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The latest ada dition to my Wall Of Text Fan Club is Lexi, the cashier at an Oldtown Portland Convenient Store.

Whenever I set foot in her shop Lexi calls out "My Hero!" because I defended her agains a shoplifter who tried to put the arm on a pint of Ben And Jerry's.

While I did not injure that right chap in _any_ way, I put the fear of G-d in him when I grabbed him then shouted "Put That Back!" as well as "Call 9-1-1!" The particular way I grabbed him prevented him from punching me.

He won't be shoplifting at _that_ particular store any time soon.

Sammy used to work at a donut shop near my home. I was very proud when she told me she shared my writing with a friend. For Sammy I bought a binder; when I saw her each week I gave her a new essay, article, rant or manifesto which I three hole punched at work.

Sammy doesn't work at the donut shop anymore, so I'll be mailing my Walls Of Text to her at her new place of work.

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On my way back from some morning fishing, a question occurred to me and I thought I'd see if any of you know. Does the government shutdown mean the game wardens are off work? Wondering strictly out of concern for the wellbeing of those fine, upstanding individuals.

On 29th March we remove ourselves from our local, and very successful, trading bloc, the EU.

I have been preoccupied making plans and making my objections known in a peaceful and democratic manner. I'm afraid that politics and worrying about the future has taken over.

I figured I should brush up on my French and I've made a stash of supplies so that we can eat after the borders close on 29th March. We import most of our food. And that food which we do grow is often picked by migrant workers who will no longer be welcome after Brexit.

We have oil and gas pipelines that cross continental Europe and we buy gas from that nice Mr Putin who only wants the best for his patriotic friends. We also import electricity directly from France via a 2GW cable under the English Channel. Obviously this gets more and more expensive as Sterling continues to lose its value.

Several prominent Brexit supporters, including Jacob Rees-Mogg decided it would be better to move their business to Ireland (in the EU) and the great patriot John Redwood advised his customers to pull their money out of the UK and invest in places like the EU in the light of Brexit.

There's still the unsolvable problem of the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Dinosaur-deniers the DUP are propping up a minority Tory government and staunchly preventing any progress because they don't want a "border" between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK, despite the fact there's already a physical one in the form of the Irish Sea.

The Scottish Government brought a case to the European Court of Justice asking for a ruling on whether a country (eg the U) could unilaterally revoke Article 50 (the statement of intention to leave the EU). The UK Westminster government opposed the Scottish governments action, but was unsuccessful. The ECJ ruled that the UK can unilaterally revoke Article 50 without the agreement of the other 27 EU member states. All we need is a vote in the Westminster Parliament (which is sovereign). So it's not over yet!

The banks in the City of London have been making further preparations. About £700M of assets have moved to Frankfurt.

We also have to consider the extra delays at the borders for goods and raw materials coming in and out of the country. Much of our trade goes through Dover, in Kent. In Kent, they're preparing by creating another motorway-lorry-park, this time the M26. Industry will perhaps find it difficult to produce and to sell when things are held up in Kent.

Believe it or not, we have a Kipper in the family. He's also a Baptist. Goodness knows where he got that from. He was shown Father Ted when young but hey ho. I was treated to an entertaining conspiracy theory about Silicon Valley and the EU deliberately suppressing "right wing free speech." A long, convoluted "explanation" followed.

This conversation also confirmed a conclusion that I'd reached over the years regarding Kippers (UKIP members). They have a very naive and simplistic view of countries, nationalism, the modern world, "free speech," "hate speech," conservatism, economics, science, international relations, history (the World Wars and the Cold War, the rise of Nazism) and have precious little clue about "their own country" i.e. the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. They get it confused with England and are pretty ignorant about Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland.

When mentioning that I was now in favour of Scottish Independence and that I didn't want to lose my right of Freedom of Movement, and that I hoped Scotland would join the EU, the classic Kipper ill-informed and patronising reply came back, "I can't understand why you'd want to regain your sovereignty only to give it away again to the EU." It's a trading bloc and it is democratic. It's more democratic that British First Past the Post Westminster Centralised "democracy."

My sister had the right idea. She settled in Germany years ago. The mayor of her town wrote to all British citizens inviting them to apply for German citizenship which she has done and will be sitting her citizenship exam in a couple of months time.

Finally, I asked why UKIP had appointed Stephen Yaxley-Lennon as its advisor for being mean to brown people. That didn't go down well. I got chapter and verse on what a nice man he really is and has brown friends etc.

And don't mention Trump. It'll just get blamed on Obama. And Mr Putin is a very nice man.

Game over UK. We have fallen to the fascists. Run while you can.

“Sarah” is not her real name because she’s got a Monkey On Her Back.

She held out hope of such Weasel Action last night but actually spent fifteen solid hours in the can doing her makeup as I myself whiled away the early morning hours instructing my own Monkey on the crucial importance of avoiding recidivism

I just now left her at my place as I set off to totally blow away an Electroencephalograph machine. I am by now Dead Certain I have Temporal Lobe Epilepsy - thus my Hypergraphia and my “Altered Sexuality”.

