Breaking stuff

I was playing in my World of Warcraft raid last night and I was being terrible.  The boss would get ready to do his gigantic attack that we all had to dodge away from, and I would click to move.... and nothing would happen.  I would die, and let the team down.  This is an easy thing to deal with if it is 100% of the time - the mouse is broken, and you move on.  But when things work 98% of the time, you wonder if you are just bad and failed to click.  There is always that doubt in your mind.

You can't keep playing with a 2% failure rate.  The boss is going to make you 'React or die!' 50 times, and failing once means you die and your group loses.

Finally I concluded that I could not keep playing.  Thankfully Wendy and I are using the same mouse so we swapped hers in and I got to keep on going.  That feeling when you play properly and get confirmation that yes, it was the equipment failing, not yourself... priceless.

However, I now have a mouse that works most of the time.  Videos on the internet assured me that all I had to do was tear the mouse apart and clean the tiny metal piece that gets all gunked up over time.  I didn't have a lot to lose, so I tore the mouse apart.  The metal piece was immaculate though, so clearly the internet videos were wrong.  

Upon reassembling the mouse the left click didn't work at all.

In some ways this is better.  At least this way I don't have my money demon telling me I should keep on using the mouse until it is well and truly broken.  I can pretend to keep on using a mouse that works 98% of the time even though it makes me sad.  

I can't use a mouse that doesn't click at all though.

I tore the mouse apart and reassembled it a couple of times and finally concluded that all my attempts at fixing it have resulted in the tiny metal piece being ever so slightly bent.  Wendy and I attempted to get it back to its pre intervention state, but we failed.  It turns out that even a slightly bent metal piece is totally useless, and the mouse is junk.

After only 8 months of use!  Junk!

Admittedly that mouse has had some hard living.  My hands always make all of my peripherals gunky and gross, and I have been on the computer *hard* since the pandemic hit.  That mouse has not been treated lightly.

Still, it irks me that I couldn't fix it properly.  All the internet videos assured me it would be easy and foolproof, but apparently I am fool enough that I broke it anyway.

Getting better, but not all the way

Our stories about illness often do not reflect the reality.  Too often when we talk about disease we try to put it into convenient buckets - sick, healthy, cured, infected.  The reality of illness is that a huge proportion of health struggles wax and wane over time becoming more or less of a struggle but never completely vanishing.  Even when we are discharged from the care of doctors and people talk as though we are cured we often have to deal with the illness for a great time to come.

Pinkie Pie is a great example of this.  When she was young she had serious kidney problems that led to a four day hospital stay many years ago.  We spent years being careful about diet, water intake, bathroom usage, and other things and still ended up in the hospital or doctor's office many times.  That hasn't been an acute struggle for five years or so now, and in the minds of many people I imagine Pinkie Pie is cured.

She isn't cured.  She never will be. 

Although she isn't cured she is in much better shape.  A short while ago the hospital finally cleared us to stop visiting them and to continue on our lifelong program of managing her illness.  These days that is fairly easy and we rarely think much about it, but I still need to keep on reminding her to do the things that they have told us to do.

It is weird to think about sometimes.  I feel like there should be some giant emotional release of tension to finally get the news that we aren't going to be visiting Sick Kids Hospital anymore.  That release didn't happen though.  She was steadily getting better over years and years and it was clear that this sort of thing was coming.  When they finally told us to go away forever it felt like just another step along a long journey.

I am trained by media to expect a huge reveal "You are cured!" and a subsequent shift in paradigm.  Instead all I have is just a vague sense of relief that we don't have to commute downtown for appointments anymore.

I think this is a more realistic model of illness and recovery than what books, movies, and shows train us to expect.  Disease is rarely one and done, usually leaving a long, difficult trail.

Thankfully after many years and much struggle we are on the easy part of that trail.  We can't entirely relax because the trail could get rough once again, but for now the path is smooth and straight.

Reality is sad

For quite some time I had it in my head that the pandemic would be winding down in the spring.  I had thought that by the time summer started I would be back to doing the best things with the best people.  I have been missing those activities that can't be safely engaged in during these stressful times.  I had all kinds of plans for board game nights that devolved into orgies (carefully not messing up the pieces, of course, that game is going to get finished *properly*).

But it seems that I was overly optimistic.  Canada is apparently planning on having half of its population vaccinated by September 2021.

When I read that it was a punch to the gut.

Another *year* of sitting at home, not able to see many of my favourite people, not able to do my favourite things.

Another year of the World Boardgaming Championships not happening.

Another summer of sitting at home, not able to go out and do the things.

Another year of not seeing my extended family.

It is all kinds of depressing.

I find it hard to figure out what to think of it.  On one hand, I am the sort of person that wants to eat at home anyway - restaurants not opening doesn't matter to me.  I am financially stable still, so I don't worry about that.  I have fun things to do, and I am confident that when it all finally ends I will have much to go back to.  I don't have to take serious risks with my own health, and I can stay at home.  My kid is mostly self sufficient these days, and homeschooling is actually going quite well this year, far better than ever before.

Many people don't have those things.  I don't want to be whining about my circumstances when so many have it so much worse.

Still, knowing that other people have all my problems plus a bunch of extra ones doesn't help me much.  The feelings are still there.

However, there is nothing to be done for it.  I just have to accept that I have another year of being at home, and make the best of it.

You can be damn sure though that when we finally do get the restrictions lifted I am going to have such an outrageous party it will be remembered for years and years to come.  New heights of debauchery must be reached to celebrate the end of the worst crisis of my life so far.

I guess I will hold onto that thought tight, and use it for whatever comfort it can bring.

Running it twice

Child rearing is a rollercoaster of emotion.  Sometimes, like in my last blog post, you have to watch your kid go through wretched stuff that you wish you could defend them from.  Pinkie Pie had an adult man approach her and try to rope her into a 'relationship' on the street.  Many people messaged me or commented hoping that the police would get involved and do something, but the reality is that when I called them I got redirected to a nuisance line and left on hold.  After a long time listening to 'hit X for graffiti, hit Y for parking issues' I finally gave up.  The police do not have the time or inclination to do anything about this, in large part because no actual laws were broken.

It is tough to tell your kid that an evil predator is out there and that the people charged with protecting us from such predators will do nothing.  I don't blame the police in this case though - I wouldn't want to try to give the police enough money to be able to put tons of hours into every case of some asshole being awful to someone else, and I don't want them to have the power to smash into people's lives when they don't have any reason to think a law was broken. 

Sometimes you just have to tell your kids that bad stuff happens, and that you will do what you can to protect them... and sometimes what you can do is little to nothing.

But there are good times.  For example, today I realized that Pinkie Pie had never heard the Boot To The Head skit by the Frantics.  If I said Boot To The Head, she wouldn't understand what I was talking about!  This cannot stand, obviously, so I found it on youtube and got her to listen to the clip.

