3.14 And A Piece of A Pie

Everything is in there, somewhere

Job – as expected, I haven’t gotten jack shit from the yearly review, but it’s mostly because I’ve been there less than a year. So no hard feelings. I’d say the good outweigh the bad still in this situation. There will be a real talk next year and it’s probably going to be “make it or break it” kind of a deal

Entertainment – watched the first season of Happy! – damn, that was one funny shit they’ve made. Pretty hardcore with dark humor and poking fun at almost everything – from Die Hard to My Little Pony. Loved the show.

Next thing I watched was the Triple Frontier – a Netflix movie. Honestly – I wasn’t impressed. I don’t know why, but the whole movie just didn’t strike the chord with me. It’s not that there’s nothing happening, it’s just not the stuff that’s happening doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t add up in my head. And with the cast – I sort of expected better characters, less cardboard, and more meat and bones.

Photography – hasn’t shot anything new yet, but edited the fuck out of previous shoot I’ve done. Also, started sorting through the shoots I didn’t edit last year, so there’s more material coming up. The thing is now instead of one or two images per look I am picking several – and that takes a lot of time to edit. I almost feel like I am pushing myself to shoot better images out of camera, to save time on edits. Let’s see how this Sunday’s going to pan out.

As I was figuring out the phpBB for communities I’ve been testing Facebook integration. Unfortunately, phpBB isn’t going to cut it – the FB integration is very rudimentary and probably isn’t going to work in the long run. I mean – I am still pretty good with technology and I still couldn’t figure out how to log in. I am pretty sure the target audience would be at a loss. With that said – a VERY NSFW picture.

don’t even try… ah, who am i kidding

Sunday, Monday – Who Cares

When it’s almost 3 AM – which day is it, really?

Job – so it’s been a weekend and I was doing something else. In the meantime, the company is “trimming fat”, so I guess it should start exercising 🙂

Interesting read from one of the guys I have been following. He’s not bad and he’s preaching some smart stuff, but as all the people who have something to sell, he’s selling too hard. I understand, he has to – and should probably learn from him. However, the point he’s making is that the overall economy is moving towards selling cheap shit on Amazon and doesn’t benefit anyone except Amazon. While I agree that selling on Amazon does benefit Amazon alone, I doubt we’re already reaching the point where everyone’s a Besos slave.

However, he’s making a good point on cheap labor markets are stealing and copying shit. He states: “Anything that could be stolen and faked – will be stolen and faked”. 99% of the shit that is being faked is luxury items where you’re not paying for quality or craftsmanship – you’re paying for brand that represents quality and craftsmanship from far away past. So I am not worried about that.

He then arrives (via a couple of logical steps) at the point that virtual “world” or “virtual reality” has a larger capacity then the actual real world. I am not arguing with this point, however, I am not sure what kind of economy would exist in the world where every single provider would want to print their own money. Also, see – lootboxes. Good luck with creating economy there.

Life Drama – I had about an hour of spare time today, so I went back to chat people up on Facebook. Some of the groups refreshed some of the members, so it was fun. Old farts showed up in a couple of topics, but I happened not to clash with anyone – which was surprising. But it did get me back to the feeling of wasted time and constant interruptions. So I’ll probably stay away from it for a while longer.

Photography – almost caught up with the latest shoot (damn, I had a lot of material from it) and forced myself to work on a pinup poster from June last year. Yeah, that whole “asshole of the year” award. Surprisingly the model was extremely nice about it, so I feel even worse. Usually they just lash out at me and I shut them off, but this one was the exact opposite. So I guess I’ll have to finish them all soon.

Absolutely safe for everyone

It’s Almost Wednesday, So It’s A Post

Start on Tuesday, so the title is legit

Job – things are progressing in a weird and uncomfortable way. Should probably start looking around for a spell, at least I’ll know where I stand. Too bad I’d have to start going to some office or something – kinda like this working from home thing.

