Doom Report (Week -7: Stop Calling It Inflation!)

This week, many of my normal political shows collided, either in radical agreement, or complete contradiction.  While I’m not a political expert by any means, I do seem to have the advantage of apparently being the only person in the world watching all these sources at once.  At the very least, they’re definitely not watching each other.  Here, then, is my synthesis of the week’s news.

These are the shows I’ll be referencing throughout this week’s report; feel free to watch them yourselves and evaluate whether you think I’m fairly representing their views:

• On this week’s episode of The Weekly Show, Jon Stewart interviews Bernie Sanders on “Rebuilding Trust & Efficacy in the Government”.  Stewart is of course the former host of The Daily Show, and is now back there one night a week; I trust I don’t need to explain who Sanders is.
• On this week’s episode of Some More News, Cody Johnston and Katy Stoll do a fairly in-depth post-mortem on the election, somewhat incisively titled “Is Everyone Stupid?” Cody and Katy were writers for Cracked.com, where they worked on a faux news report à la SNL’s “Weekend Update” called “Some News”; Some More News is a continuation of that.  They’re super-progressive and not particularly fond of the Democrats.
• On this week’s episode of The Coffee Klatch, Robert Reich, Heather Lofthouse, and Michael Lahanas-Calderón do their weekly news roundup, this week entitled “Rage Against the Machine”.  Reich was Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton (meaning he’s as old as Biden and Trump), and has been a professor and political pundit in the years since, mainly expounding on our growing income inequality (much like Sanders).  He cofounded Inequality Media; Lofthouse is the president of Inequality Media’s Civic Action org.  Calderon is their director of digital strategy, and the official Gen Z representative on the panel.  These guys are fairly pro-Democrat and moderately progressive.
• This week, Brian Tyler Cohen interviewed Mehdi Hasan on his YouTube channel.  BTC is a staunch Democrat, and the only “serious” news source that I picked up during the writer’s strike that I still watch.  He’s often too pro-Dem for my tastes, but he also covers things I can’t get elsewhere.  Mehdi is a British-born journalist perhaps most famous for having his MSNBC show cancelled during the early days of the genocide in Gaza; the network said that fact that he was Muslim was “coincidental.”  Yeah, right.  This year he started a new website and YouTube channel called Zeteo (a Greek word meaning “to seek out the truth”); contributors will reportedly include Greta Thunberg and Bassem Youssef.  He’s fairly liberal and not afraid to drop an F-bomb, so I might watch some of the Zeteo videos.¹

So, first and foremost, we need to stop calling the horrible price increases we’re all dealing with “inflation.”  I really think this is part of the messaging problem that the Kamala campaign was suffering from.  As I talked about in our last Doom Report, there seems to be a strong consensus developing that a big part of Kamala’s defeat—if not the entirety of it—was because she toed the Biden party line that the economy is going great, even though people can easily see (and feel) that it really isn’t.  Mehdi Hasan talked about how the administration has done all these great economic things, but they aren’t getting “credit” for it.  BTC ate this up, since it reinforces the line he’s been harping on since the election: the right-wing media machine is very effective, and the left-wing media machine basically doesn’t exist.  And this, of course, is why voters were too stupid to realize that the economy is actually great.

I malign BTC, of course: he didn’t actually call the voters stupid.  Even Cody wouldn’t go that far, and he was hosting a video titled “Is Everyone Stupid?”  But, in the first section, Cody opined that people aren’t stupid ... they just don’t know as much about politics as the rest of us.  You know, us smart people.  I’m being a bit unfair to Cody as well, but I think both of these takes are missing the point.  While it’s been reported that Google searches for “what are tariffs” spiked after the election, understandably leading many to (figuratively) facepalm and wonder why folks couldn’t have Googled that before they voted, it’s still overly dismissive to ascribe this disconnect to ignorance.

So what, in my opinion, is the problem?  The problem is that the Democrats kept telling people that inflation was going down, and it was.  But prices aren’t coming down.  And that has nothing to do with inflation.  Inflation, as an economic term, is defined as follows: “a persistent, substantial rise in the general level of prices related to an increase in the volume of money and resulting in the loss of value of currency.”  But when prices are high because corporations are just gouging us—which they can do because Reagan (primarily following the philosophy of his solicitor general Robert Bork) gutted antitrust enforcement—that ain’t inflation.  Bork tried to convince us that consumers benefit from corporate mergers in his 1978 book The Antitrust Paradox, but 40+ years of actual experience (and data) show us that that’s bullshit.  If a corporation can raise prices, they will, and, during the pandemic, they could, so they did.  Why would they bother to bring them back down?  Well, in a marketplace with vigorous competition, they’d bring them back down because, if they didn’t, the competitors would eat their lunch.  But when you’re a company that controls 85% of the market (which is true of multiple industries in our country at this point), you’ve got no real competition, so fuck it: keep on gougin’.

So, when the Democrats were saying “inflation is down” and “the economy is much better,” they were right.  And also completely missing the point.  What they should have said is, “yes, you’re paying too much for everything these days, but it’s nothing to do with inflation: you’re getting screwed by corporations.”

And, here’s the fucked up part: as SMN pointed out, The Atlantic broke the story that Kamala wanted to go after big business, but apparently her brother-in-law Tony West—the chief legal officer of Über—wrote her a letter urging her not to do that.  So she didn’t.  So she lost.

Okay, I’m oversimplifying again.  But try to imagine how much different things would be if Kamala had answered the question “what will you do differently than Biden?” by saying “I’m going to go after these corporate oligarchs who are raping and pillaging our country and picking your pocket.”  It makes for an interesting thought experiment at the very least.

Sadly, the Dems are not only not going to start doing that, they’re probably not going to start doing much of anything differently.  The people who advised Harris, as well as other Democratic strategists, are already looking for other people to blame.  In response to Maureen Dowd’s contention that “politically correct” language like “Latinx” and “BIPOC” are responsible for the Democrats’ loss, Katy Stoll responds:

Does she present any actual data that the term “BIPOC” alienated half of the country or more?  Let’s see ... no, no, that’s dumb.  Who needs data?  Data’s for wokes.  Also, as we already showed, there isn’t any data.  It’s just vibes.  But, beyond vibes, these people are transparently trying to cover their own asses.  Kamala Harris ran the campaign they wanted.  Joe Biden reads Matt Yglesias and watches Joe Scarborough.  They got the centrist, non-woke campaign they’re complaining that they didn’t, and now they’re scrambling to blame someone else, because that campaign lost.

Mehdi Hasan goes further:

We’ve seen ... all the team of advisors around Harris ... basically saying, we got nothing wrong.  We did nothing wrong, we’re not contrite, we have no apologies, we’d do it all the same.

Sure, it’s true that incumbents lost all around the world.  But, as Mehdi points out: okay, but why did they all lose?

They [Harris’ campaign strategists] keep going, “well, you have to understand: we inherited a really bad situation.  The internal polling was really bad.  Joe Biden was more unpopular than even you knew.”  Then why the F did you not break with Biden ... ?  It actually makes it worse for them, not breaking with Biden, by them now admitting that they knew he was more unpopular than the public knew.  Because, then, the arguments were “oh, well, we can’t break with a sitting president”—you can if your internal polling is telling you that he is toxic and pulling you down.²

Blaming phrases like “Latinx” is just blame-shifting.  Sure, it’s true that, as a strategist pointed out in a clip that Katy showed, Latine people themselves don’t use “Latinx,” because it’s impossible to pronounce and it’s just weird.³  But to then extrapolate that that’s why Latine’s didn’t vote for Harris is just insane.  I’m not sure I want to go so far as Katy in saying that a lot of these liberal elites are just blaming minorities the same way that Republicans are, but it’s also fair to note that Maureen Dowd is absolutely a Boomer (and white): she’s just 6 years younger than Trump.

Look, at the end of the day, Jon Stewart nails the whole shebang right in the opening sentences of his interview:

But I got the sense that, what kind of happened to the Democrats was that they were in a position to defend a status quo that most voters—certainly, many—felt was no longer delivering for them.  ...  that many Democrats felt like: oh, no, we are improving your lives.  You just don’t realize it.

Sanders responds that, among other things, Citizens United has turned Congresspeople into employees of megacorps.  Which means that any party that wants to appeal to working class voters has two options: pretend that the system is working just fine, even when people can clearly see that it’s not, or .... you know, just lie.  Also known as, the Democratic strategy and the Republican strategy.  Sigh.

