Author: Ridley

Hey, you! You like spoilers? Good! Read on! If not, then scram! I’m literally going to spoil the entire show starting with the next paragraph, so if you don’t want to know what happened, get outta here! Alrighty, welcome to fight night 3 of season 5! The first two shows were heavy on brutal action and light on judges decisions. That’s not the case the time. Will it be “Duck was robbed” redux? You’ll just have to read on and find out. Fight 1: Copperhead v. Gigabyte Zach Goff’s Copperhead is probably the closest thing the fans will get to seeing Minotaur this year. It’s a 2-wheel drum spinner that hits hard enough to, well, we’ll get to that. John Mladenik’s Gigabyte is the Mother of All Full Body Spinners, a big, inverted wok with lots of bits mounted on the sides to smack you with. The only prediction I made for this one was that it wasn’t going to the judges. It didn’t go to the judges. Copperhead looks much the same, but the motor is definitely more impressive even if it doesn’t make the hornet-swarm buzz of Minotaur. The two bots spun up quickly and met in the middle of the arena. The self-righting bar on Gigabyte popped off almost immediately, apparently affecting their driving and allowing Copperhead to back them into a corner. A full-body spinner does not want to be backed into a corner. The next few seconds were marked primarily by Gigabyte bouncing off the sides of the arena. Copperhead had some time to spin up and hit Gigabyte hard enough to remote the shell from the body. My guess is that the self-righting bar was probably structurally important because that really shouldn’t have happened. The Copperhead folks were nice enough not to clobber Gigabytes exposed innards ad the judge counted the decapitated bot out. Winner: Copperhead (Knockout) Fight 2: SubZero v. JackPot Logan Davis is at the helm of Team SubZero this year. It’s a flipper that is best known for being able to take absurd amounts of damage as opposed to dealing it out. JackPot, driven by Jeff Waters, is a four wheel vertical spinner with two unusually large bars making it a sort of mini-HUGE. Interesting. The bots came out and met head on, with SubZero getting under JackPot and driving it around the arena. It seemed like a good time to use that flipper, but it never fired for some reason. JackPot was struggling to move in any meaningful way and couldn’t do a lot with the weapon except when it was riding on top of SubZero and whacking the top of the bot. It would have been interesting to see this one go three minutes to see how the judges would have called it, as SubZero was in complete control of the match but the primary weapon wasn’t work (note: this is foreshadowing). Eventually, SubZero’s motor gave out or it got hung up on an obstacle (it was hard to tell which) and it just stopped moving, giving JackPot the win in its first fight. Winner: JackPot (Knockout) Fight 3: Gemini v. Uppercut Oh, Gemini. Ace Shelander’s multi-bot, a pair of 125 lb. bar spinners, looks good on paper but it’s had serious problems in the arena. Alex Hattori’s Uppercut debuted last year and had a shockingly good run for a new bot. It’s an unusual vertical spinner, with a single “fist” and a counterweight, so there’s only one “side” to the weapon and, of course, it hits up instead of down. There’s no way I can make this recap a longer one. Gemini split to try to flank Uppercut, but Uppercut just went after the left bot and punted it twenty feet across the arena and over the wall. It turned, faced the other bot, and split it in two with one hit. Game over. After the match, Chris Rose asked Hattori about the fight and he just grinned and said “My bot is fun.” Yeah, it sure is. Winner: Uppercut (Knockout) Fight 4: Rotator v. BETA Victor Soto’s Rotator is a contender for the Giant Nut. It’s a well-armored bot that can mount weapons on either end and Victor is a fantastic driver, as he showed when he dismantled Tombstone last year. This is the first time we’ve seen John Reid’s BETA in a while. It’s the apex hammer bot, really hard to hurt, and it can actually cause a little damage with the hammer (which, for a hammer bot, is really impressive). The bots came out of the gate quickly and BETA just started pushing Rotator around. BETA had a huge armored wedge on it and Rotator couldn’t do a thing about. BETA just drove around shoving Rotator into the wall over and over. On the other hand, Rotator had a top-mounted disc spinner and the idea was that if the hammer hit it, the hammer would take more damage than their bot. The BETA folks agreed, and never fired the weapon. So, it was essentially a wedge bot pushing around a spinner that couldn’t do anything about it. Eventually, BETA shoved Rotator into a corner and the the spinner bot bounced off the wall and into BETA’s hammer, knocking the head of the hammer off. That was literally the only big “hit” of the fight and BETA immediately resumed shoving Rotator around. This one went to the judges and it was…not a popular decision. The judges split 2-1 in favor of BETA. I won’t get too deeply into Battlebots lore here, but, in order to discourage wedge bots, the scoring rules are heavily weighted in favor of bots that use their primary weapon. You can get 5 points for doing damage with your weapon, 3 points for aggression (and aggression with the weapon is favored), and 3 points for control of the match. Was this the correct decision? I think so, but it was tight. The only damage that was done was one hit by Rotator when it was bouncing around and on one wheel, and the rules state that the only damage that counts is damage inflicted by “…deliberate, controlled action,” and it would be a real stretch to say that was the case. On the other hand, BETA absolutely dominated the other two categories. Rotator might as well have…

