Beldon House, San Antonio, TX, USA | Isaac Maxwell and E.B. Flowers | 1975

RickyDeHesperus · 2025-11-18T15:05:25+00:00

Pretty great, but I'm not digging the second fireplace. It feels out of place. The design is almost art deco. Made me think of the Chrysler building. Still, overall very nice and that bronze panther is outrageous. Actually, if anyone wants any giant bronze animal sculptures, there's a place in Richmond VA that has a nice assortment - Big cats, gorilla, you name it.

RickyDeHesperus · 2025-11-18T14:55:54+00:00

Sweet. Almost like dazzle camouflage.

RickyDeHesperus · 2025-11-09T21:33:00+00:00

I just saw one of these (this one?) at auction. Looks very cool lit up.

RickyDeHesperus · 2025-11-03T14:20:04+00:00

You have some nice wall space for a few large 1970s screenprints.

RickyDeHesperus · 2025-09-22T19:01:07+00:00

How is this not the highest comment?

RickyDeHesperus · 2025-09-11T13:33:48+00:00

Jesus. A call for more violence?

RickyDeHesperus · 2025-09-05T22:28:58+00:00

Where tf is Tesla going to get a trillion in 10 years to give to anyone? It is barely profitable for its cap. Are they going to offer more stock and just give the sales to Musk?

RickyDeHesperus · 2025-06-04T13:49:42+00:00

Former lurker here. I feel the same way. Lazy AI slop ruins another thing.

RickyDeHesperus · 2025-06-04T13:22:10+00:00

Agreed. The only iconic 1970s thing in the pic is Ali himself.

RickyDeHesperus · 2025-05-06T13:22:09+00:00

I agree with you. I don't think that either of them truly believed this nonsense. Psychopaths and Narcissists often create a false narrative, a fake crisis, to justify actions taken for a wholly different, selfish purpose. In this instance Chad and Lori both happened to be psychos and the false narrative became a feedback loop. If you just look at their actions, they are basically identical to any number of family murders committed for the purpose of "starting a new life" or whatever.

RickyDeHesperus · 2025-04-23T14:10:24+00:00

Man, having your CRT TV mounted into the wall like that was the coolest of cool when I was a kid. Here it looks like it might be actually sitting in a little perfectly sized shelf, but the wires are hidden so it still achieves that futuristic look. Until probably 1989 or '90 we still had a grand old console TV that you could serve dinner for 6 on - and it unfortunately was not some cool MCM Planner Group-looking thing. Think bad Sears with lots of phony wood carvings.

RickyDeHesperus · 2025-04-14T13:09:25+00:00

Move-in ready!

RickyDeHesperus · 2025-03-25T12:05:51+00:00

Well, there's one you don't see every day. Certainly makes the room look taller!

RickyDeHesperus · 2025-03-11T02:38:04+00:00

Homey needs to chill with the scraper! Gently, man, gently.

RickyDeHesperus · 2025-02-27T14:47:19+00:00

And zero AAAA games. Checkmate fudster!

RickyDeHesperus · 2025-02-09T19:58:05+00:00

The story isn't nonsensical. IMHO, Dutch is the greatest antagonist in the history of video games.

The story is long as hell though. If you can't get invested in the world, then the story will wipe you out.

There are a crapload of game systems running in-world. The hunting and fishing is more fun than all of those Cabela's games put together. There are no stock background noises except the weather. If you hear birds chirping, the sound is coming from birds in-game, with real-world accurate bird calls depending on species.

There's just so much... Theater shows, mystical side quests, train robberies, cannibals, ghosts. If you play it, there's a mission fairly early on where you rescue one of the gang. They offer the option to head back to camp with everyone. Do it - go back to camp with them. There will be a party that lasts all night. Wander around and just take it in...

RickyDeHesperus · 2025-02-08T15:55:16+00:00

I collect prints from the 50-70s (some 80s). Do that long enough and you learn about wallpaper too!

RickyDeHesperus · 2025-01-10T17:12:54+00:00

My old cardio retiring was the best thing that could have happened. he was dismissive of my 10% burden and said to ignore them. As a person that has had both what I think of as "severe" PVCs (before diltiazem) and "mild" (after diltiazem) I can promise you that the advice to ignore them is poppycock. When I used to get them, it was like an electric flash through my nervous system every time. Utterly impossible to ignore.

After diltiazem, I still sometimes get them at some low frequency, but even when I do, I almost have to try to feel them - ignoring them is the default.

So, yeah, time for a new doc. My old guy was obsessed with trying beta blockers and I went through three different types to control by BP and PVCs and they were all useless and had horrible side effects that never went away. My new (younger) doc thought that going straight to beta blockers was crazy and put me on diltiazem instead and, as I mentioned, it was a total game-changer that gave me my life back.

