EVOLUTION BY PHOTOSHOP

Armadillo Rhinoceros

Elephant Lizard

Sloth Eagle

Duck Horse

T-Rex Squirrel

Parrot Dog

Shark Horse

Owl Bull

Parrot Horse

 

DO DRUGS GO WITH THAT BICYCLE?

BACK IN THE 90’S WE WERE A BIT MORE HARDCORE

When a friend said she remembered Cuba Street, Wellington as being “bohemian” in 97, and I laughed and said that by 97 it had already become a safe space for office dwellers to visit and pretend they were living dangerously.

And then I dug out my “Cuba Street 92” calendar from my treasure trove – all of these photos are from that and were taken in 91. When we opened our bike shop “Cycle Services” in 1991, Cuba Street was not just where you went for a grunty coffee or some second hand stuff, it was also the first place to go to for drugs and prostitutes.

Now I’ll go on about drugs a bit here. I was new to all this scene, and to me “drugs” basically meant smoking some pot or maybe spotting some oil.

As a cyclist I was pretty familiar with ephedrine which was actually still legal in NZ in 91 and was very popular, used as a sort of everyday speed. When it was outlawed it just went underground like all the other drugs.

Most people use coffee for the same purpose now. And coffee in Cuba St was said to be some of the strongest in the world.

The first time I walked in on a drug deal my eyes nearly popped out of my head. A respectable looking man in a suit with a large brief case had it open and was discussing bulk pricing with a couple of our bike shop customers on the huge range of drugs that he had samples of.

Apart from pot, the popular one in Wellington in those days was acid. But you could buy anything you wanted really, including heroin. I was told the cocaine was a rip off in NZ, and that was why nobody here was much into it.

What Wellington was infamous for in 91 was glue sniffers. And sometimes Cuba St was like zombie dawn of the dead. Bloody glue sniffers everywhere, staggering about, holding their plastic bags and drooling.

Some of the people on the street were fairly tough, and just up the road was the BP’s (Black Power) who ran a tinny house ($20 foil wrapped servings of pretty average pot). But you didn’t take photos of the BP’s, you casually crossed the road when you saw them coming, so there are no photos of them here!

This was in the days before digital cameras, and mobile phones had only just come out. They cost $3000 and were the size of a brick. This next photo was taken in front of the second hand book shop next door to us (note our Cycles Peloton sign in the top left). And the poor guy in the photo was stabbed to death a few months later…

Our neighbours on the other side were Midnight Espresso, the legendary coffee shop, and this is a young Geoff Marsland (Havana Coffee Works) in our doorway

Although I did have a camera, I didn’t take many photos because buying film and developing it was expensive. Part of why I started taking thousands of photos when I got my first digital camera a decade later is because I knew just what I had missed getting photos of back in the early 90’s. And some of them would have been quite something.

I guess this is all looks like a window back to an old forgotten time now, but as a young and impressionable goober, this was the environment that shaped me. And even now I’m partly still a guy from old time Cuba St, rather than an over the hill computer addict.

When I hear millennials getting offended by lame bullshit I wish I could push a button and transplant them to Cuba Street in 91. It was an amazing place, but some of them might just have gotten their whingeing faggy heads smacked in…

Those were awesome times back in the days before computers.

And getting “offended” wasn’t that viable an option

All photos taken by Barry Thomas

MY DECEMBER MONTHLY CHALLENGE

The start of a new month is always the best time to try a monthly challenge. And this is the last month of 2024. Next month will be the start of a new year, and I'm really not sure if I'm up for attempting this one as a new years resolution. To tell the truth I think I might be struggling with this after about two days. 

Last year I decided to quit all social media for a month and did actually manage to do that. Afterwards I went back to using Facebook, but permanently quit all the others, so that worked pretty well. 

For the past quarter of a century I've been digging into various rabbit holes online, and doing my best to convince as many people as possible that the narratives are all false. Not just the "mainstream" narratives, almost everything we are told, is fake. From both sides. Yes there are some bits of truth here and there, but they are like bait on a hook.

At this point I have an urge to rattle off a bunch of examples. But for once I won't do that, because this is my monthly challenge. I'm going to stop posting about all the fake narratives this month and leave that stuff for other people to talk about. This is a multi level game, and we are all being played, including me...

I came up with an acronym, PINE: Positive, Inspiring, Necessary, Entertaining - and for the rest of this month I'm going to aim to make all my online posting (and thinking too, as much as possible) PINE. 

Let's see how this goes!

LINUX NEEDS MORE FILE BROWSERS

 Don't panic, I'm only kidding. Linux doesn't really need any more file browsers, it already has at least 32. What it needs are some more that are as good as the one that comes standard on Windows.

 This seems to be an issue that Linux developers have been refusing to address for decades. As a Windows user switching to Linux I think it is probably the biggest issue that sends so many Microsoft refugees straight back to Windows. Most Linux file browsers suck...

This is the process I went through looking for a good file browser when I was trying out some different Linux distros. Articles like this one proudly proclaim "there are 32 options for Linux file browsers" but I actually tried out about half of them (the others were clearly not what I was looking for), and there was only one I really liked - NEMO (Which is the default file browser on both Linux Mint & Linux Zorin). 

 

 

There was only one other file browser I liked (Dolphin, the default file browser on KDE distros), but even that had an issue I would need to sort out before using it (it doesn't show my PCloud drive), and I thought most of the others were hopeless. 

