Powderhorn

I mean, the guy handing out eggnog (with extra nog available) likely did lead to a hangover, but this is something different.

The burner warehouse offered an event last night (these sorts of things happen right under your nose, but as with a speakeasy, you have to know when and where they are) with food, fire dancing (because of course they did), some serious house and trance, copious amounts of alcohol and weed, and of course a few different fire pits.

There were three tiers for tickets: Free, $15 and $30. I opted for option 1.

The friend who introduced me properly to the burn scene felt inclined to come out last night, so we'd occasionally cross paths, and then once we'd kind of tapped out, we retreated to his van.

He has a dog that really brings all the girls to the ... drainage ditch. So we're drinking beers and shooting the shit while a woman plays with his dog a few feet away.

All in all, a wonderful night. I made new acquaintances, ate some OK food, heard some good tunes and hung out with the guy who's become my closest friend in the past couple of years.

But then, you wake up alone in a trash-filled van and realize that was fiction.

Well, that's just really shitty.

Quick backstory: He died Nov. 14.

I keep trying to feel something -- anything -- and yet my mind tends to wander to my ex-wife for that.

I very vaguely remember times where we'd have fun, as with me riding on his shoulders, but the final year Oma came for Christmas, all of that was gone.

A friend and I had split a beer several months back (I think we were 11) when my parents went out for the night and got us pizza.

As 11-year-olds are, we stupidly did not dispose of the evidence. My parents being reasonable people, the punishment was "don't ever do this again."

So it is against this backdrop that I'm sitting in my room, and my dad bursts in, furious. In my face like he'd never been before, and I was frozen in shock and confusion. I'd not done anything.

Over the course of the next half hour, the picture becomes clear: Oma had opened a beer thinking it was a V8.

What I never got was an apology. He knew damn fucking well that he'd falsely accused me and scared me, but apologizing was apparently too much.

There were nearly 35 years for that apology. It just didn't happen.

Just after my rent went up by more than my food and cat budget, I rehomed Clovis and bought a van.

I'd done quite a fair amount of research, having been dabbling in tiny-home living for seven years, so building out an off-grid system wasn't the issue it could have been.

I was not prepared for how things would transpire.

I selected my van based on the Cummins engine and Allison transmission, both of which are famous for longevity. Thing is, that covers nothing else, so when the starter motor dies, well, that's a replacement. Serpentine belt breaks on your way back from a build day? That's a $400 tow for five miles.

The electrical system was a high point early on. Everything just worked, and my laptop was happy to work with my 5G hotspot while the fridge actually kept ice cream cold.

Moving forward two years, my fridge has failed so many times that I don't even bother putting anything other than beverages in it. It's a cooler after having to throw out hundreds of dollars of food over several rounds of trusting it again.

The electrical system? Well ... you sign up for certain things when putting your batteries in series, and one is sudden imbalance. Which means the whole system is dead. This is fine when you can crash with a friend and charge there, but when he's down on the coast, this becomes a very expensive hotel adventure.

One other thing that made me feel good about this decision was my ex-boss was fine with me using the dumpsters (I park a few hundred feet away from those), but that lease ran out a year ago, and everyone else nearby locks theirs.

There is a lot of trash in here.

It's not all doom and gloom, but some days, it feels that way. For example, I never waste food anymore unless the fridge fucks me.

But slowly, normal human conditions change. I had a gym membership to shower daily and perform other bodily functions. Sadly, things did not go well at work, and now that was a $20 expense I couldn't justify.

I'm not a naturally stinky person, and I still had the nearby brewery to go to for indoor plumbing; so far, so good.

Obviously, I was still peeing in bottles when leaving the van wasn't really an option. There's a fair amount of grass here where I could dump them, so I wasn't being a bad neighbour.

Then, you have the first time you get sick. Even the 24-hour 7-Eleven an eight-minute walk away is not going to be a solution to shitting the bed. This is where a bucket comes into play, if you hadn't donated the bucket to the makerspace for an event and not retrieved it.

So, now I'm not regularly bathing, and that's the least of my hygiene concerns.

I share this not for sympathy, but because there's a strong sense overall that people become homeless and everything goes wrong at once -- and we just become degenerates. That isn't the case; many would like to bounce back, but as things continue to deteriorate, that simply becomes harder.

My dad dying means I'll have the funds sometime to file for bankruptcy and hopefully be able to get back on track, but that still looks like a long road.

