Journal – Page 4 – Stay With Me, Go Places

British Library image titled "Shelling The Houses of Parliament" (see page 147. Big Ben is falling to the left.

Battlebots: Season 8, Week 1

Posted on 9 January, 20239 January, 2023 by Ridley

Hi! There are oh so many spoilers in what follows. So. Many. Spoilers. Pretty much “Oops, All Spoilers!” Don’t read any more if you haven’t seen the episode yet and plan to. So, hi! Welcome to my first recap of the first episode of Battlebots Season 8 (or Season 7…Amazon lists it as season 8, so that’s what I’m going with). If you like watching people pit two 250 lb. machines against each other, you’ll probably like Battlebots. No other sport comes close for sheer destruction. It’s great; it’s all about brains until you get your robot in the box, and then it’s just sheer power. The new season looks like it’ll be played by largely the same rules as the last one, and in a very similar battlebox. There are kill saws (that don’t kill), screws (that just tangle your robot up sometimes), hammers (that don’t do anything), and an “upper deck” for…reasons? I don’t know. It’s easy to forget just how heavy these things are when they’re tossing each other 20 feet in the air (and yes, they most definitely do that). These things are scary. They can hurt you. I know, because the legendary Ray Billings suffered an injury working on his equally legendary Tombstone and won’t be able to participate this year. That a huge loss for the sport, but mostly, I just hope Ray’s OK whether he ever participates again or not. So, here’s my breakdown of the first week’s fights. The bots have 3 minutes to fight. If they knock out the other bot, then they win. If both bots are still standing after 3 minutes, then it goes to the judges. You do NOT want it to go to the judges because the judging is inscrutable. No scruting these judges. Every bot will fight four times, and then at the end of the regular season, 16 (or 17?) will be selected to enter the championship tournament. If you want to know more, here’s the official site. Now, on to the fights! Witch Doctor v. Ribbot Heck of a way to start the new season: Two powerful vertical spinners and (mostly) durable four-wheel body configurations. Both of these bots are likely to make the tournament, so this was a good test for both of ’em. With two such evenly matched robots, the strategies were likewise similar. They went face to face like two bulls and tried to get an angle that would allow them to hit their opponent without getting hit. Michael Gellatly, Witch Doctor’s driver, won the driving battle and got the first big hit on Ribbot. The little froggy flew through the air and Witch Doctor was there each time to smack Ribbot again. At the risk of spoiling my spoilers, this fight demonstrated two themes: The fight was very one-sided and ended quickly, and both sides tried to be more “aggressive” than last year. Gellatly said that they’d increased the spin rate of Witch Doctor’s weapon to the maximum-allowable 250 mph at the potential cost of reliability. If these trends keep up, we’re going to see a lot of very short fights. Quantum v. Captain Shrederator This would not be one of those “short fights,” which probably already tells you which bot won. Quantum is a terrifying control bot with piercing teeth while the Captain is a full body spinner that looks frightening but almost never wins because it tends to…stop working entirely. I commented before the fight that this could be a tough fight for Quantum, a big spinning bot that can’t even control itself can be a toughie to control. Wow, was I ever wrong about that one. Quantum scooted across the box immediately and got a grip on Shrederator before it had time to spin up. The English control bot carried the Captain around the box like a cat carrying its favorite toy for the entire fight, biting through the top armor, and then releasing briefly as required by the rules. Lather/rinse/repeat. It didn’t quite go the distance, as one of the bites found the spinner’s batteries and that was that. HUGE v. Shatter Two of the more innovative bots around squared off in what was always likely to be a one-sided affair. Shatter’s a really interesting hammer bot with great durability and mobility, but there are some bots that simply don’t have an answer for HUGE and they’re one of ’em. Shatter put a long, serrated hammer on in place of their normal affair, but it made no difference at all as HUGE was able to approach without fear and keep whacking that hammer bot with its terrifying vertical spinner. What was interesting was not that HUGE won, but how HUGE won. The maneuverability and driving skill were both way beyond anything we’ve seen from them in the past. Captain Jonathan Schultz said he “wanted to be more aggressive” and he certainly was. There was a sense last year that Huge had peaked, but if this fight was any indication, that ain’t the case. Glitch v. Riptide The two rookies of the year from last season, Glitch and Riptide are both vertical egg-beater spinners who hit really, really hard. The similarities end there, as Riptide is a fast, conventional four-wheeler that reminds me a little of Yeti in that it’s fearless and (here comes that word again) aggressive. Glitch, on the other hand, is the most accurately-named bot in the business. It’s prone to all sorts of fiddly mechanical issues, it’s absurdly low to the ground, and it beat the #$@#$ out of Hydra last year. It too has four wheels, but they’re the slidy wheels like on Shatter and they don’t always work. Both teams predicted a quick fight and kudos to them. The Glitch folks wanted to go weapon-to-weapon, which would have served them better than what actually happened. Riptide got around to their side, flipped ’em, and it was game over. Well, it could have been, as Glitch was never going to self-right. They took a few more shots to try to flip Glitch back over, but instead knocked it upside down onto the upper-deck. Game over. Free Shipping v. Gigabyte The big news here is that Gary Ginn and Free Shipping have a weapon this year. He’s gotten away from the marvelously entertaining but hopelessly outclassed gimmick bots…