Apparently the original Boot To The Head contains an anti-gay slur by Ed Gruberman, the jackass in the sketch. Thankfully the version I found does not have that phrase, as it has been changed. I don't know if the version I first heard many years ago was the original or the new version, but I hope it was the new one. I certainly wouldn't share it with her in the same way without that alteration.

There are many hilarious things that have a wonderful first time experience.  You can't get that again, but sometimes the process of watching somebody else have that first time experience can be almost as good.  Watching Pinkie Pie giggle and twitch with joy at Boot To The Head was so good for me, and now we have another shared bit of culture we can enjoy.

I have her trained to say "Party on Garth" after I say "Party on Wayne".  She has never seen the movie in question, and indeed I can barely remember it.  Still, those little bits of shared memory are a source of happy feelings, and I like that she is happy to be a part of nostalgia she doesn't quite understand.

Parenting a teenager is not the easiest thing, but I gotta say, it is *so* much better than parenting a toddler for me.  There are still struggles, but the good parent moments are superior when the little person can actually grasp what I am talking about.

Evil in the world

This weekend I went through one of those unpleasant parental firsts.  Pinkie Pie got her first experience with sexual harassment at the hands of an older man, and I had to figure out what to do about it.

He met her on the street, managed to convince her to give him her phone number, and then proceeded to text her over the course of the next hour or so.  He told her he was in love with her, that he desperately needed her, and asked for pictures.  He ignored the fact that she isn't attracted to men in any way, smashed right through her 'but I have a girlfriend' objections, and wasn't fazed at all when she told him she is only 14.

He continued to message her with desperate and bizarre statements, making it clear that he required her in his life and could not cope without her.  He even claimed to run some sort of 'love and connection' business, for which he even had business cards.

Thankfully Pinkie Pie trusts us, and brought his messages to us to ask for help.  I talked with her about all the obvious manipulation and gaslighting, and explained what he was trying to do.  She had been feeling worried and bad about the whole thing, and was happy to block him.  As far as lessons go, I am glad she got past this one without much damage.  I think she is over it, and is moving on.  

I, on the other hand, keep having thoughts of tracking this bastard down and smashing him into hard objects until he breaks into little pieces.  I doubt that the police can or will do anything, since while it is obvious to anyone who glances at the messages what is going on, he hasn't actually done anything illegal, as far as I can tell.  In this, we are on our own.  I don't know if there is any point in messaging him myself, threatening outrageous bodily harm should he ever be near her again - it certainly isn't an idle threat, but I have no idea if that would make things safer for Pinkie Pie or not.

Making it safer for her is my only concern.  Making things safer for all the other 14 year old girls out there is important, but I can't do a lot about that.

I am not one to overreact in terms of what I will let Pinkie Pie do.  She is going to continue to have the same freedom to wander about as before.  The world isn't perfectly safe, but I won't build a cage for her.  The best I can do is teach her how to handle this sort of thing and hope that I never actually need to beat the hell out of some asshole who tries to hurt her.

Her friends, to their credit, were entirely supportive and were talking about going out to beat this dude up or try to scare him.  I made it clear that they were not to do such a thing under any circumstances.  They noted that it would be a pretty bad look for a bunch of white kids to be out beating the hell out of a black guy in a bout of vigilante justice - not an observation I would have expected from my friend group when I was a teenager.  They are way more woke than I ever was.

I don't want this to escalate to violence or intimidation of any sort, and I particularly don't want kids involved in any way.  If that sort of thing was ever called for though, it is definitely not on them - it is on me.  Here's hoping it never comes to that.

Failing to stick the landing

 Wendy, Pinkie Pie, and I have been watching Avatar:  The Last Airbender for months now.  We have a pizza and Avatar night every week, and tonight we finally finished the series.  Wendy and Pinkie Pie are way more into the show than I am, but I am definitely still enjoying it so far.  

Unfortunately, like many shows, this one failed to wrap up the series in a way that satisfies me.  It actually stumbled into what I consider one of the most common and unfortunate issues in entertainment - failing to resolve a difficult, tense choice properly.

One of the key things the show highlights about Aang is his conflicted feelings about killing.  He wants to defend the world, and it is made clear that his destiny is to fight and kill the Fire Lord.  He wants to fight, and to win, but not to kill.  In many places in the story this is a major source of issues and angst for our hero, and in fact there is a whole short arc devoted to him trying to resolve it.

Aang's decision to kill or not could be a powerful climax to the series.  He could kill the Fire Lord and regret it, saving the world but costing him personally.  He could refuse to kill and watch the world burn, which would be devastating in a different way.

Instead they decide at the pivotal moment that he doesn't have to make this choice.  He can just win without killing because magic.  Yay!  What a relief!

The problem is that all the tension in the scene falls completely flat.  What did training matter?  What did Aang's struggle over killing affect?  He just went straight to an answer he could have used in the first season, removing the need for much of the story so far, making many of the struggles of the protagonists entirely moot.

It seems as though the writers were desperate to have Aang not kill people, so desperate that they were willing to throw away half of their story.  It isn't as though a refusal to kill makes a story bad, far from it, but making that moral choice a cornerstone of your story and then just abandoning it is sad.  Thing is though, if Aang isn't willing to kill, why was there so much killing in the series?  Smashing ships, crushing tanks, exploding aircraft, there is no end of mass killing of bad guys by the heroes, Aang in particular.  Aang and his gang, without any sign of moral quandary, murder huge numbers of people throughout the series.

The people they murder without worry are the unnamed randoms, the soldiers without stories, the poor, the low.  But murder a lord?  We can't do that!  Killing the highborn *matters*, in a way that killing the lowborn does not.

Let me be clear - the murders of soldiers aren't shown on screen.  Avatar doesn't explicitly show the grisly deaths, but tossing people in the middle of the ocean, or crushing a vehicle they are in to nothing, is definitely lethal.  You can't ignore the fact though that the gang will kill without worry so long as the victim isn't someone important.  As soon as the victim is important, powerful, known, suddenly they will risk anything and everything to keep that person alive.

It manages to be both classist and cruddy storytelling at the same time.

Little debts

Pinkie Pie was put in a difficult situation the other day.  She went out to find bits for a Hallowe'en costume for herself with a friend.  We gave her $40 to buy the bits, and told her this was half of her birthday present.  She was happy with this.  When she arrived at the costume place, they didn't have what she wanted.  They had something her friend wanted though, and her friend had no money.  Pinkie Pie wasn't too sure what to do about this, but eventually agreed to buy the thing for her friend.  This got extra complicated when they arrived at the register and the stuff ended up costing a lot more than she had thought, and used up almost all of her money.

These sorts of situations aren't easy to navigate.  How much do you loan to friends?  How hard do you lean on them to get the money back?  What do you do when you have the money... but it kind of isn't your money?  Are you able to say "Never mind, I am not buying that" once you get to the register in a store?"

Lessons like this aren't ones they teach in school.

