jducoeur

Much of my TV watching happens in the morning, as I do my morning run on the elliptical. I tend to pick a standard-length episode of something, set the machine to 45 minutes, and go. But that tends to leave a few minutes at the end, so I always like to have a series going that I'm watching in small chunks of 3-5 minutes at a time, after the theoretically-but-not-actually 45-minute episode ends.

Last year, that filler series was the anime Sword Art Online. I finished it a couple of months ago, and have been meaning to write a review ever since, but I kept putting it off, because I can't put it into the "recommended" or "disrecommended" buckets. Instead, this one is Complicated.

tl;dr -- I recommend (with reservations) the first two seasons, and then recommend that you stop, put down the remote, and walk away.

Let's get into the details. Mild but necessary structural spoilers here, about the overall shape of the series. Buckle up -- this one's long. ( Four complicated seasons of distinctly different stories )

So like I said: complicated. I recommend the first two seasons with reservations; I do not recommend the second two seasons. I do recommend the GGO spin-off (if you can find it -- I'm not sure whether it is currently available in the US), and it may be worth watching just book 4, Mother's Rosario, on its own.

Just finished (like, a minute ago) the Netflix adaptation of the graphic novel Locke & Key. So it's time for a quick review. (No big spoilers.)

tl;dr -- solidly good adaptation. Not slavishly faithful to the original, but it gets the themes and characters right, and is a satisfying story unto itself.

Background: the original Locke & Key was a fairly substantial series, written by Joe Hill (Stephen King's son) and illustrated by Gabriel Rodriguez. It ran for 37 issues, and was collected into six volumes. There have also been some followup stories since it ended, but the main series constitutes a complete novel unto itself, with a proper beginning, middle, and end.

The Netflix TV series ran for three seasons, totaling 28 episodes. I'll be doing a little compare-and-contrast, but mostly focus on the TV version here. I do recommend the comic -- it's a great story, which leans a bit more into the horror aspect than the TV show -- but they're not quite the same. Season 1 of the TV show broadly follows the lines of the comic, but things gradually diverge from there, and Season 3 is very much its own thing.

As we start the story, the Locke family is broken. The father of the family, Rendell Locke, has been brutally and pointlessly murdered, and the family is bereft. Needing a change of scenery, Nina (the mother) decides to move the family to Rendell's home town of Matheson, MA. (Lovecraft, MA in the original comic, which was a little unsubtle; IMO changing that was probably wise.) They move into the family homestead of Keyhouse, a sprawling Victorian mansion. (Which is apparently at least 250 years old, but let's not quibble about the architectural anachronisms.) Along with her come eldest son Tyler (16, I think?), daughter Kinsey (15) and 12-ish Bode.

Gradually, they begin to stumble upon the family secret: the keys. The house is full of keys that whisper to the kids, especially to Bode. Each key is unique, and each possesses its own distinct magic. One lets you go anywhere; another lets you walk into someone's head and see their memories. One commands fire; one opens the mysterious doorway in the cave deep beneath Keyhouse. But only the kids can perceive the magic -- anyone over 18 can't truly see it, and can't retain memory of it.

(Okay, mostly. Suffice it to say, almost everything I am saying here comes with caveats. This series involves a lot of magic, and very little is hard-and-fast.)

The history of the keys, the house, and the family slowly unspool, mainly over the course of Season 1 but details continue to emerge throughout. (As do ever-more keys.) Suffice it to say, while the TV series is less a horror story than the original, there are still demons and death involved, woven in amongst the kids exploring their magical toys.

I won't get too deeply into the plot, noting that the first two seasons mostly resolve, but each leaves a big problem in its wake. You do have to watch all three seasons to get a complete story. That's generally fine -- there's a little bit of Netflix middle-of-the-season sag here and there, but it never drags terribly.

I did find myself caring about the characters. Nina is far more important in the show than I remember her being in the comic -- she is a recovering alcoholic, and her brushes with magic, which she is unable to remember if she is sober, do nothing to help with her mental state.

She and the kids all get pretty strong arcs; in general, this is a more honest and realistic coming-of-age story than the comic is, with Tyler graduating and trying to figure out his life, Kinsey dealing with relationships (both good and bad), and Bode learning that magic doesn't solve every problem. But I found Nina's arc the most relatable, slowly dragging herself away from tragedy, reconnecting with her kids, and making a new life.

The production isn't remarkable, but solidly good -- I never found myself complaining about the writing, acting or production values. They use enough CGI to make the magic feel real, but understand that basic practical effects are often the best option when they suffice.

There are no major content warnings -- which on the one hand means they play it a little safe, but also means that I think it's probably fine for older kids. There's some violence (and, y'know, evil demons), but by the standards of modern TV it's pretty middle-of-the-road.

And yes -- the series ends, pretty conclusively. The ending is quite different from that of the comic (the story has gone in very different directions by that point), but IMO is quite a bit stronger because it is more character-focused.

So overall, recommended. Not a work of art, but a good solid watch that pays off well.

Now that things have calmed down to a dull roar (literally), let's talk about what happened last Sunday, and the aftermath. This will be very long, but it's been A Week.

Lots More to Come

So that's more or less the state of things. ServPro come back tomorrow to do a mold assessment. Hopefully they've managed to shut down the problem, but odds are that at the least we're going to need to replace a bunch of insulation in our unit, and quite possibly replace the flooring in the kitchen. (Which has warped noticeably.)

The hallway is now more visibly a wreck. They've cut away the bottom few feet of the drywall, and have four more Bees blowing at the walls to dehumidify the interior. If we're lucky, we'll only have to replace the hallway-side walls, not our interior kitchen walls. (Which would require taking down several wall-mounted cabinets.)

Overall: yay for competent contractors -- I'll particularly compliment the ServPro team as friendly, available, and attentive to detail. But I suspect it's going to be months before we have everything repaired and fully buttoned up...

So, there's this genre of comics that I traditionally call "whiny autobiography". It's an author dissecting their own recent life in detail, not just "warts and all", but obsessively focusing on those warts. I tend to think of it having seriously kicked into gear somewhere around the late 80s or early 90s, with a bunch of B&W author/artists doing it, especially the trio of Canadian bros: Chester Brown, (to a lesser degree) Seth, and the self-indulgent master of the form, Joe Matt.

Frankly, while it was interesting for a bit, it got annoying before terribly long. There's a lot of parading around going, "Look how awful I am!", with little sense that the author has learned anything, and precious little artistry.

