Horizon Zero Dawn: The Forbidden West is a sequel, and it feels like one. While the central storyline started in Horizon Zero Dawn is well-covered and well-pursued by this sequel, The Forbidden West, the second game has so much going on that it’s hard to keep track of it all, and yet it has a weirdly vacant, empty world in which all of it is happening.

For all that, I enjoyed my time with Aloy and company (and it is “and company” in a very wanna-be Mass Effect way).

The Forbidden West is slightly upgraded in terms of graphics and assets, and the overall effect is breathtaking. The Forbidden West is a very pretty game, even moreso than the remastered edition of the original. The new settings, including caves, underwater, underwater caves, swamps, and seashores are all beautifully and artfully designed and decorated, and running around inside them is a source of delight if you’re the sightseeing type.

The central storyline restarts with Aloy trying to track down a surviving copy of the GAIA files, the only AI capable of restoring the globe-spanning and now slowly decaying terraforming system. This leads her westward to locations where she can supposedly find one. As one expects, she does find one, but there are complications which involve adventures to all corners of the map to find other, missing parts of the system, which in turn lead to running into one or two Big Bads, with the usual plot complications of double-crosses, underhanded schemes, and hidden agendas all leading up to the big reveal, the boss battle, and the bigger reveal leading up to the next game; the usual mass of Plot that follows around any open-world game this big. There are more than a few laugh lines, wham lines, and just outright tearjerking to keep it all moving along.

And yet, there’s something weirdly empty about The Forbidden West. The first game [spoiler alert if you haven’t played the original Horizon Zero Dawn game] had four tribes: The Nora, the Carja, the Oseram, and the Banuk, and there were relationships from a century-deep backstory between these groups that carried plot and motive. The Carja were everywhere, the military heavies of the game, still recovering from a civil war which left rebel camps everywhere, the Oseram had divided feelings about the Carja, and so on. The core NPCs, such as Vala and Erend, had reasons for disliking the other tribes, and even individuals in the other tribes, but they also recognized the value of trading or learning from them. HZD’s setting felt alive, like things happened in it even when you weren’t paying attention.

There’s very little of that in The Forbidden West. The tribes of The Forbidden West don’t interact very much at all. The Carja and Oseram have a trading district on the north-east corner of the map, so you can visit them. The Oseram have a tradition of digging out the ruins of the past, “delving,” so you run into them in The Forbidden West quite a bit. The other tribes: the Tenakth, the Utaru, and the Quen, barely interact at all. They’re all depicted as xenophobic; Aloy, as is required of the main character, impresses them and gains their trust by plot complications that lead to her saving this city or that person or that tribe. But it definitely feels static; the world doesn’t change around you unless you’re the one making the change.

On the other hand the game is overflowing with “things to do.” The original game had a simple skills tree, some vaguely annoying crafting (“Collect three owl feathers and bring them, and I can make you a bigger pouch for your healing potions”), and a little mini-game in the form of the Hunter’s Training Grounds to help you upgrade your weapons and learn a few tricks.

The Forbidden West ratchets this up to 11, with an in-game mini board-game called Machine Strike, a sort of chess-means-Warhammer; an updated melee system with combo moves as complex as anything ever seen in Mortal Combat; “Melee Training Pits” that parallel the Hunter’s Training Grounds where you practice your melee skills and earn new upgrades; more Hunter’s Training Grounds; two different kinds of “blueshine” (here “greenshine” and “brimshine”); a massive and complex skill tree of skills trees; two different potion systems (potions and food); a complex crafting system involving a lot more collecting and doing, a lot of new weapons and weapon types to master; a brutal machine combat endurance arena for more earning of legendary weapons; a “valor” combat effectiveness score; a racing game… it was just too much game. I never finished the melee pits, never played more than the tutorial game of Machine Strike, did only one race, didn’t finish the last Hunter’s Ground, never mastered the new shields technology, all because they were just distractions from Aloy’s story.

On the third hand, the lore of the game manages somehow to be pathetic in both senses: invoking only a sense of horrified pity and sadness for the world before, and so skimpy and lifeless that it really doesn’t move you very much. You find the usual lost cell phones with last messages on them, or advertisements, or reminisces. The map is almost the same size as the original game, but it feel bigger, with two different valleys full of dead machines, on both sides, from the Last Battle of the California Salient, so you find a lot of flight recorders with last words of pilots or passengers just before they went down. Yet it doesn’t quite add up to the emotional impact of the few stories in the First Bunker of HZD, the one where Aloy found her focus, or the story told as you delved GAIA Prime.

One thing that really annoyed me: in settlements and cities the lines given to NPCs were fewer and more repeated, and it got old very, very fast. Worst, the lines about one rebel leader that you heard over and over were still being repeated at the same time you were being thanked for doing the defeating! Plus, the whole “Elizabeth Sobek is God and Aloy is Jesus” (“For the goddess so loved the world that gave her only manufactured daughter”) thing kinda got both more obvious, and less worthwhile, as the plot progressed. Also, oddly, they decided not to voice the kids at all. Children are everywhere in the settlements, but you never hear them; I guess they were less plot-relevant than the incessant praise from the adults.

I don’t use “fast travel” because it feels like cheating, like teleporting about in a world where foot travel is the most common way of getting anywhere. Unlike HZD, The Forbidden West has four or five points where you have to carry something precious from one end of the map to the other and you can’t afford to stop, but you still get XP if you strike an animal with your robot horse. The sound effects include a sickeningly meaty thud and sometimes a crunch. It’s awful to hear that several times during your desperate flight, but it’s even more grotesque that as you’re doing so the game announces +35XP - Wildlife Kill. I must have gotten over 150XP just from trampling birds, foxes, mice, and other beasties on each ride.

Horizon Zero Dawn felt like a world in which an important story was being told in a richly designed and carefully crafted world. The Forbidden West feels much more like a stage on which Aloy is an expression of the player’s desire to be the main character with a standard set of plot points along the way. Each member of your team has a loyalty mission but they don’t accompany you otherwise. It seems like not pursuing the loyalty mission would not change the outcome. And with all the side-stuff going on, it’s hard to know if any of the props on that stage are a Chekhovian gun.

Still, you get to hang out with Vala and Erend, meet new friends, and even recruit an old enemy, to your side by the end. You can stick to the main story, and even do the satisfying side quests and even most of the errands, and do just enough of the “activities” to keep your weapons sharp, and you can finish the game without having to do all the silly extras that have been shoved into this overstuffed glinthawk.