I’m Sure This Isn’t As Pointless As It Feels

Posted on 8 January, 20238 January, 2023 by Ridley

(honestly, I’m not even a little bit sure) We’re doing a getaway night at the Havana in San Antonio on account of it being one of our favorite places to stay, fairly close to home, and it vibes hard enough on its own that we don’t have to go out and be among people so we can just stay in our room. That’s one of our preferred ways to vacation, so it makes sense for us. Anyway, Nicole is fast asleep because “super chill” is a big part of those aforementioned vibes. I’m not quite ready to call it a night so I decided to install Firefox on my Chromebook.It was one of those “Huh, I wonder if this is possible?” things and, once I saw that it was, I wanted to give it a shot. It was not, as you may have guessed, as simple as “download an app and install it.” It was a reasonably involved process (at least to the non-Linux user) involving: Turn on the developer beta Linux mode. Install Linux on a virtual machine. Install an installer. Install Firefox Once these steps were complete, I could run Firefox on a Chromebook inside a Linux virtual machine. The process took about 20 minutes. It isn’t the greatest experience, but it does work. It might be a better experience if my Chromebook weren’t 6 years old, but you work with what you’ve got, eh? It does what I need it to do, so that’s good enough for now. That raises the question: What do I need it to do? Good question! The easy answer is “prove that it can be done” which was something I’d been wondering about for a while. It’s also useful, from a strictly hypothetical standpoint, for maintaining multiple identities should I ever decide to do such a thing. Looking very very innocent. Is it worth it? Probably not. It’s slow, it’s clunky, and I’m not really doing anything I couldn’t do with multiple Chrome logons and a decent password manager (btw, taking Keeper for a spin after LastPass completely botched their response to their latest breach) couldn’t do and probably do better. There’s a non-zero chance I’ve just done something awful to the limited storage this little fella has. It was fun, though. On the off chance I ever actually need to do something like this, I know it can be done and, assuming I don’t remember the exact step, I know how to find them. There’s value in that, I suppose. -RK

