Post-Pandemic TV Roundup (part 1)

Around about the one-year anniversay of the pandemic, I published a pandemic TV roundup, which described all the televsion I’d been watching during the lockdown.  Well, not all of it: even two, longer-than-usual posts wouldn’t have been sufficient for that task.  But all the TV shows that I’d both started and finished in that year.  And I rated them all, from one to five stars (well, except that nothing got one star, because, if the show had really been that bad, I wouldn’t have finished it, so it wouldn’t have made the cut).  Now, I was able to do this detailed overview because I keep track of all the TV episodes I watch.  Originally, I started doing this because many streaming services were terrible at remembering where you left off, and I was tired of spending half an hour scanning through old episodes trying to remember how much I’d already watched.  So I just added it to my mega-spreadsheet where I keep track of my todo tasks.

Of course, just like the todo list itself, the bonus to this plan is that it serves as a diary: since I never delete data (a principle that one learns fairly early as a database programmer), everything I’ve ever done—and, now, everything I’ve ever watched—is recorded.  Well, not movies: I never bothered tracking them, because you watch them all in one sitting.  And a lot of “regular” viewing, such as The Daily Show, I don’t bother to track, because I always stay current on it, so there’s never any need to remember which episode I was on.  But, for episodic TV,¹ I’ve got a pretty solid record.

So, it occurred to me to do another roundup, only this time, since I’m now covering a period of over 3 years, I’m only going to talk about the best of the best, the stuff I’ve rated as 5 stars.  (I’ll do an honorable mention at the end for shows that came in at perhaps a 4.5.)  I’ll keep everything brief and spoiler-free; these are basically tiny recommendations as to the best stuff I’ve discovered in the past 3 years.  Some of it may predate that time, but it’s all stuff that I watched in that period and was blown away by.  And, as it turns out, there were enough shows on the list—even limiting it to 5 star shows—that I couldn’t squeeze them all into one post.  So this is part 1; part 2 will likely come next week.  Finally, the order is just chronological in terms of when I watched them, which is close enough to random that you really shouldn’t read anything into it.

Without further ado then: the roundup.

Dimension 20 “Pirates of Leviathan” (Dropout, TTRPG Actual Play)

One of the few seasons of D20 to be filmed entirely remotely during the pandemic, this still manages to be quite possibly the best season ever, and certainly up there in the top 10 (if not the top 5) medium-form actual play shows, period.²  This is like the all-star game for streaming D&D: Matt Mercer and Marisha Ray from Critical Role, B. Dave Walters from Idle Champions Presents and Invitation to Party, Aabria Iyengar from Worlds Beyond Number and Battle for Beyond, Krystina Arielle from Sirens of the Realms and Into the Mother Lands, and Carlos Luna from Rivals of Waterdeep and content producer for Roll20, all GM’ed by regular D20 game master Brennan Lee Mulligan, surely one of the best GMs in the space.  It’s a stunning season; highly recommended.

The Nevers (originally HBOMax, 1 season, Urban Fantasy)

Due to controversy over creator Joss Whedon, HBO cancelled this show after 1 season and then pulled it from their site, so you may not be able to find it anywhere.  But, if you ever get a chance, watch it: Whedon may be a toxic person to work with, but he puts together some magnificent content.  The story is not entirely resolved, but it’s sufficient that you won’t feel let down if you watch it all the way through.  There’s a twist that blindsided me in all the best ways, and the primarily female (primarily British) cast is just amazing.  Plus smaller roles from genre faves like Claudia Black (Farscape), Nick Frost (Spaced), and Pip Torrens (Preacher).

Dimension 20 “Magic & Misfits” (Dropout, TTRPG Actual Play)

The summer of 2021 was often referred to as “the Summer of Aabria,” because Aabria Iyengar was suddenly GMing for the top actual play shows: she did 8 episodes of a side story/prequel for Critical Role, 3 episodes of a where-are-they-now story for The Adventure Zone, and this season of D20, the first ever not GMed by Brennan Lee Mulligan (who instead sits in as a player).  This would not be the last time Aabria ran the dome at D20, but it is perhaps the best.  Including the entire cast of what would become Worlds Beyond Number (i.e. Lou Wilson and Erika Ishii were also present), plus the ever-engaging Danielle Radford, this off-kilter take on a Harry-Potter-like world manages to both celebrate and criticize that series all at the same time, with a surprisingly deft hand.  Brennan’s character of Evan Kelmp, the person pegged to become the Voldemort of the story, is perhaps the standout, as he rails against his fate in extremely amusing fashion.  It’s hard to beat “Pirates of Leviathan” for me, but this comes damned close.

Locke & Key (Netflix, 3 seasons, Urban Fantasy)

Based on a comic by the excellent (and prolific) Joe Hill, this fantasy centered on the 3 Locke children, who have recently lost their father and are forced to move back into their ancestral manor, features some magnificent acting, magnificent writing, and magnificent effects.  Plus recurring roles for genre faves such as Aaron Ashmore (Warehouse 13) and Kevin Durand (The Strain), and a story that is neither too rushed nor overstays its welcome ... just a gem.

Reacher (Amazon Prime, 2 seasons thus far, Action/Mystery)

I never understood why someone let Tom Cruise play Jack Reacher, a character who is a full 10 inches taller than the actor.  I’ve never read the books myself, but I do know that the character is supposed to be an imposing, almost hulking, figure.  Alan Ritchson is still 3 inches too short, technically speaking, but he much more embodies the energy of the character.  Season 1 was insanely good; season 2 only a very slight step down.  Looking forward to future seasons.

Legend of Vox Machina (Amazon Prime, 2 seasons thus far, Adult Animation)

The idea to turn Critical Role campaigns into animated series was a natural one, and, after a record-breaking Kickstarter, the first of these, based on C1 of CR, became a reality via Amazon Prime.  The original cast all record their own characters, naturally, while the numerous NPCs are cast with a dazzling array of vocal talent, from the core voice actor pool (such as Grey Griffin, Darin De Paul, and Kelly Hu) to big name genre stars such as David Tenant (Dr Who), Gina Torres (Firefly), Khary Payton (The Walking Dead), Stephanie Beatriz (Brooklyn 99), and Lance Reddick (Fringe).  This is absolultely not a kid’s cartoon (although perhaps not quite as adult as Castlevania³), and it has a bit of a rocky start (the first two episodes can’t quite seem to find their tone), but give it a chance and you’ll be hooked.

The G Word (Netflix, Documentary/Educational)

As I said in the last roundup, I don’t typically do documentaries.  But Adam Conover, formerly of College Humor and mastermind of Adam Ruins Everything, gets a pass because he can make any topic entertaining.  With little introductions from President Barack Obama, each episode Adam delves into a different aspect of our government (“our” presuming you live in the US), and often how it’s been corrupted by capitalistic efforts.  I’m not sure there’s anything else you could watch that will simultaneously make you laugh, make you learn, and piss you off quite like this will.

Archive 81 (Netflix, Horror)

Starring Mamoudou Athie, who I knew as the titular Jerome of the “Oh Jerome, No” segments of Cake,⁴ and weaving a twisty little tale of surreality and bizarrerie, this genuinely creepy split-timeline story centers on a data archivist hired to clean up some tapes documenting the mysterious end of a sinister cult.  Mind-bending, but in a very good way.

