jducoeur

(I've just sent this to the relevant officers, but I'm also sharing it publicly: this is a serious topic, more than worth some proper public discussion, not just random conversations on Discord. Comments are welcome, but keep them civil, thoughtful and productive; I will squash or delete anything that gets too heated. I encourage you to write your own letters -- feel free to crib from here if that seems useful to you, but please make your feelings known to the powers that be.)

Unto Their Majesties and Highnesses of the East, the Kingdom Seneschal, and the Board of the Society, Justin du Coeur sends greetings and concerns.

I read yesterday's updates to the COVID policies with some dismay, which was heightened by the online discussions around it. As I had expected, the result is that a number of members are no longer comfortable attending indoor events -- which in practice means all events for about 4-5 months in these parts. Realistically, some of those people will just give up and go away. Worse, the folks who are least comfortable with the new rule are in many cases the newest and most enthusiastic members; given that retention is a long-term challenge for the Society, anything exacerbating that is, IMO, a grave mistake.

And the hell of it is, I don't think any of it is necessary. Fundamentally, the problem here is micro-management. We've swung from "All Events Everywhere Must be Fully Masked" to "No Events Anywhere are Allowed to be Fully Masked". (Yes, yes -- it is possible to get exemptions from the SocSen, but let's get real: very few local autocrats are going to even dare to send that email. The broad perception is that you've forbidden it, and that's that.)

Putting it bluntly, that sort of rigid rule only makes sense in a world where there is broad consensus about the problem -- and we don't live in that world. On the one hand, we have people claiming that the pandemic is over and everyone should just go back to normal; OTOH, we have the reality that hundreds of people a day are being killed by COVID, vastly more are being crippled by it, and lots of folks are extremely worried. I know too many SCAdians who have had their lives destroyed by Long COVID, and many of my friends are terrified by this rule change, despairing of what it says about the SCA.

A lot of people are making entirely reasonable risk-analysis decisions that, for them, the new SCA rule is irresponsible. And indeed, it is out of line with much of the rest of geekdom -- most of the other activities I participate in (ranging from dance gatherings to SF/F conventions) are nowhere near this casual about masking yet, so we look even more irresponsible.

And no, it isn't enough to say, "if you are worried, wear a mask yourself". The science is crystal-clear here: having everyone masked is far more effective at preventing the spread of COVID than just doing so yourself. The rule as it stands comes across to many people as a statement that the SCA as an organization does not care whether you live or die -- and moreover, is actively preventing you from being safe, even if the local branch wants to be.

To address this, I propose a small tweak to the rules. We need an additional codicil, saying basically:

* Specific events may require more stringent masking and/or proof of vaccination. Any event with such rules must state them clearly in all event announcements and publicity.

I'm sure that people will fiddle, catastrophize and wordsmith this to death, but really -- that's all it needs to say. By allowing events to have stronger rules, we provide for variations in local culture, as well as the different nuances of, eg, indoor vs. outdoor events.

Different areas will make very different decisions about how to handle this, based on real-world culture as much as SCA. Some places will take a purely laissez-faire attitude, along the lines of the new rules. Other areas (likely including this one) will tend to require masks for indoor activities for the time being. Some will likely split the difference, experimenting with both styles and seeing what folks prefer. That's fine: our cultures are different, and the problem here arises solely because of a bad habit that tries to squash those differences out of existence with rigid universal rules.

I urge you to seriously consider this straightforward amendment to the policy. Allow local branches some latitude to see what works for them. It isn't that hard, it would largely defuse this crisis quickly, and it would better allow the SCA to conform to the differences in real-world culture that are the reality we need to deal with.

In Service,
Justin du Coeur, OL OP
Chatelaine, Barony of Carolingia, East

Star Trek has, as a whole, gotten a bit stuck. Much though I'm enjoying Discovery (in the middle of the second season so far), it's conspicuous that since we got to the end of ST:TNG with the movie Nemesis, most of what has happened has been prequel. The next major thing to happen in that universe was the time-loop that led to the reboot movies. (Which, yes, are canonical with Next Generation: they just take place in an alternate timeline, looping back to an alternate Kirk et al.)

The series Picard, which has run two seasons on Paramount+, is the biggest exception to date. They start more or less in "real time", thirty-some years after the beginning of ST:TNG. I just finished the second series.

tl;dr -- a somewhat weak first season is made up for by an absolutely brilliant second. Worth watching; if you're a Star Trek fan, especially of Next Gen, it's a must-watch. Hang on, and let's get into the details...

The two seasons are distinct novels, and each can be watched on its own. I recommend watching season one, but largely because it establishes the characters, about 2/3 of whom are new. But I should be clear: season two is the main reason why it's worth watching.

Each season is, in its way, a sequel to Star Trek canon. Season one is a very direct sequel to Nemesis, which was probably a mistake: it was a fairly bad movie, and wasn't a great basis for a series.

Around 20 years after the events of Nemesis, things aren't entirely ideal in the Federation. The Romulans, left homeless refugees in the wake of that story, are largely distrusted and benighted outcasts. (Not entirely without reason: they're still Romulans, still prone to paranoia and intrigue. But they're by no means unthinking evil.) Picard is retired, and increasingly viewed by the establishment as a probably-well-meaning but naive old man. And after the events of that movie, true artificial intelligence has been firmly outlawed, for reasons that seem a bit strange and get explored over the course of the story. In general, the Federation has gotten a little inward-looking and paranoid.

Season one is, fundamentally, all about Commander Data. (Who is, yes, dead as of the movie.) He has left a legacy behind, and this is the story of it blossoming. The concept is lovely and inspiring.

Unfortunately, the writing is -- well, let's just say Not Good. The plot is ridiculously complex and a bit shaky, involving a couple of different women who are connected to Data, Romulan scheming, a left-behind Borg cube, and of course (this is Star Trek after all) a Vast Alien Intelligence. It's a fairly fun ride, and the acting and direction aren't bad, but the plot is a mess. I don't regret watching it, but if Season one was all there was, I wouldn't be recommending it.

Fortunately, then comes Season two. This starts a year or two later -- as I said, they are separate novels. All of our characters have had a lot of Life in the intervening time, including two failed romances among our six protagonists.

(Worth noting for some of my friends: one of those was between Seven of Nine and Raffi, one of our new characters: one of the rare lesbian romances in Star Trek canon, and it colors much of Season two. The chemistry between them is delightful.)

And then there is a sudden Borg incursion, and things get Very, Very Weird.

It's hard to say much without spoilers (and I don't want to spoil this), but Season two is classic Star Trek at its best, a story of alternate timelines, time-travel, and trying to preserve the future we know. If Season one was a sequel to Nemesis, Season two is a sequel to the much more fun First Contact. (As well as Assignment: Earth, for those who remember TOS.) Suffice it to say, much of the season takes place in the year 2024, as our heroes fight desperately to prevent the Darkest Timeline.

And it is a far more personal story than Season one. This is a tale of Jean-Luc Picard wrestling with his greatest demons: the Borg Queen, Q, his own fear of personal intimacy, and the family history that led to all of this.

Yes, I did casually toss out Q. This is the final Q story, the one that was alluded to in the final episode of Next Generation. I won't claim that it entirely makes sense, but it wouldn't be a Q story if it did, and emotionally it works quite nicely. Broadly speaking, the plot mostly makes sense, which is about the most one can usually ask of a time-travel story. (There's a pretty clear paradox involved, but handwave-handwave-Q.)

Fundamentally, Season two is the story of three old men -- all facing their mortality, trying to come to grips with their past sins, and figuring out their legacy. Each handles it differently, and the contrast is subtle and well-handled.

Both seasons are chock-a-block with cameos by familiar faces. Many of them are pretty gratuitous (eg, Riker and Troy in Season one), but suffice it to say that, Data's death aside, Brent Spiner is a constant presence in both seasons. And Seven is a core character -- frankly, she's more interesting and important here than she ever has been before, and most seriously kicks butt. But S2 uses its guests more wisely, with Guinan as a significant character, and Alexander Siddig in a magnificently bait-and-switch appearance. (Plus a glorious walk-on in the final episode that explains so much, in a deeply Wrong way.)