Audacity

Posted on 6 January, 20236 January, 2023 by Ridley

File this under: LiveJournal-esque2022 was tough, wasn’t it? I’ve struggled to explain exactly why it felt so much worse to me than 2020 and 2021 which were pretty awful in their own way. They were a period of non-stop crisis that, while scary, felt finite. “This too shall pass.” Take care of ourselves, get the vaccines, and the odds were good that we’d get through it. But 2022? 2022 had the feel of “the new normal.” The price of everything went through the roof; wages didn’t. Heaven help the folks on a fixed income. Some of the inflation was due to issues caused by COVID; most of it wasn’t. It was just an opportunity to rejigger the economy to transfer even more wealth to the wealthy. Plus, we just decided to surrender to the disease. I wish I could blame it all on MAGA, but the truth is that there were plenty of anti-vax ninnies on all sides and, because of this, it was inevitable that COVID became endemic. Would it have done so anyway? Probably. We’ll never know because, as a people, we couldn’t even think of other people long enough to make an effort to slow it down. Wearing a mask was too much to ask, so I don’t know what I was expecting. So, 2022 wore me down because of the realization that “this is just how it’s gonna be.” This is how things are and I’m going to have to get used to. This seems so much more oppressive than a time of crisis. There’s no adrenaline to “deal with it.” Yes, I know I’m coming from a place of incredible privilege in that we managed to land on our feet following the economic shock of the pandemic, and I apologize if this comes across as insensitive to those of you who were hit hard and struggled mightily to get back up. My hope for 2023 is that I can reclaim hope. Hope is a funny thing, isn’t it? Steinbeck’s take is probably about right, even if it isn’t the most…hopeful. I need to stop living in survival mode and only trying not to let things get worse. That was 2022 and I don’t have enough years left to waste them in that mode. I have goals, and plans…”works in progress” would be the term…and I feel as though I finally have enough want, enough hope, to move forward. So, that’s it for me for now. Helluva year, 2022. Let’s not do that again. Onward and upward in 2023…in spite of everything. -RK

British Library image: The Conjuror's Levee, showing an astrologer giving a woman a reading.

A Tale of Two (not recent) Movies

Posted on 4 January, 20235 January, 2023 by Ridley

I don’t watch a lot of movies these days. Those of you who know me personally understand the irony as well as the reasons for it. For some reason, we decided to watch a couple of films last week and I wanted to share my impressions of them. Megamind Have you ever seen a film that had nothing in particular wrong with it but you just couldn’t love? That was Megamind for me. All the pieces fit nicely. The animation was solid. The celebrity voice acting didn’t take me out of the story like it normally does. The overall themes were good ones, although…we’ll come back to it. The ending was satisfactory. I feel like I should have liked it more than I did. The one confusing thing, to me, was the muddling of the themes. Was it a children’s movie with the message that you aren’t constrained by the circumstances of your birth? Or, was it a rom-com farce where deception is always uncovered and then overcome in the third act? It was both, and the weaving the two of them together, and they didn’t quite pull it off. One thing that I wish had received a little more thought was the differences between how Titan and Metro Man reacted to receiving similar powers. There was some subtext there that may or may not have been intended that I would have like to have seen brought to the surface. Maybe it’s just “Titan was a real asshole before he got his powers, so of course he’d use them selfishly,” but it would have been an interesting rabbit hole to explore. My absolute favorite thing was Megamind’s plausible-but-wildly-incorrect pronunciations. I do that all the freakin’ time and I thought it was really charming even when it turned out to be a plot device. I’m happy to call it a good movie even if it didn’t quite land for me. I’m probably not the target audience for it, huh? Constantine Sigh. I’ve been intentionally avoiding this just because I love the source material so much and, having seen the previews with the gun-totin’, black-wearin’, Keanu Reeves as John Constantine, I just wasn’t interested. I’ve long held that, if they absolutely had to make Constantine an American, the absolute best choice would have been Dennis Leary. He has both the look and the fast-talking shithousery to him that you want in a magician who doesn’t have nearly as many aces up his sleeve as he wants you to think, but the one he does have is going to land between your shoulder blades if you cross him. Having seen Constantine, I haven’t changed my opinion, but I’m not sure Leary would have been better for the movie they actually made. It’s a deeply, deeply weird film that draws deeply from the comics in some aspects, but in others it couldn’t be less like them. The including of bits of the Dangerous Habits storyline was welcome, but…I gotta tell you, as much as I love Tilda Swinton, Gavin Rossdale would have made such a good Gabriel (or, at least, the comics version of him). There were a lot of changes that were clearly made to make the film a little more palatable to an audience that isn’t prepared for Garth Ennis’ take on religion and, while they certainly didn’t help, I get why they did it. The inclusion of a cursory romance felt tacked on, and there was so very much scenario chewing when acting would have served the story better. This probably makes it sound like I hated it, but I didn’t. It was a very weird but undeniably interesting movie. I think there was a very good movie in there somewhere. It felt like they were trying to walk the line between the story they wanted to tell and the story they could tell and, while I don’t see him as John Constantine at all, Reeves clearly “gets” the character, so kudos for that. I’d still rather have seen Dennis Leary, though.