Pinkie Pie ended up paying for the stuff.  She came home and talked to Wendy, and Wendy decided that this counted as Pinkie Pie's birthday present still, but if Pinkie Pie could manage to get the money from the other kid to repay us all that money that was loaned, we would buy her another birthday present.

This didn't sit well with me.  I didn't do anything for a while, but eventually decided I needed to speak up.  The other kid had paid back $8 by then, and we were recording the money owing on the fridge.  I did not like looking at that recording of the debt, and it made me uncomfortable.  Pinkie Pie has to learn how to deal with debt with her friends, especially friends who have different ideas about how to manage money than she does.  I can't fix that.  But Pinkie Pie's friends owing *me* money... that doesn't sit right.  The extreme imbalance in our power levels in the situation combined with me not actually signing on to this whole debt situation is a mess.

I don't want to put Pinkie Pie in the position of enforcing a debt between me and a kid.  That isn't fair to her, and I know how much being caught in other people's debts upsets me when I have no control over the situation.  I think if you are the one enforcing a debt you need to be the one who can forgive the debt if you choose to.

We talked about it and decided that we should give $8 back to Pinkie Pie and tell her that she doesn't have to pay us back.  She lent the money to the other kid, and she is welcome to collect it or not as she sees fit.  We are removing ourselves from the situation and that $40 is entirely Pinkie Pie's problem, not ours.  That doesn't make it easy for her necessarily, but at least she isn't caught between her friends and her parents now.  She can write it off, or try to get it back, or whatever, but it is only her that is involved in the situation.

Lending money to friends is messy.  We all have to learn that, one way or another.  If she ends up learning how to cope with this and it only costs her $32, then it was money well spent.  

Linking it up

Part of teaching Pinkie Pie is basic school stuff everyone recognizes and most people hate.  We do math workbooks and french workbooks and grind through a lot of the rough stuff as we teach her and her friend.

However, it isn't all grind and solve.  I have been spending a lot of time watching random educational youtube videos trying to find interesting topics to show to the kids.  Sometimes I just show them some cool astronomy thing, but sometimes I manage to tie stuff together in ways that make me feel clever.

The other day I sat them down to watch a video about how life transfers and uses energy.  It talked about ATP and all the systems life has evolved to make use of it, starting from single celled organisms right up to humans.  Then I showed them a video about the Kardashev scale for civilizations, ranking them based on the amount of energy they have access to.  For example, humanity is currently at .75 on the scale, where 1 is using all of the energy that earth has to offer, 2 is using the entire sun, and 3 is the entire galaxy.

The common thread?  The laws of thermodynamics of course!

Body heat is one result of the use of energy by our systems.  This is due, in part at least, to entropy.  You always get waste heat when you transfer energy around.  This waste heat is also an issue if humanity ever achieves type 1 civilization status because we will rapidly boil ourselves to death using that amount of energy on the Earth itself.  Going further than that and building megastructures like Dyson spheres also must account for this problem - dissipating heat is a huge issue when you talk about far future technology like this.

For kids struggling in grade nine science teaching about thermodynamics may be a bit ambitious.  Still, I quite enjoy the challenge of finding disparate subjects that I can link together in some ingenious way, so I take whatever opportunities are available to me.  

The videos typically are only about 10 minutes in length but it usually takes me a solid half hour to get through them.  I constantly stop and check to see if the kids understand the language or concepts being used, and then talk about stuff until they are up to speed.  I don't know if they have noticed that I use youtube as a way to keep them interested in an endless set of mini lectures, but that certainly seems to be what I am doing.  I do like to have graphics and guidance for my teaching, and using videos to give me things to talk about and places to go works well for me.

I don't think I can keep my two pupils on track to learn all the stuff the school expects them to learn.  On the other hand they are going to know a little bit about all kinds of stuff, and there is some merit in that.

A successful bid

One of the best predictors of how long a relationship will last is the way the people in it respond to bids for attention.  These bids are usually small things like pointing out a funny thing to a partner, asking a question, or a request for assistance.  Most of the time all we need to do to respond positively is acknowlege the bid, pay attention to it, and respond in some reasonable fashion.  You don't have to respond to every bid of course, but if you consistently ignore them to stare at your phone, shrug and move on, or otherwise lack engagement, your relationship is likely to either end or be miserable.

I put a large emphasis on responding to bids from people.  My romantic relationships get a lot of attention here for sure, but it also applies to child rearing and friendships too.  I think I may actually respond to bids so much that it is unhealthy for me, though I presume that the people I respond to like it.  

The way this plays out is that I am doing something on my computer with my headphones on, absorbed, and either Wendy or Pinkie Pie talks to me.  I can't tell what they are saying (because headphones), so I stop what I am doing, say "Wait, I can't hear you", take the headphones off, put them down, turn around to face them, and say "Okay, go ahead".  This is a positive way to respond to a bid.  I set aside what I am doing, make it clear that I prioritize their feelings and communication, and make sure I am prepared to engage in whatever it is they have for me.

Sometimes that is a good thing.  Maybe it is time to make dinner and I was being reminded, or maybe there is something interesting we can talk about.  Unfortunately a lot of the time it is something totally trivial that I do not care about at all.  It might be Pinkie Pie wanting me to look at the cat that she made in The Sims, or Wendy saying "Oh, never mind, I see it now."  In both cases it is frustrating because I tore myself out of my flow to respond to the bid, and now I have to get myself back into it.  Often what I *want* to say is "Not now, busy" but I don't.  It is important to not respond in that way, and everyone makes it clear that how I respond to these things is crucial for them.

I want to be a good partner and a good parent.  I want to be there and responsive when the people in my family ask for my time and attention.  I just don't know how to cope with some interruptions being necessary and worthwhile, and some being for things I absolutely do not care about at all.

The pandemic turns this from an occasional frustration to a serious struggle.  What I need is the ability to focus on things without being dragged out of my zone.  Unfortunately we have a tiny space and everyone is on top of me all day every day.  I am the one responsible for the vast majority of chores and work, so Wendy and Pinkie Pie need to constantly talk to me about groceries or dinner or cleaning or appointments etc.

If I could just go to work for a few hours and do things without anyone else around it would be wonderful.  I get a bit of that late at night after other people are asleep, but then I need to tiptoe around so as to not wake them up, so it doesn't quite do the thing I am hoping for.

I really like the idea of all of us interacting casually, being open to little conversations about nothing important.  I want to be receptive to people talking to me, even when it isn't something momentous.  I like the idea of talking with them about random stuff that popped into my brain too.  I just desperately need that separation at times, that ability to sink deep into a headspace without being interrupted.

The struggle goes the other way too, no doubt about that.  Pinkie Pie spends all day in her room, and she won't take care of any basic life functions without constant harassment, so I constantly have to be knocking on her door and barging in when she ignores the knock.  I am sure this is difficult for her too, but because she is always behind a closed door and won't respond to messages I literally cannot wait for a good moment to communicate with her - I have no way of knowing what time would be good.

