A slow week

It’s Valentine’s Day tomorrow, and then Presidents’ Day the following Monday.  In the meantime, nothing much has changed.  Our littlest one is still working on learning how to ride a bicycle—she’s a bit old for training wheels, but she’s getting a late start, so we’re cutting her some slack.  We got our middle child back on neurofeedback (the cutover to new insurance caused an interrpution of a few weeks), and he seems much happier.  Plus we started a new D&D campaign, with Merrick in charge.  (For those interested, it’s based on this fun little subscription.)

Next week, I’ll come up with something more interesting.  Probably.

The Waning of the Year

In this time of year’s end and family coming together, I remind you of something Dean R. Koontz once wrote: “for in your family you saw, day to day, those specific things in specific people that justified, by extension, a broader love of fellow men and women.”

Hold your family close.  Because they will teach you how to love the rest of the world.

It's Christmas Time ... Again

Well, another holiday season is upon us, which means it’s time once again for me to wish you a merry christmahannukwanzaakah^* and perhaps invite you to revisit my two holiday mixes: Yuletidal Pools I and II.  Now is a time to be with family, and as much as I also love you, Constant Reader, one must always put one’s children first.

Nonetheless, I will take advantage of this time of the year, as I often do, to wish you and your family the brightest of Yuletides, Hannukahs, Christmases, Kwanzaas, Pancha Ganapatis, and even Boxing Days.  As the year winds down and a fresh one looms on the horizon, it’s a good time to reflect on what we had (or didn’t have), and what we hope for.  What I hope for is that all of us will be happier, and healthier, and more hopeful.  Perhaps it’s a bit meta to hope for hope, but I think we could all use a little right now.

Happy holidays.

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* As always, ™ Jon Sime.

Witchlight Wild Launch

This week my youngest (not quite yet 10 years old) officially started her first D&D campaign (the Witchlight campaign, which I alluded to in a previous post).  She’s very excited about it.  And, so far, she’s doing a great job, youth and limited familiarity with the voluminous rules notwithstanding.

As I mentioned previously, I’m going with my dinosaur-person.  Our middle child (who I still sometimes refer to as “the Smaller Animal,” even though he’s now a good bit taller than me) is being a sort of a blob-like creature called a plasmoid.  Meanwhile, the youngest is running a character to help us out who is a small mouse-person called a jerbeen.  So our party looks something like this:

So far, we’ve met each other (which was fairly entertaining), and then we found the Witchlight Carnival and met its proprietors, Mr. Witch and Mr. Light (naturally).  Our first mission is to find a missing pink unicorn.  Should be a piece of cake.

I’m pretty excited for the adventure, and I’m excited to see what modifications the girl will make to the published adventure.  Changing things up to suit yourself or your players is pretty standard for experienced DMs, but newbies often try to run the adventure exactly as written.  But our girl has already thrown in several of her own touches (I know this because she proudly announces it whenever she does so).  So I’m excited to see where things go from here.

A more extensive post next week, and more news from the Witchlight trail as I have it.

Dark and Dreamful Daughter

After the cessation of “free Fridays” last month, my $work is kindly tailing us off slowly by offering us one “free day” per month for a few months, to be taken whenever we like.  I took my October free day this past Friday, so this weekend I’ve been enjoying the break.  I’ve only a couple of things to tell you about.

Tonight, all the family except my youngest and I went to a homeschool association teen event, leaving us two to have a father-daughter night.  I took her out to Taco Bell (which for some reason she finds quite exciting), then we came back and she suggested we watch a movie.

Now, the background you must understand is that, a few months back, I quoted something from The Crow to her.  Of those movies which I consider my all-time favorites—I sometimes refer to these as my “top X movies,” since the number only ever increases—one of my main criteria is quotability.  A good movie should provide lots of great quotes that you can bring up in everyday life, such as “buck up, little camper!” or “fuck me gently with a chainsaw” or “screws fall out all the time: the world’s an imperfect place.” I forget exactly which of The Crow’s great quotes I used in this instance (probably “this is the really real world—there ain’t no comin’ back”), but, the point is, my daughter didn’t recognize it: at not quite 10 years old, she’d never seen the movie, of course.  So I suggested we watch it, and, for some reason I can’t recall right now, we were alone at home that night as well.  Now, if you’re going to watch The Crow, you absolutely must watch it at night, with all the lights off.  It’s a very dark movie with a very creepy vibe, so you have to establish the proper atmosphere.  So we fired it up on the big TV, with the sound turned way up, and every possible light extinguished.  And I suppose she was really enamored of this, because, tonight, she requested another “dark movie” night.

So my choice for tonight was Dark City (the director’s cut, natch).  She seemed to enjoy it (as she did the previous choice), and she’s already picked out the next one (The Matrix).  So I suppose it’s become a tradition at this point, and I’ll have to start thinking of even more dark movies for her and I to watch.

The other thing I’ve been working on this weekend is my character for my youngest’s upcoming Witchlight campaign.  My inspiration for this character has been a race from a moderately obscure RPG that I bought but never played (primarily because the mechanics are super-wonky, in my opinion): Earthdawn.  Earthdawn, supposedly set in the same universe as the fantasy post-apocalyptic (and far better known) Shadowrun, had a lot of great fluff ... just not so great on the crunch.  While many of the races are the same in both games, Earthdawn does add a few new options, including a species of swashbuckling dinosaur people: the t’skrang.  This pic should tell you all you need to know about them:

So I had to make up a custom D&D race for them, which I’ve named the tsaagan.  “Tsaagan” is a genus of dinosuars in the raptor family—although it certainly sounds like a fantasy name—and these guys look a lot like raptors.  Plus the “ts” at the beginning is a nice homage to their inspiration.  So far I’ve written up the mechanics (the “crunch”), but not yet the lore (the “fluff”).  But that’s sufficient to get started, I think.  Next up I have to nail down the class, but I’m leaning towards fey wanderer, which seem particularly apropos given the setting.

And that’s all I’ve got for this week’s mostly non-post.  Next time I’ll work on something with a bit more substance.

