Thankful for Heroscape (among other things)

This week was Thanksgiving, and I took an extra two days off, so I had sort of a 6-day weekend.  One of those days we ate a lot of food (but not so much turkey this year) and came up with some ideas of what we were thankful for.  (One of the things I was thankful for was that we didn’t have to have any of those uncomfortable conversations so many “news” stories lately have been telling us how to navigate—or trying to tell us, anyway.  With brilliant advice such as “avoid politics”—gee, ya think?—none of the ones I saw were actually particularly useful.  Thankfully, we didn’t have to worry about that because our Thanksgiving dinner comprised 4 people who all happen to have compatible political views.  But I digress.)

One of the days was spent having an all day (about 6 hours all told, I’d say) Heroscape battle: 3-way, 2v1, with me holding the heights against two swarm armies (Marro drones and vipers) run by the Smaller Animal (who, again, is way taller than me by this point) and one of his best friends who hasn’t played in a while.  And another day was another 3-way Heroscape battle (1v1v1 this time) with me, the Smaller Animal, and my youngest, who thus far had resisted playing (though they’re fully into the crafting aspects of making custom elements for the game).  But suddenly they found an army that interested them, and demanded we play for a second day in a row.  For the record, I won the 2v1 (primarily because I drafted a long-range army who was able to tear up the mostly-melee attacking armies before they could get close enough to engage), and the Smaller Animal won the 1v1v1 (because they chose a regenerating army that was devilishly difficult to exterminate permanently).

So it’s a been a family-focussed few days, and then it’s back to work tomorrow.  I think the break did me some good, and it should be fun to get back to work again.  Let’s find out.

Doom Report (Week -10)

This week, I’m watching the news and wondering where all those people my friend was talking about last week are ... you know, the ones that are supposed to stop the idiot we just elected from doing bad things if he goes too far.  And yet, our future president has suggested we put a climate denier in charge of the EPA, a Russian asset as head of national intelligence, a pedophile as the Attorney General, a person who believes in neither vaccination nor pasteurization to run the CDC and the FDA, and a Fox “News” host who thinks that women shouldn’t serve in combat to head up the Department of Defense.  Theoretically, all those people have to be approved by the Senate, but he’s already asked the new Sentate majority leader to keep the Senate in “recess” until he appoints whoever he wants to wherever he wants, and it’s not clear whether that request will be rejected or not.  And, even if it is, it’s not clear whether the new Republican-led Senate will just do whatever he wants anyway.  And that’s not even considering that he wants to put a guy with billions in government contracts in charge of the budget by inventing a new government department (which, technically, the president can’t do, but, again: if Congress is just going to give him whatever he wants, that’s not much of an obstacle).

I continue to hope I’m wrong.  I mean, the guy’s not even president yet, so all of this dreck may not come to pass.  And, as I mentioned last week, I’m far more interested in you being able to tell me “I told you so” than the other way around.  But, the fact that the guy’s not even president yet and is still able to cause this much chaos does not bode well for our chances, I fear.

Wake up and smell the catfood in your bank account

Hey, look: two microposts for the price of one!

What Kamala Should Have Said

I’m sure by now everyone’s seen at least clips of Kamala’s Fox “News” interview with Bret Baier.  Several excerpts have been replayed ad nauseum, but the one that interested me was this one:

Bret: If that’s the case, why is half the country supporting him?  Why is he beating you in a lot of swing states?  Why—if he’s as bad as you say—that half of this country is now supporting this person who could be the 47th president of the United States?  Why is that happening?
Kamala: This is an election for President of the United States.  It’s not supposed to be easy.
Bret: I know, but ...
Kamala: It’s not supposed to be ... it is not supposed to be a cakewalk for anyone.
Bret: So, are they misguided, the 50%? Are they stupid?  What is it?
Kamala: Oh, God, I would never say that about the American people.  And, in fact, if you listen to Donald Trump, if you watch any of his rallies, he’s the one who tends to demean, and belittle, and diminish the American people.  He is the one who talks about an enemy within: an enemy within—talking about the American people, suggesting he would turn the American military on the American people.

Now, Kamala is currently getting credit for not “falling for” that “trap” (although it was so clumsy and obvious that I can’t really believe that anyone would have fallen for it), and I understand that she had her talking points that she needed to get out, and this was a score for her in that department.  But here’s what I wish she would have said instead:

Imagine there’s a user car salesman.  And he sells a lot of cars.  But the reason he keeps selling those cars is because he keeps telling lies: he makes claims about the cars that just plain aren’t true.  And people keep believing him, because they assume that he wouldn’t be allowed to outright lie like that.  Surely, they think, surely if he were completely making shit up, someone would come along and stop him, because that would be bad.  Probabaly illegal, even.  So he keeps conning people into buying the cars.  Now, in this situation, we wouldn’t blame the victims of this con job ... we wouldn’t say that the people buying these cars are stupid.  We have to blame the conman, right?  He’s the one doing the lying and cheating.