Wendy works in our living room, so she has the same sorts of struggles.  I can't easily tell when she is engaged with her work or not, so if I need her attention I have to either wait, which might take hours, or just interrupt her.  Working at home is difficult for her even if I am leaving her alone, especially with difficult work where she needs to be in flow to do it properly, and me needing input on stuff ratchets up the challenge.

Having only a kitchen (where I am on my computer, usually), and a living room (where Wendy is on her computer, usually) as our living spaces is driving us a bit batty.  What I would give for an office space with a door I could close!  The ability to go and do something for a couple hours with a door between me and casual interruptions would be a wondrous thing.  

But, you know, money.

I don't have good answers here.  I would like to respond to bids less, but I can't know which ones are the ones I want to filter out until I have already responded to them.  I could put up a little flag that says 'go away' on it, but that doesn't actually work that well in practice.  It is weird and uncomfortable to not chat about little things to someone who is *right there* in a way that wouldn't be weird or uncomfortable if they were in an office ten meters away.  You just walk to the office if you have a thing worth saying, or don't bother if your thing isn't worth saying.  A 'go away' flag simply doesn't create the same social environment.

I am so profoundly ready for the pandemic to be over so people can get out of my space and I can drill down deep into something, knowing that I have hours of time where I can focus and nothing shall distract me.  Trivial or important, all distractions break my creativity and flow.

Withdrawing from society

Almost a month ago I watched the Netflix show entitled The Social Dilemma.  It was about social networks and the algorithms they use to decide what to show users.  I knew that social networks used these algorithms and that these algorithms were there to increase ad revenue and engagement, not to promote truth, but this show outlined clearly just how bad things are.

As as example, FB was instrumental in the widespread influence of pizzagate.  Its algorithms noticed that people were extremely engaged with the nonsense story of a child sex ring operating out of a pizza joint, organized by high level Democrats in the US.  Obvious foolishness, but it got clicks, so FB showed it to as many people as possible, and plenty of them bought it.

In response I decided to unfollow everyone on Facebook.  I still use FB for messaging, and I can still be part of organizing events or conversations, but I no longer see anything on my feed except ads... which makes it quite easy to ignore my feed entirely.  I could have just refused to look at my feed of course, but I know myself - resisting the urge to look would take precious willpower, and I didn't wan to have to resist temptation.  Unfollowing everyone means that it would take a lot of time to actually make my feed exist again, and I was pretty sure I wouldn't do that.

This trick worked.  I unfollowed mostly everyone and I have ignored my feed for four weeks now.  I do feel better overall, but it isn't entirely rosy.  There are certainly bits of news I will miss, and events in the lives of my friends that I will not see.  Still, while most of those feel like a real thing at the time, they have no long term impact.  Nearly all of those things that social networks convince us are crucial actually don't matter at all a week later.  That said, if there was a good way to get those moments without having to scroll endlessly through a FB feed, I would get them.  Unfortunately, there isn't.

I am happy about the time I have retrieved from FB.  I don't scroll, wondering if there are new things.  I don't read stuff I have no interest in simply because it was there in my feed.  I also don't get misdirected and subtly influenced by FB's algorithm anymore.

Doing this has made me more aware of the other networks that I touch and how they react.  For example, a Youtuber I watch occasionally made a video about her dating life - in the past, she identified as straight, and thought the stories that her straight male friends told about dating were exaggerated or not important.  Then she came out as bi, went on some dates with women, and experienced the exact same frustrating behaviours that her straight male friends had complained about.  I think her politics and beliefs are similar to mine; this wasn't some right wing 'women are the worst' kind of garbage, just an acknowledgement that a new environment brings new perspective.

Youtube immediately begane shoving 'Feminist gets owned by LOGIC' and 'Watch Jordan Peterson demolish liberal snowflakes' videos at me.  A single video was enough to give it the clue that I might be receptive to the MRA / PUA / antifeminist outrage machine.

It doesn't matter that the Youtuber in question doesn't believe in any of that garbage, nor that I don't.  Youtube wants clicks, outrage gets clicks, so it is endlessly searching for something that will outrage me so I will click and click and click.

Algorithms have figured out that I like Hearthstone videos.  It knows I play World of Warcraft and will check out news stories about it.  These things are useful!  But they also desperately try to get me hooked on bigotry and tribalism because that is how you make money.  I don't know the best way for society to cope with this.  I am sure that the increasing polarization of society is in large part attributable to social media and algorithms, and I think long term that is going to cause some serious damage.  

Unfortunately just knowing that something is a problem doesn't automatically lead you to solutions.  I don't know how we all tackle this.  I just know that I am going to remove myself from the mess as much as possible.  I don't want it anymore, both because I think it is bad for my personal life, and also because I think it is bad for humans as a whole.

Murder school

Wendy and I have been homeschooling Pinkie Pie for a month now.  We didn't want to risk sending her to school in person, and the virtual school would be a nightmare for her.  She can't learn by watching a teacher on a screen for hours and hours.  We aren't sticking to any kind of fixed curriculum though, because it works much better if we just teach whatever comes up.  Of course we find things to bring up during lessons, but at least half of any given lesson is just answering odd questions that Pinkie Pie asks.

For example, during a history lesson the housing crisis of 2007 came up.  Then questions about the Great Depression got asked.  By the time the tangent was resolved I had talked about mortgages, the stock market, erosion, housing, banking regulation, and a bunch of other things.  Pinkie Pie isn't going to get the kind of focused education you get in school, but she sure is going to learn all kinds of stuff.

The best question so far though came up during a Math Walk on Friday.  (Math Walks are where she and I take a half hour walk and practice math as we go.)  Pinkie Pie asked "So, where would you stab someone if you wanted them to die really fast?"

This is the kind of parenting question I live for.

She clarified that she wasn't planning on murdering anyone.  She had a story in mind and wanted a character to be some sort of assassin or something, and to write a character that knows how to efficiently kill someone, the author needs to know how to efficiently kill someone!

My teaching fu was strong that day.  I lead off with the general observation that many wounds can be eventually fatal, but is it the brain, heart, and lungs that will kill you extremely rapidly if they are damaged.  I talked about the way the lungs take in oxygen, covered the gas composition of air, touched on photosynthesis, discussed blood flow and heartbeat, explained the heart - lungs - heart - body system, and explained the defensive purpose of the skull and ribcage.

In the end I summed up by telling her that any large amount of trauma to the centre torso is likely fatal, but that if you want to kill someone easily you can just stab them in the neck.  Necks are easier to attack than brains are, most of the time.

She seemed quite happy with the detail of my response, and presumably spent a bunch of time over the last few days writing scenes of mayhem and murder in her newest fictional world.

Either that, or she is going to stab me in my sleep someday soon.  

Probably in the neck.