The Problem with Jon Stewart (Apple+, 2 seasons, Comedy/News)

Less of a news show (like The Daily Show), and more of a deep-dive into topics of current interest (like Last Week Tonight with John Oliver), the excellent return of the master of injecting humor into the often dark topics of our news cycle was cut short because Apple refused to let him discuss certain topics (like AI, where it had a significant monetary investment).  Still, the 20 episodes he managed to put out before being silenced covered some fantastic topics such as racism, climate change, gun control, and incarceration.  Educational, funny, and not to be missed.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, (Paramount Plus, 2 seasons thus far, Science Fiction)

I was legitimately surprised at how good this Star Trek prequel series was.  Featuring Christopher Pike, the original captain of the Enterprise (from the pilot of the original series), as protrayed by Anson Mount in his best turn since Hell on Wheels, this series collects an amazing array of both new and old faces in the Star Trek universe.  It’s primarily episodic (unlike, say, Discovery), and hits all the best Trekkie tropes: court case to defend an officer accused of something that is both unjust and undeniably true, diplomatic mission with impossible-to-please aliens, memory loss, reality warps, time travel, and weird Vulcan mating rituals.  If you love Trek, you’ll definitely love this.

Game Changer (Dropout, 6 seasons so far, Faux Game Show)

There are various forms of the faux quiz show: the Brits practically invented it, with news shows (e.g. Have I Got News For You), wordplay shows (My Word), improv shows (e.g. Whose Line Is It Anyway?), and trivia shows (e.g. QI).  Most of those format have made it to America (e.g. Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, Says You!, Whose Line Is It Anyway?⁵), so it’s pretty rare to find something new in this space.  Game Changer is not an improv show, definitely not a news show, incoroporates some trivia and wordplay, but isn’t those either ... in point of fact, it’s a bit impossible to say WTF it really is, because it’s a different show every time.  The gimmick of the show is that the “contestants” (generally comedians from the College Humor/Dropout troupe) have no idea what the game is going to be at the outset and have to figure it out as they go along.  Some of these are utterly brilliant, others less so, and occasionally they run out of ideas and repeat a concept from an earlier show, which is a bit disappointing, but overall it’s a great show.  Season 1 is probably the best, but Season 5 has some of my all-time favorite episodes (although it also has 6 episodes doing perverted versions of The Bachelor and Survivor, which I didn’t really care for).  Addictive, and highly recommended.

Stranger Things (Netflix, 4 seasons so far, Urban Fantasy)

I probably don’t have to tell you how good this show is: the blockbuster series made Netflix a shit-ton of money and is generally credited (along with Critical Role) for the resurgence of D&D.  What really gets me is how the show consistently maintains quality across the seasons, adding more and more characters (and more and more great actors) and more complex storylines without ever getting predictable or tedious.  Few shows can match it.  The series finale will be next year, so I’ll likely go back and watch it all from the beginning again, which is a thing I only do for the very best shows.  This is one of them.

Umbrella Academy (Netflix, 3 seasons so far, Superhero Fantasy)

Like Stranger Things, this is an amazing Netflix show that I will undoubtedly rewatch in its entirety before the series finale season 4 later this year.  It’s absolutely a comic book show, though not really a show about superheroes (more a show with superheroes in it); it’s a show where any weird shit at all can happen ... and typically does.  The time travel aspects make it hard to follow sometimes, but it all slots together beautifully, even on repeat viewings, and the characters, outlandish as they are, are human in a way that is both poignant and relatable.  I suppose if you really hate comic book properties, you might not like it, but everyone else should absoutely watch it.

The Sandman (Netflix, 1 season so far, Dark Fantasy)

While Dream of the Endless—a.k.a. the Sandman—is technically a comic book property, it’s also a Neil Gaiman property, and that’s more the vibe here.  If you’re into the comics version, there are Easter eggs here a-plenty, but it will also absolutely grab your interest if you’re just a lover of fantasy stories.  Creating an immortal being who is also relatable to an audience, with all-too-human foibles, is a really difficult task, but the writers here (including Gaiman himself) and actor Tom Sturridge do an amazing job.  The cast is insanely good, including Gwendoline Christie (from Game of Thrones) as Lucifer and Kirby as Death, plus voicework from Patton Oswalt, and a smaller role for Stephen Fry.  Stunning visuals and a complex but satisfying storyline make it a must-watch.  Looking forward to season 2.

Pennyworth (Max, 3 seasons, Gritty British Crime Drama)

Yes, yes: techincally, this is another comic book show.  But it doesn’t really hit the proper absurdities of a comic book show till season 2, and, honestly, you should probably stop after season 1.  That first season, exploring the origin of Bruce Wayne’s butler, follows Alfred on his journey from a turn in the British army to the London underworld, à la Guy Ritchie.  I was amazed at how good they made it, and disappointed at how little they could keep it up.  Season 2 is watchable, but not great; season 3 I’ve never finished because it was just depressing how mundane it became.  I’ll probably get back to it someday though.

Mythic Quest (Apple+, 3 seasons so far, Workplace Comedy/Drama)

Many people adore It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.  I am not one of them.  However, the team of Day, Ganz, and McElhenney scored a much bigger hit (to my taste) with this show about videogame developers.  McElhenney is great as the head guy who is both an enormous prick and also a lovable dork, but it’s really Charlotte Nicdao, a perennial on Aussie television but not much known in the US until now, that makes this show work for me.  Add in more amazing actors such as Danny Pudi and F. Murray Abraham, plus the ever-reliable Ashly Burch (voice actor from Borderlands and Horizon Zero Dawn as well as occasional guest on Critical Role), and it’s a home run.  I don’t think seasons 2 and 3 were quite as good as season 1, which has one incredible episode out of nowhere that actually made me cry like a baby, but they’re close.

Inside Man (Netflix, Crime Drama)

David Tenant and Stanley Tucci, British crime drama—I really shouldn’t need to say more than that to hook you.  But this also has a dogged crime journalist, a genius solving cases from behind bars, and Dylan Baker as a prison warden.  Plus an everything-that-can-go-wrong-will-go-wrong plot that could easily have been a comedy of errors, but here is played straight and becomes an inevitable tragedy.  Especially if you love things like Broadchurch,⁶ don’t miss this.

The Peripheral (Amazon Prime, 1 season, Science Fiction)

Chloë Grace Moretz had done 16 movies before I saw her in Kick-Ass, but that was the film that made me remember her name forever.  Especially after following it up with the mind-blowing Let Me In.  This series was a casualty of the 2023 writers’ and actors’ strike, which is as big a crime as the ones perpetrated on those unions in the first place.  The story isn’t entirely resolved, but I can’t tell you not to watch this season.  Excellent time travel, excellent scifi gadgets, excellent acting.

