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.]