Hedging towards disaster

Donald Trump has made a hobby of defying democratic norms.  Some norms aren't important, of course, and many of them need to die, but there are norms that are critical for society to function and for people to have confidence in their government.  For example, people in elections shouldn't be calling for their opponents to be arrested, or threatening to arrest them should the election go a particular way.  That sort of behaviour can destroy a democracy.  Another key norm is that politicians agree that if they lose an election that they will peaceably accept the result, rather than insisting on becoming a dictator or instigating a civil war.

This last norm is one Trump has been insistent on ignoring in recent times, and it is a terrifying prospect.  Trump hasn't outright said that if he loses that there should be a civil war and he will stay in office indefinitely as a dictator.  He knows that saying that right now would be too much.  It would be a risk for him personally, as calling for civil war is the sort of thing that can get you impeached, imprisoned, or killed.  Vaguely avoiding the question of abdicating power and suggesting that the electoral process is tained and fraudulent won't get you put in prison though, so it is safe.  Safe for Trump, at least, but it absolutely threatens democracy in the US.

I think Trump has a plan here.  He is a fool and an asshole, but he has plenty of raw cunning, and he knows that if he gets up and yells "White people rise up, destroy the government and install me as dictator for life!" that he risks everything.  If instead he merely tries to convince people that elections are pointless and cozies up to white nationalist militias, he might find himself installed as a dictator anyway if the election doesn't go his way.  He can get people riled up and ready to fight if he loses, especially if the margin is tight.  If they don't rise up for him, well, he lost anyway, so no great loss.  If they do rise up for him and win, well, great, then he wins!

Classic Trump.  He aims to get other people to take all the risks that will make him personally a huge profit, and if things go south he has it set up so he can jettison them completely and sail off unscathed.

I am deeply concerned.  Demonizing of the free press, constant talk of fradulent elections, musings on delaying elections as an obvious power grab, these are things you see in states that are about to fail and collapse into dictatorships.

People often yell about how *this* election is the important one, much more important than the others.  I usually don't buy into that.  Every election matters, and we constantly get on about how the stuff happening right now is the most important stuff - it never fails.  The likely upcoming election in Canada, for example, is one where I have district preferences for who wins, but I am not fooling myself into thinking that this is *the* election.  It is just *an* election.

But in the US I think we might actually be looking at a decision point between a dictatorship and democracy.  If Trump wins or loses handily there will be rumblings, no doubt, but the thing that scares me most is if he barely loses.  He has made it clear he has no intention of leaving office should there be any doubt in the result, and he has a Supreme Court packed to defend him no matter what he does.  I worry that he will simply announce that the election wasn't legitimate and he will stay in power until he can arrange a proper one, at a time to be decided later.

A lot of Republicans, and a lot of the power structure, will absolutely stand by him if he does this.  Does that end in a civil war?  A dictatorship?  A quick coup / impeachment?  I don't know, and neither do you.

This is where the erosion of norms takes us.  We need our leaders to model the behaviour of accepting election results, or the populace won't accept them, and that leads to catastrophe.  Trump is much like Littlefinger from Game of Thrones - he is happy to burn down the kingdom as long as it gives him a shot at ruling over the ashes.

A runaway

 Pinkie Pie ran away from home for the first time a couple weeks ago.  She is back and all is well, don't fret.  It was the sort of event that starts from the smallest sort of conflict and blows up for no good reason.  I asked her to clean the bathroom sink, she was in a high anxiety state where she couldn't do it, and I took her electronics away until she got the work done.  This led to her grabbing some things and sneaking out the door to a friend's place for the night, returning the next day. 

When we found that she was missing Wendy and I had different reactions.  Wendy was panicked and started searching the building and streets for Pinkie Pie.  I sat at home.  I figured that things were not at all dangerous, but even if they were we had no way to find her so there was nothing much to do about it.  I messaged the parents of her friends and sat back to play some video games.  We needed one parent home in any case and it was clear that it would be me.  This is definitely the pattern that Wendy and I have had over the years - she needs to *do something* and I coldly calculate that doing things isn't worthwhile, so I  ignore the problem and goof off.  

Many years ago Wendy was coming home from a work trip and I thought she was coming home on Friday night.  She arrived home Saturday night to me saying "huh, you sure are late".  I had just spent the day playing video games despite her not being home.  She couldn't figure out how I could have been so calm, but the way I saw it if her plane had crashed and she was dead in the Atlantic there is nothing I could do about it, might as well play video games.  If somehow I had got the flight info wrong and all was well, I should also play video games.  So I played video games!

We had to debate what to do about all of this.  Some parents would instinctually want to punish and yell, but neither of us had much interest in that.  Honestly if a kid is so upset that can't deal with being at home anymore I think running to a nearby friend's home to spend the night is a reasonable reaction.  It can't be the default response to a simple chore, but sometimes stuff gets overwhelming, I get that.  We made it clear that the problem was not telling us what was going on, talked about how she felt, and moved on.

I certainly made her clean the bathroom sink the next day though, you can be sure of that.

I remember running away when I was little.  Much younger than Pinkie Pie for sure.  I grabbed some stuff and headed off into the snow, and ended up sitting at the sawmill in the back field.  My parents eventually showed up and talked to me, and then went back home and waited for me to calm down and return.  I had intended never to return, but naturally I sat in the cold for a few hours and then came home.  I recall the incident that started this and while it is a small thing in retrospect, it was a huge deal to me at the time.

This is the sort of way I want to handle things.  My parents didn't scream at me or punish me - they discussed the incident, agreed that everyone hadn't handled it all that well, and reassured me.  They accepted that I was upset, but made it clear that there wasn't any choice in coming home... but I could do it on my own time.

That was a great way to handle it, I think, and I tried to emulate that with Pinkie Pie.  I hope I succeeded.  In any case we all agreed that we hadn't done things perfectly but that we would try to improve.  We acknowleged each other's feelings and needs, and moved on.  Nothing has come of it since.

Dealing with small people's feelings with empthy and understanding is a damn lot of work.  It is a lot more humane and effective than yelling, but geez it isn't easy.

So you want to talk about race

I read the book So You Want to Talk About Race recently.  I picked it up in part because I have been having some difficult discussions about race with people I know and I wanted to look for suggestions that might help me get my point across.  I try to start off arguing carefully, knowing that "Wow, you are super racist" usually doesn't put people in a receptive mood.  However, after awhile, I end up saying "Yeah, actually, the things you are saying are racist, and your beliefs are extremely destructive" and then no more useful conversation happens.

You see, being called a racist is pretty much the worst thing that can happen, which means that since white people get called racist, racism is mostly a thing that happens to white people.  Or so it has been argued at me, at any rate.

ARRRGGGGHHHH.

This book is a useful tool when having these sorts of discussions.  It covers a bunch of practical topics like microaggressions, the model minority myth, police violence, and many others.  I already knew the great majority of the facts the book covers, but I did find the model minority chapter quite informative.  It isn't a deep dive into any one topic, and it isn't a scholarly work.  It is a simple book for the average person who wants to learn about the subject, and it fills that niche cleanly.