The Last of Us (Max, 1 season so far, Post-Apocalyptic Horror)

This is another one I likely don’t need to tell you how good it is.  Bella Ramsey, who has been great in everything I’ve seen her in, from Game of Thrones to The Worst Witch, is stellar here, and it’s tough to go wrong with Pedro Pascal, not to mention ancillary actors like Anna Torv (Fringe), Rutina Wesley (True Blood), and Nick Offerman in a single episode that punches you in the gut like an 800lb gorilla.  It’s scary, it’s gory, it’s creepy, and it’s impactful.  Not many series can do all that in one show.  This one does.

Dimension 20 “Neverafter” (Dropout, TTRPG Actual Play)

Yes, it’s a third entry for Dimension 20, and a second recommendation for Brennan Lee Mulligan as GM.  What can I say: they’ve been firing on all cylinders since the pandemic started.  This season, the D20 regulars (Lou Wilson, Emily Axford, Siobhan Thompson, Ally Beardsley, Zac Oyama, and Brian Murphy) each take on the personality of a different fairy tale character (Lou is Pinocchio, Emily is Little Red Riding Hood, etc).  And Brennan throws them into a dark, twisted version of the Brothers Grimm’s world (which is, to be fair, far more close in tone to the original stories than the Disneyfied versions we’ve become accustomed to), and the results are delicious, terrifying, and wondrous to behold.  Probably hit “Pirates” and “Misfits” first, but this should be a close third choice.

Next week: part two.

__________

1 Or streaming shows.  Can we just call it all “TV” please?  I watch it all on my television, even YouTube.  The fact that it isn’t being broadcast over the airwaves doesn’t make it not televison ... and, if it did, we wouldn’t have been watching TV ever since cable was invented.

2 For context, I consider short-form actual play to be the one-shots, or occasional two-shots, and long-form to be those ongoing campaigns that run anywhere from 50 to 100+ episodes.  So medium form is typically somewhere between 6 and 20 episodes, and is often the perfect place to start if you want to see if actual play is for you.

3 See part 1 of the pandemic roundup.

4 See part 2 of the pandemic roundup.

5 The trivia format doesn’t seem to have made it to us yet, aside from things like Funny You Should Ask, which is apparently a show on CBS that’s been running since 2017, though I confess I’ve never heard of it before writing this post.

6 See part 1 of the pandemic roundup.

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.

Midnight Synthesis I

"The Moon Is Shining in the Sky"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

One discovers music from all sorts of places.  Once upon a time we used to use the radio; nowadays it’s super-rare for me to listen to the radio at all, much less find anything new (and good) on it.¹  Then for a while I tried Internet radio (such as the inimitable Radio Paradise²) and Pandora (back when it was an actual music discovery service, before it was bought by the detestable Sirius XM).  But probably the most reliable source of new music throughout the years has been coworkers.  My employees at Barefoot Software exposed me to things as varied as Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd to Sublime.  A guy at Thinkgeek that I barely knew introduced me to Modest Mouse, and my fellow code monkey Jon Sime, who I worked hand-in-hand with for years, introduced me to Naomi and Skyedance.  And so it’s gone, for every job since.  At my current job, we have a whole Slack channel devoted to sharing music, and I’ve picked up a lot of great ideas.

And that’s how I can tell exactly when I discovered Urban Heat: March 24th, 2022.  A coworker (again, someone I didn’t really know) posted this:

Here’s a pretty fun band I discovered at SXSW last week, for those who are into an 80s synthwave vibe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTvSIt8EUuU

Now, you say “80s” and “synth” in the same sentence and my ears perk right up.  There was a lot of fantastic music in the 80s, but, as you know from my extensive talking about my 80s My Way mix, “my way” generally means heavy on the synthpop.  It’s what really attracted me to the music of the time.

We tend to think of synthpop as upbeat and ... well, poppy.  It’s right there in the name, after all.  But, speaking as someone who listened to a lot of it in the 80s, I can tell you: synthpop has a lot of layers, a lot of different modes, if you will.  And there’s a certain flavor of synthpop songs that is best suited for listening to late at night, in the dark ... at times when you’re not necessarily sad, and not necessarily contemplative, and not necessarily wistful, but perhaps all three at once, and even experiencing other shades of emotion that you can’t quite put a finger on.  When all those feelings come together, in the deep of night ... well, when that happens, you need this mix.

So, while there can be no doubt that Urban Heat was the mix-starter here, there’s also some classic 80s synthpop that I wanted to showcase as well.  And let’s kick that off with what I really feel like is the epitome of this sound: “Today” by Talk Talk.  Talk Talk is one of those bands who never achieved mega-success—their highest charting single in the UK was the third release of “It’s My Life” at #13; in the US, they managed #31 on that track’s first go round—but, in the synthpop scene, they were hugely influential.  A huge number of artists have credited them as influences, including Tears for Fears, Radiohead, Kate Bush, and members of Pearl Jam and Porcupine Tree.  They’ve been covered by No Doubt and Weezer, a tribute concert to them filled the Royal Festival Hall in London, and a documentary about them won the jury prize at Musical Ecran festival in France.  Much of their music is poppy, sure, but all of it is also a bit dark.  And I think the perfect example of this is “Today,” from their remarkable debut The Party’s Over (which was their second biggest hit in the UK, hitting #14 in 1982).  They were doing this sort of music before anyone else, as far as I know, and in many ways they did it best.

Still, let’s not discount Depeche Mode, most especially on their album which is almost entirely devoted to this flavor of synthpop, Black Celebration.  This goth-infused synthpop album is so perfect that I actually picked two tracks off of it: “But Not Tonight” provides our volume title, while “Stripped” is, as its name implies, a bit of a stripped-down track, with its synth chords providing near-minimalism, while the reverb on David Gahan’s vocals give it an almost eerie quality.  And of course this is the perfect place for one-hit-wonder Re-Flex’s iconic “The Politics of Dancing,” which is perhaps the closest thing to “upbeat” we’ll hear in this mix.  This is a shimmering, glittery darkness, sure, but dark all the same.

Closing out the 80s, I didn’t actually discover German synthpop band Camouflage till well after that decade, but they fit right in with the Depeche Mode vibe.  Their sophmore album, 1989’s Methods of Silence, contains a number of decent tracks,³ and I felt like “One Fine Day” was just perfect here.

And just because the 80s is over doesn’t mean the bands of the 80s are.  There are two major finds showcased here.  The first I tripped over when they performed on Stephen Colbert’s late night show: he’d been hosting for less than a year when he announced that New Order was going to be performing new music after 10 years of nothing (and around 20 of nothing notable, in my opinion).  I was intrigued, but not hopeful; when most bands get back together after a gap of that long, they produce “new” music that is merely a lackluster echo of their glory days.  But Music Complete is something entirely different: it’s an album that rivals Technique, and maybe even Brotherhood, in its depth and quality.  And it is, in some indefinable way, darker than their other outings—so much so that I couldn’t resist putting two tracks from it on this volume.  “Academic” is a deceptive little tune: it seems like it’s going to be all bright and happy, but then smacks you upside the head with lyrics like these:

There was a time when my world belonged with you,
But I was so misguided in my youth.
I couldn’t help but drink this poison brew;
You had a strange perception of the truth.