A British Library image of a bunch of foppish types in top hats sitting at a bar

A Tale of Two Steaks

Posted on 1 January, 20231 January, 2023 by Ridley

The other day, Nicole was craving a steak and she wanted to go to a restaurant. We live in a small enough town that there are now steak restaurants nearby, so we drove up New Braunfels and tried the Longhorn Steakhouse. Longhorn is a chain restaurant owned by Darden, the owners of Olive Garden, Cheddars, and, until recently, Red Lobster. So, we set our expectations appropriately. They were on what we used to call a “false wait” when I was worked as a server. There was a 20 minute wait for a table even though the restaurant was half empty. This was likely due to their being understaffed either in the kitchen or the front of the house. No worries, though. This is not an uncommon situation. Nicole decided to get fancy and ordered a filet with mushrooms on top while I stuck with the chicken fried steak. The food arrived, albeit without the mushrooms she’d ordered. It took another ten minutes to get the mushrooms, and when they arrived, they were clearly straight out of the can whole mushrooms without any seasoning (unless you consider “30 seconds in the microwave” a variety of seasoning). So, now the steak was cold and it wasn’t even really a filet. You might generously refer to it as a tenderloin, but it was one that had the mealiest texture I’ve ever experienced in a steak. The mushrooms weren’t a suitable steak topping; the hope had been that they would have been chopped and, you know, seasoned. The small handful of french fries were cold when they arrived, but at least they didn’t get any worse with the wait. My steak was fine. It was a chicken fried steak. Not good, not terrible. fine. A week later, we were in Austin on Anderson Lane and decided to stop off at Bartlett’s in an attempt to right the wrong that had been done to our taste buds. Bartlett’s had been a Houston’s previously and might as well still be. The menu, the service model, the everything, was pretty much the same as it had been. If you’re not familiar with Houston’s, you might know Hillstone as about half of the Houston’s have been rebranded. It’s the same idea. So, they’re a chain restaurant, but if you’ve ever been to one, you understand just how different they are. As someone who has been in the chain restaurant business for over three decades, I can assure you that there is no chain in this country that executes what they do like Hillstone/Houston’s. Their standards are absolutely bonkers in a way that probably doesn’t sound rational. They have a small menu and it’s expensive for what it is, but not Expensive-expensive. They happened to be out of their French dip sandwich the day we went, so I got the chimichurri steak standwich and…I’ve never tasted its equal. The steak was generous, it was perfectly prepared, and it was (naturally) tender enough that it was easy to eat without having to cut it. All the vegetables were fresh, the chimichurri was clearly homemade and absolutely delicious. The price of both meals was almost exactly the same. My takeaway from this is that, as a restauranteur, don’t put anything on the menu that you can’t execute. You’d think that would be obvious, but I worked for Bennigan’s and I can assure you that “Can we actually execute this item consistently?”* is a question that was never raised. It’s all good and well to put upscale items on your menu, but if you can’t prepare them, then you’re chase people off. Stick with what you can actually do. The corrolary, of course, is that when you’re in a questionable restaurant, don’t aim for the stars with your order. You may be in the mood for something really fancy, and you may be tempted to order it if it’s on the menu, but you really should consider whether That Sort of Restaurant can actually prepart that item. * During the ill-fated Russian food promotion at Bennigan’s, we offered Beef Stroganoff on the specials menu. This item was prepared by combining our frozen beef fajita mix with a sauce made by adding sour cream to our meatloaf gravy, and then serving it on top of microwaved noodles we kept around for our ziti entree. This was, from a taste standpoint, one of our more successful Frankenstein offerings. My advice was always “stick with the Monte Cristo and the potato skins.”