Reich bemoans that we now take democracy for granted (contrasting us with South Korea, who this week quashed a coup by barricading the doors of the National Assembly and just voting; Riech’s point was that democracy in South Korea is new enough that their people are still willing to fight for it).  But this is naïve: Stewart points out that defending democracy isn’t appealing to people for whom democracy is failing them.  Or, as BTC puts it:

By saying, “we have to protect our institutions; we have to protect our democracy,” for so many people out there for whom democracy (and our institutions) isn’t working, that is not the message they want to hear.  That is the message that’s going to push them away.

So what should the message be?  Mehdi points out that, with the exception of Joe Biden in 2020, when the Dems put up an “establishment” candidate (e.g. Kerry, Hillary, Kamala, Al Gore), they lose.  When they put up a “Washington outsider” (e.g. Clinton, Obama), they win.  And that’s probably not a coincidence.  As Cody pointed out, Obama won by running on hope and change.  Maybe we didn’t get enough of that once he actually got in office, but that’s what he ran on, and he won.  Twice.  When BTC asks why so many Dems won House seats even though the country shifted to the right in the Presidential election, and mentions the success of Golden in Maine and Perez in Washington, and wonders if they won because they tacked right, Mehdi responds:

You mention Jared Golden and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez: yeah, I don’t share their politics; they’re definitely to the right of me.  But, did they run right-wing campaigns, or did they run populist, authentic campaigns?  Did they say “right to repair” (in her case); ... “anti-monopoly” (in his case)?  All right, this is what we need to be talking about right now.  It’s not about whether you sign a tick-box of “I’m left,” “I’m right,” “I do these policies”; it’s about: Who are you fighting for? Do you have a fighting spirit? Do people know what you stand for? Are you authentic, or are you just a kind of, poll-tested, focus-group-tested, bland person who no one thinks is going to fight for them in Washington, D.C.?

Will the Dems do this?  Unlikely.  They’re still trapped by the corporate profit cycle.  Stewart and Sanders talked about the food corps spending all this money to design food which is making us diabetic, and then the drug corps spending all this money to develop drugs to cure our diabetes.  And they do this because it makes them money.  (I would have added that the insurance companies enable this.  You think you need insurance because otherwise you couldn’t afford medical care, but of course companies couldn’t charge that much for medical care if the insurance companies weren’t picking everyone’s pockets and funneling the cash to big pharma and big healthcare companies such as United Health Care.  If no one could afford to pay those exorbitant costs, we’d all just die and the companies would go out of business.  Instead, insurance is enabling the whole cycle.  But I digress.)  Stewart asks Sanders what it would take for Congress to wake up and understand how badly things are going for ordinary people, but Sanders points out that they do understand: it’s just that all the corporate money prevents them from voting their conscience.  Stewart says that that’s depressing: it means they know they’re screwing us and it’s all cynical.  Sanders counterpoints that when megacorps have millions of dollars to devote to destroying you in your next election, and you realize that the guy who replaces you could be much worse, it’s not you that sucks, but the system.

Basically, as Cody and Katy point out, the Repubs have the Dems playing defense, and you can’t win playing defense.  These episodes—and my synthesis of them—contains several ideas on how they might turn that around into playing offense, but they don’t seem inclined to want to do that.  Hell, take a simple example: Cody points out that campaign strategists told Walz to “lay off” calling the Repubs “weird,” even though it was actually working.  Mehdi goes further and says Walz was “buried”; when Walz badmouthed the electoral college; the Harris campaign disavowed his remarks, even though the American public really hates the electoral college.  Yeah, Tim: stop saying all that stuff that actually appeals to people!  Walz was really hard-done by these “strategists.”

Gaza is another place where the Dems could have made some inroads, but dropped the ball.  Mehdi said that he had at first decided that Trump’s margin was so large that the loss of Muslim-Americans over the Dems’ Gaza policy must not have made any difference.  But he later reconsidered: sure, 65% of Muslims voted for Harris, but it’s also true that Harris lost Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin by a combined 230,000 votes (roughly).  If slightly more than 115,000 Muslim-Americans in those three states had switched from voting for Trump to voting for Kamala, she might well have won the electoral college while losing the popular vote (and what delicious irony that would have been).  Impossible to say whether he’s right on that score, but he also points out that, even above and beyond the numbers, vowing to do better than Biden on the Gaza situation would have at least been a difference from Biden, the lack of which was, again, her biggest weakness.

I’m also pretty sick of hearing this, which Reich repeated this week:

Well, in fairness, she only had 3 months.

THE ENTIRE UK GENERAL ELECTION TOOK 43 DAYS.  Kamala had 107.  Shut the fuck up about not having enough time.

Speaking of United Health Care (as I was a few paragraphs ago), their CEO was assassinated this week.  There was a lot of hand wringing about how awful it is that some people on the Internet are ... shall we say ... lacking in sympathy over this incident.  Lofthouse and Reich had this exchange:

Lofthouse: But, so what are the big take-homes from this?  Medicare for all?
Reich: Well, I would say ... you can’t use somebody’s death ... to do anything with.

On which I have to call bullshit.  This is the crap that Republicans say when there’s a school shooting.  When a tragedy happens is exactly the time to talk about the factors that led up to it, and how we can change things to make sure it doesn’t happen again.  And it is possible to say that the killing of this man is a horrible tragedy on a personal level, and to feel overwhelming grief for his family, and to note that he made $10 million dollars a year and that UHC has made a policy of denying claims which has led to the deaths of thousands of Americans ... probably more.  If you need more info on how terrible a company UHC is, More Perfect Union has a good video on the topic.  Does that mean he deserved to die?  No, of course not.  It also doesn’t mean we should pretend that none of that is true.⁴

I have two big takeaways.  The first is that the Democratic party is not the answer.  I am strongly considering joining the Working Families Party.  It’s in some ways a faction inside the Democratic party (much like the Tea Party Republicans), but also in many ways a completely separate party, with a strategy for creating a third party alternative that doesn’t take votes away from one party or another.  Which sounds like a fantasy, but they’ve been working at it since 1998, and they’ve achieved some amazing things.  On the city council of Philadelphia, there are 2 WFP members to only 1 Republican; on the Hartford CT city council, there are 3 WFP members and no Repubs at all.  In a few states, such as New York, you can vote for the Democratic candidate on a separate line; this helps the candidates understand where their support is coming from.  Beyond some good articles on the Internet, there are 3 videos that I think help people understand who they are:

• quick intro by Maurice Mitchell, the National Director (brief)
• Building Blocks of WFP Power, a bit more info (informative)
• Maurice Mitchell on WFP Post-Election Mass Call, the WFP election response (inspiring)

Secondly, when I wrote my election reflections post, I went on for some time about how I hoped I was wrong about all my dire predictions.  I was somewhat pleased to hear Cody Johnston echo my words nearly exactly:

We have to assume Trump is going to do all the stuff he said he wants to do.  Granted, there are things that might prevent him from doing those things, and, if he is prevented from doing them, people are gonna call us alarmists for saying he’ll do bad stuff, but frankly, that would be great.  I would love—love—to be wrong.  I would love to prepare for the worst and for that to be a waste of time.  But that’s not gonna stop me from preparing.

Can’t sum it up better myself.

__________

1 But probably only the non-serious ones.  They have a series where they talk to comedians about news that sounds pretty interesting.

2 Yes, he actually said the letter “F” instead of “fuck.”  It was early in the interview.  He loosened up a bit by the end.

3 If you need more details about this difference, there are good articles about that on the Internet.  Short answer: “Latinx” is a white people thing.

4 Speaking of More Perfect Union and healthcare, they just did a fantastic video on Medicare “Advantage”, which I, sadly, am rapidly approaching the age where I really need to know that.  Spoiler alert: it’s not particularly advantageous.

