they are . . . you're basically not acting like yourself to lead people into believe you're a better person than you really are, and there are even times when you hear the other people say something to the effect of, “You seem like a different person than who I thought you were.” You often hear people advise that you, “just be yourself,” but that clearly doesn't apply to first impressions.

J_Scarbrough wrote:
I feel like first impressions are so phony

Not in may case.

But these first impressions didn't concern personality or looks or what I thought the person was into or anything like that. These are only about “Is this a good person? Are their motives true?”. Basically just a simple character evaluation.

These 3 were big flashes on the red flag meter.

Ozoneocean wrote:
Very distinguished and impressive facial hair!

——-
Thank you! :)

I rely more on instincts, not the person's exterior presentation. Everyone emits vibs…and I've learned to my regret not listening to my instinctive reaction upon first meeting some people.

(Sorry) I've got to learn what buttons to push when quoting.

Honest question time: am I the only person in the world who doesn't like Funko Pops? Seriously, I have never seen the appeal in them . . . what's to like about black beady-eyed chibis? They're kinda grotesque, if you ask me.

Now Vinyl Idolz, I really liked those, those were a lot more appealing, like somebody managed to take stylized caricatures of famous characters and 3D-printed them . . . and I hate that Funko bought them out for no other reason than to eliminate the competition.

JohnCelestri wrote:
I rely more on instincts, not the person's exterior presentation. Everyone emits vibs…and I've learned to my regret not listening to my instinctive reaction upon first meeting some people.

Exactly!

The trick to quoting is to place the open the quote tag and the close /qoute on either end of the text you wont to quote :)

J_Scarbrough wrote:
Honest question time: am I the only person in the world who doesn't like Funko Pops?

I've always disliked them.

One of our former Drunk Duckers works in their head office, I used to read his posts what the company was doing all the time, they're pretty awful.

Sciatica. I never thought I'd get it. I had to clear out under the kitchen sink so the plumber could fix the sprayer. Felt a spasm but no pain. A day later I can barely walk. With the holiday it took a week to finally get it looked at. Got some muscle relaxant for the spasms. Then another two weeks to get to an orthopedic doctor to get a prescription for physical therapy.

My wife has canes stashed all over the house for her own back and leg problems and now I'm walking with one.

Damn evolution. Getting hominids to walk upright and not caring about the back. Hips and knees but not the spine.

Bring on cyborg body enhancements 😅

———

Im probably not the first to realise this but “Clippy” has basically taken over the world at the point.
If anyone rememberz the terrible animated paperclip help program… That now totally controls what you see on YouTube and all social media, it checks your Spelling, filters you on selfies, it creates bad AI images, it creates terrible stories through chat gpt, it fields our questions when we phone a business, it opens a chat window when we visit a site.

Clippy Controls the world

Ozoneocean wrote:
Bring on cyborg body enhancements 😅

———

Im probably not the first to realise this but “Clippy” has basically taken over the world at the point.
If anyone rememberz the terrible animated paperclip help program…

Clippy Controls the world

I imagine it more as the evil side of Badgey from Star Trek Lower Decks.

I've had sciatica since 2015 or 2016. Flare-ups can happen totally at random, and when they do, they seriously knock me on my ass. Most of the time, such flare-ups may only last for a couple of weeks or so, but I've had one that lasted as long as a month. Just since August 2022, I've had about five flare-ups, so not only are they lasting longer, they're coming more frequently. Meanwhile, I've been trying to work with Disability since the beginning of the year to try to get some aid from them since it limits my mobility and capacity to even carry on with my day-to-day life, but they are taking their ever-lovin' time . . . as a matter of fact, two months ago, they scheduled an Determination Exam, which I had, then the doctor wrote an order for me to have an X-ray - I didn't know the procedure, so I called the facility to ask if I could just walk-in, or if I had to schedule an appointment for such, and was told the order had to be faxed to them first, and then they would schedule from there, so my agent did just that. I waited, I waited, I waited, we heard no updates; we both tried contacting DDS with no luck, so I finally followed-up with the facility myself to see what they knew about anything . . . then they told me all I had to do was walk-in the same day and they could've gone ahead and done the X-rays . . . that's not what they told me originally! So now, I've been scheduled for another Determination Exam for the end of January. What a drag this has been.

I've been through all that with workman's compensation and auto accidents. Fortunately my job is mostly sitting in a very comfortable chair so I can still work. In fact I'm actually more comfortable sitting at work than sitting at home. So no need for disability. I tried getting it for my depression years ago. My psychiatrist said I was more than eligible but my therapist insisted I could cope with working. He was right.

