Punkie

About 4 days. multiple times. I was really poor once. I used to take Tylenol and Tums to keep away the hunger pains, and I am surprised I still have a liver and kidneys.

Kept women with Instagram influencer vibes selling Lulu Roe or whatever. Usually has a job listed as a “realtor” but don’t actually sell houses. Houses are always McMansions with gray floors, white walls, and vaulted ceilings. They have kids are named Jaydenn, Ashleigh, Brittany, Colt, and Madison. Their skin is tanned, taught, and they always smell of product.

Electrical power? I mean, not including camping, I think 4-5 days after a major storm.

The record is my maternal grandmother who lived to either 86 or 89, depending on what birth record you use.

I have a kaleidoscope for the blind.

One of only 150 or 250 made (I forget which). The artist (Reinhold Marxhausen) got Alzheimer’s in his final years, and is probably dead now. It looks like a metal blob, but the inside is hollow and it has are springs that vibrate and make tones to the slightest touch and heat change. Just shake it and hold it to your ear. It makes different and unique sounds depending on who is holding it, the weather, the air temperature, and so on.

I got it from a kaleidoscope collector, who sold it to me because the small handmade box it came in was damaged in shipping, and it wasn’t worth as much without the box. I keep it in a handmade suede bag.

Edit: I made an Imgur post about it: https://imgur.com/gallery/kaleidoscope-blind-Ab8Xz

Not mine, but from a post: First, you’re never going to win a head-on battle with an adversary that’s got you outgunned. That’s not the point of the Resistance. The point is to create friction, make it hard for your adversary to operate, to increase transaction costs.

Second, resistance doesn’t have to be a dramatic act. It can be a small act, like losing a sheet of paper, taking your time processing something, not serving someone in a restaurant. Small acts taken by thousands have big effects.

Third, use your privilege and access if you’ve got it. He and his buddies stole weapons from the Nazis by driving up with a truck to the weapons depot, speaking German, acting like it was a routine pick up, and driving away.

Fourth, part of the third point really, sometimes the best way to do things is right out in the open. Because no one will believe something like what you’re doing would be happening so blatantly. All good Social Engineers know this.

Five, bide your time. But be ready for opportunity when it strikes. Again, your action need not be dramatic. Just a little sand in the gears helps.

Six, and this is a no-brainer, operate in cells to limit damage to the resistance should they take you out. Limit the circulation of info to your cell, avoid writing things down and…

Seven, be very careful with whom you trust. Snitches and compromised individuals are everywhere. My dad was arrested because of a snitch. His friends weren’t so lucky, the Gestapo machine gunned the cabin they were in without bothering to try and arrest them.

Eight, use the skills you have to contribute. Dad was an electrical engineer. When the Nazis imposed the death penalty for owning a radio (the British sent coded messages to the Resistance after BBC shows) he said he became the most popular guy in town.

I also wonder what the trade value of gold might have been in that universe? For all we know, it might be an either/or situation. Like “Well, I could have my favorite takeout every Friday for a year, OR the newest smartphone.” Both are tempting but for different reasons. Like, “I could buy a lot of turnips, potatoes, and beer with one golden smurf and not have to worry every month if I have enough food, but then they taste REALLY good on their own.” Gargamel struck me as someone who didn’t have a lot of money, so having been poor myself, I understand this weird conundrum. Also, having a golden smurf to trade might bring unwanted attention from locals would who assume he has LOTS of them, and rob his home looking for them.

Yes. Most of them were east-to-find solutions on the web, or someone else giving me access. “Can you reset my password on Blah?” “Try TempP@ass123.” “I’m in, changed password. Thanks.”