This is one of the few books that I will give an absolutely unqualified Read This Book rating.  I agree with all of it, and I want everyone to have this information.  It is quick, well written, effectively organized, and informative.  If you want to have a conversation about race, this is a great place to start, particularly because the author aims parts of the discussion at white people, and parts at people of colour, with the goal of helping either of those groups improve understanding and communicate effectively.

Sometimes people are convinced by research.  Sometimes they are convinced by personal stories with high emotional content.  The book has both things, covering all the angles.

Next time I have someone ask me for a recommendation because they want to understand the subject better I will definitely tell them to read So You Want To Talk about Race.  Better that then trying to learn by listening to an angry white guy, methinks.  I have all the vitriol, but not the qualifications.

Time travel is the worst

 I liked the Umbrella Academy Season 1.  It had characters I enjoyed watching, a great aesthetic, and a bunch of neat world building that I wanted to see more of.  It wasn't perfect, but I had a great time with it.

Unfortunately UA ended up being a lot like The Matrix.  It had all these cool ideas that didn't quite fit together, but it didn't have enough time for you to sort out exactly how they didn't fit.  There was still tons of room to imagine that the writers had all of it figured out, and that later on you would see the story come together beautifully.  Then the next chapter came out, and everyone realized that they had been just making shit up the whole time and when they actually tried to put it all together it looked like a junkheap instead of a carefully crafted narrative.

A substantial part of the problem was that UA was determined to have a bunch of time travel.  You *can* do time travel well (see Terminator 2), but the way to do it well is to simply have it happen off screen.  Time travel happened, sure, but now the characters just have to cope with the situation they are in.  Shows where the characters can time travel and change the past all end up being a disaster.  UA had the time travel pretty much off screen for the first season, which was fine, but in the second season they elected to have lots of time travel in the plot, and that blew everything to bits.

You can't just have a character who can go back in time and fix anything that goes wrong.  It makes all the decisions everyone makes totally silly.  Heck, the revelation that he can do this retroactively trashes the first season of the show, since now we know that he could have solved all the problems any time he wanted, and he just didn't because the writers told him not to.

Having everything go terribly and then fixing it by 'turns out the character can go back in time and change anything he wants!' feels like they were trying to go for a big emotional scene but lacked any sense of creativity or long term thinking and came up with the most silly, hackneyed, destructive idea they could and ran with it.  It isn't easy to write characters into dire situations and then have them get out of those situations in a believable but surprising way, but if you can't write that, then find someone who can.  Just throwing up your hands in despair, employing a Deus Ex Machina, and giving up on any world consistency or dramatic tension going forward is pathetic.

It is easy to see where this heads.  In future the character simply forgets to use his 'fix anything with time travel' ability, and they write stories as if this major plot point never happened.  I know that in superhero stories characters forgetting to use their powers is common.  That doesn't make it good.  It isn't just with nonsense time travel either - characters in UA consistently have abilities they forget about, or don't bother using, for no reason.  They have a hugely important conversation in the show where all the main characters desperately need a villain to tell them something.  One of those characters can mind control people, and does so regularly.  All she has to do is say "I heard a rumour that you answered all of our questions" and the villain would spill any secret they desired.  Since they were desperately trying to prevent Armageddon at that point, it would be entirely justified!  But she forgets, because that way the plot can happen.

It sucks, because I like the people in the show.  I like the weird retro/futuristic blend of the tech.  I like that they blend in stories about people of colour and queer people and make those struggles part of the narrative.  

But the plot is a travesty, and the worldbuilding is an inconsistent mess.  Whenever the characters need to be in a place for the plot, they go all robot 'beep boop I am going over here now' even if it makes no sense whatsoever.  What a waste of a bunch of good character building.

So many superhero shows fall into the trap of gifting characters amazing powers to solve problems and then completely forget that this changes the world and they will actually have to account for those marvellous new powers at other times.  Unfortunately Umbrella Academy does this, and to an extent that I just can't care about it anymore.

I look scary now

 I have been gradually increasing my shagginess over many months.  My hair on my head was never going to look good, but I had some hopes that my beard would eventually be attractive.  That did not occur, and I am now quite sure that lots of hair is just a terrible look for me.

Yesterday, I finally decided I had to do something about it.  This is phase 1.  For years I had thought that maybe my hair was thinning on top, but I wasn't sure.  After letting it grow out though, that thinning is undeniable.  My dad now has more hair than me.

Phase 2 is me without the hair.  I saw a picture online of an older guy with buzzed hair and a huge beard and it looked fantastic, so I was wondering if I could successfully rock that look.  It turns out I cannot, and everyone who saw it was horrified.

It just doesn't do the thing I was hoping it would do.  Onto phase 3, which is just the same but with a less scraggly beard that has been trimmed down quite a bit.  People viewing my makeover were much happier with this look than the last - nobody likes the big beard on me.

This one is okay, but it just isn't great.  When the beard is shorter it doesn't fill in the way I want.  Also, a shorter beard isn't nearly as much fun to fiddle with, and it still requires maintenance.  Half of the draw of a beard is not having to maintain anything!  Time to take even more off.  Phase 4!

Back to my old look, the one I have been rocking for years and years now.

This is my best look.  I guess that is good to know, since I have had a goatee for about 25 years now, with a couple of six months beard growing stints that didn't work out.  I know this is just the way I should be, but every so often I have to test it out to be sure.

Now I need to endure a few days of Wendy and Pinkie Pie looking at me like I am an alien and walking around me staring whenever we pass one another.  They don't react well to extreme changes in my appearance.

Feel free to chime in about what look you like best, though it doesn't seem like I will be taking your suggestions unless they happen to fit the buzzed look at the bottom.

Yelling at people

I have been hunting for an online home in World of Warcraft.  Finding the right guild to settle into is not an easy affair because there are so many things that can make a guild a bad fit for me.  You need to make sure the people in the guild are playing for the right amount of time, at the right time.  You also gotta find folks that are doing the sort of playing you are doing, at the right level.  Matching all the basic logistical bits is tricky.

But those aren't the only sort of considerations.  I had been in a guild for six weeks or so with everything seeming quite reasonable and then it went from fine to disaster in a tiny span of time.  One raid night one of the raiders starting telling risque jokes, which generally I am fine with, and then graduated to telling jokes bashing gay people and people with disabilities.  I got pissed and told him to stop.  

I don't have any sort of authority in the guild.  Other people can ignore me unless management is willing to step in, and management seemed to have nothing to say on the matter.  Still, apparently my grumpiness was intimidation enough, and the jokes stopped.  Temporarily.

The next raid he started up again, and after the raid I wrote a post talking about how much I cannot and will not tolerate such things.  Both on a political / philosophical level, and also on a deeply personal level.  Even if I would be fine with gay bashing jokes generally (I am categorically NOT fine with it) there is no way I could tolerate it because of the people close to me.