If you don’t want spoilers, pray make haste and depart this page as there will be almost nothing that isn’t a spoiler. Seriously. Hie thee away! Get thee to a nunnery! All that stuff. Shoo! OK, with that out of the way, welcome to my take on Fight Night 2 of Battlebots this season. It was another two-hour episode that featured less action per minute of broadcast than an NFL football game. I get that they need to pay the bills, but this feels excessive. Fight 1: Shatter! v. Ghost Raptor Just like last week, we started off with an enticing fight. This one featured Adam Wrigley’s Shatter! facing off against Chuck Pitzer’s Ghost Raptor. Shatter! debuted last year and, for a hammer bot, it was really interesting, featuring ablative armor and unusual wheels. It didn’t perform especially well, but you got the sense they’d learn from those defeats. Ghost Raptor is an older bot that’s taken several years off, but it still looks competitive. It features a top-mounted bar spinner on an articulated mount, allowing it to change the angle of attack and do some lifting. Shatter! box-rushed Ghost Raptor because that’s what you do against spinners and everyone knows it. The hammer scored a couple of early hits and it looks like a much more threatening weapon than it did last year, when the head actually fell off one time. Ghost Raptor was dazed by the early blows and attempted to out-maneuver Shatter!, which wasn’t going to happen, and to push the hammer bot around, which did. But, the damage from those early hits was too much and Ghost Raptor just stopped moving. Wrigley explained afterwards that, based on what he could see, there was no shock absorption between the spinner and the internals, so mashing the spinning bar could knock stuff loose on the inside. It looked like that was exactly what happened. I like the way this guy thinks. Winner: Shatter! (Knockout) Fight 2: Ribbot v. Tracer Last year, David Jin’s Ribbot, covered in frog-shaped green foam, looked like one of those ridiculous gimmick bots like Royale with Cheese that was fun to look at but served little function other than a punching bag. After they walloped End Game, you kind of had to take them seriously. This was the first year competing for Jason Woods’ Tracer, but he’s been in the pits for ten years so it’s not like he was a newbie. The concept behind Tracer seemed to be “Duck, but with a vertical bar spinner.” The bot was built to be indestructible first and damaging second. Ribbot, a Swiss Army bot, came out with their undercutter, a low mounted disc spinner. Ribbot tried to get around the side of Tracer, but Tracer was more maneuverable than they had expected and they wound up going weapon-to-weapon. After a nervy couple of seconds, both bots were back at it. Ribbot swung around and caught tracer on left side of their front shield, flipping their opponent on its back. In theory, Tracer could self-right by using the spinner, but that almost never works and such was the case here as the little green frog that could claimed another victim. Winner: Ribbot (Knockout) Fight 3: Kraken v. Black Dragon Fun fight, this one. This is the third year for Matthew Spurk’s Kraken, a bot that barely competed the first time out but improved mightily in their second year. It’s a control bot with huge front jaws and a couple of teeth. Gabriel Telles brought Black Dragon back for a second year. It’s not a revolutionary bot; it’s a vertical spinner, but last year it showed a good combination of power, reliability and quickness on it’s way to the Final 16. Kraken performed an immediate box rush because, duh, and was able to get Black Dragon in its jaws almost immediately. However, Black Dragon went with their lightest spinners, a pair of vertical discs instead of the drum they usually use, and they did this in order to increase their top armor. This mean that, while Kraken could hold Black Dragon, it couldn’t really damage it. Kraken did manage to burn a belt off of Black Dragon, but most of the damage was done to Kraken’s teeth (later, tooth) when the two of them came together. The other issue Kraken had was that it couldn’t get Black Dragon’s back wheels off the ground, so even when the Brazilian bot was clamped, it could still push Kraken around the box. This one went the distance and, honestly, I could see it go either way. Black Dragon did a little more damage, but Kraken exhibited more control The judges were split, but Black Dragon was declared the winner. Winner: Black Dragon (Spit decision) Fight 4: HUGE v. Mammoth This fight right here is why you should watch Battlebots. HUGE made a, um, huge splash when it debuted because it was so much bigger than the other bots. It’s a giant vertical bar spinner mounted between two wagon wheels. It looks like a joke, but it most certainly is not and it has clobbered some very good bots (ask Bronco). Ricky Willems saw HUGE and said “Hold my beer” and built Mammoth, a bot that stands 6’4” and shovels opponents out of the box. This fight was nuts. The two of them came together right off the bat. Mammoth smacked HUGE, but HUGE’s spinner flipped Mammoth completely off the ground, bending its weapon in the process. This happened several times and somehow, both bots survived and landed on their wheels. I’ve never seen anything like it. It looked like HUGE had this one under control, or, at least, like it was going to be the only bot able to do any damage. But, while the big spinner bot is surprisingly nimble, it doesn’t have great traction. Eventually, Mammoth was able to get HUGE into the corner and prevent it from getting its weapon up to speed and squared up for another hit. The big shovel/lifter/spinner on Mammoth kept whacking HUGE and eventually got one of HUGE’s wheels out of the box and that was that. In the post-fight breakdown, Willems showed just how much damage he’d taken: Both structural support bars had holes in them and HUGE missed knocking his weapon chain off by less than…