(And we could also blame the TV station who keeps showing ads saying how great this criminal is even though they know he’s lying.  But that might be too subtle for a Fox audience.)

So that’s what I wish she’d said.  And, I know, she needed to get her point in about the Nazi quotes Trump keeps spewing (quick, who said this, Hitler or Trump? “Those nations who are still opposed to us will some day recognize the greater enemy within. Then they will join us in a combined front.”^*), and also there’s no way she could have gotten through an answer that long without Baier interrupting her.  Multiple times, even.  But, still ... that was the right answer, I think.

Beetlejuice Redux

This weekend we rewatched Beetlejuice, in preparation for watching Beetlejuice Beetlejuice next week.  Here are the the things I had to explain to my children:

• This movie is so old that the “little girl” in this movie is the mom in Stranger Things.  (And you should have heard the gasps of disbelief.)

• Who Ozzie and Harriet were.  And, looking back on it, that was an outdated reference at the time: the only reason I know anything about The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet is because of second-hand stories from my parents.  Not sure what Burton was thinking on that one.

• The sandworms look like they escaped from The Nightmare Before Christmas because of Tim Burton’s involvement in both.

• Why the concept of a “talking Marcel Marceau statue” is dumb (and therefore funny).

• That’s a Johnny Carson impression, which is totally wasted on the youth.

Despite all that, they really enjoyed it (again/still), and are now sufficiently refreshed on the story to watch the sequel.  Just in time for spooky season.

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* And are you willing to admit that you only knew it was Hitler because Trump isn’t that articulate?

Technicolor pachyderms is really too much for me

This week, our new Heroscape has finally arrived!  We got the prepainted versions of the new master set as well as what they’re calling a “battle box” (which is basically just a mini-master set).  So we slapped all the terrain together into a basic map and my middle child and I have played two games so far with the new figures, trying different configurations and combining with some of the classic figures to fill in gaps.  So far, I haven’t managed to win a game, though it’s been pretty close both times.  They seem to be having a good time kicking my butt, so I’m happy enough to provide the experience.

Our smallest child isn’t interested too much in playing, though she likes to watch and provide a running commentary.  And a fairly snarky one at that.  She also likes the mapbuilding aspect, and the map has been getting slowly larger and more elaborate as the week goes on.

She also displayed some interest in taking a non-Heroscape figure we found while gathering supplies in my office and working up a custom card for it.  In just a couple of hours, she managed to work this up on her art tablet:

I should be clear that, while I did help with the wording a bit, all the graphics and layout is completely her work.

Anyways, that’s how we’ve been spending our week.  Maybe I’ll have a more formal review of the new set next time.

Feeling so good-natured I could drool

This month, we’re getting new Heroscape for the first time in 14 years, and a new edition of D&D (despite the fact that they refuse to admit it’s a new edition) for the first time in 10.  Exciting times for my two primary gaming passions.  So far all we’ve seen are previews, but I’m cautiously optimistic.  Probably more so for the Heroscape “Renegade wave 1” (really wave 14) than the D&D “Fifth Edition 2024 rules” (really 5.5e, or, as the great Dael Kingsmill has dubbed it: “5e2e”).  But still looking forward to both.  Good times for fantasy gaming fans.

How I loved your diamond eyes

When a show I thought was okay premieres its second season (or third, or fourth, or ...), I just watch the new season.  The recap is good enough.  When a show I thought was pretty good premieres a new season, I often back up two or three episodes to help refresh my memory and put me back in the vibe of the show.

But when a show that I really love puts out a new season, I go back to the beginning and watch it all again.  For instance, season 5 of Stranger Things (its final season) will come out next year, and I’ll go back to season 1, episode 1 and start watching, just as I did when season 4 came out, when season 3 came out, and when season 2 came out.  With the end result that, by the end of next year, I’ll have seen season 1 of Stranger Things five times, season 2 four times, season 3 three times, and season 4 twice.  Of course, I’ll only have seen season 5 once, but maybe I’ll rewatch it all from beginning to end a few more years hence.

I bring this up because season 4 of The Umbrella Academy (also the final season) is coming out next month, so I’ve started back around with episode 1 of season 1, and let me tell you: it’s just as amazing as it was the other 3 times I’ve watched it.  It’s about as close to a perfect episode of television as I can possibly imagine.  It sets up some extremely complicated family dynamics in an engaging way that epitomizes the maxim of “show, don’t tell”; it introduces a whopping 10 main characters in a way that cements them all firmly in our minds; it includes some amazing acting, some amazing music (including a gorgeous violin piece performed by Lindsey Stirling), and what may be the most perfect single cinematic shot that I’ve ever seen, set to (of all things) “I Think We’re Alone Now” by 80s pop star Tiffany.  I was really surprised how great it was all over again, the fourth time I’ve seen it.

Anyways, that’s my recommendation to you: go rewatch The Umbrella Academy.  Unless you haven’t seen it at all yet, in which case ... what are you waiting for?

