Well, I suppose it was inevitable.

Another XZ-2 ("Near Mint") should be here Saturday. Not a bargain, per se, but a fair price. If it's sharp across the frame, I'll be happy.

The temperature in the header is wrong. Well, at least it's not what the temperature is here. It's 40°F out there this morning. There was frost on the roofs of the houses yesterday when it was similarly low.

Skies are clear and sunny though!

Mitzi and I saw this yesterday in a matinée at the local multiplex. It was great because the kids are in school and there were only six people in the theater.

I liked it, even though I'm pretty much "over" the superhero genre, heroes and anti-heroes alike. It was different enough in casting, tone, characters and sets to be entertaining. It didn't take itself seriously. It wasn't all "dark." There were hints or nods toward that, but they didn't demand you take them seriously.

("Dirk Dark. Dark Phoenix. Roy. My name is Roy.")

Mitzi did have trouble figuring out what was going on at first because we haven't seen Captain Marvel, though we did watch WandaVision. She didn't make the connection though. I explained after the movie. She just rolled with it, and enjoyed it as well.

Pretty fun.

I'm a little embarrassed to admit that Mitzi and I watched this last night. It's mostly more of the same, with some nice Italian locations.

I don't know how much there is a genuine appetite for this sort of mayhem, or if it's just that we like seeing certain "stars," and producers like printing money so they just repackage the same stuff over and over again.

This is just Shane in Italy. Kind of a reverse on the "spaghetti western," I think.

If I had to guess, I think Man On Fire did well at the box office, but it wasn't the kind of movie that lent itself to becoming a franchise. It's sort of ambiguous, but I think it's pretty clear Creasy died in the end. I'm sure clever writers could work around that, but maybe there were IP issues elsewhere.

Anyway, The Equalizer was tailor-made for being a franchise, and it was almost an identical character. So... Denzel as McCall! "Two 'c's, two 'l's."

What made Man On Fire better than your average blood-soaked revenge flick was Creasy's tortured soul and a glimpse of redemption in the eyes of a little girl. (Dakota Fanning. Surprise!) "Do you think God will forgive us for what we've done?"

Moral injury. Something I've been thinking about more and more lately.

Antoine Fuqua tries to bring some of that angst to McCall in 3, but if feels like a veneer, and a very thin one at that.

Anyway, I enjoy watching Denzel Washington. The body count is absurd. The bad guys are really, really bad. And it's ultimately about as memorable, and enjoyable, as a McDonald's (One "c," one "l".) cheeseburger.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 08:34 Tuesday, 28 November 2023

In recent years, I've given a fair amount of money to political campaigns. With a couple of exceptions, I have little idea of how well that money has been spent. I'll probably be giving to campaigns again, but not just yet. For now, I'm trying to give more to non-profits I care about.

Today I donated to 1000 Friends of Florida, a non-partisan public interest group that's trying to preserve and protect Florida's natural environment through intelligent growth policies.

I became a member of the Matanzas Riverkeeper. I've donated in the past, but I'm now doing a monthly contribution. I also give a monthly contribution to the St Johns Riverkeeper.

I increased my monthly contribution to our local public radio station, because they are a vital resource to our community.

There are a few more. Mostly environmental. This isn't "virtue signaling," because I don't really care if anyone thinks I'm virtuous or not. This is me suggesting to you that you might look around for local non-profits doing work that you think is important and supporting them.

We are in a world of trouble, but there are people out there working hard to make a difference. Let's help them out.

I think NFTU still has a role to play for me, because this is the sort of post I don't wish to include in the marmot.

What brings me to the woodchuck hole today is another missive from the mediocre mind of Moss.

Essentially, it's a promo piece for local Republican pol, Dean Black. I suspect Moss is trying to elevate his profile in local Republican circles by currying favor with Black and getting the party line posted in a local news outlet. (Presumably in the interest of "balance." It's certainly not for its analytical or rhetorical excellence.)

The headline offers, "Love him or hate him, Dean Black continues to shape the narrative."

It's not a binary choice. There are a couple of other options, one being fatigue, the other, nausea.

