Lion ponderings

   A walk in the woods was another grumpy male baby boomer coming of age movie.  The big mcmansion, the retirement, the marriage in this genre are now foreign concepts to later generations. A lot of characters came & went, with no payoff.     There was a very sad subplot of Steenburgen living alone with her dimented mother which led nowhere.      For depicting baby boomers as old fashioned, it was overkill to see them sticking to pay phones & paper maps in 2015.  Even baby boomers had moved on by then.      Redford was shown with a 2015 era macbook.  Some bits of the 1998 book obviously were mixed with bits of 2015.       If there was any point, it was to showcase the  Appalachian  trail.  The real Fontana Dam in NC, on the trail, was shown.     The starting point shown was the real starting point in Amicalola falls GA.  The red building since got a bigger...

  The last gootube downloader immune to goog's latest countermeasures finally got taken down.  Not sure how they disabled it or how it worked before.  It was a cash cow.  It ran too fast to be screencapping.  It could have been using logged in accounts or running a browser which constantly reloaded the approved player.  Nowadays, using a burner account is the only way to do it practically.  It seems watching a lot of music videos on the same IP address as the downloader reduces the occurrence of the login requirement so they're measuring the ratio of approved accesses to unapproved accesses.  Started opening every video to download in an approved player & letting it play commercials in the background.  While this did improve results, it seems to require many approved plays for every unapproved download.     Another functioning gootube downloader popped up, with lots of reset connections.  https://app.ytdown.to/en27/...

The combination of losing 401k catchup contributions & not getting any raises has led to 1/2 of the lion kingdom's income now going to the 401k.  Lions don't take home a paycheck until June.  There's a growing chance lions may have to cut back on deferred compensation in order to bridge the next 4 years & have some of the roth conversions go directly to expenses.  Such is the price of moving large sums of the taxable cash to stonk to avoid taxes. The 401k has really lousy returns compared to the IRAs, but nothing is going to see significant gains in 4 years.  At the same time, there's been enough passive income to offset the paychecks, which creates a huge tax advantage.  As long as passive income can replace the paychecks, it's hard to reduce the deferments. It felt good to meet expenses without selling any stonk, but if we're going to be shifting assets around to optimize taxes, there has to be some stonk selling & payment for capital gains if the ...

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzFJ2g0kUpU Surprised the PIC free sample program still exists & has free shipping.  Seem to recall the terms getting stiffer & the shipping requiring a charge, 20 years ago.  They reduced the maximum amount from some ridiculous number to 3. Indeed, they always required a corporate email address & they might have further reduced it to 2 part numbers, though the shipping is free again.   There was a phase after 2000 when microcontrollers were new & there was a lot of value in getting any amount of computing power for free, regardless of the fact that the C compiler was for Windows only & paid.  We programmed in assembly & made parallel port programmers.  Lions briefly thought they could make an autopilot with the free samples.  A minimal autopilot probably could have been done in C.  Now, the mane problem is space to store them.  Lions still have a corporate email address, but those...

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPrq-MMd-1k Reviewing british biker's review of the villages, it could be the closest analogue to the current location, in terms of an uninterrupted bike path between destinations.  Having said that, lions are rarely on the bike path except for speed workouts & those are becoming rarer with age. The 3 mane destinations: Brownwood Paddock Square   Lake Sumter Landing Spanish Springs    It's 8 miles from end to end.      It was all farmland when lions left.    The box is 5x7 miles.  Targ & wally are not in the 3 mane destinations but still inside the box.  The cheapest rentals all seem to be outside the box.  Most of the rentals are houses now. The smallest apartments there are currently in the $1200's.  With all the fees, they're going to be $1500.  This compares to the coast which is going to be over $2000 with fees.  Largo is the most walkable.   Titus...

1 year after wicked 1, started on Wicked 2, realizing the magic was gone without the original cast. https://growmane.blogspot.com/2025/01/lions-had-basically-memorized-wicked.html       Discovering the yellow brick road was built with animal abuse changed the whole thing.  A bit random for a civilization which had steam power.        Trophy wife, forever without cross glasses.    Cowardly lion finally showed up.  They overdid the cowarding.  There were some new songs not in the soundtrack.  Some old songs were shortened, like Wonderful.  The origins of all the old songs were finally revealed but lions heard them enough to 2x them. Young lion assumed Idina was converting humans into animals, but in reality they were always animals & the antagonist schoolmaster was banishing them.  Then 1 by 1, the origin of the tin man & the straw man were revealed.  They were the love interests of greenie & ...