This buildup is intentional contrast. Having just finished It's Lonely at the Center of the Earth: An auto-bio-graphical novel by Zoe Thorogood, it technically falls into this category. It's limited-timespan B&W author-artist autobiography, with the author very much self-absorbed by her depression. (CW for suicidal ideation)

But it also makes its forebears look even weaker by comparison, because this is a bloody damned work of art.

tl;dr -- buy it.

Without getting too deeply into the story, Thorogood is a young comics creator, who broke at least someone big a couple of years ago with the graphic novel The Impending Blindness of Billie Scott. Then COVID hit, leaving her somewhat isolated (like so many of us), which did nothing for her depressive tendencies. So in order to do something, in the middle of 2021 she decided to spend the next six months just rendering her life in comics. (I gather this was done somewhat as it was happening, but clearly not day-by-day -- there are some very clear chapters here.)

What could be downright turgid in lesser hands winds up absolutely fascinating. As she goes through major ups and downs (including no small amount of self-sabotage), she takes the opportunities to wander off into digressions about her life and upbringing. The result is that the story is never slow, even when the days are passing with no real events aside from some page-by-page toe-tapping as she waits for upcoming planned events and excursions.

And the thing is, it is a story. Frankly, I can't even figure out how closely to realtime she was drawing this, because it ebbs and flows very much like a good novel, foreshadowing and all.

And the art is just glorious. She wanders freely between styles ranging from basically stick figures to near-realism, page-to-page (and sometimes within a single panel) for expressive effect: she has many different ways in which she renders herself, each with different emotional connotations. (Indeed, she has several different versions of herself, each drawn differently, occasionally arguing.)

Lurking behind it all is the personification of her depression, sometimes just along for the ride, sometimes looming so large it consumes the page. This is a very internal story, but she uses the graphic form brilliantly to render all of that emotion to the page.

Most often it's done semi-realistic (several characters are consistently drawn semi-anthropomorphically), in more or less standard panels, but occasionally you turn the page and boom -- there's a full or double-page spread that just punches you in the face. I would say the page turns here are more effective than anything else I've seen short of The Sculptor (Scott McCloud's masterpiece).

Perhaps most astonishingly, after all that -- the self-imposed timeline, the emotional roller coaster -- against all odds, the story actually manages to end with an epiphany that is beautiful, appropriate, and if not exactly sunny, at least hopeful.

Put it all together, and I'm just floored. She's young -- still in her mid-20s -- and this is a graphic novel that I would stack with the masterworks of many of the greats.

Indeed, I am going to stack it with them: this is going on The Shelf -- the three-foot span at the top of my graphic novel bookcase, reserved for the absolute creme de la creme of the medium. It says a lot that, toward the end, I was doling the book out a few pages at a time, because I didn't want to get to the end.

So like I said -- this is one worth seeking out, unreservedly recommended.

(And as for myself, I finally tracked down The Impending Blindness of Billie Scott, which I had missed the first time around, and will be reading that next.)

A lot of discussion going around Mastodon asserts that the tsunami of layoffs happening right now is all about Bossism -- that people are being laid off to crush any idea that workers might have any power.

There's probably a bit of truth to that -- I'm sure that there are some billionaire-scum CEOs who have wet dreams of following Elon Musk's example of completely crushing the will of his employees -- but I honestly think that's probably mostly not it.

Much of this seems to be coming less from the corner office, and more from the investor set -- in particular, from activist investors who are buying into companies, and then massively pressuring them to cut costs, especially through layoffs. The question is, why?

The most obvious answer is of course the simplest: they think that stripping costs will goose the share price, so they can flip the stock for a profit. That's one form of traditional vulture capitalism (one of the nastier forms of market failure, IMO, since it rewards short-term gains over long-term value), and I'm sure some people are motivated that way, but AFAICT it's fairly dumb if done that crudely: most of what I've seen says that the boost to the stock is brief at best (and sometimes counter-productive) unless you couple it with root-and-branch restructuring that actually makes the company better. (Which very little of this appears to be doing.)

The conspiracy-theorist side of my brain (because who doesn't like a good conspiracy?) has been pondering another, much subtler motive: what if it's all about inflation? This is going to get a bit long, but hear me out if you're curious.

( Fun with billionaire conspiracy theories )

FYI for the SCAdians in the audience:

Having just discovered The Scallion -- the SCA's own version of The Onion -- I'm rather enjoying it. It's fun, silly, occasionally rather sharp satire of the Society.

So I've syndicated it here as thescallion_feed -- folks who like it may want to follow along!

Okay, bear with me -- I'm eventually going to get to the drinks.

In the beginning, I was visiting the offices of Rally Health (my then-employers) for the first time since I was hired. Rally was on K Street in Washington DC, a neighborhood that I hadn't spent any time in before. We were having our first on-site for our entire team, getting to know each other.

I had a couple of hours to kill that first afternoon, so I decided to go for a wander into nearby Georgetown. And it was there that I stumbled into Georgetown Olive Oil Company, and was utterly consumed.

Those of you who know me well will know that I'm a bit of a novelty and variety geek -- FOMO is a major force in my life. I want to try everything. (Smorgasbords are horribly dangerous for me.) So this store was a wonderland of varieties of olive oils and balsamic vinegars.

Messing around with olive oils, sure -- I'd been picking up a variety of those for various olive oil stores over the years. But I'd never seen such a selection of balsamics before, and so many of them were so cool. Black Truffle! Blood Orange! Bourbon! Mojito! Smoked! And of course, they promise flat-rate shipping if you buy enough bottles, so it's even a deal. I bought a lot of bottles, mostly small ones.

And then I had all these bottles, and was presented with the dilemma of what the heck to do with them. I mean, some could be used simply. (The Smoked Balsamic is thick, intensely flavored, and fabulous on veggies -- half a tsp on plain vegetables is glorious, and highly recommended.) But some were just weird. I mean, Mojito Balsamic? It sounds cool, but what do you do with Mojito Balsamic?

Finally it hit me: why not take it literally? It's named after a cocktail -- why not use it in one?

That totally worked. A dash of lime, a hint of mint, in a slightly sweet and sour environment. As a mixer in a cocktail, there's a world of potential there.

So the moral of the story is, if you enjoy experimenting with mixology, it's well worthwhile to keep a stock of balsamics in your cabinet. Good cocktails should often have a sour note to them -- not overwhelmingly, but a balanced cocktail should (IMO) be a bit sour, a bit sweet, and a bit bitter. Too often, folks limit that "sour" to lime and lemon juices, but you can do so much more.

Vanilla balsamic belongs in this drink; Blood Orange in that one; Espresso here; Jalepeno Lime there. There are so many options to add subtle notes that enhance your drink. It's really fun -- I recommend giving it a try! (Just keep in mind that it can be strong: you typically want up to a maximum of a tsp in my experience, not the tablespoon you would sometimes use of a citrus juice.)