There is nothing remarkable about Dean Black or the "narrative" he's shaping. It's the same old broken record of division, agitation and dereliction; and I guess I'm saying I'm "sick and tired" of it.

Moss and Dean are representative of what passes for Republican "thought" in Florida politics in the years since the Trump ascendancy. It's an adolescent, zero-sum view of politics, where parties are either "winning" or "losing," and the public interest is entirely out of the equation.

Florida is a failed state, after more than a generation of gerrymandered, one-party rule. It's facing environmental challenges due to the climate crisis and uncontrolled over-development, threatening its unique natural environment and wildlife. There's an insurance crisis that is doing as much to make home ownership less affordable as high interest rates. Florida "leads" as one of the states with the highest rates of uninsured citizens for healthcare. All because of a party-driven, petulant, myopic and simply inhumane refusal to expand Medicaid. Public education in Florida is being discarded in favor of publicly funded, private indoctrination centers.

The future of Florida is dark, "Sunshine State" or not. Gerrymandering and one-party rule have made the state's government vulnerable to corruption, group-think, and extremism when elections are largely decided by primaries, where the most motivated voters are the most extreme ones.

To a Republican mind, this is "winning," because politics are viewed as "sport," entertainment for the masses. Increasingly, if one listens to Republican rhetoric espoused by its leader, Trump, one that threatens to become a blood sport.

At its best, politics is where people of good will, acting in good faith, come together to serve the public interest through cooperation and compromise.

In Florida, politics is all about power and money. The power to raise money, and the power to give public money to favored interests. The public interest has been forgotten.

If Moss had any intelligence, he'd understand that. But he's a partisan climber, not a political thinker. I regret that Jax Today offers him a platform.

The sun was giving hints that it might come out this morning, but I wasn't sure. There might have been nice cloudscape shots, or there might be enough light to get a decent bird shot, assuming there were any birds to be found.

I thought I'd be clever and so I brought along the little XZ-2 stuffed into my vest pocket, with the OM-1 on the sling for birds.

As it happened, the clouds rolled in, but before they did there was an "interesting" shot on the street, with low-angled early morning light illuminating the front of the house and a large palm shadow cast on it as well, and a blowing American flag on another house in the left of the frame.

For the rest of the walk, I mainly shot with the XZ-2, doing closeups of mushrooms, playing with the Dramatic Tone filter and just looking for something to shoot.

When I got home, I worked on the house shot and noticed that the left side of the frame was very soft, to the point of being blurry. So I looked at a few other shots and seemed to detect the same thing on a couple of them. In the closeups, it wasn't really detectable since the subject was in the center of the frame and the depth of field was pretty thin.

Well, I wanted to know for sure so I set up a tripod in the library and shot some books. One thing leads to another, and I ended up testing the MX-1, the XZ-1 and both of the Stylus 1s cameras.

The good news is that all of the cameras but the XZ-2 were sharp corner to corner at all apertures from f1.8 (2.8 in the case of the Stylus 1s) to f4.

The bad news is the XZ-2 is pretty decentered. Both the left and right sides of the frame are soft, but the left side is just plain out of focus. I checked my library for my original XZ-2, and it was sharp corner to corner as well. This is just a bad specimen.

As a practical matter, it probably wouldn't affect 75% of the kinds of shots I take. If I wanted to take clinically sharp landscapes, architectural interiors, or some types of documentary work, it'd be a problem. Really, biggest problem is just knowing about it. On the one hand, it allows me to work around it a bit, or only use the camera for "fun" shots. On the other hand, knowing about it nags at me. I only paid $100 for the thing, which is about half what most of them go for on the auction site, so the price wasn't exactly unfair even with the optical defect.

That nagging feeling will probably pass. Most feelings do. I've just got to get comfortable with the idea of never relying on that camera for anything important, except insofar as having fun is important.

On the bright side, I am pleased that the MX-1 is very sharp, and the other Olys are sharp as well. And that Stylus 1s with the "stuck lens" was a real bargain.

Can't be lucky all the time!