A few times when I am really acting like a Senior Linux Administrator is figuring out a kludge or back door nobody had thought of. Recently, a client told me that the former admin had left and didn’t leave the password to over 300 systems (it turns out he did, the client was clueless, but I didn’t know that in the moment). I found every system the admin had access to, and looked for a dev box where he had access but I could take down during production hours. I took it down, booted into init with /bin/bash, changed root password, brought it back up. Then I checked his home directory to see what public keys he had. Based on that, I checked to see if there were any private keys on the bastion systems that matched as a pair (using ssh-keygen -l -f on each pair to see if the signatures matched). They checked which pair had no password. That was pretty quick because I quickly discovered a majority of these cloud systems also had an ec2-user that could escalate to root via private/public key pairs (it is supposed to be removed for security reasons, but wasn’t). Within a few hours, I had full access back to all their systems. Without taking down production.

I was 38? Not sure. I was a teetotaller. I didn’t drink because alcoholism ruined both sides of my family, and I didn’t want to even be tempted. Drinking and being drunk had no appeal. When I drank ANY alcohol, my face would swell up: lips, tongue, sinuses, and throat. And that was stuff like Nyquil, or my wife at the time always wanted me to “just sip this foo-foo drink, and tell me it’s not great!” My wife drank (responsibly) and liked big, fruity drinks, and she always wanted me to taste what she was having. My lips would swell up, but I always figured that was because I never drank and was a lightweight.

I was at a friend’s wedding in Salem. Her side had maybe 5 people. The groom’s side had over 100. The groom’s side was Greek, and despite my multiple attempts to rebuff their stuffing wine down my mouth, it ended up happening because of stupid peer pressure. I probably had 2/3rds of a bottle. I felt like I had the biggest ENT infection ever; I saw amber, and then blacked out. Only I didn’t. I was later told that “your face was red, but it was hard to see in all the dim lighting (it was an outdoor event). You seemed a little out of it, but I was drunk, soooo…” I woke up at the groom’s brother’s house in their guest bed. No memory of how I got there. I wasn’t sick, as apparently I drank a lot of water, but I was pretty fucking terrified.

Everyone said I was nice, chatty, and I know I was awake because I texted sexy things to my wife. “Oh my god, you’re drunk, and I am not there to see it!” was one of her replies. Shit. My nose was runny, I could barely swallow, and when I looked in the mirror, it looked like I had rosacea. When I went down to the kitchen, the bride and groom were there, and my friend said “you don’t look so good.” I told her what had happened, and she got REALLY angry, since it was her father in law who had made me drink (he claimed if i didn’t drink his imported wine, he would be insulted, and it was bad luck). I drank lots of water, and eventually, the swelling went down and I could breathe normally. No sir, I didn’t like it. I didn’t see the appeal of being drunk.

Later, I decided that I wasn’t mad about it. I had decided to just deal with the effects of alcohol instead of making a scene at a Greek wedding. “I can now say I was drunk once, I didn’t die or make a fool of myself, and I still didn’t like it.” It kind of cemented “I will never drink,” and I still haven’t at 56.

A few years later, they were doing an allergy test, and it turns out I am allergic to alcohol. Not like anaphylaxis, but something called “flush” which is common with Asians, apparently (I am not Asian). That’s why my body reacts that way, only I didn’t know it because I never drank.

I look at it like, he kept us safe! Couldn’t hurt, right?

Give them time to write it up! They police are having problems with the shared Google Doc permissions.

The DC Metro system has no public bathrooms. This causes problems, if you can imagine. I was starting my first week of work in Silver Spring, and as I was exiting the station, there was a woman in leather spandex stirrup pants yelling at the station manager she needed to use the bathroom. The station manager told her “we don’t have bathrooms, lady.” Back and forth as I passed them. Then the woman just said, “A-IIGHT!” backed up, pulled down the spandex, pulled aside her thong, squatted, and dropped a huge, coiling log right in front of the turnstiles.

We had a homeless (?) guy named “Gandalf.” he was named that because he wore a stadium jacket with a broken zipper, tied at the waist with a rope, big floppy hat, and a cane. Used to rant in tongues. Near where I worked was the (now former) Discovery Building, and during “Shark Week,” they put a HUGE inflatable shark “through” the building (head on one side, tail on the other. This thing was stories high). Gandalf used to spend time across the street, shouting biblical phrases at it like he was banishing some demon. Thanks for keeping us safe, Gandalf.

