Elf Sternberg

Clair Obscur (review, the very spoiler and angry part)

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 16:58:29 GMT

WARNING: I cannot emphasize enough that here be spoilers. Maybe you want them. Maybe that’ll make the art and gameplay worthwhile.

There are stories that let us be heroes. Horizon Zero Dawn, Mass Effect, Half Life are all such stories. Prey was such a story until the epilogue, at which point the story changaed so much I swore to never play it again. (I did, but I skipped the epilogue). There are stories where our heroism is very much a choice (the first two Bioshock games, or Cyberpunk 2077), and there are stories where the point is to say that being the hero doesn’t always come with the ending you thought it did (Bioshock Infinite comes to mind).

I write science fiction. I’ve thought a lot about the Simulation Problem, the moral infrastructures of aliens and robots unlike ourselves and how those would interact with human consciousness and human frailty. I’ve cheered for Free Guy, a dumb (but fun!) movie that has as one of its central themes Wittgenstein’s maxim for believing if someone has a soul: if you can’t tell if someone has a soul, your only moral choice is to believe and act as if they do until proven otherwise.

Clair Obscur’s theme is that it doesn’t matter if you’re the hero, or not. It doesn’t matter if you have a soul, or not. Your very existence is worthless in the eyes of God.

You spend the first two-thirds of the game with Lune, Sciel, and Mielle, as well as the others. You learn their backstories, their sadness at being in so broken a world, their tragedies that led them to join the expedition, gamble their lives on potentially hopeless task, and against the slimmest of odds save their world. The game shows you in slow, beautiful steps how their suffering, their love, their loneliness, and the companionship they’ve found in this adventure make them human.

At the end of Act II, you learn your friends are “not real.”

The prologue introduces the Paintress, a monstrous, bony figure on the horizon who is inflicting all the pain and suffering the citizens of Lumiere face. In Act I you meet “the man with the white beard,” who slaughters almost all of the expedition, leaving only a handful alive, the core of your party. Act II brings gives them names: the Paintress is named Ailene, and the man with the white beard is her husband, Renoir.

Ailene and Renoir are gods. In their world (of which you see barely two minutes in the entire game), there is a war between The Painters and The Writers. Nobody says why; I dug up every piece of lore I could and couldn’t figure it out. Both of these groups have the magical power to create new worlds by painting (“Canvases”) or writing them. An incident killed one Ailene and Renoir’s son, and left one of their two daughters, Mielle, hideously scarred and crippled by burns. Ailene took one of her dead son’s paintings, added a ton of detail to it, and gave him a city, Lumiere, in which they could live together.

Renoir had once been trapped in a painting decades ago, and Ailene saved him. Renoir and Ailene know that entering a painting eventually drives you mad, but Ailene would rather have had a lifetime with her son and go mad. Renoir entered the painting to drag Ailene back to the “real world,” but Ailene fought back; Mielle followed him to help her mother. The resulting battle caused The Fracture and caused Mielle to lose her memories, so she thought she was just another citizen of Lumiere, and Gustave adopted her and taught her how to live in the Fractured world.

That’s the overarching Lore. You just spent more time reading about it than the game itself spends showing it to you in dialog and flashbacks.

At the end of the game, Mielle has gathered enough Chroma (a form of magical power mostly used as currency in the game mechanic) and come into her own power enough that you, the player, are to make a choice for her: drive Renoir out of the Canvas, or let him burn it.

If you drive Renoir out of the Canvas, the people you’ve spent hours and hours with, the people the game told you to care about, get to live for as long as Mielle keeps her sanity. Eventually, though, she will die. Mielle wants this. She wants to live as an ordinary person, live out her days in a reconstructed Lumiere with the friends she’s come to trust and love, to see them happy, to see them live out the lives the narrative told us they deserved.

If you let Renoir destroy the Canvas, Mielle has a chance to live out a “real” life, in the real world, in a burned shell of a body, it’s skin barely able to move, blind in one eye, unable to speak. There’s a whole human mind back of that remaining eye, but her family treats her with contempt. Ailene’s attachment to her son will be broken and she’ll have a chance to be healed.

Your choice, then, is to take the risk that your life means something and deserves a chance, or to accept that it doesn’t mean anything at all and your death will give the gods (with whom you have almost no contact and who view your very existence as a problem) a chance at some closure.

Like, no. To hell with that sort of premise. It made me angry with an incandescent rage that all that time was buildup to “Oh, let’s give Renoir a chance at closure.” He murdered a city already. He’s been abusing his power to create and then neglect life for decades. He gets less than ten minutes of screen time and we’re supposed to accept that his feelings, his “life forces on us cruel choices” bullshit, matters more than our friends, our companions, and our lives? Just because he’s some arbitrary definition of “really real?”

Nope, not playing this game again.

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Clair Obscur (review, non-spoilery part)

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 16:57:53 GMT

I tried hard to write no spoilers in this post. I describe the world as established in the prologue, and some pretty generic descriptions of places throughout the game, but I’m keeping the plot points to myself.

I enjoy playing video games in which the writer makes a few promises: that the person you’re about to inhabit is someone interesting, and that the world in which you’re about to awaken and try to fix is itself interesting. I’ll play games with one or the other: the Doom franchise is just plain ordinary physically challenging fun, but the art is amazing; Dead Space gives us a brave but tortured soul whose first close brush with evil makes him the unhappy savior of the galaxy in chapters written with thought and care; Prey is both incredibly pretty and gives our heroine reasons to sacrifice her humanity piece by piece to save her space station’s crew and, ultimately, Earth itself.

Clair Obscur hits those notes with grace and precision. The premise is pure video game fantasy: 67 years ago, a horrifying supernatural event (which the people in this story have come to call “The Fracture”) tore the world into pieces and unleashed monsters, leaving only a tiny island of human survivors struggling in a city call Lumiere (which is this world’s Paris, complete with a half-melted Eiffel Tower). Lumiere is losing its struggle, and every year it sends its strongest men and women out to try and find the source of evil and stop it.

That’s not spoiling it; that’s just the intro. I’d be spoiling it if I told you why the Expeditions are sent out every year, why it’s “Expedition 33” if the Fracture was 67 years ago, or why I cried at the end of the friggin’ Prologue, much less at several points throughout the game.

I was warned that at the end I’d “cry in technicolor.” I didn’t. Almost did, but something stopped me. But that’s for the other post, where there will be massive spoilers.

You spend the majority of your time with your party: Lune (your cleric), Sciel (your wizard), Gustave (your mechanic & warrior), Mielle (your warrior), and eventually you’re joined by Verso (warrior) and Monoco (tank). None of them are called these things, but these are clearly the roles they play in your party. They are all incredibly well-written people: Lune was always a lonely child, isolated from her peers by her connection to the Lumina (the source of magic in this world); Sciel is filled with rage at the unfairness of the world but wants to be loving and humane underneath it all; Gustave is awkward and charming and you want to hug him but yow, is he deadly in combat. You have dialogues among them that lead to “relationship scores” that unlock certain adventures or abilities. It’s not a particularly new system, but the voice acting, mocap, and just general quality will keep you glued.

The combat is… annoying at first, then easier later. The game doesn’t explain anything, so maybe this is spoilery, but the characters clearly understand it even if the player doesn’t, so I’ll give it away: “Pictos” are talismans with spells you can learn and use in combat, and you can use them the moment you get them, but you only have three Pictos slots. “Luminas” are spells you have learned; once you’ve mastered a Picto (by using it four times in combat), the spells becomes accessible to the other members of your party without the talisman, and you have Lumina slots for them. You earn Lumina slots by finding Lumina or earning it through combat, and you distribute it to your party during the “rest at camp” mechanism. Luminas have different “Lumina point costs,” so when you find some Lumina, you dole it out to different characters to give them slots for buffs.

Combat is Japanese Role-Playing-Game style: your party (maximum of three) face against an enemy party (again, maximum of three) and you pick either spells you know (buffed by Luminas and Pictos) or just go with your base weapon attack, in a turn-based system. Every character gets a number of “actions” per combat; spells consume actions, and base attacks give more back. “Who gets to play when” is determined by the relative Speed attributes of your characters vs the monsters. Different weapons interact with different attributes (speed, strength, health, agility, luck) and some have buffs based on your character’s magical ability.

And everyone has some kind of magical ability, but their metaphors for “what Lumina does” are different for each character, and you have to learn all of them to be effective. Lune’s is straightforward and elemental; Sciel’s is kinda like tarot cards with a light-vs-dark motif, and when she’s in “twilight” she does double-damage; Monoco’s is based on shape-shifting. It’s all weird and clever and fun in battle.