I'll be honest: I hope there isn't another season of Picard. There could be (there is room for more stories about him)(edited: and I learned today that yes -- there is definitely one more season coming), but this one is all closure, all the time, and it's a fine way to finish his story. IMO it's one of the best overall seasons of Star Trek to date, and more than makes up for the weak first season. If you care about the universe as a whole, and especially if you enjoyed Next Gen, it's a worthwhile finale.

(Edited to fix my goof from last night, mixing up Nemesis with Insurrection.)

This week's highlight was one of our occasional outings to the American Repertory Theater (ART). As usual, we were seeing a show in previews -- this month's selection is Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. Let's talk about it.

tl;dr -- a brilliant reminder of a past but very familiar time. See it.

Twilight was written in the wake of the Rodney King beating, and the ensuing riots, and is entirely about them. So there is a big content warning here: this is a story very much about violence, both the police and mob sorts, and the results of all of that. There is no violence on-stage per se, but the relevant films are shown on-screen during the show.

(For those who weren't around at the time: Rodney King was essentially the George Floyd of the 90's, and it is sad how strongly 2020 echoed 1992. It was the first instance of racist police brutality being captured on home video and widely broadcast around the country, and hit the US hard. The most conspicuous difference between then and now was that the officers back then were acquitted, and Los Angeles erupted in a riot of epic proportions. It was a bad time all around.)

This show is more or less a revival. In late '92, Anna Deavere Smith conducted hundreds of interviews of people in and around these events -- everybody from King's relatives and the cops involved to rioters to bystanders. She wove those interviews into what is the closest thing the stage has to a documentary, composed entirely of quotes from those interviews.

The original production in '93 was a one-woman show, with her playing all the parts, and I have no doubt that it was remarkable. This revival has a diverse cast of five actors, and I suspect is better for it: the choices of which actors play which roles echo strongly in the story, because this is so very much a story of society and race. It was not only a tale of white cops beating up a black motorist -- the Latino community also got sucked into the riots, and the Korean community found themselves feeling victimized, trapped in the middle of all these forces, with many of their local shops under siege.

All of those voices are represented, and the show wisely doesn't pass any easy or pat judgements. Almost everyone comes across as at least somewhat sympathetic, getting to tell the story from their own point of view. (With the extremely notable exception of LA Police Chief Darryl Gates, who comes across as the very slimiest sort of politician. And the cluelessness and self-centeredness of a couple of the white bystanders is sometimes cringe-inducing, and at times horribly hilarious.)

Those moments of humor help the story avoid being too bleak, an important contrast to some other accounts that are just heart-breaking. The tone intentionally varies, and there are some fascinating experiments with the setting -- for example, placing several of the characters in an entirely fictional dinner party. (Still continuing to be scripted entirely in their quotes -- just contrasting them as back-and-forth debate over the table.)

This helps keep the whole thing a lot more interesting than your average documentary, as does the structure of the show, which follows theme more than strict chronology. Be prepared to learn a lot as you go, but also be prepared for some aspects to be referred to long before they get explained. For example, I had forgotten about Reginald Denny, whose assault is a significant subplot on several levels, speaking to American racism and the way all of this was perceived.

The production is generally brilliant -- excellent direction and absolutely stellar acting. Francis Jue particularly stands out, flipping between characters (many cross-gender) and accents fluidly, as does Elena Hurst, but all five actors are a delight. Wesley T. Jones plays most of the black rioters - but then does a delightful job as an utterly snide and self-righteous Charlton Heston, using this as an educational moment for why everyone should have a shotgun. Sets are intentionally stripped-down and simple, as are the costumes, to help a story that shifts viewpoints every couple of minutes. (And in some sections every few seconds.)

It is showing at the ART for several more weeks. I highly recommend it: despite being a couple of hours long it never drags, and it is remarkably absorbing -- human and real in a way you don't often see on stage. They only briefly call out to the events of 2020, but the show as a whole is a reminder of the way that the greatest tragedies quickly turn into "just history" unless we internalize them and act on them. It's a lesson worth taking in.

This morning's email included the latest entry from the Exploding Giraffe blog. (Which is co-authored by Paper Girls author Brian K. Vaughn -- it's quite a bit of fun, and interspersed with his current very-NSFW serialized graphic novel Spectators.)

This entry included some of the results from the "Time Capsule" contest in the Paper Girls letters page, where in 2016 they asked people to predict some things about 2019. It also included a followup: much the same poll, asking about the world of 2025.

I could have responded with a straight face, but where's the fun in that? Being rather punchy this morning, I wound up free-associating the following in the comments section, and it's worth preserving here:

1) Who will be President of the United States in 2025?

Hansen Wong, an artificial intelligence accidentally created when someone typed "Ideal President of the US" into Midjourney AI in mid-2023 and (as usual) turns out to be close enough to correct to be usable. He is a generally good President, aside from the random attack on Antarctica in March '25. (Programmers are still trying to figure out what inputs led to that; current best theory is that it has to do with building a strategic penguin reserve.)

2) Will artificial intelligence be a danger to humanity by 2025?

We wouldn't dream of referring to our benevolent President as a "danger".

3) Who will play James Bond in 2025?

23 year old Fire Ross was an unknown until Barbara Broccoli, desperate to make the Bond franchise relevant beyond an aging audience and seeing the way things were going, commissioned a bespoke analytical engine to do the casting. Signs so far are good for the young black actress -- as of this writing, it is the first time in many years that the under-30 crowd appears to care about Bond.

4) Will the city of Cleveland have won any (additional) major sports championships by 2025?

No, but in a surprise upset they did come in second in the '24 Pairs Figure Skateboarding Championship, and hopes are high for the '26 Olympics.

5) Which nation or group will pose the greatest security threat to the world in 2025?

"Threat" is very much in the eye of the beholder. But much of the world is worried about what President Wong plans to do with all those penguins.

6) Will superhero movies still dominate Hollywood in 2025?

Yes, but all the attention on the upcoming Bond film is shifting the balance back to "spy" movies. That said, given the rumors of Bond's new flying car and gadget-filled bangle bracelet (sparking lawsuit threats from Marvel about IP theft from their planned Nicole Fury film), many observers point out that the lines have become pretty blurry.

7) Which will be more valuable in 2025, Apple or Google?

Apple, mostly due to anticipation of the recently announced iBall -- an artificially intelligent contact lens that reminds you of all the current gossip about the person you are currently talking to.

8) What company, if any, will be more valuable than either of those companies by 2025?

FlickTrack, which takes the world by storm with AI-generated five-second memes, each one custom-generated based on your social media feeds. That has become extraordinarily popular very quickly, and rumors have it that the iBall will feature a FlickTrack plugin that augments reality with scenes that appear to be happening right in front of you in reality.

(FlickTrack assures everyone that it is not being used to program people with propaganda from the Chinese government.)

9) Will climate change have significantly impacted your country by 2025?

This was originally a concern, but after the completion of the Dome, America has gone back to placidly thinking of it as Someone Else's Problem.

10) Which beloved celebrity will no longer be with us by 2025?

Max Headroom, declared obsolete on September 1 2024.

11) Will marijuana be largely legalized throughout most of the U.S. by 2025?

Legalized and broadly mandated, on the grounds that Americans had been getting dangerously harsh, and getting them to "mellow out" would be necessary for human survival.

12) What disease will we have a cure for by 2025?

Chicken McNuggets, which were finally recognized as the sinister fungal life form they had always been, and were then hunted down and exterminated. The average American's lifespan immediately increased by approximately five months.

13) What food will be the new “superfood” by 2025?

P'eng. Given the sudden abundance of penguins, they (of course) become a trendy foodstuff for the excessively elite until President Wong declares them off-limits for consumption. (No one yet knows why.) So an enterprising new startup produces a vat-grown but surprisingly tasty fake penguin meat, genetically engineered to be full of protein and antioxidants. It is already getting quite popular, and a major iBall-based ad campaign (which will show ads for P'eng on all billboards you pass by) is planned for October.

14) What current technology will be completely obsolete by 2025?

Cell phones aren't obsolete yet. But predictions are that everyone under 40 will be using iBalls by late next year, so the writing is on the wall.

15) Will there still be print newspapers in 2025?

