The Realm

Well so far looks like this place hasn't blown up just yet. Speaking of holding on until the bitter end...My cell phone is dying. You guys know I have no love for cell phones but I've had my Galaxy S7 for five years now. Chris got his J7 at the same time I got mine in Dec 2016. His started having problems with power and staying on as well as memory and not being able to receive photos in text. He held out as long as he could but as is our way to be "In your face world!" He got another J7 ha ha. And I knew the day would come when my S7 would kick the bucket. My problem has been my battery is getting worse an worse. And you can't just open my phone and add a new one. Of course they wouldn't do something easy or convenient like that. It has been holding less and less charge and become harder to charge up. Today looks like it's my last day with it perhaps. It dropped to 4%. I charged it for an hour and it wa 19% and I watched it go 18, 17, 16 all the way to 4%. I'm afraid to turn it off and unplug it. It's literally on a life line. I was afraid to get the memory card out as it might not turn back on. I was able to remove my photos at least through the cable which has never worked well for me. I'm now in the unpleasant process of trying to back up photos from text conversations. Some like with Chris, Joker and ACtipton I have tons of photos. And it's not easy. I have to download them to the internal storage then transfer them to my pc. I wish I could save texts. I'd have backed up those ages ago. You guys know I archive everything. But phones aren't real computers. They suck and don't make things easy as they should be. I'm afraid my phone will die before I back up all the pics. So that's what my day entails today. And yes I'm already looking through ebay for a good new unlocked S7 in white or silver. Wish me luck. I never liked that mine was black.

On a happier note. Here is a photo of my puppy when I met her at 4 weeks old.



She's five weeks today. I hope the breeder will send me updated pics, but she'll have to send them to Chris's phone.
.

I am doing much better now from my surgery. Not much has happened since I have mostly been in bed recovering but I have less pain now and I'm able to get up and about. I drove for the first time the other day. I went out and got some wipers for my Jeep. The old ones were falling apart. I got some nice high end ones. I've never done that before and it was rather funny how they were square instead of the normal arc shaped. I wasn't sure what to think at first but then realized they match the rest of the car so that's good. They are unique that way. I have yet to test them out as it hasn't rained though today we finally got some heavy rain because it's coming ahead of yet another cold front. My poor plants. When can they ever go back outside? I am sick of this low 40s upper 30s night stuff. It's Spring already this should be over with.

I have no idea how I missed this, but this is the most awesome commercial I have ever seen for the new Jeep.



It's awesome Malcolm came back to play this part. I loved the transition from the original movie to the new modern jeep. And it's nice that the JL looks like it would fit right into Jurassic Park even without the paint job. I found out about this when I saw a still frame and noticed the LED headlights. That's not the original Jeep I thought. So I started to investigate and found this awesome commercial.

Chris and I had a very nice day off yesterday. Oh only one minor annoyance. His phone has been having storage issues so we took it to T mobile to have it looked at. They told him the update he's been avoiding was just a T mobile update and not an os update. So he finally allowed it and well turns out it was an OS update. That's what happened to me last year. I was so mad that now it happened to him too and he doesn't like it either. So he got upgraded from Marshmellow to Nougat. I have been avoiding the update on mine because I'm afraid mine will be worse. I had already been put on Nougat and Oreo is out now which is even worse. I don't want that on my phone. They've also been pestering me to upgrade to the new phone. I do like some things about the new S9 but not enough to switch. I love my phone, it works fine and I like how small it is. The new one is too big and I don't like the edges of the screen. Looks like it's melting off without a decent frame. So I'm going to avoid the update as long as I can and keep my phone that I like as it is. Suck's about Chris's phone. They destroyed his clock on his lock screen and there's no way to fix it.
.

One of the things I wanted to do in this post was talk about the new change on my phone and how bad it is. But I don't have all the screen caps yet. Chris has the old version and our OS looked the same so I have to wait for him to get home to get a few more screen shots I am missing that I could not find online. The biggest loss to me is the world clock looking so bad now and being buried a well as the alarm which is part of the same program. I never used the timer or the stop watch so I don't care about those much though I'm sure they've been ruined too. The original world clock was great because you could click on "World clock" and the earth was right there. It was a grey earth but the background had constellations that were so cool. You could spin the earth and the stars moved accordingly. The cities you had were set. You didn't have to "add" anything though not all major cities where available. Florida only had Miami which was odd. When you clicked on a city the entire timezone lit up on the earth and a box showed you the time and weather and how far ahead or behind they were if it was another time zone. If you clicked in a space the timezone stayed lit up. One of my fave things was to click random cities then spin the earth in all directions to see where the time zone hit. I loved looking at the tiny pacific islands. You could zoom in and out of the earth. And one of the coolest things was it had the shadow of night and day. I would constantly check to see if the sunset was coming or which of my friends had night already or day. I didn't even check the time most of the the time. I just loved seeing where the edge of night and day was all around the globe. It was my fave app.