The Wild Beyond the Daughter

Well, the Free Fridays are over, but I’m still only posting full posts once every other week.  Ya read this blog against my explicit advice, ya gets what ya gets.

This week my youngest has been starting her deep dive into the newest D&D release, The Wild Beyond the Witchlight.  She’s decided it’s going to be her first actual D&D campaign that she will actually run—thus far, she’s only run a Dungeon World campaign^* of her own devising.  But I ordered the book for myself, and she fell in love with it, and now she has her own copy ... she even got the bundle with all the cool extras in it.  She’s very serious about it: she’s asked my advice on which section to read first to prepare, and she got some sticky tabs from Christy to mark the pages.

So that’s what our nine-year-old teenager is up to.  We’ll see if she carries through with it, but she’s thus far been very determined in her goals.  So I think it will happen, sooner or later.  That’s my girl.

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* If you don’t recall, Dungeon Word is a sort of D&D-lite game based on the Powered by the Apocalypse rules.

Isolation Report, Week #65

This week we had a new roof put on.  You know, when they tell you that contractors will be arriving at your house at the crack of dawn and making a lot of noise over your head, you say yourself “duh.” Of course there’s going to be a lot of noise.  But knowing it and experiencing it are entirely different things.  For 3 days, everyone in the house was woken up far before they were used to being conscious—even our middle child, who is the only true morning person in our family.  Lack of sleep was just the beginning though: the loud noise and massive amounts of dust coming in his window made our middle child (who was recently confirmed to be on the spectrum) fairly discombobulated,^* the indoor cats hid under the bed for 3 days, and the outdoor was scared to go out but not scared enough to be coerced into using the litterbox like a normal feline being.  We couldn’t let the dogs out in the yard because they think they’re vicious and want to “attack” the workmen.  We couldn’t run the air conditioner, because the roofers covered it in plastic to keep the dust from getting sucked into the vents, but we also couldn’t get in the pool, because stray pieces of shingle and once even a tool were raining down on it.  And the constant doorbell ringing: there are rotten beams, you should probably replace the gutters, we had to add new “fascia boards,”^** can you move your truck out of the driveway so we can park a porta potty there instead?  (It’s still there, by the way.)  It was a lot.

Next week they’re coming to turn the power off for up to 6 hours so they can replace our electrical panels (so that should be a load of fun), then the actual solar panels get installed.  As I say, it’s a lot, but at the end of the day we’ll have enough solar power to never have to pay the power company again, and a battery backup which should last indefinitely the next time said power company turns off our electricity for specious reasons.  Assuming the solar company isn’t full of shit.  We shall see, I suppose.

On the pandemic front, our humans are now 60% vaccinated, which is to say 2 of us have had 2 shots, 2 of us have had 1, and one of us hasn’t had any (but only because she’s too young).  Moving forward to a better future, hopefully.  Again, we shall see.

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* The technical term is “emotional dysregulation.”

** No, we didn’t know what that meant either.

Isolation Report, Week #63

No long post this time, but I will point out that this week saw the last episode of round 2 of Narrative Telephone.  You may recall my first talking about it back in week 8, again briefly in week 14, and I even gave it a 5-star rating in my pandemic TV roundup part 2.  Well, that was all about round 1.  Now they’ve done round 2, adding guest stars to help them achieve maximum chaos.  This last one was an amazing story kicked off by Aabria Iyengar, which of course the Crticial Role crew butchered beyond recognition.  But you should watch ’em all.  It’s the closest to joy I’ve gotten out of the past year and a half.

• R2E1: Return of the Matt (Matt Mercer starts; Brian W. Foster guests)
• R2E2: Two Brothers, One Coast (Brian W. Foster starts)
• R2E3: The Night Before Winter’s Crest (Laura Bailey starts, Micah Burton guests)
• R2E4: Two Brothers, One Coast (Micah Burton starts)
• R2E5: Questions and Quackery (Liam O’Brien starts, Dani Carr guests)
• R2E6: Familiar Feywild Fables (Dani Carr starts)
• R2E7: Chutney’s Christmas Vacation (Travis Willingham starts, Aabria Iyengar guests)
• R2E8: Of Heists and Horses (Aabria Iyengar starts)

Again, you don’t have to understand anything about Critical Role—or anything about D&D at all—to appreciate these.  It’s just the delight of watching 8 friends (and guests) struggle to recreate what has gone before, and then watch each other fuck it up completely and give each other shit about it.  It’s fun, and it’s funny, and it’s weirdly sweet.  Take happiness where you can find it, especially these days.

P’raps something more substantial next week.

D&D Story #1: The Demon Doll

You know, the great thing about having your gaming group be comprised of you and your children¹ is that all your D&D stories double as cute kid stories, so perhaps if you reader don’t care for the one aspect, you’ll enjoy the other.  Of course, if you don’t like either one ... well, see you next week, I suppose.

Now, as I explained in my post on game rotation, we’re actually doing a few different games—different campaigns, sometimes whole different systems—and occasionally we put aside one and start a new one.  Mostly this has to do with the sessions that my eldest child runs, because I just keep the two I have going and don’t experiment with new stuff.²  But that one is full of ideas, and every once in a while we just play something new and different for a while ... remember, one of the advantages that I talked about with the game rotation system is that you’re more open to experimental stuff.  Anyhow, the latest experiment is try to play a Pathfinder game.

If you don’t know what Pathfinder is, the short answer is that it’s an offshoot of an older version of D&D.³  The components of roleplaying games (TTRPGs, in any event) typically get divided into two categories: the nitty-gritty, mechanical bits, and the more abstract roleplaying bits like the setting and advice on how to roleplay and that sort of stuff.  Or the crunch and the fluff, as we generally refer to it.  The current version of D&D tends to try to strike a balance of about half-and-half crunch vs fluff, but there are other games which lean hard on the fluff and are pretty crunch-lite⁴ ... and then there are games which are super-crunchy.  Pathfinder is one of those.  That’s mostly why we haven’t tried to play it yet: it’s a lot to take in for our younger players.  But my middle child is ready (mostly), and my youngest has been playing for over a year now, so despite her young age she’s got some real experience under her belt.  So we thought we’d give it a shot.