Not in the traditional form; ecological concerns have made them rather un-cool. But there is an "artisanal news" movement forming that aims to bring them back, in the form of a new iBall plugin that will let you read the current news, formatted to look like a newspaper, whenever you hold a blank off-white sheet up in front of your eyes.

[ETA: BKV liked it! Squee!]

The movie How to Talk to Girls at Parties came out about five years ago -- it was mentioned by the annual Movie Year in Review panel at Arisia, and I've been on the lookout for it ever since. It's now available on HBO Max, so we watched it for movie night.

tl;dr: weird as hell, full of attitude, not for everyone but I liked it.

The movie is loosely based on the Neil Gaiman story of the same name, about a trio of guys who wind up at the wrong party, full of aliens, and have a strange night of it. The original is mystical and odd, very Gaiman, but a bit too abstruse to really grab me deeply.

This adaptation is chock-full of attitude. It is set in the punk scene of 1977 Croydon, and doesn't let you forget that for a second. (It includes Nicole Kidman chewing scenery as a slightly over-the-hill punk queen bee who owns the local scene.) The music, style, and language are very much of that time: be prepared for a period piece, but a loud one.

Less obviously, the style of the movie is that of a 1977 science fiction movie -- from the cinematography to the sheer goofball weirdness, this is a love letter to the strange movies of that time, and it is beautifully executed. Even the SFX are intentionally by no means modern.

This is very much a love story, not just an alien encounter, and the adventure goes both ways: the alien girl exploring Croydon, and the colonies going after her in this strange new world. It's a story of a collection of hidebound dying civilizations (all bizarre, but each distinctive in subtle ways) coming face to face with a culture of principled rule-breaking.

No, it's not the most brilliant thing I've ever seen, but it's surprisingly good in its own way -- better than the original story IMO. If you're interested in something deeply, unapologetically strange, celebrating both the SF movies and punk music of the 70s, it's worth checking out.

When last we left our hero, he had finally found out that his foot was, yes, broken, but Pennsic was still on the cards. Picking up from there...

So -- yeah, Pennsic. It happened, and it didn't suck.

The biggest challenge was that my foot had mostly stopped hurting a few days before I left for the War. That sounds lovely, but it put me squarely in the danger zone. As the podiatrist explained to me, when the foot stops hurting, that's when you are most likely to say, "Great!", start moving normally, and break it even worse.

So this was a War of forcing myself to take it easy -- easier than I've done since something like Pennsic 15. Avoiding the dance tent like the plague, because the temptation would be horribly strong. Walking only about five miles a day. (Which is maybe half my usual, and for the first time ever I actually made non-trivial use of the bus system.) Generally not being responsible for much.

It was slightly boring, but remarkably relaxing, and there is much to muse on there. (There is another post brewing, about my subsequent realization that I may be a wee bit overstretched.)

Anyway, herein ensues my traditional stream-of-consciousness wanderings about last week. This will be long, covering lots of topics, but hopefully it's a bit interesting.

By my best guess, it's been eight years since I was last at Pennsic. That isn't for any dramatically good reason. Mostly, it's half that traveling on my own isn't as much fun (to put it mildly, Pennsic isn't Kate's bag), and half that I acquired a CPAP in 2014, and camping with the damned thing sounded like too much effort.

That latter excuse got firmly torpedoed by the release of the first really great CPAP battery I've ever seen. None of this farting around with heavy deep-cycle marine batteries: this thing is only four pounds, with a convenient carrying handle, and provides about five full nights of power.

It achieves this by specialization. It is for CPAPs, and nothing else. It comes with direct DC power cables for a bunch of major CPAP models, and powers them very efficiently -- each one at the correct voltage. And it recharges ferociously fast: as far as I can tell, the thing draws up to 24 amps if you'll give it that, so it recharges faster than my cell phone.

I haven't actually pushed it to five nights, because I haven't had to. But after three, it claims to be at about 50% and still going strong.

Caveat: it's persnickety, and you have to be careful. Turn down the power usage on the CPAP (turn off humidifier and such), and turn the battery off when you're not using it. But used properly, it's a marvel, and way easier than I was expecting.

The War itself has changed less than I had expected in eight years. Lots of little things have changed or moved, but mostly everything was where I expected.

The biggest change was to Lochleven's encampment. We've been in E18 -- nearly the "lower right" corner of Pennsic -- since time immemorial. (See map.) But we've talked about moving for a long time (E18 is a fun location, but it's muddy and somewhat noisy), and everyone decided that this was the year for an experiment.

So we moved to B03 -- the extreme "upper left" corner of Pennsic. (Get to Bannockburn, at the foot of Mount Eislinn, turn left, and go all the way to the end: we were the second-to-last encampment.) From our old site to the new is somewhere between one and two miles by road.

I have mixed feelings about it. The downside is that it's a much less exciting neighborhood, and considerably further from most of the folks I hang out with. And the quiet is just plain weird -- for me, going to sleep to the sound of distant drums from the Bog is part of the Pennsic experience.

OTOH, it's pretty convenient for the fighters, fencers and archers, who make up a substantial fraction of Lochleven. It's uphill (so far less muddy), has lots of high tree canopy that folks can camp under, and the Oversized Parking for my big rental van couldn't be more convenient.

So we'll see what we choose to do going forward. I expect a spirited discussion at Lochleven's winter household meeting.

Weather was pretty average. The annual Act of God -- a serious drownpour this time -- happened on middle Friday, so when I arrived on Saturday things were pretty soggy, and the air was soupy for the next several days. (Although not horribly hot, with highs in the 80s.) But things cleared midweek and steadily improved from there on, so the last several days were gorgeous: dry, clear and cool.

I got to see lots of folks, which is half the fun of the War. This included several people who I've previously only talked to via the Known World Discord (which I've been hanging out on a lot this year), as well as a bunch of friends I haven't seen in years. Most folks were doing well, but some not -- it was sobering to talk to at least one good friend whose life has been savaged by Long Covid, and has had a pretty crappy year as a result.

Covid was, of course, a recurring theme. While Pennsic had reasonable requirements (vaxx or test in order to enter; if you get sick, please leave immediately), Omicron laughs at such things, so there was a fair amount going around. One family from Lochleven had to leave early in War Week because of a positive test (although given the timing, I suspect they may have caught it before arriving); a couple of others tested positive after getting home.

So while I'm not panicked about it (Pennsic is mostly outdoors, and I wasn't interacting much face-to-face with those folks), I've spent this week mostly isolating and testing, to be on the safe side. Knock on wood, I still feel fine; assuming I still test positive tomorrow, I will cautiously figure that I escaped.

I sat through East Kingdom Court (of course -- this is me), and it was unusually good. Their Majesties have every bit as much style as I've been led to believe, and clearly believe that putting on a great show is part of the job, so Court was more fun than usual. (Any 3+ hour Court that can be described as "fun" is doing something right.)

Court was actually the other thing that tipped the scales and got me to attend the War: I knew that Thyra was getting her Pelican, and didn't want to miss that. (Really, pretty much everyone except her knew about it. The fact that they double-whammied her again helped make that possible -- as far as she knew, everyone was there for her husband's MoD.)

It was also lovely to see Emine (one of the friends I've made on Discord) get her AoA, and I wound up sitting with Hu Zhen and Matthias (also friends from there), so it made for an overall excellent experience.

There were other entertainments as well, of course. I did a modest number of classes -- highlights included a great survey of period cookbooks available in English, and a class on SCA philosophy taught via selections from Silverwing's Laws. I sat in on the bid meeting for the 2023 Known World Music and Dance Symposium. (June 29 - July 2 in Charlottesville, assuming it clears all the bureaucratic hurdles: I'm looking forward to it.) And I caught most of the Wolgemut Returns to Pennsic concert, which was every bit as much of a blast as I would expect: they always give great show, and it left me completely jazzed.

This was the year of The Crazy Plan, which I've been hypothesizing for years now.

Given:

Me feeling slightly guilty about how much vacation I'm taking this summer;
The sometimes difficulty of finding a place to recharge the CPAP;
The desire to occasionally chill out in A/C and get a really good shower;

The plan was to rent a hotel room -- but not one to sleep in. After all, night time bardic circles are at least half the fun of Pennsic. No, the idea here was to head over to the hotel every couple of days, get that good shower, recharge everything and check my email.

