South Park Political Correctness

For a long time I have been a fan of South Park.  I love how nothing is off limits.  They will mock anything and everything as long as it’s funny.  I admire that.  Well, I just finished watching every episode they have released to date.  The last season is the reason for this post.  They took aim at the whole Politically Correct (PC) movement.  It’s awesome.

It’s no secret.  I hate political correctness.  That’s one of the reasons I am a fan of Donald Trump.  Don’t get me wrong.  I don’t like Donald Trump at all.  Not even a little bit.  He is a brash, egotistical, self-serving ass hat.  I know what people may think of that description.  I cleaned it up a lot before posting it.  But I am a fan of Donald Trump, because he says what he thinks, Political Correctness be damned.  I have a lot of respect for that.  And in that vein, I intend to make more posts to this site, the goal will be to voice some opinions that will not be popular with the PC crowd.  But such is my right according to the 1st amendment.

Here’s the thing about the Political Correctness movement.  They will proclaim people’s right to free speech.  But they don’t really believe in it.  It’s just lip service.  They only believe in free speech that agrees with their own views.  If your view differs from theirs, your words are labeled hate speech and they want to shout you down, stifle you, or outright silence you.  Well, this site, humble as it may be, is my platform to voice my opinions, and voice them I will.  With any luck, I will piss off a lot of Politically Correct people.  So, if you are a proponent of Political Correctness, go hide your Cheerios now.  I’m about to piss all up in them.

Oak Ridge Apocalypse

So, anyone that likes zombies may like to read a free zombie book.  It’s available at OakRidgeApocalypse.com.  The author is posting a new piece every week on Sunday.  I have it under good authority that there will be six pieces for Dusk of Man: Part One, and approximately another 12 pieces for Part Two.  And here is a small piece that won’t be posted for some time.

      Wayne drove slowly down the exit ramp into the rest area.  He was watching for movement and didn’t see any.  He carefully wound his way through the cars toward the building that promised vending machines and restrooms.  He took one last look around before killing the engine.  They climbed off the bike and Wayne pulled out the shotgun.  He noticed, with approval, that Misty had also pulled out her pistol.
      “Let’s see what we can find,” Wayne said, leading her towards the building.  He got to the doors and waited for Crystal to catch up.  “You ready?”
      “Yes,” she answered.
      Wayne pulled the door open and they stepped inside. There was a row of vending machines all down the left wall.  On the right were the entrances to the restrooms and a giant map of Tennessee with a big  ‘You Are Here’ star marking the rest area.
      “Let’s eat,” he said, heading for the vending machines.  As soon as the words were out of his mouth they heard the tell-tale moan of a zombie coming from the women’s restroom.  They whipped around in time to see it come shambling out of the lady’s room.  It had been a young woman in her mid-twenties.  It was wearing a dress that looked too big around the middle, and it had a huge dried bloodstain in its midsection.  Something was hanging out the bottom of the dress, and Wayne thought it looked like intestines, but it was dragging something behind the zombie.  He realized why it didn’t look right.  It was not an intestine, but an umbilical cord, and the thing being dragged behind her was the fetus.  It looked like it was about a month premature.  The dress was so loose around the middle because she had been pregnant when she died and turned into a zombie.  He could tell by the way her dress hung that her stomach, which had been inflated to the size of a beach ball, was hanging loose from where the baby had dug or eaten its way out.  She kept coming, and the thing at the end of the umbilical cord squirmed, unable to stand, but wanting to feed just as much.  Wayne registered all of this in a matter of seconds.  He turned and watched realization dawn in Misty’s eyes.
      “Crystal, stay back,” he said and brought the shotgun up.  He shot the woman through the side of her head.  The shotgun blast was deafening in the small building.  His ears were ringing from the blast.  She went down in a heap, but the baby still squirmed behind her.
      “Let me have the handgun,” Wayne said, motioning for the Ruger.  Wayne took it and aimed at the fetus’s head.  He fired a single shot, stilling the baby.  The pistol shot amplified the ringing in his ears.  He looked over at Crystal and she was holding her hands over her ears.  “Okay, about those vending machines,” Wayne said.  Crystal removed her hands from her ears and nodded.  They walked back over towards the vending machines.
      As Wayne’s ears stopped ringing, he heard more moaning, lots of it.  He looked out the back doors towards the woods behind the rest area.  “Crystal, we gotta go!” he yelled.  There were hundreds of zombies coming out of the woods.  They ran back out the front doors toward the motorcycle and saw zombies coming from everywhere.  Wayne got the shotgun back in his pack and jumped on the hike. Crystal climbed on behind him as he started it.  A group zombies were in the way of getting out.
      “You’ll have to shoot while we move,” Wayne yelled.  “Be careful not to drop the gun.” Then he shot forward and rode through a gap between two zombies.  He headed toward the fewest number of them.
      “Remember, the head,” he called back to Crystal.
      “I got it,” she called back.  She was holding on to Wayne with her left arm and had the Ruger in her right.  Wayne picked a group of three zombies and accelerated towards them.  The gun went off in his ear.  She hit one of them in the chest, not a kill shot, but it put the zombie on the ground.  Before she could shoot again, they collided with the other two. One of them got thrown to the side.  The other got a handful of Wayne’s shirt, but before he could get dragged off the bike the gun fired again.  Wayne saw the zombie grow a third eye and its hand fell limp off him.