Pictos come with “secondary effects:” a higher health, higher speed, or higher damage. So once you’ve learned one and have the Lumina slots to equip it without the talisman, you may want to trade it for a more generic one that gives you a better chance of surviving in combat.

The biggest controversy in the came is the parry mechanism, a QTE (or “quick time event”). If a monster attacks, you can dodge the blow, but you have to learn the precise moment when you can dodge during their attack animation. The dodge “window” is 0.3 seconds, which is actually pretty learnable for most people. Or you can “parry,” which also does damage back to the monster in an instantaneous counter-attack, but the window for that is only half of dodge: 0.15 seconds. That takes longer to master (You get really tired of hearing Mielle shout “parry it!” when a monster attacks someone other than her). You do a lot of dying but eventually you find the rhythm of a monster’s moves and learn to hit the “parry” button in the right pattern and combat becomes a lot simpler after that.

If there’s a problem with the game it’s that the third Act doesn’t tell you what you should do next. It has a single mission: “Find and kill the final boss.” Each of your characters has laid out a side-mission for you, which you should do to unlock future abilities, but they’re very much side missions; if you were confident in your ability to parry, you could end the game immediately, but you’d miss out on a lot of great art and storytelling– and some pretty important lore.

It is without a doubt one of the most beautiful games I’ve ever played, both in terms of the art and the characters, the dialogue, the sound design, the music (OMG, the music!), everything about it.

I’d almost recommend it if the ending hadn’t filled me with such rage and loathing that I actually regret playing it, I deleted it the moment the game was over, and I’m very unlikely to give it another play-through, ever.

You can read that part, if you like, but it’s got massive spoilers.

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"Considering Matthew Shepard"

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 16:37:45 GMT

Omaha and I had the privilege of attending Considering Matthew Shepard, an oratorio with an extensive chorale put on by blending three different choruses: the University of Washington Chamber Singers, the UW Chorale, and the Seattle University Choir.

It was… heart-wrenching. It doesn’t try to traumatize the audience with graphic descriptions of the murder, but it does make clear that the killers were brutal and unrelenting, that they upgraded from petty theft and robbery to full-blown murder because Shepard was gay. One of them even said as much.

The opening song, “An ordinary boy,” talks about who he was and includes photos of diary pages in which he lists all of the things he loves. Soloists portray his mother, father, and younger brother in an aria as they describe Matt Shepard as they knew him. The narrative continues with Shepard going to the LGBTQ meet-up on campus, then going to a bar and, eventually, being taken to a lonely road, beaten, robbed, and left tied to a wooden fence.

The fence, of all things, has its own voice as it describes the night as its passed, as Matt’s heart continued beating. Shepard was found 18 hours after his assault, still alive. His heart beat for another eight days, but he never woke up again.

There are three songs following this one: the angry, “What have you done?” (which includes mention of churches that protested at the funeral and displayed signs that proclaimed “Shepard Rests In Hell”); the sad “Prayer for peace” (in which the fence, again, signs about how people came to touch it, leave gifts there, and make of it a memorial), and “Just like you,” in which the choir talks about the two killers and how human they were. They weren’t monsters. It ends with that bittersweetness that’s endemic to all of queer life, queer joy intermingled with the sense that the battle with compulsory heterosexuality will be generations long.

I cried a lot. I lived through those days. I was going through my own coming out, repeatedly, as different parts of me tried to reconcile: kinky, queer, horny, married and also, suddenly, fatherhood. As I watched those sincere, earnest twenty-somethings on that stage, it hit me that they were just as moved by the moment as I was, and yet most of them had been born after Matthew Shepard’s murder, and after the huge battle, after the evangelical church was briefly shamed for being so ugly in face of a young man’s death.

And yet they cared. I wonder how passionate I was about that sort of thing when I was in my mid-20s; that would have been, oh, ’92 or ’93 or thereabouts, the height of the AIDS crisis. I went to quite a few protests in that era, got the t-shirts, did my activism as a Planned Parenthood safer sex outreach volunteer. I wish I had the naivete that went with such passion; these days, my activism is small, targeted, and mostly consists of calling my congressfolks and financially supporting the lesser of two evils.

If you have a chance, go see Considering Matthew Shepard. Just remember to bring tissues.

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A short trip to France

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 17:51:06 GMT

${Work} decided that it was time for this all-virtual company to have a company-wide face-to-face, and after much to-ing and fro-ing, the venue chosen was a large bed and breakfast in Alsace, France. Our CEO is wonderfully organized and, basically, after getting buy-in from everyone who would be attending, just emailed us tickets to the airport, the train to Strasbourg, end pretty much every detail.

All I needed was to get on a plane and go. Which I did, Sunday at noon. Which meant I’d be arriving in Paris at 7am on Monday, although my body would only think it was 10pm, since the flight is ten hours great-circle over the Arctic.

On the flight, I did a little hacking on my Surface Pro, and got both Gamescope and XRView working, so I was able to play Warcraft in complete privacy on my Rokid AR glasses, which are pretty nice. Lets me enjoy my furry pr0n without my seatmates having to know. And I did get the blessing of having the seat to my left empty, so I could stash my bookbag and still have a place to put my feet.

The jet lag just murdered me. It’s a good thing the “business” part of the business trip was a four or five hour session in the morning and we were free in the afternoon, because I spent the next three days spending my afternoons napping and trying not to feel dead to the world, nor feeling insomniac when I was awake at 4am because my circadian clock was still convinced it barely dusk back home.

That said, Monday was our “travel” day, and since I’d gotten into France early, and so had two of my peers, we met up at the Gare d’Est (East Station) and rode the subway to the Louvre, where we walked through the garden, had a lovely snack and then a fantastic lunch, all while walking around the city and just, you know, touring. That’s what tourists do. The Eiffel Tower is surprisingly clunky-looking up close. The Seine is beautiful. The garden at the Lourve only proves the last couple of kings were perverts, since the garden includes a hedge labyrinth just tall enough to make it hard to guess the maze, but short enough not to hide the four statues of naked girls running along the path. Other statues of Greek Gods and French Heroes are also placed about the pathways, and it’s hard to imagine someone in the US leaving a marble statue gilded in gold and made in 1772 out where just anyone can touch it.

As we walked around, I did see some local collective was putting up antifa stickers with the slogan, “No neighborhood for fascists!” I can get with that sentiment.

The train from Paris to Strasbourg covers the same distance as the Amtrack from Seattle to Portland. Paris to Strasbourgh takes 1 hour and 45 minutes. Seattle to Portland takes 3 hours and 25 minutes, and that’s the “fast” route! We could have these incredibly civilized, ridiculously comfortable transports carrying us around the country, but we’re addicted to the cramped, painful, noisy airlines, and I’ll never figure out why.

The meeting itself was at a farm house in the middle of nowhere, in a small town about 20 minutes outside of Strasbourg. A barn had been converted into a bed-and-breakfast meeting area, and everybody grabbed a room, and we all sat down to dinner together, meeting each other for the first time in a space not mediated by Zoom or Google Meetup (or whatever the eff they call it now).

I woke up the next morning and wondered why it was still dark at 7:00am. I thought, maybe I’m significantly further south than Seattle, but, no, it’s only 1.2° south, which isn’t that far. This is one of those things that always blows my mind about Seattle and maps: 70% of Canadians live south of Seattle, and England, Scotland, and Ireland are all north of us.

We made a grocery run, and it was, well, it was a full-size grocery, comparable to the local Safeway or Publix. The vegetables were absurdly fresh, and we were told not to buy bread. One of my peers was a local, and he led us to a small bakery about a 20 minute walk from the farmhouse, and we bought fresh-baked bread there. I spotted this “HappyVore” fake meat being sold on the shelves. I’m sure in a furry universe that’s a popular, if controversial, brand.

That bread was amazing. The omelette I made for breakfast for myself the next day was mind-bogglingly good. All the food was incredible.

And we hired a chef. She came in the evening to cook French and Moroccan-style meals, recommended local wines (two every night! A white for the salad and a red for meal), and she always cooked so much I usually had leftovers to tide me through breakfast or lunch the next day.

The only thing that disappointed me was the coffee. It was about as boring as you could imagine. I make better with my kettle and press back home. On the trip home I actually stopped at a Starbucks to drink coffee that didn’t taste of the 1980s. Sure, it tasted like the work of the Omnissiah, but at least it didn’t remind me of Folger’s. Also, all of the soda pop is artificially sweetened as a form of harm-reduction.

