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Gat Out of Hell - , a kind of DLC-ish thing for Saints Row... I played this game for like the third time through this weekend

(heh looking at some notes maybe it was the only game I played all the way through in 2017 as well?) It's like $4 on Steam or PS4 store and is just such a good side story. Light on the "big scenes" but heavy on the generous and fun physics and movement empowerment - and its take on the environment hell is actually pretty funny, a few notches better than GTA 5's sense of parody.

And I love the central image of the player (either Gat in his gang jacket or Kinzie in a tanktop and jeans) with burning angel wings, soaring over and around the metropolitan hellscape...

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I'm such a hypocrite - like if I'm "heads down" on something I have a hard time not showing my annoyance when someone else asks for my attention for something.

But when I'm on my own and know I should be barrelling through a task, I welcome ANY little distraction and sidequest.

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On my devblog, thinking back to my earliest training in Scrum: the duck calls, "you suck and that makes me sad", roadkill burgers, and the metaphor of "The Chicken and the Pig"
Working my way through Vonnegut - Hocus Pocus is one of his later books (1990) and is disturbingly modern with its thoughts on messing with the climate (though with a tinge of expecting glaciers for a new ice age, a sentiment I remember from a Barney Miller episode) and white folks who want lots of guns.

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I AM NOT writing this book for people below the age of 18, but I see no harm in telling young people to prepare for failure rather than success, since failure is the main thing that is going to happen to them.

In terms of basketball alone, almost everybody has to lose. A high percentage of the convicts in Athena, and now in this much smaller institution, devoted their childhood and youth to nothing but basketball and still got their brains knocked out in the early rounds of some darn fool tournament.

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The lesson I myself learned over and over again when teaching at the college and then the prison was the uselessness of information to most people, except as entertainment. If facts weren't funny or scary, or couldn't make you rich, the heck with them.

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"I have to tell you, though, that you are not the first person to say the game was all over for the human race. I'm sure that even in Egypt before the first pyramid was constructed, there were men who attracted a following by saying, 'It's all over now.' "

"What is different about now as compared with Egypt before the first pyramid was built--" Ed began.

"And before the Chinese invented printing, and before Columbus discovered America," Jason Wilder interjected.

"Exactly," said Bergeron.

"The difference is that we have the misfortune of knowing what's really going on," said Bergeron, "which is no fun at all. And this has given rise to a whole new class of preening, narcissistic quacks like yourself who say in the service of rich and shameless polluters that the state of the atmosphere and the water and the topsoil on which all life depends is as debatable as how many angels can dance on the fuzz of a tennis ball."

He was angry.

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The most important message of a crucifix, to me anyway, was how unspeakably cruel supposedly sane human beings can be when under orders from a superior authority.

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[On Human Space Travel] "How could all that meat, needing so much food and water and oxygen, and with bowel movements so enormous, expect to survive a trip of any distance whatsoever through the limitless void of outer space? It was a miracle that such ravenous and cumbersome giants could make a roundtrip for a 6-pack to the nearest grocery store."

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I agree with the great Socialist writer George Orwell, who felt that rich people were poor people with money.

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Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

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[The 3 servants of the prison warden] were old, old men, sentenced to life in prison without hope of parole, back when I was a little boy in Midland City. I hadn't even learned to read and write, probably, when they ruined some lives, or were accused of doing so, and were forced to lead lives not worth living as a consequence.

That would certainly teach them a lesson.

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My second point, in fact, was something the convicts had taught me. They all believed that the White people who insisted that it was their Constitutional right to keep military weapons in their homes all looked forward to the day when they could shoot Americans who didn't have what they had, who didn't look like their friends and relatives, in a sort of open-air shooting gallery we used to call in Vietnam a "Free Fire Zone." You could shoot anything that moved, for the good of the greater society, which was always someplace far away, like Paradise.

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"At least we still have freedom of speech," I said.

And she said, "That isn't something somebody else gives you. That's something you have to give yourself."

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Otter teaches human how to pet him.

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Statistically, some of you will be single parents. Sorry, I have bad news for you: Love dies, and children live.

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Celebrating a weird anniversary today - I just noticed about half of my music is date April 22, 2013 - ten years ago today (so like 2232 songs out of 4397 have the same date, though I know I ripped a big chunk of that from CDs in 2004 when I got my first iPod). I think that's most likely indicating when I switched to a mac as my main computer...