What remains to be seen is whether the TLE explains _all_ of my Neurological Disorders as I _also_ have all the symptoms of Pernicious Anemia. We’re that actually the case, Vitamin B12 Injections would save my very life as it _killed_ my Great-Grandfather.

Doubt was cast on any form of B12 Anemia by another doctor when he pointed out that my symptoms were transitory. We’re it B12 only the injections would enable me to speak or to write intelligibly.

It is difficult to detect TLE as one’s Temporal Lobes are small and in the very center of our brains, just to either side of the Corpus Callosum that bridges our two lives together.

  It there is a far more sensitive EEG electrode array that one wears like a hairnet. I don’t know yet which electrode type I will have as yet.

Sarah suggested she and I hand over a ten spot for a private theater this evening. It happens that try as I might I simply cannot Spooge if I hadn’t enough sleep; she hasn’t slept in days and would need to “Get Well” to do so.

“What do I do when you fall asleep at McDonalds?”

“Call me on my phone or tell me to go outside and smoke a cigarette.”

So when she falls asleep at the skinflick tonight I’ll drop her a dime to suggest she have a smoke.

She’s a member of the very same sex club I’m in, which far more than bodes we’ll for William Jefferson Clinton:

It means I’ll only have to pay ten clams to get in when the manager throws a... uh... “Party” and so springs for pizza and snacks.

While us male regulars at the Oregon are all old familiar friends, for unaccompanied women it’s not nearly so humbly homely:

“I had to call the cops.”

In other news, Google Webmaster atolls yields the insight that 58% of my search referrals are for “Oregon Theater”.

It’s helpful that my business and personal sites are now on different domains as I would not want potential clients to regard me as unprofessional.

Global Rank For Warp Life:

https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/warplife.com

What link would yield my United States Rank?

I Am Absolutely Serious:

ALL BY MYSELF I made Kuro5hin #6 for Bangladesh!

But I'll _never_ tell!

Acid andy recently had the heartwarming conviction to reach out to me for fear I'd kicked the bucket or abandoned SN. I suppose I haven't been that active lately, in SN or otherwise.

So I'll tell you what I've been up to.

Life has been a category 5 shit hurricane for the last two years, though recently things started ostensibly improving. Loss of income, debt, bed bugs, serious health issues, mom getting cancer, my beloved cat dying, there's a lot more. It hasn't been fun. I've become an angrier person overall because of it, which saddens me a lot, because I used to be like a rock that nothing could scratch.

If the years of OCD prior to effective treatment made me a more melancholy, cynical person, then the last two years have made me much more irritable, temperamental, and hot-tempered.

I've currently landed a passably-paying job with a tech company. I'm bound by NDA to prevent from telling you much more about what those duties entail or which company I work for.
The boss clearly means well but he's made it more than a slightly rotten experience for me so far, with constantly shifting demands, impossible time frames, and me getting blamed and threatened because of other people's mistakes on multiple occasions. I've also made just enough airhead mistakes of my own to make them think it was all my fault, which clearly doesn't help.

Volition and Epoch 2.0 are still definitely on the agenda despite a lack of current repository activity. It's just very hard to find the time and energy to work on those right now. When I have the time, I don't have the energy, and vice versa.

My best real life friends are either in excruciating pain from lupus, picking up the necrotic chunks of leg flesh that fall off their diabetic body, or nearly blind as the result of a stroke, so I suppose it's been terrible for everyone around me lately.

Things are slowly improving, I just hope I can keep this momentum, because I'm already seeing some warning signs, and well, I didn't end up becoming such a pessimist for no reason.

There. Now you know.

And from Former President Ahmadinejad.

"I would like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year. May, 2019 be full of happiness, prosperity, and peace for everybody. Jesus loved everyone and wanted us to love all. God Bless" twitter.com/Ahmadinejad1956/status/1077287938839531520

Very special tweet. Right? He's saying MERRY CHRISTMAS again. Or possibly for the first time. And that's because of me. Only I could end the War on Christmas. By proclaiming, and WINNING, the War on Political Correctness. It's Christmas. Perfect time to give a teacher a gun. And make our schools much safer. whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/president-donald-j-trump-committed-making-schools-safer

By the way, I am in the Oval Office, all alone (poor me). Wearing nothing but my robe & socks. And I just gave out a 115 mile long contract for another HUGE section of the Wall in Texas. #ChristmasWall

I'm currently busy because I received start-up funding (and use of a ridiculously swanky office). The first development deadline is on Mon 31 Dec 2018. The second development deadline is on Thu 31 Jan 2019. The third development deadline is on Sun 31 Mar 2019. Funding currently lasts until Fri 31 May 2019. Unfortunately, this has greatly curtailed my annual fun programming project for Christmas 2018. Previous efforts have taken three days. This took three hours.