For many years, my family had a Thanksgiving holiday tradition of watching National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. Since the kids have all grown, it was hit or miss, mostly the latter.

Of late, I've made it kind of my personal tradition to watch Die Hard, because "It's not Christmas until Hans Gruber falls off the Nakatomi Tower."

We spent last Thanksgiving up in DC with Mitzi's older daughter. Their infant son was sleeping when we watched it at their place, and it was a fun time, a la Mystery Science Theater 3000, or Rocky Horror, as we commented on all the absurdities of the film.

This Thanksgiving, Mitzi's younger daughter was here with us, and her two-and-a-half year old wasn't going to sleep anytime soon, and watching the movie after was kind of incompatible with her staying asleep. So we watched Kung Fu Panda instead.

They went home on Saturday, so Mitzi and I watched Die Hard on Saturday night. With just the two of us, it's not quite as much fun as Mitzi doesn't seem to enjoy my commentary as much as I do. Alas. And it's kind of bittersweet because of what Bruce Willis is going through, and missing Alan Rickman.

Which brings me to another holiday film we watched for the first time in several years, Love Actually. I watched that movie every year for several years back in the 'aughts and early 'teens; but it can get to be a bit too much after a while. It's a little hard to believe it's been 20 years since that movie was released.

We enjoyed it very much, and I think Bill Nighy's character is the funniest. I'm glad he's still with us and doing some remarkable work; LIving and Their Finest being two relatively recent movies featuring him that Mitzi and I enjoyed.

We wrapped up the holiday film festival last night with another classic I hadn't watched in a fairly long time, Grumpy Old Men. Hard to believe that Jack Lemmon was only two years older than I am when he made that movie.

I'm sure there will be more holiday movies between now and the new year, but it feels like we got off to a nice start.

I have a crush on Hannah Waddingham, so I enjoyed her Home for Christmas very much. She's a remarkably versatile artist, and I hope we get to see her in more work in the years to come.

After everything settled down yesterday, while the sun was still out, I tried to take a couple of shots with the XZ-2 and the MX-1 to see how similar they might be.

Not very, it turns out.

The most interesting thing seems to be the way the RAWs are handled.

I expected some differences in the JPEGs, so I compared a RAW image from both cameras. If these are the same lens/sensor systems from the same OEM, then Olympus chose to do some lens corrections in the RAW file (suffix .ORF). There is visible barrel distortion in the MX-1 RAW image (DNG format), which is corrected in the JPEG. With the XZ-2, there is no such visible distortion.

I'm willing to believe they're doing lens corrections in the RAW file, because the JPEGs and the RAWs have never been identical in terms of coverage. They differ by one or two rows of pixels at the long side, shifting the image left or right in portrait, up or down in landscape. There is data there, so it would seem there is some tiny crop involved.

I didn't mount the cameras on a tripod, so I can't compare the actual coverage of each one. I may do that later. Crappy weather today, though I could do it in the house I suppose.

Monarch is pretty good. I'm ambivalent about these franchise efforts, like Star Wars, Star Trek, the MCU and DC and so on. The debates about "the canon" in all these efforts seem tedious and foolish to me, but I'm officially a grumpy old man now.

And frankly, I get tired of seeing the same stuff repackaged over and over again, mostly to provide easter eggs to the fans.

But this still feels fresh enough, despite being nearly 70 years old, to be entertaining. I'm sure they'll ruin it soon enough, but for now it's a worthwhile diversion.

I don't know if Lessons In Chemistry will return for another season. I suppose I could look, I'm sure someone knows. But it feels as though it was designed to be a "limited series," and it wrapped up all the loose ends in the finale.

I loved it.

I am disappointed we didn't get more of six-thirty's internal monologue, and that one episode does seem kind of odd because of it. And I'm sure there are many things that one might criticize, but I can't think of any.

I'm glad Slow Horses returns this week.

Our house guests have departed, and the ensuing laundry effort seems to have dampened (heh) Mitzi's enthusiasm for a ventless dryer. I'll wait a while and revisit the issue.