The buzzing guitars of “Academic” are replaced by a synth intro reminiscent of a child’s toy piano on “Restless,” where Bernard Sumner’s breathy, almost whispered vocals give the track a softness that make it perfect for late-night listening.  Overall, two tunes that fit perfectly here.

The other 80s update that you’ll find here is Alison Moyet (Alf to her friends), who was the lead singer of what I usually consider to be the most important synth band of all time (or, at worst, a close second behind Soft Cell): Yazoo.  Typically truncated to “Yaz” here in the States, I knew their hit “Situation,” but it was the random choice to buy Upstairs at Eric’s as one of my very first albums (I think it was on sale or something), almost certainly at Peaches during my freshman year of college, that really blew me away.  Nearly every song on that album is a gem, and I chose one⁴ to be our “push song” at work one day early in 2022.  And I got to thinking, I pretty much know what happened to Vince Clarke post-Yazoo,⁵ but whatever happened to Alf?  I had always had the impression that she left synthpop behind and gone on to do more of a soul-type thing (sort of Adele before there was Adele).  And, you know, she did do that for a while ... and then she stopped recording altogether for a while, due to litigation with record labels ... and then a few more albums ... and then, over 30 years after Upstairs at Eric’s, she released The Minutes.  And this record, despite being nearly 10 years old by the time I stumbled on it, is just brilliant.  It’s synthpoppy, but in a much more modern way, and some of the tracks are just perfect for this mix.  Again, I didn’t try to restrain myself: there are two selections here from The Minutes.  First, “Horizon Flame,” a track that starts out with synths doubling as strings, adds a subtle underlying drone, and gradually ramps up to an ode to “ordinary pain.” It was perfect as the second track of our opening triptych.  Meanwhile, easing into the back third of the volume, “Right as Rain” has a much stronger electronica rhythm, but keeps the drone and even amps up the dystopian lyrics:

If you can’t be happy with me,
Be unhappy with me;
Stay unhappy with me.

Both are just amazing tracks.

But of course it was the modern revival of this darker style of synthpop that was the impetus for the mix in the first place, so let’s not fail to showcase Urban Heat.  The third track in our opening triad is “Running Out of Time,” from their debut Wellness.⁶  It sort of encapsulates all of Urban Heat’s expansive sound: there are echoey vocals, that classic synthpop drum machine rhythm, and sparkly synth chords in between the verses.  It’s just gorgeous.  Then, winding down to our closer, “Stay” starts out slow but insistent, but then blossoms into an electro-guitar-fueled chorus:

Well, I guess if you want to stay,
Who am I to tell you not to feel that way?
Tell them all, they’re all better off:
Better off anyway.

If you like synthpop, you should really pick up this album.

And it’s a truism in the music industry that, if you can find one band making a certain style of music, you can find half a dozen if you look hard enough.  We should probably start with the prolific Davey Havok, ostensibly the lead singer of punk / nu-metal / emo band AFI.  I don’t actually love AFI, personally, and even if I did, their music certainly wouldn’t fit here.⁷  But he and another AFI member went on to found Blaqk Audio, who are a perfect fit for this mix.  I actually did restrain myself this time and chose only a single track, “Waiting to Be Told.” With an almost martial beat and soaring vocals, it’s a strong entry.  But it’s Havok’s other side project, Dreamcar, to whom I gave the honor of the opening track.  I first heard “Kill for Candy” also on Colbert’s show, just a year after I heard the new New Order song, and I was immediately struck by the similarity.  Dreamcar is not synthpop, but then neither is New Order: they’re both quite strongly new wave.  But “Kill for Candy,” as hooky as it is, has a really strong dark throughline that I thought made it work very nicely here.  Plus it’s just a gorgeous song, so it certainly had to go somewhere.⁸

Finally, the Black Queen is a group founded by members of Trent Reznor’s touring band for Nine Inch Nails and members of the Dillinger Escape Plan, a band I had never heard of before, which is typically described as “metalcore.” And, apparently, what you get when you combine metalcore with industrial is this flavor of dark synthwave, because their debut album (Fever Daydream) feels like someone took Urban Heat and Blaqk Audio and ran them through a mellowizing sausage grinder.  Their single “The End Where We Start” is probably more dark than poppy, but Greg Puciato’s vocals here are high and sweet and melodic, in stark contrast to his normal growly screams in the Dillinger Escape Plan.  It’s a nice lead-in to “Stay.”

Midnight Synthesis I
[ The Moon Is Shining in the Sky ]

“Kill for Candy” by Dreamcar, off Dreamcar
“Horizon Flame” by Alison Moyet, off The Minutes
“Running Out of Time” by Urban Heat, off Wellness
“But Not Tonight” by Depeche Mode, off Black Celebration
“Academic” by New Order, off Music Complete
“Remains” by Zola Jesus, off Okovi
“Oblivion” by Grimes, off Visions
“The Politics of Dancing” by Re-Flex, off The Politics of Dancing
“One Fine Day” by Camouflage, off Methods of Silence
“Today” by Talk Talk, off The Party's Over
“Judas” by Clan of Xymox, off In Love We Trust
“Waiting to Be Told” by Blaqk Audio, off Material
“Right as Rain” by Alison Moyet, off The Minutes
“Disconnected” by Emma's Mini, off Beat Generation Mad Trick
“Restless” by New Order, off Music Complete
“Stripped” by Depeche Mode, off Black Celebration
“The End Where We Start” by the Black Queen, off Fever Daydream
“Stay” by Urban Heat, off Wellness
“Trust Me” by Zola Jesus, off Stridulum

Total:  19 tracks,  82:24

I’m not sure what here is too unexpected, but I did feel like I could find some synthy goth tunes which might fit the vibe.  My first thought was Zola Jesus, who ... well, she’s hard to describe, but she has a very distinct, synthy style of goth/darkwave.  “Remains” is a track with nearly ambient vocals and a techno beat, and I thought it provided a beautiful bridge from New Order to Grimes.  Meanwhile, “Trust Me” is a slow, sober track that just made for the perfect closer.

And why not throw in some witchhouse?  Whatever you may think of Grimes—and having a child with Elon Musk definitely does call into question one’s personal choices—you can’t deny she’s got some talent behind the boards.  “Oblivion” is my all-time favorite Grimes track,⁹ and it slots in perfectly alongside Zola Jesus as the end of the first third.

The middle stretch of the volume is a strong dose of that 80s goodness: Re-Flex, then Camouflage, then Talk Talk.  And then I needed something to bridge the 34-year gap between “Today” and “Waiting to Be Told,” so I thought of Clan of Xymox.  Xymox was of course a great, synthy (if not quite synthpop) band from the 90s.  Clan of Xymox, though, has a much stronger goth character, despite both incarnations being mostly just extensions of Dutch genius Ronny Moorings, plus it’s still going strong to the present day.  I thought “Judas” was pretty solid here: it’s certainly got the dark in spades, and it’s got some great synth work as well.

And perhaps the only truly unexpected tune here is from emma’s mini, who I introduced you to back in Smokelit Flashback VI.  In general, emma’s mini is less synthpop and more electropop, which is certainly similar, but definitely not the same.  Most of their album Beat Generation Mad Trick is pretty upbeat, but “Disconnected” has a different cast.  It has the same soft echoey vocals that many of the tracks here, and, while the chorus is nearly as upbeat as “The Politics of Dancing” (though the tune as a whole doesn’t come close), the lyrics (e.g. “I fell down”) have a darker tinge.  I thought it worked very well here.