The guild management made it clear to me that they were going to make gay bashing comments now and again, and I could either be cool with it or leave.  They also made it clear that I was making people uncomfortable by calling this sort of thing out, and they weren't happy about it.

You see, they play WOW to relax, and they don't want to feel judged while playing.  They want to be a fun, no politics, no drama sort of guild.  That means gay bashing has to be tolerated, because after all, it is crucial that the guild be a easy, welcoming place for straight people who want to be bigots.

They also chastised me for thinking only of myself, and not taking anyone else's feelings into account.

It made me sick to my stomach.  Obviously that attitude is wretched, and I am well rid of them.  However, I hate having to find a new place to hang out, and I hate not knowing if I am getting into a nest of vipers when I am doing it.  Guilds all claim to be fun, easy going places.  Nobody advertises "We are a bunch of bigots, come take a dump on minorities here."  Nor do they say "This is a place where we do not tolerate bigotry."  They just talk about raid times and what bosses they have killed.

In both board games and computer games I keep seeing this idea floated that gamer communities are the most accepting communities.  It is so obviously nonsense.  They *are* the most accepting places of being a gamer, that is for sure.  Accepting of other things though?  Not so much.

Welcoming to some

I have been following and commenting more on the World Boardgaming Championships Facebook page.  There is a large and contested set of posts there surrounding women feeling safe and included in WBC.

One thing I have seen in several posts is the idea that WBC is completely welcoming to everyone regardless of gender, race, culture, appearance, or anything else.  In fact it has been pitched as the most welcoming place in the entire world.  (Naturally it was pitched this way by men who think that we don't need to do anything to change women's experiences at the con.)

Of course we also, in the same thread, see women talking about all the challenges, insults, and rude or abusive behaviour they have witnessed on many occasions.  How do we square these two points of view?

I have a story that may help illustrate.

Years ago I was invited to an puzzle solving event.  After the event, all the attendees went to a nice bar to get dinner and drinks.  At the time I was living well below the poverty line, and I was regularly skipping events solely because of the cost of bus fare.  Everyone else at the party was ordering whatever they liked off the menu and chatting about their homes, their cars, and the vacations they had planned.

I didn't have a house, or a car, and vacations were a dream.  If I had ordered dinner at the bar I would have burned through 3 months of entertainment budget in a single meal.

Many people in that group might well have felt uncomfortable in many areas of their lives.  After all, they are a group of puzzle nerds.  I am sure to all of them, this was an incredibly welcoming environment.  I am also confident they thought they were being welcoming to me.

But it is fucking hard to sit and listen to people talk about their financial misfortunes when they are bemoaning how they have to put off buying a cottage, and you have to feel guilty about not tipping the waitress because you can't afford a single drink.

I can tell you without any doubt, people can be extremely comfortable, *think* they are being entirely welcoming, and make someone feel desperately out of place.  I left the bar eventually, and didn't get back together with that group.  I don't blame them, or think they did anything wrong.  They didn't know how it made me feel.  I didn't complain.  But I wasn't going to go back.

When I first attended WBC I felt wonderful.  It was incredibly welcoming to me, and I felt right at home.  But I am not every person.  My experience is not universal.  Just because WBC is extremely welcoming to straight white guys who are good at games does *not* mean it is welcoming to all.  Some people at WBC, notably women, have the same experience I had at the bar, but at the con instead.

If you are a white guy who loves to dress in nerdy Tshirts, cargo shorts, and a backpack of board games, WBC is fantastic place.  The rest of the world may give you looks and shut you out, but this place is perfect.  It is easy for you to fit in, and you are completely accepted.  I can easily see how you remember all the places in the world where you weren't accepted, and conclude that WBC is simply accepting of everyone!

But that isn't reality.  WBC is super accepting of you, for sure.  But that experience is not universal, much as you presumably want it to be.

So if your experience of WBC is one of comfort and acceptance, great.  I am happy for you!  But when you conclude that everyone else must have had the same experience, you are insisting that your experience is the only valid one, and you will accept nothing else.  You are refusing to be the accepting person in turn.

If you remember other places in your life where you got side eyed looks, and people talked as though you weren't there, or assumed you were clueless without knowing anything about you, you know that isn't fun.  It doesn't make you want to go back there.  Women are telling us all that this is how they often feel at WBC.  The men at WBC have a responsibility to try to give them the accepting, easy, comfortable experience we have.  The first step is listening to what they say, and *believing* it, even if it strikes us as quite different than our own experience.

I am not saying WBC is the worst.  I love it!  I think the people running it have good policies in place, and work hard to make it great for everyone.  I think a lot of the people attending do the same.  But we have room to improve, and the stories women are telling us make that crystal clear.

Warm welcomes

This is the time of year that I travel to the US to play in the World Boardgaming Championships.  It is one of the best things in my year and it is a great disappointment to have to miss it this year.  Unfortunately playing board games in a convention hall is only slightly below orgies in the covid 19 risk list, so WBC stood no chance.

Much as I love WBC it has some issues.  The official policies regarding inclusion of women, minorities, people with disabilities, and such always struck me as good ones, and my experience has been that the con officials do a solid job trying to make it welcoming to everyone.  However, we can't deny that board games are a white male dominated hobby, and the people that come to WBC trend very white, and very male.

Yesterday there was a thread in the WBC Facebook page about how extreme the white male dominance in board game design is.  It pointed to this article about the issue, which comes from a woman who designed one of my most played games of the past few years - Wingspan.  So far so good.

One of my friends replied to this post talking about her experiences at WBC, and how there have been many incidents that made her feel unwelcome.  The problems she had weren't ones that are easy for officials to do something about - it wasn't people saying obviously awful things like "Girls can't play this game!  Go away!"  Her struggles were more subtle, like people making comments that suggested that she was only there because she had a husband / boyfriend who was at the con, or assuming that she has no idea how to play, with the clear implication that this is because she is female.  She likes WBC, and a lot of the people there, but these experiences taint that.

This sort of post is hard to make.  I know it was difficult for her because she was struggling to explain the problem while avoiding coming off as whiny.  Women are often dismissed when they try to walk this line - they often find there is literally no ground between downplaying the problems they have and being ignored because they are 'too emotional' or 'too pushy'.

A couple of guys wandered in to make excuses.  The men just don't know how to talk to women, you see, and they want more women involved in the hobby!  I decided I couldn't just let this stand, so I explained that if you want more women involved in the hobby, you don't try to shout down women when they explain the problems - you fix the problems.  Claiming that you don't know how to talk to women is just misogynistic nonsense, because you can just talk to them the same way you talk to men.  Talk about the con, or the game, or whatever else.  Women aren't some foriegn species with inscrutable motives.  Just assume they are humans who like games and talk to them on that basis.

Of course there was some tension, as there always is when you ask people to behave better, but the conversation was entirely civil.

