Category: Uncategorized

1 comments

…to go to another planet.

Discovered on one of my internet wanderings this morning, Panjin Red Beach is located in the north east of Beijing and is appropriately called this due to the seaweed which turns to a bright red colour in autumn. It has become known as the “Home of the Cranes” and is the home to 260 different types of birds, including the endangered Crown Canes and Blacak Beaked Gulls, and 399 different types of wild animals.

0 comments

2 comments

This week’s school shooting (not to be confused with last week’s or the one the week before that or next week’s or the one the week after that) got me thinking about violence in America; something that as a society I believe we’ve grown increasingly numb to.

Perhaps numb isn’t the right term, but there’s no denying the schizophrenic way that violence is viewed by our society. Violence is woven into the American DNA and celebrated with an almost orgiastic frenzy in everything from our popular music to our movies, television shows and video games, yet we seem shocked and appalled when a shooting occurs. Do we really need car chases and killings in every damn episode of {Fill in pretty much any Television Show Name}?

Just the other night we were watching a preview of some upcoming series and I turned to Ben and said, “Does everything need to have a shoot out in it?”

It’s past time that we throw off any illusion of being a nation of Peace, because we most certainly are not. As a society we revel in death and destruction as exemplified by our popular entertainments—except of course when that death and destruction happens to visit itself upon good, god-fearing white christians or in those infrequent instances when karma comes back to bite us on our national ass. (See 9/11.)

I’m tired of politicians, lawmakers, and so-called “men of god” saying they want peace, yet with every step and word uttered, fetishize and advocate for never-ending violence and bloodshed. In short, I think it’s time we cut the crap and just embrace our murderous, bloodthirsty national identity. The ancient Romans never apologized for it and certainly never made excuses.

So yes, we are the planet’s dominant serial killer—not only of the other, but also of our own people. And we have the guns, the tanks, the missiles, the nukes and the military spending to prove it—not to mention the psychopaths with their personal arsenals wetting themselves over fevered visions of turning the United States into a christianist theocracy and meting out Old Testament punishments upon non-believers with impunity. ‘Murika! Fuck yeah!

It’s not like any of this is new—and to be honest it certainly is not limited to only the United States. But our country was birthed in bloodshed and it comes with the territory as much as we’d like to deny it as a nation. Yes, the United States was created with noble ideals (something I think has kept some of our basest instincts in check), but again and again it seems that as a society we reach for the gun, the assault rifle, the switchblade, the missile or the bomb to settle our differences—or to simply make a point instead of examining why we do it—or seeking alternative methods of resolution. And when something bad happens, we wring our hands ask, “How could this have been stopped?” while remaining stunningly, blindingly oblivious to the obvious answer and unable to affect any real change because of the NRA’s death grip on our politicians. And then we promptly forget about the whole thing until the cycle repeats. Ad nauseum.

2 comments

If you ever have several hours to waste and don’t mind peering into one of darker recesses of the internet (or at least out of control pareidolia) head on over to YouTube, type in Mars anomalies (or for that matter, Moon anomalies) and in the immortal words of Bette Davis, “Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.”

Okay, I will admit that I love a good conspiracy theory as much as the next guy*, and I fully believe that NASA and our government are withholding knowledge of a whole lot of what is actually “out there” with good (or at least misguided) intentions, but on the other hand, I don’t see birds, animals, insects, tiny little people, toppled statues of kings, masks, and carefully fashioned blocks of stone in every damn photo sent back from our various Mars rovers.

I would admit that yes—conservatively—5 to 10 percent of what these kids-living-in-their-mom’s-basements are finding is unexplainable, and many of the things they’re seeing are just on the edge of camera resolution and can therefore be interpreted as pretty much anything, but that five to ten percent of those images are undeniably fascinating.

In addition, there are many, many images where quite unmistakable (and poorly executed, I might add) image manipulation has occurred with the original NASA files. Obvious blurring is one thing—and can be attributed to data loss during transmission back to Earth—but when sloppy cut-and-paste duplication has occurred (a series of three identical rock outcroppings in one image come to mind) you have to ask why?

 

*I do, however, fully believe we went to the Moon and consider myself lucky that as a child I was witness to that incredible bit of history being made.

 

0 comments

I realized today that if my first lover—who died in 1991—had immediately reincarnated, he’d now be older than we were when we first met.