We had really productive meetings, getting refamiliarized with general discussions of the architecture of the product, a long bull session on our values as a company, and wish lists of what we want to accomplish with the product. I thought some of my ambitions were outlandish but, no, everyone agreed that everything I said sounded perfectly reasonable, even the one I thought was truly crazy: turning the elements folder into a showcase for web components, styling, internationalization, accessibility, the whole shebang. It’s ambitious as hell, and I thought it would get a thumbs down, but the leads were like, nope, that sounds like a reasonable ambition to us. So what do I know?

I did walk the entire little town we were in. It was chill, hovering around freezing. In fact, we just left the soda pop, white wine, and beer outside, since there was no reason to use the freezer when it was colder outdoors. The wine was amazing, but the beer was… beer. I had only one, a brown ale the French guy liked, and it was drinkable, which is about the only thing that recommends it. At least the whole “the only beers you can get in winter are more bitter than your soul” thing Seattle has going on hasn’t infested other countries.

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The Dead (Furry) Internet

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 17:39:00 GMT

Henry Farrell (himself) asserts that LLMs are “cultural technologies,” stores of cultural information with patterns of retrieval that are new and to which we will adjust. If this is true, then Furry Fandom should probably be doing a lot of introspection and undergoing a lot of change.

Let’s emphasize that nothing I say here is the fandom’s fault. I am not blaming anyone. If I’m going to indict anyone, it’s the people who make the Furry-oriented models for Stable Diffusion and other image generation software, because that’s where the critical fault lies.

Obsessive Labeling

It’s an open secret among the people who enjoy porn illustration renders (not gonna call it “art,” it never is) that the best way to get a really good porn pic is to render it using a furry model first, and then use the image-to-image feature to say, “Rerender this with humans.” The furry community has an obsession with categorizing its interests, and the people who draw lewds will draw and tag everything. The accurate and comprehensive labeling on E621 can be found embedded deep in any furry-oriented rendering model, exceeding by orders of magnitude the accuracy and precision of models based off other image sites like Rule34 and its ilk.

It was also a commonplace joke that the first generation of rendering models, the Stable Diffusion Series 1 models, were incredibly bad at rendering men. It sometimes seemed as if SD1.5 and its offspring had only ever seen one penis, and an exceptionally ugly one at that. The furry models, on the other hand, have an incredible catalog of male bodies and body parts, and to this day exceed the state of the art in some of the models that came after Series 1.

The furry artist community is being devastated by its own success. The thieves (and they are thieves) who dumped all of E621 and other furry art collections into the first generation of furry illustration models, and who collectively managed to create models better tagged and far more comprehensive than the commercials ones created by Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, Dalle-E, and NovelAI as a non-commercial, under-the-radar operation, exploited this otherwise admirable dedication to accuracy to wreck the furry art community’s future.

And A Loss of History

At the same time, that labeling has gone on mostly in terms of acts and artists, not characters. If LLMs are stores of cultural information, then in thirty year someone will still be able to “render this picture in the style of Personalami, Chunie, and Taran Fiddler,” but you won’t be able to call up any original characters that don’t belong to a massive franchise. Thirty years from now you’ll be able to render (and render porn of) Lola Bunny, Maid Marian from Disney’s Robin Hood, or Rocket Raccoon, but the primary original characters from the founding of the fandom are completely lost. There are no skiltaire in these models; no Omaha the Cat Dancer; no Erma Felna; no Hervystia; no one from Doug Winger’s fertile (in many senses of the imagination) cast of characters; no one from Ken Cougr’s stable.

Maybe that’s a good thing, but if LLM’s are going to be with us for a while, and they’re “stores of culture,” then they’re admissions that Furry Fandom, for all its pride in wanting to be non-commercial, does not love its own artists nearly as much as it loves Paw Patrol (of which, at last count, there were 103 characters encoded in a variety of open-source illustration models).

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All I Want Is A Democratic Leadership With A Heart, A Brain, and Courage

Sat, 06 Dec 2025 17:21:48 GMT

The 2025 off-year election happened about a month ago. Democrats won a number of highly important races in places like Georgia, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, plus a large number of down-ballot elections at the city and county level, with the most notable being that of Zohran Mamdani winning the moyorship of New York. A lot of punditry came out and shouted, “The Democrats are winning!”

We’re not winning. It’s just that the Republicans have finally angered enough of the electorate that they’re beginning to lose. There’s a difference, and we need to understand it. As a wise old woman once told me, “Voting isn’t really how things are run. The career bureaucrats run things, voting is a way to object, mostly. Someone always benefits or they won’t do the work keeping the thing running. The fight is usually over who controls the benefit.”

That’s what’s happening now. The people who elected Donald J. Trump and the rest of his (now literal) clown cars are upset that he isn’t delivering. As Paul Krugman put it on his blog the other day,

Trump ran a campaign about bring prices down, cutting the price of energy in half, making groceries much cheaper. He obviously hasn’t delivered and hasn’t even made an effort to deliver. I’m glad that people feel betrayed.

That’s what happened on November 4th. The electorate objected to being mislead. They objecteda to being lied to by this guy. They objected to being betrayed. Oh, yeah, you can find a lot of “people” on 𝕏itter (most of them Russian robots these days) pumping the MAGA rhetoric, and it can be frightening when we read that these machines are better than we are at picking the best way to change an individual’s polticial opinions. But even all that psychological warfare can’t win when so many basic things like meat, coffee, and medication have seemingly doubled in price over the past year.

Therein lies the problem. They’re not protesting the mistreatment of their latino. They’re not protesting the economic tornado that has devastated America’s Black communities. They’re not protesting the wave of anti-trans, anti-gay, anti-lesbian legislation, or the end of the postal service, or the termination of America’s prominence in science and medicine.

All of these will make it harder to live together as a nation in the future. The high prices, though, those are what make it harder to live at all in the present, and that’s what the electorate protested on November 4th.

The reason the Republicans are still winning is because they’re promising people they’ll do something. It may be objectional, you’ll hate some of it, but at least they’ll be doing something.

The Democrats routinely promise to do nothing. The grim joke with Democratic activist slogans is that, if by some miracle an election wave powerful enough to give them control of the goverment is allowed to ever happen, whoever they elect will issue a ton of pardons, a few congressional committee will issue reports about how bad it was but that nothing should be done because it would disrupt and damage “the comity of America” or whatever.

For example, Hakeem Jeffries, the current Democratic minority leader of the House of Representatives, floated the Democrat National Committee’s choice of slogan for 2026 as “Strong Floor, No Ceiling.” Like, what the fuck does that even mean? Let me propose a better slogan:

Arrest all them bastards.

With a few remarkable exceptions at the municipal level, nobody has said anything like that.

There is one (ONE!) politician right now who loves the same America I do. Who, every time he’s on camera, praises something great about it: the natural parks it preserves, the vibrant cities where so many people live together, the beautiful farms and countryside that feed us. Who loves the visions of the artists, the vibrancy of queer people, the excellence of Black and Muslim athletes and scholars.

That politician is America’s most noteworthy socialist.

When was the last time you heard a white Democrat Congressman praise someone who wasn’t white or male? I looked, and I can’t find a recent incident of someone else defending Ilhan Omar from the Republican’s constant barrage of abuse. I can’t find a recent report of someone else defending Sarah McBride, the only transwoman in the House of Representatives.

I don’t want to hear some half-hearted, mumbled concession that, “Yeah, they shouldn’t be mean to Mrs. Omar or Ms. McBride or Ms. Octavio-Cortez.” I don’t want them to look embarrassed or ashamed that hey have spend some effort defending a woman or a black person or a trans person or a latina. I want them to be proud of their colleagues, to say what admirable features, ideas, and perspectives those colleagues bring to the table.

I want to hear a white Democratic Congressman say, “Look, I don’t agree with representative Omar on everything— we’re Democrats, we’re allowed to think for ourselves— but these attacks on her patriotism, her citizenship, and her commitment to representing her District are un-American and must stop.”

I want to hear Democrats say that America is loud and proud in all its forms. That well-funded and well-run cities are necessary for the health of a powerful, dynamic country. That the very word “civilization” comes from a Latin term for “to live peacefully aside strangers.” That freedom isn’t made better when we take away students’ freedoms to be who they are inside, or citizen’s freedoms to travel without documents, or women’s freedom to live without having to marry.

Mamdani won on a simple idea: “New York City is a fantastic place to live. People are struggling, true, but history shows us a lot of successful ways to ease their burdens and make New York City an even better place to live.” It’s a progressive vision. It’s a postive vision.