I eventually came up with a character idea that I thought was pretty hip, and my middle child went with one of their first-ever⁵ non-shapeshifter-centric characters, basing him on the old videogame character Vexx.  But I promised you a cute kid story, so let’s focus on what my youngest came up with.

She’s going to play a young child: specifically, the long-lost brother of her character in the Freak Campaign,⁶ Rose Redd.  His name is Levi,⁷ and he’s 11.  At first, my eldest was none too keen on this plan, not wanting to run a game where they regularly had to put a young child into dangerous situations.  But my youngest persisted, and she explained further.  See, this young boy doesn’t actually fight when there’s trouble.  Instead, he lugs around a stuffed toy that he found (who knows where) on his long travels.⁸  This toy looks like a demon—a fluffy, lumpy, child’s toy version of a demon, granted, but a demon nonetheless.  Horns, red skin, pointy tail ... the whole kit and caboodle.  But it’s beat up: it’s threadbare, one of its eyes is missing, part of its stuffing has fallen out so it’s lopsided and parts of it are a bit flat, and so on.  It definitely doesn’t look menacing, but perhaps a bit creepy ... who thought this was going to make for an adorable children’s toy?  But here’s the dark secret: when Levi is put in danger, this demon doll actually morphs into a full-sized, very real demon, who goes rampaging off and attacks the enemies.  So the demon does all the fighting, while the kid very intelligently stays hidden and safe from danger.  Outside of combat, the kid can contribute in more roleplaying-focussed ways, like helping to solve puzzles or maybe some light scouting (the kid’s got to be very good at remaining unseen to have survived this long), and is probably decent at using his power of cute to make friends.  But, when the swords and spells come out ... so does the demon.

Now, this on its own is a pretty inventive concept.  (For those of you wondering how we plan to implement this mechanically, Pathfinder has a class called a “summoner.” It’s never been my favorite Pathfinder class,⁹ but this is actually one place where it can make sense.  The demon will not be an actual demon, but rather Levi’s “eidolon,” as a summoner’s pet creature is called in the game.)  Is the demon real?  Is it perhaps a protective spirit from some other plane that just somehow got stuck in this unsettling form?  Or maybe it’s a psychic projection of Levi himself, hinting at potential power that might be unlocked someday.  But that’s not even the point of the story.

See, in addition to being wildly inventive, my youngest child is also very crafty.  Like, as in arts-and-crafty.  She’s a maker, is what I’m saying.  And, at some point while we were coming up with all these ideas about Levi’s demon doll and how it would work in the game, she decided to draw it, for reference.  And then she decided she’d just make one.  So she did.

To be clear, she drew that picture all by herself, then (with minimal help from her mother) cut out some fabric pieces, put them together with hot glue, stuffed it with stuffing, then hot-glued all the pieces together, including the button for an eye.  What was once just a vague idea in her head is now an actual, tangible thing in the real world that she can hold on to at the gaming table.  It just blows my mind.

Did I mention she’s only just turned nine?

Anyhow, that’s my D&D story for today.  Or my cute kid story, if you prefer.  Tune in next week for what will probably be a more normal-sized post.

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1 For more details, see my post on the Family Campaign.

2 There’s also the game that my youngest—just barely 9 at this point!—runs, but that’s pretty sporadic.

3 And the long answer is: read this.

4 Pretty much any Powered by the Apocalypse game, like Dungeon World, for instance.

5 Outside of one-shots, anyway.

6 Again, see game rotation for (a few) details.

7 Currently.  He’s gone through a few name changes so far.

8 It is yet unclear whether Levi was kidnapped or ran away from home, and, if the former, who took him, or, if the latter, what possessed him to run away at 8 or 9 years old.

9 In fact, given that you summon a creature from a pocket dimension who can look like anyhting and evolves as you get to higher levels, I long ago pegged being a summoner as playing a Pokémon trainer in Pathfinder, and dismissed it outright.  I can tolerate a lot of atypical high fantasy in my D&D—monks, psionics, dinsosaurs ... even guns—but I gotta draw the line somewhere.

Isolation Report, Week #59

This week saw a few things to give us hope.

Firstly and most crucially, the man who murdered George Floyd was found guilty.  The news told us that it was the first time in all of Minnesota’s history that a white police officer was convicted of killing a black man, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if it weren’t the first instance of that in our whole country ... or at least one of the first.^*  Coupled with a recent story of a black female officer who had been fired for stopping a white officer from killing a black suspect and finally won her lawsuit restoring her back pay and pension,^** could this indicate things are actually changing for the better?  It’s hard to say.  Certainly we can’t say things are all better now.  Certainly we have much farther to go.  But a journey of a thousand miles, as they say, starts with a single step.  Even if all we have for now is that step, surely that’s still a good sign ... right?

As far as the actual pandemic goes, the vaccines are here, and finally it’s getting easier to get them.  In our household, there’s one appointment made, and one actual initial dose received—just earlier today, in fact.  That’s progress toward an inevitable state of full vaccination for all the humans here in the house.  Still, I wonder ... even after we’re all vaccinated, will things then be back to “normal”?  Being vaccinated, they say, doesn’t preclude you from potentially infecting others, so you still need to wear the masks.  And the virus has several new mutations: will the vaccine protect against those?  Even if you believe so, will you have enough faith in that to put yourself in a crowded space full of potential disease vectors?  Because it’s not just COVID-19, you know ... more COVIDs will come, and completely other diseases ... swine flus, avian flus, ebolas, zikas.  Maybe it’ll just be safer to stay home.  We have Amazon, and food delivery, and a biweekly veggie box.  We have five or six streaming services and a lot of videogames.  We have a decent Internet connection and no office to go back to any time in the foreseeable future.  Maybe this is the new normal.

I hope not.  But, as my mom was fond of saying when I was a kid: wish in one hand, shit in the other—see which one gets full first.  So I’ll continue to hope, but I won’t hold my breath or anything.

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* An article from USA Today suggests it might be the sixth.  In our 250-year history.

