POGtastic

@pogtastic.bsky.social

480 Followers 478 Following

Software engineer, big blue semiconductor company. POG = Personnel Other than Grunt. Wife guy. Dog guy. Terrible chess player.

Two GNOME windows overlaid on top of each other. In the back layer is the game window for the game PAPERS, PLEASE (2013). In the front layer is a window that is capturing the back window.
yea
An infamous photo of a Scout Sniper platoon posing with an American flag above a black-and-white double Sig rune flag. The "SS" stands for "Scout Sniper," don't'cha know
Cover of INNUMERACY: MATHEMATICAL ILLITERACY AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
Grainy JPEG of a pair of iFunny posts by BasicallyBlank FIRST POST Imma drink a bottle of dayquil and a bottle of nightquil [sic] and see what happened [sic], keep you guys posted SECOND POST Hoptal
Richard sitting on a doormat next to a sliding glass door. Leashed up and ready to walk
Richard the "lab mix" (read: not a lab mix) lies on a doormat attentively
A very blurry picture of a very young and confused Me holding a chocolate lab puppy. A tiny terrier mix (Laila) is in the bottom left corner, looking dejected that she is not the only dog in the house anymore
Hanging out on the left field line, watching the Portland Pickles warm up
A scared border collie mix lies on a bed
A screenshot of Google Street View of State Highway 323 in the southeastern corner of Montana, about halfway between Alzada and Albion. Utterly flat, featureless prairie, stretching to the horizon. It's all hayfield and pasture. A disused highway is in the bottom half of the picture.
A map of the world showing IALA Maritime Buoyage regions. Region A is red. Region B is green. The Americans, Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines are green, so in those areas port is green. Everywhere else is red, so in those areas port is red.
Dudley the Pack Lab
Cover of Stephen Biesty's Cross-Sections: Castle
A stock image of an old man in a red sweatshirt shrugging and turning his hands up, with the caption of "guess I'll die"
A very dense loaf cooling on a wire rack
Screenshot of the ending of a successful NetHack ascension. Mike the Thief has just offered the Amulet of Yendor to the high altar of Kos, winning the game. Mike the Thief did some alchemy, hence 659 HP (utterly excessive).
An absolutely gargantuan livestock dog (mix of Anatolian Shepherd, Great Pyrenees, and Bernese Mountain Dog) lies in a gravel pathway next to a card table and guards his food bowl
Denise Gough looking horrified and disgusted at something on her phone
Four "Road Fatality Markers," signs that the state of South Dakota places at the site of every road fatality. These four all say X MARKS THE SPOT THINK! DRIVE SAFELY
Denise Gough, the actress who played Dedra Meero on Andor, looking disgusted and horrified at something on her phone
Marines in the proper uniform of the day (silkies, plate carriers, and helmets) putting 20 mortar rounds on target per minute
A black-and-white sketch of a basic concertina wire setup, an obstacle that has been around for more than a century to channel infantry into killzones
Taylor Lorenz tweet from 7:04 AM, August 20, 2025 "People learn stuff on their phones all day!"
You could have left-wing authoritarian followers as well, who support a revolutionary leader who wants to overthrow the establishment. I knew a few in the 1970s, Marxist university students who constantly spouted their chosen authorities, Lenin or Trotsky or Chairman Mao. Happily they spent most of their time fighting with each other, as lampooned in Monty Python’s Life of Brian where the People’s Front of Judea devotes most of its energy to battling, not the Romans, but the Judean People’s Front. But the left-wing authoritarians on my campus disappeared long ago. Similarly in America “the Weathermen” blew away in the wind. I’m sure one can find left-wing authoritarians here and there, but they hardly exist in sufficient numbers now to threaten democracy in North America. However I have found bucketfuls of right-wing authoritarians in nearly every sample I have drawn in Canada and the United States for the past three decades. So when I speak of “authoritarian followers” in this book I mean right-wing authoritarian followers, as identified by the RWA scale.