I liked it enough that I will be playing the sequel, if and when it comes out. I do want to know how it all ends.

A headline this morning on NBC read, Arizona Moves to Ban AI Use in Reviewing Medical Claims. This law is profoundly idiotic, and one of the most important bits of idiocy is obvious right in the body of the law. The law is a PDF, so I’ll paste the whole thing here. It’s not long:

H.B. 2175

A. Artificial intelligence may not be used to deny a claim or a prior authorization for medical necessity, experimental status or any other reason that involves the use of medical judgment.

B. A health care provider shall individually review each claim or prior authorization that involves medical necessity, experimental status or that requires the use of medical judgment before a health care insurer may deny a claim or a prior authorization.

C. A health care provider that denies a claim or a prior authorization without an individual review of the claim or prior authorization commits an act of unprofessional conduct.

D. For the purposes of this section, “health care provider” means a person who is certified or licensed pursuant to title 32.

Notice in section D they define “health care provider.” They chose not to define “artificial intelligence.”

In insurance, an actuarial table is a database that takes in a collects a massive pile of data and creates a statistical relationship between your current health (and lifestyle) statistics and the likelihood of your death, future disability, or the likelihood of any given treatment having a benefit that justifies the cost.

Insurance companies will stop calling their AIs “AIs” and start calling them “Actuarial attention models,” since the “model” in “large language model” is just a massive pile of data about the statistical relationships between phrases to determine what phrase is likely to follow another in human speech. The “AI” models used by insurance companies use a similar algorithm (“these medical and lifestyle events in this order are likely to create this outcome…”) but respond with a spreadsheet, not a conversation.

This bill effectively bans actuarial tables, since both actuarial tables and machine learning models do the same thing: statistical analysis. LLMs are especially bad at it because they’re just probabilistic parrots without any actual human intent behind what they’re saying; all the intent went into choosing the training data, the outcome is still broadly incomprehensible to even the best computer scientists. But this is an illusion; behind the curtain, it’s just statistics about likely outcomes.

The problem here is not the use of statistics. The problem here is systems that require low-level workers to make judgments that “maximize shareholder value” at the expense of human lives, while at the same time shielding upper-level management from any criticism or penalty for expending human lives. “That’s just what the numbers say” is the whole of the reason, even if the one real number that matters to insurance executives is “If you save too many lives, my bonus goes down.”

Accountability drain, the ability to say “no one person is responsible for this outcome,” will persist until we as a civilization decide “for every decision, there must be someone who has the final say in what it is and how it can be changed, and that person is accountable for what follows.” Banning statistical analysis of any kind isn’t the change we need. It’s just window dressing over ongoing human misery.

The 1940 film adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath, by John Ford, nails this perfectly:

THE MAN: All I know is I got my orders. They told me to tell you you got to get off, and that’s what I’m telling you.

MULEY: You mean get off my own land?

THE MAN: Now don’t go blaming me. It ain’t my fault.

SON: Whose fault is it?

THE MAN: You know who owns the land — the Shawnee Land and Cattle Company.

MULEY: Who’s the Shawnee Land and Cattle Comp’ny?

THE MAN: It ain’t nobody. It’s a company.

SON: They got a pres’dent, ain’t they? They got somebody that knows what a shotgun’s for, ain’t they?

THE MAN: But it ain’t his fault, because the bank tells him what to do.

SON: All right. Where’s the bank?

THE MAN: Tulsa. But what’s the use of picking on him? He ain’t anything but the manager, and half crazy hisself, trying to keep up with his orders from the east!

MULEY: (bewildered) Then who do we shoot?

Arizona decided to shoot the computer, for all the good that’ll do.

About once a month we try to have my adult children come over and have dinner, to touch base, see if they’re doing well, and feed them. They both grew up on my cooking, and my son, at least, continues to cook whenever he has the time and energy, which isn’t as often as he’d like.

This time, I made the American classic Betty Crocker Ham & Scalloped Potatoes. If you read that recipe closely, though,
you’ll see that the total cook time is a mind-boggling 1 hour and 40 minutes, and that’s after you’ve spent 20 minutes putting everything together. It’s 2 hours ’til dinner is ready, although the cook only has to put in the 20 minutes at the beginning.

Thanks to a delay at the pharmacy and a traffic accident on the way home, I didn’t have two hours. But I do know how to cook. And thanks to Anthony Bourdain and Jacques Pepin, I had a few aces up my sleeve. I realized that the long cooking time was there to ensure the potatoes were cooked through and softened, and that I could shorten that process substantially by pre-cooking them until not quite soft enough for mashing, and while that was happening I could soften the onions for a much longer period in lower heat, caramelizing them for a deeper,
sweeter flavor.

Ingredients

• 1 medium onion, sliced thin


• 6 Yukon gold onions, sliced 1/4” thick


• 4 tablespoos butter, divided 3tbs / 1tbs


• 3 tablespoons all-purpose flour


• 1 teaspoon salt


• 1/4 teaspoon pepper


• 2 cups milk


• 3/4 cup cheddar cheese


• 1/4 cup Parmesan cheese


• 1 1/2 cups cooked ham, cut into small cubes

Directions

• Preheat the oven to 350°F


• Put a Dutch oven on the stove, on medium-low heat. Melt 3tbs butter in the pan, then the onion slices, stirring to coat completely with the butter.


• Put the potatoes into a pot, cover with cold water, and bring to a boil. Turn it down immediately to a simmer and set a timer for 12 minutes.


• Watch the onions, stirring occasionally. Do not let them burn!


• When the timer for the potatoes goes off, try to push a fork through a slice. It should go through with some resistance (they have to be firm enough to stand up to mixing), but not solid the way fresh potatoes will be. If they’re not ready, another three to five minutes
  should do it. When the potatoes are ready, drain completely and set aside to cool.


• Heat the milk in a microwave, about 3 minutes, but not to boil.


• Put the last tablespoon of butter into the onions and, when it melts completely, add the flour. Stir to coat completely, about a minute.


• Turn the heat up to medium and begin slowly adding the milk, stirring continually to mix it all together. You’re going for a white sauce with caramelized onions here! The gluten in the flour should thicken the milk as it heats up, and you want it consistent. When all the milk is added, take the Dutch over off the heat and stir in the cheddar cheese, then the salt and pepper, tasting it as you go.