** This actually happened last week, but this week’s events put me in mind of it.

A Spreadsheet Story

The main reason you won’t get a proper blog post this week is that it’s my middle child’s birthday weekend, and I’m at their beck and call.  But there’s another possibly vaguely (probably not really) interesting reason as well, so I thought I’d share it with you.

For most of my life, I’ve been one of those annoying OCD-but-disorganized people.  All my CDs had to be alphabetized just so, and the bills in my money clip had to be facing the same way, but all my workspaces were a horrible mess and I rarely had any firm concept of what I was supposed to be working on next.  A few years back I made a conscious decision to get myself organized: as we get older, it’s not so much that our brains lose the ability to juggle all those myriad of things we’re supposed to be remembering that we have to do, it’s more that we finally realize how terrible we were at it all along and that it’s only getting worse with age.  So I settled on a Method™ and ran with it.

The one I chose was Getting Things Done (sometimes referred to by its fans as GTD), and I learned a lot from it.  Which is not to say that I embraced it fully: the biggest issue I have with it is that David Allen, being about 20 years older than me (he’s actually about halfway between the ages of my mother and father), loves paper.  There’s lots of writing things on paper and filing paper and moving paper around.  I don’t do paper.  But of course the system can be adapted to computer software, and there are many GTD programs out there.  But part of the issue with being all OCD-y and a programmer is that I can’t adapt my way of working to someone else’s software: I gotta write my own.

So I created a massive Google Sheets spreadsheet with oodles of code macros (in Javascript, which I really don’t like to program in) and, whenever it does something I don’t like, I change it.  I can’t really say that it’s a proper implementation of GTD, but I’m sure that anyone familiar with GTD would recognize most of what’s going on in there.  I didn’t take GTD as a blueprint for exactly how to organize my shit, but I absorbed many of its lessons ... maybe that should be a whole blog post on its own.  But for now, I have to admit one thing.  A fuck up I made.

Back when I was originally designing my GTD-spreadsheet-monstrosity, I made a fateful decision.  When I complete a task, I don’t actually delete it ... I just mark it completed (by adding a date in the “Completed” column) and then it disappears from my “shit you need to do today” view.  But it’s still there.  Partially I did this because, as a programmer who mainly works with databases, I’ve had many years of conditioning that you never delete data because you always regret it later, and partially because I thought it would be cool to have a record of everything I’d accomplished (so now my todo list is also my diary).  Sounded perfectly rational at the time.

Now, I’m not going to go into all the details of how GTD works, but one of its main concepts is that you track everything. EVERYTHING.  This gives you a lot of confidence that you haven’t forgotten anything, because, you know ... you track everything.  I’m coming up on my 4-year anniversary of tracking everything in my spreadsheet and I’ve accumulated over 15 thousand items: tasks, longer blocks of time for projects, things I was waiting on other people to get back to me on, etc etc etc.  It works out to about 4 thousand a year, and I shouldn’t be surprised if it’s actually increasing over time and I’m soon to hit 5 grand.  Now, if you’re a big spreadsheet person (as many people are these days, in many different areas of business) you may have heard technogeeks tell you not to use a spreadsheet as a database.  Being a technogeek myself, I knew this perfectly well ... and I did it anyway.  I did it advisedly, for reasons of expediency.  Because I didn’t want to spend months trying to develop my own application from scratch, putitng me even further behind on getting organized.  The point was to get up and running quickly, which I did.  But now I’m paying the price.

This weekend, while sitting around waiting for my child to inform me of the next videogame I was drafted into playing or the next meal I was conscripted into obtaining, I had a brainstorm about how to make this system way more efficient.  It’s not a proper fix, but it would radically decrease the time I currently spend sitting around waiting for my spreadsheet to respond, so I figured I better do it.  I thought: this won’t be too hard to do.  Of course, it was harder than I thought—it’s always harder than you think—and I haven’t gotten things completely back to normal yet (and I stayed up way too late last night), but I made some really great strides, and I’m seeing an even bigger speed-up than I thought.  So I’m pretty pleased.  Even though I’ll probably be fucking with it for the next several weeks.

So that’s why I have no time to make a proper post.  Except mainly the birthday thing.  Next week will be better, I’m sure.

Isolation Report, Week #51

[You could also read the most recent report, or even start at the beginning.]

Well, our family is heading into the March birthday season, that annual time when we have two birthday weekends of our own, not to mention one of the two birthday recipients’ best friends, who also has a birthday in there.  In happier times, we’ve sometimes combined hers with one of ours and had joint celebrations.  This year, of course, it will be a pandemic birthday.

And, what makes me sad, and angry, and frustrated, is that, being that we live in America and are talking about March birthdays, this will be the first crop of kids now experiencing their second pandemic birthday in a row.  That sucks for them.  It would suck for anyone, but in this case I’m talking about kids celebrating birthdays ranging from their 7th (our youngest child, last year) to their 15th (our middle child and their friend, this year).  I mean, I can’t imagine how hard it would suck to have your 16th birthday, or your 18th, or your 21st, in all this shit, and I know there are people going through that too—I don’t happen to know any, but just stastically there have to be.  But at those ages (yes, I would argue even at 16) you’re starting to develop some maturity.  You’re starting to understand that, while the world is often awash with possibilities, sometimes it just sucks, and you have to learn to start accepting that.  But 7 – 15 ... man, those are your peak years of innocence, I feel.  Those are the times when, unless you’ve had some hard luck or some hard circumstances, you shouldn’t really have to be aware that life sucks sometimes.  You shouldn’t even have to think about it sucking for other people, much less yourself.

But, this is the world we live in, so we make the best of it.  We do Zoom birthday parties, and hold online gaming events, and, if we’re lucky enough to have social bubbles, maybe do very small parties within those.  And we make sure we let our kids know that they are still loved, even if the world is kinda shitting on them right now.  And we keep telling them that this won’t be forever.

Hopefully, we’re not lying.

Isolation Report, Week #45

[You could also read the most recent report, or even start at the beginning.]