On the one hand, that worked. OTOH, it wasn't really worth it. It cost a fair bundle even by my standards, and none of it was really necessary. Checking in at work was worthwhile, but could have been done by phone. The CPAP could probably be charged with an adequate solar array. And the in-camp shower is sufficient, if not luxurious. So I think that next year, I won't bother.

That said, getting a hotel room for the night on the way each direction was totally worthwhile, and helped make for a safer drive. And points to HGI, on the way home: they upgraded me to a King Suite with a mammoth jacuzzi tub, which was so the right thing after a morning of striking camp and seven hours on the road. They continue to be my hotel chain of choice.

Also worth noting: after many years of renting from Enterprise, this year entailed a switch to, of all things, U-Haul. Enterprise was unwilling to guarantee me a van with cruise control, and I was no way risking that drive on a still-slightly-broken foot without it. So we looked around, found that U-Haul does guarantee it, and you can do long-term round-trip rentals if you call. And they gave me a significantly better rate than Enterprise, to boot. ($900 for 11 days, including 1500 miles, tax, and the CDW -- not bad at all.) So we have a new winner there.

A great aspect that hadn't occurred to me was the "kids". Lochleven's camp has always been full of children underfoot, and when last I saw them they were mostly teenagers.

That was eight years ago.

Now, they're mostly 20-somethings, in college or graduated, and several of them came to Pennsic with their SOs. It was a blast getting to hang out with them.

Probably the biggest highlight of the War was the last night, which was absolutely Classic Lochleven. Everything "downtown" was pretty much shut down, so after dinner we lit a fire and started burning All The Wood.

We actually hadn't overbought this year, and went through the official firewood pretty quickly. So Becky started foraging in the wood we were camped under, finding rotten deadwood and tossing it on. This wasn't always easy, given that some of that deadwood was eight feet long, but she persevered, slowly feeding it in and building up an absolute lake of embers.

So we all sat around, roasting gigantic marshmallows. (Which was great in and of itself -- there's an art to toasting it just right, peeling off and eating the outer browned layer, and then repeating with the innards.) And things quickly turned to song.

Most of the camp gradually drifted to bed, but Becky, the "kids" and I kept going for a full six hours, until after 1am -- singing, talking, and generally having a grand time.

I'd forgotten how much I love that campfire, and it was delightful getting to share it with the next generation: a perfect way to end Pennsic.

So -- yeah, it was pretty great. It was a relaxing time, and there were lots of other highlights. (Watching friends in various battles, especially the Heroic Rapier Champs. Turkish coffee from Kafa Merhaba, and many coffee slushies from Odyssey. Helping Crook'd Cat de-mud the bricks from the oven, after it was disassembled. Walking -- ever-so-slowly -- around the lake on Friday.)

I'm planning on returning next year, when I expect it to be a lot more crowded. (Only about 8k on site this year; I suspect it'll be back to a full 12k or more for Pennsic 50.) With any luck I'll be in better health, and being camped in the middle of nowhere won't be a problem. The big question is whether I bite the bullet and go for more of it -- one big change is that a lot more interesting stuff happens Peace Week these days, so I may want to do more than War Week...

As of this morning, before watching the last episode of Season 3, I was hoping to be able to do an end-of-series full review of Umbrella Academy. I can't really do so. Seasons 1 and 2 end with truly catastrophic WTF cliffhangers that leave no doubt that there has to be another season. That's not quite true here: they could end the series with Season 3, but I really hope Netflix is smart enough to give it one more.

So I'll keep this review brief. The tl;dr is that it's a strong series, that I like more with each passing season. I recommend watching it, with the understanding that it really needs one more time to finish the story.

Summarizing where we are:

The Umbrella Academy is the story of seven "siblings", born of different mothers spontaneously and suddenly in 1989 and raised by the harsh genius billionaire Reginald Hargreeves. Each has a distinct superpower, ranging from Diego's impossible knife-throwing to Allison's ability to control people to Number Five's teleportation.

I'm not even going to bother summarizing the plots of the first three seasons. Suffice it to say, this story is consistently timey-wimey (there is So Much Time Travel), and each season has an overall arc of "We know that the end of the world is coming, we know when it is coming, we know it's kind of our own fault, but we don't know exactly what's going on or how to prevent it." This doesn't get as reductive or repetitive as that sounds, though, because really, this isn't primarily about the plot -- it's about the dynamics of this extremely strange and broken family, and each of them slowly growing up.

The tone is that of a family dramedy with occasional superheroish fights and special effects. It rarely goes into Deep Dark Pathos, but each of our protagonists is fairly messed up in their own way.

Season 1 (which was several years ago) has a moderate case of Netflix Disease -- its ten-episode run sagged in the middle, and felt about three episodes too long. The pacing improved markedly with Season 2 (which takes place in 1963, and has a lot more social consciousness), and Season 3 is really quite tight and bingeable IMO.

The series is based on a comic book; suffice it to say, the show is much better than the source material, both in terms of interesting characters and coherence of story. While the show is extremely weird, and nobody should go in expecting hard science fiction, it has its own internal logic, and works if you just roll with it.

Diversity note: the first-billed actor is Elliot Page, and while it's very much an ensemble show he is always a little bit first among equals. He transitioned in mid-series, and his character follows that arc: the character who begins as Vanya comes out as gay in Season 2, and transitions to Victor in Season 3. This is handled reasonably respectfully: it's not brushed off, but it isn't handled as some sort of woo-woo super-nonsense, nor does it turn into big melodrama. Victor just finally figures out who he is, comes out to the family, there's a mild amount of confusion for a little while, but broadly speaking everybody accepts that, as their lives go, this barely even begins to count as unusual, so they get past it.

Overall, it's a solidly good story so far, and one that has been improving season by season -- I started out mostly liking it, but by now I'm deeply invested and really care about these characters, fucked up though they are, which is always a sign of a good show. The only reason I have to hold back from a whole-hearted recommendation is that the tale isn't quite done yet: the end of Season 3 isn't a cliffhanger per se, but it's not a satisfying resolution either. With that caveat, I recommend checking it out, and joining me in hoping they finish it properly.

Call for ideas!

I'm once again in charge of the Gaming Programming Track at next year's Arisia. For now, the main job is to come up with panel ideas, so we can figure out what we want to do in that track. I already have a fair-sized database of ideas (this being me, and having done this before), but I don't know everything, and it's been a few years.

So -- what would you find interesting in a gaming panel? This is pure brainstorming, and the definition of "gaming" is broad, encompassing board games, video games, LARP, tabletop RPG, VR and more.

(To be clear: this is different from the Arisia Game Room. I have nothing to do with what games will be played at Arisia; I'm in charge of what we're going to talk about.)

I absolutely will not use all ideas -- I need to boil this down to a representative and interesting sampling -- but I promise to write all of them down and think about them seriously.

The floor is open -- spread the word!

When last we saw our hero, he had attended ESCape and come home with a slightly injured foot. Picking up our story from there...

The symptoms have been changing over the past couple of weeks. The original pain has largely gone away, but my right foot has gotten yet a bit more swollen, and walking is a real problem, because I can't wear a normal shoe without it getting kind of painful.

So, I had a video meeting with a podiatrist this evening, which was very much a "good news / bad news" sort of thing.

I described the timeline and the symptoms. She examined the x-ray very, very carefully, and pointed out where the stress fracture is -- just barely visible, but a slightly light spot where she expected it to be. So yeah, the injury was worse than we originally thought.

The probably-good news is that, from the description of the current pain, she thinks (fingers crossed) that it is probably healing more or less on schedule, and if I haven't made things worse I can probably do Pennsic so long as I'm a bit careful. (When I get a little time, I need to go get a fresh x-ray, to confirm that it's healing as expected.)

The current problem is apparently the swelling itself -- as she described it, once a foot is swollen, it tends to want to stay swollen. So, rather counter-intuitively, the way to deal with the painfully puffy foot is compression socks -- applied periodically, for gradually increasingly periods, to basically squish my foot back into shape. (Plus some special shoes, which she specifically recommends for stress fractures.)

It's going to be touch-and-go, and I'm going to need to not walk my usual ten miles a day at Pennsic. But hopefully everything will improve on schedule, and I'll be able to make it as planned...

