Let’s stop giving these billionaire shitheads even more money. Stop spending ANY money with companies that do evil or are related to evil people.

Here, I’ll get you started on some quick and easy companies worth boycotting and driving out of business:

• Twitter
• Paypal
• Tesla
• SpaceX
• xAI
• The Boring Company
• Neuralink Corporation
• Zip2
• OpenAI
• SolarCity

These companies are all directly related to the economic crisis that is now facing America. All of these companies should be shuttered. Stop giving money to them. I’m glad to say Paypal is the only one I used every once in a while, and I can easily replace that site with other payment methods. Boycott them all, never a single penny ever again.

Hey idiots, are you all happy? Yes you, you absolute morons that supported this shit are directly to blame for the death of my favorite hobbies over the past decade. Thanks to the Republican’s determination to destroy America, hobby companies that I have supported for years are now either already shut down, or have halted all sales to anyone in America. Why? Tariffs. Tariffs are driving the United States at 100mph towards a brick wall named “Recession”. What better way to grind a country’s economy to an absolute stop than to disable all extracurricular spending. Why? What’s the point of the tariffs? It’s to cripple the economy. The conservatives intentionally want to take America’s economy (and other things) back 100 years. It’s mentally deranged.

All I can say is we are battening the financial hatches down and won’t be spending any extra money until this stops. That enamel pin purchase I had in my Etsy cart? Cancelled. Don’t want to risk spending the money. That new tire inflator from Amazon? Cancelled. Nintendo Switch 2? LOL yeah fuckin right. Can’t afford it any more, tariffed in to hell. That favorite meal from the local Italian place? Nope, no longer spending money on that as well. Food prices have gone up exponentially and now we can only afford to cook at home. Thanks tariffs, thanks boomers who voted for this! It’s all your fault! Remember this. This is what you wanted, you voted for this.

The destruction of this country’s entire financial stability is directly in the hands of the them now. Boomers, The Worst Generation.

It took an immigrant congressman to standup and finally say, this is not right, this is not normal, Trump must be impeached immediately. Shri Thanedar has introduced articles of impeachment against Trump. The President is NEVER above the law, and as Shri outlines in his articles of impeachment, none of this is legal;

1. Defying a 9-0 Supreme Court Ruling
2. Dismantling Federal Agencies
3. Imposing Damaging Tariffs
4. Violating First Amendment Rights 
5. Creating an Unlawful office
6. Dismissing criminal cases of donors
7. Denying due process and other constitutional violations.

Read more details in his press release here.

Thanedar seems to be the only congressman willing to defend the constitution and this country. Why is he the only one with a spine? Why are we 100+ days in to this utter insanity and congress has only been sitting around twiddling their thumbs? I’m taking note Illinois congresspeople. I will vote accordingly. 

You can’t uncook a fully cooked brain, and it seems the boomer generation is doing everything they can in their last feeble grasps of influence, to shit on the floor on the way out. Why? Why are they like this? Did they eat too many lead paint chips? Is it because their lives didn’t turn out like they had dreamed? Is it because of shitty life choice after shitty life choice and now they want to subject everyone else to shitty life choices? Why do they vote for destruction? Why do they voluntarily chose hatred, vitriol, and cold abandonment? I am genuinely so lost on what is wrong with that generation of people. The absolute brain rot that has propelled the current elected officials in to office is directly to blame for what is happening in this Country right now, and it IS the boomer’s fault.

I’m fucking disgusted by all of it, and honestly I’m disgusted by anyone who could support any of it, at all, even slightly.  That’s right. You. You disgust me. Live with that fact and the personal choices you have made, and know that people will always be disgusted by such viewpoints.

“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

That’s the America I grew up in. That’s the America I was promised. Where the fuck is it? Where is MY America? The country that does good in this world. Not this garbage. This isn’t my country, you’re not my boomer. 

The toxicity, damage, lies, and other awful things spread online are nearly exclusively propagated by “social media” sites pretending to be community hubs, facading for corporate owned billionaire oligarchs. Let’s stop beating around the bush here and call out Reddit as one of the biggest and worst criminals of this that I have recently witnessed. Reddit pretends to be a community hub, but is actually in bed with every other big corporate oligarch. Reddit has recently started a new campaign to silence calls for Federal Workers to Strike ASAP in light of the recent proclamation from president Muskrat. I witnessed it with my own eyes; lurking a reddit thread about the recent federal worker unrest reading massive threads of comments about it, and when I refreshed, posts started vanishing. One by one. Each time I was refreshing I was seeing more and more posts about the federal worker strike getting deleted. Reddit corporate staff are actively working to silence calls of a Federal Strike.  I couldn’t believe my own eyes so I jumped on my computer and opened the same thread. I started tabbing open comments, and eventually they were all deleted. I started watching user accounts of federal workers calling for the strike, and I was watching these reddit accounts get banned one by one. These were not smurfs, in one case I saw a legit 10+ year old reddit account get completely killed. I watched Reddit staff shift the entire tone from one of federal unrest to one of people making fun of federal workers. This is honestly crazy, seeing this level of censorship occurring before my eyes…. and on Reddit of all places.

