Denji Log

08/17/26 The heat advisory was extended through Sunday and into today. I haven't seen another update yet, so maybe this is the last day of the heat advisory. From Thursday to Monday. Today's heat index was 109 again. We were supposed to get a light shower around 6PM. That didn't happen, then an abrupt, severe thunderstorm came through after 10PM when there wasn't supposed to be any chance of rain and now we're under a severe thunderstorm alert. Already show some huge limbs come down. Supposedly, winds up to 40mph. From what I saw, I believe it. Reported the conditions to mPING. The wind has calmed down since earlier. Just some rumbling thunder and distant lightning with light rain now. I love how our weather reports have gotten so useless, even down to the hour. It's like we're back in the early 90s, one of the things that was actually worse. We made so manty advancements in weather detection and being able to alert people, and then we shifted to letting companies be allowed to privitize much of the weather for profit and defunded a shit ton of everything else. Just one in a long list of many stupid grifts we've allowed politicians and corporations to get away with, and like many of those grifts, they'll get people killed. I remember once reading on Reddit, quite a few times actually, that it was absurd that the villain in Twister was a guy "in it for the money", for corporate meteorology, because that's clearly not a thing, right? Private companies were absolutely already pulling that shit back then! That's why the movie made that guy the villain in the first place! The whole big success within the plot of the movie, the goal, was for non-corporate researchers with the goal of saving lives finding ways to get data to extend warnings to people in immediately danger to give people a better chance of survival. It was a huge deal when the real research that movie took inspiration from was making strides and that moving helped kicked off a lot of research and amateur storm watching, much like JP helped the field of paleontology flourish again for a bit. Things used to be really, really bad when it came to getting people in danger any alerts out in a meaningful time frame, and because we got used to taking that for granted, we're going to have to learn that lesson again of why that was so important. Sometimes, when I'm watching videos on people budgeting and shopping, to see how other people manage their households, I'm just left disturbed by what the United States is really like. You can see a bit of the help families get in Japan mentioned in this video with the vouchers, but it was this video with a mom going through her entire family budget and how much of it is just subsidies and how little she paid in both taxes and toward health insurance despite all of those nice subsidies that I was just felt so much absolute disgust for how things are run and debated in the US. There's already no fucks given about adults, for sure, but even children, like we allow grown ass adults to be given equal time to debate why children should starve if their parents aren't "worthy" enough for whatever reason. The subsidies mentioned in that video go beyond food too. What the fuck am I paying all these taxes for if they're not supposed to go to any people? Isn't that the entire point of them?

It's wild. Even the most mild, ordinary things that would be common in another other developed country are treated uniquely as ridiculous privileges in the US. The US is so messed up. Can't even convince people that children should be fed...

08/15/26 Halfway through August now. The new TWBSI ECO came yesterday, the Pink Lemonade Bronze. I've been writing with it since I got it. I'll get around to taking a picture of all of my TWSBI ECOs at some point. Probably when I get around to putting up those items on Ebay to sell so I don't have to get my light out twice LOL. The pink is a lot paler in person, which I think looks even better. I really like pale and dusty pinks. They look more "earthy". A lot of pink products look like medicine. All my bronze & RG ECOs togethers look very much like a palette for a cafe for real. If they ever do a green one, maybe a matcha color? But I'd be happy with most greens. Sad the most recent green they did was with a black nib. It just...doesn't look good to me. The heat advisory that started initially Thursday has been extended once again, now till Sunday night. Given Monday is expected to be hotter than Sunday, I expect it will be extended again. The heat index is up to 109 now, from 106 yesterday. Still trying to figure out what I'm going to do for next year re: planners. I think I won't bother doing a new techo kaigi to post here until September and I've sorted out exactly what the plan is. Currently, I'm planning on a Cousin, but I don't know if I'll be getting anything else. So far, the covers have mostly been duds or ones I have some caveats about. I need to know more on the material for each cover, but I get the feeling most of them are going to be plastic-y shit again. The