The other battle I'll have to fight is what color to paint the house. She loves the current (dark) color. It's no longer on the approved list, (the architectural review committee has "freshened" the list of approved colors) but I'm concerned she's going to want a dark color.

Dark colors absorb heat. Even with insulation, that adds heat load. It's a choice that will cost money and/or energy for years after you've made it.

Choices have consequences, and we keep making them as if they don't. Consequences often borne by others.

It's interesting, our house guests didn't seem to have any anxiety about the future of civilization. They're both busy in their careers, raising a young daughter with another child on the way. It's possible they just don't have time. In the brief amount of time we kind of discussed it, they seemed confident that technology would fix whatever challenges we might face.

Oy.

They live in San Diego and they have a gas furnace. When they got a quote to replace their HVAC system (they also have central air), they included the furnace! I think I convinced them to just go with a heat pump. The prices in California are very high, but there are some incentives. They also have gas hot water, gas dryer and gas stove! I told them about the house that exploded in Pennsylvania, but I don't think it made any difference.

The biggest impact you can make in terms of your CO2 emissions, if you're a daily commuter, is replacing your ICE vehicle. But they were saying something about waiting until they had rooftop solar before they bought an EV!

It was a holiday, and they're Mitzi's family, so I didn't engage very much. But I was surprised by how little the climate emergency seems to factor in their thinking. Maybe we gave them something to think about though. Planted a seed, or something.

Also, given the amount of natural gas being pumped in and around their house, and the greenhouse potential of "natural" gas, getting rid of that might be more effective than getting an EV, to say nothing of the health and safety benefits.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 07:12 Sunday, 26 November 2023

If that isn't a compelling title, I don't know what is.

I'd recently heard about heat-pump dryers, I think they're more commonly referred to as "ventless dryers," but I'm not sure about that. I thought they were kind of a new thing, but no, they've been around for decades. Just not so much in America.

Of course.

So I spent some time on YouTube yesterday. (I use an ad blocker, and it seems YouTube's response is to mute the audio about three quarters of the way through the video. No big deal. I just unmute it.) And I spent some time at energy.gov looking at dryers.

I'd originally thought that I'd replace our conventional dryer when it was end of life, but that could be a decade from now. Today, it's about 4 years old and may still be worth a little money. And it'd use a lot of energy in those 10 years.

So I think I'm going to buy an LG-DLHC-1455 ventless dryer. With a ventless dryer, water from the clothes is condensed and stored in the dryer. You can connect a hose and discharge it to the drain pipe, but I don't think I'm going to do that. Maybe we can use it to water plants. Ideally, it'd be captured and re-used for washing clothes, but we're not there yet.

My only trepidation is expectations. I've read enough reviews and seen enough videos to understand that the process is different enough that we might feel as though the laundry isn't "dry" when it's done. And since this is a major purchase, and the old dryer can't live in the house indefinitely while we get used to the new one, at some point we'll be committed to this one and I'm hoping Mitzi won't be unhappy.

The lower temperature is supposed to be better for clothing anyway. Plus we're not exhausting air that we've cooled to the atmosphere, making it up with warm, humid air that we'd have to cool again. So there's another efficiency gain by eliminating the vent.

There is no federal incentive for ventless dryers, but Florida is offering a sales tax holiday on them. If you're considering one, you may want to look for incentives where you live.

While I think it's important to make homes all electric, and more efficient, it's important to remember that if you're driving to work every day in an ICE-vehicle, your greatest energy use is gasoline. So the biggest change you could make to help the transition from fossil fuels is to drive an EV or a plug-in hybrid, and one that is sized appropriately for your actual needs versus your emotional ones.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:20 Friday, 24 November 2023

It's Thanksgiving Day, so maybe we should give a little attention to the matter of gratitude.

I suppose gratitude is a form of self-care. A way of acknowledging, "It could always be worse," and it often was.

Is it a form of worship? Are we supposed to give thanks to God?

Or should we be thanking all the people who came before us and gave us all the things we wish to appreciate today?

Are those things a gift? Did we do anything to deserve them?

Who is the gift from? God? A system?