Next time, we’ll ride the rails.

__________

1 For an exception, please refer to the not-so-long-ago story of my discovery of the only Taylor Swift song I’ve really liked (so far).

2 Which is, somewhat surprisingly to me, still going strong after a mind-boggling 24 years on the Internet.  That’s longer than Facebook, and almost as long as Google and Amazon.  Few things on the Internet achieve that kind of longevity.

3 One of which is a short bridge I used on Phantasma Chorale II.

4 Specifically, “Don’t Go.”

5 Specifically, he went on to form Erasure with Andy Bell.

6 Wellness started out as an EP, but has since been expanded to a full album.  See the Bandcamp link in the tracklist.

7 Perhaps it might find a home on the Thrashomatic Danger Mix.

8 Before this mix existed, it was slated for Totally Different Head.

9 Though, honestly, that’s perhaps not saying much: I’m not a huge Grimes fan.

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.

The Saga of a HELOC

Last year I decided that it was finally time to fix some of the big stuff around the house: the garage roof was leaking, the swimming pool needed retiling, and we’d been operating with no air conditioning upstairs for nearly ten years, and the Smaller Animal—that’s the one with the heart condition, who’s not nearly so “smaller” any more—is prone to overheating.  Of course, things like that require quite a bit of money, but the good news was that we’d been paying off our mortgage for 13 years, so we’d reached the point where the mortgage insurance had dropped off, plus the value of our house was shooting up.  And my credit score had bounced back from all those youthful credit card indiscretions.  All in all, a good time to leverage our equity and get some cash for repairs.

We looked first at refinancing, but we didn’t relish the process and paperwork for getting a whole new mortgage.  I looked at the whole second mortgage thing, but then I found something even better: a HELOC.  That’s a home equity line of credit: meaning, you only borrow the money when you actually need it to pay for something, the equity of the house serves as the collateral, and most are interest-only for the first 10 years or so, then you start paying it off.  In 10 years, we’ll be nearly done paying off the primary mortgage, so it’ll be less onerous to take on another payment.  And, if we get a windfall, we can always pay off the HELOC early.  It’s a pretty good deal, and many financial sites out there recommend it as the way to go.

So I started looking into banks that offered such a thing, and I found a credit union that I liked.  Now, this story is about how the universe hates me, not about how I chose a terrible bank, so I’m not going to name the exact institution.  Besides, as much as this bank fucked up, a lot of it wasn’t their fault, and they also had a number of very helpful employees along the way, so I’m not going to throw them under the bus.  I’ll just say that it happens to be a credit union based in New Jersey.  Which, in this day and age of doing everything online, I figured wouldn’t matter that much.

But of course people in New Jersey tend to work New Jersey hours, and I don’t even work “regular” hours here in sunny Southern California.  I often work late into the night, so I get up late.  My work is fine with that, and if I need to take a break to handle something that simply has to happen during business hours, they’re very understanding.  And, for West Coast businesses, my roughly 4 hours of overlap with what’s considered a normal workday is plenty.

But of course New Jersy is 3 hours behind us, so that 4 hours becomes about an hour, and it’s the first hour of my day, when I’m still waking up and feeling a bit groggy and out-of-sorts.  So it’s not ideal.  But, I figured, as long as I can handle the majority of it via email, I should be good.

And my initial contact, who was the lending equivalent of a salesperson, seemed to get that.  Oh, she kept sending me messages like “when’s a good time to call?” and so forth, but I just ignored that and kept on asking my questions and asking for info via email.  It took me several months to make up my mind, because that’s just the sort of person I am (i.e. I have to analyze every possible choice from every possible angle), but she was patient and never told me to fuck off, and eventually my CFP took a look at the rates and the conditions and said, wow, that’s a pretty good rate, you should jump on that.  So I did.

Now, as it happened, this was right around the holidays at the end of last year.  I returned my completed application on 12/12/23, and was transitioned to a loan processor on 12/21.  By the time Jaunary 2nd rolled around, I was getting emails from a different processor because the first guy had gone on vacation.  On 1/5, I got an email from a third processor, but the very next day the second guy was back.  And of course the first guy eventually came back (that was on 1/16) and tried to take back over, but there was already a good deal of confusion by that point.

See, one of the conditions for the loan was that I had to open a savings account with the bank, with a minimum initial deposit of $5.  And I would get a better rate if I had payments automatically deducted from that account.  Which seemed simple enough: just open an online account.  I’ve done it many times, at many different banks.  Piece of cake, I thought.  Except it wasn’t.

My first attempt failed.  My second attempt failed.  The crew of rotating loan processors advised me to go online and set up a video appointment with the technical support department ... which also failed.  I ended up making 8 attempts on 5 different browsers on 3 different operating systems on 4 different devices (including laptops, desktops, and phones) before I was finally able to get through the account opening process.  I never was able to successfully schedule a tech support appointment, and none of the “advice” from the processors ever worked: it was just trying over and over again until something finally clicked.  All I got from the processors were repeated instructions to do the same things I was already doing that weren’t working, and stern admonitions like this one:

PLEASE NOTE:
Opening a membership account is a member requirement on this process.

To which I responded, yeah, I know that.  That’s what I’m trying to do.  And what eventually worked was Microsoft Edge on a Windows machine, which is ... just, no.  There’s no way I was going to borrow The Mother‘s laptop and use Edge every time I had to do anything with the bank.  At this point, my whole impression of the bank’s technical capabilities was plummeting.  But I had two bigger problems.

First of all, the loan processor was threatening to close my application, because it’s only good for a certain number of days.  I kept pointing out to him that none of the problems I was having were my fault, so it was kind of on them to extend the loan.  Which didn’t fly.  So I had to CC my salesperson and get her to step in, which she did and the deadline was extended.

But the biggest problem was, they wouldn’t open the account without putting in the $5.  Which is fairly unusual: the normal way online banks do it is, you open the account, then you have 30 days (or whatever) to make the initial deposit, or it just gets closed automatically.  But this wouldn’t even let me finish the account opening process without the 5 bucks.  Fine, I said; how do I add that?  There was exactly one option: I had to go through a bunch of hoops, give them all the same info I’d already given in the loan application, including yet another picture of my driver’s license, and then I had to send them a selfie (WTF??), and then I just needed to enter the login and password for my main bank account.

And that’s where I shut it down.  I’m not giving out my frigging password to my primary bank account.  I just met you! no way I trust you enough to give you the most sensitive password I own (and especially not over Edge ... sheesh).  So I emailed them back and said, nunh-unh, try again.  So my salesperson stepped in (again) and got the something-something department to open the account manually, waiving the $5 minimum, so then I had routing and account numbers to add to my main bank, so I could transfer the $5 that way.