Bonus: cocktails aren't the only thing you can put balsamic into. Almost as often as I do that, I put it into seltzer.

I've been drinking plain seltzer my entire life. (My heritage is, after all, New York Jewish.) But it gets boring, so I was very taken when, about five years ago, our local bar-supply store taught me that you can use bitters in seltzer to give them some flavor. But that's still a little one-note.

For real complexity, start with a pint glass with about a tablespoon of a flavored balsamic; add to that some shakes of a complementary bitter to taste. (I like a lot of bitter; most people will want just a dash.) Pour the seltzer on top -- slowly, since it will sometimes foam a lot.

It takes some experimentation, but when you get it right, you wind up with a "soda" that is low calorie, with a flavor that is subtle but interesting and fun. (I use our SodaStream a lot more since figuring this one out.) So if you're looking to play, I recommend picking up some small bottles of interesting-sounding balsamics and bitters, and messing around with them.

No, it wasn't that bad -- by the standards of Christmas mishaps, it was relatively minor. But it's worth a diary entry.

Last Thursday, Kate and I flew down to Annapolis, to spend the holidays with her family. Mostly staying with her folks, but everybody going into DC for a show and museum on Saturday, then spending Sunday night at her brother's house in the DC suburbs, back to her folks on Monday, and fly home on Tuesday (today). It all sounded like a pretty good time.

In a fine demonstration of Applied Murphyology, that plan survived until Friday morning, when her father started sneezing and sniffling. To his credit, he quickly tested, and sure enough -- a strong positive line.

(Mind, I don't particularly fault them: they've been decently responsible and careful. But they've been traveling a lot, and that's always a bit dangerous nowadays.)

There was a brief consideration of us jumping over to her brother's house instead, since we'd only been briefly exposed, but reality put the kibosh on that idea: his partner is currently on immunosuppressants (due to a recent flareup of an occasional problem), so even a brief exposure was too high-risk to be worth taking.

I explained Paxlovid to her parents; on Saturday they went and got him a prescription. I was distressed that this required them sitting in Urgent Care for two hours, but Christmas Eve is pretty much the worst case scenario.

So it was mostly a quiet week at her folks' condo, although we did manage to salvage some bits and pieces of the plan. Kate and I had been planning on going to the National Museum of African American History and Culture while the rest of the family went to Wicked. (We had seen it on stage before, and didn't care so much.) Since it was just the second day of exposure, we figured that we probably weren't a risk to others yet, so we tested (negative as expected), masked up, and drove into the city.

The museum was more educational than I'd like to admit: there was a lot of the bad early history that I didn't know. But learning is kind of the point of the exercise, and we spent a solid three hours walking through the History floors. (The museum has three subterranean floors that are more or less a tour of the history, starting in the Renaissance and ending with Barack Obama, and two above-ground ones dedicated to culture.)

I recommend the experience. It's very detailed, and pulls no punches. The only downside is traffic management: some of the sections get pretty jammed. Now being now, that felt a little uncomfortable, even on a relatively low-crowd day. (Not so many families at the museum on Christmas Eve.)

Sunday, Kate's brother came over briefly, and we did an exchange of hostages, passing along presents and the dinner components that each household had cooked. After he got home, we did a family Zoom call to open the presents together, so it wasn't too different from normal.

We weren't able to eat exactly the same dinner, but we managed to get surprisingly close -- duck on both sides, in our case duck breasts seared on the grill, with a really marvelous smoked port wine sauce made by her brother's partner. It was pretty lovely.

By Monday, Kate and I were still feeling okay, but it being Day Four, going to anything indoor and public seemed like a bad idea. So we instead wound up going to a park near her folks' place, with a nice four-mile path through the forests around it.

We noted the gazebo at the entrance, which appears to be dormant; after that, we began observing the lower pavilions scattered throughout.

The walk gradually turned into a biological discussion of the pavilions -- what they eat (animals? people? stuff that falls off the picnic tables?), the observation of the larger, older pavilion in the middle (clearly the silverback), the speciation of the examples we observed (two had chimneys, obviously to better attract prey), speculation about further evolution (Kate argued that, if you hybridized the species, you would wind up with one that had a hibachi in the middle).

Eventual conclusion was that the gazebo is clearly the lone apex predator -- best to pass by while it hibernates in the winter. (The other safe time of year being summer, when you have Sousa bands to fend it off.)

It was a lovely time -- getting to stretch our legs, enjoy a cool (but no longer crazy-cold) day, and generally be silly together was a definite mood-lifter.

Today was returning home; continuing the Applied Murphyology theme, of course my throat has started to feel a little scratchy. So there was nothing for it but to do what I was starting to consider anyway: I shaved both cheeks clean, so I can finally get a proper fit on an N95. That was maybe-worthwhile for protecting myself from other people at the various big upcoming events (Arisia, Birka, Intercon, etc); now, it's a strict necessity for protecting others from me.

Mind -- I literally haven't seen my cheeks in 40 years, so this took some nerving myself for. But the conclusion was that I can leave the mustache and some beard on my chin, without compromising the seal, so the visual difference is subtler than I had feared. It's the first time since this all started that I've felt like a mask is truly fitted properly.

I put on the mask when we left the house in Annapolis, and didn't put it back on until we got home. In the plane we managed to grab the only two-seat row in the plane, so as not to be sitting next to anybody. So I didn't feel like a complete slimeball flying home, but it's definitely one of the most uncomfortable things I've done recently.

(Waiting for the flight was an adventure unto itself, which deserves its own blog post. Suffice it to say, I do not recommend flying Southwest at the moment -- the flight staff were lovely, but the airline's execs have screwed up the airline's systems to a truly epic degree.)

Home now, and with the stress of flying passed, the scratchiness is getting worse. Tomorrow I retest; assuming it's finally positive (which I think is likely), then I get to try to score some Paxlovid myself. Yay -- hopefully that will be less hassle than it was for Kate's father.

Hopefully it'll be a mild case. Kate's father still sounds pretty decent -- just mild cold symptoms -- but there's no way to know how it'll hit me.

The one bright spot is that we didn't have any concrete plans for this week, so nothing is actually being foiled for us. But I'm a bit distressed about the fact that spontaneous shenanigans with friends are now probably out of the question -- I suspect that I'm going to be largely quarantined until at least a week from today, and even that is only if things go quite quickly.

So the rest of the winter break is looking like a staycation of reading comics, drinking tea, and sniffling a lot...