Its weird how liking to have files of music seems to make me old and stodgy. I just don't get the Spotify lifestyle, having to pay rent to get to your music... TIL about rabbit starvation - I'm sure my diet gets plenty of fat along with he protein but in a time that emphasizes lean meats, interesting to know they aren't an unalloyed good.

(Yes as always a good mix is best.) Rozsa Melinda finds shows how much gender bias is baked into Google Translate as it translates from Hungarian (which uses gender neutral pronouns) into English -

(Via This tweet embedded in this article on Cracked.)

That's a serious problem with machine learning - it picks up the biases of the data it's trained on.

Hell, I'd go further than that and say it's a problem with humans. It seems like our Right Hemisphere may well be the seat of our deep, long-lived wisdom. But it's a product of its environment, just like everything else - but its pronouncements seem just so fundamentally true. So if the structure you grow up in is sexist and racist, sexism and racism are just going to seem like obvious truth.

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Happy Earth Day.

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How old school is Arlington?
I just got a new laptop. Ordered a month ago, given the new uncertainty in my economic circumstances, the timing wasn't ideal, maybe - but at least I know I have a machine that would see me through a "Bring Your Own Device" workplace. (Also good to have a usable backup machine at hand, tbh.)

Anyway, new machine = time to bust out the stickers! Clockwise from bottom left, my old laptop, the cases of two work machines, and my new one, the MonkBook Air. I like sticker'd computers. They make it easy to tell one from another, for starters, and I dig the aesthetic, and what I think it says about me. (Not entirely complimentary things for every audience, I'm sure.) Also, I hope it makes a computer look less worthy of stealing...

I kind of wussed out, and the MonkBook has its stickers on a case. I decided I wanted a wall-to-wall, no whitespace, but i also ended up using a selection of stickers consistently nearer and dearer to my heart than ever - Cleveland ("You've Got To Be Tough!"), School of Honk ("I'd Rather Be Parading"), JP Porchfest, Boston ("Remain, Reclaim, Rebuild") - and I didn't want to obscure their messages, so I had to be careful with the additional layers.

Arguably, I have too many stickers...

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Trump, who has met Kim in person three times and crossed the Korean Demilitarized Zone alongside the young dictator last summer, said they had developed strong ties.
"I've had a very good relationship with him," Trump said.
Trump has previously described "falling in love" with Kim and exchanging glowing letters that underscored their unusual relationship.
He said last week he received a "nice note" from Kim recently.
"I think we're doing fine," Trump said at the time.
Later, Pyongyang denied that Kim had recently sent Trump a letter and accused him of evoking the personal relationship for "selfish purposes."

What an odd, summer-camp-romance sounding thing.

Reminds me of GWB talking about Putin in 2001:
"I looked the man in the eye. [...] – I was able to get a sense of his soul."

(As the Putin character in The Capitol Steps put it:
"......very romantic")

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Saving Your Health, One Mask at a Time - really good, common sense advice.

Masks and maybe even gloves are important for stores. But it's not too hard to make your house and even your car a reasonably safe and more relaxed sanctuary. Your risks will never be zero, but you can bring them down to the point of livability.

(Caveat: the article doesn't mention it but once someone has it in your home, things are clearly much rougher.)

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Happy Earth Day, here's a piece by an old mentor of mine...

Earth Day 2020 from Jeffrey Ventrella on Vimeo.

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Sophisticated new research links Hannity's coronavirus misinformation to "a greater number of Covid-19 cases and deaths." Take it with a small grain of salt but I think they're doing their statistical due diligence: FOX viewers who watched Sean Hannity who was blase and not talking much on Coronavirus in February made less cautious decisions, got sick, and died more often than FOX viewers who watched Tucker Carlson, who sounded the alarm more consistently.

What people watch matters. The further you get from reputable sources - sources who base their reputation more on being correct and fact-checkable most of the vs being in good political alignment most of the time - the more dangerous and unreliable your information is.

(that said, I recognize Vox has a political lean - but from what I hear about the paper, it seems legit.)

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Alright, you probably knew this was coming... in the words of Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist - Playin' the Cello:

Good kitty self-care isn't always pretty, but it can be kind of funny!

EARTH DAY REMINDER: none of us are getting our security deposit back, but that doesn't mean we have to be lil turds for the rest of the lease

So some jeans have label that could let the belt pass underneath, and so could act like a wide belt loop- SURVEY: should they? A. Of course! Support the belt and let the label be read B. Don't be ridiculous! Belts go over labels and only under actual loops. Rallying for science with BABAM!
"What do we want?"
"SCIENCE!"
"When do we want it?"
"AFTER PEER REVIEW!"