As you probably know, the way these online accounts verify each other is to make little deposits called “trial deposits”: there’s two or three of them, they’re less than a dollar each, and then they withdraw them back at the end.  You verify the bank by entering the amount of the trial depsoits, which proves you have access to the target bank account.  And, now that the account was officially open, I could use the credit union’s mobile app, so I did have access to the target account.  So may main bank did the trial deposits, but, when I went to verify them, they had cancelled the account.  So I had to call them, and they said the transfers were rejected from the credit union side.  So I passed that along, at which point my salesperson proved to be the hero yet again: she instructed the loan processor to mark the application complete (despite the fact that my account was in a bit of a limbo state, not having received the minimum intial deposit), then she tried to call me to explain what I needed to do, which of course took a few days before we could connect, and in the meantime I started receiving insistent emails from a closing agent.  And I understand that she was just trying to do her job and close things out in a timely manner, but at that point I still didn’t understand how I was going to get a measly $5 into this new account, much less how I was going to be able to get a regular monthly payment into it, so I wasn’t quite ready to sign a bunch of leagl docs yet.  We’re up to February by this point.

Over the phone, my salesperson told me that the reason the trial deposits were rejected was because they weren’t the minimum $5 initial deposit.  I’m not sure this entirely made sense, since I could see the trial deposits in the phone app, so it seemed like they weren’t really rejected, but whatever.  My salesperson advised me to write myself a paper check for the $5 and use the mobile app to deposit it.  Which seemed a bit ... circuitous, but I just wanted to get the whole thing wrapped up, so I just did that.  And my loan closed on 2/22.  Now, this particular HELOC had a condition that I needed to pull out at least $25,000 on closing (that’s what they call the “initial draw”), and that I had to not pay any of that back for the first year.  This was another discount to my interest rate, and my CFP approved it, and I needed nearly that much to cover the upstairs A/C and the garage roof, which were the two things we planned to do immediately anyway.  So that was fine, and the initial $25k was deposited to my fresh, new credit union account on 2/27.  Story over, right?

Nope.

Because I didn’t realize that “do you want us to FedEx you a check or just deposit the initial draw into your savings account?” was a trick question.  In hindsight, if I’d only taken the check ...  But I thought to myself that the online banking troubles were surely over by now, and it would be easy to get the money moved electronically from the credit union back to my main bank, or in the worst case to my other online bank (I use that one because it has a higher interest rate on savings).  How young and foolish I was then.

First I set up both my main bank and my high-interest account bank as targets for transfers in the credit union.  This worked perfectly ... except that, apparently, while doing electronic transfers into the credit union account was fine, doing transfers out of it was not possible.  Like, it just wouldn’t show the external accounts as an option to tranfer to, only to transfer from.  So I figured I’d just add the credit union as an account for tranfser in my high-interest account.  Which also worked perfectly, except for the fact that they have a $2,000/day limit, and a $10,000/month limit.  Shit.  At this point the HVAC repariman and the roofer were botgh scheduled, so I started transferring $2k per day, and then set about trying to figure out how to get to the rest.

I tried to set up the credit union account again at my main bank.  It was rejected before I even got past the first page.  I called them; they told me that the credit union account didn’t allow ACH transfers (which I pointed out was patently false, due to the several currently ongoing transfers to the high-interest account), and then they told me that I’d have to talk to their external accounts department (who of course had gone for the day), and then eventually they told me that I had to stop asking them about it or else my account might get flagged for fraud.  (Personally, I’m convinced that they’re just pissed off that they never got their 67¢ from the trial deposits back.  I offered to cover it for them, but they didn’t buy it.)

So I called the credit union (during my one hour overlap) who suggested that I use “shared branching.” This is a system whereby credit unions all over the country have reciprocal arrangement where you can go to a credit union near you, even though it’s not the same institution, and use it as a branch.  Excellent.  There’s exactly one shared branch in my city, so I went there, only to discover that they had a $1k/day limit.  Well, $1k/day in cash and $1k/day in check form.  So they advised me to try another shared branch, which was an entirely different credit union, but it was 20 minutes away.  I figured, while I’m here, just give me a check for a thousand and a thousand in cash.  I didn’t really want the cash, of course—who wants be carrying around a thousand dollars in cash these days?—but I really wanted to make sure the HVAC guy (who was coming first) would be covered.  But the check they printed for me didn’t have my name correct, because I’m a “Jr,” which is the bane of my existence, and apparently my name was not correct on the credit union account, and the check was automatically printed out based on my account name, so it was made out to my dad.  I pointed out that my main bank was super-picky about the name being correct on checks deposited via the mobile app, so they’d need to cancel it and write a new one.  Except they couldn’t cancel it, because it was a cashier’s check or a certified check or whatever, so they had to redeposit it.  And then they couldn’t write another check because they could only do $1k per day in check form, and they’d already done that.  So now I was up to only 11 thousand, out of the original 25.

So I called the shared branch in the next town over to verify that they would not have any limits; they confimed that, while there was a daily limit on cash, there was no limit on the amount they could give me a check for.  Excellent.  So I drove there.  And their machines were down.  So I had to come back on a different day, which I did.  And they said my account had been flagged for fraud and I had to call the original credit union.  So I did (during my one hour overlap), and they said they’d have to talk to the fraud department, who of course had gone for the day.  So I waited for them to call back and tell me that the fraud hold was lifted, which took a few days, and then I drove to the 20-minutes-away shared branch for a third time, and they told me that the account had been flagged for fraud again.  They theorized that trying to get a single check for roughly $14k was just automatically triggering some fraud threshhold and suggested that I call the source bank.  They’re in New Jersey, I pointed out.  Oh, well, then, they’ll be closed now, they responded.  Yes, I know, I said.

So I called the HELOC credit union again—and, let me tell you, even the most understanding workplace in the world was starting to look askance at me by this point when I said I had some business to attend to, yet again—and asked how I could get my hands on this frigging money that they’d so generously lent me but were making it very hard to get at it even though I was already paying interest on it.  They could do a wire transfer, they suggested, but that would cost money.  Hell, no, I said (honestly, a wire transfer is cheap enough that it probably would have been worth it just to end the torture, but it was starting to be the principle of the thing).  They could mail me a check, they suggested: it’ll only take 7 – 10 business days.  Hey, what about that FedEx option? I asked.  Can’t I still get that?  Well, they said, they could request special dispensation to get the check expedited, but no guarantees.  Fine; I’ll take it (what choice do I have at this point?).  And it was expedited, and it arrived promptly, and I depoisted a check for nearly $14k to my main account on 4/4.  That’s about 38 days post-closing, and countless hours of my time.  Just to actually receive the money I’d already paid a month’s interest on.

We had to postpone the roofer.  But the HVAC fellow came in and did a great job, and luckily he was happy to take that $1,000 in cash off my hands.  And hopefully the roofer will be able to come in a week or so.  And then we can start looking for a pool renovater.  And maybe someone to install an on-demand hot water heater.

So that’s the whole story.  I’m sure you felt like it was a lot to read, but imagine how I feel: I had to live it.  The Mother says I obviously racked up some karmic debt, and whatever I did must’ve been pretty bad, and, who knows? maybe she’s right.  I’d like to think I’m just so lucky in life in general that the universe likes to make sure I don’t get too comfortable.  After all, complaining about how hard it was to get 25 thousand dollars so I could (in part) retile my southern California swimming pool is sort of the definition of “first-world problem.” Still, I thought you might enjoy this comedy of errors, so at least, perhaps, my misery has brought you some joy.  Enjoy the schadenfreude.