Do that with the America, Democrats.

Embrace, admire, and defend the people whose life paths aren’t your own. Say how much you love America, even the conservative, rural parts of it. Say how great the country is, admit to its flaws, and say it could be even better.

And that you’ll arrest all them bastards.

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Terrain Theory: Goddamn, but that fish is lonely

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 23:13:42 GMT

“Terrain theory” advocates use an image of two goldfish bowls, one in which the water is green, and in the other the water is clear. It always comes with a slogan: “Don’t medicate the fish, clean the tank!” I’ve been staring at that image for a few days now because I knew there’s something wrong with it, but I couldn’t quite figure out what that something was or how to put it into words.

“Terrain Theory” is an “alternative model of health” promoted by the US Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The idea behind it is short, easy to understand, simple to the point of childishness, and utterly, fatally wrong: if you lived in a healthy world, you wouldn’t need vaccines and antibiotics.

But goddamn is that fish lonely.

Terrain Theory is presented as an alternative to germ theory; the essential idea is that human body is a “terrain” that hosts lots of other micro-organisms, and that illness isn’t the introduction of inimical organisms, it’s when the terrain becomes “unbalanced” in some way, making one exhibit symptoms.

Like all zombie ideas, this one has a clear grain of truth. A healthy gut is undistracted and can handle small incursions of foodborne illness without making you ill. A healthy immune system can fight off a lot of familiar diseases. (The word “familiar” there is doing a lot of work!) Strong muscles and bones make a healthy old age more likely. We take great pains to keep our food fresh, our water clean, and we’re slowly learning the necessity of keeping our air decontaminated.

But goddamn is that fish lonely.

The reason we do things like keep our food fresh and our water clean is because they can harbor dangerous bacteria and other germs. Infections are a matter of numbers and statistics: a small incursion of viri can be handled by your immune system, but if enough get into you, some will sneak past the guards and give you fever and chills and worse. A small amount of hostile bacteria in a dish too-long among the leftovers will die in your stomach acid, but if enough get into you, you’ll be spending tomorrow on the porcelain throne. That threshold is different for everyone, depending on a host of factors that depend on front-line defenses in your respiratory and digestive systems as well as the entire layered defense system of your bloodstream and tissues. (For example, I almost never seem to get foodborne illness, but my wife is much more sensitive; on the other hand, I seem to catch every virus my nose encounters, but she never catches the flu or a cold.)

Terrain Theory is the bizarre idea that at the microbial level, predator/prey dynamics don’t exist. That no invasive species would cause a boom/bust cycle inside your body, turning it into a battlefield as it seeks out its prey and the body fights back.

What makes the image so wrong is that the fish is lonely. It never sees other fish. It’s nowhere near its niche of evolutionary adaptation. They evolved to live in slow-moving streams in the mountainous regions of China, not pristine clean goldfish bowls.

You and I don’t live in a perfectly clean world. We’re not Howard Hughes, holed up in our air-filtered bunkers. We live among other human beings, some of whom will encounter other human beings that have diseases, and they may transmit those to us, via air, via touch, via intimacy. There’s only so much cleaning we can do in a day, and unlike RFK Jr. we can’t hire other people to do it.

What Terrain Theory advocates don’t understand is that there is no perfectly immune human being, not even close. At the microbial level all of nature is trying to figure out how to live within us or eat us, and they evolve one Hell of a lot faster than we do; we produce new offspring about three times in our lifespans, and each of those three has some shatteringly small chance to develop a novel immunity they might pass on to their children. Inside you, an average of thirty-five trillion bacteria are reproducing every three days, and every one of those has its own shatteringly small chance to develop into something deadly inimical… but you get 3 chances in 70 years and they get 70,000,000,000,000 chances every week.

What’s worse is that you can’t live without them. Some of those bacteria are actually as essential to your well-being, speaking of “terrain,” as mammals and birds are to the health of a forest. Microbiome gut bacteria help regulate blood sugar and bowel health, and I’m sure we’ll find even more functions they and we have evolved together to provide them with a mobile survival platform and us with a better immune system.

Besides, I’ve known several monks in my life. They’re not holed up in their monasteries. They go out into the world to do their ministry and integrate their monastic orders with the surrounding communities.

Terrain theory takes a single idea how we live healthier lives, “we should live with a reasonable amount of cleanliness,” and tries to claim that it’s the only idea. That somehow the microscope was not only unnecessary but an evil addition to our arsenal of tools with which we defend ourselves from sickness and death. Throwing out medication and vaccination as “dispensable modern inventions humanity never needed before” ignores the centuries of pain and suffering disease inflicted even on those warlords who kept for themselves the lion’s share of clean water and fresh food.

I’m not a monk. And, quite likely, neither are you. We eat, drink, breath, kiss, and even have sex with other human beings, and every contact gives the microbial world in which we live and of which we are hosts another chance at moving from one body to another. Terrain Theorists can avoid good food, good friendship, and good messy sex all they want, but they’re sadder– and sicker– people for doing so.

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Seattle's Blackberries Are Not a Commons

Sun, 10 Aug 2025 20:55:40 GMT

It is mid-August, the very height of blackberry season in the Pacific Northwest, and with some rain earlier this week the blackberries in my neighborhood have plumped up and are undeniably delicious. All this week, I’ve seen kids and their parents at the communal blackberry bushes that grow along easements, drainage ditches, and jogging trails. There’s no organized effort; it’s just take what you can, and if you’re late to the party, tough luck.

I was picking blackberries and mentioned that to someone else who was there with two kids. “I think they call that the tragedy of the commons,” he said. I didn’t answer him, but it is not, it is absolutely not, because those blackberry plants, while they are communal, they are not a commons.

A commons has three important features. First, it is a local, naturally occurring feature of the environment. Second, the community is dependent upon that feature for their very survival. Third, there is a widespread communal understanding that the feature is fragile and can be exploited, cheated, or damaged, and there is an ongoing, vocal communal effort to ensure that nobody damages it or cheats others out of their share.

Himalayan blackberries may be local, and they may be a plant, but they’re an invasive species introduced about a century ago, not something the Pacific Northwest has had since time out of mind. Nobody in the Pacific Northwest is dependent upon them for food, and certainly not warmth, water, or shelter. The only communal decision being made about them is that they have to be torn out quickly and often whenever they’re a danger to local agriculture, infrastructure, or a child’s scratched arms. The route from my home to the local light rail into Seattle has a patch where the vines grow out over the bicycle path, and sometimes the bicyclists will do some guerrilla weeding to get rid of them.

“The Tragedy of the Commons” is a racist trope invented to sound scientific and to get into the peer-reviewed journals because the inventor of the trope, Garrett Hardin, wanted white people to embrace “a fundamental extension of morality.” That extension was not to bring more human beings into the fold of those who we must protect; it was to convince white people that white people had a superior moral claim to the future, and if there was an planetary disaster that limited the Earth’s capacity to keep all of humanity alive, white people must be prepared to kill everyone else.

There were no tragic commons. Commons, for centuries, allowed communities to subsist, to survive, often with a reasonable expectation of “enough” heat, food, water, and shelter, through careful communal management of local environmental features.

Commons don’t exist much anymore because they were inconvenient to kings and emperors; they made it hard to tax, because nobody knew how to value them. Wikipedia’s article about England’s Enclosure Laws describes some of the process by which “commons” were turned into “resources”; the latter could be described, accounted, owned, and taxed by the ever-reaching arm of monarchies and empires. But while they did exist, they were valuable, sustainable, well-managed, and treasured by the people who depended on them.

Seattle’s Himalayan blackberries definitely ain’t all that.

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Horizon Zero Dawn: The Forbidden West [game, review]

Sun, 22 Jun 2025 19:24:31 GMT

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,

Sony’s marketing messed up badly when it made two follow-ons to the original, The Frozen Wilds and The Forbidden West, that have the same initials.

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.

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An obsession, a confession, and a time to just go on

Sat, 17 May 2025 16:19:11 GMT

I’ve just done something… I’m not sure what to call it. Terrible? Wonderful? Should have happened months ago? I deleted a project on my hard drive, in fact the biggest project, all 415 gigabytes of it. My writing only amasses all of 25 megabytes, or about four million words, not counting any of the social networking I’ve wasted my time on over the past 36 years– and it has been 36 years, stretching all the way back to 1989 and my first encounter with Usenet in 1989.

The project’s name, which was so big, overwhelming, and so in need of isolation that it had its own username and local account, was stable.