[ETA as I head towards bed: yep, now have a mild fever. Entirely unsurprising, but sigh...]

[ETA2, next day: yep, faint but definite positive test line. I have a video appointment with a doctor scheduled for tomorrow morning, to get the Paxlovid scrip.]

During the holiday break, I'm catching up on some of the graphic novels I have in electronic form. In particular, I'm working on some of the stuff I got in the enormous pile of queer comics I got from Humble Bundle a while back. (One of those "donate $30, get 50 graphic novels" deals.)

Not everything in the pile is great (for no obvious reason, it seems to include almost every Archie Comic that includes Kevin Keller, of whom I approve in principle but I just don't like Archie that much), but most is quite good.

An honorable mention goes to The Backstagers, which is fun and silly -- an exploration of the weird magical world behind the high school curtains, full of corridors and strange lands, where the actors never go but the backstage crew must explore and know in order to produce just the right shade of paint on demand.

(Not a full review because the bundle only included v1, and Boom Studios' website is currently down for maintenance, so I have to wait before getting the other three books.)

But two books so far are both complete and worth a clear recommendation, so a couple of short reviews...

First up is Girl Haven, by Lilah Sturges, Meaghan Carter, and Joamette Gil.

Ash is a lonely kid, whose mother disappeared three years ago, still desperately trying to hold on to the hope that she might return someday. Having just made a few new friends, Ash shows them her writing and art studio, largely untouched since that day, and they accidentally discover that the imaginary world that she was always describing in her work is all too real.

Koretris is a land of magic, full of talking animals and a fight between light and darkness. It is also only open to girls -- so how exactly was a boy like Ash allowed in?

This is very much a story about gender identity, as Ash wrestles with the hope that maybe this world is confirming something, but it isn't quite that simple -- instead of saying what to believe, it is more forcing Ash to make a choice.

It's well-written, and I'd say well-suited to younger teens: there is some darkness to the tale, but it's generally a positive story about growth and self-discovery, very strongly advocating the notion that you should decide your identity for yourself. Recommended -- in particular, parents should give it a look.

On the flip side is the rather darker and much funnier Camp Spirit, by Axelle Lenoir.

I first encountered Lenoir with her fabulously weird quasi-autobiography Secret Passages earlier this year. That is the tale of her younger childhood, starting to come to terms with the idea that she might be a little different from other people, her parent were aliens, and that she has an interdimensional doppelganger -- you know, little-kid stuff like that.

Camp Spirit is a somewhat more straightforward novel, but still has much of the same flavor. Elodie is 17, and absolutely despising the fact that her mother has ordered her to earn some money for college by spending six weeks as a camp counselor.

Much of the story is a fairly classic coming-of-age yarn, with scenes that would be all too familiar to many of us who were shy kids at summer camp (from the horror of camp toilets to the unbearable embarrassment of communal showers), livened with humor that grows as the story goes along. Elodie is given the problem cabin: a collection of absolutely uncontrollable red-haired girls -- watching her gradually learn how to harness and weaponize them is nastily fun. And she spends a good deal of time trying to navigate her own feelings about "little miss perfect", her friend Catherine.

But there's also a weirder level: the awkward-to-the-point-of-creepy Camp Chief; the camp songs (which are all Satanic heavy metal tunes); the legend of the local woods (which tells the tale of the good and wicked spirits that inhabit them); and of course that mysterious blue glow in the forest every night.

Suffice it to say, this is not a horror story, but it's often a fairly eerie one with some fantastical elements, as Elodie gets more and more determined to figure out what is up with this place.

Over the span of this six weeks, Elodie grows up a lot, going from sullen teenager at the beginning to significantly more self-possessed young woman by the end. That progression is well-rendered and reasonably believable; moreover, the story is an excellent ride.

Highly recommended -- it's a good book, a bit offbeat, and suitable for older teens as well as adults.

I'm mostly keeping my observations about Elon Musk and Twitter over on Mastodon, but this one's a little too interesting and important.

Musk just announced (quoting, so you don't have to actually go to the hellsite):

Twitter will start incorporating mute and block signals from Blue Verified (not Legacy Blue) as downvotes

This innocuous little announcement is both brilliant and horrifying. Consider:

He's driven most of the progressive side of the world off Twitter already.
The people willing to pay for stupid blue checkmarks at this point are mainly his neo-Nazi fanboys.
He is now officially factoring their views -- but not those of anybody else -- into the Twitter algorithm. If you mute somebody, you contribute to nobody else getting to see them either.

So from here on out, he doesn't need to ban non-right-wing journalists. Instead, he is encouraging his flock to collectively silence them.

Hell, from a financial POV it's the most evilly brilliant thing I've seen in years. He is essentially saying, "The reason to pay me $8 is so that you can own the libs."

All of that while being able to say, "Me? I'm not doing anything wrong. I'm just allowing my customers to express their opinions, and shaping the site the way they want it." And the only way to fight it is to give him money. No matter how it plays out, he wins.

Seriously: if you are active on Twitter, get off. Now. This is beyond Orwellian -- it isn't commanding the mob to be evil and violent, it is selecting for evil, empowering it, and profiting off of it. The appropriate response is ostracism: for us to collectively say clearly that Twitter is now nothing more than a bigger and fancier version of Parler, not suitable for decent folks to hang out on.

Spread the word. If you know any journalists who have a shred of integrity, definitely spread the word to them. If you know any business owners who still advertise on Twitter, make clear that that association is now strictly negative publicity.

And just to be clear: any comments attempting to both-sides this will be deleted. There are times to stand up and be clear, and it is time to loudly declare that Twitter has been corrupted beyond any reasonable hope.

This just came up in conversation on Mastodon, and is worth mentioning here.

Everyone is posting examples of "conversations" with ChatGPT at the moment. The results aren't always right, but it's surprising how often they're close enough. And when they are wrong, I've noticed that they are often wrong in the same sorts of ways that a slightly over-confident human might be wrong -- not obviously "ah, you are a computer", more "no, you're confusing two similar problems". It's approaching Imitation Game quality faster than I had expected, with far less of the glitchiness that the image-generation bots are still prone to.

But a fair number of people are still going, "Enh, so it's a slightly better chatbot. Doesn't really matter that much. Who cares?"

I strongly suspect that there are two audiences who will care: criminals and state actors.

Consider:

Most people live much of their lives publicly online, and have lots of miscellaneous more-or-less public information.
Moreover, their social networks are basically trivial to derive from public information.
We now have AIs that are extremely good at sucking in and collating massive amounts of information.
We now have AIs that are rapidly passing the uncanny valley in their text conversations, and becoming pretty convincingly human in their responses.