I feel old.

2 comments

This is just too good not to pass on in its entirety:

From AMERICAblog:

Earlier today, someone took a killing machine and loads of ammunition into a heavily-trafficked area and opened fire, killing some and wounding more. The shooter may have a history of mental health problems; they may be a militant racist; they may be a Men’s Rights Activist; they may be a religious extremist; they may have just gotten laid off from work. Whatever their motive, they will almost certainly have obtained their killing machine legally.

You’ve probably read the details elsewhere by now, but at the end of the day, they don’t matter. This story isn’t all that different from the many that came before and are sure to come after. America averages one shooting of at least four fatalities per day, with one shooting per week at schools. These shootings are happening faster than we can meme them. The routine is familiar, and we already know how the next few days are going to play out:

First, we will be reminded that this is definitely not the time to discuss ways that we could have prevented this shooting, along with tomorrow’s and next week’s and the ones to follow. At times like these, a bad reading of the Second Amendment is more important than a basic understanding of the First:

There needs to be a mandatory waiting period imposed on anti-gun extremists commenting on breaking news crime incidents. #UCCShooting ~ Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) October 1, 2015

Instead, it would be much more productive for all of us to quietly appeal to a higher power—one that has pretty clearly signaled to us that they’re agnostic when it comes to American gun policy:

Praying for Umpqua Community College, the victims, and families impacted by this senseless tragedy. ~ Jeb Bush (@JebBush) October 1, 2015

Second, we will be reminded that although America’s homicide rates are practically off the charts compared to other countries, now is definitely not the time to second-guess our borderline religious commitment to the killing machines that make it way easier to kill a bunch of people at once:

After all, don’t you know we might need to revolt against the government some day?

Third, someone from the NRA will say that the real solution that would have prevented all of this is more guns. Most of America will find this ridiculous. Congress will find this reasonable. President Obama will scold them.

Fourth, there will be a new round of public opinion polling showing broad support for public policies that could have prevented the shooting, ranging from universal background checks to a ban on high-capacity magazines. We will flash a momentary glance at Congress to see if they will pass any of these policies, and then remember how unbothered they were by what that guy from the NRA said.

Fifth, gun sales will go through the god damn roof.

Sixth, this video will go viral:

Seventh, another mass shooting will take place. We will go back to step one.

See you next week.”

1 comments

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has returned the best color and the highest resolution images yet of Pluto’s largest moon, Charon—and these pictures show a surprisingly complex and violent history.

At half the diameter of Pluto, Charon is the largest satellite relative to its planet in the solar system. Many New Horizons scientists expected Charon to be a monotonous, crater-battered world; instead, they’re finding a landscape covered with mountains, canyons, landslides, surface-color variations and more.

“We thought the probability of seeing such interesting features on this satellite of a world at the far edge of our solar system was low,” said Ross Beyer, an affiliate of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging (GGI) team from the SETI Institute and NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, “but I couldn’t be more delighted with what we see.”

This composite of enhanced color images of Pluto (lower right) and Charon (upper left), was taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft as it passed through the Pluto system on July 14, 2015. This image highlights the striking differences between Pluto and Charon. The color and brightness of both Pluto and Charon have been processed identically to allow direct comparison of their surface properties, and to highlight the similarity between Charon’s polar red terrain and Pluto’s equatorial red terrain. Pluto and Charon are shown with approximately correct relative sizes, but their true separation is not to scale. The image combines blue, red and infrared images taken by the spacecraft’s Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC). Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

High-resolution images of the Pluto-facing hemisphere of Charon, taken by New Horizons as the spacecraft sped through the Pluto system on July 14 and transmitted to Earth on Sept. 21, reveal details of a belt of fractures and canyons just north of the moon’s equator. This great canyon system stretches more than 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) across the entire face of Charon and likely around onto Charon’s far side. Four times as long as the Grand Canyon, and twice as deep in places, these faults and canyons indicate a titanic geological upheaval in Charon’s past.

“It looks like the entire crust of Charon has been split open,” said John Spencer, deputy lead for GGI at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “With respect to its size relative to Charon, this feature is much like the vast Valles Marineris canyon system on Mars.”