No corporate social media sites can be trusted, AT ALL any more.  The comments you read, you think are organic, have been curated, manicured, and shaped, to say exactly what ideology the billionaires who own Reddit are pushing. I never realized what an extremely dangerous tool Reddit (and all social media owned by them) has become for the oligarchs. They can pretend to be natural community opinions, when in reality they’re just wiping the opinions of the mass amount of accounts that aren’t pushing their corporate political agenda. This is extremely scary and dangerous to democracy as a whole.

Something bad is brewing. Mr. Stark, I don’t feel so good…

Well, I’ve come across another dying battery.  This time though it’s not brand new… however, it’s not that old either. This is a Samsung 30Q battery that I was using in my daily carry Emisar D4v2 flashlight. The D4v2 has battery indicator RGB leds in it and I had noticed that my light was losing its charge between uses. At first I thought I had just used the light more than I realized, but after I carried my Convoy S2+ shorty for a week, I noticed the D4v2 was still self draining. So I gave it a full charge and went back to my voltmeter for daily checks and yup… it is indeed self discharging. Note that I didn’t check it for a week at the end of my chart as I knew it was gone at that point. The frustrating part about this one is that this battery wasn’t that old. I label all of my li-ion batteries with the date I got them and this battery was from 8/2020, making it just a year and a half old now.  While I don’t think I had an excessive amount of charge cycles on it, I will admit that since this battery was in my pocket hot rod light, it did get driven extremely hard a number of times. However I don’t think it’d been driven hard recently, so I’m not sure why it just decided to go bad on me. If you have any thoughts as to why this happened to a relatively “young” battery let me know. Fortunately I had a spare 30Q from my UV light that I replaced with a more powerful version, so I didn’t need to order a new one. However I do need a new Samsung 50E for my new UV and those have been out of stock for like 3-4 months now… these stock shortages on literally everything are getting mighty old.

The other day I picked up my Convoy S2+ flashlight as my carry light for the day, and I clicked it on to check it, and it started stepping down almost immediately. The light turned off after about 30 seconds, as the low voltage protection was kicking in, which means the 18350 Li-Ion battery in it was out of juice, and the light’s programming was shutting down the light to avoid flattening the battery. I thought this was odd as I was pretty sure I had only used this light once or twice since the last time I fully charged it, but I shrugged it off as my own bad memory and chucked the battery in the charger. After it charged up, I pocketed the light and carried it. After a few days of relatively minimal use, the light started stepping down again, meaning the low voltage protection was kicking in again. My first thought was that the light was causing some sort of parasitic drain on the battery while not in use. However, this light is not an e-switch, it’s a physical tail switch, so it’s not actually possible for the light to have a parasitic drain.

So what is going on? How is a battery being drained while physically disconnected? The only way this would be possible was with a bad or damaged battery, but this battery is only 5 months old so I wasn’t sure. I decided to set the battery on the counter and check it with a volt-meter daily to see if my idea was right.

So, I started logging daily voltages and quickly had my answer. After just the first day it dropped .05 volts by just sitting on the counter. There should not be any measurable voltage drop after such a short amount of time. The next day was even more dramatic with a .14 volt drop after a day!  Well, there we go… the battery was bad… and it was likely my fault.

This light usually takes an 18650 battery, but I decided to order the optional (smaller) 18350 body with it as I mainly just wanted a smaller light as another daily-carry option. I found a lot of run time charts as this is a very popular flashlight, but was having trouble finding run time info for my particular LED and battery combo, so I decided to perform a run time test myself our of pure curiosity. I set it to 100% and let it run. The Convoy S2+ is an older design and while it does have Low Voltage Protection, it does not have a thermal throttling ability like my Emisar, Noctigon, or Q8 lights. This means that it doesn’t care how hot it gets, it will keep going, and relies on your hand to tell you to turn the light down. Li-Ion lights like this are really only meant to run on 100% for a short period of time as they produce a lot of heat when running full blast. After all, these are 4 volt lights, some running upwards of 15 amps at a time. I hadn’t really considered this small fact before beginning the run time test. After about 7-8 minutes I want to check the light and it was VERY HOT, so much so that I could barely touch it. It freaked me out a bit and I quickly shut the light off and let it cool down and didn’t think much else of it after that. However, I think on that day I cooked the battery. This light/battery worked fine for a good month before I performed this run time test, so I think I damaged the battery and it created some sort of internal short which was causing the battery to self-discharge.  Fortunately a new battery is only $6 so it wasn’t an expensive lesson to learn, but a good one to learn never-the-less. I will be more careful with lights that lack either LVP or Thermal Throttling in the future 🙂

I just realized that a handful of old posts on this site still had Youtube videos embedded via a flash object. With Flash’s forced demise last month, all of these embeds broke. I have gone through and fixed them all (aside from one that was linked to a now-deleted account) to embed the videos using Youtube’s html 5 object. So, shall you want to watch a remote control pumpkin drive around my office, or an Acer Predator fail right out of the box, you can once again. Thrilling, I know. I have also fixed some image sizing problems that were making my logo look less than optimal since the site redesign, as well as fixed the automatic icon created if you bookmark this site on an Android or iPad tablet device.