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 -9: The Overton Window)

This week, the saga of Trump’s cabinet is both better and worse.  Matt Gaetz at least is gone, and he was certainly the worst of the bunch.  But, then, Gaetz is the very epitome of shifting the Overton Window.  If you don’t know what that is (and aren’t willing to click that perfectly good link I just dropped on you, though you really should), I’ll give you a quick precis:  The Overton Window is the set of what’s acceptable to voters.  But it’s constantly shifting over time, usually in small increments.  For instance, gay marriage wasn’t even remotely acceptable in the 50s—you couldn’t even bring it up in conversation.  Now it’s legal (at least temporarily).  Same for smoking pot, although that was still considered verboten as late as the 80s, and isn’t legal everywhere even today.  Those are things that took decades for the window to shift.  But, if you’re clever (and have some sort of authority behind you, like being an intellectual thinktank, or a president-elect), you can shift the Overton Window much more quickly.  All you need to do is, put forward an idea that is so ridiculous, so outlandish, so ... well, to use the official Overton term, unthinkable ... that suddenly the ideas that seemed radical before are now not so crazy.

So Matt Gaetz was a bridge too far.  To the point where everyone was stunned by it—even the Republicans.  Susan Collins, who you may remember from her comment that Trump had “learned” his lesson after the first impeachment (her exact quote was that he would be “much more cautious in the future”), said she was “shocked” by the Gaetz nomination.  (Apparently there’s much money to be made on betting whether Collins will see things coming, like, say, the changing of the seasons.)  Lisa Murkowski and John Thune (the latter set to be the new Senate Majority Leader now that Mitch McConnell is finally being put out to pasture) also expressed doubts.  And now Gaetz is stepping down.  See, the system works, right?

But, the thing is, that was all a distraction from the other insane picks.  Which keep on coming: Linda McMahon (yes, the wrestling executive) to head the Department of Education, and Dr. Oz, the TV quack huckster, to run Medicare and Medicaid.  And let’s not forget the previous insane picks: Pete Hegseth, the Fox “News” host, is in no way qualified to run the two trillion dollar Defense Department, and is also apparently a sexual predator.  Then again, as many have pointed out, that’s apparently a unifying theme for his cabinet: Hegseth, RFK Jr, Musk ... even McMahon has been sued for enabling sexual abuse.  But I suppose that makes sense for the adjudicated rapist who’s hiring them.

Meanwhile, the Democrats are falling over themselves to blame each other for why Kamala lost.  Many, for instance, are saying that her campaign was “too woke.”  Which is completely moronic, because the Kamala campaign flew so far to the center that they were actively pissing off the proper liberals: from trans folk to people opposed to the Palestinian genocide.  Palling around with the Cheneys, for fuck’s sake, is about as far from “woke” as you can get.  But still people want to believe it’s someone else’s fault.  Awfully convenient for the white supremacists that the Dems now apparently want to blame the same “others” that the Republicans do.

As to what is the real reason why Kamala lost, I’ve heard a lot of theories in the past weeks.  But probably the best one came from the author of Bone of the Bone: Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class, in a recent Jon Stewart interview:

So yeah, people are hurting.  And if you’re looking at them in the face and saying, “actually, you’re not” ... whether that’s a move to kind of defend your own administration that, of course, the Democratic candidate was part of—and that’s very difficult to thread that needle, the task she was handed to propose how we’ll change, but also still be riding with the last administration.  ...  But most people are hurting. And here’s the thing, because I know that a lot of liberals and Democrats and progressives alike might be saying: ... the Democrats have the better policies. They address all of those needs better, even if imperfectly.  In the end, ain’t the Republicans worse?  And while I happen to agree with that, here’s the trick: the Republicans, meanwhile, are the ones validating the pain.  And politics is an emotional business before it’s a rational one.  And that’s why they win.

— Sarah Smarsh, The Weekly Show, 11/14/24

Partially I like this because it lines up with my own theories that I talked about nearly a year ago, and partially because it’s the more insightful version of what James Carville pegged as the reason.  Carville is a bit of an asshole, but he ain’t stupid, and his assessment was that it all came down to when Kamala was asked (in her interview on The View) what she would do differently from Biden, “and she froze.”  Or at least that’s how Carville put it; I would instead say that she waffled and ducked the question, but the end result is the same.  And while trying to boil down an entire failed campaign to one moment is overly simplistic as well as reductive, it is emblematic of the point that she was trying to toe the party line that everything was going great with the economy while ignoring the real concerns of real people.  And, even more incisive to me personally, it’s exactly what my friend said to me in the conversation I reported on a couple of weeks ago.  It’s a trenchant observation.

Of course, let’s not discount the sexism!  Here’s one of Stewart’s producers on another episode:

It can also be true that there’s some sexism and racism ...  Every election, the person who has spent the most money has won, except in two cases: the women.  Just saying.

— Lauren Walker, The Weekly Show, 11/21/24

Again, haven’t fact-checked this, but it certainly wouldn’t surprise me.  I’m not entirely sure what it says about says about us that we’re finally willing to elect a member of a religious minority that’s around 25% of the population, and a member of a racial minority that’s around 15% of the population, but not a member of the gender that’s not a minority at all.  But not anything good, I don’t think.

Will things get worse before they get better?  No one can say for sure, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that’s where the smart money is.  I guess we’ll have to stay tuned to 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 Senate 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.

Election Reflections

I was talking to a friend today, and I think he might have voted for Trump.

He wouldn’t come out and say it, and I wouldn’t ask—was too scared to, I suppose—but it seemed pretty clear from all the Trump-defending along with all the dismissing all my worries about the future.  My friend is not (so far as I know) racist or sexist, and I know him pretty well, so I feel pretty certain about that one.  I’m a bit less sure that he’s not homophobic or xenophobic, but I’m pretty confident that I would have picked up on that somewhere in the past 40+ years.  He’s absolutely not uneducated: he in fact holds an advanced degree and works in a pretty prestigious technical field.

So what gives?  Well, we needed a change, and that was the only choice.  Kamala’s refusal to say what she would do differently from Biden was foolish, in my estimation, and it apparently cost her more than I realized.  The last few years have been pretty awful, financially, and she really didn’t do a very good job articulating what she would do differently.  Of course, Trump didn’t do a very good job articulating anything, but he did have the undeniable advantage of being “the other guy.”  And, to be fair, pretty much everyone in charge got kicked out this year: Tommy Vietor (of the Pod Save America guys) said that this is the first year where the leadership of every developed nation in the world was rejected at the same time, regardless of whether they were left, right, or center.  I didn’t fact check him, but certainly the ones I know about (ours, the UK’s, France’s, India’s) conform with that assessment.  This is fairly typical really: when you’re getting hit in the pocketbook, throw the bums out.  I certainly sympathize with that perspective.

But, here’s my issue: I sort of hoped that we, as a country, wouldn’t say “well, we need a change, so let’s elect the rapist.”  Isn’t that going too far?  As I tried to articulate to my friend, if the choice were between whoever’s currently in charge and, say, Charlie Manson, or Jeffrey Dahmer, we wouldn’t elect the serial killer ... right?  Trump is definitely not Charles Manson, obviously, but my point is this: there is a line.  I have to continue to believe that.  I was just hoping that the racist, Hitler-loving, convicted felon rapist wouldn’t be on the near side of that line.

In our conversation, there were many defenses of Trump floated about.  Here they are, as best as I can articulate them, and here are my counterpoints:

• All this calling him fascist is over the top rhetoric. Except ... is it really?  The guy quoted Hitler—multiple times, even—and said that he wished his generals were more like Hitler’s.  Sounds kinda fascist to me.  Pointing out that he sure does know a lot about Hitler for someone who’s supposedly not a fascist doesn’t seem over the top to me.  (My friend seemed a bit exasperated about the Hitler quote thing.  “What did he actually say that quoted Hitler?” he asked, clearly expecting that it was a rhetorical question.  Too easy: immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country, and we have to fight the enemy within.  The subject was quickly changed.)

• He was President before, and he didn’t do any of that really terrible stuff you’re worried about. True.  Because, last time, a combination of incompetence and being restrained by sane people meant that he had difficulty accomplishing any of the really crazy stuff.  But are we forgetting that he actually tried to do those things?  If the arsonist can’t burn your house down because he can’t figure out to work the flamethrower, that’s good, but you still don’t let him keep the thing, right?

• He doesn’t really mean all that crazy shit he says. For instance, last time he said he would build a wall and make Mexico pay for it.  Obviously we all knew that he was never going to do that.  Okay, probably a fair assessment, but why do want to pick someone who goes around saying they’ll do things that they really won’t do?  If the only way you can justify choosing a person is by ignoring everything they say, you might be working too hard at it.