 

 

In fact there were only about half a dozen that I even thought were as good as the default file browser on Windows XP (Yes, XP from 2001!) but as with many things, this elephant in the Linux room seems to go unnoticed by most geeks.

 

The fact that it was Linux Mint that developed the Nemo file browser, thereby fixing the glaring hole that has made Linux all but unusable for non geeks for decades, was the final evidence that convinced me Mint is the best Linux distro.

The Nemo file browser is the main program that enabled me to switch to using Linux. Without this I'd be completely lost.

RANDOM IMAGES #47

THE MOON LANDING HOAX

Looking over what's left of the traffic to my old www.frot.co.nz blog, one of the most popular posts this past year was an old cut and paste post exposing the fake moon landing.

 It's been over half a century since the "moon landing" didn't happen, and it boggles my mind that there are still people only now grasping that it was fake. But maybe it's a gateway point for normies to slowly grasp other more recent deceptions. Like 911, or climate change, or "covid-19" for starters...

Sometimes the masses seem to move so slowly it's like watching paint dry or something, but what the hell, if the moon landing is a starting point, we can revisit that moronic spectacle yet again. Get your duct tape out!

 THE BIG LIE

So you still think America actually landed men on the moon? Well, think again. Here is proof that the moon landings in the late 60’s and early 70’s were all a big lie.

To see the full story, check out the MOON LANDING page.

WHALES ON BIKES

And this is why Wellington, New Zealand's most LIBTARD city, has been brought to it's knees by "bike lanes". While hundreds of cars are grid locked and dozens of business are closing down because their customers can't park, every 10 minutes a self righteous whale on a bike rides past, gloriously saving the planet from geoengineered "climate change". Even NORMIES are starting to get really pissed off now.

WELLINGTON WAS SHAKING BACK IN 55

 Yesterday I was asked how many people died in the huge Wellington earthquake of 1855. I had no idea so looked it up online:

The 1855 Wairarapa earthquake affected much of the Cook Strait area of New Zealand, In Wellington, close to the epicentre, the shaking lasted for at least 50 seconds. The magnitude of the earthquake has been estimated as 8.2, the most powerful ever recorded in New Zealand. There were 9 deaths.

But don't worry too much, it's estimated that earthquakes this big happen in NZ less than once every 1000 years, and even by that standard, this one was unusually large.

Lambton Quay before the earthquake (around 1854):

WEIRD SCENES AT THE LINUX OASIS

As part of my transitioning to Linux process, I'm posting some random oddities that might be helpful to any of the future Windows refugees that I'm sure will be increasing in numbers as part of the great Windows 11 exodus of 2025.

 This is a typical example of the weird process of finding good Linux software. Like many aspects of Linux, sometimes it seems as if it's all being deliberately made as hard as possible.

A basic tool I want on my computer, is a graphic display to show all my drives (I have an operating drive and two slaves). I just want it to show all the folders and display how much space they are taking up. On Windows there are plenty of free options available, and it's fairly easy to find OK ones. https://www.lifewire.com/free-disk-space-analyzer-tools-3986870

Meanwhile on Linux they are like the holy grail, with searches all leading to geeks going on about typing commands in terminal and viewing this data without actually having any GUI (Graphical User Interface). So all totally useless... And then there are lots of apps with stupid looking coloured pie charts. So also totally useless...

What is this purpose of this circular crap?

I was just about ready to give up but a little voice in my head said "this is Linux, you can find anything, never give up" So I kept looking at compilations of useless drive analyzers, until I stumbled upon this one: 3 open source GUI disk usage analyzers for Linux 

The first one was so lame I nearly didn't keep scrolling, but luckily I did because their third choice turned out to be just what I was looking for. It's called QDirStat and it's fairly similar to the one I was using on Windows, but actually better because it works much faster.

This is how I view it:

 

It can also show all sorts of other stuff including some really ugly coloured crap, but that can all be turned off:

 

That is not how I view it!

Success! But yet again the best program on Linux was hidden under a mountain of unusable geek garbage. And that is one of the things that makes switching to Linux more difficult than it needs to be. The entire process was very similar to what I had to do to find a good file browser when I was trying out some different distros.  

 

It's all in the name

Part of why QDirStat was hard to find is that it has a meaningless, incomprehensible, forgettable name. Maybe that's why nobody talks about it. 

What would I call it? Maybe something like "FAGI" (File Analyzer Graphical Interface) - I'd aim for something memorable and a bit dodgy. (Like GIMP!)

 

 

WOMEN'S FOOTBALLER OF THE YEAR

 Women's Footballer of the Year! - Is there a point at which this becomes too obvious?... No, it appears not...

"Zambian soccer star Barbra Banda, hot off a championship-winning season for the Orlando Pride, has been named the BBC’s Women's Footballer of the Year — and immediately became a target for anti-transgender and anti-intersex bullying online"

So saying this MAN is a MAN is bullying? But not saying HE is a MAN would be RETARDED...

 

 

WHY DID JAGUAR BANKRUPT THEMSELVES?

 Yes Jaguar really have just deliberately destroyed their historic brand. Why would they do that? I suspect the Indian parent company are bankrupting the brand so they can short the shares. Either that or they really are woketards. But I'm guessing this is an accounting move.

 They were really cool once. But then they became woke & went bankrupt.

It's sad that this once prestigious car brand will be remembered as totally lame & gay for ever more...

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ocC4GJ_9Z4