On the other hand, I don’t think I have time to have my own career to stagnate for another couple of years. I mean – it’ll probably recover at some point, but we’ll see where we stand way sooner.

Life Drama – not much is happening there. I kind of started recovering from all the shit that was happening between 2015 and 2019, so that’s a good thing. Start noticing this when you have time and desire to do little personal projects or just fix things around or do some exploration. Should start reading them books, I guess.

Photography – also, drama. One model thought another model thought wrong, so she have her a piece of mind. Which the other one returned. And I almost ended in the middle of it. Thankfully, that shit wrapped up real quick and I was able to avoid participation. We’ll see if this comes back in any way, but for now – it’s over. In the meantime, I am slowly editing some images here and there and actually enjoying it again.

Posted another shibari picture on Reddit and got a couple of responses from people wanting to do the scene. Not sure how I feel about it.

But i feel good about this picture

Random Wednesday Wake Up

Because I was too busy yesterday. And day before. And before…

Job – things are churning on, as always. Demo, calls, emails. Calls, emails, demo. Occasional talking-to to little old me, because why not.

An interesting thing is that now I am starting to see and understand how so many startups got underway so quickly – and why they were so easy to catch on. I knew why it happened, I didn’t have a chance to actually experience that “a-ha!” moment until recently. Basically, it’s that well-known fact that large companies are too big to innovate and smaller and more agile (in a common sense of the word) player comes in and – kaboom! – disruption. It’s actually a very healthy fun to see how exactly these large companies cannot innovate because they’re so large. Also, apparently I’ve been living under a rock and didn’t hear about Disney buying Fox until yesterday. So what I think is happening now is companies willingly turn themselves into these huge dinosaurs, slow and easy to prey on.

What would be interesting (to draw technology analogy here) is if companies go the way of micro-services. A company willingly chop itself up into small pieces, fast and agile enough to compete with disruptors at every step of the way. Now, this would be interesting. Globalization resulting in micro-segregation. That’s an interesting concept.

The Works – Moved the 12 posts from 2001 (or something) and dumped iDoWriting. Now it redirects here. I don’t care about that old concept anymore, it’s been fucking 18 years.

Also, testing the forum (phpBB for now) to see if I can completely segregate the users to one category/forum. I know the functionality is there, just want to make sure I know how to do it. The goal is to replace the FB groups with something off-FB so that their rules would not apply.

Photography – back to doing shoots. But this feeling of one-night-stand is fucking exhausting. I want people I can rely on. I want people I could trust and do some complex concepts with without wondering if they’re going to ghost me at the last moment. I know I want too much, but still – I want that damn piece of mind.

Rated NC-17

Drawing A Blank

Have no idea what to select as a title. Drawing a blank.

Job – the beatings will continue until morale improves. Well, it’s about a month and a half until the end of the March, we’ll see what’ll happen then. My bet – nothing major, which will trigger me looking, which will trigger the hostility, which will trigger me looking even faster and round and round and round we go again.

There is, of course, always a chance that someone up there will turn up just a little smarter than usual, but even if they were – why would they bother? I don’t get my expectations higher than usual.

Stargate Atlantis Rewatch – done! That CSI episode (Vegas) always makes me sad. Besides, it’s weird that not a single person from SGC had said – let’s beam down the containment team to pick up the pieces. And rescue Sheppard, while we’re at it. Sad.

Photography and Instagram (somewhat new topic) – decided to try out a few auto-posting services for Instagram. Created a secondary account, bought a subscription at Postfly.io and – kaboom! – it expired the next day. Now I am trying to contact the seller (TheNextWeb) and the Postfly Automation website to get it restored. Obviously no one is responding within reasonable time. TNW has a funny return policy, saying – if you ask for refund via PayPal we will cancel your TNW account and forever ban you on our website. Because – reasons. Will give them another couple of days, since obviously, all interns are busy at the moment and they’ll return your call as soon as they stop jerking off in the bathroom.

