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.

__________

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 best 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.

__________

* 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.

Creeping Rageaholic I

"Set Shit on Fire"

[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.]

This is one of my longest idea-to-realization mixes.  I originally had the idea for this mix back in 2003, when the guy who had been hanging out with a cartoon dog and entertaining my kids put out an album, and the first song on it sucked me in with a serene opening and then just exploded into existence about a minute in.  It reminded me rather forcefully of driving back and forth from where I went to college in Northern Virginia to my parents’ house in southern Virginia and belting out ”‘cos it already is!” at the top of my lungs, and I knew I had to pair those two somehow.  But I didn’t finalize this first volume (or at least get it as close to “final” as any of my mixes ever get) until just this year.

Part of the problem is that mix has a very specific mood.  Musically, the hook is that these are songs which lure you into a false sense of security, then just burst into being.  It’s a little more than just dropping the beat; many of these transform fully from ballads to full-on rockers, if not heavy metal bangers, somewhere between verse and chorus, or even between one verse to the next.  But, emotionally, that’s a very specific mood to capture.  Some of these songs are about loss, or about violent discovery, or about reflecting on one’s own faults and the inevitable frustration that comes when you know you need to be better but somehow just can’t manage to achieve it.  I’m just not in the mood for that very specific energy all that often.  But, when I am, these are the songs I reach for.

To give you an idea of the vibe you might get from this mix, I’ve assembled you a little cento, cobbled together from lines of the songs in this first volume.  When it comes to naming a mix volume, there’s two camps that most of them fall into: either there’s a perfect line from one of the songs that instantly suggests itself as perfect, or there’s nothing that really jumps out at me and I have to go scouring.  But this volume is a bit of an outlier: there’s an embarrassment of riches here, and I ended up with so many great candidates that I started piecing them together in my head.  Here’s what I ended up with (attributions given at the end of the post):

Day after day after sorry day,
the sun makes me sick.
One, ’cause you left me.
You hate the things that I like—
that fascist faith will kill you.
I think I’m just paranoid;
I’m fucking lazy ...
there’s just too much pressure to take:
I’m just another soul for sale.
It’s not my time to wonder why ...
You monkey, you left me.
Set shit on fire.

So that should give you a rough idea of what you’re in for.

For the most part, these tracks fulfill the original pattern: they start out slow, or mellow, or understated, then burst into a sudden sonic explosion (though we’ll see a few songs which subvert expectations in one way or another).  The mix title ... well, the imagery is a bit unusual, but overall this is one of my most intelligible mix names.  The volume title is the last line of the little cento above, of course.

So, the first two tracks of this mix were pretty much always going to be Steve Burns’ epic opener “Mighty Little Man,” from his Steven-Drozd-of-the-Flaming-Lips-produced debut album, closely followed by “For Nancy,” the midpoint banger from Pete Yorn’s debut.  Both songs play with quiet/loud dynamics in a way that’s quite different from the standard grunge pattern.  In grunge, the contrasting dynamics are just a part of the structure of the songs; bands like Nirvana and the Pixies have refined the pattern to an art form, but you can’t really claim to be surprised when they do it.¹  These tunes hit with more emotional impact when they explode: they lull you into a false sense of calm, then burst into emotional being.  There’s really nothing like that feeling.

“Shutterbug” was the next most obvious choice: it’s a magnificent dichotomy of almost-whispered vocals punctuated by raw guitar chords that are almost metal in their ferocity.  It was easily the most standout track from Veruca Salt’s excellent Eight Arms to Hold You.  It was perhaps a bit unimaginative of me to just tack it on as the third track in the mix, but, honestly, these three really combine to form an opening triptych that firmly establishes the mood.  After that, there were a few other obvious choices: Linkin Park’s Hybrid Theory is basically composed of nothing but tracks that fit this pattern (from which I thought “Crawling” was the best exemplar), and the amazing “Bring Me to Life” by Evanescence was still fresh and darkly glittering at the time I was putting together the mix.  It opens with a simple piano melody and Amy Lee’s sweet, understated vocals, then Beny Moody’s grinding guitar licks kick in, and there’s that beautiful single beat of absolute silence before each chorus bursts forth ... it’s quite transportative.  Likewise, PJ Harvey was a no-brainer: I was pretty blown away by Rid of Me when I first heard it, and in particular the way that the title track starts very softly and makes you lean in, only to rock you on your heels with PJ’s aggressive guitar and Rob Ellis’ thundering drums.  There was never a world where this tune didn’t appear on the first volume of this mix.

