zombie movies, war movies, and the cycle that brings us [automatically] to world war every so often

 Perhaps there is some truth to the Strauss–Howe generational theory. This theory suggests that people hunger for world war after the soldiers in the last one have mostly died off. The people born recently have not been in a big war, and their parents were not shaped by a world war. Even their grandparents were generally not in a giant war. The chain of remembrance of the horror of all out war is broken, leaving only the very obvious economic boom that tends to follow these periods of destruction.

For us, the conditions for a world war are all there. We see the pandemics and the rising antagonism against anyone slightly different. And, this time around, we have a very obvious ecological collapse that will accompany and exacerbate the damage from any weapons used.

The media has prepared us for all out war. Summer military blockbusters like the Top Gun series boost enlistment in all branches of the military. Zombie movies put people into the proper mindset to switch off their morals, and kill the dehumanized enemy without fear of committing a war crime. In a zombie movie, the protagonists are helping every zombie that they head shoot. It is a very good thing to prevent the spread of the zombie contagion to the excellent 'uninfected' in your own branch of humanity. There are very few zombie movies shot from the zombies perspective, but the 2 that i know of are both totally mind bending.

images created using google Gemini and the photo realistic model called Imagen.

The signs of oncoming war are clearly seen in the election or placement of rapist dictators as heads of government. T-rump is a great example. He could never have been elected 20 years ago. People had no love for rapists or fraudsters at that time. In the 1990s, I do not think that a show where workers are fired in a mean way would have been popular or even watched. It is clear that we now respect cruel men that are good at harming people and institutions, and also skilled at getting away with serious crimes.

The US is totally divided into warring factions that truly hate each other. I am sure that it is the same in many other countries. We will all fight a light civil war until/unless we can join in a vast planet wide conflict. Ironically, this war may actually postpone our demise. Going along as we are, we will cook ourselves off of earth in less than a century. But, if we destroy the cities, and most of the food crops on earth, we may get the human population down enough to reduce our pumping and burning of fossil fuels, and also make room for some other species besides humans and dogs and cows.

It depends how many nukes we use before the fighting moves to the streets of bombed out cities. I knew that this would happen when i saw my country bankroll a cruel and cowardly genocide. We let, or even encouraged, Israel to bomb part of their own country for 2 years. We paid billions or trillions of dollars to burn and starve the native population of another country. We stopped the United Nations from taking action again and again, and let Israel shoot at UN forces, and kill or evict UN aid workers.

Again, none of this could have happened in, say, 1995. In those days, we were helping minorities to get a 'white' education, and freeing women from the partial enslavement to their men. Women became free to work for fair wages, and could choose to give birth or to abort each pregnancy. Now, many women have been fired from positions of responsibility, and in many states, they must either die or give birth to each fertilized egg. Have we become crappy, cruel people?

I believe that [YES]  we have become cruel and uncaring. I will circle back to this 'seasons' theory, with a pause of around 4 generations between giant world wars. This cycle is the reason that we have become cruel and full of hate. It is a natural cycle. I saw this very clearly when I did a controlled white mice experiment in grade school. I had a cage with white mice and a shell no pest strip. And I had a control cage with white mice but no poison laced strip hanging in it. As i expected, the no pest strip mice all died fairly quickly. it seems that the strips were released with little or no testing, if a 10 year old scientist could prove them to be fatal to small mammals.

It was the control cage that taught me the most. When there were just a few mice, they got along really well. there was heterosexual sex between male and female mice, and no fights at all. Reproduction was super fast, and the cage was soon teeming. I continued to feed them well, so there was no starvation or food shortage. Yet, as the cage filled, there were battles of increasing ferocity fought, and more and more homosexual sex that produced [of course] no offspring. I noted that homosexuality was not a disease, but a natural reaction to overcrowding.

My ten year old self saw what crowding and commotion did to the otherwise kind and loving mammals. They would fight for space, even if there was no battle for food. They still wanted sex, but it was mixed in with cruelty, and was geared to produce few baby mice. As an interesting note, the poison strips were removed from the market after I turned in my report, and it had caused at PS 191, and at Shell. Had Shell never hung the strips near mammals and seen them die horribly? Very likely, they had seen fatalities, and had simply ignored the results until some 3rd grader turned them in.