• He’s not actually running on the Project 2025 plan, so that part doesn’t matter. Wait, so we’re not supposed to believe him when he says he wants to eliminate the EPA, or to erase transgender people, but we are supposed to believe him when he says that the plan, written by people who used to work for him and commissioned by an organization that he’s openly commended in the past, has nothing to do with him?  Sounds a bit inconsistent.  (A few hours after posting this, I watched Adam Conover’s interview with Jamelle Bouie, who put it like this: ”... he’s a blank slate to people.  The fact that he is—like, he doesn’t make any sense a lot of the times, he’s constantly bullshitting, he’s constantly lying, he’s just saying things off the cuff—I think that what that says to people is that you can’t take anything he says seriously.  And that allows people to then pick and choose what they want to believe about him.”  This was such an accurate description of my conversation that it gave me the shivers.)

• Okay, but if actually tried to do any of those crazy things you just mentioned, people would stop him.  There are checks and balances. What fucking people? Elon Musk? RFK Jr? Herschel Walker? Steve Bannon? LAURA FUCKING LOOMER?  Last time, there were sane people around him (at least a few).  This time, every single one of those absolute lunatics that I just listed are specifically named by Trump’s transition team.  And, checks and balances? really?  Will it be the Republican Senate that will keep him in line? or the Republican House?  Or perhaps it will be the overtly Republican Supreme Court, who has already told him that he can do whatever he likes and never be held criminally liable.  Sure, that’s a recipe for success.

• We have too many government agencies as it is.  Getting rid of some of them would actually be a good thing. That’s one of those things that sounds good in the abstract, but sort of falls apart when you start looking into it.  If we get rid of the EPA, no one stops greedy corporations from just dumping their pollution everywhere.  If we eliminate the Department of Education, no one stops all the public school funding from being diverted to private charters that only serve the wealthy.  If we cut the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, many elderly or low-income people could literally freeze to death in the winters.  If we nuke the Strategic Climate Fund (and the rest of the Global Climate Change Initiative), then the crisis caused by climate change gets significantly worse, which may end up killing a lot more.  All those are things Trump’s team has actually proposed eliminating, by the way.

• If he screws up too badly, then he’ll lose all his support and we’ll vote him out (or, technically speaking, vote out the Republicans) in 4 years. Well, I sincerely hope that we’ll at least partially vote out the Republicans in two years.  But how much damage can be done in that amount of time?  “It’s not like we’re going to have two years of people just going ‘woohoo!’ and dumping pollution everywhere for two years.”  Um ... are you sure?  I honestly can’t see any reason why we wouldn’t.  Not to mention the two years of rounding up “illegal” immigrants, the two years of cruel laws surrounding abortions and transgender rights, the two years of brutal prices caused by tariffs and reversing the decision to disallow junk fees and allowing unchecked corporate mergers.  Yeah, maybe it won’t be as bad as all that ... but why are we risking it?

Here’s a simple example.  Our biggest household expense, outside the mortgage payment, is our grocery bill.  It’s more than double what it was four years ago, and I’m actually feeding two fewer mouths at this point.  But it still keeps going up.  And I’m not even counting what we spend on vitamins or toothpaste or paper towels or laundry soap.  Just food.  And I’m not including eating out either—that’s a whole different budget.  Just the food that we get from the grocery store, and it’s easily more than double what we pay in electricity and natural gas combined.  And I think many people have the same experience, and it’s almost certainly a big part of the reason that Trump won.  But here’s the thing: Trump is not going to make the price of groceries go down.  The biggest contributing factor to that is corporate price gouging.  Biden’s FTC chair, Lina Khan, has been fighting to keep Kroger from merging with Albertson’s for two years now, but she’s out the minute that Trump takes office.  In a year, Trader Joe’s will likely be the only grocery store not owned by the same megacorp, outside more expensive “health food” stores.  And do we really think the guy who promised the oil and gas industry record profits if they helped elect him is going to tell any big corporations that they can’t keep making shit-tons of money off our misery?  Yeah, I’m not holding my breath for that one.

So I’m fully expecting my bills to go up, not down, just on that single issue.  And the rest of his economic policies are just as bad:  Tariffs will make prices go up.  Deporting immigrants will reduce the workforce and force companies to pay more for labor, which will make prices go up.  And all those relaxed regulations and hanging unions out to dry will certainly make the billionaires much richer, but if you think the corporations are going to pass their savings onto you, the consumer, you haven’t learned anything from the last 50 years of financial evidence.  If you increase corporate profits, they spend it on stock buybacks and CEO bonuses and you get nothing in return.

If you voted for Trump, perhaps you’re feeling pretty good right now.  I encourage to hold on to that feeling for as long as possible.  I suspect that, in a year or two, you won’t be feeling all that good about it.  And, look: I hope I’m wrong about that.  I would be very pleased for you to be able to tell me “I told you so.”  But past history doesn’t lead me to believe there’s much chance of that.  And, even above and beyond the financial impact, what about the human cost?  If, as I suspect, Trump’s plan to deport about twice as many people as there are illegal immigrants results in more horrific images of children in cages, will that be okay?  I mean, they’ll likely be brown children, so maybe it won’t matter to you.  But I hope you don’t actually think that way.  If I’m right that Trump tries to implement a significant chunk of Project 2025 and that results in minorities and, especially, LGBTQ people, being put at risk of prejudice, violence, and loss of healthcare, will that be okay?  I mean, maybe your church told you all those people are going to hell anyway (despite the fact that Jesus not only told you to love your neighbor, but to even love your enemies), so maybe that won’t matter to you either.  But I hope you don’t really believe that in your inner heart.  If Trump attempts to use the Comstock Act to make abortion care so difficult that it may as well be a federal ban, will that be okay?  If Clarence Thomas makes good on his threat to overturn the right to same sex marriage, will that be okay?  Maybe you think that none of that affects you.  But I’ve got children who could be impacted by nearly all of those things, so I don’t have that luxury.

Again, I want to be wrong about this.  But I can’t help but wonder why you thought voting for a racist was okay if you’re not racist.  Why you thought voting for a big fan of Hitler was okay if you don’t believe in fascism.  Why you thought voting for the man who’s bragged about single-handedly getting rid of Roe v Wade was okay if you believe in equal rights for women.  I understand the pocketbook argument, I really do.  And maybe your finances will be better off in a year or so, though I’ve outlined the reasons why I don’t actually believe they will be.  But, either way, you still voted for the racist, Hitler-loving, convicted felon rapist, and that makes me wonder if it’ll be worth it in the end.

Time: see what's become of me

Well, another trip around the sun and I’m about to turn another year older.  This year my birthday falls exactly on Election Day here in the U.S. ... lucky me.  Honestly, I would have preferred to have a bit more peace and calm on my birthday, but we takes what we gets.  Perhaps I’ll be fortunate enough to get a birthday gift for all of America.  I suppose we’ll know by next week.

Darktime II

"All the Devils Are Here"

[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 series introduction for general background.  You may also want to check out the first volume in this multi-volume mix for more info on its theme.

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.]

There were a few tracks left over from the original Darktime mix after I trimmed it down to a proper volume length, but not nearly enough for a second volume.  So I’ve had to spruce it up rather significantly to flesh out this set.  Our top artists are probably Black Tape for a Blue Girl, Jeff Greinke, and Nox Arcana, who each have 3 songs between these first two volumes.  In fact, BTfaBG in particular is significant because they were almost certainly the mix starter.  It was from scouring the Internet’s early, primitive sharing sites that I accumulated the vast majority of my BTfaBG collection, and many of them inspired me to pair them up with other, equally tenebrous tracks, and that’s what eventually turned into Darktime.  You may recall that this is one of my “mood mixes,” which are the small set of mixes between the pre-modern and modern mixes.  And there was a lot of “stuff I found floating around on the Internet” involved in those.