Well, since our last isolation report, a lot has been going on, at least politically.  It’s difficult to know what to say about the events that have transpired here in the U.S. ... on the one hand, it seems completely predictable and expected.  On the other, that doesn’t keep it from being horrific.  Our only real saving grace here is that this attempted insurrection was being run by complete idiots.  Well-armed idiots, granted, but hardly brain giants.  Throughout the whole thing, I kept wondering to myself: what exactly do they think they’re going to accomplish?  Did they imagine that the entirety of the Congress was going to say “gee, people ran us out of the place we normally meet; I guess we can’t do anything now! may as well go home”?  Some Congressperson tweeted that we were lucky that one of the staffers got the official electoral college ballots before the rioters could destroy them ... but so what if they had?  Would that really have stopped the election from progressing?  Our entire government would have just thrown up their hands and said “oh, well, I suppose Trump will just have to be President forever now.” Sure, that makes sense.

So, they caused a lot of chaos, and, sadly, some people died (on both sides).  But I just can’t believe it was ever going to change anything in the long run, or accomplish any of their actual goals.  Assuming they had goals.  Aren’t these the same people who were sitting at home and laughing at the Occupy Wall Street movement for not knowing what they wanted?  But it seems to me that this was the same thing.  Except the Occupy-Wall-Street-ers never killed anyone.  I hope that wasn’t their goal.  That would be sad, and scary, and even more disturbing than it already is.  But somehow I don’t think that was ever the point.  They just listened to Trump, and Giuliani (“trial by comat!”), and the other morons, and they decided to go fuck some shit up, without any real goals or concrete ideas of how it was going to end up.  Certainly if they had planned a little better, they wouldn’t have managed to all end up on camera, faces exposed, and easily identifiable by the authorities.

But it happened, and we have to deal with it, and we’re still all locked down and not really able to go anywhere or do anything.  A friend told me that one of their relatives who works at a local hospital says they’re putting patients in the gift shop at this point.  Admittedly, you’re hearing this third-hand, so feel free to discount it as an unreliable source, but if you live in the U.S. I bet you’re awre of similar conditions where you live.  Things are getting worse, and we still have to wait another week or so before it can even start to get better.

Of course, the House has impeached Trump, again—no surprise there—and many people on television are expressing dismay that the Senate won’t vote to convict before Trump is already out of office.  I’m not stressed on that point.  Sure, he’ll no doubt do plenty more damage on the way out, but I think the important part is that he does get convicted, and that’s more likely to happen with the new Senate than the old one.  Why is it important to convict him after he’s already out of office?  Well, first of all, it’s important to send that message to any future idiots who find themselves in Trump’s position.  But I think it’s just as important that Trump not be allowed to run for office again (as some people in the media have pointed out), and that he not be allowed to reap the benefits normally afforded to ex-Presidents (as apparently no one has thought to mention yet).  A retired President continues to collect a stipend for life, plus the Secret Service protective detail, which we already know that Trump views as a money-making venture.  So I really don’t want my tax money going to support that sort of bullshit for however more years he manages to cling to life.  And, in my experience, only the good die young: true assholes can live for-fucking-ever.

I don’t know.  I guess we’ll have to see how it all shakes out.  Hopefully there won’t be any more violence, and hopefully the new administration will restore some sanity.  But I honestly don’t know.  I’m just waiting to find out like all the rest of you.

Isolation Report, Week #43

[You could also read the most recent report, or even start at the beginning.]

Well, there’s been a little bit of $work (mostly catching up on some stuff I never seem to have time for under normal circumstances), and way too many videogames (primarily Portal Knights, except not on the PlayStation any more, because: fuck Sony), and there was a New Year’s Eve celebration in there somewhere.  We watched The Iron Giant, which I’ve always said is one of the greatest kids movies of all time, because a) it’s not a musical, b) it has some pretty great animation (being the first cinematic directorial effort from Brad Bird, who would go on to do The Incredibles), c) it proves, as fas as I’m concerned, that Vin Diesel (who voices the giant) is capable of complex characterization no matter what people think, d) plus a surprisingly great performance from Harry Connick Jr (as a beatnik-turned-scrap-dealer) and a dependably hateable villain from Christopher McDonald (whose Kent Mansley—“works for the government”—has an oily despicableness exceeded only by his Shooter McGavin), e) it has an equal number of very funny moments and very emotional moments (it makes nearly all of us in our family tear up at least once, and often more than once), and f) it has an amazing message, which I once used as the centerpiece of a blog post on individuality.  But mainly it’s not a muscial, a virtue I appreciate more and more as the years go on.  After that, the smallies and I played some Trine 4 until 11pm, when we gathered everyone up to celebrate the arrival of 2021 in Denver (because I didn’t really expect the Smaller Animal—who, to be fair, is now mere inches away from being the biggest person in the house—to make it to midnight), and then we played a bit more, and then it really was midnight, so we celebrated again, albeit on a smaller scale, and then everyone went to bed except for me, and I sat up and fucked around trying to finish the giant bottle of pink “champagne” I had bought at Trader Joe’s.  I did have both The Mother and the eldest helping me out this time, but no one really likes sparkling wine but me (and, honestly, I’m a bit “meh” on it myself), so I wasn’t able to polish it off.  But then the next night I did, on account of a giant bottle of sparkling wine always has less in it than you think, partially because a lot of it disappears into bubbles, and partially because most of the weight of the bottle is in the glass.  (Pro tip: sparkling wine will not survive until the next day unless you have some wine stoppers, which I finally bought some of this year.)

And that’s our New Year’s for 2021.  It’s only been a few days, but so far it’s seemed pleasant enough.  It certainly feels like 2020 was a low point, but I will not tempt fate by trying to claim that it couldn’t get worse.  Rather I shall just point out that we have a few early indicators that 2021 could be better—such as a new President and a couple of new corona vaccines—and, while neither of those things are going to be perfect, at least they’re positive signs, and I will choose to take them as such.  I wish a better 2021 to all of you, to all of us, and pretty much to all of the world.  I think we sort of kind of deserve it.

Isolation Report, Week #41

[You could also read the most recent report, or even start at the beginning.]

