The musings of a madman...

      The cooler it gets outside, the fewer times a week I have to leave my house.  These things are proportional...  I will be back outdoors sometime around March.  At this point, I am up to "put on pants"-level going outside about three times a week...  Four if I am doing the Band Booster Dad thing.  Being stuck-but-not-stuck in the house reveals to me the fact that I am back on actually answering unknown numbers again, as we have discussed at length once in the past. [ Phlip note : Wife Person™ saw me actually do that shit week before last! ]     I guess I can refrain from making this lead-in any longer than it needs to be and g'head and just say it . My phone rang... Me: "Hello?" Caller: "I heard you battled Smoak ." Me: "Ex--...  excuse me?  Whodis?" Caller: "Jericcho--..." Me:  " JIGGABOO JACKSON!!! " Jericho:  "I'm trying to put that behind me, man." Me:  "Everything on the internet is forever ho...

      "Not that this was necessarily what you asked, but yes in fact I have been thinking about this... What if we have been doing this politics and leadership thing all wrong all along? How, you ask? Well what if there is such a marked haste to make every single-ass decision with minds unfortunately clouded by a complete refusal to hear and/or consider opposing views due to not approaching these discussions with anything even resembling clear-enough mind? What if maybe, just maybe, there was an idiot-proof and evidence-shown means to approach each and every single decision with the clearest mind possible and the movers and shakers who make all the decisions have just been ignoring it?     Think about it... This lil shutdown kerfuffle? Over before it starts! Wars, conflicts or even RUMORS of such? No such thing! Budgeting and taxation questions? Damn near self-correcting! People fighting in the Wal Mart parking lot over a spot in line on Black Friday?...

     I knew this damned day was coming...  I knew as soon as I was "done" with it in September that I had not heard the last of this situation, and I said as much at the time.  I guess my only real source of "surprise" is how little time it took to come back to me. To be totally honest, I shouldn't be all that surprised about that either. I say all that to say -- and y'all know it -- my phone rang. Me: "Hello?" Her: "I'm bugging out right now!" Me: "I'm fantastic, thanks for asking!" Her: "Huh?" Me: "You know you haven't spoken to me since the end of May, right?" Her: "Oh, oh yeah right... And I had the problem with my brakes and my landlord." I know where this is going, but she don't know that so I'mma play dumb or at least treat this conversation like it is all news to me.  Remember, she came to PHILLIP for advice because she has known me before Moe Phillips existed.  Her l...

  (yes, this is the permanent WaW image from now on)      After some discussion with a couple of people, I've decided that I will be doing this once a month for the foreseeable future...      The narration project was--... A challenge. In the challenge, I found that I have had to slightly alter how I approach the writing of a story. Today, we will discuss the necessity of embracing change, and welcoming challenges when it comes to growing creatively. Let's talk first about what had to change...      First was story length. As a general habit, I've approached this with a "my website, my rules" kinda thing and if I give y'all a 3500 or 5000-word story then that's what y'all getting. What I've learned setting up some stories as long as the lower side of that for narration is that my preferred narration tools are limited at or over 10:55 in length. For that reason, I'm limited to what I've noticed is about 1900 words now. This has, how...

       Sometimes when I get bored, I go to Craigslist... Not because I need or intend to buy anything, just to kill a little time. Don't knock me for this, I've found two of my cars and Yeti doing JUST this.      Anyway, I'm on Craigslist last week and I happened upon a "personal services" ad that REALLY piqued my curiosity, and no I was not in the "pussy for sale" section of the website, I assure you. [ Phlip note : the "pussy for sale" section is more often the "pænis surprise" section, if what I read on Reddit is to be believed ] In the ad--... fuggit, copy/paste time. "Gentlemen, had a rough breakup? Wanna get back at her? Well we're here to help! Contact us at [information hidden] to discuss services we can offer"      Well shiiiid... I'm fully comfortable in a room with my ex for hours on end without addressing her directly, so I don't NEED this service, but I'm always doing on-the-ground research...