My Favorite Book About My Favorite Book

Posted on 21 December, 202221 December, 2022 by Ridley

Steinbeck’s East of Eden hit me hard. It is, on one level, a book that deconstructs excuses and demonstrates that, no matter what you’d done in your past, you always had the ability to choose to do the right thing. That was next-level self-reflection when I first read it. It’s also a fine story and it doesn’t come across as preachy, which it absolutely would have in the hands of a lesser writer. I should probably mention that I’m biased; I find him an incredibly appealing author, a proper socialist, and pretty good looking too. I believe kids today would refer to him as a “snack”. So, depending on when you ask, I might well list East of Eden as my favorite novel. But…did you know that he also wrote a book about the book while writing the book? Steinbeck wrote his novels in longhand on big sheets of paper and a stack o’ sharpened pencils, on the front of large sheets of paper. However, he liked to “warm up” before he started working on the story, so he kept a diary on the backs of the paper. In most cases, he’d write a little bit about what we going on in his life at the time, then lay out what he hoped to accomplish with the day’s writing and how he planned to accomplish it. He’d include reminders to use short, simple sentences for action sequences and things like that. Once he was sufficiently warmed up, he’d start the actual work on the front of the next sheet. As fortune would have it, many of these sheets have been preserved and even collected. The diary he kept while writing East of Eden has been published under the name Journal of a Novel. It’s one of my favorite non-fiction books, offering tremendous insight into what he was trying to do with East of Eden and the many technical tools he brought to bear to do it. His writing makes everything feel so effortless, but if his own journal is to be believed, there was a lot of work behind making it look so easy. There are fascinating side stories as well, particularly those involving the name of the novel. He didn’t come up with “East of Eden” until he was more than halfway through writing it. It boggles the mind to imagine any other title, so it’s a little shocking how close we were to having something far more pedestrian and less suited to purpose. Included in the collection are the letters he wrote to editor Pascal Covici while he was writing. The back and forth between the writer and the editor are yet another window on how the novel came into being. It’s also a reminder that even the titans need good editors and I shouldn’t expect to succeed with anything less. I went to a book signing by Neal Stephenson where he moaned a bit when someone asked “the dreaded process question.” I’m sure writers do get tired of answering it, but reaction speaks to just how much interest there is in how the sausage is made. Journal of a Novel is a long, but genuinely interesting, answer to that question. If you’re in to that sort of thing, I strongly recommend it.

We Probably Should Have Read Erenwhon In School

Posted on 18 December, 202218 December, 2022 by Ridley

Got some good news today of the financial variety (“I’ll be able to pay my bills” as opposed to “I’m $%^#$( rich!”, but I’ll take it), so instead of complaining, let’s try to be a little more positive today. Just kidding. Let’s talk about Artificial Intelligence and the absolute clusterfuckery of it all! Let’s get the obvious out of the way: Traditionally, the purpose of automation in a capitalist system is to eliminate the need for workers. Doing this not only reduces the number of people you have to pay, but it also reduces the earning power of the people you can’t get rid of since there are more people competing for fewer jobs. That’s it. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something. This goes back a long way. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was published in 1776 and served as a religious novel for certain members of my family. All of three years later, Ned Ludd supposedly-but-probably-not-really smashed two stocking frames, an event that because a cause celebre for people worried about how automation would affect a society built around employment (and Mr. Wolf). Like a mote circling a drain, the impact of automation started slowly and has inevitably picked up pace as the void beckons. In 1954, The Twilight Zone episode “The Brain Center At Whipple’s” turned its flashlight to the writing on the wall. Spoiler alert: Not only did the workers lose their jobs; the managers did as well. If you want to feel old, watch any movie set in an office in the 1970s (9 to 5 is always worth a watch) and pay attention to how different it is: The typing pool alone has more employees than Twitter does now. If an office had 40 typists, it now has none, or, if there is still one, there are 40 people vying for that job and you ain’t gonna be able to live on what it pays. Why all the talk about automation? I thought we were talking about AI. AI is, in one sense, part of that same trend, but it’s the point where the draining water gets more vertical than horizontal. We’re going to be bleeding jobs like we’ve never seen before. We’re not prepared for it. A lot of shit is going to break. And finally, we get to the point. The drive behind AI, and the money behind it, isn’t about simply eliminating labor. That’s a long-term play and, in today’s world, there is no long-term. This is about making fist-fulls of cash in the very short term. Play along with me here: What are the laws governing liability when AIs make mistakes? How do copyright laws treat AI-generated work-product? How do the laws handle AI-generated work that makes a facsimile of copyrighted or trademarked work? What laws cover AI at all? If you think we’re not prepared for the joblessness we’re about to face, that is small potatoes compared to how our legal system is about to be abused and re-written. In some ways, the AI boom is similar to what Uber and Airbnb did: Get into a space before any regulation exists and become so entrenched that it becomes a fait acompli that your business model is legal. Uber and Airbnb in particular aren’t companies in the traditional sense (and they do everything they can to fight that classification). Their role is to break existing systems more than to make any money. Sure, getting rid of workers is a great thing from a business standpoint, but imagine the mischief one can wreak with procedurally generated art, music, text, code, or almost anything else you can imagine when there are no regulations in place. When an AI or algorithm running an armed robot kills someone, where is the liability? What if the AI or algorithm is procedurally generated by another AI or algorithm? AIs are very good at diagnosing medical patients. That should be a boon for everyone, but it almost certainly won’t be. It’ll be used to cut payroll, of course, but more importantly, it’ll be implemented in a way designed to save costs and avoid liability because that’s where the money is and why on Earth would private hospitals owned by equity firms do anything other than what makes the money and protects them from lawsuits. This is a gold rush into an unregulated space and it’s going to happen and it’s going to suck. You may have noticed that I haven’t offered any solutions or discussed the value of human innovation vs. machine-generated stuff. That’s because I think it’s probably too late for solutions. Short of a Butlerian jihad, we’re too far along to even think about getting ahead of this and setting up guardrails. America’s weird and self-defeating deference to the private sector has ensured this, but I don’t know that it would have been any better in a better society. As to the second point, I don’t honestly believe that human innovation, our creativity, whatever you want to call it, is superior to what machine learning will eventually accomplish. We all love the story of John Henry, but John Henry died and, 5 years later, he wouldn’t have won anyway. My only advice is: Brace yourself. Vote for policies that will at least try to rein in the worst excesses, and for those that will support people who lose the ability to work because there’s no need for them anymore. That’s what we’re facing and pretending otherwise isn’t going to help.