• Begin adding the potato slices and the ham, a handful at time, stirring gently so as not to break too many of the slices (it’s okay if a few break) to coat everything with the onion sauce.


• Sprinkle the top with the Parmesan cheese, and bake for 20 minutes. If it’s not browned on top, turn on the broiler for a minute or two, but watch it closely!


• Serve hot.

It’s an extra ten to fifteen minutes of effort, and it’s a lot more hands-on doing even this minimal amount of caramelizing the onions, but dinner’s ready in 50 minutes instead of 2 hours and the flavor is a heck of a lot deeper and more satisfying.

Serve with a steamed or roasted green vegetable (broccoli, string beans, something like that) and a salad with a bright dressing.

The Kroger grocery chain recently held a shareholder teleconference where they discussed replacing all of the price badges on their shelves with digitial badges. The idea is that the stocker can just scan the product’s bar code and the digital badge will automagically update with the current price. Using e-paper, very low energy comm chips, and a sliver of solar strip along the top, the badges will be self-powering, self-maintaining, even self-identifying. IPV6 means there’s enough IP addresses for every badge in the store, they won’t be very busy most of the time so they won’t saturate the network, etc. etc. Technologically, the challenges of this plan are not that big. And this is not a terrible idea.

During the call, however, one of the presenters said that these badges also introduced the possibility of surge pricing, in the same way that Uber does surge pricing: when a product is scarce, they can instantly raise the price to reflect its scaricity, ensuring that only those who are willing to pay more for the product, those who truly demand the product, will pay for it.

If I was a shareholder in this deal, I’d be pulling out of Kroger the second they start rolling out their surge pricing idea.

My degree was in accounting, because in 1986 my parents thought “There’s no money in computers.” So I minored in CS. At the time I was doing so, formal “cybernetics” was a big part of the curriculum, thanks to Ronald Reagan. You see, the Soviets were still trying to cyrbernize their entire economy using computers, and for some reason the Americans became convinced that cybernetics was about computers.

It’s not. “Cybernetics” has become so corrupted as a word that a whole new discipline has been created to take its place: “Systems Thinking.” Either way, what they these terms mean has little to do with computers. Cybernetics is the study and modeling of a complex system, focusing on the flow of materials into the system over time and analyzing how those flows can be optimized to produce the best possible outcomes. The Soviets hoped to model the entire economy, every raw material and every factory and every individual need, to create a cornucopia machine. Needless to say, that was a bigger job than any computer they had could possibly have managed.

A forest is a system. The inflows are, well, water and sunlight and soil. The durable events over time are rain and sun and the seasons and the ocassional forest fire. A forest has evolved to grow at an optimal rate under its local conditions.

In the US Pacific Northwest, forestry is in a sustainable mode; the USDA (Department of Agriculture) and private forestry companies work together to harvest wood at a sustainable level. The forest recovers at a rate that is less than optimal (because humans are removing some of it), but which produces wood at a steady rate which USDA arborists regularly adjust, seeking an optimal rate. This works because the USDA owns a lot of the forest land in the Pacific Northwest.

In the US Atlantic Northeast, the story is very different, a cycle of boom and collapse. Most of the forests are privately owned. If a private forestry company does not harvest its forest to collapse, and another does, the one that does ends the cycle with more money than the one that still has a viable forest, and it ends the cycle with the power to buy out the poorer business. If they go bust, newcomers to the game with shiny MBAs leap in and hedge fund that sucker. But the forest is still there; ruined but arable. Replanting happens, and within 15 to 20 years the cycle begins again. It’s a classic prisoner’s dilemma: if anyone cheats, the system goes into overdrive and heads toward collapse again.

The Pacific Northwest arborists are always watching out for oscillations. Oscillation states are between “sustainable” and “headed for collapse”; take too much and the forest gets hurt, and recovers more slowly, and is unharvestable for a longer period. Collapse is considered different from oscillation because it’s both almost total and because recovery probably won’t happen within the timeframe of a business’s survival.

Grocery logistics is a similar system. There is still “time” in the Just-in-Time inventory and logistics systems of the 21st century. When a shortage occurs in a system, that’s an oscillation. Accounts who know their systems know that the way to figure out how to handle the shortage is to increase the amount of time inventory sits in a warehouse, maybe from one week to three, and then to start backing off until the rate of delivery from supplier to warehouse to retail outlet stabilizes. If you shorten the rate, try to push more inventory into the system in a short period of time to make up the shortage, you make the oscillations bigger as the system experiences a blockage of more product, less processors at the warehouses, and an inelastic amount of shelf space on which to sell it. You get these pulses of days when you have too much product, and days of not enough.


Surge pricing will damage the ability of acocuntants to determine that optimal rate. The market signal that something is wrong comes from a number of places, but one of them is a drop in the income from a given product. If you adjust the product price, you damage the system’s information flow. America throws away megatons of food every year; we overproduce by ridiculous amounts, and the same is true of many other necessary products: diapers, toothpaste, aspirin. A shortage in any of these is not a case of supply and demand; we are, as a civilization, oversupplied with all of them. It is a case of logistics failure.

Surge pricing is not an attempt to price something in short supply in order to meet consumer demand for a steady supply of a product. It is an attempt to paper over a logistics failure in order to meet shareholder demand for a steady supply of a profit.

Which brings us to the prisoner’s dilemma and the quarter-by-quarter punish-or-reward system of our current stock market. If Kroger tries this and shows even modest increases in profitability over two or three quaters, all of their competitors will follow suit. At which point, consumers will get deeply annoyed at unpredictable pricing with seemingly random changes day-by-day. Consumers will seek out alternative outlets and pull back on their interactions with big-chain grocery stores until the stores relent or collapse. Or Congress steps in and tells them to cut out the bullshit.

Surge pricing in a heavily oversupplied commodity market is a sign of MBA brain: logistics failures are an opportunity to reap profits, not fix the system. It will make the experience of buying groceries more anxious and miserable, so you know the psychopaths will love it.

Omaha and I took the electric vehicle camping in a national forest. Our assessment is that it’s very do-able and very serviceable if you’re willing to do a little planning ahead of time.