Well, the greatest sport known to humanity is back and…it’s wow. I’m not going to say that Battlebots will be the best thing that happens in 2020, but I’m not going to say it won’t be. The format is essentially the same: Two 250 pound robots bashing each other until one of them is too damaged to continue or three minutes pass. There are a couple of new wrinkles. Robots without wheels can be a lot bigger (500 pounds, I think), there’s no audience, and they’ve upgraded the hazards inside the battlebox so they’re presumably more than just nuisances. Other than that? It’s Battlebots. What more do you want? There will be spoilers here. There will be so many spoilers. There will be very little that is not spoiler. If you don’t want to know how the fights turned out, you are in the wrong place. OK, now that we’re clear, let’s go over the fights in this 2 hour season opener! Fight 1: Sawblaze v. Whiplash This promised to be a heck of a fight. Jamison Go’s Sawblaze made the quarterfinals last year and Jeff Vasquez’ Whiplash made the semifinals. Go and Vasquez are two of the best drivers around and their bots are among the most reliable and maneuverable, although neither of them are huge hitters. Or, at least, they weren’t last year. Sawblaze somehow got lower to the ground than last year, and the dustpan forks on the front of it pushed Whiplash around for most of the early going. Whiplash got in a couple of hits with their articulated spinner, but they never really squared up on Sawblaze and, even after taking out one of their opponents’ tires, couldn’t win the shoving match. Last year, Sawblaze introduced a new type of weapon: The hammer-saw. Instead of just using a sawblade on an arm that swung down on the top of their foes, they added some weight to the blade and swung the it with a great deal more force. It had never been especially destructive, but this time, with Whiplash pinned against the screws, Sawblaze brought the weapon down and split the top armor plate. Something important (and probably expensive) broke in Whiplash as it was rendered immobile and counted out. Winner: Sawblaze (knockout) Fight 2: MatCatter v. Fusion I had MadCatter figured as a sacrificial lamb for the new bot from Team Whyachi. Fusion is a combination spinner; horizontal on one side and vertical on the other. The Ewert family had been pretty successful introducing new bots (check out Hydra last year), and Fusion looked like a good one. Meanwhile, Madcatter looked like…a cat. A cat with a vertical spinner and a kind of goofy paw-lifter device, but still…it didn’t look like it could live up to Martin Mason’s enthusiasm (not that anything could). MadCatter performed the mother of all box rushes, sprinting across the box and bopping Fusion before either of them could get their spinners up to speed. The initial hit seemed to take all the speed out of MadCatter, but Fusion wasn’t exactly running rings around them. In fact, it was MadCatter that was clearly on top, picking its spots, getting under Fusion, and delivering hits and trying fruitlessly to flip the other bot. The cat wasn’t doing a lot, but it was the only bot doing anything. Fusion was struggling mightily with things like “going in a straight line” and eventually started smoking, which is often a precursor to stopping entirely. That was the case here and the bot I thought was just there to provide an opponent won a pretty convincing victory. Winner: MadCatter (knockout) Fight 3: Axe Backwards v. Malice Speaking of sacrificial lambs: Kurt Durjan’s Axe Backwards. This genuinely interesting looking bot, a full-body vertical spinner, has been dissected by some very ordinary bots and just destroyed by some of the good ones. Malice, driven by rookie Bunny Sauriol, was an unknown quantity, but the 65 pound horizontal drum spinner looked menacing enough to make me think the newbie would make short work of Axe Backwards. Kurt taunted Bunny during the countdown, but once the fight started, the roles reversed immediately. A single hit effectively ended Axe Backwards as a mobile piece of machinery. Malice could have just pounded Axe Backwards to a pulp, but after getting in a couple more shots, she backed off and let the referee count out the flaming wreck of little plastic-y axes. Winner: Malice (knockout) Fight 4: Bloodsport v. Skorpios Justin Marple’s Bloodsport had an impressive debut last year, albeit against some seriously inept bots (thankfully, the multi-bot trend has almost completely died out). Zach Lyttle’s Skorpios went a long way in the tournament last year largely by being very well-driven and very hard to hurt, but without doing much in the way of damage. I had Skorpios as the favorite based on what I saw of Bloodsport last year, but this year’s version is a very different bot. The horizontal lawnmower blade was replaced by a spinning disk which