After that, I looked a bit to the industrial scene.  Stabbing Westward’s “What Do I Have to Do?,” with its sparkly synth-noodling intro, was a pretty obvious choice.  Meanwhile, Machines of Loving Grace’s biggest hit “Butterfly Wings” inverts the pattern by starting out with standard industrial intensity, then dropping down to quiet moments between verses.  “Kiss Off” by Violent Femmes was another obvious choice: it starts with Gordon Gano’s acoustic guitar and quiet vocals, giving it almost a folk song vibe, and this time it’s Brian Ritchie’s bass that provides the burst of feeling; the song quickly turns and becomes a bit of a rant, which makes it fit perfectly here.  In the exact opposite department, it’s the slinky toms and bass of Green Day’s “Longview” that provides the calm before the storm of the guitars and snare.  Obviously Dookie was going to have to feature here, and I thought “Longview” was a great choice (plus it leads into “Kiss Off” quite nicely).

This mix was also started at the height of my fascination with Magnatune,² so it’s not surprising that several of its artists ended up here.  Perhaps most obviously, spineCar’s “Waste Away” follows a similar pattern to “Longview”: the rhythmic bassline is joined by a studied, pulsing drumbeat, then muddy guitars and quiet vocals join in, building to the crescendo where the lead singer breaks into a scream on the third syllable of the song’s title.  It’s a piece of undeservedly little-known nu-metal from the late 90s.  Then there’s “Dirtbag”: the original version of this tune, by Brad Sucks, is a perfectly lovely piece of alt-pop—the lyrics are a bit edgy, sure, but the melody belies that.  But part of the deal with Magnatune is the artists explicitly give permission for other Magnatune artists to remix their work, and what producer Victor Stone (working under the moniker Four Stones) does with “Dirtbag” is transcendant: he adds a seething undercurrent of anxiety and simmering rage by adding echoes and contrasting drones.  It’s really something to hear.  We’ve heard from Jade Leary before;³ “Meaner than Winter” is a short, not-quite bridge track that never really explodes, but always seems on the verge of doing so.  I felt it was a pretty good transition from the first half of the volume to the slightly harder edge of the second half.  Then we have “Charming Gun,” by trip-hop artist Artemis.  Honestly, I’m not sure this track really fits the theme all that well, and I was on the verge of taking it out several times.  But, in the end, I think it maintains just enough contrast (not only quiet/loud, but also slow/fast) to keep its place.

After that, two later additions were Metric’s “Black Sheep” from the Scott Pilgrim vs. the World soundtrack, and “The Pretender” by the Foo Fighters.  The former is just a solid post-punk offering that actually punctuates its quiet verses with strong guitar/bass/drum licks between the lines in a way that I found irresistible.  The latter ... well, I’m not one to think that Dave Grohl learned his craft from his time in Nirvana, because I think he was always pretty damned talented.  But I can’t help but wonder if his unerring talent for knowing when to crank up the vocals into a a full-on scream and when to back off is at least a little influenced by Kurt Cobain, who was undoubtedly the master of that technique.  When I first heard “The Pretender,” I knew unquestioningly that it had to be on this mix.

I follow that track with another one that manages to simmer without exploding and yet never feels unsatisfying: “Glycerine,” by Bush.  The only proper grunge song on this frist volume, the contrast here is provided by Nigel Pulsford’s crunchy guitars and strings, of all things.  Sixteen Stone is a revelatory album, and I’m kind of surprised it’s taken me this long to feature a track from it.  And I close with Smash Mouth, who, along with Nickelback, it seems to be fashionable to hate on these days.  But Fush Yu Mang is a pretty important album itself, and “Let’s Rock” is a great tune that hits a lazy, almost ska vibe for its verses, then bursts into a beautiful metal-inspired crescendo of emotion.  “Fuck it, let’s rock” indeed.