A system that favors some at the expense of others?

Should we be grateful for the system?

What are the things we're grateful for? And how sure are we that we'll always have them?

Does gratitude suggest action? Or is gratitude merely a "good intention"?

If there are things you are grateful for today, perhaps you should spare a thought to how you might ensure that others may be grateful for them next year.

It could always be worse.

And it likely will.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 07:00 Thursday, 23 November 2023

Our internet went out at 10:45am yesterday. It's still out. We have a Comcast tech scheduled to arrive between 10:00am and 12:00pm today. Figure maybe about 1:00.

I've got my iPhone stuck in the window and I'm having mixed success with it as T-Mobile doesn't have great coverage here.

It's made me appreciate just how addicted I am to the internet. Even most of my files live "in the cloud."

Since we don't have internet, we also don't have cable. Oddly enough, we do get the guide. The router diagnostics tells me it's receiving some data, but it's not getting any "Unicast Maintenance opportunities," whatever those are.

So no streaming, no cable. Last night we sat out back in the screened enclosure around Mitzi's fire table and talked.

Like savages.

Later on we went in and watched a DVD.

It is a "first world" problem of the privileged. But it's given me a lot to think about. Much like electricity and ready access to clean drinking water and indoor plumbing, it hasn't always been like this, and it may not be again soon.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 08:37 Wednesday, 22 November 2023

The Olympus Stylus 1s with the "stuck lens" arrived today. The listing showed two third-party batteries with the camera. I was hoping it would simply be a matter of using an OEM battery delivering enough power to get the lens to retract.

Put a new(ish) OEM battery in and turned it on. Heard a brief noise, and the screen lit but didn't show any information.

So I turned it off, rattled it to see if I could hear anything and it all sounded good.

So I turned it over and gave the bottom a good stiff rap with the knuckles of my right hand.

Turn it on and there was a bit of a stutter step as the lens retracted and then extended, and the LCD showed the image.

Installed an SD card, ran through the setup menu, and it works.

Did the magic incantation for the shutter count and found that there have only been 925 shutter actuations on this little gem.

$78, free shipping. $83 with sales tax.

That's a solid bargain. Quite pleased.

(Part the first...)

I feel fine. But it is an apt description for what my interior experience has been like for the last week. We seldom have so many days of clouds and rain, but it seems they're finally clearing out of here.

It's still cloudy, but there are patches of blue and it's definitely lighter. We had rain of varying levels of intensity for much of the last week. 1.32" overall, according to my weather instrument.

Miami took a beating between rainfall, king tides and high winds causing power outages.

It wasn't the kind of weather that made me feel like being outside or taking pictures, so I looked at some of my old ones.

I also tried to search for images on Mastodon. I tried the #Olympus tag and a few camera model tags and got very little. I gather you can't search back farther than a couple of months back on Mastodon. Another "feature" of federation, I guess. Can't cache all that data. Which is fine. It was just something that was fun to do on the bird site.

I did find one guy who shoots a fair amount with an XZ-1 (so it was fairly recent), and I got some inspiration from his photos. Also got an idea to use my Raynox M-150 with the Stylus 1s. I have the CLA-13 lens adapter for the Stylus 1s, thinking once that I'd get the 1.7x teleconverter. But that's $$$ and I have better cameras for those long lengths. I was going to sell it to KEH.COM, but then I read about someone using it for macros on the 1s, which is perhaps its weakest feature as a compact camera. Hope to play with it as soon as it gets a little brighter out.

Put the drone up and got a little bit of sunrise this morning.

Got some of the housekeeping done I needed to do before our guests arrive. It's just my office and the garage. I need to finish it, but they don't get in until late tonight so I still have some time. I do my best work under pressure.

It's still wet and rainy. Kind of casting about for something to blog about.

I was scrolling through my Mastodon timeline and didn't find much inspiration there.

The whole Israel/Hamas thing reminds me of 9/11 and then the run-up to the Iraq War. "You're either with us, or you're with the terrorists."

Yeah. No thanks.