Now that I’m bringing the mood mixes into line with the modern mixes, there’s less of that.  Most of the BTfaBG I own now I bought, because I wanted to have the full albums.  Take “Left, Unsaid”: it’s a meandering, ethereal, but still creepy track, and, when the vocals finally kick in nearly halfway through, they’re murky and provide more atmosphere than lyrics.  It’s a great example of what makes Sam Rosenthal’s personal project so perfect for this mix.  I’ve had a copy of “Left, Unsaid” for æons now, but I only bought This Lush Garden Within, their fifth album (and yet still considered one of the early ones), fairly recently.  Which is how I came across “Into the Garden,” another track off that album, which shares the gothic horns and murky vocals, but gets right into it much more quickly, and then layers on some female vocals for good measure.¹  As for Greinke, I’m returning to Cities in Fog, whence I drew one of his tracks for last volume, because it really is the album of his that’s best suited for this mix.  “Moving Through Fog” is exactly what it says on the tin, complete with echoes that you can’t quite pin a direction to and muffled industrial sounds that could be machinery or equally could be restless spirits.  Nox Arcana also returns with its same album from last time, Legion of Shadows, which likewise is just too perfect for this mix.  “Spirits of the Past” is, as the name implies, pretty spooky, but also weirdly pretty, with its bell percussion and synthy, Phantom-of-the-Opera-esque melody; “Ancient Flame” is much calmer, giving a slight Middle Eastern vibe, like a night in the Arabian desert.

There are other returning artists as well: Amber Asylum is back with a short, bridge-like tune that begins the transition into the middle third of the volume.  “Ave’ Maria” is what you’d hear if you dared engage the old-time phonograph you found in the haunted house you were exploring.  Nox Arcana’s progenitor Midnight Syndicate² provides the “Epilogue” from their Carnival Arcane, which is here used as a bridge to transition from “Ancient Flame” to the closing triptych of the volume.  The new-age-y Angels of Venice also return with a quite long track, “Tears of the World (Lacrimae Mundi),” which I almost ditched several times; the first minute and a half is more reminiscent of Incanto Liturgica, but after that it settles into a solid, Halloweeny vibe.  Darkwavers Love Is Colder Than Death are also back, this time with “Tired to Death,” a synthy track with a funereal beat, though it does pick up a bit in the middle, and Susann Heinrich adds some ghostly vocals as well.  And we also return to the soundtrack of the original Dark Shadows for a “Seance” from from composer Robert Cobert, which sounds a bit like what the original Star Trek’s theme would have been if it had been a horror series instead of a scifi one.

This volume also reflects my newfound passion for gaming music.  Jeremy Soule provides “Aquarium of Alkonos,” a spooky, echoey track from the Icewind Dale videogame, and there’s a Jason Hayes track from the World of Warcraft game soundtrack,³ “Duskwood,” which is perfect for exploring creepy woods at night.  The newest addition to this volume—not added until I actually started getting organized for this post, in fact—was “Let Them In,” a track from the Candela Obscura soundtrack, credited to “Critical Role & Colm R. McGuinness,” though I suspect McGuinness did most of the work.  We’ve heard from McGuinness before, everywhere from Shadowfall Equinox VIII to every volume of Eldritch Ætherium except the first,⁴ and here he turns his penchant for dramatic, cinematic music to a creepier bent, as befits the Candela Obscura game.  Plus it flows so beautifully off the LICTD entry that I knew it was perfect here.

Like Greinke, Kevin Keller is usually found on Shadowfall Equinox,⁵, but “Chamber Doors” is a lot darker tonally than his usual fare, so I thought it worked well here.  And French soundtrack composer Xcyril closes us out with a weird, synthy track called “Organique.”  The foreground gives insects-scattering-in-a-panic vibes, while the background is more howling-wind-on-a-cold-winter’s-night, but the whole thing works well here, and it fades into a muted something-else-entirely in a very satisfying way.

It’s also not that surprising to see hardcore gothic representatives Faith and the Muse here; “And Laugh—but Smile No More” is a creepy little harpsichord bridge that takes us solidly into the center stretch of the volume.  And witchhouse project oOoOO winds down that center stretch with the short “Crossed Wires,” which wouldn’t really be out of place on Cantosphere Eversion, but I thought it was dark enough to work well here.  As for brothers and film composers Mychael and Jeff Danna, they’ve worked together on films such as The Boondock Saints, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, and the animated version of The Addams Family, so they know how to do creepy and dramatic, and how to combine the two.  A Celtic Tale: The Legend of Deirdre is the soundtrack to an imaginary film⁶ about legendary Irish folk hero Deirdre, protagonist of a tragedy which could put any of the classic Greek ones to shame.  I’m not sure what part of the story “Druid” is supposed to represent, but, as it comes late in the album, it’s probably not a happy one.  This is the perfect song for meeting with a mysterious mage to seal a dark pact, and it flows beautifully into “Left, Unsaid.”  Plus its slow boil makes it a great opening track.

Darktime II
[ All the Devils Are Here ]

“Druid” by Mychael Danna & Jeff Danna, off A Celtic Tale: The Legend of Deirdre
“Left, Unsaid” by Black Tape for a Blue Girl, off This Lush Garden Within
“Moving Through Fog” by Jeff Greinke, off Cities in Fog
“Aquarium of Alkonos” by Jeremy Soule, off Icewind Dale [Videogame Soundtrack]
“Chamber Doors” by Kevin Keller, off Intermezzo
“Ave' Maria” by Amber Asylum, off Frozen in Amber
“And Laugh—but Smile No More” by Faith and the Muse, off Evidence of Heaven
“... You” by DJ Food, off Kaleidoscope
“Into the Garden” by Black Tape for a Blue Girl, off This Lush Garden Within
“Spirits of the Past” by Nox Arcana, off Legion of Shadows
“Tired to Death” by Love Is Colder Than Death, off Teignmouth
“Let Them In” by Critical Role & Colm R. McGuinness, off Candela Obscura [RPG Soundtrack]
“Crossed Wires” by oOoOO, off Without Your Love
“Hell Is Empty” by Emilie Autumn, off Fight Like a Girl
“Psalm” by Koop, off Sons of Koop
“Tears of the World (Lacrimae Mundi)” by Angels of Venice, off Angels of Venice
“Ancient Flame” by Nox Arcana, off Legion of Shadows
“Epilogue” by Midnight Syndicate, off Carnival Arcane
“Duskwood” by Jason Hayes, off World of Warcraft Soundtrack [Videogame Soundtrack]
“Seance” by Robert Cobert, off Dark Shadows, Volume 1 [Soundtrack]
“Wandering Heart” by Xcyril, off Organique

Total:  21 tracks,  76:10

What’s unexpected here?  Not too much.  Classically trained violinist Emilie Autumn is usually more suited to Fulminant Cadenza, where we’ve already seen her, and Distaff Attitude, where we haven’t (yet⁷), but “Hell Is Empty” (which also provides our volume title), is a creepy little bridge that I thought perfectly transitioned us from the center to the back stretch.  And that back stretch kicks off with an even more unlikely candidate, Koop.  The electrojazz Swedes are perhaps the last folks you’d think would produce something dark and gothy, but “Psalm,” from their first album (which is the least jazz and the most electro), feels like a song from a black-and-white gothic horror movie—you know the kind: unsettling, but not really scary.

And, finally, DJ Food is Londoner Kevin Foakes, who we’ve heard before on Mystical Memoriam.  He’s an electronica artist who often ranges from upbeat electropop to downtempo chill, but ”... You” is a short, vaguely unsettling track with some muddled female vocals in the middle (and some similarity to “Psalm,” actually).  It was too perfect for this mix for me not to include it here.

Next time, we’ll start trying to achieve inner peace using electronica beats.

⇐ Darktime I

Darktime III ⇒

__________

1 The Internet seems disinclined to identify the female vocalist for me, but I’d guess it’s Susan Jennings, who did the artwork for the album, wrote some of the lyrics, and is credited with vocals on at least one other track.

2 I feel comfortable calling them that, because Joseph Vargo, who basically is Nox Arcana, got his start working with Midnight Syndicate before breaking off to do his own project.  And the MS guys have definitely credited Vargo with a lot of their vibe, such as their themed albums which seem specifically designed to be played during Halloween parties.

3 Which we’ve mostly seen thus far on Eldritch Ætherium, specifically on volumes III and IV.

4 So II, III, and IV.

5 Specifically, volumes II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, and VIII.

6 At least that’s how AllMusic described it.

7 Perhaps in the fullness of time.

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 used 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.

__________

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

Actual Play Time, Part 2: Depends on How You Slice It

[This is the second post in a series.  You may want to begin at the beginning.  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.]

[Last time, we talked about my discovery of actual play and my realization that it was a whole new medium.]

You know, for writing about novels there’s the language of literary criticism; for writing about movies, the jargon of movie critiques is also well-established.  But actual play is new enough that the terms haven’t evolved yet.  Which means I get to make up my own.