generic for one of my cat's medicines came today. Hopefully, it works as well, then I can cut the price of that expense in half. The cost of 60 pills generic is the same as 30 pills with the name brand. I saw recently there's an Instax Mini 13. Looks like it's just aesthetically different and I guess it's better for selfie/group shots for the young ones who grew up without film cameras to work. But basically it's the same camera. It's wild to me how much just the 12 I have has inflated in prices. When I got it, it was during a sale, but the full price some years ago was $60 (IIRC, I believe I bought mine for $40) and around here they typically go for $80-120 depending on the store you're in. The same fucking camera. (Film hasn't really gone up though, thankfully. I usually stock up one some when I see them on sale.) I'd gotten it at the time because it was the cheapst film camera I could get that wasn't straight up garbage. I'd like to get a nicer film camera and a nice digital camera again, but everything is so expensive now. I used to have a decent digital camera some years back. It got lost, sadly. I can't even get that exact same camera again. It's more expensive now than it was when I bought it, despite being probably nearly a decade old model now. Sigh. I am glad that more people are buying second hand goods, but I know a portion of what's inflating prices is people looking to "flip" them because they know people are now buying more of this stuff. Flipping houses, flipping second hand goods, scalping new goods. I know these people have been around for a long time, but they didn't used to be this big of a problem. It's gotten so ridiculous. Just moving objects around between people who have no intentions of using them. What a waste. Got an idea for a horror story. Have a headache now. Waiting it out before I start writing.

08/13/26 Well, Reddit's finally gone and done it. Not only am I not able to view regular Reddit on desktop or mobile without being logged in, you can no longer view Old Reddit without being logged in at all. So, as I am sticking to my rules set out for the LB experiment, I can't use Reddit anymore. I would hope this would get more people to go elsewhere, but these sort of lockdowns don't seem to move users usually. More useless walled gardens full of ads and bots. Today and tomorrow, we're under a heat advisery. The temperature's only supposed to get to 93, but with humidity, it's looking like the "feel like" temperature is going to be around 103-106 tomorrow. Glad I don't work in a warehouse anymore. I remember when it would get to like 110 outside and feel like 116 with humidty (because it's always humid here), and the inside of the wrehouse would feel another 5-10 or more hotter depending on where you were in the building. IIRC, they used to warn us being up against the machines could bring it possibly 115 degrees hotter than outside. Of course, the fans and water machines were always broken. We'd always have at least one person per area per day in summer faint from the heat. They'd just make us work around them. I'd be stuck being moved all over the place, because I don't really get as affected by heat as other people, I guess. I always did have a rather high level of endurance even as a kid. But those days were brutal even for the ones most able to "survive" it and still be moving at regular pace. Some people would realize they were about to faint and just lay on the ground in front of any fan that was still working or they'd go to the bathrooms (one of the only places you could feel any AC outside of the office rooms) and literally sit or lay on the bathroom floor. Or just run the sink water over their heads. You know someone's desperate for coolness if they'll lay straight onto a dirty bathroom floor. Truly desperate. The managers at least didn't go after the people to get back up. If someone laid down, you just left them to rest unless it looked like they needed a doctor called. We were supposed to have water bottles and popsicles every day every shift, but they'd do it for a couple of days and not bother. That was a decision from above. Not much the managers could do about it. The vending machines would all run out of bottled water, soda, energy drinks, coffee, juice. Literally anything drinkable would get bought before halfway through the week but they only had it restocked every one to two weeks. Can't imagine what it's like in there now. After the last election, that building basically threw all regard for any safety out the window. Decent managers fled, because they weren't willing to risk maiming or killing good workers, and shittier ones moved on up who were willing. We went from an occasional injury here and there to constant major injuries across every department and we were expect to work with those injuries, or don't come back. Straight up just telling us, sure, we might be able to sue maybe, but they'd rather deal with us in court. I left not longer after getting a head injury. Honestly, so many businesses in general seem to have ramped up