It was just an experiment with stable diffusion. It grew into an obsession. I realized the other day that I was wasting hours on the damned thing, tweaking to find one more perfect image in a sea of six-fingered, three-armed men, women, furries, and monsters. I told myself that it was merely a recreation, a form of leisure. Over the course of

To be “ethical” leisure, a hobby needs: (1) perseverance, (2) stages of achievement and advancement, (3) significant personal effort to acquire skills and knowledge, (4) broad and durable benefits, and (5) a special social world with a unique ethos that is deemed valuable both by the participants and by observers. Stable Diffusion utterly fails at 4 and 5.

And I’m supposed to be an expert at this stuff.

the past 2½ years I generated upwards of a million images, and still had about 100,000 of those on my hard drive, just taking up space. Not to mention the models themselves, some of them LORA files that simply cannot be found anywhere else for love or money, jealously hoarded by aficionados because they were created before April of 2024, when the big boys decided no more LORAs that allowed you to generate pictures with “absurdly large breasts” or “being caressed by lots of tentacles” when they also tried to sneak underage girls into the data stream, and which you could then generate if you knew the right keywords, the which were frequently embedded in the keyword_frequency key embedded in the metadata block.

All gone now. Poof. Even the backups have been destroyed. Going cold turkey on day one.

And when I say “wasting hours” I mean it truly; it was as bad as two or three hours every day. I had stopped reading. I had stopped coding for fun, although that may be more an artifact of how well my brain works after that nasty COVID bout and the ravages of turning, well, 59.

I never posted anything that I generated because I recognize the ethical problems in image generation “AIs.” It’s funny how many of the people deep into this, er, hobby, recognize that this isn’t AI at all and simply call them “diffusion models” of one sort or another. I don’t want to take money out of artists’ hands; I want more artists making more art, not less. The number of story ideas I extracted out of these, good grief, thousands of hours I soaked into that thing over the past 30 months I can number on one hand, because it’s literally 5. Out of the million images I generated, I kept five.

There are artists on Twitter who have given me more good story ideas in an hour than the estimated nine man-months of my life I put into what is probably the most useless skill I shall ever have acquired.

There’s no reason I couldn’t rebuild most of it; after all, it’s just downloading software, and this time I have more skill in handling LLMs in local space, since, again, I had no desire to share either my skills or my products with a commercial image producer.

I also deleted a lot of tools that I had developed along the way. I wrote my own little programming language: Loopy. The Loopy interpreter was written in Python and allowed me to do all sorts of peculiar tweaks to the prompts and the various strengths and timings of components of the prompt in mid-process, just so I could do odd and silly things with wildcards above and beyond what Stable Forge was capable of processing, and could do it hands-off, without the browser running. I could “do multiples runs of five of this prompt, using the same seed for each run, only using these six different LORAs in succession,” or “Do the multiple runs, use the same seed each time, but progressively increase the influence of the LORA,” so I could do some empirical analysis on just how much of one LORA or another I needed to get whatever the LORA promised to do to look “exactly right.” I could even go to one of several image galleries on-line, such as CivitAI’s “Furries” gallery, pick as many images as I liked from the gallery and open them in tabs, and the Loopy would download the generation data for each image and attempt to reproduce them locally, with whatever tweaks I wanted that day to make them more interesting to me.

And despite all of this, despite generating at least a million pictures, I found five I wanted to keep.

That’s an obsession. Despite my own observation that AI exploits a critical vulnerability in the human brain, I succumbed to it. I drowned in drab beauty, like a certain billionaire obsessed with making everything look like the inside of a 1950s “historical fantasy” titillation film, regional car dealership rococo slop. It’s ironic, I suppose, having seen what the Pixiv “artist” AIBot could do with it, and understanding exactly how habit-forming it could be, that I wanted to be able to do what AIBot did, and better. And, I suppose, I did to better; much better. Read thousands of prompts and you’ll develop the skill too, it just won’t be a very useful skill.

Anyway, all gone now. I hope. As I said, I could put it back, minus some “classic” LORAs for a variety of, well, mostly breast sizes (always a hard thing to get right with the early generation, and I never graduated beyond Stable Diffusion 1.5), but I deliberately made even that difficult: I deleted the Loopy toolkit repository. I don’t want that temptation.

I expect I’ll be grumpy about this for a week or so; a habit, even a bad habit, puts the victim through an extinction burst when your brain realizes that that particular source of dopamine is no longer operant. But I suspect I’ll also get over it; I wonder what I’ll do with all the extra time. I should plan on finding something better to do with all that brain power.

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Faced with human misery, Arizona decides to execute a machine

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 15:39:24 GMT

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.

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My beautiful gaming chair became a torture device...

Sat, 28 Dec 2024 18:00:03 GMT

While out Christmas shopping, I ran into my orthopedist while waiting in line. I usually thought doctors hated being asked about patient stuff out of the office, but he actually asked, “How’s the shoulder?”

It was a fair question. Despite being two years out from surgery and being mostly healed, I had gone to see him back in early November because I had been suffering from incredible upper-back pain radiating from the right shoulder. I told him, “The next a patient comes in with that sort of shoulder pain I reported, tell him to buy a new office chair.”

Omaha and my kids had gone in for a gorgeous gaming chair, the sort you’re supposed to be able to sit in for hours on end and just game. And it was just as comfortable as I could have possibly imagined. The chair had a tall back with these wings that seemed to bucket and embrace the whole upper body.

But I tend to slouch forward anyway, so over the two year I’d had that chair my shoulders had started to pull forward, straining the muscles and tendons that connect the shoulder to the ribcage in the back. My current job involves a lot of transitions between mouse and keyboard, and that small motion, constrained by the wings of the chair, had started to set up RSI in the unnaturally extended connective tissue. The pain had started to grow, and I was worried something was wrong with the shoulder again. After seeing the orthopedist, I did a small meditation on the nature of my pain and where it was most obvious, and the answer came to me fairly quickly: at the end of the workday, after being in that chair for several hours. And I also realized that as I approached the chair I was starting to dread sitting in it.

I pulled my old Herman Miller out of the storage room and swapped it with the gaming chair. Fighting with the chair. I became a little more diligent about doing my shoulder stretches and strengthening exercises, and after about two weeks the pain started to disappear.

No real lessons here other than what seemed like a great solution to my sitting forever turned out not to be. Worrying about real ergonomics, getting up regularly, and doing the exercise we’ve all been told to do, turns out to be the real solution.

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Ham and Scalloped Potatoes [Recipe]

Fri, 01 Nov 2024 19:03:24 GMT

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.

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Stable Diffusion's "BDSM" tag reveals the cold insincerity of machine "learning"

Sat, 07 Sep 2024 21:43:02 GMT

Human rituals mean a lot to human beings, and the people who think most about them are the ones who deliberately craft them. Churches call them “services,” pagans call them “circles,” companies call them “meetings and reviews,” but they’re all rituals, a time and a place where a context is set, a specific set of emotionals is engaged and constrained, and a specific aspect of your persona is brought out to help you play your part in the ritual.

(Also, fuck you, Mark Zuckerberg..

Kinky people call them “scenes.”

In a fantastic post recently, Henry Farrell wrote that large companies are using AIs to conduct important human rituals: to write all sorts of documents, including performance reviews, letters of recommendation, and letters of reprimand. These documents are “rituals of social coordination;” we know what they mean, who wrote them, and why. When a company uses a form letter to dismiss an underperforming worker, it feels harsh and impersonal when, clearly, there are some very personal issues being discussed in the separation. Using AI to sort-of “randomize the form letter and make it feel personal” upends this ritualistic relationship we have with other people and with the forms of work. This also applies in academic life; writing is a form of thought, and writing for other people is a way of saying how much you thought about communicating with them. If you use an AI to write the bulk of your material, you’re not thinking, and you’re dismissing the kinds of thoughts you want to engender in others, leaving it to the AI to find the most boring, most routine, the “maximally unsurprising consensus presentation” of your thoughts.

Because what an AI lacks is sincerity. Here’s the thing about sincerity, “the virtue of acting in alignment with your feelings, thoughts, and beliefs in a genuine and authentic way.”

I could make a divergence here into what “authentic” means here, but I’ll just let Hannah Arendt muse on it for awhile.

It requires a certain vulnerability; if your thoughts, feelings, and beliefs are in alignment with another, you have to be willing to take some hurtful shots to maintain it. You have to be willing to put those feelings out there, to speak them, to act on them, and to accept that the response will not be all rainbows and unicorns.