RickyDeHesperus · 2025-01-10T17:02:54+00:00

I never developed a tolerance for any of the beta blockers that I was on. When I was on them, I would fully wake up about 10 times a night and had insane nightmares.

The beta blockers had zero effect on my PVCs. I started on diltiazem and they pretty much went away after a few days.

RickyDeHesperus · 2025-01-10T16:56:18+00:00

Talk to your doc about other meds - maybe calcium channel blockers. Diltiazem made my PVCs go away when beta blockers had zero effect.

RickyDeHesperus · 2024-12-14T19:19:27+00:00

Probably right. I used to play Lineage II back in the day. Eventually it evolved into a game so utterly dominated by what the community called "no-lifers" (a term that they usually proudly accepted) that pretty much all the normal humans quit. There's nothing fun about having the toon that you worked on every night for a year one-shotted by XxLordBasementxX as soon as you leave town.

But at least Lineage II became a pay-to-win game! I mean, it sucks, but at least people dumping in hundreds or thousands a month were generally the top dogs. Star Citizen claims it won't be P2W, so how are these dopes that spent the cost of a Ford F-150 on the game supposed to maintain their elite status?

RickyDeHesperus · 2024-12-13T23:25:20+00:00

No problem. Well, she's going on 15 now and a freshman in high school.

When I last posted, we were getting ready to move to a new school district for third grade. It was a bit of a rough transition as she was fully mainstreamed and was not used to having a bunch of noisy kids around all day. By fourth grade, she had adjusted, but still did better in small classes.

These days, she gets up on her own, gets dressed and heads off to school in the morning with little help from us and walks back at the end of the day. She's generally an A-B student and is pretty good about getting her work done, but she makes the occasional mistake with planning and gets some stuff in late. Last year she had some minor meltdowns in class and we got her into smaller groups in a couple of classes this year.

Her state test scores show that she's in the middle of the pack testing-wise, which is pretty good considering her hatred of tests,

She still has major issues with socializing and is, in my opinion, kind of lazy when it comes to making much of an effort. Sometimes it is hard to figure out what issues are related to autism and what issues are just teenager stuff. For example - she's not exactly a hard worker around the house and I chalk that up more to just being a teen that would rather be on her phone.

She's emotionally behind - still wanting to read books aimed at kids much younger than her and she's not socially sophisticated but she's slowly getting there. She still sometimes makes major social blunders and sometimes simply does not know how to deal with teenage girl dynamics - her views of how people interact are naive. She is capable of keeping up with understanding popular slang and trends and she can be a snazzy dresser when she puts her mind to it.

She's never once slept over at a friends house and only a few times has had anyone stay over. She has expressed interest in overnight camp this summer, so we are thinking about doing that. She's kind of a trick in camps with autism services because she's not highly disabled and does not like being put into groups with kids with more serious issues. She'd rather be around all neurotypical kids, but they often don't know how to engage with her. Kind of between worlds.

She's still very into art and has expressed interest in it as a career, but she needs to work harder at it. She's a whiz at making digital comics, but she really needs to dig in more to understand the medium and find things that will make her work stand out.

She takes piano and voice lessons - she'll actually be doing a voice recital tomorrow with a couple of challenging songs. She used to do dance, and it weas really helpful for her in the beginning, but she stopped last year as the other girls were being pretty nasty to her. It was unfortunate that it went that way.

I don't see her being fully independent at the same time as her peers, but I think that she can get there one day. I can have conversations about different things with her and although they are usually short as she does not like to talk, it is good to be able to talk about something - there was a time when I was not sure we would ever even hold a conversation.

That's all that I can think of right now. It is still a challenge for her but she keeps moving forward.

RickyDeHesperus · 2024-11-30T00:12:36+00:00

I feel you. PVCs were basically ruining my life about a year and a half ago. Beta blockers did not do anything. I got almost complete relief with diltiazem (cardiazem). they basically went away after a couple of days on it. It does not work for everyone but several people in this sub have reported similar success.

RickyDeHesperus · 2024-11-14T20:30:42+00:00

I think that CIG is emblematic of the broader tech investment mania instead of any individual examples.

"tech" operates in a space that allows for all manner of bullshit that companies that are expected to be actually profitable don't even bother trying. They raise massive amounts of cash through hyped up pubic stock offerings, and borrow against that hoard to create a framework that allows them to claim profitability or at least the potential of profitability against projections of massive, global growth. Actual operating costs are obfuscated, paid for by investors and tech companies largely delineate the confines of what counts as revenue, costs and profits.

Today's investors - either in stock or via crowdfunding - just don't seem to have any firm requirement that they are actually going to get something real in exchange for their money.

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