was clever, because Skorpios’ already weak weapon was never going to get through it without destroying it’s own saw. This proved to be the case, as the first time Skorpios brought the saw down, it was bent and rendered ineffective almost immediately. Bloodsport also surprised me by managed to get under Skorpios, something that very few bots have managed. There were no huge hits, but it was a death by a thousand cuts as Bloodsport took apart Skorpios’ front wedge and kept pounding the underside of one of the lowest bots around. Eventually, Skorpios just stopped moving and that has traditionally been something that was very difficult to achieve. Impressive. Winner: Bloodsport (knockout) Fight 5: Captain Shredderator v. Lock-Jaw Brian Nave’s Captain Shredderator has been around forever now, and very little has changed. It’s a brutal full body spinner that can do tremendous damage to an opponent while doing as much, or more, damage to itself. There was a lot of talk pre-match about how he’d simplified the bot to try to make it more reliable. In the other corner was another known quantity: Donald Hutson’s Lock-Jaw. It looked pretty much the same as always, but apparently, this was a ground-up rebuild. I figured Lock-Jaw had this one in the bag on theory that betting on the…

I’m writing today from my home office. I haven’t been able to say that since…2001? In any case, it’s been a while and it’s nice not to be dragging Nicole to work with me and making her put up with whatever stress I’m feeling. My blind kitty has adjusted marvelously and he’s sleeping in his bed next to my desk. This isn’t bad. So, let me briefly go over how we got here. This summer, during the lockdown, our cashflow was actually pretty good since we weren’t (and still aren’t) going anywhere near restaurants. We figured that we needed a bigger place than the one bedroom apartment we were in if I was going to be working from home for the foreseeable future. We started looking at two bedroom apartments and the lighbulb lit up. “We can’t afford to live here, but what if we bought a house close to here, close enough that I could come into town a few times a week? Was our credit good enough? Could we afford it? Were there any places nearby where we would be happy living? At the time we started looking, the answers were “no,” “no,” and “who knows?” But, with decent cashflow, we were making inroads on the credit. We started looking at some of the towns around here and found some that would work (and many more that wouldn’t-anything requiring that I get on the interstate wasn’t going to work). Then we found a place we really liked and everything to a lot more real. We decided to cash in our savings, get our credit card usage under control, and make sure we had enough on hand for putting a chunk down and then moving. It takes a while for the credit reporting places to show the changes and, in that time, we missed out on the place we’d found (we dubbed it “The Parsonage” because it was between a church and a library and had no neighbors at all…sigh). Back to the drawing board. Unfortunately, a lot of other people were having the same thoughts we were and prices were going up at a crazy rate. We found some great places in bad locations, so lousy places in good locations, and some great places in great location that were just out of our range. It was getting frustrating as it felt like the window was closing. But then (and I can’t believe I’m starting a paragraph with “but then…”), Nicole found a house that had been listed an hour earlier. She set up a showing for the next day and then told me “I found it.” Sure enough, she had: A house in a town we liked that had a style we loved and at a price we could swing. We met the realtor at the house and within about 5 minutes we were ready to make an offer. It was a good thing we didn’t wait as there were several offers on the first day, but ours was accepted, so…huzzah! The next bit is crazy. We were pre-approved for the amount, but we now had to get down to locking in an interest rate and…holy smokes, interest rates are nothing right now. I do not have what anyone would mistake for good credit and we still came in south of 3 percent. We started giggling because that was beyond our wildest hopes (with the caveat that we have few wild hopes regarding percentages). And here we are, a month later, and we’re in the place and it feels pretty great. We got incredibly lucky in that a lot of dominoes fell precisely where we needed them to to make this work. The long and the short of it is that we’ll be paying substantially less on our mortgage than we were paying in rent on our one bedroom apartment. We got really lucky. After a crazy, awful, frustrating, scary year, we seem to have landed no only on our feet but in a better life as well. Things could have been very different. I am not particularly deft with money (those of you who know me well may enjoy your chuckle at the degree to which I am understating things) and I was afraid that I had permanently locked myself into renting. It can be cheaper to own, but you have to be able to save money to buy and it’s hard to do that when you’re renting…it’s a hell of a treadmill. I’ll leave with this: If you have an opportunity and urge to buy, or you are in a position to refinance, now is a great time to do so. I’d never paid much attention to interest rates (see above paragraph) but apparently they’re as low now as they’ve been in the last fifty years. A very generic picture of the back yard and some beautiful sunlight.

