The Internet was out all night and day 🙁

It sucks and I couldn’t help the paranoid thought–"Why did the police cut out the Internet? What are they doing?"–that popped in my head.

I hate that they’ve been so entirely awful at their jobs that my first thought is starting to always be "What did they fuck up now?"

And it’s like, I think our local police department are okay.

But I don’t know if the police I’ve dealt with have been purposeful nice guys that were chosen for their public-facing customer service work. Maybe the rest of the department is a blazing clown fire. I don’t know.

Like, there’s a lot of local government people getting arrested for some truly heinous crimes.

And I know, some people are like "They’re all getting arrested for awful shit! That means they’re getting away with lying and cheating their way into office!" but I’m kinda like "They caught them. Good." I’m always just really hopeful that they get epic prison sentences and crippling fines.

Stop them from being able to use the power of their money to circumvent what’s right.

I feel disappointed when they get a slap on the wrist and no prison time when a person without so much money gets sent straight to prison. And I’m not like "Good! Lock up the dude! Nobody should have a means of lessening a minor sentences." because they didn’t commit minor crimes.

It sucks that people have spent so much time and effort to change the laws to favor the rich and punish the poor.

I hate the current prison system. And I side-eye the government system that is propping it up.

Someone with money can pay money to get out of prison and have their record purged of serious crimes like physical assault, sexual assault, and "I didn’t know it was murder"-murder. While at the same time, a woman pre-pandemic wanted her daughter to go to a better school district and I think she’s still in prison today. Like, where the fuck is the governor or whoever hands out the crime forgiveness certificates at?

People should have their right to vote returned if the "big felony" they committed was like smoking or selling weed 30 years ago. Why is that person still in prison? Why are you continuing to torture them and their family for stuff that’s no longer a crime? You should free them and offer them some kind of "rehab therapy?" where they are taught how to adapt back into a world they haven’t been a part of.

Recidivism happens because someone that has been kept in a cage for months and/or years was then released with no help to adapt. I mean, some people are straight up evil. If they’re going to be violent, they’re going to be violent. But others are people that were in prison during the entire rise of smartphones and maybe even of computers.

A dude that doesn’t know how to sign up for an email address because the last one they had was a Hotmail account.

"Here dude. All consequential transactions are now handled online."–Like, WTF? Even for people that haven’t been to prison, it’s a terrible way to run things.

The credit card system went down because the Internet was out.

It was very inconvenient to buy milk today. But if the Internet was out long term? And someone depended on their own card reader to get paid?

Soft-forcing people to have to use cards is bad enough. But then to charge people for spending their own money?

Anyways. The Internet was out. And a lack of necessary infrastructure was very difficult to deal with in a regular moment. I don’t know what it would be like in a war zone.

~Harper Kingsley

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So I’ve found D’Angelo Wallace on YouTube.

Like, I don’t usually watch videos. But every once and a while I’ll take a dip into the rabbit hole. Especially since I can watch YouTube on the big TV screen.

I watched a bunch of "Koreans React to American" videos and some World Friends content last night. Like, the stuff about differences between Chinese, Korean, and Japanese chopsticks opened my eyes. There’s a reason why there’s different chopsticks. Like, I should have an array that I rotate my way through.

And today I visited Bluesky and my attention was caught by an Iron Spike share of D’Angelo Wallace talking about the "Natalie Beach being soft-stalked by Calloway"-shitstorm that’s seemingly building up in the background of the world.

Like, Calloway is seemingly out of control and she needs a wake up call of some sort. Because she’s obviously sliding.

Natalie seems to be doing great. But there really needs to be an eye kept on the Calloway situation because… yikes. She could pop up at any moment to cause some "drama." And I mean the type that involves the police.

I have no involvement with the story. I didn’t give that woman any money. I did see the tweet thread on Twitter (it was Twitter, not "X." (And I put that in quotes because he likely changed the name because he hopes to sell the Twitter name at some point in the future and he wants it to be worth money. If things had continued on in the same way, the resale value would be like nothing; he changed the name. So, if you want to continue calling it Twitter… it can help keep the name at value costs, just saying.)) but it was so long ago I’d forgotten about it. Until I watched that 2 hour long video today.

I’m a nosy person. I want to know what’s going on even if I’m not involved. So that whole Adult Drama going on… Calloway seems like someone to at least keep a side eye on.

~Harper Kingsley

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I’m really enjoying this Chinese novel. It’s been machine translated to "Losing Money to Be a Tycoon." (The author name has been translated to "Inebriation-seeking Blue Shirt.")

It’s 1717 chapters long, with some author notes here and there. And it’s a "guy wakes up 10 years ago with a system" story. Only instead of a magic finger, he’s given $50,000 with a promise of more if he follows certain steps.