Wendy: Hes a girl, for sure, but hes not gay. He looked at me like a gay woman would look at another woman.
Lisa: Totally. Hes like a fancy lesbian.

It's intriguing learning how consciously he cultivated his omnisexual persona.

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"Did Your Parents Have Any Kids That Lived?"

Stupid insult, or stupidest insult? (Recently used on me by some clown on FB with a Prince userpic who was arguing that manbuns were terrible and showing how Millennials were awful, men morphing into women. Either a choking level of irony, or a master-level troll.)

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Why Arabs Lose Wars. You always need to take this kind of broad brush painting with a suitable grain of salt (to mix a metaphor or two) but I find it fascinating; the tl;dr is that armies of Arab nations are hobbled by a rigid sense of hierarchy that's not present in the US military (to name one example) and may reflect greater cultural differences.

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What's In Prince's Fridge circa 2011...

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the anus is the ear of the butt

Missed doing an entry today! Too distracted by seeing John McEnroe play tennis. Man, it feels like Chrome's spelling check suggester used to be better. Not being able to suggest "anonimized" go to "anonymized" is kind of sad, and I'm tired of copy-pasting the misspelling into Google to get the right version. (PS I hate spelling. Being a phonetic thinker makes proper spelling so difficult sometimes... I think I will never get "seperate" right on the first try.)

The social media is a lot like Ancient Egypt... writing on walls and worshipping cats.

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Your intellect may be confused, but your emotions will never lie to you.

Not sure if I believe it or not.

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TECHNOLOGY RANT So I had a brilliant idea that if I can't preserve or restore "Date Added" to my iTunes collection, I could try a different file copy method than I had previously used that would then preserve "Date Modified", and then I could just sort my "recent music" smart playlist on that. Smart, huh?

Turns out you can sort a playlist on "most recently added", "most often played", "most recently played", but not "most recently modified". Holy living fuck, why do they make this impossible? Is it such a vanishing minority of people who A. like to listen to their recent music more and B. change computers that it's a bizarre thing to want?

I've found 3 or 4 potential ways to potentially keep this sort order, and Apple has thwarted all of them. Damn.

Think Different my ass.
--Dumt & Farligt Phantom Flex Highlights - 1080p Random anecdote: many years ago in my Palm Pilot I wrote down the semi-cryptic notation "BTK Peppyrock". More recently I realized it was a reference to a song, that BTK was "Birth Through Knowledge", and that it had the video above. Just recently I realized I should have an MP3 of this song. It's no masterpiece, but it lives up to its name, and I dig the percussion and scratching.

Many thanks to Matthias Thorn who is terrific at hunting down these odd MP3 files (without me having to use some super-suspect downloading "service"... here's a hint kids, when they offer you free Firewall and Antivirus, and the option to include that isn't uncheckable, DON'T DO IT.)

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You probably wouldn't worry about what people think of you if you could know how seldom they do.

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So you need a typeface ....
--kind of brilliant, with a hint of Goedel Escher Bach...

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Humor is just another defense against the universe.

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This led an annoyed Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to dissent in a recent case that the court was peddling "nightmarish images of out-of-control flatware, livestock run amok, and colliding tubas" to justify drug tests for any student with a pulse.

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life is unfinished business

I so resist that idea, longing not to miss anything interesting!

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"The Buddha In His Own Words" - not bad, interesting use of repetition as a narrative technique. Sunday morning I joined my mom who was watching some of those "get your home ready for a sale!" shows... I suppose it's especially poignant for folks in this stage of the real estate cycle. Some of the advice seems a bit contradictory ("get your stuff out of there so people can visualize their own stuff there!" "your place is too sterile, get some more stuff in there!" - I guess it's a fine balance) and for some of the shows I'm happy I don't have to deal with the hosts in person, they seem kind of overbearing.

I wonder why there aren't as many "hey buyers! Look out for these stupid tricks!" shows. (Sometimes when the hosts tell a would-be seller "that's a real negative for the price of the house" I wonder if there is a "did you realize that when you moved in, you fool?" subtext. Also it seems kind of weird when they talk about the current value of the house, minus the original cost and the cost of improvements, they absolutely ignore inflation.) I guess there is another set of shows for people who just want to improve the space they plan on staying in. All these houses look a bit off too; I'm not sure if it's because they're in that weird seller's mode of decoration, or if they just lack books. At least they are realistic situations, not stuff that seems made up for TV.