So, there’s a lot going on, huh? Before I get heavy on ya, here’s Jerry Jeff covering Tom Waits because you deserve something nice: So, I’m going on very little sleep because my kitty’s not doing so great. The good news is it’s mostly a lot of little things rather thing one big and very bad thing. When they’re 17 years old or so, you take what wins you can get. He’s got conjunctivitis in one eye, he’s got detached retinas (which we knew, but still) but there’s no pressure from anything nasty growing behind the eyes, so that’s good. But, he’s got hypertension and a little infection too. The net of this is that he’s now on multiple medications and he’s not super duper happy about anything and he’s not terribly energetic right now. But, he’s doing better and starting to act like himself again, so that makes the three vet visits, including one to an emergency 24 hour clinic, well worth it. The (other) old man in all his glory. There was an election. Joe Biden won the election. We’ll see what happens next, but I would regard all threats as serious and keep an eye on things. I’m not comfortable yet that the result will be accepted. In another good result, Austin approved the transit bill which means more trains. This is good news. It won’t do me any good personally, but it’ll be very good for a lot of people and well worth the investment. John Stuart Mill would approve. I’m just exhausted right now. In addition to work (trending positive), the cat (same), and the nation (mostly positive with a chance of disaster), we closed on a house today. Somehow I don’t think I’ll be getting any more sleep for the next month or so. Finally, I’d like to give a little shout-out to our car dealership, Roger Beasley Mazda. We had a slow leak in a tire and we’re concerned we needed new ones. We took it the dealership, told them we were prepared for whatever we needed (got a lot of driving coming up), and they took a look and said “It’s a minor leak…we’ll patch it up for ya. $28.” As my mother has said and will surely say again, “You can’t beat that with a stick!” Yeah, that’s where I get it from. Sorry. -RK

Rehabilitating Presidents’ bad deeds is an American tradition at least as old as I am. Apparently, we don’t like thinking that these harmless-looking old men did truly monstrous things while they were holding the highest office in the land. Maybe we look at them now and think they couldn’t possibly have overseen a domestic spying regime and unprecedented government secrecy (Obama), manufacturing false evidence to start a war and codifying torture (W), transferring wealth to the wealthy while creating draconian crime laws (Clinton), or, cripes, just about everything that Reagan did. Traditionally, we wait a little while before whitewashing their reputations and try to make them respectable to a broader audience. It’s sort of an unspoken thing, and I guess unspoken things don’t apply to one Donald J. Trump because dang, folks are already trying to make a softer, cuddlier Trump and he hasn’t even conceded defeat yet. “He’s not evil, he’s just a regular president with some quirks and a unique style of communication, and he’s definitely not a fascist.” Yeah, no. Dude is straight-up a fascist. I wanted to get this into writing because, if left to the fuzzy memories of days gone by, this attempt to revise the history of the Trump administration might go unchecked. Memory is not reliable, and history books have done a terrible job of detailing the flaws of past presidents and I can say that because I’m old enough to have voted from some of ‘em who have since had their halos polished. There are no angels in the Oval Office, but even with that caveat, Trump is an entirely unique species of evil. Helpfully, the Washington Post took it upon themselves to ask “Is Trump A Fascist?” back in 2016 and then to revise their findings in August of 2020. Unhelpfully, they graded him on a pretty subjective scale of one to four “Mussolinis.” Sigh. There’s still some good stuff in the article, but I’ll summarize it: In 2016, they said “eh, not really” and in 2020 it was more of a “well, there are still a couple of boxes his doesn’t tick but it hasn’t been for lack of trying, so he’s not a fascist, but he’s still the greatest threat to our democracy in a long, long time.” I don’t find the idea that “Well, he’s tried to do fascist things but people around him stopped him” to be especially exonerating. That’s especially true since those people tend to get fired for preventing him from sending active duty U.S. troops into U.S. cities to put down protests. In a somewhat-functional government, it takes time for fascism to take hold because you can’t replace everyone in the bureaucracy overnight with people who are loyal to Dear Leader. It takes time, so it’s not surprising that there are still some checks and balances against his fascist impulses. That’s not to say the process isn’t moving along at alarming speed. The President has been systematically removing people who aren’t, above all else, loyal to him personally. That’s not normal, and it’s not healthy. Ideally, you want people who put the country first. Failing that, you usually wind up with party apparats. Demanding loyalty to one’s person is, in fact, a sign of fascism and I’ve never seen anything remotely like it in my adult life. EDIT: I could do an entire post of the abuse of the Department of Justice and the office of the Attorney General. This tidbit is going to be relevant for the next few months, I reckon. Of course, that’s not as shocking as when he said that the Constitution grants him the authority to do whatever he wants. Again, this is not normal behavior from a president and not something you can just write off as “one of his quirks.” This is a claim to absolute power. This is a big deal. It’s also, sing along as I’m sure you know the words, fascism. It’s a good thing we have the courts, huh? Or, at least, we have the ones that haven’t been filled with Trump loyalists, right? It