Lion ponderings

After finally surviving Nomadland, lions have concluded the working poor don't have many hobbies.  Lions couldn't stand spending so much time sitting still, talking about nothing, & wandering.  The reviews manely focus on the scenery. It was based on real events & journalistic work by Jessica Bruder, but not on a true story.  The actors are real working poor who presumably aren't as poor now.  It was shot outside a real amazon fulfillment center.  Like most of the working poor, the promised land for her was Calif*.  It's a strange trend that the poorest flock to Calif* while the richest move out. The working poor are the upper class of homeless in Calif*.  They live in RV's parked around lake Merced.  Lions always thought they were the smart ones.  They get to keep all their money instead of spending it all on rent.  They don't have to spend all day commuting.  Lions always figured they came from the midwest to make a fortun...

Finally entered the 4k world. The cheap folding table is a disaster for such a large monitor. Font rendering in Cinelerra is a disaster. Surprisingly, the ages old 24 point XTerm font is still large enough to read. The $50 stand isn't the best. Gamma is better than the old monitor. Viewing angle is worse than the old monitor. It didn't take long for the honeymoon to end. After fidgeting with the contrast, it turned out if the viewing angle was just a hair off, the color fell over like a 1980's passive matrix panel. It's nowhere near as good as the monitor lions had for 13 years. That's the problem with VA's & why VA's are cheaper despite product reviewers praising them. An IPS panel like what lions had for the last 13 years doesn't cost much more for the improvement. The mane disappointment is how much more a 32" costs than a 40". What a lion views on a monitor is that which he'll never view in real life on account of being l...

 Imogen Heap lives in her childhood home, a round mansion crammed with junk.  Her studio is in the basement.  She bought it from her father in her 30's, after becoming wealthy from showbiz.  She spent the last 10 years developing $2000 musical instrument gloves as a startup venture.  Like the rest of generation X, she looks like a fossil. People who make a lot of money, have an idea for a gadget but no knowledge of how to build it, are ripe for getting ripped off.  In the acquisition economy though, recent celebrities like Casey Neistat have managed to do well with startup ventures which were absolute flops. Back when lions had any views & were still eligible for adsense, they were paying $1 per 1000 views. They since concentrated the algorithm to pay fewer channels & pay the survivors $3 - $5 per 1000 views, depending on how much of the commercial was viewed & how much the advertiser paid. 1 billion views is $3-5 million. The average science ...

  The lion kingdom's last drive was Dec 25.  2 months drained the car battery 17Ah.  Definitely preferable to run it on a Lipo than recharge the lead acid every 2 months, but lions still think they're going to drive every 2 months.  It took 100 minutes to recharge it, so 1 60 mile drive every 2 months is not enough to keep the battery charged.  A solar panel could keep the battery topped off, but be expensive.  It might buy more battery life by not letting it lose 17Ah.  Lions have had 9 year batteries die early from not being driven enough. Of course, in 15 years all cars sold in Calif* are going to be electric, making this solar panel battery saver worthless.

1 of the photos which will define 2021. Try to imagine yourself as a paying passenger during EDL. You're in a lone ship descending towards a completely deserted planet, through a completely deserted atmosphere with no other aircraft or living beings in it. You have a view through a window of the red pitted horizon you've seen for your entire life in photos, but can't see where you're going & only have situational awareness from a screen with a 3D model of the strange planet.  No-one else in the universe knows what's happening. Panicking humans are watching what happened to you 11 minutes ago, back on Earth but they can't see what's happening now. You wonder why you paid your entire net worth to take so much risk, knowing you have a 1 in 2 chance of not being around in 7 minutes.  You & the other 100 passengers in the room were 1 of the majority of men who never had a family, didn't leave anything behind on Earth & wanted to send your genome o...

The lion kingdom's 13 year old HP finally died. It wasn't the fuse, the switches, the backlight, but the mechanical stand finally perishing. Went to the Apple store many times in 2007, trying to gauge the quality of the new 30" monitors before finally plunging the $1300 for one. 30" monitors in those days were dimmer, but beautiful. The mane concern was how many DVI ports it had. That kind of money definitely bought a long life. Shopping for a new monitor is more of a hassle in old age than the wonder it was long ago. Gone are the days when any new monitor was a revolutionary improvement for a lot less money. It's now a matter of sorting through a pile of equally expensive options with little improvement over what you had 13 years ago. Any monitor in 1997 was lightyears ahead of a monitor in 1987. The lion kingdom finally accepted that there are no more 30" monitors & it's going to be a struggle to fit a 32" in the apartment. Lions refus...

  Slowly catching up to generation X by finally watching The Net. Who could forget the primary color bitmaps on a Powerbook 540C? Or how about filling an entire desk with 2 19" CRT's? No antialiased fonts or video in those days. Digitized photos were a stretch, but a new fangled compression format called JPEG started to make them possible. Low quality video was actually possible in those days, but beyond what anyone knew how to do. The graphics in the movie were actually quite obsolete even by those days. Nothing was the comic relief for generation X like Dennis Miller in his peak.

  24 years after the legend was ported to supermarkets, the fire flavor finally arrived. There's an epidemic of old men making 3D printed animatronics.

  Lions have slowly realized the reason programmers never age past 30 is less to do with burnout or lack of interest & more to do with them having enough money to retire at a much younger age than other industries. Most of them did exactly what they were told, invest in index funds. Over a 20 year period, there are going to be crashes, but there's always going to be a boom. Most lion coworkers made 300% on what they invested in the good years, 500% from what they invested in the bad years & gave their commutes a rain check at 40. The ones still working only stayed around because they're at a very high job title or they invested very poorly. There is age discrimination, but it's an effect of everyone retiring much younger than other industries. If everyone stayed in cash & was still starting from scratch after 40 like Walmart employees, there would be discrimination against everyone under 40. Because most people eventually hit paydirt at a young age in thi...

  Finished the millennial version of Little Women some time ago. Obviously, it would never be as good as the generation X version. The random jumping between time periods was unbearable. The bitchy blond was over the top, but more attractive in a dominatrix way than the generation X version. The professor was nowhere to be seen in 2019 & just suddenly showed up to get married. The 2019 version covered different areas of the book. The 2019 version definitely had more intricate sets. After watching 2 versions now, maybe lions should finally read the book.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRr1kaXKBsU Every time the lion kingdom accidentally rewatches this video because it remembers nothing, it deciphers just another fraction of a percent. That's why Derek Muller is a billionaire who owns a hilltop house in San Diego. Interestingly, despite his PHD in physics, he never learned the subject in the video as part of the PHD. There is no gravity. There is only acceleration. When we're sitting still, we're really accelerating relative to spacetime. It's easy to write anything off as spacetime.

  A young lion was grateful to the hypothetical old lion who would someday pay off his student loans, by some means that wasn't known. The old lion is grateful to the young lion for creating stock positions at the right time. Helas, wiser investments would have kept up with inflation for the last 20 years. Merely keeping up with inflation would have led to retirement by now, but instead, the lion kingdom only has about 10% of the total buying power it had 20 years ago. The lion kingdom now views most of its remaneing career as funding its journey to Mars. It'll be partly funded by cash & partly by debt. The more the starship crashes in its early testing, the safer it will be in the long term. Based on the number of explosions, it's going to be very safe.