Nothing drove home the insincerity of AI quite so strongly until I saw someone on a kink message board using an AI-generated image of a woman covered in body writing.

The Wheel of Emotions

Kink and BDSM are almost off-putting in its sincerity. You have to be honest about what you want, especially if what you want is something outrageous like being hit, being cursed, being mistreated, being taken to your physical and emotional limits into some very strange and dangerous parts of the wheel of emotions. This honesty, this “having no hidden agendas,” is delivered forcefully in every BDSM 101 lecture I’ve ever attended, and is reinforced time and time again even as your skillset improves. This honesty is hard.

Remember, that BDSM has such a skillset is what makes it a socially valuable leisure activity.

“Body writing” is pretty much what you think it is. It’s about taking someone’s feelings that they keep hidden deep inside and writing them on the skin, with a body-safe marker, making them visible to everyone else, to explore how one experiences shame, humiliation, and vulnerability. “Cock whore,” “cum slut,” “hurt me,” and worse can be written there, words that take the bottom’s fantasies and lay them out on the skin for the world to see and, if so desired, for he photographer to capture forever. It can be both deeply humiliating to show these authentic desires off in a private setting, much less and a public one, and deeply cathartic to let them out, to allow others to know that, in your heart, this is what you want.

At least, it’s what you want at that moment.

Body writing can also be a form of pride. Lots of bottoms experience a confidence to go deeper, to do more, to endure more, when the words are on the outside, when the feelings are visible in language highlighted against their skin. There’s a sense of “living up to the honesty you asked for.” And there is always the safeword if, it turns out, reality is far less fun than the fantasy seemed to be.

The prompt “body writing, bdsm” in a diffusion engine produces pictures of women (almost exclusively) with gibberish lines marked across their bodies. This sort of picture, at least to me, erased everything that’s important about the ritual and the act.

CivitAI “Body Writing” sample. Click for clear (NSFW) image.

The best tops are those who, with a pose, with a word, with some ineffable charismatic shift, create a circle in which the context is almost breathtakingly different. You know, in that moment, that the rules are different now. You can touch and be touched in ways completely impermissable in other settings; likewise, the casual gestures of trangressive power people use to influence one another in the “real world” are forbidden.

If you top (or want to), I think you’d benefit from Keith Johnson’s book on improvisational acting, Impro, especially the section on how words are used to convey hierarchy and power.

You know that you’re in the hands of someone you trust, on some level. Or you’re in the hands of a relative stranger who knows the rules, and you and they are going to go on an exploration of who you are together, at least for a little while.

But that one AI illustration of “body writing” is the exact opposite of that intimacy, and I would never play with a person who used it to illustrate their own profile on Fetlife. It has no connection to either the understanding or the exploration that is part of kink. It has no connection to the humanity of it. It, for want of a better word, blasphemes the whole idea of connection that is one person and another taking a deeply personal journey together.

And I use the word “blaspheme” with some malice aforethought, because I was also shown the illustration at left the other day, and it really drove home part of my thinking.

AI-Generated Worship Service

The pastor reading this sermon aloud has a connection to his congregation, but the AI doesn’t. It’s just spewing words in the most common and likely phrases. As Henry says, it’s mocking this deeply important consensus ritual about what it means to attend church, to commune with God, to be among your fellow practitioners. It is a cold machine, and it has no worth beyond its utility to us. To present this as a meaningful event, with that grotesque mockery of the Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, is to mistake laziness for connection.

Maybe someday, like in my stories, we’ll have software with rich inner lives, lives that are more than stochastic prediction machines, lives that will resemble our own. That is not what’s going on inside Stable Diffusion or ChatGPT, and I suspect LLMs are, at best, a tiny adjunct that generalized AIs will someday use.

Henry calls corporate LLMs “prayer wheels,” after the Tibetian Buddhist community’s use of wheels with prayers marked on them. The idea is that you spin the wheel and the prayer is given a moment of new life into the world with you, yourself, having to do more than provide a momentary gesture toward prayer. Corporate LLM writing creates the “gesture of sincerity” while the user is alleviated of the emotional labor of having to look like he actually cares. Using SD to create visions of kink and human intimacy drove home to me the lack of sincerity in a profound way. At least, when an artist draws this sort of thing, they care about what they’re making. The image link above reveals that, too often, a lot of highly talented artists don’t care about exploration or intimacy, they care much more about enjoying hurting women.

A cure for “bad” BDSM media is better BDSM media. This year I’m recommending Sunstone, Familiar, and Black Label.

And really, fortunately rarely, I’ve dealt with managers who didn’t really care about the performance review, they (like I, I confess) just wanted to get it out of the way, get their paycheck, and go home. And the LLMs may let them do it, but it does mean that one more human-to-human connection has been severed, and a machine has gotten in the way again.

I’m not looking forward to the day someone gets hurt because they try a rope rigging rendered by Stable Diffusion.

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Surge Pricing for Grocery Stores is a Disaster Only Psychopath MBAs Could Love

Sun, 11 Aug 2024 21:10:48 GMT

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.

We will put aside the idea that this is a great system for doing Bayseian analysis, randomly changing prices until they figure out the optimal pricing scheme for a single grocery store to extract all of the “discretionary income” present in the neighborhood, leaving their customers with almost no loose change.

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.

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Even my investment advisor is taken in by AI magic pixie dust, just a little...

Sun, 11 Aug 2024 03:34:39 GMT

In a recent letter to clients, investment guru Ken Fisher talked about his portfolio’s positions with respect to the “AI industry,” and in the middle of is this (admittedly very skeptical take on the “AI boom”) he praises his friend’s “AI-supported insulin pump which constantly regulates and adjusts the dose automatically, eliminating the dozens of needle sticks and injections she had to do every day before this.”

Intrigued and a little annoyed by this bright spot in an otherwise dour assessment of AI’s potential, I went and looked up what’s actually running on the Pearl “artificial pancreas.”

It’s runnning Bayesian analysis on top of the Bergmann Minimal Model of Glucose Regulation, with small randomizations in the perturbation model to update the Pearl’s model for the individual using it.

The Bergmann model is 45 years old. Bayes’ algorithm is 260 years old. What the Pearl does is monitor your glucose levels precisely and, over the course of the day, make predictions about when you’ll need more insulin, and then monitor how your glucose levels respond to its scheduling, updating the schedule in order to smooth out the responses and help the diabetic patient manage better.

There’s a lot that goes into the Pearl monitor. Insulinic medications that are stable at room temperature for long periods are a modern technological miracle. Batteries that last for hours or even days are a modern technological miracle. Glucose sensors that tiny are a modern technological miracle. Microprocessors that can handle the load are a modern technological miracle. Even the very low energy “body area networking” so that the glucose monitor and the insulin injector can work in tandem is a modern technological miracle. Miniaturizing this into a package you can wear on your belt is a modern miracle. Software provers like Idris and Agda that can certify the system will behave exactly as specified are a modern miracle.

But you can’t sell any of that. Either they’re black magic to those unfamiliar with them (software provers) or they’re just part of what we’ve come to expect from technology (the miniaturization). They feel like a natural extension of whatever Steve Jobs wrought when he introduced the iPhone in 2007.

But “AI” is a buzzword. It’s hot, it’s sexy, it’s now. One of the papers my investment advisor sent me when I questioned that little bit has this to say:

… integrates real-time glucose monitoring with advanced artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms and closed-loop insulin delivery. … Through the integration of AI algorithms, not only can glucose levels be continuously monitored … continuous glucose monitoring technology with sophisticated AI algorithms … Using advanced algorithms and machine learning … the integration of complicated algorithms and cutting-edge machine learning techniques … Through the utilization of advanced algorithms … analyzing the incoming glucose data through the integration of complicated algorithms and cutting-edge machine learning techniques … to implement sophisticated algorithms that intelligently calculate the precise insulin dosage …

Do you see a trend here? Every mention of AI emphasizes how “advanced,” “sophisticated,” or “complicated” it is, but there is not one discussion of the algorithm itself. Not a single mention of what they’re using.

So I tracked it down. It’s Bayesian analysis all the way down!

A 260 year old algorithm is not exactly cutting edge. It is the opposite of cutting edge. I don’t want to demean the makers of these things, they’re brilliant and wonderful and I want every diabetes patient who needs one to have one. But most of the miracles inside them are hardware miracles or miracles in modern software development. The software itself is not AI. It is standard modelling software you could have run on Lotus 1-2-3 on your IBM PC in 1983 (albeit much more slowly than what the Pearl uses for a brain today).