Full Plates

Well, we’re back from our week-long trip to Las Vegas, which was a lot of fun, but also somewhat exhausting.  It’s nice to be sitting in my own chair, watching my own television again.  And, later, I’ll be sleeping in my own bed, which will be best of all.  Hopefully I’ll have a more complete report on the trip next week.

Today I’ll just give you a short note on the results of our license plate game.  My two younger children suddenly realized, right in the middle of the week, that the parking lot was slowly filling up with license plates from pretty far away, and started trying to “collect ’em all.” We continued all the way through to the drive back home, whereon I thoughtfully slowed down every time we passed a semi, an RV, or a trailer (those being the vehicles which had the best chance of being from far off).  At the end of the day, we collected 34 states: 31 from the US, 2 from Canada, and 1 from Mexico, which I thought was pretty damned impressive.  Having lived on the East Coast, and having spent a bit of time traveling through New England in particular, I’ve seen a few Canadian plates in my time, but I’ve never seen a Mexican license plate in my life.  So that was exciting.  Anyway, here’s a list of what we managed to geolocate:

• Alberta
• Arizona
• Arkansas
• California
• Colorado
• Floria
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Indiana
• Iowa
• Maine
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Montana
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Jersey
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• Ohio
• Oklahoma
• Oregon
• Quebec
• Sonora
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Utah
• Virginia
• Washington
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

Not a lot from the Eastern half of the country, but a moderately respectable showing, I’d say.  My youngest had a map which she downloaded to mark off the states as we saw them.  Perhaps I’ll post that at some point.

Primm's Cup

No long blog post this week: I’m in sunny (way too sunny, actually) Las Vegas for another Perl conference—my first since the pandemic.  I brought two of my children for moral support.  And I guess I’ll take them to do a few things around town, but mainly the moral support.  From where I live, Las Vegas is a bit over a 4 hour drive, which isn’t terrible.  Of course, it ain’t that fun, either, particularly when your little Prius is desperately trying to get the inside temp down to the 68° you requested while whinging that the outside temp is anywhere from 101° to 106°.  And the drive is mostly a whole lot of nothing: flat land, scrub brush, and stunted Joshua trees.^*  I think I even saw an actual tumbleweed or two.  And the roads are very, very straight—I swear, at one point I glanced up at Waze and the map was entirely blank, with a single, perfectly straight line bisecting it, upon which our little arrow floated, seeming to make no progress.  My children will verify this, as it was so surreal I had to point it out to them.  Anyway, a drive like that can put you right to sleep, regardless of whether you’re actually sleepy or not.  I thought the kids would have to pee more often and that would help break up the drive, but not so much, it turns out.  We stopped once in Palmdale and then not again until Primm, which is nearly 200 of the 284 miles.  If you’re not familiar with Primm, just imagine the sort of “town” that might spring up if you slapped the cheesiest casino possible directly on the Nevada state line and you’ve pretty much nailed it.  And, if you’re not familiar with Palmdale ... well, don’t worry: you ain’t missing much.

Anyway, that’s been my day, so there was no chance to write a proper blog post.  And, next Sunday, I’ll be traveling back along the same route, so don’t expect too much then either.  Maybe in two weeks there’ll be something more exciting.

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* That’s not my picture, but it’s pretty much exactly what the whole trip looks like.

To those who cannot remember the past ...

This week, I had the good fortune to attend an anniversary dinner for my work, where I enjoyed some lovely cuisine with 10 of the 11 other people who have also worked for our company for 10 years or more.  We ate, and drank, and talked, for several hours.

At some point the topic of the recent college student protests against their institutions’ ongoing financial support for the killing of innocent people in Palestine came up.  Now, I think there’s a very interesting discussion to be had about how it really shouldn’t be a controversial opinion to be anti-genocide, and it really shouldn’t be controversial to say that they have the right to protest—it’s literally one of their First Amendment rights, along with freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion.  But that wasn’t the discussion we had.  The discussion we had was how much of an idiot you have to be to think it’s a good idea to call the police to “break up” a protest on a college campus.  Even a completely clueless administrator (or rich donor, or Speaker of the House) with only a cursory understanding of history should understand that attempts to stop a protest via violence only makes it worse.  (Special dispensation for the Speaker, who doesn’t seem to know any history that isn’t found in the Bible.)  I would more likely believe that the suggestion to call the police on a campus protest came from an undercover instigator who was trying to make damn sure that the protests succeeded than credit the notion that some college president said, with complete lack of irony, “I know: we’ll call in the cops and the National Guard and that will definitely put this silly protest thing behind us.” I am not old enough to remember the violence at Kent State—I was in fact four years old at the time—but I know about it, and even I understand what a moronic idea that is.