In North America people who submit to the established authorities to extraordinary degrees often turn out to be political conservatives, 2 so you can call them “right-wingers” both in my new-fangled psychological sense and in the usual political sense as well. But someone who lived in a country long ruled by Communists and who ardently supported the Communist Party would also be one of my psychological right-wing authoritarians even though we would also say he was a political left-winger. So a right-wing authoritarian follower doesn’t necessarily have conservative political views. Instead he’s someone who readily submits to the established authorities in society, attacks others in their name, and is highly conventional. It’s an aspect of his personality, not a description of his politics. Right-wing authoritarianism is a personality trait, like being characteristically bashful or happy or grumpy or dopey.
An old chocolate lab with a red leash is held by a little hand
Poster for MOON (2009) starring Sam Rockwell
A border collie mix begs an out-of-frame girl for food
A Ford Explorer, a 7-seat mid-size (!!) crossover SUV. yes, the full-size SUVs are even bigger
Warning signs basically saying "Down is optional. Up is mandatory"
Dawg it's the Grand Canyon, it's very big Miles and miles of banded rock, descending for thousands and thousands of feet
Dorothea Lange's photograph MIGRANT MOTHER (1936), showing an utterly despairing woman (Florence Owens Thompson) and her two kids during the Depression.
Excerpt from Page 3 of THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER, by George Orwell. In some cases I have noted ’Landlord good’ or ’Landlord bad’, because there is great variation in what the slum-dwellers say about their landlords. I found–one might expect it, perhaps–that the small landlords are usually the worst. It goes against the grain to say this, but one can see why it should be so. Ideally, the worst type of slum landlord is a fat wicked man, preferably a bishop, who is drawing an immense income from extortionate rents. Actually, it is a poor old woman who has invested her life’s savings in three slum houses, inhabits one of them, and tries to live on the rent of the other two–never, in consequence, having any money for repairs.
The Far Side comic where a demon is showing a stooped old man into a room. Inside is a bunch of kids with banjos "Your room is right in here, Maestro"
Hans Moleman calling for "the biggest seed bell you have... no, that's too big."
An elderly chocolate lab stands expectantly for toast
A woman would put her clothes into the first washtub and wash them by bending over the washboard. Back in those days they couldn’t afford store-bought soap, so they would use soap made of lye. “Do you know what it's like to use lye soap all day?” they'd ask me. “Well, that soap would strip the skin off your hands like it was a glove.” Then they’d shift the clothes to the vat of boiling water and try to get out the rest of the dirt by “punching” the clothes with a broom handle—standing there and swirling them around like the agitator in a washing machine. Then they’d shift the clothes to the second zinc washtub—the rinsing tub—and finally to the bluing tub. The clothes would be shifted from tub to tub by lifting them out on the end of a broomstick. These old women would say to me, "You’re from the city—I bet you don't know how heavy a load of wet clothes on the end of a broomstick is. Here, feel it.” And I did—and in that moment I understood more about what electricity had meant to the Hill Country and why the people loved the man who brought it. A dripping load of soggy clothes on the end of a broomstick is heavy. Each load had to be moved on that broomstick from one washtub to the other. For the average Hill Country farm family, a week’s wash consisted of eight loads. For each load, of course, the woman had to go back to the well and haul more water on her yoke. And all this effort was in addition to bending all day over the scrubboards. Lyndon's cousin Ava, who still lives in Johnson City, told me one day, “By the time you got done washing, your back was broke. I’ll tell you—of the things in my life that I will never forget, I will never forget how my back hurt on washdays.” Hauling the water, scrubbing, punching the clothes, rinsing: a Hill Country wife did this for hours on end; a city wife did it by pressing the button on her electric washing machine.