Still can't come up with an ending for Interstellar_Battle_Girls though. Wrestling with it because I do want to wrap it up. Just don't like endless comics without a final resolution. Besides I have a bunch of finished scripts that I'd like to produce instead. But I'm not going to abandon this thing like I did Sword of Kings I haven't forgotten that. If I could draw or find a free artist willing to do it I'd continue it, but production with the figures would be very challenging. Like how do you do massed cavalry charges? It's incredibly tiresome to do that in almost any medium. I'll stick to Robofemoids instead. It's amazing how every story with a few exceptions fits into the ongoing story of the Robofemoids. I just keep going back to that and fleshing it out a bit more. “Fleshing out” considering the amount of bare flesh on display in the comics quite an apt turn of phrase.

bravo1102 wrote:

I imagine it more as the evil side of Badgey from Star Trek Lower Decks.

yeah, but Badgey is a comedy derivative of Clippy :P
So you're really just imagining Clippy, but with Jack McBrayer's voice LOL!

bravo1102 wrote:
Like how do you do massed cavalry charges? It's incredibly tiresome to do that in almost any medium.

The way to do it is traditional movie tricks-
Invest in cheap plastic Napoleonic figurines on horses, or cowboys and Indians- do basic pant jobs and shoot then with false perspective and blur.

You can also to the old “mat painting” technique where you paint the background scene on glass and photograph it in front of the actual scene with the correct lighting.
Though for this you'd get a punch of colour printouts and stick them on a sheet of glass. The lighting would be tricky but you could mange it.

——————-

I had a brainfart today and walked into traffic. Almost got hit. It was SOOOOO close. A car swerved to miss me and stopped. I'm still feeling a bit crap after that.

I've been watching a lot of American TV series from the late 2000s and they often heavily reference the military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, wrongly calling them “wars”. (Because they're not talking about the initial invasions)
It is SO weird the way the writers think about the situation and the way they show it on the screen, the language they use…

Basically the American soldiers are in the exact role of the Nazis during the occupation of France and other countries during WW2, and the “insurgents” and like the French resistance and partisans, that is the exact dynamic of the situation. All those movies and TV shows about WW2 are reversed with Iraq and Afghanistan 😅
It makes me imagine what it's be like if they did a WW2 occupation drama from the Nazi perspective with the Nazis as the tragic heroes- it'd be so revolting but they can't see they what they did was just the same 😓

It'd even be the same if they did Star Wars Story from the Expire's perspective of a bunch of stormtroopers brutally suppressing and “liberating” a rebel outpost 😅

It's just soooo dumb.

Yea it's ok to be sympathetic to people who had to serve but none of that is heroic and the real victims were always the civilians of those countries.

Ozoneocean wrote:

I had a brainfart today and walked into traffic. Almost got hit. It was SOOOOO close. A car swerved to miss me and stopped. I'm still feeling a bit crap after that.

I tend to do that if I'm waiting at a light and the song I'm listening to changes, then I'll just walk into the street.

lothar wrote:

Ozoneocean wrote:

I had a brainfart today and walked into traffic. Almost got hit. It was SOOOOO close. A car swerved to miss me and stopped. I'm still feeling a bit crap after that.

I tend to do that if I'm waiting at a light and the song I'm listening to changes, then I'll just walk into the street.

The music resets our stupid brains XD

———–

Why is it that when hollywood people, especially character and comedy actors, become a BIG DEAL they immediately run out as fast as they can go and get super expensive eyeglasses with thick rims?
They look like absolute wankers. Pretentious wankers.
I just saw Jordan Peele wearing a pair. a while ago I saw Nick Frost in them, and still earlier I saw Simon Peg in a pair.
W A N K E R S in the extreme.

I mean, it's bad enough that they “graduate” from doing comedy (nothing sadder than a comedy actor turned dramatic), but to get that look to complete the image as a sort of Clark Kent serious arty person disguise is just so typical, obvious and generic.

lothar wrote:

Ozoneocean wrote:

I had a brainfart today and walked into traffic. Almost got hit. It was SOOOOO close. A car swerved to miss me and stopped. I'm still feeling a bit crap after that.

I tend to do that if I'm waiting at a light and the song I'm listening to changes, then I'll just walk into the street.

As someone who was hit by a car twice in my freshman year of college, no headphones or ear buds while I'm walking.