Before they build the STSS, there were “gangster types” that would hang around, gun handles poking from their waistbands. That stopped the DAY after football player Plaxico Burress nearly shot his dick off in a nightclub by having his gun stored in a similar way. Never saw guys flashing their gun like that since.

I usually do if the feeling is mutual. Like, if I am always the one reaching out, I’ll eventually stop, and usually they don’t even notice.

Probably see the dinosaurs in the late Cretaceous. Just before the KT extinction. I want to know how accurate we are about what dinosaurs looked like. All we know are from the bones and some fossilized skin and feathers here and there. I bet there are a TON of animals we don’t even know about because they were never fossilized. What did the T-Rex use their little arms for? Were dinosaurs covered with waddles, weird skin flaps, some hairy stuff, and what color were they? For comparison, if we drew modern animals like we draw dinosaurs from just their skeletons:

Stuffing and mashed potatoes. I make the mashed potatoes, and I am really good at it. I am not sure why, since it’s just ordinary yellow (or russet, depends on what they have) potatoes, milk, salt, and butter. I don’t even peel them, but it gets all the rave reviews.

I think the longest was 4 days when I was 12/13 as kind of a “I wonder if I can?” I was pretty much neglected as a kid, so I was left up to my own creative paths, and there was a time when I was trying out all kinds of new age stuff of the late 1970s and early 1980s. I think one of the things I read about was something experimental called “Delta sleep,” where you could get a night’s worth of sleep for just 2 hours only. I am sure it was new age bullshit, but “the army is experimenting with this” and so I decided to give it a try, using a biofeedback machine home kit that I had. This led to, among other things, parasomnias, but my record was 4 days with no sleep (roughly 80 hours, so less than 4 days technically).

For lack of a better term, things became “crispy.” Like too in-focus, too real, too stark. Colors were too bright, sounds were too loud, edges of thing were too defined. We all have a mask that we present to the world where there is a buffer of self versus your environment, and that was gone. My short term memory became horribly degraded, and I started seeing moving shadows where there were none, and certain things had “vibrations” and others did not. I can’t tell you which had what, because I couldn’t figure it out, and I suspected towards the end I was hallucinating, anyway. So what I am saying in all this was that’s what I remember, and I am not sure if my memories are 100% accurate. I wrote stuff down, but toward the third 24 hour period, it was indecipherable afterwards.

“Okay, the trees are like lungs of the earth… how exactly? And why is the letter X written everywhere?”

So my end opinion after all those experiments was “if you don’t sleep on the regular, your brain starts to malfunction, and not in a fun way.”

Since that time, the longest as an adult was 46 hours, when I worked a 12 hour swing shift at a vastly understaffed International; help desk, and my second called in sick for two days. So I did my 12, she called in sick so I did her 12, and then I did my 12, and after another 10 hours my boss found someone to let me go home. I was in poor shape. I never want to do that again. The desk record was 54 hours, when a snowstorm prevented anyone from getting to or leaving the building, but that was someone else, and I believe the company set up cots for everyone trapped.

One of my best friends lost her place of living when her boyfriend of 4 years said the relationship had actually ended in his head 2 years previously, but he needed the rent. But then he found a new girlfriend to grift from, “opened the relationship,” and they edged my friend out. I am still mad they did that to her; she was so heartbroken and damaged from that.

Layoffs are not bad press. Not to the shareholders, the only ones who matter to these types. I used to think “oh, layoffs mean the company isn’t doing so good,” but shareholders see “they reduced cost but lost no customers, thus increasing value of the company should it be sold.”

I was out of sugar, so I tried to sweeten Kool-Aid with honey. Nope. Just god-awful.

When eventually washed off, the aerogel is handily broken down by soil microbes.

I am not going to claim to be an expert on any of this BUT that wording sounds suspiciously like bullshit. Maybe it’s not, but it’s one of those phrases that sounds like when vitamin companies claim that more B12 has shown to fix whatever ails you. Or “our plastic is environmentally friendly: 100% recyclable, and breaks down into teeny micro-particles over time, and gets absorbed by the sea life like ordinary sand…”