the full disregard for both employee and customer in the last couple of years to such a disturbing and breakneck speed. It's sad how things have turned out. I've been watching a lot of old recordings of day to day shopping trips from the 90s. It's crazy to think how alive everything looked, so many colors and so much stuff and with so much disposable income. In less than forty years, the whole soul of everything has been sucked away. Most of the country is poor, almost no one can really go to the doctor for much, almost no one can afford houses or children, and the world itself is on fire. For no reason. We literally don't need to run things like this. I've been trying to withdraw from the economy as much as possible. I think everyone should, really. If the employee doesn't matter and the customer doesn't matter, then the system does not serve us. The heat has killed some of the plants we planted this year, but some are still pushing through anyway. I'm going to have to rethink gardening and what I can even grow with this ever increasing heat. A lot of those planting guides you see on the back of seeds haven't been updated since the 70s (seriously) and others not since the 2010s at the most recent. None of them are useful anymore. Plenty of plants should be partial sun or full shade now, or simply can't grow in certain areas, but we're not really being given good advice on it. Kind of like the weather. We got to a point we got really good, accurate weather. But that's over with too. We peak, and then it gets taken away. Again and again. I think a lot about how a good portion of the US hasn't had any major renovations since FDR. So much of the present is coasting off of what FDR did some 80 years ago. Because no one wants to put their foot down and actually spend the money to fix things. Why do that when you can grift more in the present and kick it down the road? And when the road deadends, just move into a bunker, I guess.

08/11/26 Been a few days since my last update. Couple of rants and some updates on the LB experiment, which I should really probably make a page for at this point. (And probably a layout too, LOL.) Yesterday, I went to visit the nearest Goodwill, just to see what it was like and if there might be something useful there. Most of the thrift stores that are left around me are trash, for one reason or another. I wasn't expecting much out of Goodwill either, because they are also trash, but I was still curious what goods they might have. The store itself was almost entirely just clothes, a lot of them with tags still on them. I notice right away there's displays of new product in bulk, clearly just bought from other stores who couldn't move the junk. And I find more, and more, and more of this shit throughout the store. Some of it isn't even marked down, it's straight up it's original full price. The actual second hand goods are sparse. There's basically no electronics, no bags, all the pots (outside of loose lids) are new in box products, very few toys, no blankets or yarn or fabric, there's no VHS or cassettes despite these being back in fashion and the blu-ray and DVDs and CDs are all clearly never been opened new product. Like they're just some stock from some shady place that never got sold. No real movie titles, almost all knockoff B-movies at full price, all clearly never once watched. The CDs are mostly Christian music, again clearly never once opened. The donation lane was also closed off entirely. At the front of the store was also a lot of full priced snacks and full priced umbrellas. It's like it was morphing itself into a Bargain Hunt or a Ross. This wasn't a thrift store, it was a "discount" store (and judging by the prices, not really discounted either). I already hate places like Ross and TJ Maxx. They often don't even mark things down that much, if at all, but they give people the illusion they're getting a deal. And a lot of what ends up in those places is there for a reason. That product couldn't be moved elsewhere because it was junk to start with. I could rant about all the thrift stores and second-hand stores around me. They're all fucked up for some reason or another. Goodwill, who are also fucked up in general, being an option should tell you how fucked up the others are. Sigh. I guess it's online only for secondhand for me. The other rant. My dad always tells me he saves a lot of money at Costco. Hell, Reddit is convinced you do too, because they're really stupid over there. Anyone ever seen a side by side bill comparison for warehouse membership vs regular ass grocery stores knows, unless you're feeding a family of at least 5 a very shitty, unhealthy diet, you will never save money going to those kinds of places. My dad shops for 3, him, my mom, and my brother, plus pet food. So, just by that metric, we already know he's not getting the best deals there. I asked him how he budjets during his trips and he said he doesn't even look at the prices of anything. He just pays, because he "knows" he's getting a good deal. He showed me one of his receipts