From the Walking Eagle News Weekend Update for December 9, 2017:

Quote:Lateral violence breaks out on social media, UN observers say
Fierce fighting has broken out on Twitter and Facebook, UN observers report. The assault began early on Friday evening with truth bombs and flame attacks, quickly over-running hospitals with the wounded. Aid agencies say thousands have fled to refugee camps on Instragram.

So I've had a week from Hell.

So on Monday, my parents found out that they had been dropped from their Obamacare individual health plan by the government.  Because my father will be moving to Medicare next year, my mother put only her social security income on the application for MediCal (which is the local Medicaid).  From that, they decided that the household income was too low, and so they stopped paying for the insurance and put them on MediCal.  But because they don't actually qualify for MediCal, actually using those benefits would be fraud -- so no health insurance at all for a month.

And then the fire came.  The Thomas (Aquinas) fire started on Monday night (dammit Sailor Mars), and has been burning ever since.  It's eerie watching the homes of your friends on TV when there's fire all around.  While this house was never in danger, it was a block away from the mandatory evacuation zone.  There are upsides to living next to a hospital, as you figure that firefighters will work extra hard to preserve the area.

This is what it looked like on Monday night from my house, a little past midnight:
   

That's freaky to see.  These areas haven't burned in 30+ years, so it's definitely time for a burn.  The natural cycle here is 30 years in SoCal for fires (60 years near Santa Barbara).  But with the week of sustained Santa Ana winds, it's been impossible to control the fire.  So we now have a fire ranging from Fillmore to Montecito that still seems to be growing.  Currently at 170000 acres, or 688 square kilometers.

https://maps.nwcg.gov/sa/#/%3F/34.4026/-119.2699/11

But I didn't stick around, because I had to go into the office this week.  So I got to drive to Temecula on Tuesday, which was fun because every time there was smoke across the freeway, everything slowed down.

And the first thing that happened at our general meeting was that the two founders of the company were both resigning.  This was a complete shock to pretty much everyone -- even family members didn't know that both were leaving at the same time.  The company is going to be in the hands of two of the other early hires, so it's not like it's a huge change, but it still is.  We're at that phase where we're not really a startup any more, we're hiring too fast.  But work is otherwise looking good.

And I got home on Friday, and of course everything was still on fire.  The smoke was thick through Santa Paula, and here in Ventura, the only things in the sky were a cloud of smoke, a sickly orange moon, and Sirius doing its bravest to shine through the haze.  The order to boil water has been lifted.

And then late on Friday night, I found out that Medicaid wanted us to repay $20,000.  This is because Oklahoma Medicaid doesn't want to have to pay for my grandmother to be in nursing home, so they look back through the last five years of finances and see if they can wring more money out of people.  I mean, because obviously, undue influence from 1000 miles away when we visit like once a year.  So now we've got to hire an attorney in another state.

The temperatures are in the mid 80s now (~30°C), and the smoke is still pretty bad here.  This is what it looks like now.  Pyrocumulus one direction:
   
And a complete halo in the other:
   
It's just this fucking year, man.  Congress is about to pass a tax increase on me to pay off corporations, at the same time I'm being asked to pay health care costs out of pocket for two generations of elders.  My mother had heart surgery a couple months ago, and my father had to have a kidney stone surgically removed.  Both of them were insured at the time, and both are doing much better.

My grandmother, though, finally took enough falls that she had to be moved to a nursing home.  She's 101 years old now.  She made it to 100 at my aunt's house, but since my aunt now has her own medical problems (like being in a coma for a week, having a stroke that a hospital didn't notice because of other problems), she has to move out.  She says she's ready to die, which is too bad, but at this point, it's probably for the best.  My mother keeps talking about killing herself, but that's probably the stress.  But I'm just getting tired of it.

Let's see, we had to euthanize one of the terriers this year too, because her skin infections had gotten too severe -- it was like her immune system had shut down, and even the constant course of antibiotics couldn't maintain her.

And we're living in a hellscape of cinder and ash, where the governor says that this is the new normal.  But the national government denies that climate change is real.  We have to fight just to keep what we have, because they want to take it away and give it to the powerful.  All of the time I've had to spend this year on planning protests and rallies just to have the government ignore the people every time.

I mean, nothing bad has happened to me, but it has to everyone around me.  I'm just so tired, you know?

Welp, its finally actually happening:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nnw9WJ8YcxE

This is so cool... We've known for decades that there are caves under Montréal, but another set has been found!

http://www.cbc.ca/news/multimedia/explor...-1.4431920

And it's down at the level of the top of the local aquifer:

... could you give me a hand sorting out the 3D-art freebies for making fanart, please?

We've got a little list on the freebie wiki. The regular editors don't play the game, and the page is getting messy.

The second-largest section on the page is "to be sorted" - we don't know where those links should go. The largest section is "Imperium of Man", and I've been lead to believe that there are recognizable sub-sections that could go here... but I don't know what those sections are.

What should go where?

Was there an update pushed overnight (on Ubuntu/XFCE, without requiring me to use the usual interface gadget and agree to it) or something? 'Fox suddenly wants another gigabite of RAM, which means it takes about half an hour to load a page because that does not exist and shoving everything into the page swap apparently clogs the works like nothing else. I didn't open any new pages and my ad-blocking is set to "maximum hostility even if it means content doesn't load correctly" and it is, as noted, aLinux ssytem, so viral shenanigans seem unlikely (also, it's ONLY a problem in 'fox, I'm using Chrome for this just fine but I hate the way Chrome takes away most of the interface I'm used to)

... that Halifax exploded. It's still the largest non-nuclear explosion on record anywhere.

CBC has colourized some photos of the aftermath:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scoti...-1.4435266

It's the only trade agreement that the USA has ever abrogated. And the USA pulled out of the agreement because the other country supported the Confederacy during the Civil War.

Just saying... while looking at the current NAFTA talks.

(Sources: 1, 2.)