Do you ever have a dream where you wake up and some fact or thing just keeps rattling around your brain and when you wake up, you are convinced it’s either totally true or the best (or worst) thing in the world and you just have to do something about it?
Yeah that happened to me last night. When I woke up, I had the phrase “Curly Brace Face” stuck in my head. In my half awake/half asleep state, I was trying to decide if that phrase would be the name of a nerdy indie pop band, or some sort of front end super villain and can’t quite decide. I think it could work either way and now I can’t get the phrase out of my head even though it’s really dumb and pointless but yep, my brain glommed onto it.
Hopefully writing it out will kick it out of my brain, like the way of getting a song lyric out of your head is to just listen to the song. We’ll see, and make sure to check this super exciting blog again to see how successful I am.
I’ve lived in Florida my whole life (other than a brief 3 months stint in New Jersey for a work thing). And while this state has many great qualities, and many not so great qualities cough our entire state government especially the Governor *cough, the one constant has always been the heat and humidity. If you live here, you’re used to it of course - the 82 degrees at 5am and how stepping outside any day from late April to early November feels like walking into a bathtub.
But the last few years, to the surprise of no one, climate change has made things much worse. Tampa (where I live) had never before recorded an actual temperature day of 100 degrees or higher, yet we broke that record two years ago, and now it’s fairly common to get days like that, or at least days where the heat index is well into the triple digits. And of course with all this heat, we’ve also had far less rain. You used to be able to almost set your watch to a summer afternoon thunderstorm between 3-5pm but this year at least we’re in a drought without a lot of rain most days. This is unusual because Tampa usually has at least 250 days of rain a year but this year we are tracking far less than that, and far less total rain too.
Then there are hurricanes - 2 years ago Tampa Bay got it’s first direct hit in over 100 years, Hurricane Milton, which was just a few weeks after being grazed by Hurricane Helene. The damage was pretty bad, though it could have been far worse. Florida is just a big ol' strip of land hanging out between the Atlantic Ocean and the ultra hot Gulf of Mexico, but with the rising heat the storms that make it into the Gulf get super charged and can rapidly intensify from a category 1 to a category 4, sometimes in under a day. So yeah, not great.
All of this is to say that, like a typical Florida man, I’m going to ride it out here stubbornly (and maybe stupidly). Florida is home. I can of course hope that it doesn’t get much worse, climate and weather wise (writing this as I’m about to go mow my yard at 8am when the “feels like” is already up to 102 of course).
Visit Florida!
As I’m a cat person, I figured that sharing a pic and some info about my four cats might be something that folks enjoy (the internet does love cats after all).
Bisque (5 years old)
I originally intended to just get Bisque from the Humane Society because at the time my son wanted an “orange boy cat” but Elton John ended up coming home as well when he came up to me in the “kitten room” and flopped over, basically saying take me home. Despite his pretty appearance, Bisque is, in a word, an asshole. He bonded with me (instead of my son) pretty quickly and I’m his “person” without a doubt. With everyone else, including the other cats (especially Tina Turner) he can be mean and nasty, and isn’t above biting or scratching even me. It seems like he just never learned how to properly show affection and play without making people bleed. That all being said, he isn’t so vicious as to be dangerous (unless I’m trying to take him to the vet) and despite his asshole tendencies, I love him anyway.
Elton John (5 years old)
Sweet and incredibly friendly, he always greets anyone in the house, be it family or friends or repair people. Even though Bisque thinks he is “in charge”, Elton John really rules the roost and gets along with everyone. Thankfully he took to my son right away, so even though he didn’t get the cat he wanted originally, he did get a sweet and loving companion who sits on his lap, follows him into his room at night and is just loved by all.
Tina Turner (2 years old)
Tina has spunk, personality and is incredibly sweet and kind, but also doesn’t put up with shit or let other cats push her around. She does have crazy eyes, but is super nice and loving, wanting pets and attention. She’s a bit of a loner, coming out for periods at a time to play but tends to spend most of her time sleeping under my bed, in the box spring lining that she so kindly tore open and destroyed. She’s also absolutely OBSESSED with water, making a huge mess almost daily from her cat fountain and drinking from the faucet whenever she gets a chance. She’s Blondie’s sister.
Blondie (2 years old)
A bit skittish when you pet her, she is incredibly sweet and nice and 1000% in love with Elton John. We got both her and her sister at the same time from a cat rescue because we were told that she had bonded with her sister and they couldn’t be separated. Well, that lasted about 2 weeks before she bonded instead with Elton John (and thankfully he loves her too) and now she follows him around, lets him clean her and sleeps with him when she can. She also strangely loves corners, rolling around on counter tops and rubbing her face all over the edges.
All four are great cats and as I work from home, keep me company all day long.
Back in June, I traveled with my family to Atlanta to attend a World Cup game.