recently. He spent over $800 for two weeks of food for three people. He always takes my brother and my brother, NEET that he is, uses the chance to get as much junk food and non-food items he can on the way. My mom doesn't bother going with them most of the time. Anyway, I decided to sort out what they were really spending the money on. My dad's biggest claim of why he goes to Costco is he "saves so much on meat". So, let's look at the meat. Meat ended up being over 1/3 of all the money spent out of that ~$800 trip (I'm excluding the taxes, to be generous). He spent about $274 on meat. That is more than my wife and me's entire food budget for a month, and yes, we do buy meat. He claims he's getting a good deal because it's "in bulk" so it'll last a "really long time", but he buys this same amount of "bulk" every two weeks, and eats through all of it every two weeks. This is what they are eating in two weeks time period. Here's the meat they got:

2 hams
2 roasts
shrimp
party-sized sushi platter with salmon as a snack for my brother
NY strip steak
pork chops
chicken drumsticks
wagyu burgers
grass-fed ground beef
brats
Canadian bacon
pre-cut steak strips

This is for 3 people for 2 weeks. My dad also does not eat leftovers, ever. A lot of their food gets wasted. Like they'll buy a shit ton of bread, far more than even a large family could eat in two weeks, and most of it will get moldy and then he'll buy the same amount of bread all over again. And it's not cheap bread either. He'll try to buy the most "premium" sounding product in the store. (Emphasis on sounding, because it's clealry junk but it'll have a fancy name and be expensive.) We did not eat this much meat when I was a kid, if you were wondering. When I was in elementary school, we had WIC and food stamps and our meat was mostly pork chops and salsbury steak or hamburgers and cheap hotdogs. At least 2 dishes a week often had no meat at all. By high school, my dad demanded every meal have meat or it wasn't a real "meal" deserving of a hardworking man or whatever, but it still wasn't this level of gluttony. The sweets portion of the bill totalled more than the grains, fruit+veggies, and other misc items like eggs + milk combined. Buying like $10s worth of cookies here and $16 sugary snacks and $12 cakes and shit. When I asked him what was an example of money saved, he picked out the cheapest item of meat, the drumsticks that were $7.50 for several pounds of meat. Which was indeed a good deal, and was already by itself more than enough meat for 2 weeks for 3 people. So, he could have just stopped there. But then he went on to spend $274 on meat. They also bought some clothes (they don't need more clothes, they have so many they never wear all of them). He also went on a shopping spree at Hobby Lobby the day before, which I know about because he invited me, which I declined. I don't shop at Hobby Lobby, ever, and I certainly wouldn't be interested in going on an unplanned random shopping spree. (This was not him offering to buy stuff for me, but to have company while he shopped for random shit.) He usually, from the receipts I've seen, spends over a $100, if not $200 whne he shops at Hobby Lobby. He also went to a liquor store after his Costco trip, because the beer he bought at Costco just wasn't enough alcohol for him for two weeks. A few years ago, he had a lot of money in his savings acount, but last he showed me his bank stuff, he's depleted the vast majority of it for frivolous nonsense. One of his other huge spending areas was bulk household goods he didn't actually need. He seems to always fall for being bulk household items at Costco. He's also really wasteful on the things that do make some sense to buy in bulk, like razors and toothbrush heads. For the toothbrush heads, he's buying the most expensive ones. But even at that, he buys them way too often and he always has since I was in high school. He has to be throwing them out more than once a week at the rate he goes through toothbrush heads. For razors, he tosses the blades after a single use. Again, something he started when I was in high school. (Meanwhile, my brother and I were expected to share a tiny supply until the blades were so dull they couldn't cut anything.) As for the other weirdly large chunk of his Costco bill, it was supplements. The man spent more on random supplements than all of the grains and more than all of the fruit+veggies (at least it was more than combined). But even with those two categories, it was a lot of waste. Premium-sounding breads that will mold because he bought too many, expensive fruits, ridiculously priced eggs. I bought eggs this week too, spent under $4. My dad spead $10 for the same amount of eggs. I bought a watermelon this week, spend under $4. He bought one for $16. The one he bought is about double the size of the one I bough, so I would expect the price to be double not four times the cost. He buys oranges every two weeks, but doesn't eat oranges. My mom and brother don't eat them often either, but he buys them anyway and