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Sports

I grew up with sports.

I used to watch my favorite NFL football team play every weekend and couldn’t wait for the Super Bowl. I remember getting depressed after the All-Star game because I knew there would be no football until next season.

I actually liked the XFL and I loved that it filled the gap of the missing NFL. It only lasted for a season which sucked royal money balls.

I turned 50 and something happened. I’m not sure exactly what it was but I started to not care as much about football as I once did. I’m pretty sure the enormous salaries had something to do with it. I’m sure making teams change their name because someone is “offended” may also have something to do with it. I think it was the money mostly.

Right now, the Washington Redskins don’t even know who the hell they are. The people that are offended aren’t even the people that are supposed to be offended. The real Redskins (the Indians for you new people) don’t give a fuck.

When the coronavirus hit, sports because the last thing on Earth that people actually cared about and I was ok with that. I guess it took the pandemic for me to realize just how insignificant sports really is. The sports went away for a period of time and everything was ok.

This is from an article in today’s paper.

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First of all, these kids did NOT lose everything last year. They are still fucking alive aren’t they? You fucking moron.

Everyone didn’t die. The newspaper was a lot more fun to read for me because the sports section (if it was in the paper at all) was only a page or half of a page.

To sum up this article…

…fuck sports.

March 28, 2021 by Mike Williams Blah Blah Blah Opinion

Baby Bottle Service

How about your favorite coffee beverage served in a baby bottle?

No. I am not making this up.

From my daily newspaper…

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I’d link to the whole story but since it’s a paywall, I’ll refrain.

March 22, 2021 by Mike Williams Blah Blah Blah

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

…or as I used to say back in the 90’s.

Happy “would have been” Birthday Grandma!

I think of her often. She was a wonderful lady.

As I go onto Google this morning, I have to ask myself “why is this google so fucking lame?”

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No traditional St. Patrick’s Day anything in this.

Well, at least its green.

March 17, 2021 by Mike Williams Blah Blah Blah Opinion

Fake People

Let’s face the reality. People are shit.

With that being said, it is little wonder why this story is relevant.

Researchers at Netease Fuxi AI Lab and University of Michigan have recently created MeInGame, a deep learning technique that can automatically generate character faces by analyzing a single portrait of a person’s face. This technique, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv, can be easily integrated into most existing 3D videogames.

Pretty soon. We won’t even need the “real” input photo and computers will just generate characters for us. I am also going to assume that computers will also generate fake voices to go along with it.

What does that mean?

It means big movie studios will be able to make a movie without all of the overhead of the actors. I’m sure there will be labor rattling in the beginning but actors are expensive. They also can say bad things in public, hurt your brand, etc.

A computer that you control, will probably not do that.

March 5, 2021 by Mike Williams Blah Blah Blah

Cancel Culture

I am surprised to see this from California.

“Cancel culture and the efforts to silence differing opinions and voices should be a growing concern for all of us,” said state Sen. Melissa Melendez, R-Lake Elsinore. “A climate of intolerance has been established and has stifled healthy and normal debate. Anyone who values their own freedom of speech should be concerned.”

February 27, 2021 by Mike Williams Blah Blah Blah Cancel Culture

A Comment About Time

I had a rather interesting thought today about why I may become bothered when I get a call or a text or an email or an instant message outside of normal working hours.

I think the answer is a perceived “give” and “take.”

For example, I am giving the company I work for 12 hours.

If anyone contacts me outside of those 12 hours, it may feel like they are “taking” or “stealing” my time.

They obviously are not. The work needs to get done and not everyone in the world is on my schedule.

I always enjoy taking a moment and trying to figure out why I might be feeling the way that I do. As I get older, it is a more practiced exercise that I enjoy.

When I was younger, probably not so much.

February 14, 2021 by Mike Williams Blah Blah Blah

Once Upon a Time on Earth

I just finished writing the fourth entry into my short story collection called 60 Pages.

I like this story and definitely felt like this could have easily been a novel. I even left the end of the story open for that purpose.

Here is a summary I wrote for it…

An alien fleet discovers that Earth has unlocked the powers of magic. In a universe still reeling from a previous conflict the goals are clear.

This new threat must be neutralized.

With help from an unlikely source, the humans prepare for the battle of their lives as they defend their world and their way of life from a threat light years more technically advanced than they are.

In the end, the only real question is who will win? Will the aliens save the galaxy from the new magical threat or will humanity survive to fight another day?

February 7, 2021 by Mike Williams Blah Blah Blah Writing

Learning

Since this is my website I can write about whatever I feel like writing about. Today, I’d like to say a few things about learning.

I used to have a membership to a weird little website called Lynda.com. I found it because some of the Photoshop podcasts I followed would often advertise that they had more content on Lynda.com. It was a weird name so I stayed away until one day, I didn’t.

I signed up and began learning all kinds of things. It was mostly technical and had a lotto do with work related applications but it was a place you could go and learn pretty much anything.

And then LinkedIn, a site that I didn’t really like although I can’t remember why bought Lynda.com. I was almost devastated but I quickly got over it as the site kept the logo and all was good. It did hound me to upgrade to LinkedIn Learning which I ignored for a very large amount of time, until I didn’t.

I am using LinkedIn Learning now and I really like it. I exceed my goal of 120 minutes of learning time every week. One week, I ended up with over 400 minutes.

This isn’t a paid advertisement but if you are so inclined. I would recommend them.

February 3, 2021 by Mike Williams Blah Blah Blah

Uninstalling Adobe Creative Cloud

I uninstalled the Adobe suite this morning on my M1 MBP and I’ll tell you why.

It was consuming mass amounts of my CPU time. It wasn’t a fair amount. Yesterday it clocked the CPU at nearly 100%. Why? That is a good question for an app that I wasn’t even using.

I wasn’t using Photoshop, Lightroom, or Bridge. According to my monkey brain logic, that means that Adobe should not have been using any of my CPU. Even if you are checking for updates, you don’t need to check that often and you most certainly don’t need to keep phoning home about it.

The programming is ridiculous and I can’t believe that more people haven’t complained about it. I have 16 gigs of RAM and it was still an issue for me.

There are other apps on the market besides Photoshop. I don’t use it very often anyway.

Well, that is why I decided to remove it. I’ll spend some time today trying to find something that works close enough that I can continue to create the banner that I use it for.

Bye Adobe. No. You can’t have all of my CPU.

February 1, 2021 by Mike Williams Blah Blah Blah

Aliens: Come and Get It!

This is my #1 reason why I think aliens will have an easy time of conquering our planet should the need arise.

A vast majority of the human race whole heartedly believes (sights unseen) in completely made up and imaginary things. That makes them gullible as a species and deserving of eradication. Humans are simply too stupid to exist in the grander universe at large.

The #2 reason is that the human monkeys kill each other. It is difficult to say which should be #1 and which should be #2. They are both just as bad.

People say that we should focus on the good things about humanity. To me, that is like asking the same thing when talking about a serial killer. For example “sure, he killed 15 people but he donated to charities.”

As I was searching for a picture for this post, I found this…