Cardhouse Unsure Disconnected Disassociated Flailing Systems.

Arc Raiders: May your strings echo through the Rust Belt. [20sec]

Achievement unlocked: guitar. That one-song recorder thing needed a lift. I would just play a few notes, walk a bit, play a few notes. There’s a sort of unwritten rule not to dome recorder players, not that that’s followed 100%. “We’re putting the band back together”

So far I only have two nicknames for the ro-bots. Mr. French for the crawly thing that shoots five bajillion machine gun rounds BRRRRRTTTTT, and Sky Asshole for the fella you just saw in the video. It’s subtle.

2025dec14.

Got a letter in the Cardhouse mailbag the other day.

Hey, I dig your cynical takes. I’m interested in your services; can you give me a quick rundown of pricing and what’s included?

That’s the full message. “Services.” Uhhh what TYPE of services, there’s a lot going on under the hood here at Cardhouse dot com. Advertising? There’s no advertising on the site. Sexual? You can’t afford me. Writing? What is writing, am I right? Write. The letter was sent from a domain that doesn’t have a webpage but a TLD I am not familiar with, so let’s gooooo to the researchmobile. “ShortDot has positioned .CFD as a short, memorable, three-letter domain extension that is ideal for clothing brands, fashion houses, fashion designers, models and influencers, apparel manufacturers, footwear businesses, cosmetics companies, and online retailers with a flair for artistic expression and appreciation for stylish clothing and creative fashion design.”

Memorable SNORT. They don’t even mention what CFD stands for soooOOooo memorable Okay, right, you want my cutting remarks on today’s casual disposable fast fashion (TLD .CDFF), perhaps in the form of infectious “Tick-Tock” content. $3000/dance, E-Z. Next. Wait ... hold the line this is hilarious. The domain .CFD was originally created for some bizzy-biz hi-faluting financial horseshit “Contract For Differences.” Let me quickly, painlessly explain Difference Contracts: If I have a stock and hold it then zzzzz sorry I fell asleep twice. However, much later, in a bizarre twist, this ShortDot thing snapped up “CFD” to use for fashion because: logic. There’s a .party TLD, so there’s gotta be a .fashion TLD, right? [LQQKS] yeah .fashion. Wow. What? Wow. Am I going to tour the CFD domain? No, I have fresh-drying paint to stare at.

$4000/dance. Snooze? Lose. Does this include a free bike bag I’m trying to get rid of? For you, no. Anyway, this idiot was part of a pack of three; the other two wanted some bike lock recommendations; one of those also used the term “cynical.” All of them have skeevy addresses that bgp.tools doesn’t like so they’ve all been binned. They’re that desperate now, I guess, to make a poor AI sit and read my crap and figure out how to make me barf out a reply. Maybe the two bike lock ones were trying to dovetail into some pig butchering scheme. I should have known, I took the email address off of the website years ago and the contact page directs people to ko-fi or patreon. I thought for a brief moment that someone read this website I todally didn’t spend 15 minutes crafting a ridiculously long email about bike locks to send to an algorithm trying to scam me what a cap to 2025 hats off the writers have done it again LOL WTF TLD CFD DPZ XXX OOO XXX [FX: throws hat up in busy intersection, gets creamed by a car or two]

Still, not as bad as the algorithm that rammed hundreds of letters in my email box back when it was a submission form. The algorithm for whatever reason decided to chop up a very important message about Oakley sunglasses into tiny chunks ‒ 61 bytes, to be exact (“This style of ingenuity and innovation h” plus a few status bytes etc.) ‒ and send each of those chunks, one at a time, over the course of a few weeks. I forgot to piece them all together I guess.

2025dec14.

Evan Edinger: This Gas Station Drug Nearly Ruined My Life [25min] & My Kratom Video Uncovered Something Weird [26min].

A rough outline of the point-of-sale situation in the US: Kratom is currently illegal to sell in skeevy gas stations etc. in six states. The rest are either legal or “regulated.” There are cities in which consumption of the drug is illegal, but legal everywhere else in the state. There is a pro-Kratom association playing creepy footsie with states let’s make it safe for people to get hooked easily and a few states have bought into the hustle this is my shocked face: [editor insert image of non-shocked person here]. There’s a 2022 80-page paper “Kratom: Summary of State Laws” [pdf] created by the Legislative Analysis and Public Policy Association if you want to dial it in more.

I quit coffee recently due to increasing bouts of dizziness/foggy brain. I wasn’t looking for something to replace it, I just happened across this randomly. Honestly nothing is worth the bother but this stuff should be not be POS legal.

2025dec13.

Meditations for the Anxious Mind: This is why everyone is a DJ now [4min]. (via Jon)

2025dec12.

Shawn Grows: How Jackfruit Could Solve World Hunger in 7 Minutes [7min].

2025dec05.

The Evolution of ARC Raiders EP3 ‒ Building ARC Machines [22min].

2025dec05.

Not Just Bikes: Keep these Stupid American Trucks out of Europe [14min].