The thing that I thought of after that discussion, too late to contribute it there, so that now I must share it here with you, is that it might also behoove people in positions of collegial power to try to think of a time when there were widespread college protests that we currently look back on and think, man, those college kids were totally wrong.  Would it be the Free Speech Movement in 1964? the civil rights protests against racial inequality in 1968? the antiwar protests of 1970? the anti-apartheid protests of 1985? the protests against school shootings in 2018? the Black Lives Matter protests of 2014 and again in 2020?  Which of these are people looking back on and saying “well, here’s an example of where the college kids really blew it, and I bet they’re embarrassed about it now!” Is there a single counterexample that I’ve missed? a single case where the protests were misguided? a single case where these people—and to call them “young people” is just pointlessly reductive—really should have been told to “stop the nonsense; stop wasting your parents’ money”?  I haven’t thought of one yet.  But perhaps I lack the imagination of those wiser than I.  (Although, I gotta tell you: at this point, I’ve managed to live long enough that most of the idiots spewing this sort of garbage are no longer older than I, so maybe I should start referring to them as the “young people.”)

Anyway, that’s just what I’ve been thinking about recently.  Thinking about, as Elizabeth Shackleford put it in the Chicago Tribune, college protests and the right side of history; thinking about the ACLU’s advice to college presidents.  Thinking about how stupid you have to be to want to escalate college protests, and how morally bankrupt you have to be to think you’re going to come out looking good trying to quash them.  Just little stuff like that; nothing too heavy.

First of the season

Today I finally got the pool warm enough to swim in.  It was not warm, mind you: just warm enough.  So my youngest and I spent nearly an hour in the pool, shivering and playing ball.  (Well, okay, the last bit was spent in the jacuzzi, warming up and playing 20 Questions.  But you know what I mean.)  This is perhaps the latest in the year we’ve waited since we moved in here, but the weather this year has been pretty abysmal.  I’ve complained a bit about the rain, which has been pretty miserable, but of course the rain has affected the temperature as well.  Normally I can’t get through March without being tempted to crank up the pool heater.  But this year it’s been getting cold at night pretty much every night until just this week.  So there wasn’t much point till now.

So, climate change is screwing us, but we’re gonna go down fighting.  We’re paying for a pool, and, dammit, we’re going to swim in it.  Weather be damned.

I'm drownin' ovah hyeah ...

Today I’ve spent all day recovering from my water pillow springing what might be generously described as “a leak.” So I’ve had to disassemble the whole bed, wash everything that’s washable, bin everything that’s hopeless, and drag the mattress out to sit in the sun.  After dealing with that all day, I’ve got nothing left in me to devote to a blog post.  Hopefully next week.

R.I.P. Jim Ward

As one gets older, more and more of one’s heroes tend to die.  And even hero-adjacent figures.  And, sometimes, people that you can’t exactly explain why they were important to you, and often you didn’t even realize they were that important to you until after they were gone.  I distinctly remember my father being very upset when Del Shannon died.  Now, you who are reading this very likely have no clue who that is.  I knew who it was, of course: he was the guy that sang that one song.  Not sure if he was a proper one-hit wonder by the strictest definition, but certainly I had never heard but one.  I was a bit taken aback that his death was that impactful to my father: this was not a Beatle, not Elvis, nor even Carl Perkins.  Any of those and I would (and did) understand that my dad probably saw it as a moment that represented the passing of part of his life, part of his culture.  But ... Del Shannon? the “Runaway” guy? really?

But by this point in my life I’ve felt this way many times myself.  I felt this way (and wrote about it) when John Perry Barlow died.  Before he passed away, I’m not sure I could have come up with his name if you’d asked me about him; after he was gone, I understood what an impact he’d had on my life.  And again when Neil Innes died; I remember it felt a bit unreal to think that the guy who wrote (and sang) about brave, brave, brave Sir Robin, who bravely ran away and hid, was just ... done.  It shouldn’t have felt that way, I thought—after all, he was just a guy, a year older than my father, whose songs were already a decade old by the time I heard them ... why should it be surprising that time had moved on and he was now no more? shuffled off his mortal coil? an ex-Python?  And, anyway, he was just the guy who wrote the music for them, and, once again, I probably couldn’t have come up with his name if you’d pressed me ... but it was still significant once he wasn’t around any more.

And now Jim Ward has died.  Who the heck is Jim Ward, you ask?  Another barely noticed influence on me, this time in the D&D world.  Not one of the co-creators of the game: that would be Gary Gygax, who we lost in 2008, and Dave Arneson, who we lost the following year.  But he was one of the first people to meet Gygax and play this new-fangled game that Arneson had conceived of and Gygax had put down (very complicated) rules for.  He played (sometimes) a wizard named Drawmij (read that backwards if you don’t immediately get it), who became a big deal in the D&D world of Greyhawk: he was a member of the Circle of Eight (which included such other luminaries as Bigby, Rary, and Leomund) and bequeathed us enduring legacies, such as the spell Drawmij’s Instant Summons and the magic item Drawmij’s undersea apparatus.  Meanwhile, in the real world, Ward himself became a very early employee of TSR, the company Gygax founded to produce D&D, and co-authored seminal D&D book Deities & Demigods, as well as designing Metamorphosis Alpha, commonly considered to be the first sci-fi TTRPG, and Gamma World, commonly considered to be the first post-apocalyptic TTRPG.  In his later years, he wrote a series of columns for D&D site EN World called “Drawmij’s TSR”; for the most comprehensive view on him, his “who is Jim Ward” post is a great read, though I favor his very amusing takes on corporate mismanagement, such as the story of why I got cardboard chits instead of dice in my first D&D box set.

