Thursday nights are "date nights"

As I usually spend Friday afternoons & evenings at the condo, and because new Star Trek: Discovery episodes are dropped on Thursdays, T and I now have a Quarantine Tradition of spending Thursday nights together watching TV.  We usually get a pizza and drink a bottle of wine.

Last night was one of those -- oh, go ahead and have another slice of pizza, go ahead and open a second bottle of wine, go ahead and watch more episodes of another TV show -- it was fun :-)

This morning I have a stressful meeting with my boss and his deputy, to discuss a difficult personnel matter.  I sent them my memo about it yesterday.  If I'm up and at 'em early enough today, I want to drive to the condo and have the meeting from there, so I can do a dance video afterward, and then take the afternoon off.

Dax needs a bath, if I can squeeze that in before I leave the house.  Or I could just do the meeting from here and then go to the condo.  Logistics!  Also, why can't T be the one who gives him a bath!  Various chores stick to me, and I suppose he feels the same way about the chores he does that are invisible to me.  Like, he's the only one who replaces light bulbs, LOL.

legally speaking

As I read the legal briefs sitting before the Supreme Court, in the case of Texas v. [States that voted for Biden], I have the following comments from the viewpoint of a practicing lawyer.  Of course, my specialty is neither election law nor constitutional law, but I have a fair grounding in basic legal principles.

(1) All of the claims made by Texas in this attempt to overturn the election have already been made in lower courts, and these claims were all thrown out by the lower courts.  Just as the Trump campaign requested a recount of all the ballots in Georgia after a recount had already been made.  Trump and his supporters are just making the same claims over and over, even though every court has already thrown them out.  There's no there there, as they say.

(2) States don't get to second guess the election results of other states.  If the Supreme Court were to even entertain this case, it would create everlasting chaos surrounding federal elections for the rest of our nation's existence as a Constitutional Republic.  Every time a state doesn't like the outcome of an election in another state, it would file suit in the Supreme Court to have that other state's election overturned.  The Supreme Court would then be forced to judge the validity of every election in every state.  I'm certain the Supreme Court doesn't want to become the Federal Election Court, they've got more important things to do.

(3) It is just too late.  In election law, invalidating votes that have already been cast is very difficult.  If you don't like the procedures for voting, you have to challenge them before people have already voted.  Otherwise, it's not fair to the voters.  If Republicans thought universal mail-in ballots were unconstitutional, they should've filed suit BEFORE everybody voted.  In fact, they did sue before everybody voted, and those suits either won or lost and either changed how people were allowed to vote or didn't.  Now that people have already voted, it is too late to change the procedures.

(4) It is just too late II.  The federal statutory deadline for certifying the vote has already passed.  The vote has already been certified.  In the widely panned Bush v. Gore case back in 2000, the Supreme Court banned Florida from continuing with its recount, in part because the federal statutory deadline for certifying the vote was just hours away, leaving no time to finish the recount.  In this case, the federal statutory deadline has already passed, so we're stuck with the votes as counted.

(5) At this stage, with all the votes having been counted and certified, Biden won by about 44,000 votes.  This is a much larger margin than Florida in 2000 (537 votes), and this 2020 margin involves multiple states.  It would be a much bigger deal for the Supreme Court to decide the election this time -- such a decision would most likely destroy the credibility of the Supreme Court for decades to come.  The nine Justices of the Supreme Court would much rather save their credibility for the hundreds of future cases awaiting their decisions, than burn it all on keeping Trump in office.  The Trump campaign isn't arguing that the vote was too close, it is arguing that the vote was completely illegitimate.  I do not see five votes going along with Trump on the Supreme court.  Roberts and Gorsuch would never go along, even if the other four conservatives did.  This is Game Over for Trump.

Sure, there's "a chance" that at least five Justices could decide to topple Biden in favor of Trump via the naked instrumentality of this lawsuit.  But it would be such a naked power grab that it would end our Republic.  I don't think the Supreme Court will destroy itself to keep Trump in charge.  I think they'll turn down this lawsuit with a simple, one-sentence, "go away".

ack, right, the condo router broke

After I got out of bed I saw the box for the new router sitting on my desk and remembered, oh shit, the Internet is down at the condo, no way am I going there for work this morning, the first thing I have to do at the condo is install the new router.