An actual diary entry!

I appear to have failed to talk about Pinewoods last year: let's not make the same mistake. So...

One of the few bright spots of the pandemic for me was that I fell in with a new circle of folks on Discord (a few of whom are here). It's a somewhat younger group than myself, full of energy, and a lot of them are into dance. This was entirely a coincidence, not why I gravitated towards them, but it's always nice to discover some kindred spirits.

In particular, a lot of them are into Scottish Country Dance (SCD), and last June many of them were buzzing with excitement about "Pinewoods", so I eventually started asking questions about what the heck that is.

I was slightly chagrined to realize that this was clearly My Kind of Thing, and I'd never heard of it before. Pinewoods is a camp down in Plymouth, not terribly far from here, focused on dance and music. It's been around for about a century, running various sessions every summer.

There's a lot of interesting stuff on their schedule (including, note, an Early Music Week), but what drew me in was ESCape, an annual week co-produced by the local English Country, Scottish Country, and Contra communities. Classes every day; dances every evening, switching off sets of the three dance styles.

So I went to last year's session, and it was the highlight of my year. The timing was perfect, during the lull when the pandemic seemed to be dying down, just before Delta ruined everyone's day. I deepened the friendships I had made online, had a blast dancing for a week, and just generally it was a literal breath of fresh air.

So this year, returning to ESCape was my highest vacation priority. I'm planning on Pennsic, but I was not going to miss ESCape, which ran July 4th week.

Things were more challenging this year, with Omicron raging in Massachusetts, so the COVID protocols were ferociously strict. (All the moreso because an earlier Pinewoods session had to be cancelled due to an outbreak among the staff.) You not only had to be fully vaccinated: you were also strongly requested to get a PCR test the weekend before, and had to show a fresh antigen test to get in the door; additional antigen tests were required each evening before dinner. Campers were assigned dinner tables for the first couple of days (where possible with your housemates, cabinmates, or travel companions), to reduce possible spread. Masks were required indoors (which fortunately there isn't a lot of at Pinewoods), and strongly encouraged while dancing.

All of that was a bit of a pain in the ass, but seems to have mostly worked: only one or two new cases were reported during ESCape. (I'm not sure whether more cases arose afterwards -- it's tricky to tease this stuff out.)

That put a bit of a damper on things, but the event was still great. I've been attending Scottish Country practices semi-regularly for the past few months, but still availed myself of the opportunity to learn more and do more of the dances. There was lots of fun hanging out, playing games (cross-country bocce is always a hoot), and generally socializing and partying in the evenings. (I finally got to try Malort, and am now starting to puzzle out how to use it in cocktails.)

In the new-and-different category, I got my first lesson in change ringing! Kat (one of my close friends from Discord) has been teaching that informally in recent years; this time, they did sessions each morning. The high concept here is specifically "ringing on bodies" -- using hand bells instead of big church bells, one bell per person. The real innovation is that Kat and their friends are experimenting with the relationship between change ringing and dance. It turns out that the major "figures" in change ringing correspond rather well to heys and do-si-dos, so the ringing patterns can be transliterated as dances. So we learned how to do that, and a bunch of us did a performance at Thursday's Chocolate Party.

The Chocolate Party is an ESCape tradition. Folks bring chocolate. Lots of chocolate. Sooooo much chocolate, pretty much whatever you find interesting. A bunch of us got together, broke the bars down into pieces, put everything on plates, separated it into "with nuts" and "without nuts" tables, and let the hordes descend. It's a delightful social, and this year was circus-themed, with Kat providing a monumentally enormous parachute that we tied to trees as a quasi-big-top, and getting to be the tallest person in the crowd with their stilts.

There are also after-parties each evening, with different themes. Wednesday's Pub Night is my personal favorite: an evening of booze (for those who want to partake) and song, focused on stuff with choruses that everyone can join in on. It's basically a folk-ish bardic circle, with lots of songs I know and some I'm still learning. (High priority next year: print out a fresh copy of my own songbook, and bring it along.)

The only downside was that I seem to have slightly injured my foot on Wednesday, which prevented me from doing any dancing on Thursday, and I'm still limping a bit. Nothing too serious -- I did get an x-ray, and nothing's broken, just some sort of strain. The upshot seems to be that my days of dancing with no padding whatsoever probably need to be over: I need to learn how to use shoes with some cushioning and arch support.

So -- not as fabulous as I might have wished, but still a delightful time, and some much-needed social. I definitely plan on going again next year.

I finished watching Centaurworld (on Netflix) the other week -- a quick review, before I forget. I'm going to talk a bit about the plot, but try to avoid major spoilers.

tl;dr: fun, mostly silly, musical, animated, with a bit more depth and darkness than you might expect.

Centaurworld opens on a Rider on a Horse (both are central characters to the story, but neither is ever named beyond that): she is riding though a blasted landscape, on a mission to deliver an ancient artifact. They are attacked by the vicious Minotaurs who have been conquering and destroying everything in the human realm, and fight them off -- while singing, because this show is not only animated but very much a musical.

But things go wrong: our heroine falls off a cliff, and wakes up in the strange land of Centaurworld, a weird, gumdrop-colored fantasy land of magic, populated by a wild variety of talking plants and animals, but mostly half-animal, half-human species of centaurs. She falls in with the herd of Wammawink, a bunch of misfits and outcasts who mostly just want to stay safely on their own and eat bubblecakes, but who somewhat reluctantly agree to help her find her way back home.

Yes, this is clearly aimed at six-year-olds from that initial premise. Suffice it to say, it's not: it's wittier, darker and more satirical than it looks like at first glance, but it takes a few episodes to start hitting its stride. It does lean a bit light -- I'd say that it's got a generally young-adult vibe, which may or may not be to your taste. Overall, I liked it.

The story is complete in two short seasons; episodes are roughly half-hour except for the more-than-double-length conclusion. The genre is, very broadly speaking, high fantasy, with most of the tropes you would expect.

Season one is mainly focused on our heroine trying to get back to the human realm and rejoin the war that she was in the middle of fighting, and ends with the inevitable revelation of the high-fantasy villain who is behind everything. Season two is a bit darker, as the war approaches Centaurworld itself, and the struggle of trying to raise an army in this chaotic and strange land.

Through all of that, though, this is primarily social satire, and the many species and lands of Centaurworld represent a wide variety of satirical targets. For example, the Coldtaurs, living in their extremely cold land, who couldn't be bothered to move somewhere warmer but are willing to consider supporting the enemy on the theory that maybe he'll give them some warmth somehow? Or the Birdtaurs -- up in the clouds, seeing everything, rooting for our heroes (and building rival fandoms around each of them), sending Tweets to each other, but unwilling to actually get involved in the fight. Subtle it ain't, but it's well-observed, timely, sometimes rather biting satire.

The core characters are, similarly, very broad, including the smotheringly-motherly Wammawink; Glendale, the kleptomaniac with an infinitely large bag of holding in her tummy; self-absorbed and preening Zulius; Ched, source of all negativity; and sweet, dim-witted, infinitely optimistic Durpleton. Everyone has somewhat more depth than they look like at first glance (Glendale, in particular, has a glorious twist in Season 2), but our heroine is the only member of the herd who is a fully-realized character.

The music is fine, and entertainingly diagetic: our heroine is frequently exasperated by everyone's tendency to break out in song, and often a little horrified when she winds up having to do so herself. There's nothing anywhere near as toe-tappingly brilliant as the music of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (IMO the all-time best musical TV series), but it's well-executed and sets the tone nicely.

Summary: solidly good YA fantasy. Not on my "You must all go watch this!" list, but a fun palate cleanser with some things to say. Worth giving a few episodes to see if you like the style -- beyond that, just keep in mind that there is a more coherent, somewhat more serious story here than it appears at first glance, and it gets steadily less episodic and more arc-based as it goes.

Kate is out of town visiting her family and I had an evening to kill, so I decided what the heck: time to mask up and go to an actual cinema. I took the opportunity to catch Doctor Strange before it leaves the big screen.

Summary: not bad, but not one of Marvel's standouts.