It makes me think about my house ambitions, or lack thereof. In some ways my view of home ownership might be a little stunted, growing up moving through a series of pre-furnished places, with no one in my family having say in where we lived. So when I hear about Condo membership fees, or how much property tax can be (big issue here in MA, with a lot of argument on either side of the property tax limit override issue... it kind of gives you a feel for how it used to be only landowners who got a vote) on top of what I know about mortgages, it makes me wonder what the point of it all is. Rent is a "black hole" but so is that other stuff!

I guess my ideal for a home is a place where maybe you had to spend a lot of money to get it, but then you could just live there and not have to think about it any more, or make it a big part of your budget.

I suppose my views might be very different if I had a family to raise.

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Bathrooms of the Moment
The corner of the bathroom in the Au-Pair apartment I'll be moving into: That was written by Beth, a friend and former colleague of my Aunt Susans. (She sometimes would stay overnight in the apartment and would leave messages when she had to leave early the next morning.) I'm kind of loathe to remove it, I kind of dig the friendly flirtiness of it.

We all had late-Easter / pseudo-Passover dinner at my cousins' in Brookline; I'm hoping this is just a promotional item and not actually Zoloft in convenient pump form.

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Poem of the Moment

Higgledy Piggledy, my white hen;
She lays eggs for gentlemen.
You cannot persuade her with gun or lariat
To come across for the proletariat.

So I ended up helping Evil B all day yesterday, and probably will again today.

In an "abundance of caution" we're wearing reasonably heavy duty breather masks, with the filters on the side for the inhale and the one way valve in the center for the exhale. So it's like your own personal atmosphere in there, all filtered and what not. One of us, and I'm not saying who, had the good line "Urrp... oh man, I'm going to be enjoying that one for a while."

The laugh of the day was all mine, though you have to understand the "friends help friends move / good friends help friends move bodies" level of friendship between me and him... "Gee, I wonder what EB's furniture will look like in this room... if that's where his futon will go, or... hey, wait, why I am wondering? I'm probably gonna be moving that crap myself in a few months!"

Well, maybe you had to be there. And there, getting a little loopy on the fumes that are sneaking past the breathing mask.

Link of the Moment
Happy Earth Day from Jeffrey Ventrella... he wrapped several Cellular Automata that he previously evolved around an interesting globe display with appropriate "earth tones", so to speak.

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Animation of the Moment

kittenfall

--Another Small GIF Cinema... doesn't loop too well, but... kitten!

Video of the Moment
Big-Boys.com has a lot of videos, 95% fall into one of these categories:
1. home videos of people failing stunts
2. military people or dumb kids blowing stuff up (see 1.)
3. racing car wrecks
4. PG13 to R-rated boobies
However, this video of a tipsy woman ripping into her boss at an office party was brilliant.

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Question of the Moment

Q: What animal would you be if you could be an animal?
A: You already are an animal.

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Essay of the Moment
Semi-scholarly essay on "Metal" culture...I think most of use knew a few "metalheads" in high school, and this was a good luck at what that's all about.

So I spent all last evening straightening up the house in preparation for the pre-openhouse cleaning. Man, what an emotionally draining task...all the fun of getting ready to move with the undercurrent of reminders of the divorce. There's a ton of crap that isn't exactly mine but isn't exactly Mo's either...the result of some clutter synergy two people have when living together.

Mo and I have been e-mailing a lot over the past few days. It's been painful on both sides but I think overall it's been worthwhile. The new thing I learned is that she really feels she put in effort over the course of the relationship and marriage to make it work for her, and to get me more engaged; overall, probably more work than I did. But the thing is for me, she never communicated the significance or severe importance of what she was doing, what she wanted me to do. When she finally talked about how precarious the situation was, last October, I started making some strong efforts to step up to the role. In retrospect, these efforts seem sad and pathos-filled. Not necessarily too little, but too late; I think Mo had already moved on in her own mind, even if she didn't admit that then. So a lot of this was a massive systemic failure of communication.

Though, maybe not. There's another divergence in viewpoint that might make one of those infamous "irreconcilable differences"...she looks for a relationship to be...an answer to some of the existential questions of life, I think I'd say. And I don't; I think those questions need to be answered on one's own. Like Henry Miller wrote in "Tropic of Capricorn":

There are no 'facts'-- there is only the fact that man, every man everywhere in the world, is on his way to ordination. Some men take the long route and some take the short route. Every man is working out his own way and nobody can be of help except by being kind, generous, and patient.