There are two extremely obvious use cases for this set of bullet points: spear-phishing and psyops manipulation.

The slam-dunk one is spear-phishing. Take an AI like ChatGPT, train it on individuals, what we know about them, and how they relate to each other. Then tell it to generate emails from Person A to Person B, using public information about Person A to trick Person B.

Some helpful context: when most people think about "hackers", they envision people breaking through firewalls and manipulating the computers themselves. There's some of that -- but a very large fraction of hacking is nothing like that. Instead, it's all about "social engineering": figuring out how to get a person to do what you want. The all-about-the-computers hacking often happens after a social-engineering attack opens the front door in the first place. Anything that makes social-engineering attacks more successful is seriously dangerous.

When I pointed this out, a friend on Mastodon experimentally tried kicking the tires, and even some trivial quick attempts with hand-seeded information produces at least vaguely plausible emails: not great, but not awful. Now imagine an AI that is trained specifically for this task: not just with Person A's public facts but samples of their writing. (Many people have established that ChatGPT is at least decent at imitating writing styles.) Imagine receiving emails that aren't just the usual boilerplate, but sound like the person they are pretending to be from. Are you confident you would never fall for that?

No, this wouldn't be trivial, but the opportunity is huge, and a forward-thinking criminal boss can surely see that it would be worth investing a few million dollars in building such a thing. (Heck, you could probably cloak in in respectability with some well-chosen use cases.) Done right, it could probably recoup the development cost before anyone even realized what was happening.

The political manipulation case is less obvious, but arguably even scarier. We've already seen what Russian hackers can do with the information available on Facebook and some made-up insane bullshit. Now imagine an AI trained on established psyops techniques and demagogic rhetoric. Have it create accounts on FB, start friending people, and spreading panic and hate in realtime, targeting that panic precisely at what its "friends" have shown they care about.

That would be a heavier lift to get right, but with the resources of a state actor working on it I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be doable.

And the thing is, if I can see these opportunities, I'd be astonished if there aren't already people working on them.

So button up -- I suspect the next few years are going to be very interesting. I'm not especially worried about Skynet taking over the world (yet), but I think there is reason to be concerned about industrial-scale manipulation of individuals, for theft, ransomware attacks, political manipulation, and so on. I have no idea how we might counter that, but it's time to start seriously thinking about it.

Thoughts? Am I off-base here? I can't see any reason offhand why both of the above aren't probably going to be feasible, but I've only been pondering this for an hour. Ideas about how we might fight back?

It's always sad when you get to the end of a series that you love So Very Much. I'm talking here about the brilliant story that you don't binge; instead, you dole it out, one precious episode at a time, for nights when you really want to watch it.

So it was for the most important series on Disney+. Forget the Marvel superheroes, the Star Wars spectacles, even the Pixar stuff. Let's talk about the reason why it is worth subscribing to Disney+: Ducktales.

No, I'm not even slightly kidding: this has probably been Kate's and my most consistently favorite show of recent years.

Let's dive in and talk a bit about why...

To get the obvious question out of the way: this is not a sequel, it's a reboot. It begins the day that Donald Duck, caretaker of the orphan triplets Huey, Dewey and Louie, is forced to move in with their miserly uncle, Scrooge McDuck. Scrooge is famously the richest duck in the world; what becomes gradually clear is that he was also the world's greatest adventurer in his day, and he ever-so-slowly comes around to realizing that having family around makes him a better person.

That said, it's not a slavish remake. A lot of new characters come onstage -- most importantly his assistant Mrs. Beakley and her grand-daughter Webigail Vanderquack. Webby is glorious: slightly spectrum, utterly obsessed with All Things McDuck, and oh yes -- Granny has been training her in combat arts her entire life. (Doesn't everyone know how to use night-vision goggles?) She balances the boys with a very different energy -- earnest and sometimes dangerously naive but ferociously competent in her own ways.

(I was also surprised at how different the boys wind up being. I'd always had the impression of the three of them as identical ciphers, but that's far from the case here. More and more as the story progresses, they wind up very different, each bringing their own distinct skills to the table: Huey's diligent Junior Woodchuck knowledge, Dewey's daredevil hijinks, and Louie's sly genius each get them out of scrapes many times.)

The cast grows steadily from there. Some are from the original continuity, and indeed from much of the Launchpad-verse -- Darkwing Duck winds up a major character (kind of), and there is an episode that can only be described as "Gummy Bears meets The Avengers". (The 1960s TV show, not the superheroes.) Plus lots of new characters to fit today's environment, such as Mark Beaks (the annoying techbro billionaire).

This being a modern TV show, there is continuity and arc. Most episodes mostly stand on their own, but there are some major arcs -- not least, the big overarching story of "Whatever Happened to Della Duck?" (the boys' mother), which covers much of the first two seasons. Suffice it to say, they eventually get around to answering that question, and the story gets better for it.

The show even winds up with a huge three-part finale, tying many plots together and firmly planting the story's overall message that family (both blood and chosen) makes you stronger. They did three seasons and then tied it up before it got tired; I'm sad not to have more of it, but that was probably the smart move.

The writing is razor sharp and often hilariously funny, especially in the first season. (IMO season two calms down slightly, as the arc takes over a bit more. But it's still pretty great.) That's really what makes the show for me. I never watched the originals (I was just a bit too old), so there's no sentimental value in it for me: this is simply brilliant comedy, with broad enough humor for the kids and enough wry commentary to be deeply smart for the grown-ups. It's exactly what I want in a cartoon, and this may be the best I've seen since the original Animaniacs.

The cast is also both stellar and brilliant, starting with David Tennant as Uncle Scrooge. (Having apparently been given the note of, "That's great, David, but could you be more Scottish?") But it doesn't stop there: from Danny Pudi and Jim Rash to Allison Janney, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Michael Chiklis, Don Cheadle -- a lot of great talent comes over to have fun over the course of the show.

Seriously: I've watched nearly all of the big Marvel and Star Wars shows on Disney+, and I love most of them, but Ducktales stands out as my favorite thing they've done so far. It's comfort watching and smart and funny.

Highest recommendation -- if you already have Disney+, find time for it, and if you don't, it's one of the better reasons to pick it up.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I'm now ensconced on Mastodon. I've recently moved my account over to jducoeur@social.coop, which seems to suit me pretty well -- social.coop is a rather process-wonky Mastodon instance focused on collective action: thoughtful progressivism is the general tone.