turns out that he doesn’t believe that he can be prosecuted, either. So, he’s answerable to no one and is filling all the positions that might challenge his authority with people loyal to him personally. Can we talk about the rallies? Those are weird, right? I don’t remember any other president holding rallies for themselves throughout their entire term. I must emphasize that these aren’t “America” rallies or even “Republican” rallies; they’re just Trump rallies. Those rallies turn into militias… fuck it, no, they’re not “militias,” they’re just gangs…flying the Trump flag and going into cities. They say they’re going to “keep the peace,” but they always seem to provoke violence rather than reduce it. The President encourages them and invariably takes the side of his supporters when there’s an incident, no matter who fires and who takes the bullet. Finally, the really weird thing about rushing to rehabilitate Trump is that he’s not gone yet and I won’t believe he’s gone until Biden in inaugurated. He’s filing lawsuits, sending out false information to his supporters, and basically doing everything he can to undermine confidence in the results of the election. Presumably, the game is to create enough chaos and manufacture enough uncertainty in the results that the Supreme Court will have a pretext to step in and hand him the job. So, yeah, the dude is a fascist. He’s not the most effective one ever, but he’s come a long way in four years and if he wrests another four somehow, it’s hard to see how it won’t be significantly worse. Don’t let anyone tell you “he was pretty much like other presidents.” It’s not true, and anyone hawking that line is trying to sell you something. -RK P.S. Kids in cages. I’ve heard people say “Well, if Trump is a fascist for putting kids in cages, then so was Obama!” A couple of notes on that one. First, while it’s an unquestionably monstrous thing to put kids in cages regardless of who is doing it, that’s not really a measure of “fascism.” Secondly, when the courts told Obama he had to stop doing it, he did, because he wasn’t a fascist. Fascists don’t believe the law applies to them. Trump just…

It occurred to me tonight that the most fun jobs I’ve ever had in my life were the ones I didn’t actually need. They were seconds jobs and/or side hustles that supplemented the income or at least gave me an outlet to do something I enjoyed when they didn’t (and yes, I understand that this makes for an extremely loose definition of “job,” but just go with it). Warning: I am going to be extremely vague as to the specific nature of the jobs for reasons. Nothing illegal, but there are some things I’m not inclined to share. I can only think of one that went bad, and that was largely due to it being a job with part time pay and full time hours, but even that would should have worked it. I was working in a dream industry for me, but the timing was wrong and it wound up being more stressful than it should have been. It took enough of a toll on me that my main gig was in put into jeopardy and there was no opportunity for growth in the second job, so I had to give it up. The others, though? They’ve been a blast. I worked in a record store when I had another job. I needed the money, but I could have just taken more work at my main job and gotten by. I love music, I love helping people find music, and the fact that I didn’t need this particular gig made it almost completely stress-free. It was just fun with a little money on the side. I worked on a book with my father back in a while back and it was brutal. This would have been during the “early home computer and internet” era. I was in charge of the graphics and layouts, and the publisher wouldn’t take emailed files at this time, so I had to print every page out on my little Panasonic KX-P4410 and then we’d drive to the airport to get to drop the pages off at FedEx right before midnight. This was four or five times a week and I had a full-time job. But, you know what? It was a blast. I’d do it again. I’m currently writing for one of the site in the Vox empire a couple of times a week. The pay is…heh…it’s Vox. That’s OK, though. I get to write and publish stuff and it’s fun and I get to be terribly silly with it because it’s not like they have a great deal of leverage. I absolutely love doing it, but if it disappeared tomorrow, it wouldn’t materially change my financial situation. The point of all of this is not “People should take second jobs.” Lots of folks have to take second jobs (I’ve been there) and that’s no fun. The point is a little hazier: A job you don’t need, one you can leave any time, can be a lot more fun than one you have to have. There’s now “Paycheck and Benefits of Damocles” hanging over your head. You’re on much more equal standing with your employer when you don’t have to be there. Imagine a universal basic income that allowed people to only work when and where they wanted to. Helluva nice dream, isn’t it? -RK

Hi. So, I’m going to make a habit of this and I gotta start somewhere. This is a snippet of a post, but it’s a true story and it seems like it is, or could wind up being, relevant. Back in the late 1990s, my father suggested that I check out his favorite web site. It was…not my personal favorite. It was about as far right-wing as you could go without being off the charts. He pitched it as a frank discussion of intellectual conservatism, as opposed to what was practiced by the Republican party. If you squinted, you could kind of see it from that angle, but really, it was just a bunch of folks who didn’t think the Republican party went nearly far enough if you know what I mean. Anyway, the 2000 election rolled around and it was one of the sites I kept tabs on to see what their take was. It was interesting. Believe it or not, there was a very real possibility that Al Gore would wind up winning the electoral college while George W. Bush took the popular vote. For a good part of the night, that seemed the most likely