In examining the burgeoning actual play medium, there are a few different ways to cut it up, but the most useful one, in my opinion, is by length of story arc.  For this purpose, I think of actual plays as falling into one of three categories: short form, medium form, and long form.

Short form content is your typical one-shot.  A “one-shot,” in TTRPG parlance, is a short adventure designed to be played, start to finish, in a single session.  Of course, a session of D&D (or any TTRPG) can last several hours, so even short form actual plays are often 3 – 5 hours long.  And, sometimes, you just can’t fit it all into one session after all, because things always take longer than you think they will, and the “one-shot” ends up becoming more of a two-shot (or even three-shot).  So a short form actual play is typically one episode, but up to 3, and it’s typically anywhere from 2 – 10 total hours of viewing time.  That doesn’t seem particularly short, if you’re comparing it to a sitcom, or your average comic book.  But trust me when I tell you it’s short compared to other actual plays.

Medium form content is usually around 5 – 20 episodes, which can be 50+ hours of viewing time.  These are longer stories, often corresponding to a longer adventure in TTRPG terms.  You can think of it as roughly equivalent to a season of television, just with more hours and more likely to be wrapped up at the end.  For some people, this is such a massive investment that it hardly seems possible, let alone worthwhile.  Yet there are several medium form actual play shows that are well worth the time investment.

Finally, long form content is a full TTRPG campaign.  For regular people playing TTRPGs, this is often a multi-year proposition, and we rarely get the opportunity to wrap them up neatly.  Somehow actual play shows manage to polish them off on a regular basis, with there being far fewer actual plays that peter out mid-storyline than there are TV shows cancelled mid-season.  (There are reasons for that, which we’ll dive into shortly.)  But we’re talking about anywhere from 50 – 150 episodes here, with the total time investment often ranging into the hundreds of hours.  Which means that the shit’s got to be pretty damned good to get people on board for a time expenditure of that size and scope.

But it also begs the question: why are there so many of these, when each one has the potential to produce hundreds of hours of content?  Surely there can’t be that much of an audience ... right?  Well, a number of factors in our entertainment landscape have conspired to change the way we think about these sorts of things.

When I was a kid, right on up to the point where my children were born, the landscape of entertainment, but television in particular, was moderately simple.  There were movies and novels and so forth, but those were seen more as one-off time investments.  You could produce a book, but you had to think about how long it was: readers might be intimidated by an overly large tome, and they might also have a big backlog of reading material, meaning that your longer novel might be less attractive than a short book that could be knocked out with a smaller time investment.  Same for movies: people were willing to sit still for maybe two hours, if you were lucky, but often the major studios shot for an hour and a half, tops, with many stories of crucial cinematic scenes getting “cut for time.” All of that eventually changed, of course: Harry Potter proved that people would gobble up multiple near-thousand-page novels, and Titanic proved that you could make people sit through 3+ hours of a movie if it was popular enough.

But television was a bit different.  We had 3 major networks, because creating a TV network was a gargantuan task that took a huge amount of money, and the existing networks didn’t much care for any more competition.  We had PBS, sure, and the occasional indy TV station, but, in general, 3 networks, and each one had 24 hours in the day, and that was it.  The attention span of the consumer was no longer the limiting factor.  No matter how much content people might want to put out, there simply wasn’t room for any more than 72 hours of it every day.  Where would it go?  As a result, a lot of great ideas never got made, and sometimes you’d even get great ideas that were made and then never saw the light of day.  Television shows were cutthroat, and they lived and died by ratings that purported to tell how many people were watching, and any show that didn’t appear to be garnering a big enough following was swiftly replaced by what they hoped would be the next big thing.  Even after we (finally) got a couple more networks in the 90s, things didn’t change all that much.

But then there was cable, and suddenly there were dozens of channels.  And then along came streaming, and suddenly the number of hours in a day was no longer relevant at all.  The Internet can play as many shows at once as there are users (at least theoretically), and suddenly the race for more content was on.  Of course, the audience was completely fractured as well.  In the “golden” era of television, every show had to appeal to the broadest possible audience to justify its existence.  And it meant that, on the consumer side, you often had to settle.  But now you can demand—and usually find—the exact sort of content you want.  I recall that, 10 years ago, I used to work upstairs from the offices of the Tennis Channel and, every day I would walk past their door on my way to the elevator and think to myself, do we really need a whole channel for tennis?  But then again I am not a tennis fan, so of course I would think that.  Other people who are tennis fans no doubt think the Tennis Channel is a great boon.  So we ended up with channels for just about everything, and streams for even more things, and a huge raft of content.

But of course content takes money to produce, which means that folks are always looking for cheaper and cheaper ways to put out more and more content.  That’s how we got reality TV: with no need for scripts—and therefore no need for script writers, script editors, script supervsiors, etc—and with most performers being non-union, unscripted TV is often significantly cheaper ... and, in an often overlooked aspect, significantly faster to produce.

And actual plays fit this mold.  You can make an actual play with minimal equipment, zero scripting, and whoever wants to be a player at the table.  You can crank out tons of content with only a modicum of effort, and there is apparently a hunger for it.  As with any new medium, more and more people are discovering it, and discovering what it can do.  So they’re willing to watch a wide variety of options.  Now, of course it is the case that the low-effort actual play shows will likely be the least popular, with the really well-established ones having full crews these days: directors, producers, sound engineers, editors, etc.  But you can make it cheaply and quickly, especially when you’re first getting started, and that’s the key.  It’s not really that surprising that a show can put out hundreds and hundreds of hours of content when the cost of doing so is moderate at worst and the appetite of the audience is continuing to be expansive.

Next time, let’s look at some of the big names in the space and see how they got that way.

Bugs in my ears, their eggs in my head

This week, I’m sick.  You’re lucky I’m cogent enough to write this much.

It's Easy to Criticize (But Cut It Out)

Some months ago, I wrote a politics post, which I framed as primarily being about third parties, but I also addressed this idea that that young people might not vote for Biden (primarily because of his stance on Palestine), and the conflicting attitudes that engendered from the “experts.” And I included a long quote from Democratic lawyer Marc Elias who was doing exactly what liberal podcaster David Rees said he wouldn’t do, and what liberal commentator (and former lawyer) Elie Mystal said one shouldn’t do: scolding people (especially young people) for saying they wouldn’t vote for Biden by fuming about how Trump would definitely be worse.

Well, the race is quite different now—what a difference nine months can make!—and yet many things haven’t changed.  I still hear Elias going off on those rants (although I tend to just fast-forward through them nowadays, because I know them by heart, and also they make me a bit queasy).  Look, Elias is a brilliant (and relentless) lawyer, and he’s out there fighting for voting rights in states across the country, and I’m so glad he’s doing it.  I have a great deal of respect for him.  But that doesn’t mean I can’t also criticize him when I think he’s wrong.  And he’s kind of a jerk on this topic.

See how it’s possible to like and appreciate someone and disagree with them?  Kind of like when people say they don’t agree with Biden’s take on the Israel/Palestine conflict (which is now morphing into the Israeal/Palestine/Lebanon conflict).  Instead of responding to that with a knee-jerk “but Trump would be worse!” perhaps it’s worthwhile to consider the closing words of Mystal’s article from The Nation that I quoted last time:

The people saying they won’t vote for Biden know that Trump would be worse.  They’re saying Biden should be better.

And, while Harris isn’t Biden, she definitely inherits his policies via guilt by association if nothing else.  Of course, if you believe Trump and Vance, those policies have ceased to be Biden’s policies altogether: they’re Harris’ policies now.  This is, of course, somewhat silly ... as Trump also said, the vice-presdient “makes no difference.” Harris was probably in the room when these decisions were made, but to imagine that she had any real control over them is just dumb.  So the truth of the matter is, we don’t actually know whether Harris’ approach to the Middle East would be as controversial as Biden’s.

But that, of course, is the problem.  She’s had plenty of chances to distance herself from the pro-genocide position, but has taken none of them.  At the Democratic convention, they had the opportunity to highlight pro-Palestinian voices, to vet the speeches ahead of time, to show the world that even people who disagree with her administration’s actions would still support her in the election.  Nope.  Not a single Palestinian-American voice was allowed on the stage, being instead consigned to hold protests outside.  And I’ve heard plenty of people say that this is the right move for her: that, by picking a side, she can only make things worse.  Which, maybe, is true.  But of course if you’re taking that attitude, then you just have to accept that some people are going to take the silence as proof of being just as bad as Biden.