As so often with Marvel, the movie suffers from being a little over-stuffed. Most of these movies are adapting something that was a significant epic in the comics, often multiple -- for example, the upcoming Thor movie is clearly smooshing basically the entire Jason Aaron run into a single movie. But this one is built from something like five separate runs of various comics, ranging from relatively recent back to the mid-80s. Madness indeed.

It's not much of a spoiler to say that the movie has three main characters (all of whom show up in the first ten minutes or so): Stephen Strange, America Chavez, and Wanda Maximoff.

Each gets a character arc, of which Strange's is the least interesting -- basically, he learns to be slightly less of a self-absorbed asshole. (Which is a recurring theme with him.)

I'm delighted to see America show up on screen, but annoyed that this movie puts her into the "girl who must be protected" role. By the end we're starting to see the America we know and love, but it's disappointing that it takes the whole movie to get there. (In the comics, she is a badass pretty much from the outset.)

Really, though, Wanda is the most interesting character here. I can't get into details without major spoilers, but suffice it to say, this movie is a direct sequel to the Wandavision TV series, and IMO it's not worth watching this without seeing that first -- this is telling the rest of that story.

(ETA: it's probably also worth watching the What If animated series on Disney+ before this -- it's not essential the way that Wandavision is, but this movie ties into it in multiple ways.)

There is lots of sound and fury here, across multiple worlds, and all the fan service one could wish for, but some of it just annoyed me -- for example, they take one major multi-year Marvel crossover arc and use it almost as a throwaway, with none of the depth that made the corresponding comic interesting. (The same problem as with Civil War -- it isn't quite so much that it is awful in the movie, as that it could have been so much more interesting if they had taken the story more seriously and given it room to breathe. Here, it is downright gratuitous, pulling this story in solely because it is another "multiverse" epic.)

It's notable that the two Scarlet Witch storylines that are loosely adapted here are two of her most important stories, and they are woven together in a way that makes sense; that plays into why I found her story most interesting. (If not happy.)

Overall -- it's fine. It's not one of the actively bad Marvel movies: the story is decently coherent, it has some fine actors (including appearances by a couple of favorites), and it's an interesting yarn chock-full of special effects. If you like typical Marvel movies, you will probably enjoy it. But it's not going to be one of the cultural-landmark movies: it's neither that good, nor that important.

I just finished Undone, on Amazon Prime -- time for a quick review.

tl;dr -- time, mysticism, love, loss, and learning. Watch it.

The Guardian's review made the same point I have to: it is impossible not to compare and contrast Undone with season two of Russian Doll. Both are stories featuring deeply self-absorbed protagonists learning about their families via mystical time travel. But I agree with their conclusion: much though I love Russian Doll, Undone is the better story.

Our main character is Alma, who cares about the people around her, but not enough to pause, think, and exercise some caution. As the story starts, she is driving along, and sees her father by the road. Problem is, he's been dead for many years.

As it unfolds, he becomes her spirit guide as she learns about the shamanistic thread that runs through the family. She doesn't exactly have the discipline to be a serious mystic, but gradually learns that time is just a point of view -- and how to adjust that. Season one becomes the quest to change the past, so that her father never dies.

Then we get to season two, and things get complicated. (Yes, I'm deliberately echoing my Russian Doll review.)

Suffice it to say, where Russian Doll is two largely separate stories about the same character, Undone is a single, two-part novel. It is both much more mystical and much more coherent, with a very clear beginning, middle, and end, and for all its mysticism, it is very much a time-travel story.

It's also very much about the incompatibility of the modern world with mysticism: a repeating theme is people taking shamans as mentally ill, and explores both sides of that -- what things look like to a shaman who is experiencing the undescribeable, and what it looks like to those around them.

Also unusual -- Alma is half-Jewish, half-Mexican, and both sides of her family are absolutely central to the story. (A good chunk is subtitled from Spanish, and a bit from Yiddish, especially in season two.)

It's a powerful tale of learning about one's history and oneself, and growing up in the course of that. It doesn't have a simple happy ending, but it ends well and right.

Particularly worth noting: Undone is animated, but not in any standard way. Rather, it is rotoscoped, a technique that has always been rare -- it is shot live-action, and then animated over the film. (Traditionally this would be literally hand-painted over the projected film cels; I assume Undone is computer-animated, but the effect is much the same.) It's a brilliant choice, because it feels real most of the time, but can fluidly turn utterly strange mid-shot. It doesn't cut from the real to the mystical, it blends them, in a way that completely fits the subject.

The story comprises two fairly short seasons, and is worth a binge. It's not simple and it's not simply comforting, but is thoughtful and satisfying. Highly recommended.

Okay, I'm curious: does it drive anyone else nuts that each form of covid antigen test works differently? They all have the same components -- nasal swab, liquid, and test strip -- but each one's instructions operate in a different order, and it makes me a little nuts trying to remember how to use one or the other.

(This message brought to you by me trying out the BinaxNOW test for the first time today, and going "Wait -- I put the liquid on the card before I swab my nose?")

I just finished Season 2 of Russian Doll, on Netflix; it's worth talking about a bit.

Our protagonist is Nadia; Season 1 starts in the bathroom at her 36th birthday party. All her friends are there, as well as other folks -- it's a big uncontrolled party in a decidedly artsy bohemian part of NYC, so not a small close-knit group. She wanders out -- and gets killed.

She finds herself back in the bathroom, a bit freaked out. She leaves the party -- and gets killed.

Yes, it's a dark Groundhog Day scenario, but it leans weird and darkly funny, rather than horrific. It takes her a few tries to even get out of the building alive, but that's just the beginning of the loop, and the struggle to get to tomorrow.

Along the way, she meets Alan, who is almost her complete opposite. She is free-wheeling to an almost pathological degree -- she says what she thinks, and doesn't much care what people think of her -- whereas he is careful and controlled to the point of rather prissy. He is suffering from the same time loop, so the two of them bond over trying to get out of it.

(I should note: this story is not a romance. Nadia and Alan largely wind up friends supporting each other in a crisis, but are, to say the least, really not each others' type.)

The story does come to a resolution, and they do eventually see tomorrow. You can stop there -- Season one is a complete novel unto itself. But it's worth continuing on to Season two, which is when things get weird.

We pick up four years later -- Nadia's 40th birthday is coming up, and she has been visiting with her friend and quasi-aunt Ruthie, who is getting on in years and not entirely healthy. Nadia wanders down to the subway at Astor Place and steps onto subway car 6622, but instead of winding up crosstown, she finds herself in 1982, in the body of her mentally ill and extremely pregnant mother.

Season 2 is all trains and all time travel, all the time. It is not a story of being trapped in the past -- after all, Nadia can just find car 6622 again in order to return to 2022. But she decides that this is her opportunity to learn more about her family history -- mother Nora, grandmother Vera, and of course Ruthie -- and maybe figure out where the lost family fortune went, and how to get it back.

(Along the way, she tells Alan about it, leading to him being in East Berlin in 1968 in the body of his grandmother. There's an interesting story there as well, and the plots do meld by the end of the season, but this is mainly Nadia's story.)

Suffice it to say, the season looks like a treasure hunt, but is really a meditation on family, history, and mortality. It gets steadily stranger, until, towards the end, Nadia has kind of broken space-time, which is a bit of a problem and needs to be fixed.

This is about as far from hard science fiction as you can get -- do not go into this series expecting explanations. The story is moderately consistent, and follows some internal logic of its own, but the tone is more mystical than scientific, especially towards the end of Season 2, which gets downright 2001-esque. (But ends better than that did, IMO.)

It's solidly good stuff, and Nadia is a marvelous character: self-absorbed to a sometimes distressing degree, but generally good and sympathetic. She is neither the "must be careful to be inconspicuous" time-traveler trope, nor the "naif who doesn't understand what's happening" one -- she's smart and well-read, but generally doesn't give a fuck and isn't interested in conforming to 1982 expectations (or history in general).

So: recommended if and only if you can go with the flow and accept the story on its own strange terms. It's wryly funny, thought-provoking, and raises a lot of feels by the end, but far closer to mystical fantasy than any sort of science fiction.

Harkening back to the last post: remember the bit about me wandering into a random dispensary on Broadway, the night before our big "we've been acquired" party? It was bright, friendly, well-lit and full of Fun With Pot.