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.

Perl blog post #63

This week, I posted something over on my Other Blog.  So, if you’re a Perl person, check it out.  If not ... well, there’s always 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.

Something to Have Said

It’s long been a tradition on this blog that, when I’m having trouble coming up with a regular post, I take the opportunity to reflect on the blog thus far.  There are, in fact, 5 previous posts in this informal “series,” which you can find links to on the informals listing page (search for “Nothing to Say”).  Some of those posts were because I truly had nothing to say, some were because I had too many ideas but none of them were working for me, and some of them were because I ran out of time for a post and wanted to buy myself some extra time to finish up properly.

This is a bit like that last one: I did have a post all planned out, and I thought it would be fairly quick to write, but, once I started looking into it, it seemed like it was going to take more time than I could properly devote to it this weekend.  But there was also a bit more going on this time around, because I discovered a number of problems that needed attention.  None of them were particularly difficult to solve, but they added up.  And all these problems centered around blog maintenance.

See, writing a blog is about more than just the actual writing of the words, in the same way that making YouTube videos is about more than just standing in front of your webcam and talking.  There’s also editing, and the technical process of getting the work published on the web site, and, occasionally, going back and correcting mistakes.

In this particular case, I found of number of small typos in old posts while rereading them to get into the necessary flow state.  I also noticed a post or two that should have been added to a series listing page but had gotten overlooked.  And, even after I decided to turn this week’s post into a “nothing to say” post, I found still more issues.  See, in order to get a proper word count for blog posts, I’ve separated out my rough draft posts from the published posts, and I’ve written a little Perl script to count the actual words while ignoring the non-content bits.¹  So, the first thing I discovered is that there were a bunch of posts which I had neglected to move from my “drafts” folder to my “published” one.  Then I discovered that my wrapper script which ran the word counting script on “all” my blog posts had neglected to consider my ongoing novel, whose chapters and subchapters were indeed blog posts.²  Then, which I had fixed all that, I ran it and it said it couldn’t find the word counting script.  So I had to track that down and fix that too.³

And part of the reason for all this required maintenance is that I only do those sorts of cleanup tasks when I need to for one of these “nothing to say” posts ... and I just haven’t done one of those in a while.  The first such post was a year into the blog, and the second was a year later; after that, they fell into a fairly steady biannual pattern.  And, if I had kept to that schedule (loose as it was), this post should have landed in ... let’s see ... 2020.

Right in the middle of the pandemic.

So ... yeah.  That didn’t happen.

And now it’s been six years since the last time I counted up how much time and effort I’ve put into this blog, which means it’s been 14 years in total that I’ve been doing it.  Which is ... a lot.  In that time, the landscape of the Internet has changed significantly.  Text information has largely been replaced by videos; some opine that this is a sign that people don’t like to read any more, but I say it’s the nature of Internet commerce.  If you want to get paid for Internet content, good luck trying to make a buck writing posts of the length I typically do on this blog.  But it’s easy to monetize video content on YouTube, as long as it’s of a certain length.  Which is why the one sentence answer to a “how do I ...?” question is now a 2½ minute video which you watch at 2x speed because you’re just trying to GET TO THE FUCKING ANSWER: no I’m not going to like and subscribe and hit the bell icon, I just need to know how to reset my fucking garbage disposal!!!

So people don’t much write blogs any more.  Hell, I’ve even read that the entire concept of blogging is now considered passé.  Enh.  That’s okay: I’m old.  Although the truth of the matter is that this really has nothing to do with old vs young—it’s just that different brains work in different ways.  Some brains need to see and hear a real person explain a thing to them.  Some people prefer to read words.  My brain is a word brain; videos are ... I dunno, meh, I suppose?  I enjoy watching videos for entertainment, but not so much for information.  Unless they’re edutainment or somesuch.  But whatever.  The point is, I enjoy reading, and I enjoy writing, and I’m going to keep on writing this blog, and I don’t much care if it’s considered old-fashioned.  Or if no one reads it, even.  I even tell you not to read it right there in the blog title.  So obviously I just don’t give a shit.  I’m a rebel like that.

So, where are we in terms of stats?  Well, we’re about a week away from being exactly 14 years into it; this week is 729 weeks from the first post,⁴ which means that this should be the 730th post (because, again, you have to count both endpoints, ’cause there’s a post at either end).  Whereas my Blogger interface tells me I have 725 posts, not counting this one, so I’m actually 4 short.  Still, only 4 posts missed in 14 years—that’s not a bad track record.

I also used to consider how many were interstitial and partial and all that.  But that’s less relevant with the new blog schedule (which came into existence right before the last “nothing to say” post), since now every other post will be one of those two things.  Still, for completeness, I’ll run the numbers: of the 725 posts, 102 are interstitial (that’s 14%), and 100 are partial (basically the same percentage).  Which is not so bad.  But how about the big one? how many words are we talking?

Well, discounting all the quotes and footnotes and all that, the grand total comes out to 798,583 words.  So nearly 800K words in 14 years: 57K words per year, or 1100 words per week on average, even with the interstitials and partials.  That’s not too shoddy, if I do say so myself.  Nothing to sneeze at, I don’t think.

And whither hence?  I mean, I said years ago (in the aforementioned blog schedule post, in fact) that I would like to break this blog into several sub-blogs, each one aimed more specifically at its target audience.  And thus far I’ve totally failed to make good on that.  I still want to, of course, although blogging platforms to make that easier are getting harder to come by as the popularity of blogging declines.  But I have some thoughts.  Maybe ChatGPT (or other AI competitor) can help me figure out how to get going on that.  I have hopes.  And, occasionally, dreams.

But I see from my handy-dandy word counter that this “partial” post has once again grown into a full post.  Which I can’t really complain about, so I shan’t.  I’ll just say that I’m looking forward to ... what, another 14 years doing this?  I’m not sure that makes sense, at the pace technology is advancing these days.  But another 14 years of putting out something for you not to read, that’s for sure.

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1 I outline the exact specs of this script in the most recent nothing to say post, if you really care.

2 This undoubtedly means that my last official stats were off too.  But I’m not going to bother going back to correct that.

3 As it turns out, I had just renamed it since the last time I ran it from the wrapper script.  No biggie.  But it took much longer to figure out than it did to fix.

4 You may recall that I used the Perl date module which I wrote to work that out last time, and I lamented that it really ought to be simpler.  Well, now it is: perl -MDate::Easy -E 'say ((today - date("3/28/2010")) / 7)' prints “729.”

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.

Be Liberal in What You Accept

If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart.  If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.

— Winston Churchill

You may have seen this quote floating around online.  Certainly it’s a darling of modern conservatives.  And if so great a luminary as Churchill said it ... well, then, certainly it must be true.

Except, of course, Churchill never said that. The International Churchill society points out that:

There is no record of anyone hearing Winston Churchill say this. Paul Addison of Edinburgh University made this comment: ‘Surely Churchill can’t have used the words attributed to him. He’d been a Conservative at 15 and a Liberal at 35!  And would he have talked so disrespectfully of Clemmie, who is generally thought to have been a lifelong Liberal?’