And, yes, I use the term “pro-genocide” advisedly.  If you pay any attention to what Netanyahu and the members of his cabinet actually say, you know very well that they are remarkably open about their goals to eliminate the Palestinian people from the Earth, and that’s kind of what “genocide” actually means.  “The deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political, or cultural group” says Dictionary.com, quite succinctly.  When the deputy speaker of the Knesset says “Now we all have one common goal—erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth”, or when the Heritage Minister says it would be okay to nuke the population because “there is no such thing as uninvolved civilians in Gaza” (this presumably includes all the children: nearly half of the Palestinian population is under 18), or when the Defense Minister says “we will eliminate everything”, or when the major general in charge of the military in Gaza says “you wanted hell, you will get hell” ... when those are the things they say out loud, I’m not sure anyone can reasonably accuse me (or anyone else) of using the phrase “genocide” in an inflammatory way.  I consider it quite matter-of-fact, actually.

And the problem with sending a country a shit-ton of bombs and then saying that you had no idea that they were going to be used for whichever atrocity-du-jour they’ve been used for is that that only works if you then stop sending them bombs.  Which, you know, we haven’t.  Saying, “well, we told them that this was unacceptable and then just gave them more bombs” is not taking an anti-genocide stance.  So you can say my language is deliberately inflammatory when I call Biden’s policies “pro-genocide” if you like, but I stand by my statement that it’s more factual than incendiary.  And now they’re bombing even more people with the bombs we’re faithfully continuing to supply them with?  It’s utter insanity, I tell you.

But I digress.  I was reminded of this whole “scolding” thing yesterday while watching Robert Reich.  Now, I really like Reich.  Possibly because, like me, he’s an old liberal—twenty years older than I, even.  Possibly because he’s a short guy, like me (5 inches shorter than I, even).  Mostly because we agree on just about everything, and he can explain things pretty well on YouTube, which is defniitely a skill.  So I was a bit surprised to hear him say this:¹

Why is this not getting through to people: why are there still so many people who are willing to say, well I’m going to go with Trump ... you know, why are they voting against their own self-interest?  ...  I mean, what why are people voting, or willing to vote, against their economic self-interest?  I really don’t quite know, except that, you know, ... for so many years, so many people have been so devastated by the economy ...

— Robert Reich, The Saturday Coffee Klatch, 9/28/24

I suppose that, one of the things I like the most about Robert Reich is that he’s a nearly 80-year-old man who doesn’t sound like a typical old man.  And I suppose that’s why I found this particular quote so disappointing: because here he does sound like the old guy shaking his head about “these kids today.” Note that, in this particular video, his regular co-host Heather Lofthouse² is out sick and he’s talking instead to Michael Lahanas-Calderón, one of their producers who happens to be a member of Gen Z (as Michael puts it earlier in the video, “the oldest of the Gen Z’s, yes”), so maybe that’s partially responsible for his falling into the trap of the rambling-old-man-speak.  Here’s another, perhaps more telling example, after discussing the recent announcement by Chapel Roan that she was not officially endorsing Harris:³

But don’t they, Michael, don’t they understand that Trump would be worse!  That is, if ... you’re making a choice here.  I mean, by not making a choice, you’re making a choice.  By not voting for Harris, you are essentially voting for Trump.  Don’t they understand this, your friends, your generation?

Ummm ... yeah, Robert.  They understand that Trump would be worse.  But, if Harris can’t inspire them to give a shit about politics, if it seems like she’s promising more of the same old horrible crap we’re already living through, they just might not bother.

The weird thing (at least to me) is that these same pundits seem to understand it perfectly when the shoe’s on the other foot.  Listen to any given batch of them talking about how the ridiculosity that is Mark Robinson could discourage Republican turnout:⁴

This is what I think you’re hoping for if you’re Kamala Harris: that there’s some category of people in North Carolina that are just like, “These guys are too crazy, I’m not gonna ... I’m just not gonna bother this year.  I’m taking this year off.”

— Tim Miller, Inside the Right, 9/22/24

This sort of perfectly describes my father, who hates Trump, but almost certainly can’t bring himself to vote for a black woman.⁵  But, when it comes to young people feeling the same about Harris, people just don’t seem to get it.

Don’t get me wrong: I will be voting for Harris, personally.  I actually think she’s been rather energizing in this race, and, far from being someone who didn’t know who she was before becoming vice-president, I’ve actually voted for her before, both when she ran for Attorney General in 2010 and when she ran for Senator in 2016.  Plus she had some great YouTube moments making Trump appointees look dumb in congressional committees.  And, while I think she won’t be as firm with Israel as I’d like, I agree with Cody Johnston (of Some More News) that she at least represents a break from the generation of Israel-is-always-right old white guys, of which Biden is hopefully the last.  So at least there’s a chance that she’ll be better than Biden, and that’s good enough for me.  But, if you’re a younger person (or even an older person) who thinks it isn’t good enough, that she damned well ought to come out and say she’s against murdering Palestinian children no matter how evil Hamas is ... well, I totally respect that position too.

People have various reasons for seemingly voting against their economic interests. In the case of my father, and many others, I’m sure, it’s simple racism.  In the case of many other working class folks, it’s just that they’ve been told all their life that capitalism is good and socialism is bad, and from that perspective voting for anyone other than a Republican seems a bit insane.  But these things are changing.  Only the oldest among us truly remember McCarthyism, and even the Cold War is a fading memory.  So the boogeyman of communism doesn’t hold the power it used to, and equating socialism with communism, when we have modern counterexamples like France and Sweden,⁶ is also falling a bit flat these days.  And, while racism is certainly still going strong in our country, it does seem to be going more and more underground.  Today’s younger generations not only have lived with diversity all their lives, but they’ve lived with the pain of late-stage capitalism and seem to instinctively understand that there must be a better way.

And some of what appears to be “voting against one’s own economic interests” is just plain evil marketing campaigns launched by rich people, who desire nothing more than to continue to be rich (and not to collect any more peers).  For decades, rich people convinced poor white people that poor black people would take their jobs, their homes, and their American dreams.  Nowadays they’ve mostly switched to convincing poor people both black and white that it’s the immigrants coming for their bounty, but it’s the same playbook.  And it might be easy to think that people that buy into these messages are dumb, but that’s oversimplifying the issue: people who are struggling will often latch onto any message, especially the ones that are slickly produced, and there’s no point in being naïve about the fact that advertising works.  Getting upset at the victims of these evil marketing campaigns is sort of missing the point.

So I’d love to see less of people railing against young people for not voting against Trump, and railing against working class people for “voting against their interests,” and more people pushing Harris to do more to try and reach these cohorts.  I think she’s doing great in many ways, but could she be doing better? Absolutely.  And the polls are too close for her not to try.

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1 If you want to follow along, here’s the video; jump to around 14:09.

2 Heather is also the president of Inequality Media, who produces those videos.

3 Same video, around 11:20.

4 Again, follow along in the video at about 8:26.

5 You may recall that I said recently that my father claimed he’d vote for anyone the Democrats put up, unless it was Biden.  Well, his sexist, racist ass is kind of eating those words now.

6 Yes, yes: neither France nor Sweden is technically socialist.  But then neither are any of the policies that Republicans label as socialist.  So I think it’s a fair correlation.

You know I never could say anything in 20 words or less

This week, one of my oldest friends from the Heroscape scene (who also happens to have been an actor as a teenager and young adult, though he’s out of that game these days) came over to our house to play Heroscape with me and the two smallies (neither of whom are all that small these days).  It was great fun, and perhaps I’ll write up a more complete report of the day’s festivities next week.  For this week, I’m pretty exhausted, and it’s a short-post week anyhow.  So I think I’ll just leave it there for now.

Engage the Annihilation

Well, we’ve had our new Heroscape sets (called “Age of Annihilation”) for a few weeks now, and my middle child and I have been playing several games.  I think at this point I’ve played, or played against, every figure in the new wave except the dragon.  (Xenithrax, like pretty much all dragons, is tricky to fit into smaller armies due to her cost.)  I thought it might be worthwhile to give my initial impressions on the new units.  (If you’re not a Heroscape player or fan, this may be less interesting for you.  Sorry ‘bout that.)