Happy pandemic holidays!  And if you’re pissed off that I didn’t say “merry pandemic Christmas,” I will refer you to my (now classic) happy whatever post.  And, also: suck my left nut.  Not the right one—I’m not rude or anything.  Just the left.

Also, it’s worth noting that that very post contains my first volume of Christmas music that I ever shared with you guys.  Back in those days—nine years ago now—I considered trying to share my mixes via some sort of Internet playlist ... Pandora, Rhapsody, what-have-you.  But the only decent option that would be free for everyone was YouTube, and, while there was a lot of music on YouTube, there was also a lot of music not on YouTube.  And, especially given my eclectic tastes, there was just too much that wasn’t already out there.  But much has changed: YouTube handles licensing for songs you upload differently nowadays, resulting in way more songs being uploaded, and it’s also easy to upload them yourself.  So there really is no excuse any more.

Thus, here you go: my inaugural holidy mix, as a YouTube playlist:

Yuletidal Pools I [featuring Michael Buble]

You’ve still got 5 days or so to listen to it.  And it’s quite peppy, and it’ll put you in the holiday spirit.  You know, unless you’re all grinchy.  Actually, there’s a few songs in there for the grinches out there as well.  Fun for the whole family.

Actually, I don’t know why I said that: there are quite a number of F-bombs in those songs.  So, you know: share with children at your own risk.  In my house, I just listened to my 8-year-old tell a mother on television who had just said “Language!” to her daughter “oh, just let her say ‘fuck’ ...” But, hey: I’m not in charge of your kids.  Probably you should be happy about that.

But, speaking of my kids, they’re all getting ready for Christmas, as they do, and (mostly) not letting the pandemic put a crimp in their holiday spirit.  We’ve been buying our gifts nearly 100% online for years anyhow, and we never travel for Christmas ... when you’re trying to organize 5 humans, 2 dogs, and 3 cats (and even more various animals in years past), the idea of traveling is pretty insane.  We just figure, if our families want to see us, they can drag their asses to our house.  We’ve got more room, and all our furniture is pre-chewed.  So far, not too many takers.  But we don’t mind.  Sometimes just having each other is enough.  This year, of course, we’re mostly sick of each other ... but I think we’ll be okay.

Hopefully.

Anyhow, you’re very unlikely to get any sort of substantial post next week, as it’s that fallow time between Christmas and New Year’s.  So I’ll avail myself of this oppotrunity to wish you merry christmahannukwanzaakah,^* and here’s hoping next year will be better.  I think it probably will be, but I don’t want to be too confident.  Don’t want to jinx it.  But, for your sake as well as ours, I’m definitely wishing it.  For us, for you, and for everyone around the world.  Just a little bit better ... doesn’t have to be a lot.  I’m not greedy.

__________

* Again and as always, ™ previous co-worker Jon Sime.

Keep Your Hands Off My Power Supply

Our power company thoughtfully turned off our power this week for 30 hours because it was windy.  They claim this was to prevent fires, but of course every time they do it, they turn the power back on and something blows and it starts a fire.  (This year was no exception, although the fire wasn’t anywhere near us this time at least.)  Personally, I think they’re doing it because of the Camp Fire, which nearly destroyed the town of Paradise (there’s actually a new documentary about it on Netflix, although I haven’t watched it).  Anyway, a judge held the power company responsible for starting the fire and it cost them a bunch of money, so ever since then they turn off the power when it’s windy ... but only to the primarly residential areas, so as to piss off the consumers and have them complain to their local governments in the hopes that they’ll finally get sick of it and pass some law or other that the power company can’t be held responsible for keeping the power on.  Notably, most of the primarily business areas (where the power company presumably makes the most money) are not turned off at these times—this week, there was about a 10-block-square chunk right in the center of our city which had power the whole time, which was sort of like adding insult to injury, even though it did make it nice to be able to drive about 2 minutes to someplace that had power.  Still, annoying to have a corporation thumb their noses at us so blatantly.

Of course, I have no proof of any of this, so you could accuse me of peddling a conspiracy theory.  I would counter, though, that it doesn’t take much of a “conspiracy”: just 4 or 5 folks at the power company who care more about the bottom line than than whether all my frozen fish food is turning into disgusting goop in my freezer.  And, honestly, if you don’t believe there are way more than that number of people with that attitude running the power companies in our country, then I have nothing more to say to you.  Well, except for this lovely bridge I’ve got to sell you.

Anyhow, it’s sort of put a crimp into my whole week, and I never really caught up.  This should be a “long post” week for me, but as last week’s “short post” was, in fact, quite long, I think I’ll just skip this week, except for the obligatory ranting above.  Which you’ve already suffered through enough, I’m sure.

Back next week for another virus isolation report.

Isolation Report, Week #27

[You could also read the most recent report, or even start at the beginning.]

Well, it’s been a few more weeks, and the world doesn’t seem to be getting any better.  Police officers keep killing innocent black people, Trump continues to do whatever the fuck he wants, and the only people who claim to have any chance at a vaccine any time soon are so unreliable as to make the prospect of taking a vaccine even scarier than not having one at all.

The only plus side whatsoever about the political situation is that Trump is apparently too stupid to stop doing skeevy shit for even a few days, so there are constant reminders about his unfitness for the presidency.  Of course, a majority of people voting against Trump is by no means a guarantee that he won’t win, as we all know from painful experience.  Nonetheless, it’s probably the best shot we have.

On the personal front, our guinea pig died a little over a week ago, despite an emergency trip to the vet, antibiotics, and feeding a liquid diet twice a day for several days.  The kids went to their first birthday party in months, although it was understandably small (i.e. attended by only the 3 families in our “social bubble”).  The PS/4 is still on the fritz, so it’s difficult to watch DVDs.  Work is going well, I suppose ... I mean, as well as one can expect given the prolonged lack of contact with my coworkers.  On the plus side, our work hired a comedian to do a Zoom show for us.  It ain’t the same as going out to a club with the folks from work, but it’s certainly better than nothing.  (And Adam was pretty funny, I thought.)

But we’re hanging in there, and certainly it could be worse.  And, you know ... only 3½ more months till this horrible, fucked up mess of a year is finally over.