While there, I picked up a bag of three "high-strength" caramels -- 40mg CBD and 20mg THC-O each. (I'm still not clear on the difference between THC-O and delta-THC, which are called out distinctly on these things.) In the name of relaxing, I had tried one of those in the late evening when I got back to my hotel, maybe an hour before bed, and gotten no reaction at all, save being a little tired in the morning -- so much for high-strength, right?

Yesterday, I decided to do a more principled experiment, and took one mid-evening (I think around 5:30 or 6pm) instead of my evening cocktail, so I would be more properly awake and could detect the sensations better.

So, the answer to "why didn't I feel anything the first time around?" is that I was asleep. The caramel last night took somewhere between 2 and 3 hours to take effect -- and then hit me, quite suddenly, like a freight train. (Right before family meeting with my parents, yay.)

The experience wasn't bad, but I'm not sure that it was good. I haven't been that high in many years. Indeed, it felt closer to college memories of tripping than to what I would generally describe as "high". I didn't quite get to the point of full-on visual hallucinations, but I could feel them occasionally fighting to break out: the TV image seeming to be choppy, the people on Zoom seeming just a little wrong -- excessively sharp visuals, body parts just seeming out of proportion.

There was no euphoria per se, but I discovered that I get annoyingly and almost uncontrollably giggly when that high, and can't tell a story to save my life, because my thoughts get very disorganized. (I had to apologize to my parents for my rather disjointed telling of the trip to NYC -- fortunately, they are children of the 60s, and were understanding about "I'm quite a bit higher than I expected to be".)

Most disconcerting was the sensation of time "snapshotting" on me: I kept finding myself doing something, reasonably confident of what had come before but without a sense of continuity. In many cases, I was absolutely certain that I had just been dreaming a moment before, and wasn't sure whether I was still doing so.

I'm mostly better this morning: a bit muzzy-headed, but back down to Earth. My general sense is that I slept restlessly, with dozing/dreams that was vivid but not unusually interesting. I think the high may well have lasted a solid 6-8 hours, which puts the expense of the caramel in perspective.

Overall -- an interesting experience, but not necessarily one that I would recommend or do again. I'll probably continue to experiment with edibles a bit, now that they're increasingly legal, but the moral of the story is that 20mg THC is, for me at least, powerful enough to not be all that much fun. (And nothing about the experience felt relaxing, despite the large amount of CBD.) We'll see if lower doses are worthwhile -- the whole thing has reminded me that the reason I largely swore off of pot (freshman year of college, when it was everywhere) is that it makes me feel somewhat unpleasantly stupid...

ETA: a bit of online poking around indicates that THC-O is three times as potent as conventional THC, and yes -- sometimes hallucinogenic. So starting with 20mg of that was probably inadviseable...

Let's finish up the trilogy with a proper diary entry, shall we?

No shit, there we were, in the middle of Manhattan. Why Manhattan? Let's back up.

A month or so ago, we were told that there was going to be an all-hands get-together for Troops in New York City. This was a big deal, and rather exciting: the company went all-remote at the beginning of the pandemic, with the result that many of us had never met each other. (Thor was literally the only one I had met in-person to date -- I hadn't even met Patrick, who had been a frequent co-worker of mine at Rally and then followed me over to Troops.)

But beyond telling us that it would be in "early May", they were notably vague about when this gathering would take place; as time passed, this got increasingly odd. Finally, a couple of weeks ago, I pinged the CTO about my growing unhappiness about this -- he told me that everyone in the company was stressed about it, but we were dependent upon "external parties" for the final schedule, so we couldn't formally plan it yet.

That set off my radar in a big way, and occasioned several days of me thinking about it. That got even stronger when the plans did begin to firm up: we were all going to meet mid-day on Monday the 9th, in front of the fountain in Bryant Park in Manhattan, and then we would be escorted to a location-to-be-announced for the rest of the day. Uh, huh.

Somewhere around Wednesday the 4th I wound up talking through my reasoning with Kate. While there are a lot of possible explanations, the most obvious "external parties" would be that we're being acquired, and the timing depends on the acquiring company. And thinking further, the most obvious acquiring company (see previous entry) was Salesforce.

"Well," saith Kate, "are there Salesforce offices in Manhattan?"

So we pulled up Google Maps, and determined that the answer was yes. In fact, there is a "Salesforce Tower" in Manhattan -- across the street from the fountain in Bryant Park. That pretty much set my expectations.

The trip down to Manhattan on Sunday was pleasant enough. I decided to drive -- in principle the train would have been better, but getting to South Station is still a mild hassle and we're still in the middle of a covid surge right now. Hopefully in future years we'll have a little less plague, and the Green Line extension will make the train too convenient to pass up.

Sunday night was a trip. I decided to take the opportunity to actually go to an actual movie theater -- it feels almost transgressive at this point, but this trip was going to involve enough covid risk that the movie wouldn't be adding an awful lot on top of that.

(The movie was Everything Everywhere All at Once -- I may write a proper review, but suffice it to say, it is every bit as brilliant and bizarre as everyone is saying. Highly recommended.)

Wandering around the city was a real highlight, though. I had forgotten that Broadway had been mostly turned into a pedestrian thoroughfare -- walking up it is just plain odd, much less eating a gyro at a table in the middle of the street. But it was pleasant and uncrowded, and I poked my head into a few shops. (Including one of the random dispensaries that have cropped up all over NYC, and picked up a few caramels to see if I like them.)

After the movie, I continued uptown to Times Square, which was almost surreal. It is still the case that Times Square at 10pm on a Sunday night is more crowded than almost anywhere in Boston ever is. I tried not to get too deeply enmeshed in the crowds, but the people-watching was wonderful, and I scored a slice of Junior's cheesecake for dessert in my hotel room. All told, it was a wonderfully normal, high-energy evening.

Monday, mid-day, as planned, as all rendezvoused in Bryant Park, to get the announcement that (surprise, surprise) we were being acquired. The only nuance that I had missed is that we are being purchased by Slack, which is part of Salesforce.

So the off-site business meeting turned out to mostly be a party. We were escorted into Salesforce Tower, taken up to the 21st floor, and handed champagne as part of an open bar. There was a good fireside chat with our CEO and our new boss from Slack, with a bit of Q&A, but it was mostly hanging out, chatting, and finally getting to socialize properly with each other.

That set the tone for the rest of the day. From there, most of us heading over to the hotel's rooftop bar, for more drinks and socializing, and thence to Ilili, a delightful Lebanese restaurant where they had reserved a private room for Troops. (A nice thing about a 30-person company: we can all sit at a single long dinner table together.) Dinner was faboo: they had much of Ilili's menu served out family-style, so we could try loads of different things, all of them excellent.

After that, several of us headed over to another hotel bar; finally, after that broke up, a few of us (including one of the legendary members of the company, who had left a year or so ago) wound up at a pub near the hotel.

All in all, it was a great day, albeit a sodden one: I probably had seven drinks over the course of twelve hours, which is more than I've had in years.

Which was fine, but meant that I was exhausted and slightly hung-over the following morning, when everything got down to brass tacks. We all rendezvoused back at Salesforce Tower, to receive our verbal offers and the initial briefings of what to expect from the acquisition.

I can't go into too much detail, but I'm nervously excited by the whole thing. After the disappointing merger with Optum (and, ten years earlier, the experience of Memento being acquired by FIS), I'll admit to some trepidation. That said, the vibe of this deal is way better. It's very clear why they want us, and how we would fit into the company. Slack has a reputation of being a generally good employer, and it appears that being acquired by Salesforce hasn't wrecked that.

And really -- Slack is in some ways an almost weirdly good fit for me, personally. I've been saying for decades that, insofar as I have a professional speciality, it is "productive online conversational systems", and while that isn't precisely what Troops does (we're more about notifications than conversation), I suspect that I might well find loads of cool things to do at Slack.

So far, there aren't any red flags. The benefits at Slack seem to be even better than the quite-good ones at Troops (and miles better than what Optum was offering), and I'm getting a significant raise out of the deal.

So, fingers crossed. I really want this to work out well, and it looks like there is good reason to believe that it will.

The drive home was uneventful, although I was pretty bleary-eyed by the time I arrived back in Somerville.