Most mornings when I fill up my water bottle, I try to express a little gratitude for having clean drinking water in my home. Lately I've been offering a wish for water and fuel and a night without bombs for the people of Gaza.

That doesn't mean I don't care about the Israelis who were murdered, or their families or the hostages.

Last week we were at an event for civilians to learn about veterans. As usual, mostly veterans showed up. Disappointing. Anyway, I learned about "moral injury." Hadn't really heard or thought about that before.

I guess I'm going to go take a walk in the rain. Seems pretty light. Maybe I'll bring along the TG-6. We have house guests next week, so I've got some housekeeping I'd better get started doing.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 07:44 Wednesday, 15 November 2023

The XZ-2 arrived yesterday. It's in excellent shape, other than the chipped and cracked cover glass at the right edge of the LCD. It even has the original thumb rest, which had fallen off mine. I'd replaced it with a little silicone sticky nub that you use for feet or bumpers.

Unfortunately, a disturbance in the Gulf of Mexico has it cloudy and wet here for the next several days. Good for moody images, but maybe not so inspiring for comparison shots.

It came with a 3rd party battery and charger. It uses the same battery as the TG-6, so I went to getolympus.com and ordered a couple of OEM batteries, as they tend to perform more reliably over a long time. They were clearing out the LH-50 battery, which is what goes in the XZ-1 for $5 a piece, so I bought two of those.

Out of curiosity, I wanted to see if there were any good deals for an XZ-2 on the auction site. Nope, about $200 or more, so I feel pretty good about this purchase at half of that.

I'd forgotten that the screen is a touch-screen, so that's a difference with the MX-1. And the screens are not identical in size, either.

You can feel the weight difference, but it's not as pronounced as I'd expected. The XZ-2 feels like a solid camera, not "plasticky" at all.

Anyway, while I was on the auction site, I looked at what the Stylus 1s was going for these days. Well north of $200 for most of them, though there was one I spotted for just a bit over $200 with shipping. But it was in very rough shape cosmetically. I mean, ugly.

I spotted one "for parts" with a stuck lens for $85/OBO, so I googled "stuck lens" and figured I'd give it a shot. Offered $75, sell came back at $78 and I snagged it.

There are a couple of relatively easy fixes I can try, and a couple more that are a bit more "iffy," but I think I can get this one working.

Some of you may recall, I'd dropped my Stylus 1s back in 2020, and it appeared to be broken. Turned it on, lens would extend and then immediately retract. The lens wasn't stuck, the sensor was. I "fixed" it by banging it on the desk in various orientations until whatever was holding the sensor gave way and it started working again.

A stuck lens, oddly enough, may be as simple as a weak battery. I have some very new batteries here, and I'll try that first. Then there are a couple of other relatively easy things to try. If worse comes to worst, I'll have some spare parts.

But I'm fairly optimistic I can get it working again. I tend to eschew optimism to avoid disappointment, but it's only $83 shipped. I'll keep you posted.

I'm going to start categorizing posts more often. "Gyre" is going to be the category of things that came to my attention that led to other things or related in a serendipitous way to other things.

Bear with me.

I subscribe to a blog called Irrational Exuberance. I don't recall why I subscribed to it in the first place, and there's been less and less that I've found interesting so I was just about to unsubscribe to it today. (I will have by the time you read this.)

But as I glanced at the posts I hadn't read, something from yesterday's (he doesn't post every day) caught my eye:

Ben Horowitz’s quote from The Hard Thing About Hard Things, “Wartime CEO knows that sometimes you gotta roll a hard six.”

"Sometimes you gotta roll a hard six." There are some readers who will recall where that phrase entered our consciousness. It was an episode of Battlestar Galactica, where Adama was telling Apollo not to lose his favorite lighter. (FWIW, Bear McCreary's "A Good Lighter" is one of my favorite songs.)

Battlestar Galactica, you will recall, was a reimagining of the 70s series of the same name by Ron Moore. Ron Moore, who's also responsible for For All Mankind.

Ben Horowitz is the Horowitz of Andreesen Horowitz. Andreesen is the author of a recent manifesto, which rationalizes the conduct of tech billionaires.