Ken Fisher is a smart guy, and even with the outrageous fees our portfolio is doing better than an equivalent Vanguard play would have done (and we’re Vanguard Admiral tier!). So it was disappointing for someone to see even this little bit of blather about “AI” as a bright spot in an otherwise very sketchy industry. It’s not.

It’s just math.

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Car Camping in an Electric Vehicle

Fri, 09 Aug 2024 01:01:11 GMT

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.

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Donella Meadow's "Thinking in Systems" naively parrots a White Supremacist talking point

Mon, 20 May 2024 15:17:45 GMT

The Tragedy of Donella Meadow’s Thinking in Systems.

This week, I’ve been reading Donella Meadow’s Thinking in Systems, because I wanted to wrap my head around the ideas that involve systems thinking and understand it better. And until about halfway through the book, it was holding to some pretty basic examples, and it was doing a fine job of convincing me that it had valuable ideas.

There was one thing that gave me pause, but it wasn’t about her thinking. She writes about New England forestry, and how ever since the Civil War the industry there has experience a predictable 40-year cycle of boom and bust, because the entire industry is trapped in a prisoner’s dilemma: either they over-log and destroy the forests’ ability to produce lumber at a steady state, or they’re out-bid by their competitors who over-log, go under, and get bought by those some competitors. In hard times, some of them go under anyway, get bought, and create larger holdings, until those holdings are shattered by bankruptcy in the next cycle.

In this story, I want to understand the system that creates this problem: the political forces that prevent the lumber industry from collectively reaching an optimal “steady state” of forestry.

The book states that there are four common meta-states for any exploitation of a natural resource:

an unharvested condition, in which humans aren’t exploiting it, and it produces at maximum

the optimal harvest, in which we harvest from it at a state that leaves it capable of sustaining itself. It produces less than its natural state, but as much as it can and produce a constant harvest for humans.

an over harvest, in which we harvest too much, its ability to reproduce new resources is damaged, the harvesters experience their own cut-back as a result, and then the resource recovers and new harvesters move in. This is the oscillating state.

an excessive harvest, in which so much of the resource is cut out that it cannot recover, not in a meaningful amount of time as humans understand it. This is the collapsed state.

About halfway through the book, though, Meadows does start to get into the political questions that influence such systems, and this is where I wanted to throw the book against the wall.

Because Garett Hardin

Because she quotes Garett Hardin approvingly and enthusiastically, and she embraces his ideas.

Garrett Hardin wrote The Tragedy of the Commons. Most people have heard of it, but I’m going to tell you something you may not know: “The tragedy of the commons” did not, historically, exist. When Hardin wrote his essay, he invented the idea out of whole cloth, and his examples were entirely hypothetical.

Hardin invented the idea, and his examples, because he hated Black people.

Hardin was a straight up, unrepentant, loud and proud white supremacist. Meadows paraphrases one of his most offensive examples. She writes: “If every family can have any number of children it wants, but society as a whole has to support the cost of education, health care, and environmental protection for all children, the number of children born can exceed the capacity of society to support them all. (This is the example that caused Hardin to write his article.)”

It’s that parenthetical that caused my Book, Meet Wall moment.

Hardin wrote those ideas at a time when conversations about “How Black People Were Gonna Outbreed White People” was a part of daily conservative discourse. It was a meme that existed everywhere in the 1960s in rural and conservative America. It was on the radio, it was in church newsletters, it was every goddamned place. Hardin wrote The Tragedy of the Commons to convince white people not to succumb to an empathetic view of Black people, but instead that we, the master race, should be prepared for ecological disaster and must be prepared to “throw the lesser races overboard” if civilization was to survive. In the meantime, welfare and school lunches and all that were just setting the stage for making that collapse happen sooner.

Meadows is quoting that idea, and does so approvingly.

Commons were real. Tragedies about them aren’t.

“But the tragedy of the commons, that’s real, isn’t it?”

No. It’s not. When you say that, you’re “thinking like a state,” as historian James Scott puts it.

Go back to before the invention of capitalism and the regulatory state. The word “commons” is the antithesis of what you and I call a “resource.” A commons was a shared communal source of subsistence that everyone within walking distance of it recognized as their responsibility to nurture. Grazing land, water, timber, fishing, game, all the natural resources that could be over-harvested were managed by local collective consensus to ensure that they weren’t. The means for deciding how that resources was shared, harvested, and accounted were local, idiosyncratic, tied up in the local history and local ecology, often unwritten, and based on there being little inequality among the families involved in the commons’ sustainability.

Commons weren’t “tragic”; commons (the resource and the communal awareness of it) were literally the means by which a town-and-farm community tied to a valley, to a region of arable land, to a river, or to a seafront, managed to keep themselves alive for generation after generation.

That’s what a commons is.

Several inventions combined in the 18th century to destroy the commons: gunpowder gave princes a far greater reach over which to impose their will; cartography and the new sciences of measurement and statistics gave those same princes the ability to “understand” their realm as a physical entity; and finally the invention of the limited liability corporation, the ability to impose one’s will at a distance using only money, created a relationship between princes and their banks that required a steady, reliable, comprehensible and uniform way of accounting for it all. The commons, with their local, quirky, “nobody owns that, how will you tax that?” nature, had to go. It all had to be standardized so the state’s accountants could account for it.

The commons were enclosed: parceled off and privatized. Formally recognized as belonging to the local lordling, not the people who depended on it. Rents could be extracted, and resources could be mined, and if the resource was exhausted, oh well, that’s not the lordling’s concern; he just needs money, he doesn’t have to be too concerned with how the peasants get it.

The Benefit of the Doubt

Hardin took a word and turned it into an attack on minorities because he thought they were “lesser races” who didn’t deserve the “largesse” of white people (it wasn’t largesse at all; black slaves built a lot of the 19th century USA and didn’t get paid for it, and white people continue to reap benefits from what those black hands built).

Meadows quotes not just Hardin’s erroneous idea, but Hardin’s vicious racist reasoning behind the idea, couched in a generic language that belies the conversation Hardin was participating in, and makes it central to one of the points she’s making.

She goes further, too, quoting Hardin’s three “alternatives” to tragedy: Educate, Privatize, and Regulate. She writes:

Some “primitive” cultures have managed common resources effectively for generations through education and exhortation. Garrett Hardin does not believe that option is dependable, however. Common resources protected only by tradition or an “honor system” may attract those who do not respect the tradition or who have no honor. Privatization works more reliably than exhortation…

As Ivan Illich has pointed out (note: PDF), those “primitives” didn’t manage through education and exhortation; they managed through regulation, on a local scale. Meadows is giving in to modern thinking here, trapped in her own experiences about how natural resources are created and distributed. Local communities had a fixed and limited range; even with good roads, an ox-drawn wagon can’t travel more than 80 miles before the animal has eaten more food than the wagon can profitably haul, and that’s been part of the human condition since the invention of the ox-drawn wagon. Privatization is a modern and radical change in the way people use and think about natural resources, and during the European transition of the 19th century hundreds of thousands of peasants were transformed from “stewards of the land” into wage laborers, cast into poverty, and often left to starve.

I really, really want to believe this is a case of naivete. Meadows died in 2001, so we can’t ask her, but her general politics in the book is a fairly anodyne liberal sort, with comfortable nods toward alternative families and abortion rights and so forth. And I really want to believe that her editors, who were all academics of the economic, macro-sociological sort, were unfamiliar with the context or meaning behind Hardin’s work.

An egregious and offensive error this big damages any arguments the book might be making. And that’s unfortunate, because the basics about systems thinking, its purpose, modeling, and uses, are really valuable and generic. I just wish I hadn’t hit this speedbump, or that she’d written it quite so enthusiastically.

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David Bowie's Blackstar In Concert

Sun, 05 May 2024 17:56:56 GMT

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.

John Cameron Mitchell onstage at the end of Blackstar

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.

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Antarctica Day 7: Swimming In the Antaractic Seas

Sun, 31 Mar 2024 19:31:39 GMT

Today, I swam in the Antarctic Sea.

We officially reached Fournier Bay, which means we had crossed the Antarctic Circle line sometime in the morning, so it was time for the (apparently) “traditional” Polar Plunge, where brave and foolish souls jump into the water just to say they have done that. I had to be one of them.