I'm posting a lot more over there than here at the moment. Partly that's simply because it's new and cool, and has that fresh new-social-network smell. (Mastodon is by no means new, but the Muskocalypse is causing massive sudden growth, so the energy level there is sky-high at the moment.) And partly it's because my brain is currently rather over-focused on Mastodon itself and the Twitter meltdown, and that topic just seems more appropriate over there: I'm going to try to avoid too much of that particular navel-gazing here.

Digression: it's slightly disturbing how I can't take my eyes off of the Twitter situation. We have a channel at work titled #social-twitter-slow-motion-train-wreck, and at this point at least once a day someone comes in and says, "Slow motion? Uh, no."

On the one hand, I'm angry and sad for the employees who have been subjected to this bullshit, as Kaiju Billionaire stomps all over Mega-Tokytwitter and then wonders why everyone doesn't love and follow him. There were a lot of good people there, many of whom were seriously trying to build a site that both worked well and was at least sometimes a net social good.

(Yes, I know, it's easy to mock Twitter. But one upshot of the past few weeks for me has been coming to understand that the #BlackTwitter community is deeply angry, because it was a central organizational tool for them, and they are far from alone. It's easy to forget how important it has been for both marginalized communities and revolutionary movements -- a place to organize and amplify their voices. That's a very serious loss, and much though I like Mastodon, there are some good reasons why it's not simply a good replacement for that.)

OTOH, wow -- it's hard to resist noshing the popcorn and watching. If there is any positive side to this horror, it is the vivid illustration of a self-proclaimed master of the universe discovering that this social stuff is not rocket science -- it's much, much harder. And it's a fine public lesson that shitting on your employees, making rash decisions without understanding the lay of the land, and generally acting like a corporate Trump is not a winning proposition.

There have been bigger corporate failures before, but never in history has there been one that was so fast, and so blatantly the fault of one idiot with the world's biggest case of Dunning-Kruger syndrome. One can't help but think that, if this is what Musk is like, Tesla and SpaceX have succeeded despite him, not because of him.

But I digress...

Anyway, I'm not leaving DW -- one of my first Mastodon posts (and certainly my most-boosted) was reminding people that this is still the best blogging site.

But I like Mastodon a lot more than I did Twitter, so I'll probably continue to post more frequently there than here. The micro-blogging approach works well when I only have a couple of paragraphs of something to say, or am largely just link-sharing, and the 500-character limit there is much more comfortable than Twitter's 280. I'll be doing most of my macro-blogging here, both diarizing and longer, more thoughtful posts. (You can do long posts in thread form over there, same as Twitter, but like Twitter that's kind of an annoying hack on a system that's mostly not designed for it.)

I do commend Mastodon to you: it's not a replacement for DW, but it's an interesting supplement if you'd like a feed that is chattier, more random, more publicly social, and often a bit more "newsy". The technical differences aside, the look and feel is a lot like a less-toxic version of Twitter, and it's rather fun.

I will note in advance that getting started on Mastodon is rather more hassle than it should be -- indeed, I have a long thread going on how we might improve things for new folks. For now, I'll just say that it gets a lot easier and more fun after you get past those initial hurdles. I'm happy to chat about that, and help as best I can, if you are interested in talking about it -- ping me directly, or just comment here.

One of the shows I've been watching recently is Stargirl (on HBOMax). I finished season one yesterday, and wound up thinking about similarities between the resolution of that story, and the past week.

High concept of the show: this is a superhero story, loosely inspired by Infinity, Inc and the like. Ten years after the death of most of the Justice Society of America, their teenage heirs (literal and figurative) group together to fight the Injustice Society. It's mid-grade Berlanti-verse: decent and fun, but kind of lightweight. (Rather like the Flash, but more by and for teens.)

The rest of this is, necessarily, spoilers.

( Spoilers for Stargirl Season 1 )

During my morning runs, I watch something on TV -- more often than not, that's when I binge something. For the past few months, that's been Discovery (on Paramount+), one of the latest generation of Star Trek shows. As of this week, I'm now caught up through Season 4. So let's do a review of the series so far.

tl;dr -- one of the better incarnations of the Star Trek mythos. Big, epic, and thoroughly modern in the best ways.

Important: I'm going to take the history of Star Trek for granted here, and I'm not going to go into any depth about it. The story has been running for 50 years, and there's just too much to try to get into. You do not need to know all of the (many) previous series in order to watch this one -- just be aware that there are a fair number of callbacks to it scattered throughout, since it is very much the same universe.

Descriptive stuff first -- I'm going to avoid major spoilers in this post (take note: spoilers are allowed in comments!), but here's the some of broad sweep of it.

Discovery is, first and foremost, the story of Michael Burnham. Like all Star Trek it's an ensemble show, but she's very much the central protagonist. It's not giving much away to say that, not long after the beginning of the story, she is basically public enemy number one, having screwed up big time and caused the Federation massive trouble. In no small part, this is the story of her gradual redemption and finding her place in the galaxy.

The series begins as a prequel to Original Series Star Trek, set around ten years before the first stories of James T. Kirk et al. There is one central connection: Michael is Spock's sister. Okay, adopted sister. Yes, she's entirely human, but was raised on Vulcan for half her life. Her self-identity is complicated and a little messed up -- a good deal of her arc is about her learning to become less Vulcan, and more comfortable in her own skin as a human.

(If you are now saying, "Wait -- what? It's impossible that we've never heard of her before", trust me: that's far from the only aspect of the first two seasons that will leave you saying that. Suffice it to say, they do provide an explanation, at the end of season two. I think the explanation is absolutely terrible, but they don't ignore the problem. Be prepared to just accept a monumental hand-wave, and move on.)

From the outset, the story postulates one new bit of Treknobabble that you need to accept: the Spore Drive. This is based on the great cosmic network of mushrooms that connect all of space, and lets the ship travel instantly around via that. Discovery is the only ship in existence with, essentially, galactic-scale teleportation.

Yes, yes, I know -- the science is deeply ridiculous in places. I'm telling you this now so that you're prepared to roll with it. Remember, Star Trek is rarely hard science fiction: as has always been true, it's space opera, and the pseudo-science is there to serve the story.

Like so much of Trek, the series starts kind of weak, and improves as it goes along. Season one is nowhere near as bad as the first season of Next Generation, but the characters are still finding their feet, the cast is still gelling, and the story features a coincidental plot twist that may be more ridiculous than the spore drive. It's a fun ride, but suspension of disbelief is critical for survival here.

Season two is a bit less ridiculous, and gets rather more fun with the introduction of Captain Christopher Pike (on loan from a dry-docked Enterprise) and a hunt for Spock, who also becomes a major character for the rest of the season. (After which they both head off to Strange New Worlds, which starts shortly after this.) But note that this season is timey-wimey to an extreme degree -- Star Trek loves time travel, and it is completely laced through this story.