The State of the Bird

Posted on 13 December, 202213 December, 2022 by Ridley

I am so tired of this. I’ve not fully abandoned Twitter yet because there are many marginalized groups saying that they want people to stay and fight and that makes good sense. The problem is that fighting a character like Elon Musk is so tiring because he’s one of those guys who’ll claim victory no matter what and, to make it worse, his fanbase loves nothing more than harassing anyone in their leader’s crosshairs. I’ve blocked Musk on his own site because he doesn’t ever say anything useful or positive (and seldom true), so the only way to make the site work for me is to hide him. Unfortunately, so much of the talk is about him and so many people screenshot his tweets and repost them that I’m still inundated with the thoughts of one of the most vacuous men ever to have a pulpit. Oh, and he’s also a piece of human dogshit. His whole management style is like a mashup of Homer Simpson and Calvin Candie. Bullying, cajoling, racism…it’s all there, and he expects people to burn themselves out in order to make turn Twitter into a mirror image of its owner. Which, to be honest, is just a cut-rate 4Chan. I mean, it’s worse than 4Chan. While he’s actively engaging in policies that will, among other things, increase child pornography on the site, he (falsely) accuses his former head of Trust and Safety of being a pedophile. This led to a wave of death threats against the guy, something that anyone who’d ever used Twitter (and/or met any of Elon’s fans would have seen coming a mile away). Elon is such a pedo guy (and, to be clear, I mean that in Musk’s use of the term, not to imply that he is himself a pedophile)! BFFL Those are big things. The small ones are almost more annoying because they’re so petty. For example, the business where he was booed at the Dave Chappelle show. Man, it happens. You think you’ve got a good gag and instead, the crowd turns on you because of all the stuff I just listed. You just take it. Maybe you sit and think for a while and ask yourself “Why would someone as rich as me be so unpopular?” Or, if you were Elon Musk, you’d say something like: Technically, it was 90% cheers & 10% boos (except during quiet periods), but, still, that’s a lot of boos, which is a first for me in real life (frequent on Twitter). It’s almost as if I’ve offended SF’s unhinged leftists … but nahhh. First of all, “technically?” Bro, when you’re that wrong, pulling the “technically” bit is a really dumb look. It was not “90% cheers” and everyone knows it. And then, to blame it on “unhinged leftists”? Maybe that makes sense to him. He bought a site with a right-wing bias baked in and proceeded to purge the voices of everyone to the left of him, which, in fairness, is probably something close to 90% of all people. Maybe he’s just saying that shit to try to get pats on the back from his far-right buddies, but it just comes across as pathetic. Finally, there’s the fact that the site doesn’t work worth a damn anymore. Notifications are constantly dropped. Account reports are ignored. I see the same tweets on a loop and I’m deluged with pornbot accounts trying to befriend me, which is nowhere near as hot as it sounds. Even with my now-copious use of the block button, it’s a shit experience. I guess that means he’s succeeded in remaking it in his image. And yeah, I get it: It’s my fault for engaging at all. Everyone knows what he is. He’s not going to listen to criticism. He’s a wannabe “edgelord” who doesn’t understand that his own tweets would be shadowbanned under his own policies, but he doesn’t care because he’s fucking Elon and rules don’t apply to him. I know this, so I know I’m just wasting my breath. I don’t know how one can try to get a service to change its ways without leaving, but what the hell? I might as well give it a go. I can certainly use it to post stuff that might be useful to the workers who were laid off, or to those who are stuck there because of the terms of their visas, or to people who are migrating to competing sites, or…*shrug* I don’t know. I’m just making it up. But, Twitter was near and dear to my heart and I hate seeing some dude buy it and just take a huge dump on everything that was good about it. If anyone has any useful ideas, I’m all ears. -RK