Now when you click on the clock not only are all the thumnails for apps terrible but it's a blank page. I had to add a city so I added Miami and THEN you click that and you get the earth. The earth is this ugly flat grey and white. The sky is flat grey blue with no stars. You can't see cities from the default altitude. You have to zoom in. And when you click a city the time zone no longer is highlighted. Night and day are still there but it's been so watered down this is no longer any fun. As for the alarm it was easy. There were big numbers you scrolled like an old odometer and sent. That's now a boring simplified clock and you have to click it to get to the settings. Extra pointless clicking when before things were right on the surface. The alarm was special to me because we both used it a lot when I was recovering from surgery those first few weeks. I had it set to go off every 4 hours round the clock for my medicine. And I had a wonderful song picked for it. Luckily the songs are still there. Crossing A River is very gentle and not something that would scare me awake. It was wonderful. So for them to have changed these things I grew so fond of while I was very sick really bothers me.
Here's the ringtone/alarm tone https://youtu.be/NSDg6vrrMnc
I wonder if setting the phone back to factory would fix this mess? I don't care if I lose my texts and as for photos I can back those up easily. While looking up screen caps I saw other world clocks that were more advanced. I haven't wanted to put an email on this phone because I don't want to download anything or have an email on my phone. But now that everything is messed up perhaps I should as I'd like a nicer keyboard skin as it worse now. And maybe I should get another world clock since I'm not happy about having lost this one. I could use an email I never use just for this phone. I just don't want to be bothered when I do get any kinds of emails even spam. I don't want my phone ringing or beeping unless it's from someone I know. So that's part of my rant until I do a comparison later on with all the screen caps.

Other than that things are going well. I'm really enjoying writing outlines for all my stories. I'm feeling very creative because of it and it's nice to have my ideas laid out so I can flesh them out later. I think today I will start to work on the frames for the next page of FBTF. I'll also try to write up some idea for how the ending to UP could have been better. I love UP it's my fave Pixar movie and I really don't have any complaints about it. But I can't help but think what would happen if I gave it a happy ending for everyone. Kind of like the happy ending for Hunt for Red October that I crossed over with Jurassic Park. I am enjoying reading all your ideas too. I was telling Gamma I love how creative the raptor pack is.

Yesterday was a great day. It was a day off and though we didn't do anything amazing, I still can't anyway, it was nice to spend a whole day together. We had a nice breakfast at IHOP which I haven't done in a long time and the staff was happy to see me again. I've been gone a long time and was a regular there. We did a bit of work at the storage unit. So we threw out stuff and made small progress there. We came home and watched Groundhog day. I really like that movie and the time concepts in it. One of my fave parts is when Bill Murry breaks the pencil and the next day when the day resets the pencil is intact again. Then our friend Mike came over and took the two white couches. I'm so glad those are gone because they were taking up so much space in our living room. Our house is packed with my mother's furniture and stuff and that made a big opening. But not only that I am very happy to have made him happy. He really needed them for a friend and I know they'll be appreciated. I gave him the tons of pillows that went with them too. He was so happy and we finally felt like we paid him back for all the amazing help he's given us over the years. If we do get this new house I'm glad we won't be moving too far and can still stay in touch. That's the only thing I'll miss about moving is having him so close as a neighbor.

Then we spent the rest of the day relaxing. I've been watching Chris play Horizon Zero Dawn and so far I really like that game. When he's done I'll play it. He's been very excited waiting for it to come out. I can't wait for Mass Effect Andromeda but this game is good and I'm very curious about the story. Short version is our civilization was destroyed for some reason and machine animals rule the earth now. Our descendants live like tribals and think the machines are bad and it's forbidden to go in the old ruins. But the lead character Aloy wants to find out what happened and doesn't listen to the rules of the tribe. I must say I am just as curious as her so I really want to find out what happened to the earth. It's that kind of deep intelligent story that Chris and I love.

BTW on the opposite extreme I found a very funny short movie I want to recommend to you guys. It's totally crazy and off the wall. It's called Kung Fury and it's on Netflix. It's so cheesy bad that it's good. Basically it's about a cop that gets Kung Fu super powers. He finds out Hitler has appeared in "modern" times. This takes place in the 80's and everything is super colorful and very cool looking. So to stop Hitler Kung Fury has to go into the past but goes too far and has to get the help of Vikings and then is sent to Nazi Germany for a huge battle with the bad guys. This movie reminds me so much of my old comic Incredible Quest of Two Monsters and A Butterfly Net that I almost wonder if they read it. There are cool cars, video games, computers, dinosaurs, gods, machines ha it's so awesome really. It's so bad it's good so I highly recommend it. And it's short. Under an hour. Here's the Amazon info on it. https://www.amazon.com/Kung-Fury-Andreas-Cahling/dp/B012UOCYKC/ref=sr_1_1?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1488812861&sr=1-1&keywords=kung+fury
I wish it were on DVD as I prefer to have physical copies of things and not just digital downloads.

Well I'll stop here for now. I have a lot of stuff I still need to write up for my idea dumps for the Charlie stories.
.