At the end of season two, things change. A lot. Without going into the details, the Discovery winds up elsewhere, and at that point the story really begins to spread its wings -- no longer constrained by being a prequel, it starts to tell its own tale, and everything finally really clicks.

Season three's tone is very different, as our crew find themselves becoming a family of necessity and choice. The scenario is about as much Star Wars as Star Trek -- a little grittier and darker, more frontier-sy and a little more desperate. It's a very neat change of pace, and helps the series finally start to feel whole. Really, it feels like the series is finally getting to the point: in retrospect, I suspect the series bible always intended to wind up here, and the first two seasons are lining up all the pieces to make it happen.

(Many of my friends will appreciate that, while it's by no means central to season three's plot, the story leans into Star Trek's longstanding anti-capitalist vibe. It's overly reductive to say that the big bad of season three is capitalism, but that's certainly an element.)

Season three ends quite cleanly -- if they had decided to stop there, I would have said that it was a good resolution. But it did continue into season four: back to a more Star Trek flavor (albeit "elsewhere"), but again serves as a solid and complete story that ends well.

(I will note that season four involves probably the best first-contact story in the history of this mythos -- the first time we've ever dealt with a species that is truly alien. They spend multiple episodes trying to figure out how to even begin to communicate.)

Season five has been announced, and I'm looking forward to it. Discovery works in the modern style, with a granularity of "season" more than "episode", so the stories have a lot of room to breathe, and at this point each season is getting a proper beginning, middle, and end.

Discovery follows the common Star Trek assumption that nobody is simply a bad guy, moreso as it goes along. Things are a bit mixed on that front in the first two seasons (which do have a moderate number of aggressive assholes), but seasons three and four work hard to make clear that the tensions here (and those tensions are cataclysmic at times) are as much about circumstances and differences of worldview and needs as anything. There are a few people who are simply nasty, and some who are hard to agree with, but most are trying to do the right thing by their own lights.

While the science is laughable, and plots in the first two seasons severely far-fetched, the direction is mostly pretty decent, and the acting pretty good. It doesn't hurt that Michelle Yeoh is a major character for the first three seasons, being as deliciously complex as usual, but the show largely rests on Sonequa Martin-Green's Michael. She starts out pretty tightly reserved -- torn between her human and Vulcan heritages and conscious of how much she has to atone for -- but as she grows and figures herself out, she becomes increasingly glorious. Frankly, by the current point in the series she's every bit as much fun as Kirk at his best, and a significantly better person.

The show is notable both for its diversity, and for how lightly it wears that diversity. By the beginning of season three, not a single member of Discovery's command staff is a cishet white man. That's never called out: it's simply a fact you can notice if you're paying attention. The crew is thoroughly multi-racial; the one truly healthy and realistic permanent relationship is between the Chief Engineer and Doctor (both male); and season three adds an enby teen to the core cast. All of this is normal, unremarkable, just the people who inhabit this ship and make up its family. It's pretty wonderful.

Note that Paramount+ also has Short Treks -- a series of 20-minute short stories, which turn out to be closely linked to Discovery. I would recommend watching them in calendar order, interspersed with Discovery as they were originally aired. None of them are essential (I didn't even notice them until I was mostly done), but many of them provide backstory, fleshing out some details that get very briefly glossed over in the main episodes.

(One of these, Calypso, is utterly fascinating, in that it is wildly incompatible with where the series wound up going. It's pretty clearly foreshadowing of how the series bible originally intended the season two/three transition to work. My guess is that Aldis Hodge was supposed to become a central character in season three, and when he proved to be unavailable (due to getting increasingly in-demand), they rethought the story to go in a somewhat different direction. The producers still swear that Calypso will eventually be in-canon -- I'm skeptical, but curious to see if they eventually try to make it so.)

So overall -- it's fun. Even when the first two seasons are being kind of stupid, it's still a fun ride, and I absolutely adored the latter two seasons. Not quite an absolute must-see, but recommended to anyone who likes space opera, and highly recommended to anyone who likes the Star Trek universe.

For those who don't know it yet, Intercon is one of the oldest and largest LARP-centric conventions in the world. I've been involved with it since 1989, and it's still one of the highlights of my year: a weekend packed with dozens of games in all genres. You can easily play five games during it; some do as many as eight or nine.

Like most conventions, Intercon has had a hard couple of years of it. Intercon T managed to run in 2020, coming in just under the wire before the world shut down. 2021 just wasn't in the cards, so we instead held Extracon, a surprisingly successful experiment in online LARP. 2022 was supposed to happen, but Omicron had other ideas.

Things are still fingers-crossed, but things are moving along well to finally run Intercon U this coming March, and now is the time to go check it out! The initial schedule is up, and signups for games will begin on November 3rd. Intercon signups run in rounds, letting you sign up for one more game each week so that things don't completely fill up instantly, but a few games from the most popular GMs will fill quickly anyway.

(As to the usual question -- "Why letters, instead of numbers?" -- suffice it to say that it used to be numbered, but the organization was rather split between the Boston-area and DC-area folks. We eventually decided to reorganize, with the DC area continuing to run numbered conventions, and us in Boston restarting at Intercon A.)

Anyway, check it out, and I hope to see you there!

No important changes -- I expect to do most of my all-too-infrequent diarizing over here -- but in the wake of my skepticism of Twitter growing even more this week, I'm trying out a couple more services.

On the more-established side, I've finally set up a profile on Mastodon. I expect to use that the same way I've been using Twitter: to post links to interesting stuff, with relatively light commentary. Probably little content per se, but I'll likely use that to tie together my posts from here, Medium, and elsewhere, along with other things that catch my eye.

For those who haven't encountered it, Mastodon is a social network, but one designed in the good old-fashioned way: a federated network based on common protocols, rather than a huge corporate monolith. So instead of being a walled garden, it's a whole bunch of cooperating systems, each with its own ethos and focus -- you can join one and still follow stuff from the others. (Within some limits: for example, many servers explicitly ban content from servers that are focused on white supremacy, child porn, etc.)

If you're curious check it out; if you're already there, feel free to follow me and let me know you're around.

On the more-experimental side, I'm also checking out Cohost, which is Yet Another Posting Platform. We'll see whether it goes anywhere -- it looks nice, but at first glance may be too similar to DW for me to actually do much with it. But if you're over there, say hi!

Any other recommendations folks have? While I'm not sure that Twitter is going to melt down, I strongly suspect that Musk has no idea what he's doing, and the panic seems to be driving some healthy churn. Time to encourage folks towards less-sucktastic platforms...