Even higher-resolution Charon images and composition data are still to come as New Horizons transmits data, stored on its digital recorders, over the next year – and as that happens, “I predict Charon’s story will become even more amazing!” said mission Project Scientist Hal Weaver, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.

The New Horizons spacecraft is currently 3.1 billion miles (5 billion kilometers) from Earth, with all systems healthy and operating normally.

New Horizons is part of NASA’s New Frontiers Program, managed by the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. APL designed, built, and operates the New Horizons spacecraft and manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. SwRI leads the science mission, payload operations, and encounter science planning.

0 comments

1 comments

I don’t even mind if people make up things about me as long as they don’t make me look boring or ordinary—as long as they don’t smooth me out or reduce me.” ~ Grace Jones, from her new autobiography, I’ll Never Write My Memoirs

0 comments

2 comments

1 comments

Well, we all survived another Xtianist “End of the World.” This is obviously a good thing, because I’ve never known what proper attire is for an Apocalypse.

4 comments

We have to stop idolizing stupidity in our society and herald, not ostracize, intelligence.” ~ Facing Traffic

0 comments

My latest celebrity crush obsession, Jake McDorman in Limitless.

That’s a view I wouldn’t mind having. ?

Double your pleasure, double your fun!

Wow. Just wow.

Now CBS, please don’t fuck this one up like you did with Zoo.

2 comments

1 comments

0 comments

About a week ago, for some reason 90% of the album art for the songs on my iPhone disappeared. I tried removing all the songs and then adding them back in with no success. Nothing worked, so I finally chose the nuclear option and did a complete reset on the phone.

It fixed the album art problem, but it also wiped out all the cards I’d so meticulously put into Apple Pay.

I can’t say I’ve ever used Apple Pay because the credit union where I have my checking account still does not support it, but I think the concept is awesome and someday I’m sure it will be the norm, rather than the exception, for making purchases.

That being said, I did have my credit cards loaded into the system, and considering what a pain some of them had been to add, I did not look forward to adding them again.

But I did.

And Apple fucked me over again.

For the past few days, mail has not been syncing between my phone and Mac. A message will show up on one or the other, but not both. Additionally, I’ve been unable to delete emails, getting only a cryptic message that iCloud was unable to move the selected items to the trash folder.

So this morning, after finding a recommended solution from the Google, I logged out of iCloud on my phone.

BIG mistake.

When I logged back in, the mail was working again, but I also immediately got a message from Discover, telling me that I’d removed my card from Apple Pay.

WHAT. THE. HOLY. FUCK?

I opened up Apple Pay—excuse me, Wallet—on my phone, and to my horror saw that not only had the Discover card disappeared, but all the cards.

FUCK. ME.

Y’know, it would’ve been nice if Apple actually warned you that this was going to happen as part of the notification that that pops up when you’re about to log out of iCloud. But no.

Apple, FIX YOUR SHIT.

At this point I’m not going to bother putting the cards back in again because in all likelihood, I’ll have to sign out of iCloud or reset the phone again to fix one of Apple’s other issues sooner rather than later, and they’d all just be wiped out. It’s not worth the hassle.

It doesn’t help that there’s no uniform method among the banks to actually add their cards to Apple Pay. Some just automatically add the them. Others send you a verification text. By far the most annoying are the ones that require you to call in, navigate a labyrinthine phone tree and then wait on hold for ten minutes in order to speak to a human being because there’s no option to just activate the card with Apple Pay. (I have two different cards from a single bank; one sends a text to activate, but the other one requires a phone call. ABSOLUTELY INSANE.)

I swear—and being a fanboy I hate to admit this, but—Apple seems to slowly be turning into everything I hated about Microsoft. They are in such a hurry to do a yearly refresh of everything that the multitude of things that get broken with each “upgrade” are never addressed and just carry forward into the next iteration (see: Windows, Office).

Here’s a thought for the brain trust at Apple: you don’t HAVE to upgrade everything every year! You’re not going to lose market share for not putting a new coat of paint on OS X or iOS every twelve months. Your long-time fans would much rather appreciate that you take the time to kill the damn bugs that are infesting your software and fix what’s obviously broken before putting out a new release! There is no shame in admitting that you screwed up and put something out before it was finished cooking!

APPLE, FIX YOUR SHIT.