By “Clemmie,” Addison is referring here to Clementine, the Baroness Spencer-Churchill, a.k.a. Winston’s wife.  So I think these are pretty compelling points that attributing this quote to Churchill is just wishful thinking.

If you really want to know the convoluted origin of this quote, you can read all about it on the Quote Investigator, but basically it likely started off as this:

A boy of fifteen who is not a democrat is good for nothing, and he is no better who is a democrat at twenty.

— John Adams, 1799

which then evolved to this:

Several of my friends urged me to respond with Burke’s famous line: “Anyone who is not a republican at twenty casts doubt on the generosity of his soul; but he who, after thirty years, perseveres, casts doubt on the soundness of his mind.”

— Jules Claretie (translated from the original French), 1872

Along with many, many variations along the way, and since.  Here’s my favorite of the ones QI cites:

An excited supporter burst into the private chambers of the old tiger Clemenceau one day and cried, “Your son has just joined the Communist Party.” Clemenceau regarded his visitor calmly and remarked, “Monsieur, my son is 22 years old. If he had not become a Communist at 22, I would have disowned him. If he is still a Communist at 30, I will do it then.”

— Bennet Cerf, writing about Georges Clemenceau, 1944

That one at least is clever.  The rest are all at least moderately clumsy in the phrasing, not to mention not uttered by anyone as famous as Churchill.  Although John Adams is close.  But also pay attention to what Adams is really saying here: that, by the time you’re merely twenty years old, you should have learned not to have faith in democracy.  I know we Americans have a great belief that we live in a democracy, and that we do so because of our revered founding fathers, but often we forget that irksome things like the electoral college exist precisely because those founding fathers (or at least a majority of them) felt that the common man couldn’t be expected to be informed enough to vote sensibly, so the most they could be trusted to do was to elect someone smarter than they were.  

Of course, as I wrote in my very first blog post about quotes, “really it doesn’t even matter who said it: the wisdom or truth of the words is contained within them, regardless of any external attribution.” So who cares who said it, if it’s true.

Except ...

Well, except that it’s crap.  Even confining ourselves to the fairly modern definitions of “liberal” and “conservative”—and completely ignoring the far right (MAGA, QAnon, etc)—I can quite trivially provide two counterexamples: my father was the same conversative he is today at 25, and I continue to be just as liberal as I ever was well beyond 35.  Or 45 ... hell, I’ve now moved beyond 55, even, and I continue to be, what I’m sure is to my more conservative friends, annoyingly liberal.

And, yes, I do have conservative friends.  Remember: I said we were not defining “conservative” as meaning the MAGA crowd—I’m definitely not friends with any of them.  But, using the normal definition of “political conservative” to mean small government, taxes bad, trickle-down economics good, capitalism great, unions suck, etc. ... sure, I have friends like that.  People like that can be very reasonable and even fun.  The fact that they’re wrong doesn’t make them bad people.  (I’m kidding.  Mostly.)

No, this lovely idea that liberalism is founded on idealism, which is something you really ought to have when you’re young, but you really ought to grow out of at some point, is just crap.  Doesn’t make any sense, and doesn’t bear out in reality.  The best proof of this concept that I’ve run across is in an article from Scientific American, which posits (with some interesting studies to back it up) that conservative and liberal brains are just different.  Liberals have bigger cingulate cortices, while conservatives have bigger amygdalae.  Which means, broadly speaking, that liberals are better at detecting errors and resolving conflicts, while conservatives are better at regulating emotions and evaluating threats.  Nothing wrong with either of those characteristics, of course: each are good, in different situations.  And there’s still some disagreement over which comes first:

There is also an unresolved chicken-and-egg problem:  Do brains start out processing the world differently or do they become increasingly different as our politics evolve?

But I find this whole area fascinating.  Especially because there isn’t anything black-and-white about it, which as you know appeals to my sense of balance and paradox.  Sure, conservatives are less likely to question the status quo, but that means they’re often happier because they’re more willing to accept and enjoy their circumstances.  Sure, liberals may be better at processsing contradictory information, but we’re also prone to waffling and it can take us forever to make up our minds about an issue (that one hits particularly hard for me).  And, yes, all this is a whole lot of generalization, and individuals will differ in how they approach things regardless of their overall tendencies, and obviously we can rise above our programming ... but, at least to me, it’s actually a bit comforting to think that, when a friend expresses some surprisingly conservative viewpoint, I can say to myself, oh: they’re just wired differently.  And that’s okay.

As I’ve said before, the world would be a pretty boring place if we all agreed on everything.  So, while I continue to believe that my politics are the best politics, I don’t hate the other side ... hell, I don’t even dislike or distrust the other side.  But, I must once again stress: Trump supporters are not the other side.  Those are the folks who’ve gone way beyond the other side and out the door and down the road and across the field.  Even my father, bastion of conservatism that he is, is no longer a Trump supporter.  Trump gives conservatism a bad name, sadly.  And I think that Trump will likely not win in the presidential race this year precisely because more and more conservatives are realizing this.  I could be wrong about that ... but I don’t think I am.  And that’s a good thing.

I think proper conservatism deserves a reboot.  I still think they’re all wrong, of course, but it’s never great to have people in charge who all think the same way.  Diversity is important (again, ignoring those ultra-right-wingers who foam at the mouth when you talk about diversity), and, just as having diversity in the workplace makes your business more profitable (look it up if you don’t believe this; there are multiple studies which support this fact), so too is diversity of opinions in government important.  If the government were entirely run by liberals, we’d probably be in just as much trouble as we would be if it were run entirely by conservatives.  Finding the balance is what’s important ... but of course I would say that (balance and paradox again).

What I really wish is that our two political parties would both split in two.  The Republicans have become sharply divided between the MAGA crowd and the “traditional” conservatives, while the Democrats have become too crowded, and people as different as Biden and Sanders both claiming the same party feels weird.  If we had four parties, they could perhaps be led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Kamala Harris, Liz Cheney, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, and I think the vast majority of Americans would know exactly which quadrant of the spectrum they fall into just from that alone.  I’d love it, personally.  I would probably vote for AOC’s party the most often, but I’d vote for the Harris ticket plenty, and probably even the Cheney party every now and again.  (The less said on how I feel about the Greene-led crowd, the better.)  But we’d truly have some meaningful choices again, that’s the important bit.  And I think that would be good for our country, for our government, and for our sanity.

Sadly, I think it’s mostly just wishful thinking.  I think the two-party stranglehold on our political system is not giving up its deathgrip any time soon, and we’ll be the poorer for it.  But, as fraught with emotion as the current times are, I think we should still all remember that conservative, liberal—they’re just a difference in how we’re wired, and that’s fine.  We can still all get along, and we can still see the good in others.  And I think that’s a worthy goal.

[Today’s title is the latter half of the Robustness Principle, a.k.a. Postel’s law: be conservative in what you emit; be liberal in what you accept.  So perhaps it’s just my technogeek nature to recognize that both philosophies have value.]

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.