He has money to use to make money. THEN the system tells him that he can convert the unused portions and the used portions for money. Which immediately attracts his attention.

So he starts reading the rules and things are flipped from what he thinks they should be. He finds out that used portions of the money will be bought back at a ratio of 1:1 while extra money will be bought back by the system at a ratio of 100:1.

He thinks he can spend $50,000 and get $50,000 back.

The only thing is: He can’t spend the money selfishly on himself. Which was one of his first impulses.

The money can only be spent on different money-making ventures. And in the course of making money, there are employees and other venues where money should be spent.

He is forced to be a humanitarian.

And by forced, I mean he doesn’t want to lose the chance to make money and change his life.

Because the system gives him a bunch of money and a time limit. It keeps track of its own money and his money. And after the session is over, it gives him a cut and takes the rest. Then it resets with a different amount of money and a different time limit.

All he wants is to see his balance grow. And the best way to do that is to start a venture and fail.

How hard is it to open a business and lose a bunch of money?

Apparently: very hard.

SPOILER ALERT!

He is aware of his own ineptitude with money.

• I don’t know if he has gained valuable skills at this point. He could truly understand finances on a deep and powerful level. I don’t know. And neither does he. He doesn’t want to risk it.
• He wants to lose money so he does everything he thinks will cause a business to fail. Yet he keeps making money.

Maybe he’s in one of his own games.

• He has a fondness for screwing with his characters.
• (Breaking the Fourth Wall:) It would be an ending that the author has been leading up to.
• Some of the games and movies and their inevitable endings could be seen as foreshadowing.

Maybe he’s in a coma.

• He could be in a futuristic pod, his brain exercised by a virtual reality machine.
• He died(?) and woke up 10 years in the past of his own life. Which allows him to make different choices and leapfrog out of poverty.

~Harper Kingsley

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I decorated a couple of birdhouses THEN I looked up what the best colors are for attracting nesting birds and… whoops.

So I redecorated some birdhouses and I’m going to try to figure out how and where to install them.

From my Internet research, nesting birds want houses that are painted in hues of gray, brown, green, blue, and purple. While birds love reds, yellows, oranges, pinks, and other bright colors, when they’re trying to hide their nests and their young, they want a camouflaged birdhouse. (So if you’ve set up houses and haven’t gotten any birds, it could be due to location or paint colors.)

My birdhouses may not be the prettiest, but hopefully some birds are going to find their seasonal homes.

They’re a couple of Plaid brand unpainted wooden birdhouses. I used high-gloss acrylic paint that is supposed to be non-toxic and non-harmful. I decorated the outsides and left the interiors as plain wood. With any luck some birds will be having some babies inside them.

Watched the original "The Crazies" movie from George A. Romero. There’s a lot more going on than in the modern version, though some of the colors…

The blood is bright orange-red and a lot of the people look like they’re wearing fluorescent lipstick. And there’s scenes of fighting where there was obviously no contact. But still. A classic movie, in that it holds up.

If those events happened in modern times, people would be sharing everything online. Or freaking out that the Internet got shutdown.

Paranoia. Ignorance. Bad military operations. And a mutated encephalitis that scrambles your brains.

There’s a lot more information provided then in the 2000s version.

And, it’s like, they’re under quarantine, yet they’re going to break out with a girl they KNOW is infected and already showing symptoms? And her dad isn’t too stable either?

When the military guys were talking about scrambling nuclear weapons, it made a lot of sense. Especially since there’s no way for the military to set up a parameter around the whole area… it’s too widely spaced and there’s too many points where people can run through.

Plus how the sickness was spread makes more sense than in the 2000s version. The plane crashed in the hills and some of the canisters ended up in the river and the water sunk into the underground reservoir that provided the town’s water.

In the 2000s version there was a plane that crashed into the lake and nobody knew it was there. As though the military wouldn’t have been tracking their plane full of dangerous chemicals.

In the Romero version, the plane crashed and the military showed up that day. It’s just that for 6 days the military didn’t do a whole lot because the guy in town was told by the higher ups that it was a plane full of deactivated vaccine. People might get fevers or flu-like symptoms but it would be no big deal, when actually it was germ warfare run amok.

There was a lot going on in the movie, but it was pretty good. You just have to go in realizing that it was made in the 1970s.

Did anyone else not realize that one of the main stars of "Another Gay Movie" was Michael Carbonaro?

Anyways, I’ve got a trial Fandor subscription until the 15th, so I’m going to be watching a mix of horror and arthouse movies until it expires.

~Harper Kingsley

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https://www.harperkingsley.net/blog.
https://kimichee.com.

https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/HarperKingsley.