It’s a weird feeling when someone you didn’t really realize was important dies.  You’re not quite sure how to feel.  It’s mostly sadness, of course, and maybe a little bit of guilt that you didn’t appreciate them more when they were still around. and a little bit of nostalgia over what has been lost, and a little bit of dawning realization of your own mortality.  It’s complicated, although that’s certainly part of what makes us human.  The ability to feel conflicting emotions.  The ability to think to yourself, it’s really a bummer that this person is gone, and at the same time I’m so joyful that they contributed so much.  And, even though it didn’t seem like a lot at the time, and even if it may not seem like that much now, in the grand scheme of all the myriad experiences that make up my life, it was something impactful, something meaningful.  So perhaps mostly gratitude.  That you were touched, in however small a way, by someone who probably felt like they were just doing their job, but really they were making lives better.  And that’s pretty awesome, and worth celebrating.

Thou wast not born for death ...

[This post contains light spoilers for all three campaigns of Critial Role.  Well, not “light” in the sense that they’re not very meaningful, but light in the sense that they’re almost definitely facts that have already been spoiled for you by now.  Still, read on at your own risk.]

One day I hope to live long enough to see Liam O’Brien play a D&D character who actually cares whether they live or die.

If you’re not familiar with Critical Role, you have no idea what I’m on about, and you can probably just check out now.  If you are familiar with CR, then no doubt you know exactly what I’m talking about.  In Campaign 1 (Vox Machina), there was Vax, who almost eagerly promised his life to the Raven Queen to bring back his twin sister from the realm of the dead.  It took years (and dozens of episodes) for that promise to be reaped, but it did eventually happen, and Liam has staunchly refused to consider resurrection for Vax.  In Campaign 2 (the Mighty Nein), Caleb’s crushing guilt at what he had done in his past often made him feel his life was worthless, and that it wasn’t worth living unless he could find a way to turn back time.  Liam has spoken of Caleb’s willingness to sacrifice himself to defeat his archenemy Trent.  And now here we are in Campaign 3 (Bell’s Hells), and Orym—who at first seems like a bright, sunny character, but eventually reveals a classically tragic backstory—has now offered to give up the remainder of his life in service to a powerful archfey in exchange for the tools to keep his companions safe.

It isn’t limited to just D&D either: Liam’s character for his run (as a player) on Candela Obscura was Cosmo Grimm, a 97-year-old occultist who, due to his advanced age, had a built-in reason for being willing to sacrifice himself at every turn.  Even several (though admittedly not all) of his one-shot characters seem to have a bit of a death wish ... and even the ones who don’t often end up dead anyway.

To some extent this makes sense.  O’Brien started out as a stage actor doing, among other things, a lot of Shakespeare.  When asked once what books he would keep with him at all times if he had a real-life version of Caleb’s “book holsters,” Liam replied Hellboy and Hamlet.  There is absolutely no doubt that Liam has a strong affinity to tragedies, and tragic characters in particular.  And, don’t get me wrong: he’s excellent at playing these characters.  He’s a brilliant actor, and his talent for the dark, brooding hero with the tragic backstory can’t be overstated.

But, just once, I’d love to see him play a character with some joie de vivre, with no tragic circumstances either before or behind, someone who really lives life to the fullest and is in no hurry to die any time soon.  I mean, I think he’d be really good at that too.  And I think it’d be fun to watch.

But I’m getting old enough nowadays that I ain’t holdin’ my breath.

The Return of Stew-beef

I have, to my knowledge, seen nearly every episode of The Daily Show, since the very beginning.  That means I’ve not only seen what I believe to be every single episode hosted by Jon Stewart and every single episode hosted by Trevor Noah, but every episode in between and since, and even the majority of the episodes hosted by Craig Kilborn, who preceded Stewart.  It was a very different show back then, but I watched ’em all.  There’s been a lot of individual bits of various shows that I’ve disliked, but I don’t think there’s been a single show in these past 28 years that hasn’t made me laugh at least once, and most of them far more often than that.

So obviously I was pretty happy to see Stewart come back to the show a couple of weeks ago.  I thought his first show back was pretty awesome: as his Apple+ show (The Problem with Jon Stewart) proved, he really hasn’t lost a step since his “retirement.” He’s still got the rhythm, and the biting commentary that’s perfectly happy to skewer public figures on both sides of the aisle.  I laughed plenty.