Oak Ridge Apocalypse: Dusk of Man

New Bucket List Page

I may be a little late to the party, but they say late is better than never, or something like that.  For a long time I have known there are some things I wanted to do before I kick the bucket.  I’ve had a sort of mental bucket list for a few years, but there is something about writing it down that makes it more real.  So, here it is.  Or rather, HERE it is.

Maybe I shouldn’t make it public, but I figure, what’s the harm.  It’s really only here for me, so feel free to disregard.  See you later.

Extraordinary Compliment

Is it really a compliment to call someone extraordinary?  On the surface, it would appear to.  I mean, just look at the Dictionary.com definition for the word.  How could it not be a compliment?

extraordinary

[ik-strawr-dn-er-ee, ek-struh-awr-dn-er-ee]
adjective
1. beyond what is usual, ordinary, regular, or established: extraordinary costs.
2. exceptional in character, amount, extent, degree, etc.; noteworthy;remarkable: extraordinary speed; an extraordinary man.
3. (of an official, employee, etc.) outside of or additional to the ordinarystaff; having a special, often temporary task or responsibility.
UrbanDictionary.com offers a very similar definition.

extraordinary

(1) a very special thing
(2) something ordinary with something extra
oh! this is EXTRAORDINARY!
However, the prefix extra typically means that something is more, whatever.  Extra spicy is, well, more spicy.  Extra large is, bigger than large.  By that line of thinking, extraordinary would mean, more ordinary.  Is being more ordinary something to pursue?  It’s lake telling someone, “You’re so ordinary that you border on cliche.  You’re so ordinary, you make average look strange.  You’re so ordinary, you make the statistical mean look like an outlier.”  Sorry, I’ve been watching too much of The Big Bang Theory lately.
Calling someone extraordinary is to say they have no special qualities, nothing that sets them apart from the bland middle of society.  So don’t tell someone they are ordinary, or worse, extraordinary.  Tell them they are weird, strange, unique, one of a kind, and it’s their eccentric peculiarities and oddities that make them special.  Shun the ordinary, and especially the extraordinary. Be the outlier, and be proud of it.

Bitlocker is Awesome, and Sucks

I have been using Bitlocker for a little while now.  On the whole, it seems to do its job well enough.  I mean, it encrypts data to keep unauthorized people from accessing it.  That is its job, and that’s what it does.

The setup process is a bit difficult, if you don’t want the default settings.  By default it uses 128 bit AES encryption.  I prefer 256 bit, though it is arguable that it is overkill in today’s world.  However, the U.S. government requires 128 bit encryption or better for anything classified Secret, and 256 bit encryption for anything classified Top Secret.  They see a benefit in the added level of security that 256 bit encryption offers.  Since there is no difference in cost between the two, other than changing some settings, I figured I would go for the better encryption.  That part is trivial compared to getting my other requirement working properly.  I wanted my computer to make proper use of the TPM module, and load an encryption key from my hardware encrypted thumb drive, and require a lengthy completely random alpha numeric password to boot.  It’s easy to get bitlocker to use any one of those unlocking methods, and maybe even any two of the three, but getting all three simultaneously was quite difficult.  Boo.

I jumped through all of the required hoops to get bitlocker working just like I wanted, and it is working beautifully.  I now have full disk encryption on all of the hard drives in my computer.  Awesome, right?  Well, not completely.  I enabled encryption on my Western Digital MyBook 6TB drive.  All was going fine until an error at roughly 74.6%.  It rendered the entire volume unreadable.  I attempted to run a bitlocker recovery on it.  It kept telling me it required another volume of equal or greater size to the one being recovered.  I had to go buy another 6TB drive to attempt to recover the broken one.  The recovery ran for over 24 hours, and recovered exactly nothing.  So, I lost my entire 4.5TB media library.  Double Boo!

On the bright side, I now have two bright and shiny, squeaky clean, blank, 6TB hard drives.