FIFA is, without a doubt, one of the most corrupt organizations on the planet. But as a soccer fan, the World Cup is a huge deal and is always enjoyable. So, I set my morals briefly aside and secured 4 tickets (for me, my dad, my son and my brother) as this could be a once in a lifetime opportunity to attend.
Rather than go through the entire shitty FIFA ticketing process, once the dates and venues for the games were announced, I bought my tickets “blind” through Stub Hub. I had no idea where my exact seats were, and certainly no idea on who the teams were going to be, but since I knew how much a hassle getting tickets were going to be, I figured that ANY game at the World Cup is better than none, and I knew I would regret it if I didn’t go. I knew the Group that I was going to get
I watched the group draw when it happened (a terrible “show” with none other than Donald Trump in attendance) in December 2025 and followed the qualifiers to see who would make it. Colombia, Portugal, Uzbekistan were drawn in automatically, with three other teams (New Caledonia, Jamaica and Democratic Republic of Congo) competing for the last spot. Congo ended up winning and the Group stage was set.
When the matches were announced, I hoped for Colombia vs. Portugal, or either of those teams against one of the other two, as both as well known soccer countries. Sadly, the draw was not in my favor and I ended up with a match between Uzbekistan vs. Congo, in the last game of the Group.
Uzbekistan had already been eliminated from moving onto the knockout round, but Congo - with a win - could secure a 3rd place spot and move on. Our seats ended up being in the highest deck, right behind a goal, but as my brother put it (who became a soccer convert after attending), having such a high up seat let us watch plays develop, to which I totally agreed.
After a waived off, offside goal by Congo, Uzbekistan scored first and went into half time with a 1-0 lead. In the second half though, Congo came roaring back and ended up winning 3-1. The ironic part about my seats was that even though it was so high up, all 4 goals scored were in the goal we were above, so we got to see all of the best parts of the game right there and in person.
Despite being two smaller, non-soccer powerhouse countries, the venue was almost sold out and the fans were excited and electric. There were many people like me, who had no rooting interest for either side, but it became clear that the “neutrals” heavily started to support Congo. I saw many people wearing the Congo jersey or wearing a Congo scarf who, at least based on their race, likely had no connection to Congo, as it is a primarily Black country.
The overall experience of the World Cup, putting all of the politics of the world and FIFA and the prices and all of that aside, was one of joy and pride. People gathered together to watch the beautiful game, and for those wonderful 90 minutes, all of the other noise and politics and everything else that roils this country and the world disappeared. After the match, Congo fans (and newly adopted Congo fans) were dancing and celebrating through the concourses, filming each other and laughing and high fiving and really just showing what is great about sports, how it can unify people from all walks of life and just enjoy a simple game, played by some of the best humans in the world.
I’m so glad I got to go to experience this, to share it with my son and brother and dad, and don’t regret a single penny spent, recognizing how fortunate I was to be able to afford to go of course.
I was reading Mark Zuckerberg’s AI treatise and the thing that I can’t get over with all of the people who are so in love with AI is the general loss of humanity that embracing AI brings:
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AI makes us more productive - Great, so we offload tasks to a robot that is sometimes right, sometimes not. And what do we do with that “extra” time? More work! So we should embrace AI because it lets us do MORE work?
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AI leads to new breakthroughs - If that’s the case, where are they? Is cancer cured or world hunger solved? No, of course not. At it’s best, AI is good at organizing existing content, not making new things. It might find patterns but those patterns don’t lead to many positive outcomes, at least not at the sheer cost of throwing AI at every possible possible.
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AI will lead to more income equality - Yeah, this one is rich. Aside from the biggest AI companies being controlled by a smaller group of people, the whole idea of “disbursement” of AI wealth is a joke. Anyone who REALLY believes that these companies will just hand out money to improve the world, just for the goodness of humanity, is out of their mind. We are hoarding creatures, always looking out for our own, and anything that threatens that goes against the core tenant of who we are in our lizard brains. If handing out money was even possible in the way the AI folks talk about it, we would have done it already.
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AI can help make us smarter - Sure, it might be good for answering a question about how to do something. But part of learning is making those pathways in your brain to remember how something is done or the “why” in something, that’s what skill building is. If the text is just regurgitated to you, you don’t learn anything and build those skills, you just memorize what you need and move on.
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AI helps us be more creative with our hobbies - This is the one that is the most soul sucking to me. The whole point of doing a hobby is to DO IT, to get better at it and learn and improvise. If we offload that to something else, we don’t gain anything as a person, we just check off things on a list to say that we did them, thereby sucking the joy of learning out of something that we previously enjoyed doing. Using AI to learn things doesn’t teach us skills, it deskills us by making things “easier”
So yeah, sorry Mark, AI is not better for humanity in any way shape or form.