Lost Long Weekend

Posted on 13 December, 202213 December, 2022 by Ridley

You’d think a 3-day weekend would, if not memorable, then at least relaxing. I know I would certainly would have. Alas, it was not to be, although it was still preferable to a short weekend in most ways. December is the busiest month at work, so even taking a vacation I tried to keep an eye on what was going on and had to jump in a couple of times. Nicole was unimpressed, and understandably so, but “having a job” is important so one does what one does. On Thursday, I had a remote meeting with my primary care doctor as the prescription for my heart meds had expired and this was the soonest they could see me. They re-jiggered the prescriptions, upping some of the dosages and adding some new wrinkles. I’m not certain exactly which of the changes caused the issue, but I had an unpleasant reaction on Friday night and it left me with a migraine all of Saturday and Sunday. This was a fairly common side-effect and not an emergency, but it did kind of take the wind out of my sails. Not only will I be talking to my GP sooner than expected, but I get to meet my new dermo next week. I went in a couple of months ago to get that prescription renewed and, now that my dermatologist has retired, that prescription can no longer be filled. Huzzah! They’re an hour and a half away so that’ll be fun. We had a scare with the cats (not sure which one), but I’ll spare you the gory details. All appears to be good on that front for now, but it made Sunday and Monday pretty nervy. With all of that, was I still productive? Nah. I did approximately nothing that I planned to do. The headache made me bail on a chance to see my old boss, something I was looking forward to. Didn’t get the holiday cards done. Didn’t get the writing I’d planned to do done, although I did come up with the second melodic section for a song I’m working on and banged on it so hard I’m pretty sure it’s committed to memory now. It’s a nice little earworm, so we’ll call that a win. So, that’s about it. This post is a bit crap too, which fits the weekend perfectly. Hope your weekend (and Monday) went a little better than mine. -RK