Creeping Rageaholic I
[ Set Shit on Fire ]

“Mighty Little Man” by Steve Burns, off Songs for Dustmites
“For Nancy” by Pete Yorn, off musicforthemorningafter
“Shutterbug” by Veruca Salt, off Eight Arms to Hold You
“Part 2 [Dirtbag Remix]” by Four Stones, off Ridin' the Faders [Remixes]⁴
“What Do I Have to Do?” by Stabbing Westward, off Wither Blister Burn + Peel
“Vinegar & Salt” by Hooverphonic, off The Magnificent Tree
“Big Mistake” by Natalie Imbruglia, off Left of the Middle
“Butterfly Wings” by Machines of Loving Grace, off Concentration
“Charming Gun” by Artemis, off Undone
“Meaner than Winter” by Jade Leary, off The Lost Art of Human Kindness
“Waste away” by Spinecar, off Up from the mud
“Black Sheep” by Metric, off Scott Pilgrim vs. the World [Soundtrack]
“Longview” by Green Day, off Dookie
“Kiss Off” by Violent Femmes, off Violent Femmes
“Crawling” by Linkin Park, off Hybrid Theory
“The Pretender” by Foo Fighters, off Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace
“Glycerine” by Bush, off Sixteen Stone
“Rid of Me” by PJ Harvey, off Rid of Me
“Bring Me to Life” by Evanescence, off Fallen
“Let's Rock” by Smash Mouth, off Fush Yu Mang

Total:  20 tracks,  78:00

Which only leaves us with the two tracks that break up my two industrial picks.  I’ve talked before about my discovery of Natalie Imbruglia’s amazing Left of the Middle, so I won’t belabor the point, but it’s a testament to her versatility that, in addition to all the other places we’ve seen her in these mixes,⁵ here she is again.  “Big Mistake” starts out sweet and synthy, then right at the one minute mark it turns on you and tells you what a big mistake you’ve made trying to pigeonhole the song based on its opening.  Then there’s the truly stunning “Vinegar & Salt” from trip-hop impresarios Hooverphonic (who we’ve also seen on a pretty wide variety of mixes⁶).  This track is barely more than three minutes long, but it packs so much emotion into its short span that it fairly makes your head spin.  The verses are an almost matter-of-fact enumeration of the problems in a relationship, then the bridges crank up the tension—“honesty’s your church”—and then the chorus explodes into the stunning revelation that “sometimes, it’s better to lie.” It’s a rollercoaster ride in all the best ways.

Next time, I think we’ll dip our toes into the darker side of synthwave.

[As promised, here’s my pseudo-poem along with which songs they derive from:

Day after day after sorry day, [“Meaner than Winter,” Jade Leary]
the sun makes me sick. [“Shutterbug,” Veruca Salt]
One, ’cause you left me. [“Kiss Off,” Violent Femmes]
You hate the things that I like— [“Vinegar & Salt,” Hooverphonic]
that fascist faith will kill you. [“Butterfly Wings,” Machines of Loving Grace]
I think I’m just paranoid; [“Let’s Rock,” Smash Mouth]
I’m fucking lazy ... [“Longview,” Green Day]
there’s just too much pressure to take: [“Crawling,” Linkin Park]
I’m just another soul for sale. [“The Pretender,” Foo Fighters]
It’s not my time to wonder why ... [“Glycerine,” Bush]
You monkey, you left me. [“Shutterbug,” Veruca Salt (again)]
Set shit on fire. [“Dirtbag,” Brad Sucks, remixed by Four Stones]

Yes, I used “Shutterbug” twice; it really worked for this cento.  Those lines, of course, are back to back in the Veruca Salt rendition, whereas I separated them by almost the length of the entire piece.  I don’t think this is as good as either of my two previous centos, but it has a certain charm.  At least I think so.]

__________

1 I’ve mostly avoided using grunge tunes here, but you can expect to see at least a few in future volumes.

2 I told the story of how I discovered Magnatune in Rose-Coloured Brainpan.

3 On Shadowfall Equinox V and VI, and also on Fulminant Cadenza I and Slithy Toves II.

4 Original version by Brad Sucks, off I Don’t Know What I’m Doing.

5 Besides the aforementioned Smokelit Flashback, there was Distaff Attitude and of course her triumphant tune on Cumulonimbus Eleven.

6 Starting with Smokelit Flashback III, IV, V, and VI, and thence to Bleeding Salvador I and Plutonian Velvet I.

The vicissitudes of feline dentistry

This week, one of our eldest cat’s teeth broke and/or fell out.  So it’s been a crazy weekend, and I didn’t have time to do even a partial post.  Still, there’s always next week.  Hopefully.