1 comments

2 comments

I know that’s kind of an odd title for a blog post, but it’s true. I miss being able to sit down and actually write, instead of posting a photo of some half naked man or regurgitating some internet meme I’ve run across. I miss being able to properly express myself in regards to current events without sounding like old news. And most of all I miss the sense of community those early years of blogging afforded.

The loss of community became abundantly clear a few days ago when I realized I hadn’t uploaded any photos to my Flickr account since our trip to Atlanta last spring. It wasn’t that I didn’t have anything to upload; it’s just that Flickr had dropped off my radar, supplanted by the ease of uploading and the instant gratification of Instagram. (I’m convinced that if Instagram let you post photos directly from your desktop device Flickr would close up shop because of the ungodly mess it has become.)

But I digress.

For shits-n-giggles, I started looking at the list of Flickr members I followed. A disturbing (although not surprising—based on my Instagram observation) trend I noticed was that a majority of the people I followed had not uploaded anything to Flickr not just in months, but in years. Names and faces I used to converse with regularly and counted as friends came flooding back—along with the realization that we had totally lost contact with each other in the years that have transpired.

I fear the malaise that seems to be overtaking a once-vibrant blogging community actually comes from the internet itself. Through the availability of instant gratification and equally instant dismissal of anything that doesn’t pique my interest, I seem to have developed the attention span of a gnat. Getting me to sit and read anything that spans more than one or two pages is a major undertaking. Click, swipe, click, swipe. I can’t stay focused long enough to read 1000 words; how do you expect me to write that many?

Additionally, I’ve reached the point where I don’t seem to have anything unique to add to the ongoing conversations regarding events in our world. So many others have already voiced my opinions more eloquently and succinctly than I could ever have hoped, and cutting and pasting their quotes seems so much easier than attempting to say the same thing in a slightly different way.

I am very thankful to those of you who still come around and occasionally drop comments, but even if my readership dropped to zero I doubt I could ever close down Voenix Rising and give up blogging altogether like so many others have done. After all, it was through this blogging thing that I met Ben—and even though I feel I don’t have much to add to the conversation right now, when I do, I still want a place available where I can.

7 comments

These Christian-slime sociopaths who bray so loudly about nonexistent infringement of their religious freedoms are hair-trigger quick to try to actually abuse other people’s religious freedoms. Muslims, for example. If you really believe in the most basic American principles, then you have no choice but to believe in the religious freedom of all believers. You know, kind of the way the IRS does. (The exception being when, on extremely rare occasions, they actually dare to investiate flagrant abusers of the tax code by pastors who are knowingly pushing their abuses as far as they can to see just how much they can get away with. Then the lying-slimebag Christian scum screech about—you guessed it!—abuses of their religious freedoms, despite the reality that they’re the ones who deliberately, systematically seek to abuse their own freedoms in the direction of limitless expansion.

Because the real goal of the lying Christian slimebags is precisely that: to impose their sociopathic prejudices and hates on everyone else, including the legitimately God-fearing. And in the process, they’re doing what they can to destroy what America stands for.

Source.

0 comments

I am not a fan per se of the YA Dystopia genre, but I love both the Hunger Games as well as the original Maze Runner films. I’ve actually only read the Maze Runner books, however, so I was very excited to hear that they were going to film the entire series.

HOWEVER, after seeing Scorch Trials yesterday, I am sadly disappointed. It’s been over a year since I last read the book, so I was questioning my own memory of it, but I kept scratching my head throughout the screening saying to Ben on several occasions, “I don’t remember this being in the book.”

In fact, going back and looking at its Wikipedia page to refresh my memory after we got home, I realized how very little of The Scorch Trials book was actually in the film. Yeah, they followed the basic structure of the story, but beyond that it was a mess. I know all movies adapted from books have to make changes, either to condense the story to fit in the allotted running time or to increase dramatic effect, but this seemed to be a wholesale reaming of the source material, only to be replaced with “let’s pull some shit out of our ass and see if this works instead.”

It didn’t.

Just as an example, the characters’ breakout of the WICKED dormitory in the first act wasn’t prompted by an attack of Cranks (aggressive, zombie-like people who have been infected with a virus known as “the flare” for those of you unfamiliar with the books) on the suddenly-deserted facility as it was in the book, but rather their snooping around the heavily armed and populated installation itself and learning the reason they were brought there. There was none of the feeling of mystery and bewilderment of the book (and previous film) in this movie that involved you in the story and made you want to know what was going on.