I'm lucky that I have an exit ramp. Once one starts going down this rabbit hole, things just get more and more complex. When people talk about social services in standard media, this is all but ignored.

It's not just housing or jobs; it's literally needing to jumpstart your life with a dead battery. Bootstraps!

Throw in the increasing cruelty of services for the indigent, and you're creating the problem you're trying to scare people with.

Balance housing costs and wages, and I think you might be surprised how the homeless problem solves itself.

Maybe a few hippies want to be here, but the rest of us do not.

Bonus video of Swiss-German in the wild included. If you think German sounds harsh, you'll love the Zuerich dialect. At least it's all done in sing-song fashion, as is called for.

A real-world trial by scientists in Switzerland has demonstrated that wireless EV charging can achieve up to 90 percent efficiency compared with conventional cable-based systems, while offering far greater convenience.

Supported by the Swiss Federal Office of Energy and the cantons of Zurich and Aargau, the project, called INLADE, was carried out by researchers from Empa in collaboration with the electric utility Eniwa AG.

Through this first-of-its-kind initiative, the team tested wireless inductive charging under real-life conditions in Switzerland. They are certain that what has long been routine for phones and electric toothbrushes could soon become a reality for EVs.

“The aim was to test the existing technology in everyday use, clarify technical and regulatory issues and demonstrate its potential for the energy transition,” Mathias Huber, from Empa’s Chemical Energy Carriers and Vehicle Systems lab, said.

For decades, corn has reigned over American agriculture. It sprawls across 90m acres – about the size of Montana – and goes into everything from livestock feed and processed foods to the ethanol blended into most of the nation’s gasoline.

But a growing body of research reveals that the US’s obsession with corn has a steep price: the fertilizer used to grow it is warming the planet and contaminating water.

Corn is essential to the rural economy and to the world’s food supply, and researchers say the problem isn’t the corn itself. It’s how we grow it.

Corn farmers rely on heavy fertilizer use to sustain today’s high yields. And when the nitrogen in the fertilizer breaks down in the soil, it releases nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas nearly 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Producing nitrogen fertilizer also emits large amounts of carbon dioxide, adding to its climate footprint.

The corn and ethanol industries insist that rapid growth in ethanol – which now consumes 40% of the US corn crop – is a net environmental benefit, and they strongly dispute research suggesting otherwise.

I find myself with one spare Chromebook, and I figured I'd see what else I can do with it.

It was about this time 16 years ago that I started talking with my second ex-wife. We'd chatted briefly five years earlier, but she shut things down immediately.

And so when what happened happened, neither of us was in the mindset to fully process it. I was technically still married, and she wasn't exactly single.

As I've gone into excruciating detail before, no need here. The Cliff's Notes version is a lot of random shit happened in short order that rose to the level of weather causing us to meet.

Having spoken on the phone the night before, we confirmed my intent and need. I had an ex who'd gotten me a hotel room in Tacoma, Wash., but she reserved it starting Sunday night, and the friend I was crashing with moved the "out this weekend" goalposts from EOD Sunday to Friday.

I harbour no ill will toward him ... I'd overstayed the original "couple of weeks," so no issue there. I was able to crash with a former coworker for a night Saturday, which is where the phone call happened.

See, the issue was an ice storm on I-5. This simply doesn't happen; way too far west, but here we are.

So, driving up the 5 to Tacoma was unacceptably risky. And the woman I'd been talking to for a week lived on the South Coast of Oregon, which wouldn't be much warmer, but above freezing.

But what led to this improbable situation was how we immediately interacted. She was prickly for the first couple of rounds of messages, but then she somehow softened. I believe there's a term, tsundere, for this.

She was a hardened bitch (I don't say this derogatorily; she will happily admit as much herself) who didn't understand why she even said yes to my random ask.

One night. No funny business.

That fell apart almost comically in a few stages; needless to say, we ended up ... well, the first time was awkward because no one was there for that!

The problem is, we'd touched (her idea) while watching The Neverending Story, a movie her son was named after the main character of and also the first one I remember seeing as a child (it would later inform my preference for electronic music), and it happened to be in the place I would eventually come to revere to the point that it was my last physical address before everything fell apart and I was at her door.

States away.

I'll eventually write a book with all the details, but I'm not here to provide a history lesson; I'm here to talk about next Tuesday.