       Not to let y'all in on anything more than you want to, need to -- or particularly ASKED -- about me, but I sleep naked no matter the season. The only difference is I close my bedroom door when Ava is at my house and not with my ex wife a woman I had a wedding with once... Why am I telling y'all all of this? Because we had to deal with a home invasion last night!      We came up to our bedroom and stripped buttnekkid. Wife Person™ turns on the television in the bedroom and puts it on The Blacklist... or Lucifer... or Burn Notice...  whatever...  She turned on the TV and puts it on a show that will serve as background noise until we fall asleep when there's a noise in the living room, it is the Amazon home screen... No biggie. We got these Fire TVs in my house, turning on the TV in our room sometimes catches the sensor across the hall in the guest room or even the living room TV sometimes.      As I head downstairs ...

  I'm obsessive...      After my decision first to add narration to True Story© and then actually STARTING the project to get it done, I realized I would not be able to rest until I had them all up on YouTube. This means I would be multitasking with the AI to read, then listen back to each and every one. If you have been paying attention to me on BookFace or following the YouTube channel, you'll know that I converted every story from 2023 clear through this year, plus the whole of the Santa Saga (that one was by request). It took me from August 10 to September 5 to get all the narration done and QC'd. It was not perfect... sometimes words were changed or omitted by the AI, one time it added a whole disclaimer (you can hear that here ). I kept what I found acceptable and scheduled them out at a rate of three a day until last week.      I was worried, though... I just fed a large language model dozens of hours of the absolute WILDEST concepts in my writi...

  "Hey buddy, you remember me?"      I'mma keep it all the way funky with y'all... When someone asks me some shit like that and I wasn't looking to have already determined whether or not I'd ever met them, I adopt a "lie first and then sort it out" approach. I've found that this helps keep my ass out of situations I might not desire to be in. I turned around... Me: "Um... I can't say that I d--..." Him: "I interviewed you for the job at [company] back at the beginning of the the summer." Me: "Wait... The ones who kicked me out when I told the story about getting fired over the softball game?" Him: "Okay, so you DO remember!" Me: "Yeah man, my friends thought that shit was WILD funny." Him: "To be frank, so did everyone else in the office when we told them about it." Me:  "'we?'...  'everyone else?'...  How many damn people did you speak of my misfortune to?...

  (New WaW image, y'all!)      Y'all know True Story© is a whole construction/production process and I am 90% of the crew? It starts with a spark. I see something out in the world as I do my daily "life" thing. Something will happen in my field of view/hearing and--... Wait... Y'all DO know that there is always some element of something that happened in every story, right?      Anyway, spark... I see something out in the world and I use that as an idea. I break out the ol' phone and start typing furiously in a Gmail draft that will auto-save as soon as I navigate to another app or out of that message: (okay, so maybe not a REAL story forming) I will continue to grind out that wall of words, really only concerned with the idea of the story, minding grammar and making sure to establish properly-formed sentences and paragraphs. I do this in my Gmail drafts because that automatically saves them right where it is until I get to the PC.    ...

       Fall officially began this week on Monday. For those of us here in west-central North Carolina, the piedmont and foothills region, that means people will trek an hour or two west up to the Blue Ridge Parkway for nature's annual light show in the changing of the leaves. As mundane and unworthy of the trip as this sounds, this is a thing that people drive into the region for every single year. [ Link ] [ Phlip note : I have never personally made this trip and likely won't, September is the latest I've ever been up there ]      Although the parkway sits right on the way to one of Wife Person™ and I's favorite weekend getaway spots, we haven't been since April of last year. Not that we wouldn't WANT to or haven't had the capital means, we just haven't had the time to get away with my spring/summer side hustle and our now one year-old grandlittle.      As y'all may or not remember, but should after this paragraph, our last trip up t...