Both not everyone appreciated his homecoming as much as I.  There was, in fact, quite a bit of criticism, perhaps most emblematically summed up by Keith Olbermann, who tweeted:

Well after nine years away, there’s nothing else to say to the bothsidesist fraud Jon Stewart bashing Biden, except: Please make it another nine years

Of course, Olbermann has been a critic of Stewart for years, going back to saying that he’d “jumped the shark” back when Stewart (along with co-host Colbert) put on the “Rally to Restore Sanity (and/or Fear)” (which I quite enjoyed, personally).  So it shouldn’t have been news.  But, somehow it was ... perhaps boosted by similar criticism from Mary Trump, the hosts of The View, and a bunch of people described as “liberal media figures” whose names I’ve never heard in my life.  Basically, they accused him of “both-sides-ism.” Well, fair enough: as I noted above, Stewart is fond of not letting anyone off the hook, regardless of “sides.” But what did he actually say, actually?

Well, he said this:^*

What’s crazy is thinking that we are the ones as voters who must silence concerns and criticisms.  It is the candidate’s job to assuage concerns, not the voter’s job not to mention them.

and this:

Look, Joe Biden isn’t Donald Trump.  He hasn’t been indicted as many times, hasn’t had as many fraudulent businesses, or been convicted in a civil trial for sexual assault, or been ordered to pay defamation, had his charities disbanded, or stiffed a shit-ton of blue-collar tradesmen he’d hired.  Should we even get to the grab the pussy stuff?  Probably not.

But the stakes of this election don’t make Donald Trump’s opponent less subject to scrutiny.  It actually makes him more subject to scrutiny.

Which ... sounds pretty reasonable to me.  I’m not sure what Olbermann and friends expected Stewart to do—was he supposed to pretend that Biden isn’t old, or that no one realizes he’s old?  I mean, The Nation expresses it better than I ever could, so I’ll just quote them:

Stewart’s segment was fundamentally pro-Biden, a shrewd use of comedy to address unease while also, as Stewart at his best always does, keeping the big political picture in mind. It’s a way to address the age issue on pro-Biden terms but still maintain the trust of independents and nonpartisan Democrats, who are the swing voters in danger of abandoning Biden or staying home.

Yep, that’s what I thought too.

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* If you want to follow along at home, you can watch his monologue on YouTube; my first quote starts at 15:53, and the second starts at 17:30.

TIL: Vibecession

Many years (and a couple of jobs) ago, I was part of a weird corporate experiment that was referred to as “swim teams.” I’m not sure this was a thing except at my one company, but there is a business concept called “swimlanes” that I think might be related.  But, anyhow, what it was, was this: All the employees who were considered “squeaky wheels” were gathered up in a single room (and let me tell you, we were all looking around like, uh-oh), and were told that we were going to get assigned to one or two “swim teams,” and each team was going to work on one thing to make the business better.  That is, don’t just complain about the problems: participate in coming up with solutions.  And this was lovely, and a nice idea, and obviously it didn’t work at all.

You can probably guess why, but I’ll drill down a bit further.  One of my “swim teams” (I really can’t even type that without the air quotes) was called “employee engagement,” and it was one of the only ones—maybe the only one—where our actual CEO was on the team.  And, as she put it, the point of the team was to figure out how to get employees to treat the company as if it were their own, and not just a paycheck.  Our team came up with a number of good ideas, none of which were ever implemented.  One example: I proposed implementing financial transparency (long-time readers will recall this as cornerstone #1 of the Barefoot Philosophy).  The CEO was scandalized: let all the employees have all that sensitive financial data?  They can’t be trusted with that!  Then, a couple of weeks later, I was forced to listen to her rant on about how “employees these days” feel like they’re entitled to a job but they don’t want to work very hard for it.  And I thought to myself—very quietly, because there was no point in getting fired over a zinger—wait, you think you deserve employee engagement, but you won’t take any action that would earn that?  Who exactly is the party feeling entitled here?

But I tell you that story so I can tell you this one: I recently learned what ”vibecession” means.  It’s a topic of great interest in this political climate, with many high-level Democrats seeming to complain that people just aren’t understanding how good they’ve got it.  Unemployment is low! wages are up! the stock market is booming! interest rates on things like savings accounts are higher than they’ve been in most people’s entire lifetimes!  So why are people still complaining?  These silly consumers just need to understand what’s really going on so that they can understand how awesome the Biden presidency has been.  Hopefully they all wake up by the time the election rolls around.

But, you see, this attitude is exactly like my old CEO.  Faced with two contradictory situations—the status quo of economic indicators vs the attitudes of the common people—then obviously the status quo must be right and the people must be wrong (and also ungrateful).  I keep hearing so-called experts trying to work out how to spin the economic numbers so people will finally “get it.” What I don’t hear is anyone questioning whether it makes sense to keep using the same old numbers when they obviously don’t reflect how ordinary, non-academics are being impacted in the current economy.