Because it is now tentatively planned, nine years after our divorce, that I visit for a couple of days. She brought it up this time, so my homelessness wasn't the motivating factor.

My dad dying a couple of weeks ago and her talking with my mom for the first time in years likely softened her stance.

I'm of two minds. At this point of mental chaos, between the death and other tangible problems, a couple of days with the person who knows me better than anyone else sounds really appealing.

Fiction, but we know it is. Her boys would not countenance me in her bed. And we have a two-day window, which she has opened.

It's a bizarre situation. Hell, just finally getting along for hours at a time on the phone after so many years was unexpected.

Ah, yes ... back to the scare tactics that the only use of a VPN is to access CSAM.

Almost Everyone Uses VPNs

Let’s talk about who lawmakers are hurting with these bills, because it sure isn’t just people trying to watch porn without handing over their driver’s license.

• Businesses run on VPNs. Every company with remote employees uses VPNs. Every business traveler connecting through sketchy hotel Wi-Fi needs one. Companies use VPNs to protect client and employee data, secure internal communications, and prevent cyberattacks.
• Students need VPNs for school. Universities require students to use VPNs to access research databases, course materials, and library resources. These aren’t optional, and many professors literally assign work that can only be accessed through the school VPN. The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s WiscVPN, for example, “allows UW–‍Madison faculty, staff and students to access University resources even when they are using a commercial Internet Service Provider (ISP).”
• Vulnerable people rely on VPNs for safety. Domestic abuse survivors use VPNs to hide their location from their abusers. Journalists use them to protect their sources. Activists use them to organize without government surveillance. LGBTQ+ people in hostile environments—both in the US and around the world—use them to access health resources, support groups, and community. For people living under censorship regimes, VPNs are often their only connection to vital resources and information their governments have banned.
• Regular people just want privacy. Maybe you don’t want every website you visit tracking your location and selling that data to advertisers. Maybe you don’t want your internet service provider (ISP) building a complete profile of your browsing history. Maybe you just think it’s creepy that corporations know everywhere you go online. VPNs can protect everyday users from everyday tracking and surveillance.

The alleged shooter of two National Guard members, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, was struggling with mental illness, his ability to support his family, and, according to an Afghan veteran who fought with him, his pleas for help to the CIA went unanswered.

Lakanwal, a 29-year-old Afghan national, served in a CIA-backed Afghan force unit, known as the “Zero Units,” in Kandahar. He is facing first-degree murder charges after Army Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, 20, died of her injuries following the Wednesday shooting near the Farragut West Metro station in Washington, D.C. Air Force Staff Sergeant Andrew Wolfe, 24, remains in critical condition.

Investigators are still working to establish a motive for the attack. Rolling Stone spoke to a former Afghan unit mate who pointed to financial pressure and ongoing apparent mental illness as a contributing factor. He also seems to have felt abandoned by the United States government.

“He’s very sad [depressed],” said Lakanwal’s Afghan unit mate, who is not a native English speaker. “He’s very worried. This problem, like, he’d say, ‘I am working nine years or 10 years with [the] U.S. government. [They] never answer my phone [call].’”

After the Taliban prevailed in America’s longest running war, Lakanwal resettled in Bellingham, Washington, with his wife and five sons in September 2021. His migration was aided by Operation Allies Welcome, a Biden-era initiative to resettle vulnerable Afghans, particularly those who worked alongside U.S. forces and faced reprisals from the Taliban.

My only question is, "What took them so long?"

OpenAI looks poised to repeat the same clangers that turned Amazon and YouTube into rolling billboards by shoving ads into ChatGPT.

The ChatGPT experience has so far been blissfully free of sales patter. There are paid tiers, but the bot never tried to flog you anything. Google Search went the other way and let ads steer buying choices, which trained people to skim past half the page.

Fresh code strings in the ChatGPT Android app show OpenAI drifting towards the same trap. Tibor spotted references to an “ads feature” with “bazaar content”, “search ad” and a “search ads carousel” in the 1.2025.329 beta. The whole thing looks like the same clutter that turned Amazon’s listings into a parade of sponsored tat.

If OpenAI pushes ahead, it could jolt the web economy because the outfit knows far more about users than Google ever did. It sees prompts that reveal what people want, dread and intend to buy. Personalised adverts wedged into that flow would make old-style targeting look prehistoric.