So, OK, working from the house this morning, then going to the condo later, where I will perform Internet magic.

The router had broken at around 4pm last Saturday while I was there, I had to jury rig a temporary solution by plugging my laptop into the cable modem and using the Mac OS X "Internet Sharing" feature.  Which was OK but definitely not as good as a dedicated router, plus it anchored my laptop to the cable modem.

Cleaning house, packing, will give Dax a bath, etc.  Probably skipping the dance video.  Hopefully will be warming up for toys by 2pm.

Oh, and I didn't upload a video of myself masturbating during yesterday's Zoom Office Holiday Party, so, there's that.  Small victories.

Internet Magic

Got to the condo around 2pm, futzed with the new router and retraining all the devices to see it until around 3pm.  Then started warming up for toys.

No problem setting up the router, but I experienced an Apple Keychain fart so now I don't have the password to the router.  Not really a problem, as I'd already set everything up -- and I know the network name and password, they're the same as before.  But WTF Apple Keychain, you're supposed to remember these supercomplex passwords you suggest for me.  Where did it go?  Poof.

I can reset the router back to factory, if I ever need to access it directly, and setting it up again would take less than an hour, so, not a big deal.  It took longer to retrain all the devices than to set up the router itself.

I do a lot of file serving from my laptop to my various porn screens, that should be faster now, the old router was at least 10 years old I bet.

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Gonna try to blow out with the biggest of my butt toys toys tonight, and then focus on music tomorrow, with early-to-bed tomorrow so I will have energy for Sunday (putting up Christmas, playing a game with Steve).

Found a set of pro headphones, if I like them I'll buy a second pair so I can have the same equipment at house and condo.

unpopular advice

On Reddit they can downvote you, not just upvote you, so occasionally my advice is deemed unpopular.  Other times it is deemed wildly popular, with hundreds of upvotes.

My latest unpopular advice was that poly people need to be flexible about calendars -- that on birthdays and holidays, poly people cannot be everywhere with everybody at the same time, so be willing to celebrate birthdays and holidays on more than one day with different partners.  I'm mystified as to why this was downvoted, nobody bothered to comment on why.

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Before that, my most recent unpopular advice was on the Gay-Young-Old subreddit, where guys talk about intergenerational relationships.  A young guy suspected his partner was cheating, so he broke into his emails and hookup apps by guessing passwords, and then verified his partner was cheating.

My advice was that snooping on people is also bad.  If you suspect your partner is cheating on you, your relationship has problems.  If you go snooping on your partner, you are unlikely to fix these problems, because now you have also become untrustworthy via snooping.

That was so unpopular!  Most people think that if you catch your partner cheating, you are absolutely in the right to have snooped on them.  I understand why this advice is unpopular, but I'm sticking by it.  Don't snoop.  If you don't trust your partner, ASK to see their private stuff for confirmation.  Tell them WHY you don't trust them.  Communicate with each other, damn it.

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Oh well.

I have over 5,000 positive karma on Reddit, so I can afford the occasional unpopular advice.  But sometimes I'm clueless as to why a particular piece of advice is unpopular.  Today, I'm clueless.  I've long had to celebrate my and my partner's birthdays on multiple days, because my partners aren't all friends, and I'm not friends with all of their partners either.  With my family -- I have a big family -- we never see each other on Christmas, we always have to pick a different day because there are too many other competing demands for Christmas Day itself.  So what's the big deal?

I will forget about this in five minutes, LOL.

ugh, I forgot about the HomePods

I'm sort of like the Blob taking over K's condo infrastructure today ... making it ALL MINE, heh ... the only piece I haven't completely commandeered yet is the AppleTV ... but then I'd have to relogin to all the goddess damned streaming services

peak Bug

Is this why I've constructed my life, to have moments like this moment -- all that goddess damned work turns into a pulsating flower -- and I'm doing the bare minimum for everybody/everything else,

to have a few moments like these,

yeah,

and that's what the billionaires are doing also,

all your damned work, turns into their pulsating flower,