And I think that is related to what I look to receive and give in a relationship, being kind generous and patient. I think it's about support and feedback, security and sex, making good times and good conversation and muddling through the not-so-good-times. A good relationship is an end unto itself, but there's this primary role as a means to other ends, more personal projects in life. I need to find out if I can find someone who shares that outlook, or if I need to be resigned to remolding my attitude about this, or just giving it all a miss and being alone.

One other issue, and Mo says it's a viewpoint that some of our mutual friends share though it irks the hell out of me, is that I'm looking for a "mother figure". Maybe I just don't "get it", but to me that charge reeks of the cheapest, most-facile armchair psychiatry possible. Yeesh, sometimes I don't even think I want my own mom to be a "mother figure"...yes, I like feedback when I've done something good or cool, and yes, I tend to defer on making decisions, a funny kind of conservatism where I usually like to adapt myself to the situation rather than struggle to get the situation to adapt to me. And I like to spend the minimal amount of time on keeping body and soul together, because to me that seems secondary to the interesting things in life. But beyond those, I don't see where that charge really applies.

If anyone would like to explain more about people's perception of the "mother figure" thing, or talk about any of this in general, the Comments section is as open as always...

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Summary of the Moment
Slate reads Woodward's new book for you! Pretty good summary and some other coverage is kicking around the site as well. Comic of the Moment
Qwantz.com - "daily dinosaur comics", the story of a T-Rex, and his Utahraptor buddy. The odd thing is, every comic has the same panel layout, with the cabin and woman stomping and the Utahraptor walking up--only the text and sometimes the backgrounds are different from day to day! Very strange but cool. If you're in a hurry, just check out my favorite.

Oopsie of the Moment
--Some people were upset yesterday at work. Guess you have to be careful how you load those things. Inset is a guy working to make things right.

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Quote of the Moment
"Why not?"
--Last words of Timothy Leary.

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Article of the Moment
Wired has a piece on Death and Blogs, the entries that are left behind when the blogger dies. Sometimes it hits me that there's probably at least a few people who will first be notified of my death by the fact that my blog stops being updated for a few days. (Don't panic if this blog isn't updated though...while I've been very faithful to it over the past 2 1/2 years, accidents will happen, and only some of them are fatal...) Every once in a while I think I should make a miniprogram that, if my blog isn't updated for like 2 weeks, will assume the worst and post last will and testement farewell kind of stuff. Or I should leave detailed instructions on how I'd like my site to be left, passwords and all that. (I'm hoping to come up with some way of running a perpetual version of my sites by the time I'd need to.) Office Toy of the Moment
I got this Jabba figure cheap at KayBee. I cut out the sign he's holding from the box he came in...it says "Jabba Glob" and then "Jabba the Hutt is Oozing with Fun!" He came with green goo with plastic frogs in it that you can put in the main body and then have him drool out of his mouth. I like the implied history in this paragraph from the back of the box:

HE'S ONE HUNGRY HUTT!
Please the might Hutt by feeding him
his favorite snack--Jabba Glob! This
dripping, frog-filled delicacy is found
only on Jabba's home planet of Tatooine.
Be sure not to eat any yourself--Glob
is for Hutts, not humans!

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Link of a Past Moment
Sitting around the backlog since a few days before WTC, a music video with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. You can see some of the source material here. You know, it kind of looks like he's been into the Glob himself. In any event, this much corporate enthusiasm is not a good thing. Start my new job tomorrow. I think it'll be good to get that kind of structure back in my life, though I'll miss the free time I had. Still, I usually manage to make the time I need before and after work, so I'm not too worried.

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Link of the Moment
I've kind of rediscovered my old academic website. This isn't my original design, but rather one I made after college. It's kind of interesting, though very old-school. Kirk's Head is kind of disturbing. The Bestiary is odd-- I was going through a phase where I was very interested in small, self-contained representations of creatures, almost as a form of artificial life. If there was a background in it, I wasn't as interested, because it broke the idea of image=creature. The link section there is sort of random. The funny thing is, I'm trying the same thing again, though this time I'm being very very picky about what goes in there. (Hopefully I'll have a big grand-opening of my 'best links page ever' in a few days.)