TL;DR: Range anxiety is real, but you can manage it with a little advanced planning, and it will get better over time. Your best average speed over the highway will be closer to 40 miles every hour because of charging times. Your car probably has two batteries, you’re screwed if either one dies, and there’s almost nothing in the car that tells you about the second. If you mainly use the car for city driving, you will be shocked by how much the wind resistance of highway speeds eats into your range.

Omaha and I wanted to go hiking in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest area around Mt. Adams in south Washington State. This was our first outing going camping since we’d bought the new Subaru Solterra so we decided to see if it would be a workable solution. We made some plans and did an assessment of every charger location we could possibly need along the route. There were plenty along the north-south corridor of I-5, so that wasn’t too worrisome, and our campsite was only about 15 miles from the Bonneville Hydroelectric Dam which had a charging station as well.

On Range Anxiety

EV range anxiety is real, but it’s not that different from having “ICE gasoline anxiety.” Nobody calls it that, and after you’ve been driving an ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) car for a year or more you kinda understand just how many miles you have left before you need a gas station. EVs are exactly the same, except for two things.

First, the range indicator isn’t a vague needle responding to a float sloshing about in a puddle of liquid explosive, it’s a number, a frighteningly exact number (except when it isn’t– see the section on highway driving) about how many miles are left before your battery dies. Watching that number count down in metronomic precision is like watching a countdown until your execution, or at least becoming stranded with no way to power back up quickly.

Secondly, the availability of chargers in more rural places is spotty at best, and because they’re not usually next to 24/7 facilities they’re often at risk of vandalism or theft, so it can be frustrating to find one only to find it broken. Society doesn’t protect them the way it does gasoline stations. The fact that one can be plunked down anywhere there’s electricity available, and that a (small) profit can be extracted from their being so, doesn’t mean that everyone is willing to do so, provide parking space for it, or put up with the hassles of copper thieves and anti-EV vandals.

The cure for range anxiety is the equally exact numbers that you can derive from any decent modern map program, such as Google Maps, for the distances between where you are and where you’re going. Figure a ten percent buffer on your total battery (i.e. if you have a 240-mile range, save 24 miles of reserve). Double the distance between the charger and your destination (because you have to get there, and get back), add that to the reserve, and keep the range number above that, and you’ll always be able to get to a charger. We drove from Panther Creek into the Trapper Creek and Indian Heaven hiking areas several times before we had to charge the Solterra, which compares favorably with the times we had to fill the old Outback.

On Charge Delay

We had to charge the car three times this road trip: once on the way down, once in the middle of the trip, and once on the way home. Each charging session took about an hour, using a DC charger, to get the car back to 90% charge. EV charging takes time, but on a curve: the first 25% of the pack will charge in about 10 minutes; the next 50% of the car takes about 50 minutes; and each percent thereafter can initially take two minutes each, but climbs to five minutes for the last three or four percent.

But an hour’s charge will give you about 75% to 80% of your car’s total range, and that’s usually enough to get moving. If you plan your road trips well, you can always find a nice park or cafe to wait out the charge, and at my age naps are lovely anyway. The Solterra has something called, I kid you not, “Your Room Mode,” which allows you to leave some parts of the car on even while it’s charging, such as the radio, the AC or the heater.

I’m simply not in such a hurry that an hour-long “pit stop” with bathroom breaks, a chance to stretch my legs, and maybe buy a few snacks or a coffee, every three hours of travel is a tragedy and a conundrum.

On the flip side, hydroelectric power is ridiculously cheap. With gas prices as they are, the Outback’s efficiency was such that for every dollar of gasoline you put into the tank, it got 4 or 5 miles of range. For the Solterra, on a commercial charge, it got 13 miles per dollar put into the battery.

Oh, and residential, off-peak (i.e. between 10pm and 6am) charging? The Solterra gets 68 miles per dollar put into the battery.

Two Batteries

The Solterra, like its equivalents, the Toyota BZ4X and the Lexus RZ 450e, has two batteries. The first is the one you see all the time on your dashboard, and it’s called the Traction Battery. The other one is a plain, old-fashioned, unremarkable lead-acid thing called the Accessories Battery. The latter powers “everything else” in the car: the radio, the seat warmers, the headlights and interior lights, the door locks. It’s charged from the Traction Battery when you’re driving, providing a moderating pass-through much the same way such batteries do on ICE cars with their alternators. When the car is officially “off,” though, it discharges in the same way as it would, and it will die if you leave your headlights or the seat warmers on too long. When it gets down, the only warning you’ll get about it is a “Power Low: Please Turn Off Accesories” notification (a big one, you can’t miss it) on your dashboard.

A lot of Solterra owners recommended replacing the lead-acid battery with something more modern; although deep-charging lead-acid batteries exist, that battery slot on the Solterra can handle a lithium-based automotive battery, of which there are now several. I haven’t decided if it’s a problem serious enough to warrant replacing it before it’s time. But if you see the warning often enough, have your dealer check the health of the Accessories Battery, because some of them sat idle and uncharged for months on a dock somewhere, and that’s not at all healthy for lead-acid batteries.

3.5 M/KWh city, 2.8 M/KWh highway

The similarly-shaped and platformed Toyota RAV-4 ICE version of our car says that it gets 27 miles per gallon in city driving, and 33 miles per gallon highway driving. For the first automotive century, highway driving was always more efficient because, frankly, ICE cars are hideously inefficient. Idling uses up gasoline. Accelerating from a dead stop uses a lot of fuel, most of it wasted. On the highway a car needs only maintain a constant speed, and an ICE car with a smart transmission can optimize all of that as much as possible.

An EV, on the other hand, uses zero electricity while sitting at a stoplight. It just sits there, waiting. It doesn’t idle; idling is a phenomenon of not being able to turn the engine off in order to have acceleration ready-to-hand, but electricity, unlike gasoline, is instantaneous. It’s also complete: exactly as much energy goes into getting the car up-to-speed as is needed, no more, and no less.

The faster you drive a car, the bigger the buffer of air compressed by the nose travelling through the atmosphere becomes and the more drag the car experiences. For an ICE car, the inefficiency of city driving is so bad that ICE cars are still more efficient at highway speeds than in the city, but for EVs that reality is reversed.