They should maybe try that.  I don’t think they will, but they should probably try.  Just one man’s opinion.

GPT FTW

This week I’ve been fighting my computer curse again.  Still, despite the fact that the computer gods still really hate me, I’ve managed to accomplish a few things.  I’ve managed to get the version history from my Syncthing replicating to my Backblaze B2 account, I’ve updated the OS and a bunch of packages on my Synology NAS, fixed a long-standing annoyance with my use of NoMachine, and I started building my first custom GPT.  And all that was made much easier with the use of ChatGPT.

Perhaps this deserves a longer post—and perhaps that’ll be what I put up next week—but I’m still seeing a lot of AI skepticism out there.  Last night I saw an interview with a tech reporter who agreed that, yeah, AI might be useful for helping developers with their coding, but beyond it wasn’t good for much.  And, hey: it’s true that trying to make it useful for searching the Internet is tough (though not impossible), and trying to make it work for handling things like customer service is just a horrifyingly bad idea.  But that doesn’t make it useless.  In point of fact, for things like helping you integrate different software packages together, configure your hardware, or design a solution to an ongoing problem, things like ChatGPT are actually pretty useful.  And I think it’s only going to get more useful as time goes on.  Once they figure out how to integrate ChatGPT (or one of its competitors) into something like Alexa or “Hey Google” (as it’s called in our house), the utility of “smart devices” is going to go way up.  Because our smart devices are actually kinda stupid right now, so they could really use that AI boost.

Anyhow, I don’t think I want to turn this blog into an AI evangelism vehicle or anything, but ... damn, ChatGPT shore is useful.

That’s all I really wanted to say.

Here's My Beard ... Ain't It Weird?

I grew my first beard at 17 or 18.  I told people that I did it to look old enough to buy beer, but the truth is, I just wanted to look older.  The combination of being a short kid—my “growth spurt” between 7th and 8th grade consisted of going from 4’1” to 4’6½”—and having an extreme babyface meant that I always felt like my outside wasn’t reflecting the maturity I felt on the inside.  Not that anyone is actually mature at that age, but it’s the age when you really want people to stop treating you like a “kid.”

By the time I turned 21, I’d been repeating the “it’s just so I can buy beer” line so much that I had managed to convince even myself, so I shaved it off on my 21st birthday: I didn’t need to look older any more, I said, because now I am older.  Except ... it really felt wrong somehow.  I didn’t really care for the way my face looked in the mirror, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.  Must be that babyface, I thought.  For a few months I tried just a moustache, but that was disastrous.  Soon I was back to the full beard.

Now, many people say that, the first time they try to grow a beard, it itches too much.  Some give up entirely at this phase; others just perservere and eventually the itching goes away.  But I’m a freak of nature, I guess, because my beard never itches when it starts coming in.

But, for some insane reason, once I’ve had it for about 10 years or so, then it starts to itch.

The first time this happened, I suffered for a couple of days, and then I knew that I just had to shave my chin and start over.  But I was still scared of the babyface.  So I decided to go for a “General Burnside” cut.  (This is the fellow for whom “sideburns” are named.)

And this was when I realized: I have no chin.  I come by this honest—it’s my mother’s chin.  To call it a “weak chin” is being overly generous: in order for a chin to be “weak,” it must first exist, and mine ... doesn’t.  Once I had the full sideburns but a clean-shaven chin, I could see it instantly.  The beard was defining my jawline, and, without it, I just looked like a complete goober.  But it is what it is: every 8 – 15 years, the itching starts, and the shaving must be borne, despite the visual horror it produces.  The second time I went with the Burnside again; the third time, I did more of a Ben-Stiller-in-Dodgeball sort of cut.  Now we’ve come to the fourth time around, and I’ve done that again (mostly due to lack of imagination); of course, being older now, my facial hair is mostly white, so it’s not nearly as cool as Ben’s was.  My youngest child had never even seen my chin before (or at least not that she’d remember), so it came as a bit of a shock.  And pretty much all my friends and coworkers have had the experience of being able to say to me, at least once in my lifetime, “oh, hey, you’re right ... you really don’t have a chin.”

So that’s why I look the way I do this week.  Luckily, my facial hair—unlike the head hair—grows very fast, so it won’t take long before I’m back to looking like an itinerant hobo riding the rails.  Until then, I remain a stubbled, chinless wonder.  But not an itchy one.

[Our title comes from an old George Carlin routine that I used to know by heart.  If you haven’t heard it, you really should.]

Call and response

Have you ever been listening to a podcast (or watching a show, or reading a book), and someone in the podcast/show/book says something so crazy, so outrageous, that you just respond out loud?  You know they can’t hear you, but it doesn’t matter: you just feel the need to correct, or clarify, or just answer.

This happens to me all the time.  And I often really do respond out loud.  This week, since it’s an off-week, I thought I’d just a quick rundown of my responses-to-the-air for this week.