2025dec03.

A Quick Fond Look Back At Online Dating. I have some stories, but I ran across this short, impactful message exchange from n years ago and thought I’d properly archive it here.

Message from [user]: I laughed at your profile, though it was a bit much. It made me wonder if you are kind of exhausting, or if you just try a little too hard to impress in writing. Maybe we should IM sometime?

Me: Yes. I am exhausting, and I try a little too hard to impress in writing. No, we should not IM.

And that’s: A Quick Fond Look Back At Online Dating.

2025nov28.

Still workshoppin’ gravestones. It’s imported.

LOSE WEIGHT FAST ‒ ASK ME HOW!

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I met a traveller from a discount land
Who said “Two legless trunks
stand upon this proficiently-engraved pedestal
[FX: slips engraver a ten spot, winks in past tense]
on which these words appearinate:
look upon my stuff, ye suckos, and cry lol
sand whispering on the whispering sand something.”
‒ Ozzy Osbourne Computers

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n/a

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scared and alone,
snickers™ really satisfies!
promotional consideration paid for
(i don’t know what this means)
(chisel that last line in)
(not that one though)
(or that one)
(etc.)

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Goddamned do I fucking hate Pinterest
so glad i’m DEAD
(because Pinterest)

nick the photo traffic
nick the time people spend gathering the photos
put your ads on other people’s work grabbing other other people’s work
gatekeep it
“build your brand”
shit in your own hand!

maybe ai will destroy pinterest
is ai destroying pinterest
oh no
is pinterest okay
revenue: US$1.86 billion (2024)
greed always scales
PS: shit in your own hand again #thankyou
PPS: put you in the hosts file

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does anyone remember vruit
vruit?
[lqqks] not that vruit
the fruit/veggie drink vruit
that was the boss move
leaning on your amc concord
neckin’ vruit to sweet 8-track jams
vruit
Vruit.com This domain is for sale: $2,795

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this is party time
and you’ve got to say it’s better than a war
‒ Jazz Butcher

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Welkom in mijn hoekje! Oort cloud Jansport

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who?

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Keep honking! I’m slowly decaying to reach
Earth’s delicious inner chocolate core

I was thinking it would be nice for people to bring a small, tasteful rubber duck to place on the stone but eww plastic. Are we done with plastic yet? Haven’t been watching the news. Better idea, dirt bed instead of grass, bring native flower seeds. Plant them and maybe they’ll get a bit of me for nourishment. “Here you go, flowers.” “Thanks, deady.”

Anyway, for more about the guy what yanked the actual Ozymandias statue, see Tor’s Cabinet of Curiosities: The Circus Strongman, His Archrival, And The Pharaoh’s Tomb [57min].

and of course the James Acaster bit on the British Museum [3min].

2025nov24.

New British Canon: Exploring Tricky & Maxinquaye: The 90s Bowie? [36min].

2025nov17.

Taskmaster: 2,000,000 Subscriber Treat ‒ Taskmaster Set Tour [15min].

2025nov15.

Arc Raiders Launch Trailer [2min].

Arc Raiders launched October 30th, I just picked it up. Not really an extraction-shooter person nor a PVP person, but this is PVPVE. It’s only been a week but I’ve already seen people predicting that the good-times-lets-get-those-robots of the NA server is going to go the same way as the shoot-first EU/etc servers. I’ve only put three hours into it so far, but I’ve mostly been doing quick bite little missions with the free loadout which is zero risk, all reward. The tally so far is about six failures, one to an “extract rat” (people who camp out where the extract stations are so they can just shoot your face, take your stuff and dip), the rest to ro-bots, and ~15 successful journeys. Emotes aren’t beefy enough, I hope there’s TTS on the horizon. I’m too lazy to use a microphone. Additionally, there’s a rooster in the game that scavenges parts for you, everyone gets a rooster, and they’re all named “Scrappy.” Okay. (A) Scrappy Doo. (B) Just let people name the rooster, type it in, save the 16 characters in their file. I call mine Spucky. Not really “mine,” though, we have a symbiotic relationship. Spucky gets me scraps, I get Spucky olives and lemons from the surface while ro-bots try to erase my skull.

The PVE fans are spitty about the toxic PVP players, the PVP players are all “wah wah git gud PVE is bore-ing” and the extract campers are all “I’ve made a series of poor life decisions that logically led up to this.” I’ve been enjoying it. Right now I’m fresh meat, so I’m not going to drag out expensive gear, I just keep using the free loadout and if bad things happen, well, it’s back to the queue for another go, no problem.

That’s another thing, over 400000 people hit the game concurrently today and the servers are apparently buckling. There was only one time when I even noticed anything was happening ‒ it took a few minutes to enter. Then, right back to the normal ~5-10 seconds to start a new round.

I don’t really have a preferred Arc Raiders website, I’ve seen errorneous information on three mainstream gaming sites so far. Go out there and make mistakes.

2025nov09.

Japan Eat: A Japanese Chef I’ll Never Forget [1min].