The Cost of (Technical Debt in) Doing Business

Ten and a half years ago, I wrote an article on technical debt strategies.  It was one of my most commented-on posts, and even got its own discussion on Reddit.  The point wasn’t to explain what technical debt was, but I did so (briefly) anyway, near the top:

In software development, there is always a tension between two opposing forces: the desire to do it fast, and the desire to do it right.  ...  If you do it right, then, later, when you want to extend it, or modify it, or use it as a jumping off point for branching out in a whole new direction ..., you can do so easily, with a solid foundation as a base.  The downside is that it will take longer.  If you do it fast, you get results faster, which means you can serve a customer’s needs before they change, fill a window of opportunity before it closes, or perhaps even beat your competitors to the market with your offering.  But when you have to modify it later (which you will), it will end up taking even more time to clean things up than if you’d just done it right in the first place.

You can see why we often call this “technical debt.” You’re saving time now, but you’ll have to “pay it back” later, and the amount of extra time it takes is like the interest.  Primarily, we software people invented this analogy because it makes good sense to business people.  ...

And I still say it’s a good definition, despite the snarky commenter who said it was “actually a definition of bad coding practices.” If you want a more complete definition—and some interesting history—you can find that on the Internet, though I’ll maintain that it’s not a better defition ... just more detailed.  Other Internet articles can explain even better than I could how the technical debt concept (more of a metaphor, really) neatly parallels the concept of financial debt, but, again: the analogy I used to follow the quote above is perfectly adequate for grasping the concept.  If you have a business, and you need a piece of equipment that costs $1,000, but you don’t have that much in the bank, you have two choices: you either wait until you do have that much in the bank, or you borrow some money and buy the thing now.  In the first case, you end up debt-free, but you’re paying what in business circles is called “opportunity cost”: if you lose money (e.g. to your competitors) because you couldn’t use that equipment while you were saving up the money, that’s the opportunity cost.  Contrariwise, if you borrow the money to save the opportunity cost, you’re paying interest, which is what we call in business circles actual cost—i.e., cash.

In fact, the concept of “opportunity cost” is a perfect companion to that of technical debt.  In both cases, you’re not talking about “real” money, in the sense of dollars you can count, but you are talking about real financial consequences, even if they can be hard to measure exactly.  And the point of them is the same: to turn something that’s a bit abstract and hard to grasp into financial terms, which businesspeople are really good at understanding.  If I had heard someone tell me that some business people were starting to think that opportunity costs were bullshit made up by other people to get them to do things they didn’t want to do, I would think that was crazy talk.

And, yet ... that’s exactly what I just recently heard said about technical debt.  That business folks weren’t taking it seriously any more because they thought it was just this made up thing to get them to take software maintenance seriously.  Which ... well, of course it is.  Just like opportunity cost is a made up thing to get people to take seriously the idea that waiting has consequences.  That doesn’t make the consequences less real, though; the fact that someone made it up at some point is true of everything in our society.  The idea of “running a business” was made up at some point, as was the title of “CEO,” as was the concept of “management” and the practice of “accounting.” But no one questions that these things are real, because, you know, they are.  And technical debt is real as well.  Trust me, I’ve been in software development for over half my life now: it’s very real.  Doing things fast (most often in order to avoid paying “opportunity costs”) is the choice most often made by the business side, and to be fair there are often really good reasons for choosing that.  But the costs are quite real, and quite often painful down the road.  Pointing out that someone had to invent a phrase for it doesn’t make it go away.

The thing that really frustrates me about this apparently growing attitude is that we (technical people, I mean—the term was invented by the same guy who invented agile programming) invented this stupid term so the business people would take the problem seriously.  Ward Cunningham, bless his soul, came up with the perfect metaphor—technical debt is the interest you pay when you borrow time to pay off your opportunity costs—and now the business people are rejecting it as “made up”?  Perhaps this is the real difference between “opportunity cost” and “technical debt”: the former is what business people use to justify expenses to their accounting departments, while the latter is what the tech departmnent uses to justify expenses to the business people.  So when the business folks are the justifiers, the term makes total sense and we should all use it.  When they’re the justifiees, though ... well, then it’s all bullshit.

To be fair, though—which I am very much not inclined to be on this issue—I should point out several of the articles I’ve cited claim that this is all our fault.  The technical people, says one, overused the term and just applied it to all their problems.  Engineers, it says, say “technical debt” when they really just mean “bad code.” And of course code can be bad for a myriad of reasons: technical debt is a big one, but certainly not the only one.  It goes on to lament:

When businesspeople don’t want to grant a “tech debt week” because they saw with their own eyeballs that the last one improved the team’s capacity zero percent, how can we expect them to grant us another one with alacrity?