In summary, this hunger for war that we feel is completely natural, and will only get stronger as we continue to overpopulate the earth. By heating the atmosphere and water, we have reduced the carrying capacity of the planet a lot. It is the earth's way of getting 'a fever', and burning away the excess animals so that the atmosphere can have a few centuries to recover. It is not something to worry or wonder about. It is to be understood and accepted.

That said, it is not a great time to be female or old or a member of a minority. It is advantageous to be young and male and white. Behavior wise, all power goes to wealthy and fraudulent rapists. They are winning elections and then pardoning other fraudulent rapists! It is all very interesting, and I wake up each morning, eager to check the news and see if a nuke has been used yet. If anyone reads this, I urge you to relax and stop worrying. Yes, we will have a huge war quite soon. If it is US civil war #2, we are in for one kind of experience, and if it is WW3, we are in for a different experience. There is nothing that we can do about it. We are the mice in the overcrowded cage. We are not the experimenter, but the experiment itself.

SUPER SIMPLE SYBERDECK

The screen is the Wisecoco 10.1 inch amoled. It displays 2k, plus a little extra height. I believe that it is the exact screen used on the 10.1 inch Samsung tablets, so that suits me just fine. 2K resolution seen on a 10 inch screen is just amazing in detail. It feels like the future, when i sit really close and let the screen pull me in to a light form of virtual reality.

 

I agonized for a few minutes, but finally drilled a few holes through the lid of this [once] waterproof box. a couple of screws go through some foam, and then into the 75 mm vesa mount holes in the Wisecoco. I found a very flexible HDMI cable with the smallest possible plug, and a petite USB c to USB a cable that could easily be routed past the screen, to end up in the lower box where they could attach to [in this case] a latte panda mu.

 

 

Really, nothing has been done to route the cables except to tuck them behind the screen. Plenty of room remains in the box, in case a battery and a USB hub and some solid state drives are needed.

 My 4 gig raspberry pi 5 works great in here, as does my 8 gig cm5 mounted to the Waveshare nano b carrier board. All 3 of these single board computers can send its sound signal out through the HDMI if you select that. So, there are the 2 quiet but usable speakers in the screen that come on. 

 

I have created a sound bar as well. It uses two 3 inch full range drivers and two 3 inch tweeters.

A 10 dollar amp is screwed to the side of this crude prototype. Until i figure out a battery, there is a 60 watt 12 volt AC power supply screwed beside the amp. This sound bar gets surprisingly loud, and sounds pretty darn good. 3/4 inch plywood forms the box, and the handle is a battery cable.

i have  a hot glue gun, so that i can screw a computer and power converter to a plastic sheet , and hot glue that sheet into the base of the Moocy box. Then, the box can be closed and carried around without damaging the screen. Obviously, the sound bar, or boom box is a much larger commitment. So far, i have only carried it outside the house to the porch.

I would like to thank the folks at Wisecoco, who replaced this screen when the first one came apart, and dropped into the lower case when i opened the lid. This screen seems to be glued together better, so that it can be inverted and shaken without coming apart.

people used to comment on these posts, but i guess that folks have quit visiting. They are written just for me!
 

gaming on a budget ... get the most equipment for the dollar and build it yourself

 

I have been tuning this setup for a few years. 2 monitors are common now, and I prefer a large 2k gaming oled and a tiny oled on which to monitor equipment and see how downloads are doing. In this case, i chose the 10.1 inch 2660 by 1600 oled from wisecoco.

 

To avoid confusion, i am using the kids mouse and the tiny keyboard that [along with the 10.1 inch screen] is part of my cyberdeck project. And, the tiny input devices leave more room for the 75% keyboard and small gaming mouse from endgame gear that are used with the larger 27 inch oled from dell.

 

The large screen needs a heavy duty arm from Haunuo, which is around 40 dollars on amazon. The smaller screen was chosen in part because it has a standard 75 mm vesa mount, so it can be attached to the less expensive generic arm. Both arms can be moved easily, to tune in their best locations over time.