scenario. They. Went. Ballistic. Pages after pages of people claiming they would take up arms and take to the streets if “the will of the people” was overturned by a relic of the 18th century. They were serious. They weren’t “armed militias going to cities the President was mad at” serious, but they certainly weren’t having a laugh either. They fucking hated the Electoral College. Until, of course, they didn’t. As things turned out, Gore won the popular vote and Bush won the EC. All threats of violence were scrubbed from the site (interestingly, their willingness to scrub the site of things they didn’t like wound up being the basis for a precedent-setting lawsuit which they lost, but that’s another story). All the subsequent posts were about the “wisdom of the Founding Fathers” and how prescient their decision to create the Electoral College was. So, the lesson I learned from all this was: All that constitutional originalism stuff is hooey. They love whatever wins for their side. That’s the alpha and the omega of their political philosophy. All of the philosophical underpinnings are just retcons to back up anything that lets them win. Is the same true of the other side? Probably? It’s hard to say because, as a member of “the other side” my objectivity is not what it should be. Also, you have to remember that in 2000, there was nothing remotely close to a leftist online presence that could be compared to the “Fans of Rush Limbaugh” sites. The left couldn’t get anywhere near the enthusiasm required to build a proper echo chamber back then. Now, as of this minute and without having seen the result of counting and re-counting the ballots or the outcome of the barrage of lawsuits we’re going to see, it doesn’t look like the Electoral College is going to make a difference here. It appears as though Joe Biden will win both the popular vote and the EC, which simplifies matters a little. But, if you run into folks claiming that the Electoral College is some sort of God-given instrument of His Infinite Wisdom, I encourage you to remember this story and, if you’re of a mind to do so, call them out on their b.s. -R.K.

*deep breath* OK, so, there’s been a lot going on. Let’s do this. So, it turns out that working from home for an extended period of time in a tiny apartment is tough. Tough on me and tough on Nicole. The only reasonable work space for me is right in the middle of the living room which is a cramped space and it is certainly cramping for Nicole. Given that no one is likely to be working in an office any time soon (or, ffs, they shouldn’t be), we started looking at larger apartments that weren’t as centrally located. This place is a great jumping off point for taking advantage of the city, but there’s naught to take advantage of these days, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense for us right. But then, we had a brainstorm: “Would it make more sense to buy a house?” With the largely-remote nature of work extending into the foreseeable future, we had the opportunity to look outside of town. It turns out that this city is expensive to live in, but there are places within an hour of town that are more affordable and awfully nice. We battened down the hatches, paid some loans off, learned that paying off loans is dumb if you’re trying to work on your credit score, and got ourselves ready to meet with the bank to get a loan. We made an appointment and then… …I was furloughed the day before the meeting. That changed things a bit. At least we’d paid down some cards so we were able to get by, but it did put buying a house on hold and put us in an awkward position with regards to renewing our lease. Fortunately, I got an interview almost immediately. I wound up getting five interviews and a verbal offer, so things looked good, but somewhere between the verbal and the written, something changed and that fell through. This put us in an unfortunate position. The unemployment office here won’t answer their phone, so cash flow was becoming problematic. We were, however, fortunate. My old job decided that they were ready to bring me back so I restarted there this Monday. Phew. So, we got lucky. After a little recovery time, we should be OK and should be able to get moving again shortly. In other news, my boy is getting old. At some point in July, he seemed to be having trouble with his vision. This came to a head when I pulled out his favorite toy, the red laser. The sound of me picking up the laser always gets his attention, and this time was no different. But, when I turned the light on and started moving it around, he couldn’t see it at all. He just looked up at me and meowed, and I started crying because, damn, my cat couldn’t play with his favorite toy anymore. He’s not 100% blind, but it’s pretty close. We have to take care to not to move stuff around to much, but otherwise, he’s not terribly inconvenienced. He jumps up on the cat tree and on the bed like it’s no big thing. Sure, he runs into door sometimes, but otherwise, he’s doing OK. Anything else? Not a lot, I mean, when you’re unemployed, you kind of go to ground and try to conserve energy and resources. My secondary gig is still going, and that’s a lot of fun even if it isn’t terribly financially rewarding. The political landscape isn’t helping, nor is the ongoing pandemic and, I feel for everyone in California because it’s smoky here. Oh, and hurricanes and…jeez, this has been a bad year. Oh, and I’m pretty allergy prone, so with all the crud in the air, I’ve had post-nasal drip and a dryish-cough for some time now. Since my immune system is being kept locked down, the consensus was that I probably ought to get myself tested for COVID. So…I did. The negative result didn’t surprise me, but I did feel a little bit of relief. Anyway, that’s where I am now. I didn’t want to say anything until a couple of balls in the air landed. Fortunately, they landed relatively gracefully and without breakage. Thanks for all the concern and sorry for being vague last week, but, well, y’all know me. “Vague” is sort of my thing. -RK