Also trying out Later – another scheduling service that allows combining Instagram, Twitter, FB and a couple of others (Google+, anyone?). Looks a lot more professional, will keep an eye out on the sales.

Friday – I’m In Love

Back to the writing

Job – I’ve got not just one, not event two, but three emails from my boss saying he liked the shit I am doing. I was worried there for a bit until I remembered that during one of the meetings he mentioned that he doesn’t feel well and is on antibiotics. While I do want him to feel better (he’s a good human and a smart guy), I figured this explains the emails. Oh, well, let’s see what the next week will bring.

Stargate Atlantis Rewatch – I still firmly believe that wraith are an evolved version of vegans from Milky Way galaxy. Convince me otherwise!

Photography – editing through the backlog. Posted a couple of updates to Zealus Media – my main photography web site. Almost immediately got this shit from Tumblr:

So, basically, fuck you, Tumblr – says I and deletes the account. Bye, Felicia. Where there is no trust – there is no safety. See the image I posted below, there’s more here.

FUCK YOU TUMBLR

And Wednesday’s Blue

My fucking back hurts like a motherfucker.

Job – pushing through, although it seems like the more I push the less interest it generates up above my chain of command. It’s a complex product and it takes the time and the patience. And, apparently, while we enjoy the former, we severely lack the latter. At the very least I’ve got good experience, and at most – we’ll actually succeed in moving this damn skyscraper of a product into the market.

Stargate Atlantis rewatch – Broken Ties and the first half of Daedalus Variations. I remember when I watched Variations the first time, it was one of the very few episodes in the franchise when I actually was concerned with team’s fate. I didn’t believe for a second that they’re not going to survive, but the episode as a whole came very close to my pain threshold. Basically, knowing it’s the last season you think that anything can happen. They can pull Pa’u Zotoh Zhaan on any character or put someone on the bus for the sake of wrapping the show (Dr. Janet Frasier, anyone?). Or, you know, replace Rodney from this reality with one from one of the alternative ones. Fun!

Amazon Wishlist – done, go buy me shit! Support your favorite artist photographer. Aside from coffee, that I require to function properly (I can function without it, but you’re not going to like it), everything else on that list is about photography. I promise! And most of it isn’t even expensive. Well, except that monitor thingy. Actually, here’s a novel idea – anyone who’s getting me stuff under $100 gets a custom printed random photo – say 5×7 – mailed to them, under $250 – 8×10, above $250 – 12×18. Random photo. Same way I don’t get to choose what you buy from that list – you don’t get to choose what I will print. However, keep coming back to this blog and you’ll see what you may get in the mail. This shit’s not on Instagram or Facebook because it’s censored.

Uncensored 18+ stuff

Tuesday’s Gray

Mostly because nothing of significance happens and it’s all just a wall of a gray woosh.

Job – spent some pretty productive hours and learned a thing or two about one of the major technology companies. Can’t say what, can’t say who, but I am flabbergasted. Pushed some buttons, pushed some people. Interesting how some shit’s coming around and around.

Guess that’s why I can’t just up and start writing stuff every day about every day. On one hand I am busy doing things, on the other hand – some (most) of it is boring, some of it is under NDA, and some just my private shit that is so not interesting…

Stargate Atlantis – as I moved to fifth season in my re-watch, I had an idea. Wraith are just next iteration of predatory vegetarians. We have vegans and vegetarians who don’t eat meat, fish, eggs, whatnot. Then we have some who only consume sunlight. Obviously they die out rather quickly because their bodies aren’t equipped with necessary mechanisms to consume sunlight as energy. That’s basically what Wraith have – a mechanism to consume a “life force” (energy) but not from the Sun – this would have made them true vegetarians, but from other life forms. And this is exactly what makes them predatory.