There’s probably somebody in your life who you, you feel maybe you’re disconnected from.  ...  Maybe ... send them a letter, write ’em a handwritten letter and send it to ’em. They would really appreciate it.

— Cody Johnston on Even More News, “Santos’ Little Cameos, New House Resolutions, And EVEN MORE GTA VI Reactions”

No, they wouldn’t, because they wouldn’t be able to read it.

[Context: Even More News is the “in between weeks” podcast that goes along with Some More News, and every week they start with some wacky holidays that are listed on the various wacky-holiday-calendars around the Internet and comment on them.  This helps inject a bit of levity before they have to descend into the actual news, which is often hard to be humorous about.  In this case, it was National Letter Writing Day, and this was an easy response: my handwriting is terrible.]

And for Prosperity to be built, there is only one way only, Prosperity can be built.  Prosperity is built by entrepreneurs.

— Magatte Wade on Drilled, “Messy Conversations: Magatte Wade, Atlas Network’s Center for African Prosperity”

To quote Wikipedia, according to whom?

[Context: The Atlas Network is a web of “think tank” organizations with one goal: funded by the oil and gas industry (as well as the coal industry, lumber industry, mining industry, etc), they produce intellectual-sounding opinion pieces and “studies” that they then pass off to media outlets in order to spread the word that fighting climate change is bad.  Magatte Wade is an African native (she was born in Senegal) and she pushes the idea that it’s unfair to try to curtail oil and gas production in Africa, because that just keeps Africans locked into poverty.  Obviously what they need is for people to come in and help them exploit their natural resources, and that way they’ll develop their economies.  As you can imagine, this makes her a darling of right-wing talking heads (the first time Drilled used a clip of her rhetoric, it was from an appearance on Jordan Peterson’s show).  The sad part is, she actually has some valid points buried in there.  But, in this episode, where she challenges climate journalist Amy Westervelt to a “debaite,” you can see that she’s far more focussed on running roughshod over the arguments of the other side and “winning” the debate than in any sort of honest exchange of ideas.  She certainly isn’t afraid to play the “I’m from Africa and you’re not, therefore I know what I’m talking about and you don’t” card, nor is she (as you can see from the quote above) afraid to just state very shaky premises as “facts” upon which she then builds entirely unsound arguments.  What I found the most infuriating, though, was her tendency to just talk faster and more forcefully and just ... more ... than Amy.  This quote is from the first ten minutes, during which Amy lets her go on until she finally winds down; at the end of that, she lets Amy talk for about two minutes before trying to interrupt her.  She’s clearly from the “whoever talks the most wins” school of debate.)

[affecting nasal voice] And I would sing like this, which I never sang like before.

— Fred Schneider on Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, “Fred Schneider”

Give it up Fred: we have ears.

[Context: Fred, talk-singer of the B-52’s and utterer of such iconic lines as “it wasn’t a rock ... it was a rock lobster!” and “love shack, baby!!”, was responding to a description of the improv game “Hey Fred Schneider, what are you doing?” He apparently doesn’t think he sounds like that.  This is reminiscent of Kurt Cobain adamantly insisting that Nirvana wasn’t a grunge band, or George Bush Sr’s response to Dana Carvey’s spot-on impression of him, wherein he claimed he’d never said anything like that in his life.  The problem with such denials is, you’ve been recorded.  We can hear you.  Yes, Nirvana, you are grunge (in no small part because the word was coined to mean “music that sounds like Nirvana”), and, yes, Mr. Bush, when you try to say “not gonna do it,” it quite often sounds like Carvey’s “na ga da,” and, yes, Fred Schneider, when you call out “hop in my Chrysler, it’s as big as a whale, and it’s about to set sail!” ... you sound kinda nasally.  You just do.  Own it, man.]

And that’s all for this week.  I thought you might enjoy hearing my (normally solitary) mini-rants.  If you didn’t, you can just wait around till next week, I suppose.

Thanks were given

We’ve survived another Thanksgiving, and we’re all pretty much still thankful for the same things: family, friends, job, health, fuzzy children and videogames and having enough disposable income to spend on the things we enjoy doing.  If you happen to celebrate this holiday, we hope you had a lovely one, and, if you live in a country that doesn’t celebrate it, or celebrates it on a different day, or if you just believe that people shouldn’t celebrate taking advantage of our indigenous population, we hope you had a lovely week in any event.  Till next time.

Post-Halloween recap

Another Halloween put to bed, another birthday weekend upcoming.  Nothing overly exciting to report so far: the smallies went out for what is likely their last trick-or-treating ever, while I stayed home to pass out candy to any children who knocked on our door, of which, it turns out, there were exactly zero.  Then we all met back at the television for our annual viewing of Trick ‘r Treat, which is surely the greatest Halloween movie of all time (even counting the actual Halloween).  Our youngest managed to stay awake until the last 5 minutes of the movie, then we all went to bed and, presumably, had lovely dreams.

Until next year!