When we drove home, we had 210 miles on the pack at our average use rate of 3.5M/KWh, and from the charger in Vancouver I estimated we would make it with about 45 miles left on the pack. When we pulled into the driveway there was barely 20 miles left, and the car reported that we’d had about 2.8M/KWh of usage, almost entirely due to driving on Washington’s freeways at 70MPH.

Another thing to factor into range management. What a drag.

Overall

Overall, though, I’m mostly delighted with the Solterra. The LIDAR-informed cruise control and optical lane-keeping features make driving it on the freeways feel safer and easier without encouraging you to take your hands off the wheel; it’s a good balance of being helpful while acknowledging that it’s gonna be a long time before humans can stop paying attention to the road. Although the Solterra’s suspension is a little stiff compared to the Outback or Forester I have owned, that’s compensated greatly by the profound quiet experienced inside a car without any engine grumbling inside its frame. The reduced number of moving parts makes EVs a much lower-maintenance prospect as well. The cabin is comfy as hell, and Subaru, like Volvo, has gone out of its way to provide haptic (touchable, discrete, independent) buttons, levers, and dials, so you can signal, control the lights, the heat & AC, the windows, the locks, all of the usual things, without having to take your eyes off the road and look at a viewscreen. The CAN (controller area network) on these cars has independent modules and redundant wiring, unlike in a Tesla, so it will still work even if the radio is having a bad day. (I once crashed a friend’s Tesla by bringing up a website on the viewscreen while we were waiting at some restaurant.)

Range anxiety is managable, and more chargers installed in more locations will make range anxiety fade away. Charging times will hopefully get better, and in the meantime 180 miles of range followed by an hour of rest is probably not a tragic trade-off for most people. Besides, 90% of all trips are within 6 miles of your home, so most people just won’t have a range-management experience all that often. Knowing about the dual battery issue and more discussion of the the reality of highway driving an EV would be useful before buying one.

Omaha and I recently had the pleasure of hearing (and watching!) The Blackstar Symphony, an orchestral reconstruction of David Bowie’s last album, Blackstar. The work was authorized by Bowie after an encouter with Donny McCaslin and his band, Steps Ahead, led to both McCaslin being the saxaphonist on the Blackstar album and becoming a sort-of holder of the legacy of Blackstar after Bowie died.


McCaslin performed with Gail Anne Dorsey, who was Bowie’s bassist for many years, and who also performed the lead vocals for “Under Pressure” in concert after Freddy Mercury died. (Apparently, she also did lead vocals for Boweie’s cover of Laurie Anderson’s “Oh, Superman,” which rocks my world) and with John Cameron Mitchel, who is probably best known as the composer and lead actor for Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Mitchel appeared on stage in delightfully genderfucking outfit of a tan suit with a floor-length, butch-cut, pleated stressed wool skirt that looked just about perfect on him. (Mitchel’s bio does read “pronouns he/him”, so…)

It was a beautiful presentation, although the orchestra really faded into the background most of the time as the cover artists and members of Bowie’s touring band worked the audience over, performing the entire album in a careful arrangement.

After the intermission, they performed a lot more covers of work that wasn’t from Blackstar, including Dorsey doing an incredible version of “Space Oddity,” and Mitchel and Dorsey working together to do “Under Pressure”. Mitchel really enjoyed playing up the outfit he’d chosen, making the case that men should wear skirts more often without ever having to say so out loud.

McCaslin would occasionally step in front to talk about the evolution of the orchestral version, how he got involved in the project and how much , and you could see from his expression and hear in his voice just how utterly bugfucking gobsmacked he was to be the man David Bowie chose to carry Bowie’s ghost around the world on one last tour.

Overall, a hell of a show. If it ever comes around again, I recommend seeing it.

Over the Christmas Break I finally downloaded Mass Effect: Andromeda, the less-than-loved fourth story in the Mass Effect series. Andromeda is a pretty good game in its own right, but compared to the story of the originals, plays like Mass Effect fanfiction. The problem is that fanfiction stories are often worthwhile in their own right while clearly deriving so much context from outside itself.

The plot of Andromeda is thus: shortly after the events of Mass Effect 1, a project similar to Operation Cerberus decided that the Reaper Threat was real and the correct solution was to get the hell out of the galaxy; to sneak massive ships loaded with cryogenically preserved colonists into hyperspace and spend 600 years traveling to the Andromeda galaxy and start over. Astronomical analyses of Andromeda indicated no advanced technologies anywhere, none of the signals of spacefaring species.

The problem is that Mass Effect establishes an architecture to galaxies: clusters of one to six star systems no more than four or five light-years wide, separated by gulfs a hundred light years or more wide. The only way to get between those gulfs is to use The Relays, built by an ancient species; starship engines have duration limitations and can’t cross those gulfs. There are no relays in Andromeda, so the story re-writes the rules to say that a “cluster” can have dozens of star systems effectively as large as the whole Milky Way, and that “big enough” ships can cross the gulfs by entering hyperspace and “coasting,” preserving their engine’s reserve until they need it to exit hyperspace again. That’s how they made it to Andromeda.

Another problem is that Sara Ryder isn’t Shepherd. When we meet Shepherd, she’s already a well-respected, well-liked military officer with several years of experience. When we meet Ryder, she’s a junior member of a science team. Her father is a veteran military scout with hostile world experience, and that’s what makes him “Pathfinder,” a specialized role with a powerful AI symbiote. An accident happens, he dies and transfers the symbiote to his daughter, who takes up the role. The only thing she has going for her is the symbiote, but she quickly earns both the skillset and the respect Shepherd had.

… which, while it wouldn’t fly in an original work, is normal for fanfic.

The set-up for the series is that Andromeda doesn’t have advanced spacefaring because of The Scourge, a vast interstellar cloud with slow-moving tendrils that emerge from hyperspace near star systems and disrupts the ecology of those star systems quickly. The Remnant were an ancient race who fought back against The Scourge, but their project is unfinished. Our heroes learn that there’s enough of the project that they could at least clear sufficent space to make several worlds habitable. There’s also a war between the last two spacefaring species, which have been at it for about eight hundred years, fighting over the last few surviving inhabitable worlds. A robot construction system was sent first so when those “arks” arrive they have a central hub from which to operate; it’s basically an excuse to have a mini-Citadel.

The Angaran are a lovely species with a wide range of reactions much like humans; the Kett are xenophobic genocides and no-quarter anthrophages whose mode of reproduction is basically the plot of Quake II; the Remnant are low-rent copies of Halo’s Forerunners, only they favor green lights instead of blue.