If you meet someone who swears up and down they've never had an accident, I remind them that I had one for them because I've had so many. That law of averages. I've had your accident for you. Just say thank you, no money necessary, I'm well insured.
XD ;)

I guess I may finally be facing the consequences of clinging to Windows 7, because somehow, a trojan got onto my computer. I have no idea how, because I've done nothing out of the ordinary as far as my online activity is concerned, not to mention I have multiple adblockers on my browser as well as Ghostery, so it's not like I could've gotten it from a sketchy ad like way back 2010-2011, when viruses from ads practically killed my old computer. Even stranger is that MSE detected it infected my YouCam webcam, which I hardly ever use, and haven't even used it in months. Spybot Search & Destroy, which was my saving grace back during that dA fiasco doesn't seem to detect anything, and a scan of MWBAM (which I actually stopped using and uninstalled because its last major upgrade had a negative affect on my browser's overall behavior) also kind of turned up clean . . . I noticed a lot of people online recommend AdwCleaner and HitmanPro, so I tried both of those today, both seemed to find similar results (including that the same trojan as now also infecting the Ask Toolbar which I foolishly installed when I first got this computer in 2012 and had never been able to uninstall since), and both seem to have also removed the files and such that were infected (including finally removing the Ask Toolbar I've been unable to uninstall for 11 years) . . . but, my computer still obviously is not behaving as it should. Windows Explorer is slow to boot upon startup, Chrome takes forever to launch (anywhere from 2-3 minutes) while alos just bogging down and freezing at random, and my CPU usage will spike up to 90% at random too.

At this point, I believe my only alternative would be to take my computer into the shop and have the pros work on it. I need to get a new computer anyway in the foreseeable future, which I'm sure will have Windows 11 or something on it, but again, I just couldn't bear to upgrade from 7, considering I've heard nothing but negative reviews about 8 and 10, and I just really have enjoyed 7 . . . but I knew it would be a risk.

But again, damned if I know how I even got this trojan.

EDIT: I noticed that Avira is coming highly, highly recommended, so I gave it a try, but it came up absolutely clean and detected nothing whatsoever. Hmm.

I also neglected to mention that I would've tried a System Restore, however, years ago, I changed my computer's setting to routinely clean excess restore points and shadow copies to conserve free diskspace (which I'm also now losing at an alarming rate), so ATM, my System Restore doesn't go back far enough to before when the first time the trojan had been detected.

J_Scarbrough wrote:
I guess I may finally be facing the consequences of clinging to Windows 7,

So how could you have gotten a Trojan man?
Answer is you couldn't have.

This is an old issue with the antivirus and anti-whatever stuff: false positives.

They end up deleting vital system files and slow things or destroy things!

My old Windows 7 Samsung laptop ran like a DREAM for 10 years sold, the ONLY issue it ever had was when an antivirus program wrongly deleted system files and tanked it.
Lucky I had a full backup and fixed it good as new. After that I only ever used Windows Defender on it.

The fact is that viruses aren't that much of an issue on any computer these days (windows, mac, linux, Android -it's about equal risk) as long as you stay updated. You don't need all those cleaner programs generally, they're the real issue.

Run lean and clean and you'll be ok.

Oddly enough, I did a Google search of this specific trojan MSE detected, and similarly, a lot of the results I got also reported this thing as being a false positive, but again, I'm just not so sure.

Like I said, I only tried those other programs, but generally speaking, I only actually have MSE and Spybot installed on my machine, and that's it: the former because it came with the machine when I got it, the latter because, like I said, back when deviantART ads were killing my old computer with viruses, Spybot was my saving grace when McAfee (which was complimentary with my ISP at the time) couldn't do a thing about them. MSE only runs a scheduled scan once a week on Friday (used to take only a couple of hours, now takes literally all day), and I have to do manual scans with Spybot (although it does immunize weekly), but again, that's it. I dumped MWBAM in the mid-2010s when a major update to the program mucked up my browser's behavior for some reason.

I can relate. I desperately clung to Windoze XP for a long time, even after it stopped being supported. I finally gave in a couple of years ago and got a Windoze 10 laptop that constantly makes me miss my old one, but that's beside the point. Towards the end of the old one, what Avira mainly did was slow it down more and more and didn't work properly and failed to update reliably. I got Avast instead, even paid for the full version, and that kind of worked pretty well for some time, although their constant attempts at selling additional stuff are a bit obnoxious. So when I got a new one and could get rid of this extra software that was kind of an improvement.
My local computer expert, a former engineer who boosts his pension by keeping everyone's computers around here in good shape, told me that on Windoze 10 none of these Antivirus softwares make any real difference, except for Spybot Search & Destroy and the usual browser additions. He changed a lot of system settings, though, most of which I didn't even know exist, but it seems to have worked out so far for about two years now.