In the book, they find one remaining scientist in the facility who tells them they’ve all been infected with the virus and have two weeks to get through “the scorch” and to a safe haven to get the cure. None of that was in the movie. The main reason prompting the characters to get through the scorch was REMOVED from the film.

And it only goes downhill from there.

I want to go back and read the book again to clear my mental palate.

Why the filmmakers chose to discard—wholesale—the main storyline of the book is beyond me, and this does not bode well for the final film, The Death Cure, scheduled to be released in February 2017.

I count the original Maze Runner film among my favorites, but if you’re a fan of the series my advice would be to save your money on this one and wait for it to show up on cable—and even then, prepare to say, “WTF?!”

0 comments

2 comments

The really good pictures of Pluto from NASA’s New Horizons probe are starting to trickle in, and they are fucking breathtaking.

” alt=”” />

1 comments

Word.

0 comments

Kim Davis or Mat Staver or any of those yahoos flapping their jaws about how “Christians” are being “persecuted” in this country.

Honey, when they start dragging “Christians” from their homes in the dead of night and stringing them up in trees (or tying them to fence posts, beating them and leaving them to freeze to death), come see me. Until such time, SHUT THE FUCK UP.

0 comments

0 comments

I stumbled across Trick on television tonight. I used to count this among my top ten favorite movies, but for some reason I found it difficult to watch tonight, and ended up turning it off after only about twenty minutes.

Perhaps it’s because so much has happened in my life—and the world in general—since it came out sixteen years ago. If there was ever an indication that I am not the same man I was in 1999, it’s my quite unexpected reaction to this seeing this movie again after all that time.

I—like undoubtedly hundreds (if not thousands) of other gay men—had a huge crush on JP Pitoc at the time, fantasizing that at some point I’d have my very own sweet and sexy go-go boy wanting me for all the right reasons. Not surprisingly, I could never have predicted at the time that I would have a sweet and sexy man arrive in my life only a few short years later; someone far more real and amazing than the fictitious Mark could ever be.

And a quick Google search shows that Mr. Pitoc has not aged well. And that’s sad.

0 comments

I came to the realization this morning that I am a digital hoarder—and I suspect so are a great many other people.

The only reason there aren’t intervention shows about it is because the hoarding is virtual and hidden. There are no horrific physical piles of stuff for camera crews to step over; you won’t ever be found dead in your home, buried under a pile of roach-infested garbage, but I suspect the problem is just as real.

Why else would companies now regularly be shipping terabyte drives with their new systems?

I came to this realization this morning while trying to clear out my downloads folder. This is where I throw everything from software installers to cat memes and nekkid menz. When I started there were over a thousand items. I’m down to about two hundred and at the point where I just want to do the equivalent of shoving it all in a closet; moving it all into my equally unruly “to be sorted” folder just to get “downloads” cleared out. The irony is that nothing in the “to be sorted” folder ever gets sorted and currently stands at over a thousand items itself.

And don’t even get me started on my meticulously curated “Menz” folder. I remember back in 2002 a friend dubbed me “The Porn King of Phoenix” when I had something like 10,000 pictures. Now I’ve got six times as many and frankly I don’t even know why any more. Years ago when I was living in San Francisco I stopped going to the pride parades because I thought, “How many pictures of pretty men do I really need to take?”

I know some of this hoarding comes from blogging. I run across a handsome face or other interesting picture and think, “I’ll repost that.” Most of the time it happens, but there’s a higher probability that it will simply get filed away and forgotten. I fear that if you compare what I’ve actually posted to what I’ll culled off the internet with the intention of reposting we’d both be shocked.

Dare I say it’s the same thing as my late father’s habit of keeping stuff—and by stuff I mean junk—because as he used to say, “I’ll need it someday.”

I know without even looking that hundreds of images in my collection that are 800 x 600 pixels in size or smaller could easily be classified as junk now, simply because the resolution is so poor and need to be discarded—regardless of their content.

Time to start weeding.

Yeah, like that’s gonna happen.

I’m not going to just throw all the stuff in a closet; I’m going to do the equivalent of buying a storage shed and transfer everything onto an external hard drive. Out of sight, out of mind, but still accessible if I “need it someday.”

Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt, y’know.

4 comments

1 comments