Screenshot from https://www.vice.com/en/article/an-oral-history-of-tim-currys-escape-to-the-one-place-uncorrupted-by-capitalism/ JOSHUA BASCHE: Those came at the very, very end of the day. You’re talking about a 10- to 12-hour shoot day. HARIS ORKIN: They shot those in a row pretty fast. IVANA MILIČEVIĆ: To work 10 hours, 11 hours straight is not normally how an actor would work. When you’re filming it, you’re there by yourself–with a wonderful crew of people, but you’re just there for hours, sitting at a desk. You, after a while, are just trying to have fun with it. JOSHUA BASCHE: It’d be these long takes of them just sitting there reading a teleprompter as lines came up. It was towards the end of the day, and you could kind of tell Curry was tired, he wanted to get out of there. But then that line comes up. And you saw the smile pop onto his face when he read it through first. The first take was that take.
“But why?” Andy said. “Why would-” “As a favor to you,” Norton said calmly, “I checked with Rhode Island. They did have an inmate named Elwood Blatch. He was given what they call a PP-​provisional parole, another one of these crazy liberal programs to put criminals out on the streets. He's since disappeared. ” Andy said: “The warden down there . . . is he a friend of yours?” Sam Norton gave Andy a smile as cold as a deacon's watchchain. “We are acquainted,” he said. “Why?” Andy repeated. “Can't you tell me why you did it? You knew I wasn't going to talk about . . . about anything you might have had going. You knew that. So why?” “Because people like you make me sick,” Norton said deliberately. “I like you right where you are, Mr. Dufresne, and as long as I am warden here at Shawshank, you are going to be right here. You see, you used to think that
a crying "Nothing Ever Happens" guy pointing to a whiteboard that says "OK, A FEW THINGS HAPPENED THIS WEEK"
Matt Hamilton and his majestic mullet / mustache combo push off from the hacks to push a rock
Opinion Michelle Goldberg We Should All Know Less About Each Other Nov. 1, 2021, 7:27 p.m. ET
The start of Chapter 8 of THE CURSE OF CHALION, by Lois McMaster Bujold. The first night’s welcoming banquet was followed all too soon by the next day’s breakfast, dinner, and an evening fête that included a masque. More sumptuous meals cascaded down the ensuing days, till Cazaril, instead of thinking Roya Orico sadly run to fat, began to marvel that the man could still walk. At least the initial bombardment of gifts upon the royal siblings slowed. Cazaril caught up on his inventory and began to think about where and upon what occasions some of this largesse should eventually be rebestowed. A royesse was expected to be openhanded.
Diamond-shaped sign with a red X in the top quadrant, surrounded by "MARKS THE SPOT." Below in large capitals is "WHY DIE?" Below that, in smaller capitals, is "DRIVE SAFELY"
Panel from "The Draw Play" #249 (The Fantasy Nut) in which a fellow in a red jersey is monologuing at a sad looking guy in a blue jersey. In the background is endless text of fantasy bullshit
A bowl of sesame chicken and broccoli. Hidden underneath is a serving of rice
Heavy barred fence with an open door leading to a cave. Behind the gate is a narrow gap with a large boulder wedged into it, which the hiker must walk under. An ominous sign next to the door says CAUTION FLASHLIGHTS REQUIRED LOW CEILINGS DANGEROUS WHEN WET
The "Balconies," a giant curtain-y cliff
Preacher comic featuring a confrontation with unmasked Klansmen. "Why is it the greatest champions of the white race always turn out to be the worst examples of it? YOU!" "Wh-wh-wh--?" "WHERE THE FUCK IS YOUR CHIN?"
Ubuntu terminal window showing the results of running this script a couple times. mike@homebox:~$ ./get_timestamp.py "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5m-RHS1fU0" 2026-01-09T15:35:54-08:00 mike@homebox:~$ ./get_timestamp.py "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRuNxHqwazs" 2007-05-28T21:56:12-07:00 mike@homebox:~$
An unhappy border collie mix lies down on a Big Brown Blanket at the foot of a bed.
An elderly Labrador Retriever lies down on a hardwood floor in the kitchen
A close-up of the front of a pair of very well loved climbing shoes. The right shoe has a large hole in the toes. The left shoe is not far behind.
Richard the border collie mix is IN THE KITCHEN, strongly pressuring my wife to give him salmon
An elderly chocolate lab sits on a doormat. He is staring intently to the left at a plate of smoked salmon slices on the counter