7 Books (fiction)

Posted on 26 November, 202226 November, 2022 by Ridley

Over on the heffalump site, the hashtag of the moment is #7books. After making my list, I thought it’d be fun (for me, at least; your mileage may vary) to explain why they’re the seven that made a difference to me. Great photo you’re using there, Ridley 1. East of Eden by #JohnSteinbeck I’m always surprised when a classic lives up to the hype. I approach the “canon” novels with skepticism, but I found this novel to be absolutely brilliant. I find Steinbeck’s writing very “human” even though I struggle to describe what I mean by that. He’s deeply affectionate towards people and towards…what makes people “people,” if that makes any sense. What puts this novel on the list is not just that it’s a fine story expertly told; it’s the core message: No matter what has happened to you in the past, no matter your circumstances, you always have the freedom to choose to do right. This hurt me when I first read it. I had a stack of excuses for being shitty and I was forced to face the fact that none excused my shittiness. Oof. 2. Small Gods by #TerryPratchett This was my first Discworld novel and it remains my favorite. It’s hilarious, of course, as are most of Pratchett’s novels, and his skewering of both the falsely religious and the gods themselves is spot-on. It’s the ending, though. The coda. I’ve never read a book that stuck the landing as gracefully. I got to meet Sir Terry at a book signing. We exchanged a sentence or two and he signed my copy of Small Gods and even drew a turtle in it. He was, by some margin, the most mesmerizing speaker of all the writers I’ve encountered. He was funny and humble, and utterly delightful. Make me sad just thinking of the loss, but that might be the snifter of ruby port in front of me talking. 3. The Brothers Karamazov by #FyodorDostoevtsky My freshman ethics professor was an ass. He didn’t teach from textbooks. He said “I don’t care what Joe Blow has to say about Plato; I want to teach what Plato actually said.” So, instead of textbooks, we read the original sources, which was amazing. Of course, we were freshmen and because of that, we weren’t the most critical of readers. The professor’s favorite trick was to expose us to one philosopher or novelist, let us soak in what they’d written, and then when we were convinced, turn around and attack those same ideas we’d found so convincing. It was truly a brilliant class. Anyway, we only read the two chapters from The Brothers Karamazov, but that was enough. It blew me away to realize that what we’d been taught in high school, that novels consisted of theme and mood and plot and style, was total crap. Novels were about things, but we couldn’t talk about them in public high schools because they were about subversive things. And, you can’t get much more subversive than The Brothers. 4. The Savage Detectives by #RobertoBolano It’s possible I love Bolano’s short stories more than his novels, and I’ve never had the nerve to even try 2666. That said, The Savage Detective is my favorite Bolano so far and that’s a high bar to clear. His work is mercurial in a way that absolutely draws me in. I find Pynchon a pain because, just when I’m starting to dig the vibe, he goes off somewhere else and starts over. Bolano does some of that too, but it never loses me. Or, when it does, his use of language is mesmerizing enough to keep me hooked until I’m back on solid ground. I probably over-romanticize Bolano’s life because it’s a very romantic writer’s life, but there are worse things to romanticize, right? 5. White Teeth by #ZadieSmith Speaking of mercurial…I usually find abrupt POV changes more distracting than anything (Mona Lisa Overdrive, I’m looking at you). Smith somehow pulls it off in this shaggy dog of a story that keeps its thread in spite of bouncing from character to character and story to story. It’s absolutely something that could have come across as a gimmick, but she’s got the chops to make it work. It’s also a fantastic re-read, which is a huge plus for me. 6. The Long Goodbye by #RaymondChandler In the last 5 years, I’ve read a lot of Chandler and Hammett, as well as some of the more recent Nordic crime fiction writers, and I’ve come to a conclusion: I really don’t give a shit about crime fiction. However, I absolutely love crime fiction writing. That’s weird, right? Usually, the story doesn’t really grab me, but I’m so entranced by the style that I don’t care. Chandler remains my favorite, and The Long Goodbye is my favorite of his. I’m not entirely sure the story works, but I don’t care. It’s a reading experience I never want to end (which is good, because it’s his longest novel as well.) 7. Neuromancer by #WilliamGibson I read this around the time I was first getting into Nine Inch Nails. Wired magazine was just about to become A Thing. It’s literally impossible to get more zeitgeisty (Grammarly insists that “zeitgeisty” is acceptable, so who am I to argue?). What really grabbed me was the in media res-itude of the whole thing (Grammarly didn’t like that one). There were no explanations of anything that was meant to be common when the novel took place. You had to pick it up as you went and if you couldn’t get what an Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7 deck was from the context, you were out of luck. There are others, of course. There are always others. Heck, this list might change tonight if I think of some others. Lord knows I’ve read Lord of the Rings and the Elric books multiple times. This’ll do for now. I’m out of port and I think it’s starting to rain, so I’ll leave it at this. Have a lovely evening, and feel free to share your choices. -RK