I have implemented a small system which predicts the final moderation score of a message on a forum. This uses some search engine theory, such as postings and repetition limits. However, it doesn't use n-grams, stemming, weighting by word frequency or Bayes theorem. Indeed, a significant amount of theory has not been implemented and the result only makes predictions with a relatively weak correlation. This implementation only works with the output of SoylentNews and is heavily dependent upon certain attributes currently found in the HTML. It is also heavily dependent upon line breaks typically found within boiler-plate HTML. Regardless, the concept can be generalized and adapted for other forums.

One script collates words:-

cat /path/to/saved/soylentnews/discussions/*.html | ./collate.pl > collate.txt

The other script allows predictions to be compared against actual scores:-

cat /path/to/saved/soylentnews/discussions/*.html | egrep '(comment_score_|comment_body_)' | ./estimate.pl collate.txt | sort -r -n -k 2 | more

The second script can also be used interactively. This is minor source of amusement but is generally less insightful than browsing the collated statistics:-

./estimate.pl collate.txt

If you want to be argumentative, negative or defeatist then this script will confirm that you'll be unappreciated. For example, one of our resident trolls, SaltySpice, rarely scores above 1.2. In particular, from my cache of saved discussions, "Fuck MDC" scores 0.597.

begin 644 soylentnews-score20181224.tar.gz
M'XL("`ZZ(%P"`W-O>6QE;G1N97=S+7-C;W)E,C`Q.#$R,C0N=&%R`.U76U/C
M-A3.LW^%-KC$(0FV<R$MP6EW=K?MSG1X`*:=:1P8)Q%$7<?.2DHAW0V_O4>2
MKT`&.LNTW4'?0VR?<W0NNGQ'8?$ZQ!&/\#5KL6E,<=MQOW7;[:X]C<,PX'A_
M&5:^$`Z@W^N)I]OO]HM/`;?;Z5;<3M=UX.>@`W9NO^\Z%>14_@6L&`\H0A5.
M"?NXPEN+?4S_E6+GE;UBU)Z0R%YB&J+6;X:Q@T[5KCB&78'>Q(L%O*-3L3O0
M.\;)(N`Q%5932I8<G<5@(_<*^IDP4)%I$"IS!E;6F[K84^ALCL$N8C'E9+78
M-W9`EVXV)!:!&P;%'U<$HM1",H&-5QL8QO6<A-B:X4L2X9EEAO#PCD[/WKX_
M'M;KZ).!D#F-5Q%O-`;P3BX3DUO[:-[U)Z/SX7AO:).8*5NPYOB&>])(#-@@
M'++B*#FB.E5%7\@C<3%R6M^-&]7[SG87P0=\P3%=*`?U@12#/XO!)`34^D$H
MZT?M^N?/EBG>1\X815"A]%S+Q>[XU:U][K>^5\%,&Z*D81!:4B*6X.SMNY,3
M5#6=0X0IC>DA$E&3&3A$TR"*8HYF6'@4"AEDWX^J@\0/OB'<<FZZ;I+I1I7!
M<%)JEDS]"9,SB6?K[7,#246<1"OLN=)7LCJIM+0>^_F"E-?0MV?DS^'(CWPZ
M;A2]E^=>^*BG->X&RV6XOI@&2RN7)6R62_+TG'PJ-L;&V)VM%G*D47D!8%OY
M'ZN3_@P-X#'^%V2?\G^GXU2<MN,<]#3_?SW\GTBQ,OIRTH^7.++>'S>K1\A\
M??+3KT":53B1#_:"O!%8YC4F5W/>5'S8E%Q6]]@R!-*S1\CG"8_$S9RME>TG
M:;OQU)>4*U^90GT.@""F8<PP9"<HPI1GQJNU:H,G=*J7WF>2V4H3R5H,3GL!
M<$Y*QUM*OD_NE^`RF,YA<(B1]0&O&?H&U'E-,$O9HB2+#::;0M4J<L/+UESH
M[:+QG@DNU6M:XJ90&(0HK</0R9T+U[974@]*LZUFI5GU>;7)5A/&J27&-)UF
MKZZD?\0DLFJHUE3#09C.=-JTC.?G?W4:GX-C'N/_7K>=W_\/'''_=SJNYO__
MCO]_(1,:T#7Z,:9/[`7_A/!ADZ/L=*LK_#*@P<)C<W*IR%=]W[*$)X>V?05T
M6%1Q:H]>MWX?VZ.@]=?8+H\:G0.Y@=QO^37@>V1?E0>S8C=X0'N>J6U[ZT@S
MU<E3F;89)+J+-);'G&*^HI%H&[+LC+UDV8*G/,5C9193YSQCQ1#+I/Q:(PV9
M2T%H%J093:G_0QOC48*4E_)TU+!3(*Y,ZG6*;'.OJ.S?@UI+1?+96MXQ3B[B
MTO21S(H$#.1\AX%+9%U4[ZD,!@\G*V[W#P07&Q8E&8BH:0Z*HJNE8#XO9@9?
K\$@8^4Y`]X7\B]#0T-#0T-#0T-#0T-#0T-#0T-#0T/B_X6]42<M9`"@`````
`
end

(Usual instructions for uudecode process.)