Isolation Report, Week #24

[You could also read the most recent report, or even start at the beginning.]

Well, The Mother is back from Colorado, safe and sound.  And virus free?  It seems so, but she (and our littlest one) are staying even more out of the public than usual for the requisite 2 weeks, just to be sure.  It seemed that Southwest, at least, is doing a soft-of-decent job at trying to keep everyone safe(ish): they’re only flying 2 people to a row, and I believe the masks were required (of course our ladies would have done that anyway—heck, we even got some glasses for the little one on the off-chance that that’s helpful—but it’s nice to know everyone else will mask up as well).  The trip itself ... well, I’m sure many of you know how it feels to go home to visit your family in the best of times, much less when people are in and out of the hospital.  Not so much fun, overall, although it was nice that The Mother got to meet her neice for the first time.

Meanwhile I was stuck at home with our two older children, one of whom is ostensibly an adult, but neither of whom is noted for their motivation or pliability.  I believe I described it as like pushing elephants uphill—the classic “herding cats” didn’t really begin to cover it.  If my elder child ever figures out how to monetize talking people into going out to buy them food, they will soon be wealthy; if my middle child ever figures out how to redirect all that time spent complaining about doing a thing into just doing the thing and moving on with his life, he will soon find it nearly impossible to fill all the extra hours.  Still, it was only 10 days that I had to do it unaided, and I’m somewhat compensated by the fact that my children refuse to read this blog, so they can’t bitch at me for bitching about them.

Our politics continues to be somewhat depressing, as Trump’s obvious strategy of constantly inventing new scandals so that all the old ones get forgotten continues to work on a grander and grander scale.  Having gotten away with kidnapping people off the streets of Portland, he’s moved on to screwing up everyone’s mail delivery in the hopes that will tip the election in his favor (remember: that’s not just my opinion of his actions—he actually admitted it), talking about trying to delay the election, and—perhaps most bizarre for its banality in the face of his other actions—looking into having his face added to Mount Rushmore.  Sober people are talking and even writing about the possibility that Trump could refuse to leave office even if he loses.  Trevor Noah’s old jokes likening Trump to an African dictator really seem less and less funny all the time ...

Am I heartened by the official acceptance of the Democratic nomination by Joe Biden?  Honestly, not that much.  (For my level of enthusiasm for Biden—as well as the level of enthusiasm for the majority of voters, I suspect—I will refer you once again to The Daily Show ... they sum it up better than I ever coould.)  A bit more so by the choice of Kamala Harris, who I’ve always liked, even though of course she’s not perfect.  But, hey: at this point, if lack of perfection is the worst thing you’ve got going for you, you’re a fucking political rockstar.  While Biden may not get us anywhere much farther that out from under Trump—assuming he can even get us that far—there’s always the chance that Harris will be president soon afterward, and then we might see some real reforms to the horrific state of our political system.  But, you know, I ain’t holding my breath.

I’m also extremely amused by the people (Colbert, for instance) who talk about the fact that Donald Trump fears going to jail once he’s out of office.  Even if Trump were capable of understanding consequences—and he’s definitely not, as nothing he’s ever done, no matter how bad, has ever spawned any—this is laughable to me.  We don’t send rich white guys to prison.  Roger Stone isn’t going to prison.  Nixon didn’t go to prison—hell, even Spiro Agnew didn’t go to prison.  The concept that Trump, or even any member of his family, might go to prison one day is so remarkably naive as to be amusing ... you know, if it weren’t so depressing.

Likewise, the concept that DeJoy will be in any way inconvenienced by having to testify before Congress—if he even does!—is also just silly.  If he decides to go, he’ll pretend he doesn’t “recall” anything and nothing will change.  Hell, if he decided to go and say “hell yeah, I’m sabotaging the post office: whaddaya gonna do about it?” ... still, nothing would change.  Better yet, why should he bother to go at all?  There are no consequences for not showing up, apparently, so he could make better use of that time on a golf course or a private jet or somesuch.  People on the screens rant about how Congress should be “grilling” DeJoy, or “holding him to account” ... I say, why bother?  What difference would it make?  There are no consequences for corrupt officials lying before Congress, there are no consequences for corrupt officials failing to appear before Congress, there are no consequences for Presidents scheming to rig elections, there are no consequences for police officers shooting innocent civilians ... why do we even bother any more?  Safer to expect the worst, I think.  Perhaps then I might be pleasantly surprised.

But, as I said before: I ain’t holding my breath.

Isolation Report, Week #22

[You could also read the most recent report, or even start at the beginning.]

Today I drove to Burbank Airport (much closer and more sedate than LAX) and dropped off The Mother and my littlest one.  By this point, they’ve landed in Denver.  Flying during these trying times is certainly not something our family was looking forward to.  But due to some family medical issues, this trip really couldn’t be postponed.  So we put masks and goggles on them, we availed ourselves as often as possible of the many thoughtfully placed hand sanitizer stations, and we got in and out as quickly as possible.  That’s the best we could do.

I have to say, this was only my second time at Burbank, and obviously my first during the pandemic endtimes.  I was quite impressed at how helpful the airport and airline employees were.  When there were buttons to be pushed (such as the “walk” button for the crosswalk), there was nearly always a masked and gloved employee to push it for us.  We ended up touching nearly nohting the whole time, and everyone was super polite, not annoyed as you sometimes see with overworked transportation workers.  It was easy in, easy park, easy out.  I hope I get the opportunity to use Burbank more often.  You know, if flying ever becomes a thing we do on a regular basis again.

At $work, I was able to polish off a new project that came up with some urgency, so I’m pretty happy about that.  It wasn’t a difficult one, but it had deployment challenges, and a few times when I could have taken shortcuts: that is, doing lower quality work that could be completed faster.  But happily my bosses weren’t interested in that route, so we got it done in a relatively short timeline without compromising.  I was pretty pleased about that.

I haven’t been keeping up with the news as much due to Colbert being off for the past two weeks and Noah being off for the past one.  Possibly this is a good thing.  From what little I have heard, I’m probably better off taking a short break from it.