 

 

For sound, I connect the line out of my gaming system to this 25 dollar 4 ohm amplifier from Drok. I selected this one because it can accept power from either a 12 or 24 volt system, and because it has a dedicated subwoofer output. I use an ordinary home light switch to turn it on and off, as the volume does not have a click to shut it down. I found that a standard 3 mm screw will self tap into this size of heat sink, so, using a spacer, i attached an 80 mm noctua fan. I powered the fan from the same 13.5 volt dc wire that is powering the amp, after interposing 3 of the noctua low noise adapters before the power cord. Each one reduces the speed of the fan, and I found that 3 could silently cool the amplifier.

 

Of course, i built my own speakers using 4 ohm drivers from the company Dayton. I used their 4 inch full range drivers, a simple crossover, and their 3/4 inch dome tweeters for the left and right channels. I deployed  their classic 6 1/2 inch subwoofer for the low notes. These components seem to balance fairly well, with nice bright treble, voices that are the right volume, and startling low bass when needed. I used 3/4 inch plywood for the boxes. The left and right boxes are not ported, and very small. The sub box is a 10 inch cube, and has two 2 inch ports that go half way into the box.

 

My best case is the T1 from Form d, although this case shipped with a delicate and too short gpu extension cable that has caused a lot of problems. I bought a b610 lightening mother board and an AMD 7600x processor for this build, and sadly, it was never able to send it's video signal through the cable. My older mother board is a flagship from gigabyte, bedecked with the 13th gen i5 processor. It has enough gpu signal to get through the infuriating cable.

 

 i have pulled the covers off, so that you can see the pny rtx 4070 that has been de-shrouded. If you tinker with gaming systems, you know that you can not increase the thickness of fans at your whim, but you can use a much larger diameter fan if there is ample room in the case. These 15 mm by 120 mm fans from noctua put about twice as much air on the card without making as much noise as the stock 90 mm fans. I use 14 inch zip ties a lot for tasks like holding these fans on. It is a lot easier than joining more than one zip tie.

 

For the top fans, I used the 30 by 120 mm fans from phanteks. For this use, they are set to the middle speed, for a maximum of 2000 rpm. The fans are propped up a bit using spacers, to make more room for cables under them, and to put them the correct distance from the top panel. It is important to put screens under the fans, so that they don't grind up the power cables. I have been gaming hard on this gpu since it released, and have not had to take it apart yet to change the heat transfer materials. In this set up, it games at around 60 degrees, and nearly in silence.

 

 

 

 The 13th gen i5 was a great processor if you got one without defects, which i did! It can use 140 watts for quite some time, so i configured the T1 case to allow for the 65 mm tall and 90 mm wide heat sink from Noctua. It is also possible to space the power supply out from the spine, leaving a nice central gap for heat to escape, and placing the psu fan at the correct distance from the side of the case to breath cool outside air. It should be noted that i used the 750 watt sff power supply from corsair, so the fan rarely turns its fan on [even while gaming].

 

I used to download at night with this powerful gaming system, but that uses up too much battery power. You may notice a raspberry pi 5 driving the small screen. It uses less than 10% as much power as my gamer, and can be left on for days or weeks or months. I have downloaded files like the wikipedia database, which is over 100 gigs, over the course of many nights, using the wifi from my cell phone. You are probably seeing a pattern here. not a penny wasted that could be used for a better screen, more realistic sound, or more frames per second of gaming.

 

I play a bunch of games, with the most played being doom 2016 and doom eternal. But, i also like Cyberpunk, Ratchet and Clank ripped apart, Metal Hellsinger, Halo infinite, and many others. The older games like doom 2016 and metal hellsinger run flat out on this combination of cpu and gpu, but the newer games do not run at their max speed. it is best to use a bit of the frame gen and scaling for the new games, at least until the 'super' cards come out for the rtx 50 series. Even though i bought a 4070, and then a low profile 4060, i have not pulled the trigger on the 50 series yet. The 5070 is not a lot faster than the 4070, especially since i won the silicon lottery with my particular 4070. The PNY will run steadily at 3000 mhz, and with it's memory boosted about 800 hz. It about time, because i lost big with both of the 3000 series cards that i bought. They gobbled power and made plenty of heat, but generated few frames. 

 

lastly, i am sure that you were hoping to see the most beautiful cat on this [or any] planet.

 

 

 Yang the cat says, 'i like it on top of the computer where it is nice and warm'

Yang suggests that i make a youtube video, and see if it goes viral.