Before I get started, I’ll acknowledge that I’ve been away for a bit. Things have been chaotic and that chaos hasn’t subsided yet, although it may soon. I apologize for being vague, but I’ll clarify when the dust settles. I have a lot to say, but that’s not what this post is about. This is going to be the niche-iest of the niche-y: My thoughts on a hardware device for learning how synthesizers work! I was 18 when I got my first “real” synthesizer, and by “real” I mean that it allowed me to build sounds from scratch as opposed to just selecting presets like “tuba” and “harpsichord.” Arnold and Morgan up in Dallas had a stack of Roland SH-101 synths that they were trying to clear out, so they’d been marked down to $199 new. I literally had no clue what to do with it. There were some helpful illustrations in the back of the manual showing how to make an “organ” sound or “synth lead” by manipulating the settings, But, I didn’t know what a “DCO” was or what the different wave shapes meant. I didn’t really understand what a filter was, or how it worked with resonance, and I absolutely couldn’t have explained an ADSR envelope. But, in a sense, I was very fortunate. The SH-101 was a very simple machine with limited options and things laid out in a fairly intuitive fashion. If I worked left-to-right with the sliders and knobs, I could get an idea of how the different settings changed the sound. That was the beginning of what has been a very long love affair with electronic music. So, recently, I’ve been wondering: What would be the best synthesizer to teach the basics of analog subtractive synthesis? We’re in a golden era of neat, affordable hardware, but none of it seems really aimed at learning the basics. There’s nothing I’d sell to schools as the machine for learning how this stuff works. Ideally, here’s what I would look for: * Analog-style workflow* 37 or more full-sized keys* 4 note polyphony?* All parameters controlled by a knob or a slider (no “menu diving”)* No features beyond what is needed to learn the basics* One speaker and optional battery power for portability?* The ability to save a small number of patches because starting from scratch every time gets old* An inviting, intuitive front panel* MIDI implementation* The lowest price possible Now, there’s an elephant in the room here. Why not just use softsynths on a laptop with a MIDI controller keyboard? That’d be a lot cheaper (at least, if you don’t count the price of the laptop). Honestly, that’s not a bad idea. I’d prefer not to go that route because I think there’s real value in touching the sliders and knobs and hearing how that changes the sounds. There’s more of a remove if you’re using the mouse to do it. Maybe that’s just me showing my age, but that’s my thinking. Does anything like this currently exist? Not that I’ve found, but there are quite a few that are close. The Korg Minilogue has small keys and way to many features. The Arturia Minibrute is monophonic, but it ticks a lot of the boxes. But…these are pro-level machines and, what makes them attractive to that set is that they can do a great deal more than I’m looking for here. The closest to this platonic idea is Roland’s old Juno 106. Just look at this beauty: It may not look like it, but that is a remarkably uncluttered panel and it’s really attractive, too. This was Roland’s entry-level polyphonic synth back in the day, a cheaper alternative to their coveted Jupiter line. The Junos absolutely sold like mad, in no small part because they were so simple. You could learn everything there was to learn about them fairly quickly, which made sound creation much faster and easier. So why isn’t this my model learning synth? Because they’re very, very expensive these days and no one has gotten around to cloning them yet (Uli, I’m looking at you!). A Juno in good condition would go for a couple thousand dollars now and, because they’re vintage, they take some care to maintain as well (although less than most of the other synths of that era). Speaking of Uli Behringer, his company seems the most likely to come up with something like this. They’ve made a name for themselves cloning vintage gear and selling it much cheaper than the original. Their versions of the Minimoog, Octave Cat, and Sequential Pro-One are all outstanding, but to me, the interesting one is the MS-1, their clone of the Roland SH-101. Behringer have added some features which excite me as a gear-loving nerd, but defeat what I’m going after here. We don’t need FM synthesis for our learning machine. We need, essentially, the workflow of the SH-101 (which was nearly identical to that of the Juno), stripping out the bells and whistles, adding a few keys, and one internal speaker, and I think you’re there. Hey, turns out you CAN do edits in MS-Paint. You probably shouldn’t, though… This is my first attempt at re-arranging the MS-1 as the MS-L (for learning!). I’ve moved a few things around so they make more sense to me. I’ve removed the sequencer, the FM, the pitch wheel, and left the Arturia-style waveform mixer because that’s really nice. My uneducated hope is that something like this could be made with digital oscillators and filters instead of analog because that should bring the price down and make it more stable in the long run. The goal here isn’t to produce an analog synth; it’s to produce a hardware device that teaches the basics of analog synthesis. Is there a demand for this sort of thing? Damned if I know! I know I would have loved a class that taught me this stuff and encouraged me to play with sound design. Maybe, though, it’s just too niche and not worth the investment. It may be that this sort of thing wouldn’t have the appeal of a class in production, sampling, looping, and using a digital audio workstation. It would be very much like me to come up with an idea that would have been genius 30 years ago. Anyway, that’s what’s…