… which is fanfic, borrowing from other media to fill in the story.

Many of the side-missions feel forced, like the authors didn’t know how to glue them into the main plotline with any real meaning. Diligent players familiar with the mechanics of games like this will end with too much money and too many skill and research points unspent; after you find a weapons mix that suits you and your crew fine, you’ll run out of reasons to spend anymore, and the game isn’t stingy with providing you with weapon upgrades taken off fallen enemies or loot boxes.

… which is also a common sensation in fanfic. Things come too easily.

And, to round out the fanfic sensation, Mass Effect famously introduced a “romance plot” with awkwardly animated sex scenes that fans agreed were both delightful and cringe all at the same time. But more delightful. So Andromeda has Ryder flirting with everyone, all the time, shamelessly. You could probably bang the whole crew if you put your mind to it. And the sex scenes are longer and more explicit because that’s really what the fans want: more blue tentacled titty.

“Hornier than the original” is probably the most common of all fanfic tropes.

For all that, the story was fun. Maybe because I wanted something a little hornier, and Sara Ryder (default name) is a little less serious than Jane Shepherd. And maybe because the conflicts are a little less dire. Oh, they’re very dire; four colony vessels full of cryo-suspended colonists and zero inhabitable worlds at the beginning of the game is a dire situation, but the idea that those sleeping colonists might be all that’s left of the Milky Way’s species and cultures isn’t delivered until almost two-thirds of the way through the game, diluting the impact of “losing” a lot. To make the Andromeda setting interesting, Sara’s becoming Pathfinder and integrating the symbiote is accompanied by a two-year period of her being in a coma to find there was a revolt among the colonists, and now several of the marginal worlds on which the Angaran and Kett fight out their battles have a third problem: rogue human factions with names like “The Outcasts” and “The Collective.” This feels more than a little forced, an attempt to create more interspecies conflicts because just having two species rather than the many, many in the original series limited the possibilities.

And yes, I have to agree with the fans that the change of rendering engine brought a lot of undesirable changes, the worst of which is that we basically got only one subtype of Asari, and they’re all wide-eyed and puffy-faced compared to the sort back in the Milky Way. Choosing not to have a Salarian as part of the central crew was also a mistake but I guess it’s a lot harder to replace Mordin Solus than it is Liara T’Soni.

I do wish the game had been popular enough to justify the planned sequels; the game ends with two major plotlines incomplete: The Kett are temporarily pushed out of your cluster but they still exist and they’re still a threat, and The Scourge is still there slowly strangling whole star systems. Your Remnant specialist (who, like the Prothean specialist in the first game, is an Asari) has no idea how long the Remnant terraforming system you rebooted will be able to hold the Scourge back from the worlds you have reclaimed. Also unresolved is the plotline of exactly who paid for the Andromeda project, who authorized the use of very advanced AI in violation of all Citadel Alliance law and policy, and why those people may have had one of the Human colonists’ civilian leaders murdered, and I kinda want resolution on those questions.

But, like Half-Life 3, we may never know.

Mass Effect: Andromeda has had a lot of money thrown at it, and it shows. It’s pretty, the voice acting is top-notch, and even running on Linux it runs smoothly and without problems. It’s a little flatter and less well-thought than the original, but not devastatingly so, and given how high a bar that is, anything “a little less” is still much better than 90% of the dreck out there. If you enjoyed the first three, you’ll either really like it or really hate it, and I suspect “like” will happen more often; if you weren’t a fan of the originals, it doesn’t have much to give you.

---

Spoiler, this is the best joke in the whole game, but you have to know who Drack and Peebee are to get it, and it’s especially rich because there are no Elcor in Andromeda; that ark, as far as anyone knows, didn’t make it, so the only way this joke makes any sense is if you’ve completely imbibed the original.

Usually on this cruise when I wake up in the morning the ship is in motion, heading from one location to the next. Despite the incredible array of sensors a modern ship can use to see through even the most terrible weather, they're not much for moving about in the dark, at least not when sailing past icebergs and rocky shores with little more than 100 meters clearance between the hull and the land. We passed a number of other cruise ships along the way, such as the Viking Polaris and the Moldavia Expedition.


Our next Antarctic stop was Cuverville Island. Cuverville is another massive penguin colony, this time almost entirely made up of Gentoo Penguins. I've been lied to. Gentoo penguins don't build Linux from source code; they don't even use Linux at all!

There were also whale bones scattered across the shore, a testimony to the island's history as a stop for 19th century whaling vessels. It was essentially a rocky shore and we were allowed to follow one of two hiking paths, north or south.

As we walked southward, a penguin walked right into the middle of the pathway and stopped, watching us. Omaha and I and a few of the other guests all sorta piled up in front of him. I decided to name him "Gandalf," since he had decided that We Shall Not Pass. We're not allowed to get within three meters of the penguins, and Gandalf by himself was taking up the two-meter wide path the guides had marked out for us. "Just go around him," the guide said. "You can leave the path if you have to make room for a penguin."

One of the stories going around the guides today is that one of the guests said, "If these are Gentoo penguins, what happened to Gen one?" At first, the guide asked thought it was a joke but, no, apparently the inquirer was dead serious. It's hard to believe some people, people this rich, will take a cruise like this, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see things most people never will, and not learn a damn thing.


Omaha and I walked along the rocky beach until we heard Professor Marcel's voice. "Elf! Come here! You have to see this!" I trotted up the hill to where he was standing, and he pointed at... a patch of grass. "Welcome to the rainforests of Antarctica!" He explained that his grass is the only vascular, flowering plant in Antarctica, a tough, hardy grass that flowers and self-pollinates once a year. It is genetically identical to the grass found in Greenland, so the tiny seeds must hitch rides on the birds that migrate from Greenland to the Antarctic Peninsula every year. Those birds must fly a long way because apparently they don't get many rest stops. He also said that if you look closely you might see a tiny white dot moving on the grass; that's the Antarctic mite, one of the few insects that also lives on the continent.

Omaha and I wandered back to the landing zone and took the northern path up to another group of penguins, but also a fur seal just hanging out by herself, trying to get a nap on some rocks just a few meters away from the smelly, noisy penguins and the equally annoying humans who want her picture. None of the Antarctic wildlife are the least bit afraid of humans; these populations are heavily protected and have not experienced the sorts of trauma most animals around the planet have experienced.