they sit and rot like the bread. The meat and sweets will get eaten though. He's so wasteful. He doesn't meal plan, obviously. He doesn't think about what foods would go together or how something can be reused in other dishes. He just buys random shit. No thought for nutriton, calories, dinners, nothing. It's a child's way of shopping. He thinks my way of shopping is absurd and will make me unhealthy because it isn't mostly meats and cookies. He also bought a $40 candle somewhere, I'm guessing maybe Hobby Lobby because it wasn't Costco, though he's bought a ridiculous amount of expensive candles from there too. He likes to light them before he gets drunk and burn them all night. Which seems...like a really bad idea, but whatever. Last notes: I've added something new to the LB experiment in terms of video viewing habits. I have to watch something documentary/news like (specifically not "breaking news", but segments that would appear on a normal news channel) regularly as part of it, along with sometimes watching old video recordings from the 70s-00s that only show people doing regular things. It's interesting to see how things have changed. I think the biggest thing, and it's definitely a post 00's thing, is how much brick and mortar stores have slimmed down their in store shelfs to have almost nothing it while also widening the aisle to what seems like at least double if not triple in width (so less aisles in total) and many aisles have also gotten much shorter (less shelves). For my news segments, a lot of them have been NHK World ones, especially the Zero Waste Life ones. Back when I actually watched TV, I loved when I had access to NHK. I've learned a lot of weebs who have lived in Japan for school or work to get close to more weeb shit hate NHK and other JP news stuff. Probably because it's not about anime. LMAO. But I do think their focused segments on non-"breaking news" type stuff is actually pretty good. I think we need to feed stuff like this back into our media diets. For a less JP focus, PBS would probably be another good source. (Not NPR though. They went downhill in quality by the mid-2010s.) Some "slow food", to borrow a term from Reboot. Our brains aren't meant to be this busy constantly absorbing big stimuli all the time. Speaking of media, Reddit has now hit me with the block on both mobile and desktop for not being logged in, unless I'm on Old Reddit. Some people already had it start over two weeks ago. I guess that's pretty much the end of that. I'm not making a Reddit account to possibly view a possibly false factoid made by likely a bot with a bunch of bot comments. It's a shame Lemmy omly attracted the most toxic users from Reddit and also got immediately loaded up with bots too. But maybe it's for the best. We should all move on to slower foods.

08/05/26 Going into August now. I can't believe it's already this far into the year. Felt like the first half of the year just threw by. I've been spenidng my time coming up with ways to save more money, haha. I saw a state recently that 1 in 3 clothes purchased in the US last year were used clothes. Looking into it, this has been going on for a while. I found articles all the way back to the pandemic of at least Gen Z already being at the 1 in 3 rate by that point. Looks like in general everyone is getting at least some o their clothes second hand. Stores also just in general don't carry as many sizes as they used to. You need to be whatever they've decided are the select 3-5 sizes. You can't be tall, you can't be short. You can't be too thin, you can't be too thick. Even the malls got that way, which given one of the few reasons malls have still hung around in my area was because they carried a bigger range of sizes than Walmart or Target, they don't serve any function anymore either. One of the malls in the general area actually just shut down. I could tell the last time I was in there it wasn't long for the world. It wasn't so much that there were no people in it, but more that there wasn't enough open stores, the prices were too high, and the selection too sparse to make the trip worth it. I only stopped there to return something I bought online because the physical stores won't stock my sizes or my wife's sizes anymore, so we just have to play Clothing Roulette online and hope the stores haven't changed up their sizes again. I swear, I know womens clothes have always had super shifting sizes, but the mens clothing seems to be doing this too since at least the pandemic. Which is especially frustrating because at least with a lot of pants, the sizes are supposed to be the actual measurements. But they're not anymore. This makes buying second hand also more hit and miss than it used to be too. If the clothes are much older, my size guess will likely be correct but if it's too new, who fucking knows anymore. Sigh. Anyway, clothing aside. With this week's groceries, I got a small watermelon. I had just wanted a little bit as a snack, but the price of the smaller pre-cut amount was more than a whole watermelon and I just