The Polar Bears

The Frostclaw paladins and their hero, Knight Irene, are some great looking minis.  Anthropomorphic armored polar bears with metal clawgloves?  Just bad-ass.  They also have a fun trade-off during the game: they’re either very slow with decent attack, or have decent speed and crappy attack, and, unlike most squads, you can make that choice on a figure-by-figure basis.  You can play the Frostclaws with Knight Irene, or choose any of 6 other champions to bond with.  You can put them into an army with Sir Dupuis to boost his attack, with Concan to boost the bears, or with Sir Gilbert (who can also be their champion) to get some movement boosts.  Not to mention that Knight Irene is valiant, so she can hang out with the minutemen.  Lots of cool options.

But, of course, most of those units didn’t really need the help (especially the minutemen).  And the Frostclaws introduce a new, weird rule: they’re the first ever common unit with multiple life points.  Apparently, you’re supposed to put the wound marker on the map beside the figure, and then you’re supposed to move the wound marker whenever you move the figure, and also make sure that you don’t mix up wound markers when the figures are adjacent to each other, and it’s just a hot mess.  With the result that most people (e.g. when I’ve watched people using them on the Internet) just put the wound markers on the polar bears’ heads, like a little hat.  In our house we call it “the helmet of shame.” It’s kinda ... dumb.  Sorry.  Also, when I ran them, I ran them with the wizards and familars, so I didn’t get as much out of them as I might have if I’d paired them with any of those exciting Jandar units I mentioned above.  But I don’t really do Jandar units that often (and plus I was trying to use as many new units as possible).  So, I dunno ... I was a bit underwhelmed, overall.

But, they do look cool.  Really ... fucking ... cool.

The Pirates

There have never been pirates in Heroscape before, and it was always considered a major omission.  Now all of a sudden we have 7 different units: an admiral, two captains, two pirate heroes, and two unique pirate squads (4 members each).  This is moderately cool, and I was looking forward to playing them.  I think in general they did not disappoint, although some of the individual units may underwhelm.

First of all, we decided to forgo using Admiral EJ-1M the first time around, and this was definitely a mistake.  On the second play-through, I did take him, and I thought he was pretty damned awesome.  His first power lets you fool your opponent with your order marker placement, which is always fun, but it’s that Boarding Party special attack that really makes the unit.  And the four-armed robot mini makes a pretty imposing figure on the board.

The knaves of the Silver Scimitar are your main pirate squad: they get to pick a captain and then bond with either that captain or any pirate hero,^* disengage for those sneaky guerrilla hit-and-run tactics, and an extra attack die to encourage them to do just that.  It’s a bit too bad that it’s a unique squad—it’d be fun to field multiple squads of these guys—but they’re pretty powerful, so I get it.  The sculpts are pretty fun too: this is the first Heroscape unit where the species is just listed as “various”; the 4 squad members look like they might be 2 orcs (Heroscape orcs are blue, for whatever reason), a mostly human, and ... a four-armed green guy.  No clue what that one is.  But they look cool, so that’s what matters.

The rest of the units are a mixed bag.  Fia Bonny the Void Siren is probably the better captain; Bok-Bur-Na, the Marro captain, looks cool enough, but I found him a bit underwhelming in play.  Fia is ostensibly a human, though I guess she’s wearing some sort of space armor, ’cause she looks way weirder (and cooler) than your standard human.  I suppose Bok-Bur-Na’s powerset is more useful, but he’s also significantly more expensive, so I still say Fia is the better choice.  (And there’s no point in taking both because of the way the Knaves’ bonding power is worded.)  Meanwhile, your other choice for a pirate squad, the exiles of the Sundered Sea are, according to their card, also a pack of mongrels, but their sculpts look way more consistent.  Having some range (even if it’s only 3 times per game) is nice, but Stealthy is not as useful as First Assault in my opinion, and they have no bonding, so I wasn’t as impressed with them as with the Knaves. 

Finally, the two pirate hero options are Dorim the Bulkhead Brawler and Killian Vane III.  Dorim has a cool sculpt, but he has one power that’s literally useless unless you’re bonding with him, and he costs 100 points, so I wasn’t really sure he was worth it at the end of the day.  Killian is more affordable, adds an area-of-effect special attack, and he looks like a proper bad-ass pirate.  Having only a single power is slightly disappointing, but overall I thought he was a decent choice if you want to run a pirate army.

The Revna Heroes

At several points in Heroscape’s history, two (or three) units are designed together, but somehow they end up not getting released together.  With the results that, when the first unit appears, everyone scratches their head and says “hunh?” And then eventually the other units show up and everybody goes “ooooh ... now I see.” And here’s another case that falls in this unfortunate bucket.

The problem with Misaerx is that there are no other Revna warrior heroes.  Which makes one of her powers utterly useless.  The other one, Life Drain, is a tough sell on a figure with only 4 life: in many cases, you’ll never get a chance to use it before you’re wiped out.  At 50 points, she’s almost cheap enough to be considered a filler, but even then there are better options at 50 (Me-Burq-Sa, Tarns, Eldgrim + Marcu, etc).  So I don’t see a lot of utility for her until we have a few more options to fill out this faction.

It’s also worth noting that I also fail to see the value of adding yet another general.  (The “generals” are basically just a way to group units into vaguely coded groups, like “the really good guys,” “the nature guys,” “the really bad guys,” “the military guys,” etc.)  We originally had 5 generals, which seemed like plenty, and then we added another one, which also seemed like plenty, and then we added another one, which was starting to seem like overkill, and now Revna is the newest (and eighth) general.  Did we need this?  I’m trying to keep an open mind, but so far it appears to be yet another flavor of “the bad guys,” which isn’t even adding anything fresh or unusual.  Not a fan so far.

The Evil Kyrie

There are two new Utgar (a.k.a. evil) kyrie: Loviatäk and a new, evil version of Raelin.  These are perfect to combine with an existing unit, the minions of Utgar, which are already beasts.  Minions only have two weaknesses: they’re slow, and they’re expensive.  These two ladies are not helping with the cost, but, if you take both with your minions, they do help with the speed.  Not to mention that Loviatäk makes the minions even more deadly by letting them reroll dice that don’t show skulls (and, remember: every skull from a minion counts as two skulls).  Combine that with Raelin sitting there lowering your defense dice and you’re just screwed.  Before this new wave, your only choice for Utgar kyrie were Taelord (useful but expensive) and Runa (not particularly useful).  Raelin and Loviatäk are not only way more useful, but both are cheaper than either of the previously extant options.  I played against this army, and, let me tell you: it was pretty terrifying.  Once you take out at least one of the red ladies it gets a bit easier, but it’s tough going up until that point.

The Wizards and Familiars

The most awesome thing about this new faction is that all the figures are just crazy awesome looking.  Ewashia is a cool blue squid lady, and Raakchott looks like a plant-based wendigo.  Ewashia’s power to drop water tiles (three times per game) keeps her useful on every map; Raakchott’s powerset is hard to use, but it can be kind of cool.  The two familiars, Kita and Onshu, are cute as hell, but also alien-looking, which is fun.  Neither add a huge amount of power on the battlefield, but they’re cheap, and the Command Familiar power means you’re not wasting an order marker on them (at least until all your wizards are wiped out), so that’s fine.

I really enjoyed playing this faction, and I hope it gets expanded in the future.  There are currently no medium beasts at all in the game, and the only other small beast is a community custom, Otar (which I did use in my army).  There plenty of other wizards in the game, of course, but none of them have the Command Familiar power.  So I’m looking forward to seeing what they do with this faction in future waves.

Closing Thoughts

Overall, I’m pretty happy with this new wave of Heroscape.  They didn’t all hit it out of the park, but that’s always the case.  And of course some people will disagree with my assessments, and that’s reasonable.  But I think that, on the whole, if you were a fan of Heroscape back in the day, you should absolutely get these new sets.  And, if you’re new to the game, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed by the update.

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* Interestingly, this bonding power lacks the typical “After revealing an order marker” language, which means it could eventually end up becoming ‘Scape’s second ever double-bonding chain.

There's just a blind spot in my memory

There’s been some sickness going through our house this week, and I’m just not capable of the mental acuity necessary to put up anything resembling a coherent blog post.  Hopefully next week will be better.

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.