Home IT – my desktop started staggering today, which is pretty fucking unexpected. So I went straight into Task Manager… and holy crap – I’ve got Chrome eating up 30% of CPU time and about 4GB of RAM for six tabs. While Firefox sits at 15% with 3GB of RAM running twice that many tabs open, half of them – Gmail and Outlook email accounts, which is pretty heavy. As a first approximation experiment – kicked the Chrome off and loaded same tabs in Firefox Developer, just to keep the two browser picture. Both CPU and RAM consumption immediately dropped. I’ll run similar test tomorrow with MS Edge, but it kind of doesn’t make sense as they’re moving to Chromium anyway. Still, pretty indicative how shitty the Chrome have become – practically an IE 6.0 all over again.

Practical idea – instead of Patreon, OnlyFans and other crap – just run the Amazon wish list. You like my work – buy me something I need to continue doing my work. Speaking of work – today’s Instagram picture.

Uncensored

Sh*t, It’s Monday Again

Okay, so daily thing isn’t really working out yet. But at least it’s a weekly thing, so there’s that.

Job – last week was busy. Went for quarterly business review with one of the BUs, prepared the new deck for account managers, revised some stuff, did the sales pipeline. Waiting for feedback on my BU visit, apparently, I am so far from good graces I ought to start looking again. On the other hand – got some good stuff done, someone got a new idea into my head. So things are in motion. Also, I’ve been a good boy and filed away all my expenses in Concur in less than a month. That never happened to me before. One of the feedbacks I so painfully crafted was marked as “Very Useful”. Have no idea what it means to me.

Got a certificate for my product management training I had attended 2 weeks ago. I passed, but the level wasn’t high enough to go into being an instructor. Oh, well, something else will come along. In the meantime I’ve got a five-second satisfaction ping by updating my Linkedin.

Public – got to serve on jury duty today. Unlike last time I was asked to participate in juror selection but it looked like the lawyers had some issues with my impartiality. Honestly, I had those issues too, so they let me free. Which means free for the next 8 years or so.

Photography – trying to work through the backlog of images. For some weird reason, I want to shoot more, but I don’t want to edit. It’s weird because I used to enjoy editing as much as shooting, but now – this. Weird. But I am still chugging along, although at a miserable pace. Hopefully, I’ll be done by this summer. The good news is that I got published on a cover – again! Awesome news!

18+ as always

A Week Wooshed

Obviously, the whole week just wooshed by without me writing a single line. Damn!

A recap.

Monday – lots of work in preparation for a trip. Tuesday – even more work, in preparation for a trip. Half a day working and trying to get into a damn car to drive. As I have arrived – went to eat some Chick-Fil-As and visit a local Home Depot. Got me three poles, extremely rough rope and a splinter in the palm. Then worked until 1 AM to cover everything I won’t be able to do in the next three days.

Wednesday, Thursday and Friday – studying, eating, studying, eating, studying with the test at the end. I forgot how to even do that. So my brain is overtaxed as it is – and it turns out I have to work on a weekend. So essentially, I am lucky that casting call didn’t pan out and no one responded – I hardly had any time for that.

Of course this had to be a week someone dumped a 400GB of passwords from pretty much everywhere and I had to spend several hours pouring over most of the accounts I care about resetting passwords.

Aside from many sites not existing anymore, the fun part are the websites that don’t allow you to reset passwords for one reason or another. Case in point – Apple, that requires you to own an Apple device to reset an old password. Nice try, Apple, but no.

Another thing is, apparently, MySpace still exists. I indulged in a pleasure of deleting my account there. Felt really good.

The 500 GB harddrive from my secondary workstation has finally died, so I pulled a couple of 500 GB drives from my “spare” drawer only to find out they used to be parts of Miscrosoft’s StorageSpaces and I never had a chance to reset them. Took care of it, now I can waste them away. The dead 500 went into garbage.

Inherited a GSM-friendly LG G5 that cost me $30 to unlock. Have no idea why I would need it, but whatever. You never know. Setting it up for the secondary Instagram account – it would be interesting to see how to grow a social media account in 2019.

Speaking of Instagram and pictures that cannot go there…

18+