While it was by no means the high point of the vacation, it's worth talking a little about the sheer craziness that is The Fremont Street Experience. The Golden Nugget is on Fremont Street, and yes, the "Experience" is part of the official name.

I had originally assumed that that was pretentious, but yeah -- it's an experience all right. For several blocks, it's a pedestrian plaza, and it is just about the loudest place I've ever been. It's almost civilized in the morning, but by midafternoon there are stages blasting cover bands and DJs every few blocks: mid-evening, we could barely hear each other yell, when standing side-by-side.

The street is covered with an arched roof, running the full several blocks, so it's hard to quite call it "outside". (I didn't mask, but I did seriously think about it.) The inside of the roof is completely lined with LEDs, showing graphics that may have sometimes been sync'ed to the music.

Approximately every hundred feet is a bar, serving on the street. Most of them have a wall of frozen drink machines -- which are served in yard glasses, of course.

It would all be horribly hot, but between the fact that it is roofed, and there are doors opening onto air-conditioned casinos everywhere, so it's actually weirdly pleasant until you step off of Fremont into the sun.

(All of this was made even crazier by the enormous festival of music, food, and general bacchanalia down in Container Park, at the end of the street, taking up something like sixteen square blocks that were closed off for the duration. Around 6pm, it turned into a river of pedestrians heading in that direction.)

Basically, the overall effect is Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras, except without the soul and the good music. It is, indeed, an experience -- but not really our style...

No surprise (us being us), there are going to be a couple of posts about food. Let's talk about the surprise highlight -- Spring Mountain Road.

This is sometimes called Vegas' "Chinatown", but it's inaccurate in a couple of ways. First, it's not really a "town": rather, it's a linear strip several miles long and a couple of blocks wide. Second, it's by no means just Chinese -- it's a profusion of Asian cultures sitting side-by-side. And it's not just Asian: there's a bunch of other stuff around. But the notable aspect is the Asian markets, shops, and wow, so many restaurants.

The first day Downtown, while we had a car, we decided to wander down to Spring Mountain, explore a bit, and pick something up for dinner. In the interest of safety, we were trying to only eat inside restaurants that we really cared about, and while there were some patios along Fremont Street, there wasn't anything calling out to us for dinner. So it was time to explore takeout.

A recommendation in a guidebook led us to Sushi Neko, and that proved to be a remarkable win. No, the website isn't much to look at, but the sushi menu really is that big -- more importantly, it's surprisingly great.

That section titled "Spicy Roll"? They are not kidding. We like spicy, so we got both the "Little Tease Roll" and the "Call 911 Roll", both of which were ferocious, but also complex and tasty, and that applied to all the rolls we got: they ranged from better than average to excellent. And they know how to do takeout: all sauced rolls come with the toppings on the side. (We wound up with a lot of little tubs of different toppings.)

Suffice it to say, it was good enough that we went back again the next evening for a different set of rolls, and didn't regret it. Frankly, if we ever do wind up back in Vegas in less-Covid-concerned times, we'd love to eat in the restaurant and try more of the menu, which is full of things that didn't look like they would travel as well.

That said, while the sushi was great, it was the accidental snack that really blew me away.

We spent an hour in the late afternoon wandering around Spring Mountain Road, and quickly found ourselves tired and hot. So we were looking for a cold drink when we stumbled across Sweet Mong. The online menu isn't terribly unusual, but that's because it is aimed at takeout / delivery. What doesn't show up there is the Seoul Bingsoo. I had no idea what it was, but the guy behind the counter said, "Do you like shaved ice?", and that sounded appealing in the heat.

(Subsequent research indicates that it is a favorite dessert in South Korea, but this was the first time I've encountered it.)

When it came to our table (yes, out on the patio), the result was much more interesting than I had expected. As best I could figure out, this was (from bottom to top):

A mound of shaved, gently milky ice
A layer of glaze that quick-froze, melting and refreezing a little of the ice below it
Another layer of shaved ice
Another layer of glaze
A sprinkle of -- nuts? puffed rice? I'm not sure of all the bits, but it added lovely slight crunch
Pieces of chewy mochi
A mound of sweet red bean

Altogether it was fabulous -- easily four times as much as I'd been looking for in a snack, and I ate just about all of it anyway. Moderately sweet, cold, complex: it was just about the perfect dessert for a hot day.

Really, out of all the good food we had in Las Vegas (we'll get to the really fancy dinners in a later entry), that one dish was the one that left me going, "Wah -- wrong end of the country!". As far as I can tell, Sweet Mong is just that one little shop on Spring Mountain now, but it has shot to the tip-top of my list of places I want to see open in Davis Square. We've gotten past Maximum Thai and Peak Poke: fabulous shaved ice would be a fine addition to the neighborhood...

Got back from vacation last night. We weren't quite comfortable planning for a return to Europe yet, so we decided to do something we've been talking about idly for years: a trip to Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon. We'd each only been there fairly briefly, and were curious.

So that's where we spent the last week or so, in a few parts:

Two days staying at the Golden Nugget in Downtown Las Vegas (aka "Glitter Gulch", the heart of the classic stereotype of LV)
One day staying at El Tovar in Grand Canyon Village on the South Rim
Three days at the MGM Grand, the third biggest hotel in the world, one of the ones that define The Strip (the stereotype of "modern" LV)

plus one travel day between each of those -- ten days total, including two in the air and two driving two and from the Canyon.

As usual, I'm going to do a series of posts about various high points, rather than a chronological travelogue. So let's get into it...

Planned entries (I'll come back and edit this as I add stuff):

Spring Mountain Road
Fremont Street
The Fancy Restaurants
Headache, and the Joy of CBD
O
The South Rim (and dining experiences good and bad)
The Strip

Review: _Sword Art Online_

Review: _Locke & Key_ (TV)

Fun with sprinklers

Early Sunday Morning

Sunday

The Rest of the Week

The Pipes

The Bees

Lots More to Come

Review: _It's Lonely at the Center of the Earth_

Hot take on layoffs

The Scallion is now syndicated here

Singing the virtues of balsamic vinegar in... beverages

Have Yourself a Very Covid Christmas

A few graphic novels

Majoritarian, Capitalist Memetic Warfare

The approaching New Age of Phishing

Review: _Ducktales_

Current distractions

Super-villains, Elon Musk -- same difference?

Review: _Discovery_

Intercon U -- Hopefully Third Time Lucky

Exploring other systems after the Muskocalypse

Las Vegas: Fremont Street

Las Vegas: Spring Mountain Road

This year's vacation: Las Vegas

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June 2025

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