He also said he could well understand why I'd kept XP for so long, along with other outdated software, because according to him it marks the last point before Microsoft stopped making decent, usable programs. 😝 If it could be made to work with today's internet, he'd have stuck to it too.

The reality is, you have to keep up to date with computer stuff or you might as well have no computer at all. Fortunately, it says nowhere I have to like it. I don't. In fact, I suspect most of this talk about security and privacy is really about needing some excuse to keep us buying new stuff. Oh, there are certainly some real dangers, I'm just saying they're also convenient.
I accept that I can't keep an old computer forever, it's the same way as with cars, but I miss it anyway, no matter how often it may have made me want to throw it out of the window and reprogram it using large, dangerous forestry tools. It's because not only this last part hasn't actually changed at all with the new one, but also because even when it works, it just reminds me how much different the things programmers want are to those I want, and that's certainly not just because I'm too dumb to teach myself how to use new software.
The point of getting new hard- and software is you should be able to do more with it and better, but in fact it does the opposite, since many of my favourite programs don't work properly any more, and there are often no up-to-date ones with the same features. Instead, I have to waste time deactivating stuff that nobody ever needs but activates itself again and again and I'm in a constant struggle to get the buttons of this Ԥ$%ing HD-screen large enough for me to tell them apart and be able to hit them with the mouse pointer.
I’m just glad I still draw with pens on paper. That's at least one thing these people won't be able to sabotage with their well-meant efforts.

I decided to do a System Restore after all . . . by now, the earliest restore point that my system still had was for Saturday morning before I really started trying to get rid of this alleged trojan I had with other programs I temporarily downloaded and installed, such as AdwCleaner, Hitman Pro, and Avira (which was a pain in the ass to uninstall) . . . so far, my computer's actually performing better than it was since yesterday . . . I just really don't know if I still have that alleged trojan or false positive - at least not until I do another scan of my machine, which I'm not going to waste any time with, because like I said, anymore, it takes the damn thing all fricken day long to scan, and I don't have the time for that.

If you do some research and a bit of training you can run Windows XP forever on virtual machines- use all your old programs in perpetuity, virus and anti-virus free!

Windows 10 and 11 are actually really nice, run pretty smooth, and virus free. The only real issue with them is that they're so much more like Apple's OS in that they seek more and more to control how you use your own machine and limit your options.

I really despise that. If I wanted a computer to run like an Apple I'd by one or a Chromebook :(

I like to set things up in my OWN way and customise it specifically, I hate being told what to do by stuff that was designed by some moronic young programmer I wouldn't pay to clean my toilet.

@J_Scarbrough - you really, really don't need that level of virus and spyware vigilance. I know it's an older unsupported machine so you need to be a bit vigilant but my outdated work computer is still Windows 7 (because it's not mine and If I update it and it messes up that means downtime at work), and it's run fine for years with nothing but Avast and zero antispyware.

If you're not downloading and installing dodgy things or downloading pirate content, if your browsers are up to date a packed with properly functioning adblockers you should really be perfectly fine. You'll find the most harmful and doget thing on your comp is the antispyware in the end.

The thing about computers is that the landscape changes a lot over time and I feel you're thinking about things as if it was 10 years ago or more. The biggest threat from viruses these days is ransomware and targeted social hacks.

(Lecture)
The only antivirus you need is the in-house Defender. Windows 7 is no longer being supported so it is not being updated with anti-virus measures. I love XP too, but people continuing to run old operating systems without current security measures is the cause of a lot of hacks.

It's time to get Windows 10, as it is the most current operating system that has been put through the tests and will be supported until the end of 2025. The problem is that if you are running Windows 7, your computer will probably not be able to run 10.

Lenovo laptops are really nice.
(/Lecture)

Rant-
I hate the expanded use of AI and how it makes the world so much less creative an interesting. It turns art, information, and stories into generic garbage, do NOT use chat GPT for anything unless you're a dickhead.

But for other things too- those generic voiceovers you hear EVERYWHERE, those same few voices drive me insane! Either do it yourself, get a mate to do it or pay someone. With drone footage I HATE the typical pre-programmed rotating shots and all the other AI and programmed stuff. And the garbage AI animations make my brain want to vomit out through my eyeholes.

The problem with AI isn't just that it runs on theft, it's that people rely on it for things they shouldn't.

It's exactly like when consumer synthesizers first got cheap enough so that everyone could get one. There was so much bad music being made with generic, horrible “beats” and terrible synth effects that people just mindlessly used.