Life Sucks. Get a Helmet.

If you want to check your account, go to:
https://haveibeenpwned.com/

Look, I get it. You saw the actually-heinous people and bots posting child exploitation pornography and recognized it for the evil it is.

You reacted.

Not out of a sense of justice or moral outrage, obviously, because you are corporate entities for whom those concepts do not apply, but because they threatened your corporate value (because All Must Bow to the Craven Capitalist Command of Cupertino, and the whims of Wall Street in these, the burgeoning days of late-stage capitalism).

But, yes, you reacted.

I mean, you overreacted, and overreached, and are going to have to walk that the fuck back, but, as the poorly-drawn star says, “an attempt was made.”

But your reaction was telling on many levels, some of which were obvious to you, some of which were obvious to everyone else, and some of which might not have been obvious at all.

On the face of the Tumblr policy note we’ve all been seeing at the top of our dash is the explicit and overt sexism and puritanism that Apple has foisted on the digital marketplace by being the 800lb gorilla in the room with their app store, and anything that isn’t squeaky fucking clean when it comes to kids and nipples has no place there. “Female-presenting nipples,” for fuck’s sake. Nipples don’t know what gender they are, you dipshits. Pixels of whatever color don’t have a gender at all.

So you began flagging content as potentially violating this upcoming policy of purging, throwing an algorithm that is, frankly, as competent as the current occupant of the White House at the problem without doing even a hint of QA testing. I’m not a programmer, so what you developed and implemented is better than what I could write, but putting it into the world was demonstrably worse than the nothing I wrote.

Write better code. Do even a modicum of unit testing. GitHub is a thing, as is code review.

But, no, you panicked in the face of the impending end of 4Q18 and your need to present a shiny, healthy, investor-or-buyer-pleasing report, so you rushed it and bungled the job, and have enjoyed the attendant egg on your faces (and discovered the need for asbestos underwear that those of us who’ve been online for a couple of decades now have known about all along).

But even this inept, ham-fisted censorship attempt revealed something: you - and every other social media platform (looking real hard at you, Twitter and Facebook) - you could cut off the sexists, the racists, the homophobes, the anti-Semites, the anti-Muslims, the anti-Latinx, the “Proud Boys,” the goddamned actual Nazis, all these fucking hate groups - right at the fucking ankles. But you haven’t, and won’t, because, in the grand calculus of the iTunes store, bigots are better than tits.

You’re all craven cowards, bowing to the almighty dollar.  And we see you. We see you very well.

This is why “Millenials are killing” thing after thing. The market you’re all so fond of worshiping is based on supply and demand, and our demands are simple: if you’re stupid and hateful, we want less and less to do with you, and will take our screen time and clicks and attention and money elsewhere.

People have often asked me why I hate iPhones in particular* and Apple products in general, and their eyes glaze over when I start talking about the walled garden. This, however, is a very clear, concise, and illustrative shorthand.

I don’t care how many dozens or hundreds of billions of dollars your corporations are worth (or even if Apple keeps bouncing above the $1T line). You’re not above being taken down, inch by inch, by the millions of people whom you view as consumers and commodities to be fleeced and sold, and whose eyes are opening.

So keep looking at sand dunes and sneakers and flowers and seeing NSFW content where none exists, just to protect your precious, precious valuation.

We’re going to be looking elsewhere, and, yes, even at naked ladies’ breasts.

You’re not the only boobs around. And we know which ones we want to see.

trying to discern which is more stressful when it comes to making weight for a meet:

• being way heavy but super-hydrated the night before and literally pissing it all off in 12 hours
• being right at weight but fairly dehydrated the night before and entertaining fantasies about making long, sweet, passionate love to a fuckoff-huge glass of iced tea

weigh-in: 82.2kg / lift morning: 86kg

openers:
squat: 170kg
bench: 115kg
dead: 230kg*

2nds:
squat: 187.5kg*
bench: 127.5kg*
dead: 250kg*

3rds:
squat: 190kg*
bench: 130kg (no lift; couldn't get it all the way to lockout)
dead: 265kg*

These were all competition PRs for me (bench press +2.5kg, squat +2.5kg, deadlift +25kg), and that deadlift was a lifetime PR.

* = state record

i was perusing the other competitors in my age group and weight class - one of whom is a very casual FB friend who had to drop out due to injury, unfortunately - so it’s literally going to be just me and one other guy. which is still one more direct competitor than i’m used to, officially - there’s a guy in my gym about the same size i am, but he’s one age group younger, so our rivalry is purely of the mutually encouraging and shit-talking variety (he’s younger, better-looking, and marginally stronger than i am, the handsome rat bastard :-D (also, the guy who got me into powerlifting is also younger and prettier than i am, because he’s a six-five viking with hair down to his ass, but he’s been dick-punched by injuries lately, but we made a gentleman’s wager as to which of us would deadlift 500# first; he beat me by two days, but I put five extra pounds on the bar, so we called it a draw))

that said, i’m still excited about competing, because he’s the current state record holder in the 181# weight class (whereas I set mine in the next one up (198#) in my previous meet), and, looking at those numbers, we’re probably pretty evenly matched.

if things go extraordinarily well for me on the last lift, i have an outside shot at the american record in the deadlift for my age/weight classification. even if that isn’t in the cards next weekend, my next goal is to get down to 165# and set the world record in may, if all goes according to plan; having re-re-visited that, it might be possible to do the 181# WR if my deadlift keeps progressing well.