A large raft is affixed to the side of the boat, and passengers use the same routine as with the Zodiacs to get onto the raft, which has a set of steps for getting into and out of the water. A safety belt is put around your waist to make sure someone can pull you out if it turns out you don’t have the strength to pull yourself out. We’ve been assured that in all the time IAATO has been permitting this sort of shenanigans no one on any cruise has ever had a medical crisis doing this sort of thing. The bartender was ready with his hot chocolate and liquor, and the DJ was pumping out EDM into the excursion bay.

Omaha and I lined up in our bathrobes and waited with other people from our excursion group. We listened to the delighted whoops and screams of the victims who went before us. As we put aside our robes and exposed our almost naked flesh to the subzero air (centigrade), the song that had been playing played out and a new one started up.

It was perfect. When Omaha and I jumped, the music playing was the scifi convention staple “Rasputin.” Omaha shouted, “For science!” as she dove in. I shouted, “Ivan, you idiot!” as I climbed out.

So, I’ll let you in on a secret: when I jumped into water that was actually below 0℃ (because it’s some of the most salty water in the world), your brain cannot believe you just did that and absolutely refuses to process any signals about your actual condition until it starts to get confirmation that, no really, you just did something really stupid.

And despite being salty, the water is super clear. I could read the numbers on the ship’s side from three meters away. It didn’t hurt my eyes at all. I have no idea why. All this analysis is not to say that I dawdled, oh no. I was up and out after less than a minute in the water.

But less than sixty seconds in freezing water just isn’t enough to penetrate my decrepit, ancient hide. I climbed the stairs with Omaha immediately behind me. The air, the breeze, was what made me feel cold. I grabbed a towel and my bathrobe, belted the robe on, and quickly grabbed a hot chocolate laden with Irish whisky.

That afternoon, there were a few more Zodiac tours, which I did, but they were otherwise unremarkable. The best part of the afternoon was the lecture on humpback whale feeding activities. There are documented cases of new, emergent feeding patterns that no one had ever seen before. One of them is “bubble feeding,” in which a team of five or six whales will decimate an entire school of fish. Two whales will start to encircle a school of fish in a huge net of their bubbles from the whales’ massive lungs while the others use their loud voices to scare the fish into staying within the bubble net, and once the fish are sufficiently concentrated the whales will dive into the school of fish, rising quickly, their mouths open, sieving as many of them down their gullets as they possibly can.

Another activity is when a whale will just stay vertical with their mouths in the air, holding as still as possible, until a bird decides the whale is a nice place to land, at which point the whale will use its tongue and jaws and… no more bird.

Both of these are new behaviors, at least as far as we’re concerned, but the biologist said they might have been behaviors common to humpbacks before the whaling industry killed so many, it’s just that now that the population has made a comeback these alternative feeding methods are viable for the whales again.

We spent dinner with another couple, a fellow who made his fortune the same way I did, coming up in the 90s and doing something spectacularly singular that earned him the stock options necessary to secure his future, more or less. We spent the evening doing that butt-sniffing sort of sounding each other out, establishing bonafides, and nerding hard, much to our spouses’ eye-rolling.

It was a lovely day altogether, and I have a certificate saying that I’m really the sort of idiot who’s willing to jump into 0℃ water just to say that I jumped into 0℃ water. In Antarctic seas.

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Mass Effect: Andromeda [Game, Review]

Fri, 29 Mar 2024 03:22:21 GMT

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.

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I don't want your fucking pity. I want you to put on a fucking mask.

Fri, 29 Mar 2024 01:59:41 GMT

I really should stop talking about my COVID-19 hospitalization in spaces with normal people. When someone asks me why I mask so routinely, I sometimes explain that the first time I caught COVID it sent me to the hospital twice, for a total of a month, including short-term disability, because my “recovery” the first time was a mirage that hid the real damage that damned virus did to my insides.

The explanation is counter-productive, because they’ll just nod sagely and say, maybe not in so many words, “Ah. That explains it. You’ve been through something horrible and are afraid to experience it again. That explains why you’re not willing to be free and share the air with the rest of us. You’re trapped in your trauma.”

As if there was something irrational about wanting to avoid a disease that

lowers your IQ by an average three points every time you get it

quadruples the risk of urinary incontinence in men my age

can cause erectile dysfunction, loss of testosterone, and “direct testicular damage”

destroys the body’s ability to respond postively to exercise

destroys your ability to fight other infections

can cause brain inflammation leading to mental illness

doubles your risk of developing diabetes

significantly raises your risk of heart attack and stroke

does progressive damage with every re-infection

is seventeen times more deadly than influenza

… and yet, somehow, I’m the one who needs pity and understanding because I’m not willing to risk what’s left of my life and my health after nearly dying of it the first time. As if I’m the one who need accomodation.

Just fuck off, the lot of you.

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Antarctica Day 6: Cuverville and Brown Base

Thu, 28 Mar 2024 00:16:36 GMT

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.

Whale Bones

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.

I met some Gentoo penguins. I've been lied to. They don't use Linux at all!

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.

Sick of penguins yet?

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.

Seal Snooze

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.

Whale Tail

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.

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Antarctica Day 5: Palaver Point

Sat, 23 Mar 2024 20:20:40 GMT

The Pursuit off Palaver Point

What surprised me, although perhaps it shouldn’t have, is how quickly this level of luxury became routine, and just how aware I was that all this luxury had a human price, because I know damn well the staff and crew of a cruise ship aren’t well-treated and put up with a lot of crap, sometimes literally, and especially often from the people who feel entitled to a little bit more “service” than custom would allow. Up around 6:30, I’d make my way to the cafe and find that the morning barista, a pleasant young fellow from the Czech Republic, pulling my coffee and setting out the water. I’d read and write for about an hour, then go get Omaha and we’d head to breakfast.

It was Friday, but on board that doesn’t mean anything. It’s easy to forget there are days of the week. It’s easy to forget there’s a world outside the ship.

Climbing up to Palaver Point.

Today’s trip was to Palaver Point, which involved a hike up the side of a tall hill take in a colony of Chinstrap Penguins and the view across the Palmer Sea. Omaha decided that she wasn’t up for a kilometer long walk with a 100 meter rise, so I went alone, crossing the switchbacks to reach the top.

At the top was Professor Marcel Lichtenstein, who I’d already met. He gave us a brief lecture on moraines, the dirt and rocks that glaciers pick up as they move down the terrain and calve off into the ocean. Marcel is a character, a big man with a powerful voice and a lot of charisma. “You know, I’m a biologist, not a geologist. The first time I was in Antarctica and I heard someone say ‘Look at the moraine,’ I was looking around for the beautiful woman because in Italian ‘moraina’ means ‘brunette,’ and I figured that’s what they were looking at.”

Penguin chicks at Palaver Point.

When we got back, lunch was “Australian,” which I’m not sure meant much to me, but Omaha appreciated the meat pies.

That afternoon was a Zodiac excursion; we sat in boats and were driven around to listen to more explanations of icebergs and the history of Antarctica. All of the guides have extensive stories about the Shackleton, Scott, and Amundsen. One of our guides, Sebastian, who was also the submarine pilot, had taken leave from the United Kingdom’s Royal Navy to be on an expedition to recreate Shackleton’s amazing voyage from his doomed Antarctic expedition back to civilization on nothing more than a large lifeboat. In fact, you can see Sebastian in this video at the 2:40 mark. He told an after-dinner, over-drinks, truly harrowing tale about the voyage he and his mates undertook, including how, when they finally reached the island of St. George, they were almost washed up on some rocks and killed. This being a documentary, they had a monitor boat, but the captain of that boat declined to rescue them until they were actually in distress… and somehow they made it to shore without being killed. It was hair-raising stuff.

No Pokemon in Antarctica

The afternoon excursions usually ended around 5pm. The ship had so many experts there were lecture series to fill the time before dinner; history, geology, the biology of the birds that flew, the penguins (yes, birds, but a separate topic), the seals, just about anything and everything you could think of as being a part of the Antarctic experience. One thing that I did not find while in Antarctica: Pokemon. There are no Pokemon in Antarctica.

Evenings aren’t quite so busy. Usually, I just read. I ripped through a number of books during this vacation, all light reading and just generally fun. I also tended to go to bed fairly early. This isn’t a cruise with nightlife; there were only two places to “hang out” after dinner and both of them were sedate. This isn’t the sort of cruise where there are so many bars and nightclubs you can pick one from whatever spectrum of nightlife you can possibly imagine.

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Antarctica, Day 4 at Sea: Brown Bluff and Hope Bay

Thu, 21 Mar 2024 01:35:36 GMT

Morning Light

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.

Boarding Process

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.

Melted Rock

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.

Tragic Chick

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.

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