The grocery store Friday was the best it’s been for a while—possibly the best it’s been since pre-week-zero.  So that’s something to be appreciated.  Then there’s the fact that ... actually, come to think of it, that’s it.  That’s about all the silver linings I can come up with right now.

Recommendations for how to pass the time:

• I’ve finally gotten caught up on The Adventure Zone: “Graduation”.  If you haven’t checked it out yet, and even if you don’t normally care for D&D podcasts, I highly recommend it.  As good as Griffin is as a GM, I think Travis may be even better.
• Umbrella Academy season 2 is pretty friggin’ awesome—possibly even better than season 1.
• Portal Knights is still a great timewaster, although now my gaming partner is gone to Colorado.  No worries: my middle child just got a copy of PixelJunk Monsters 2.  We used to have a great time playing the original, years ago, so we’re hoping to recapture a bit of magic.  So far, it’s been pretty cool.
• Quibi, in its desperate attempt to remain (or maybe even become) relevant, has stumbled on a fun way to leverage the pandemic: they’ve done a “remake” of The Princess Bride, with different celebrites reprising the roles, each one shooting their part in their backyards or what-have-you.  Each scene features different actors for the same characters, and of course the whole thing has to be cut together to make it seem as if they’re interacting with each other when in actuality they’re nowhere near each other.  It’s all very low-tech, of course, and nothing matches (for instance, the Man in Black hands Vizzini a glass of red wine, but it’s become white wine by the time it gets to Vizzini’s hand), but that’s part of the charm.  Some of the casting is utterly inspired—Jack Black for the Man in Black’s climb up the cliffs of insanity, Dave Bautista for Fezzik’s rock smashing, Patton Oswalt for Vizzini’s battle of wits (for the princess? to the death?)—and it’s all great fun.  Of course, you can’t watch the whole thing, unless you have Quibi (which of course no one does), but you can watch what might be the best stretch of it on YouTube.
• I find that just sitting outside (by the pool, if it’s not too hot, or under the patio fan in the side yard) while working from home can be quite relaxing.  I have a new laptop and its battery life is much better than my old model, so I can be outside for quite a bit longer than I used to manage.  I’m still working, but just reminding myself that the outside world didn’t go away just because I never go outside any more can be good for the mental health, I think.

That’s enough for this week.  Shooting for a longer post next week.

Isolation Report, Week #20

[You could also read the most recent report, or even start at the beginning.]


I had to go to the doctor for the first time during the pandemic: apparently, I (probably) have diverticulitis.  My grandmother had this for many years, so it doesn’t surprise me too much.  Now I have to go find a gastroenterologist, and I’m sure there’s a colonoscopy in my future, which is never pleasant to look forward to.  In other sad news, The Mother‘s dad and brother aren’t doing well, so it looks like she will have to undertake a short plane ride in these troubled times, which definitely isn’t pleasant to look forward to.  Our littlest will accompany; neither of them would sleep much otherwise.

We subscribed to HBO Max; it was the same price we were paying for HBO Now, so we figured why not.  Mostly what’s on HBO Max is the same as what’s on regular HBO, but there are a few extra things.  One of which is Doom Patrol, one of those marvelously inventive comic book series (like Preacher or Legion) that is oh-so-much-more than a typical superhero story.  While he wasn’t the inventor of the Doom Patrol (a group which actually preceded the X-Men by a few months, despite seeming like a rip-off of them, which makes it decades old), it’s Grant Morrison we truly have to thank for this bit of Dadaesque surrealism (see also Happy!, on Netflix).  While the core four characters predated him, Morrison gave us Crazy Jane, Danny the Street, and the amazing Willoughby Kipling, expertly portrayed by Mark Sheppard (a character actor who’s made a career of brilliant recurring characters in great series such as Supernatural, Warehouse 13, and White Collar).  If you don’t like shows where you are constantly trying to figure out what the fuck is going on, definitely do not watch this one.

Let’s see ... what else ... we’ve been playing some family board games.  The Wizard Always Wins, Betrayal at House on the Hill, and Bears vs Babies; all highly recommended.  Also some card games—Minecraft Uno and Timeline—and of course the littlest one still sucks me into Portal Knights on a semi-regular basis.  That game is for me what I understand Animal Crossing is for other folks during these weird times: we mainly just battle things and go on quests so we can get more materials to build our awesome house.  It’s up to 3 stories now, with a rootfop observatory on top and a vegetable garden and pool out back.  There’s also a large bathroom with a red crystal ceiling, a little marketplace full of vendor stalls out front, and a cannon in the side yard that we occasionaly fire off the edge of the world just so we can watch the flaming cannonball shoot off into the abyss.  We really do spend a lot of time on it ... it’s weirdly soothing, vaguely creative, and surprisingly social.  Plus my kid loves it when we share decorating tips.

So things aren’t too bad on the personal front, although I grow ever more fearful at the state of our country.  While the rest of the world seems to have figured out how this whole virus thing works, we’re traveling backwards in time; as The Daily Show recently pointed out, we’ve now arrived at 1918, when the president said to ignore the doctors and scientists and encouraged large gatherings, people claimed that wearing masks to avoid infecting each other was unconstitutional, and localities triggered a second wave by reopening too soon.  Protests for racial justice continue unabated, but the news seems to have forgotten (or perhaps merely grown apathetic).  In point of fact, we’ve now progressed to the point where our president is sending in secret police to disappear people off the streets, and our system continues blithely on.  Is this what people felt like in Argentina in the 70s? in Russia in the 30s?  (I hesitate to mention Germany in the 40s due to Godwin’s law, but I’d be lying if I said it hadn’t crossed my mind.)  I bet you all those people in all those countries said the same thing we’re all apparently thinking: “obviously that could never happen here.”  I mean, I’m assuming people are thinking that, because otherwise why the fuck isn’t everyone in the country freaking the fuck out right now?  A couple of news stories that faded fast and a few sternly worded tweets from the opposition?  Is that really all the reaction we can get for secret fucking police? kidnapping people?  I dunno, man ... I’m not feeling particularly sanguine about the future.