But the part that made me throw up a little bit in my mouth was the construction, "wartime CEO."

And of course he posted that on Veterans Day. Because "wartime CEO," right?

So I did a duckduckgo search on "wartime CEO," and got even more nauseated.

I get the idea of using war metaphors for business. I guess business is "violence by other means." But it still makes me sick. Especially since I'm willing to bet you a sawbuck that none of these motherfuckers throwing around the term "wartime CEO" has ever served in uniform, let alone in combat. (I might lose that bet. There may be one or two.)

There's a phenomenon where certain individuals will pretend to be veterans, usually highly decorated, combat veterans. It happens often enough that it has a name, at least within the veteran community, "stolen valor."

I think a subset of the same thing is happening here. It's self-aggrandizing. It's not enough to be the chief executive officer of a business, your business must also be a kind of warfare. To be clear, they're not making the direct comparison. They're describing different business cycles or environments where one may be more challenging than the other as the same as the difference between peace and war.

Well, gosh. Of course it is. I mean, who doesn't recall that famous quote by Sherman, "Business is hell."

Ron Moore did a couple of semesters in NROTC in college, had a summer midshipman cruise; and as a talented writer, he picked up the vernacular and a little of the culture. It was one of the things I really enjoyed about Battlestar Galactica.

But to complete the circle, and for more about the connection between tech billionaires and science fiction, during yesterday's Tinderbox meetup, Mark Bernstein mentioned that Charlie Stross had posted something of a rebuttal to Andreesen.

I follow Charlie on Mastodon, but I'm not a completist, and I wasn't aware he had a blog (Shame on me, I'm subscribed now.), so I missed this. Had Mark not mentioned it, I don't know when or if I'd have stumbled on it. That's the beauty of the gyre. You can read it here.

It may be one of the reasons the first episode of season 4 landed flat for me.

Oh, and let's bring back the draft. See how much everyone loves militaristic metaphors after that.

Now excuse me. I gotta go brush my teeth.

I enjoyed the new Netflix David Fincher flick, The Killer. Kind of a thinking person's John Wick, though I suppose that may be an oxymoron.

What it most reminded me of though was Man On Fire.

While Wick eschews any moral questions, Man asks, "Will God forgive us for what we've done?" Killer dispenses with the question by embracing nihilism, the only law being, "Do what thou wilt."

Of the three, Man On Fire is most appealing to me, because a journey of revenge became a path toward redemption.

Life is meaningless. We bring meaning to life.

Do what thou wilt.

Mitzi doesn't like Upload, but I enjoy it. It's pretty on-the-nose ("Betta" as "Meta" for instance), but I like its sensibility.

Billionaires take a beating in the video streams. Maybe that's an "opiate for the masses." We get to mock our masters on TV so we don't put their heads on pikes IRL.

My, that went dark fast.

I love this show so much, but it exacts a price. As a guy who cries at Kodak commercials (obscure cultural allusion, likely now also anachronistic), I have to constantly remind myself it's just a TV show.

As an aside, if learning about slavery makes white kids feel bad, it's because they still have empathy. That probably works up until middle school, when empathy gets overwhelmed by hormones.

But I think it speaks volumes about the value of empathy in the homes of parents worrying about their grade-schoolers "feeling bad."

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:43 Sunday, 12 November 2023

Well, I suppose it was inevitable. I was looking forward to the return of For All Mankind, but now I don't care.

I can't help but hear Marc Andreeson's dumbass manifesto as the subtext.

Ron Moore is an intelligent man. It feels like he's set up his alternate history/future to avoid climate change, and now we're going to avert the limitations of finite planetary resources by mining asteroids.

I'll probably watch the show because it's interesting as an intellectual exercise; but I don't think it'll be especially rewarding.

Yesterday was Veterans Day. I'm a veteran. I decided to skip the long discursive meditation that I post here from time to time. (This being a relevant example.)

Suffice to say, service is an opportunity to make meaning. Meaning matters more than money.

Your time here is limited, and you get to choose.