Well, I’m not buying that.  If a business person says to accounting, “I’m going to borrow money to buy this thing,” and accounting responds, “don’t do that! it will cost us a million dollars in interest!” then I’m pretty sure there’s going to be some fact-checking going on.  What I’m saying is, the business folks have to bear some of the responsibility for not bothering to take the time to understand exactly what technical debt is being paid off in a “tech debt week” and what the benefits will be.  Also, what are the chances that the team will achieve their goals?  Because sometimes ripping out the kitchen cabinets and replacing them with ones where the doors aren’t falling off takes longer than the contractor’s initial estimate.  This is all very standard stuff that any businessperson worth their salt would consider when buying a physical item or hiring for a particular job.  And, if the business side asks, and the tech side has to explain themselves, then they’ll rapidly become disabused of the notion of throwing all their problem code into the “tech debt” bucket.

Another post offers the tech side this advice:

Instead, say: this is how long it will take to do.

Not “if we rush we could probably do it in...”; no, if you say that, then why are you not rushing now? Do you not care what the business wants? Do you not have ‘skin in the game’?

Say: This is how long it will take, we estimate. If you want it faster, we can cut some features.

Again, this is not how things work in the real world.  When the plumber comes by and says, “I’ll need to replace this pipe, because it has a hole in it.  It’ll take about 4 hours to get it done.  Or, I could do a quick patch job on it and get it done in an hour.” you don’t respond, “Why aren’t you rushing now?” You ask what the consequences will be for that rush job.  Is it going to keep leaking, just not as bad? is it going to stop the leak completely but only for a few days, and then you’ll just have to call the plumber back again?  There’s obviously a reason why they’re offering you the option of doing it right vs doing it fast, and you will certainly want to hear that reason.  But under no circumstances is the fast option “cutting some features”: it’s delivering the same features with substandard quality.  That is the entire point of technical debt.

But my favorite one is this, from the very first article I referenced:

In an impassioned post, a long-time software development consultant, Uncle Bob writes “A mess is not a technical debt. A mess is just a mess. Technical debt decisions are made based on real project constraints. They are risky, but they can be beneficial. The decision to make a mess is never rational. It’s always based on laziness and unprofessionalism and has no chance of paying off in the future. A mess is always a loss.”

This is such complete and utter horseshit that I’ve pre-emptively lost all respect for this “Uncle Bob” character, and I don’t even know who he is.  The fact of the matter is, sometimes you make the decision to do the quick patch job, because you really need that pipe to work for just a few more weeks, and the inevitable resulting mess—which, depending on the size and location of the pipe, might be prodigious indeed—is absolutely not the result of being lazy or unprofessional.  The customer (who is in this analogy the business side) understood and accepted the risk; the contractor (here representing the technical side) was neither lazy nor unprofessional: they did exactly what was asked of them, almost certainly over their strong objections, and definitely cannot be held responsible for the resulting water damage.  I have to believe Uncle Bob never had to pull an all-nighter trying to “just make it work” for the customer demo the next day.  A mess is not “always based on laziness and unprofessionalism”; a mess is, sometimes, just the best you could manage at the time.

So I suppose the business people will continue to crack the whip and the technical folks will continue to beg to be able to clean up their messes, and now they’ve even taken away the phrase we used to help them understand the urgency.  I don’t really blame the business people in my own company: they’re just responding to the zeitgeist.  And I’m still not buying this notion that I should blame the wider tech community—it’s 100% true that some engineers have doubtless misunderstood the proper use of the phrase, and that’s contributed to its being misused and consequently watered down.  But I find the parallel of “opportunity cost” very instructive: its challenges are similar, people often misunderstand its use and try to appropriate it for their own purposes.  But it continues to be useful (and to be used) anyway.  And I think that’s because its use benefits the business community, so they resist any abuse of it and hold onto it fiercely.  The concept of “technical debt,” on the other hand ... that, they have have little use for, so it’s fine if it falls into disuse and neglect.

Of course, one might argue that, by not understanding technical debt (and not devoting resources to pay it down), the end result is that the company has to spend more and more time to achieve the same results.  That’s time that businesses could be spending making customers happier by delivering more quickly, responding to competitive threats more nimbly, or breaking into new markets with innovative new features.  What I’m saying is, rejection of the concept of technical debt, in my opinion, has a real opportunity cost.

TIL: Vibecession

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

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

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

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

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