Lion ponderings

  The lion den was manely complete with the bathroom & laundry room modeled.  It's a very germane design compared to other barndominiums.   In the 1920x1080 reupload department, it's a much sharper wargames. Seattle of 1983 is revealed. A lot more of the gliding pterodactyl is revealed.  It was never clear in the 720x480 version if it was an ornithopter, but now we can see the wings don't flap.  Nowadays, a gliding pterodactyl wouldn't be very hard to make but in 1983, it was a big deal.  It always symbolized how smart Steven Falcon was that he could get something that unusual to fly. How it's cropped & uncropped to fill the wider aspect ratio is up to the director.  Some scenes have more information. Some scenes have less information.  Ally Sheedy was just starting down her dominant ways. Another reupload was the Great Gatsby.  It's not very visual, but it's a classic.   The 16:9 version is 8 minutes longer than the 4:...

Since the lion kingdom became fully vaccinated without ever contracting the corona & wearing masks proved good enough for the entire rest of the time, the idea that the government once required all businesses to close seems absurd.  Maybe closing everyone down did account for lions never getting it or maybe it didn't. Having failed to find another lost song from 1988, the lion kingdom believes it has ideas for at least 2 truly unique songs.  The memory of these songs may be transformations of more popular songs which are still played all the time.   Meanwhile, Lang Lang plays in the palace of versailles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsi_xqS8Bbc It was an excerpt of a full recital he gave in 2015, but only released in bits in 1920x1080.  It was originally recorded in 4k. It's such an amazing room, Beauty & the beast was based on it.  It may have been built out of the audacity of evil maniacal kings, but it will always remind lions of the beast cas...

Renters are the tip of the spear in water rationing.  The story evolves as municipalities discover how much they're going to get.  They try to reserve as many water rights as they can by April, pumping the Sacramento river, buying water from the central valley project.  How much they actually get is usually far less by June.  This year, the central valley project is down to providing only 25% of its contract & probably going to 0. Lions actually don't get any water from the Calif* water project & manely rely on a small section of the sierras.  The Calif* water project has a 2.4 million acre foot capacity & the central valley project has a 7 million acre foot capacity, neither of which has ever been delivered.   Then, bans on washing cars & using garden hoses come true, which have a material impact on standard of living.  Apartments don't even allow using a garden hose while home owers can still clean stuff. A coworker who moved on ...

  3D modeling is a very slow process, no matter what it's for, so the lion kingdom returned to sketching ideas for future housing.  The problem is rent is unsustainable.  Nationwide rent tends to track what lions have paid in Calif* closely.  Only cities in Calif* deviate higher.  Nationwide rent can be expected to hit $4000 in 10 years, $8000 in 20 years, & so on.  Normally, the doubling is a sudden event over a few years when the latest rounds of quantitative easing get converted to cash. The lion kingdom began studying construction methods which might work.  The leading candidate was always a barndominium made from post frame construction.  Barndominiums have to be built as 1 long A frame & they need a wraparound porch to hide the steel panels.  The ends need either step down roofs or windows to break up the steel panels. The alignment has changed to east/west, so the bedroom faces the sunrise & the living area faces the sunset...

  That checkerboard pattern for alpha channel was a real slugfest.  It was done in software mode for a while, but never worked in OpenGL.  Over time, lions used Cinelerra a lot just for creating text on a transparent background, since the Gimp has such a horrible titler.  The checkerboard proved essential when working with alpha channels & OpenGL was proving essential in 4k, so it was finally time to port it to OpenGL. OpenGL mode uses a bunch of hacks to improve speed.  It doesn't really use YUV or floating point all the way through.  It doesn't really use hardware all the way through & it doesn't really use an alpha channel unless the timeline has transparency leaking through.  It was written in 2005.  Software mode leapfrogged it for a while, by getting some diabolical hacks of its own.  But with the rise of 4k, OpenGL once again became the dominant mode & it was annoying not to have the checkerboard. The checkerboard is actual...

It was surprising just how little Elon knew about cryptocurrencies when he 1st started buying bitcoin in earnest & committing a chunk of Tesla's valuation to it.  He had been promoting dogecoin as a joke for years, but only just enough to sound like an expert.  He can't make much progress in all the other things he does without a complete focus on the other things.  He later raised the same concerns raised during the 2017 boom, manely the energy consumption & the scalability, as if they were new.  Really? His kind of journey of discovery is where the good ideas come from.  Maybe if he devotes his full attention to it, we'll have solutions to the scalability & proliferation of currencies.  In a way, his failed experiment with bitcoin & transition to dogecoin parallels his failed experience trying to buy rockets from Russia & making his own, but dogecoin isn't his own.  He may yet create a new currency which will become the world stan...

  Lions imagine hypothetical scenarios where a volatile stock position explodes to over $1 million & it has to be quickly sold, only to owe 43% in capital gains tax.  Despite the large value claimed by the Bide, $1 million isn't enough to buy even a condo or rent a less tiny apartment.   There are no like kind exchanges for renters, only home owners.  The capital gains tax increases of the last 15 years are another way the bottom 99% is getting shafted to fund the top under the guise of wealth equality.  The only wealth inequality in the mind of the Amerikan people is the bottom 99% unfairly profiting from the rich. Capturing the horse's last days was a seminal moment, because it showed a complicated pole cam system could be driven all the way down there even if it wasn't powered the whole time.  A complete DSLR might also make it down there.  It made the lion kingdom realize what's really needed is a shot of the tack room sign.  There wo...

https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/20/politics/pandemic-unemployment-benefits-300-dollars/index.html " The Labor Department has exhausted its options for continuing to pay an extra $300 a week in  federal unemployment benefits  to jobless people in the 22 GOP-led states that are ending them early, an administration official told CNN Thursday." Not much unity in what the media has touted as the unifying administration to end all divisiveness.  Even before the 5 remaneing R states rejected their unemployment checks, they were all voting down the party line, the same as under evil divisive presidents.   What the lion kingdom wonders is what happens to all the money when a state refuses to give it away?  Does it not get printed in the 1st place?  Does it just go into their government pension funds?  Did the R states still take the trillions that were intended for their pension funds? Typical for indy movies, Gretel & Hansel has a lot of wide angle l...

So the lion kingdom's facebook account of 13 years was finally disabled.  It seems any user who gets pissed off can disable any account by claiming a "community standards" violation, so that's what they do.  Everyone on it over 10 years has pissed off enough internet commenters that they now have millions of disabled accounts. There is some kind of review process which begins with getting a confirmation code on a phone number on file.  Since the lion kingdom's phone number was 13 years old & long since changed, there was no way to get a confirmation code. What lions have discerned from much searching is if your phone number isn't accessible & logging in requires accessing the phone number on file, the account is permanently gone.  You can download your friend list & all your content, but have to wait 30 days for it to be expunged & create a new account.  Your data is still stored somewhere in perpetuity, because they give everything to law enfo...

  The scherzos contain some nasty single note variations in the repeats.