One of the other things we spotted at Cuverville was a penguin highway, those packed snow tracks penguins create as they move from one part of a colony to another. If you click on that link and look at the image, you'll see just how incredibly long that highway is. Somewhere in that picture is this penguin, but in the first image she's just a tiny dot.

At lunch, an woman who looked to be in her late 60s to mid 70s stood behind me in the smorgasbord queue, and her hair was  the colors of the bi-pride flag.  I complimented her on it, saying "That's one of my favorite color schemes."

She looked me right in the eye for two seconds, then grinned and said in that whispery voice that says she was part of a conspiracy, "It's one of mine, too." While we were eating, we passed by the Moldavia Expedition a second time.

The afternoon was another Zodiac excursion, this one around Brown Base, the official science outpost Argentina keeps in Antarctica. A lot of countries do, and there's a lot of winking about how it's not really about having a claim when the planet's climate gets dicey and Antarctica starts to look like a viable continent for habitation. Those poor scientists live in the middle of a penguin colony, I can't begin to imagine what that's done to their sense of smell.

It was one of the lovelier Zodiac excursions, too. As we were passing the base proper, I spotted something moving in the water, pointed. "Whale!" And sure enough, it was a Humpback, a fairly large one.

There's a website, Happy Whale, where you can upload photos like this one, seeing the underside of the tail, and the site will identify the whale for you and give you a history of sightings.

At one point, we were about two kilometers from the Pursuit, out on the water far from everything. Antarctica is not silent. The ice cracks constantly, the seabirds are loud, and even when calm the sea makes its own noise. The water is startlingly clear. The air is crisp and clean in a way no part of civilization ever feels like.

I was fairly exhausted after all of that day. Omaha and I hit the sushi bar again that night, and listened to the band play. I think I went to bed early.

The next day, Omaha felt much better, and we agreed to go together out to the Brown Bluff excursion. (They called them “expeditions” but I refuse to go with that. An expedition is a voyage taken in exploration, scientific discovery, or war. An excursion is a short journey taken for pleasure or education. As occasionally unpleasant and even dangerous some of the excursions were, they weren’t expeditions by any measure.)

I was still getting up far earlier than she was, but that allowed me to go up one flight of stairs and walk the length of the ship to the cafe in Six Aft (yes, they really referred to the large installations like the lounges, restaurant, and cafe that way), where I had what was already becoming custom: two tall glasses of cold water (a half liter, total), and then a latte.

The ship was still in motion, but the day was already beautiful, if hovering at 1℃, but that was still nice enough to sit outside under the space heaters in the awnings and enjoy my coffee and read. I was not getting up before dawn; February 1st is late summer in Antarctica and sunrise happens around 4:45am. I’m not getting up that early.

The day fully “started” around 8am, when Juan, the Excursion Leader, did a public announcement that’s loud even in the cabins that the ship was steaming toward Brown Bluff and that the weather was nice enough we’d be making an excursion to the shore. I checked on Omaha and she was up, so we went to the smorgasbord breakfast where I got what was going to be my habit: a small bit of scrambled eggs, a small bowl of unsweetened whole yogurt with fruit, and a mound of roasted fresh vegetables.

The excursion crew allocates five Zodiacs for excursions, plus two more for rescue if it’s needed. The Zodiacs are stacked in the center of deck nine, with four cranes to load and unload them down the side of the boat. Deck nine outdoors is closed to passengers while the loading is going on, obviously.

Five zodiacs can move about 40 people, so the excursion groups are broken into six color codes, which rotate so that your group doesn’t have to be the “crack of dawn” group every day. This day, our color code, blue, was last, so Omaha and I had plenty of time to get our cold weather gear, parkas, beanies, and life preservers put together.


We’re loaded into the Zodiacs through a massive swinging hatchway in the side of the boat on Deck 2. When we came on board, we were each issued a shipboard ID card with both a RFID chip and a bar code. The card isn’t actually used that much; mostly just to let us into the room and to get on and off the ship. We have to show the ID when we board the Zodiac, and again when we come back, just to make sure they have everyone. How you lose someone in a bright yellow parka and black pants against all that icy desolation is beyond me.

Like Deception Island, Brown Bluff is a volcano. Unlike Deception Island it hasn’t erupted within human memory and the geologists are sure it’s quite extinct. The day remained bright and sunny as we boarded the Zodiac and rode the ten-minute boat ride to the shore.


A route had been laid for us through the penguin colony, a series of narrow poles about a meter high, which we were to walk along no more than a two meters from the path they described. Omaha and I walked the length of it, stopping to talk to the team excursionary geologist, who has a favorite rock in the whole world. This rock. It was ejected by one volcanic eruption tens of thousands of years ago, and then a second lava flow went past it, giving it this melted appearance. I figure if one must have a favorite rock, that one’s a good choice.

We discovered one thing: penguins stink. Holy mother of eldritch gods, do they stink. The smell is overwhelming, sun-baked bird shit derived completely from sea krill. In some of the photos, you can see streaks of pink on their white chests and bellies, and that’s entirely because they will, when they get tired, just flop down onto the ground, bird shit or not, and lie there for a break.

As we walked along, one of the guides pointed out this penguin mother and her chick, which looks adorable, but there’s a tragedy in this image. That other egg is dead. Given that it’s undamaged, the guide said it probably froze to death while the mother was out hunting for enough food to keep herself alive. That apparently happens a lot.


The penguin smell got bad enough that Omaha started to feel ill again. Fortunately, the wind was picking up and blowing in from the northeast, so when we walked back to the Zodiac landing zone it wasn’t too bad. Unfortunately, the freshening wind also moved icebergs, and the Pursuit had to move out of their way, so the hatch had to be closed and no Zodiacs were available to take us off. We waited half an hour before we were able to get a ride back to the ship.

Lunch was delightful, a buffet of mostly Indian dishes. Omaha and I found seating with another couple, older than we, who were spending most of their retirement just cruising around the world.

While we lunched, the Pursuit moved further south and west, to a new location about 30 kilometers away: Hope Bay. That excursion was a Zodiac tour: no getting off onto the land, just an hour-long run around to various locations while the driver and guide told stories of harrowing 19th and early 20th century expeditions, as well as descriptions of glaciers and ice, and how icebergs calved off as the glacier reached the edge of the land and broke apart under the force of gravity.