can't justify that. So I may have to freeze some of what I bought. While I was cutting everything up, I was looking at how many bentos I filled up with watermelon and I am pretty certain I cut up myself about $40-50 worth of "precut" watermelon from a small watermelon. And then I felt kind of sick. I know they obviously make more money from the cut stuff, but just the amount of saved money, how much further it went from just cutting it myself...I feel like such a high price difference like that shouldn't even be allowed. IDK. Something about it just really bothered me. And I'm just thinking, if it was one of those big watermelon, which aren't even double the price of the small one...they have to be making like $80-100 from a watermelon they'd sell at $7-8 uncut. It just feels...evil. And I know who those are designed to prey on the most. It's not "lazy" people. No one in America is all that lazy. We work more than most other countries and get almost no, if any time off. It's because people are overworked and tired, and other people may simply have a disability or be elderly that would make it difficult to cut open a watermelon. Meanwhile, these companies can't be assed to make sure our food isn't coated in diseases before it gets to the shelves. I've been wanting to make some salads, but...yeah, I'm probably not going to do that any time soon, unfortunately. As far as sickness goes, still coughing, but it's a lot less than a month or two ago. I still feel a bit weak. It's been most of the year of this now, of being sick and recovering and then again. I don't think I've been sick with os many things back to back like this since...actually, never. Hoping this doesn't go on through the rest of the year. I'd like my ribs to finally heal, at least. EDIT: Oh, I forgot to mention. I bought the new Pink Lemonade with Bronze TWSBI ECO. I've given up on exploring other fountain pens. I always come back to the ECOs, and at this point I've decided I only want them if they're 1) opaque 2) and have either the bronze or rose gold trim. I suppose if they did a regular gold trim, I'd probably get that too. Once that arrives, I'll have every ECO that's come up fitting both of those criteria. I'm sad that they've gone up a bit in price, like most things, due to the tariff bullshit. They already cost more than the regular ECOs. The cheapest option for me was Jetpens, since they have free shipping at a low enough tier for the ECO to pass over that. Usually, I'd get my pens from Goulet, but goddamn Goulet and Vanness both have ridiculously high prices to actually get free shipping. Jetpens is the slowest out of the three for me, but better cheaper than faster, especially since this is a little luxury I definitely don't need. I'll take some pictures once it arrives of all my TWSBI ECO colors all together. So in total, I have: White with rose gold, crème with rose gold, caffé with bronze, espresso with bronze, indigo blue with bronze, and soon the pink lemonade with bronze. I don't care for the black trim, the transluscent ones look cheap to me, and the marble ones feel too "old man" for me out of the limited lines. I keep thinking I'll like something else, but it's always been the TWSBI ECO from the start that I loved. And once they released that white with rose gold trim one, it's always be the golden ones. I really hope they do a green opaque one with RG or bronze trim some day.

08/01/26 I've archived July's very few, albeit very long entries. Managed to finally update the main site with something. I had wanted to get that done in July, but oh well. Now that I've gotten that finished, I can focus on that stupid vampire thing. I need to sort out a title. I've got the basic outline of everything done, all the main characters named and basic info on the two leads mostly fleshed out. I hate coming up with titles, almost as much as I hate having to give characters first names, or worse, ugh, last names. Haha, a while back my wife was like how did you really go without naming anyone in those three island stories? It was a goal, LOL. Sad news. After testing on the extra ad promo cards that came with the Anima deck, you can't artificially age them by the old Umbrae methods. They're quite literally too plasticy and too poor quality. Haha, have modern mass print decks gotten so cheaply made they're basically just mostly plastic instead of paper? They're so slippery too. It's a shame. It's a beautiful deck and I'll keep using it. Guess I'll have to get real rough with it and age it the normal way. I do wonder how these mostly plastic decks will hold up over the years compared to the older decks. I suppose at least most of the indie decks are still nice. Long, long ago, decks used to all be small print or straight up commissions anyway. Maybe we should all move back to that for a lot of things. Did some cleaning up and clearing out the other day. Got plenty of stuff bagged up for donations. I'm going to wait until I do at least one more round of going through stuff before dropping the stuff off. Archive - Icons - Previous