The postscript of the story is exactly what I suspected it would be: one of my co-workers tested positive on Thursday. So I'm in watchful-waiting mode for a few days, testing regularly and mostly keeping at home. If I'm still testing negative on Monday afternoon, I'll probably let myself go do social (but masked) activities again.

Okay, so as of last October I'm at Troops -- let's talk about that.

Troops has been very much me going back to my roots: a scrappy little startup. Unlike most such, it's been pretty well-run -- cautious without being timid -- with the result that when I got there the company was six years old and still only 30 employees. That's refreshingly sensible: too many startups fall into the Cult of Blitzscale, believing that the only way to succeed is to GrowGrowGrow as fast as possible, to weave illusions in front of investors, regardless of whether that makes any business sense. Troops thinks a lot more like I do -- you're trying to build a viable company, and that takes a lot of time and experimentation.

There's a lot to like about Troops: they started talking about the company's values from the first interview, and unlike many places, they tend to walk the walk. For example, Transparency is a very big deal, and I've been impressed on that front. Every Monday we have an all-hands that goes into serious detail for every department: not just what Product and Engineering are working on, but line-by-line breakdowns of how things are going in Sales, details about what Marketing is working on, what's going well (or not as well) in Customer Success, and so on. The result is that I've actually gotten to not only know everybody in the company, but also what they are doing, in a way that I don't think has been true of any employer since Buzzpad. (Which was only eight of us, so scarcely counts.)

The product is mundane but terribly useful: we provide analysis and notification services from "systems of record" (eg, Salesforce) to "systems of communication" (eg, Slack), so that you can get notified when something interesting happens, or just get updates on a regular schedule. The company started out just doing Salesforce-to-Slack, back when that was a new and somewhat heretical idea, but pivoted a couple of years ago to be more generalized. It's still pretty focused on customer-relationship applications in practice, but our tech is pretty general-purpose by now.

The stack is very much in my sweet spot: a pure-FP Scala backend, coupled with a TypeScript frontend. Aside from using ZIO instead of my preferred cats-effect, it's largely the same stack that I was pushing at Rally, so the coding is fun.

The company is small enough to not be hidebound -- we have a level of continuous integration and release that we were dreaming of at Rally, not too far from one release per engineer per day on average. We count on the engineers to take strong ownership of the application, working together and with Product to figure out how to make things better.

My timing could scarcely have been better. The company was just hitting market-fit in a serious way when I joined, with sales starting to really take off and the user base growing in serious ways. That's an exciting time to be at a firm, when you can look at it and say with some confidence that things are getting steadily better.

Mind, it can be a somewhat hectic environment: being a tiny group (just ten engineers) supporting a growing customer list and a hugely ambitious technical vision, we've had to work hard and stay focused. But the company has a generally good attitude, and doesn't push burnout-level stress -- folks understand that building a company is a marathon rather than a sprint, and are quite supportive of maintaining a decent work/life balance.

So it's been a good time, these past six months or so. Things got more interesting last week, but that'll be the topic of the last entry in this trilogy...

Soooo -- looking back, I haven't talked at all about work for the past eight months. That's probably been a mistake, because boy, my work life has been complicated. Let's break the story down into three posts, for the three major phases. This is basically a trilogy of diary entries, bringing us from a year ago, up to present day.

When last we left our hero, he was working at Rally Health, and largely enjoying it. Rally was pretty huge by the standards I'm used to -- my first employer of more than about 300 employees -- but still small fry in the grand scheme of things. The tech stack was solid; the people were pretty great; maybe most importantly, the community and culture were really excellent.

(I started at Rally as a consultant, and jumped ship after about a year to join them full-time. When I was interviewing, they asked, "Why do you want to work here?" My answer was, "You've gotten to 1500 employees, and don't suck. I want to see how you manage that.")

Sometime early last year, they announced that Rally would be folded into its much-larger parent company, Optum. (Which is itself part of the gigantic monolith, United HealthGroup.) That caused a lot of consternation, including people panicking about layoffs. I initially dismissed most of those concerns, on the grounds that Rally was a primary engine of innovation for Optum, and to a non-trivial degree for UHG as a whole. Surely they wouldn't strangle the goose that laid the golden eggs?

By the late summer, though, I was starting to get nervous. It was clear that Optum's benefits weren't as good as Rally's, and I didn't love the answers I was getting on that front. The response to losing our unlimited PTO was, "Oh, we just don't track the PTO for engineers. But no, we refuse to write that de facto policy down anywhere." That did nothing to soothe my lawful-good heart, and the implied inequity of it burned.

Then the attrition started. Some of it was just natural, but certain highly-placed people who I considered "Rally lifers" suddenly left, which I took to be a bad sign. So for the first time in a long time, I started actually responding to the recruiter emails.

I did a few interviews, but as usual, the really interesting one came via networking. Thor, a member of the Boston Scala group, who I'd worked with on ScalaBridge a while back, pinged me because he had just joined a little company called Troops, and might I be interested in chatting?

I'll talk more about Troops next post, but suffice it to say, yeah -- it was up my alley, and the timing was impeccable. So I wound up interviewing during our trip to Hawaii last fall (with Kate rolling her eyes about that a little bit, but she understood the situation). It all looked good, so Troops and I were making encouraging noises at each other, with me asking for about six weeks' transition time.

Then I got back from vacation, during which the merger had happened. I'll avoid going into the details, but suffice it to say, I was deeply unimpressed by Optum. The benefits were mediocre; the internal politics were more corporately nasty; perhaps most importantly, the level of general competence just wasn't there. I was used to Rally, which had an ethos of hiring great folks into all groups and giving them lots of room to build high-quality stuff; it really hurt when I kept stumbling across Optum internal systems that just plain didn't work right.

It was a worse environment in all ways, with no salary bump. It hurt to leave my team (who I really liked a lot), but they just plain weren't paying me enough to put up with that nonsense. So I wrote back to Troops and said, more or less, "I've changed my mind. Give me an offer now, and I'll put in my two weeks' notice."

So: Rally Health, RIP. It's a real pity -- as a wholly-owned subsidiary, Rally was a really great workplace, and it still presumably has that great tech stack. But Optum feels much more corporate, which isn't my scene. So, on to something better...

(I have a completely quiet weekend in which I mostly need to stay home, for reasons that will be discussed in a later entry. So let's spend a little time burbling on miscellaneous topics, starting with the driest but the one that's right in front of me.)

I've enthused at various people about SpatialChat over the past couple of years; this is a quick update.

Context: there are a bunch of platforms that let people hang out together in a "cocktail party" environment -- instead of just being all talking heads in boxes like Zoom or GChat, you are in a 2D "space" that you can wander around, and you see and hear the people who are "close" to you. The pandemic turned this niche idea into a pretty significant business, and lots of companies emerged to do this sort of thing.

Of the lot of them, SpatialChat is still my favorite: they have lots of little UX nuances that just work a bit better than the rest, and they've been rapidly adding specialized features to work better both as a co-working environment and as an event space.

That said, they've also been nailing down their business plan. Today's news is that the Free plan is (as of next week) about to drop to only 5 people at a time, rendering it near-useless for many of the casual social hangouts that we've been doing on it. That's a pity -- I'm not totally surprised by it, but it means that it's going to be less attractive for things like little Baronial hangouts.

In more mixed news, a while ago they moved from the "traditional" pricing plan for these services (roughly 1 cent/user/minute) to a flat $2/user/day for events. Whether that's good or bad depends on your use case, but it's a bit easier to plan for, and it encourages folks to hold events entirely in SpatialChat. Having been to a couple such conferences, that's not a bad thing.

So -- still a good service, and increasingly optimized for established teams and for events. But now getting a bit pricey for recreational use...

An Open Letter about the SCA's new COVID policy

Review: _Picard_

Review: _Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992_

Whimsical when tired

Quick Review: _How to Talk to Girls at Parties_

Pennsic

Mini-review: Umbrella Academy

Call for Gaming Panel ideas

Puffy Foot is Puffy

Pinewoods ESCape

Review: Centaurworld

Review: _Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness_

Review: _Undone_

A maze of twisty little test instructions, all different

Review: _Russian Doll_

Fun with Edibles

The Job Thing, Part 3: Last Week

The Job Thing, Part 2: Troops

The Job Thing, Part 1: Rally and Optum

SpatialChat

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June 2025

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