Omaha and I had dinner than night in the lounge, where there is a sushi bar. The sushi chef said, and I don’t know how sincere he was, that I was clearly a man who understood sushi since I didn’t use the soy sauce and I knew to order tomago. I was probably just being flattered. The sushi had been good enough, fresh enough, it hadn’t needed anything more, and I told him so.

On our second day at sea and still in Drake’s Passage, the rough night and seasickness meant Omaha could not be roused for love or breakfast. I got up in my usual early fashion and went up to the cafe at Six Aft to have water, coffee, and a good book until she awoke. I listened to a lot of people walk up to the help desk, visible in the center, and ask for help with the “Seabourn Life Onboard” app.

She was still sleeping when the announcement came over the speakers that the Biosecurity Briefing was due to begin. I headed down to the presentation center on Deck 4.

The International Association of Arctic Tour Operators is a public-private partnership that works with the Antarctic Treaty Organization to allow tourism in a very limited number of locations in Antarctica, in exchange for which the Antarctic Treaty Organization collects permit fees to preserve and protect Antarctica.

It might seem “unfair” to talk about limits like that, but I like to remember that people will play hundreds of hours of first-person or third-person video games like Cyberpunk 2077, Horizon Zero Dawn, or Borderlands, and those all take place in settings that are, at most, forty virtual kilometers on a side. I mean, I spent about 120 hours in HZD, and another 120 in Cyberpunk 2077, and by the time this trip is through I’ll have only spent about six hours total walking across Antarctica.

Avian Flu is what they’re really worried about. People can be carriers, and several flocks of penguins died before scientists figured out what was going on. We presented all of our cold-weather gear for a comprehensive examination and vacuuming, to remove any alien seeds or spores we may have been carrying into Antarctica. The staff took it all very seriously. Omaha, having no luggage other than what Seabourn brought her, had nothing to present.

After that, I went back to the cafe. Despite feeling “normal,” I still wasn’t entirely there. I must have looked… vulnerable when I was sitting the cafe, which doubles as the ship’s passenger support center where there’s always a line there of people getting help with getting their internet working. A couple approached me and sat down. There was some small chit-chat, and the woman said, “You look tired. Did you not sleep well last night?”

I made some comment about how my wife had spent hours in sickbay last night, and we were watching her closely because Dramamine and its relatives can reduce the effectiveness of anti-epileptic medications. They offered to pray for me, and I agreed, although I did tell her I was Jewish. “Oh, that’s okay, I have many, many Messianic Jews as friends, and they understand what it means to embrace Jesus.” I manfully resisted eyerolling.

They are truly American Gentry. They have three houses. The wording was “homes,” but if you have more than one home, I feel it’s unlikely you actually have “a home.” Not impossible, but unlikely. They own a trucking business somewhere in Oklahoma, plus several of the warehouses that those trucks serve. The wife is “committed to Jesus and the saving of America,” and I know exactly what that means.

I managed to extricate myself and went back to find Omaha. She was awake but not entirely there, and had ordered some very simple food for room service. There was an early excursion presentation, which amounted to “We’ve reached Deception Island, which is our first destination. The weather is picking up, so there won’t be any kayak or submersible trips, but we are going to let you onto land to look around.”


Deception Island is a long-abandoned ruin that was a 19th century whaling stop, then an early 20th century exploration center, then a WW2 redoubt for the British seeking to prevent Germans from disrupting supply ships going around the southern tips of Africa and South America, then the launch site for flyover surveys of Antarctica in the 1950s, and finally as a research station until 1970. (As far as anyone knows, the Germans never did attempt to disrupt trade through the Passage.) Clouds hung low over the sky, and the site we stood in had a curious bowl-shaped basalt formation walling it in. “That’s because you’re standing in a volcano,” said a guide.

“We are?” said one of the other guests, surprised by his lack of reading the landing material. “Is it active?”

“Go by the shore. I know, we told you not to kneel or sit or touch the ground, but go by the shore where the tide will wash it away, and stick your fingers into the sand.”

I was the only person to take her up on the offer. I knelt down just at the shoreline where the water was washing up on the beach of black sand. The first centimeter into the sand was as cold as above, but four centimeters down the sand became as warm as blood. It looked up, knowing the expression on my face. “That’s an active volcano,” she said.


I was a bit stunned. “This bay has the distinction of being the greatest series of failures in volcanic prediction in history. In there were three teams here in 1967, four in 1969, and four in 1970, all here to test their theories of predicting volcanic eruptions, and in all three cases they had to be evacuated during an eruption because none of their instruments succeeded in predicting or even detecting it. We’re better at it now; ground swell and the chemical composition of pre-eruption gasses are terrific indicators, but instruments back then weren’t sensitive enough.

“Don’t worry, though. If there’s an eruption, it’s just a two-kilometer hike to that peninsula over there–” She pointed southward to a spit of land that formed the bay– “… to the evacuation point. And as you can see, the hanger here and the buildings, while ruins, have been here since 1957 and nothing the volcano’s done has touched them yet.”

I took pictures of the wrecked buildings, fuel tanks, and the hanger from which the first from-the-air surveys of the Antarctic interior had been launched, plus what would become a common accumulation of seals, penguins, terns, and skewa, the last of which we were told was the most predatory bird on the Antarctic shore.

After a short Zodiac ride back to the ship, we were greeting with what has to be the most delightful ritual (can’t really call it a tradition, I don’t think) so far: hot chocolate whiskey and cream cocktails. Absolutely heaven. I will have to make an effort to not get used to this.


We ate at The Restaurant (that’s all it’s called) that night, an incredible steak dinner with three glasses of wine, and then we went up to the quieter lounge to listen to music and relax.

To give you an idea of the insane luxury of this cruise, let’s just say this: the wine is complimentary. The cocktails are complimentary. All covered by your ticket fee. You’re only charged if you want something exceptional: a cocktail made with 31-year-old Whisky will set you back $200, and one made with Louis XIII Cognac goes from $800. (I looked it up. Louis XIII Cognac is aged a minimum of 40 years, and it goes for $24,000 per 750ml liter bottle). But the ship’s standard collection of cocktails, like a negroni, they just mix and hand to you without asking for your name or room number or credit card.

I had one cocktail, but then we went off to bed.