And then the WBC official in charge of social media walked in, deleted all the comments, and told us we weren't allowed to talk about this anymore.  This was the comment she left

"There are many things we can do to ensure our hobby is welcoming to all people. Arguing divisively is not one of them. Commenting is closed. Read or do not read the article. Talk to your gaming friends. Invite someone new to WBC. Have a nice weekend!"

This absolutely enrages me.  This pretends to be about making WBC welcoming, but instead makes it clear that women with negative experiences are not allowed to express those, and anyone asking for change will be summarily ignored or officially silenced.

I assume the goal in this was to preserve WBC's image, but instead what it accomplished is to make it clear that WBC has a real problem and that management's current response is to try to pretend it doesn't exist. 

Did MeToo teach us NOTHING?

When a woman says that men having been treating her badly, the solution is not to try to hide her story and pretend nothing is wrong.  The correct course of action is to listen and learn.  I don't think the WBC officials can actually fix this directly, with rules.  I don't expect every paternalistic comment of 'so, is your boyfriend playing this game too?' to suddenly stop just because management says so.  (Also heteronormative, as well as sexist, for the record.)  But even if you can't directly fix it, you can let women talk about those experiences, and let other people listen.

I am going to contact the board and make it clear that this is totally unacceptable behaviour.  If the thread had been full of people calling each other assholes or otherwise making personal attacks, shutting it down would have been a reasonable course of action.  It wasn't, at all.  The thing that caused the ruckus is that somebody had the temerity to suggest that there might be a problem that needs fixing.

If you go to WBC, I would ask you to join me.  Writing to anyone on the board and asking for action is useful.  Sharing this to your other gamer friends would also be appreciated.  I am not calling for anybody's head here.  I don't think that 'silence women' is actually a policy.  I think this was a serious error, one that needs fixing, and I am going to ask them to do just that.  I would encourage you to be specific and make it clear that talking about the challenges women face in the con should be supported by the administration.

We want our hobby to be welcoming to all.  We will never accomplish this if our approach is to pretend is already is, and no work needs to be done.  We have to publicly talk about the issues we have, and take steps towards change.

Better than expected

Covid 19 continues to dominate world conversation.  It actually has been a major factor in why I haven't been posting over the past couple of months, largely because all of my media is saturated by it and I find I don't usually have much to add.  It sucks, people are responding to it badly, life is weird now.  I can say those things, and they are true, but since everybody is saying that it doesn't feel like there is much point in me spewing the same things onto my blog.

But I do have one point to make that may provide a different take on the whole affair:  I am surprised at how well the world is handling the covid crisis.

Don't get me wrong - we could do much better.  The response from some nations and leaders in particular has been heinously self serving and nonsensical, and average people refusing to wear masks as a political signal is also deplorable.

But we are doing a lot better than I figured we would.

At the beginning of all of this I assumed that all nations would refuse any serious measure to contain the virus in the name of economic progress.  I was stunned that so many nations actually came around to policies that closed stores and halted consumption.  I had thought that this simply wouldn't happen.  I figured that leaders would happily sacrifice 50% of the elderly and 1% of the rest of us on the altar of profit.

My expectation, made back in February, was that by this point about 2% of the world population would be dead, and we could easily be as high as 5% by year end.  I didn't expect any sort of serious attempt to stop the virus until every municipality worldwide was digging mass graves, desperately trying to find places to put all the corpses.

There was a reason I stocked up on food in those early days, and in part it was because I thought that we would have a far worse lockdown period following a monstrous dieoff due to covid.  Instead most countries had a moderate lockdown much earlier than I expected and it seems like the deaths from covid will be serious, but shouldn't even come close to 1% of world population, much less 5%.

(So far about .01% of world population has died to covid, and while it is still rising, it seems like we will have a vaccine long before we threaten to have 1% of us die from this.)

We could do much better, yes.  But we already did an awful lot better than I expected of us, so humanity surprised me in a positive way.  I normally like to whinge about how terrible people are, but I figurd I should at least note when it goes the other way and they surprise me in a good way.

In more normal covid news, I have grown a covid beard.  I already got called santa claus by a surprised family member, and nobody thinks it looks good, but this is apparently what I am doing with my time.

A failed attempt at argument

We need to cut way back on the use of force by state agents in our society.  We do need armed people at some point for the extreme cases, but it should be restricted to extreme cases.  I saw a thing online attempting to argue back against this, but it only ended up proving my point.

Obviously this is meant to suggest that you need a cop with a gun to handle this.  A naked guy with his fists raised is such a dangerous thing, after all.

But this is *exactly* what we want social workers to be doing.  We don't need a person with a gun ready to murder this naked dude.  We need someone to say "Hey, what is up?  You seem pretty agitated.  Want to tell me why you are on this roof?" without the implied threat of death or imprisonment if the answer isn't what the emergency worker wants.

Nurses and doctors and social workers and lots of other people have to deal with difficult, delusional, drunk, or otherwise problematic people all the time.  They do it without weapons, because the presence of weapons escalates otherwise safe interactions into violence.

A social worker who can talk naked dude down, figure out what his problem is, and try to help him solve it is exactly how we should respond to naked people on a roof.  (That is, assuming we think that naked people on a roof are a problem in the first place, which they are emphatically not, unless they are doing something else that is an issue.)  We definitely don't need a cop with a gun.

If that naked guy grabs an iron pipe and starts threatening to murder nearby people, *then* we need a cop with a gun.  Let's reduce the number of armed state agents by 90%, hire a ton of social workers and EMTs to replace them, and see how much less violence we can have.  I am confident it will be a lot, and we will make life much easier for the people the cops so consistently make problems for - people of colour, queer people, trans people, and others that are already oppressed.  The police amplify the effect of existing prejudices, so we need to reduce their numbers to the absolute minimum we can get away with, given the occasional necessity for violence by the state.

Black lives matter

What with all the conflict in the world surrounding BLM I figured I should link to a black person writing about his struggles with police.  Neil DeGrasse Tyson wrote a piece on this topic, and one of the key things it nails is how racist policing can't be explained away by 'but the police need to question suspicious people' and similar attempts to ignore the problem.  Tyson's story includes an example of him being questioned for carrying books into a building on campus.  This isn't a thing you would imagine any police officer randomly getting involved with, except that Tyson is black, and the police felt sure that black people don't belong near a physics department.  That is for white people!

Here it is.

One thing I have found interesting in all this is looking at the way people talk about their proposed solutions.  'Defund the police' has become a refrain from the protesters, and I am totally behind that.

Sometimes I have seen people saying "Well, obviously we want to redirect most police funding to social workers, health workers, etc. and shrink the police force, but we don't want to *eliminate* police." but others truly want to get rid of police entirely.  No armed law enforcement at all.

You see similar arguments with regards to prisons.  Prison abolition strictly means no prisons, and some people advocate for exactly that, while others want significant reductions in prison populations.

I am certainly in the 'significant reductions' camp.  There are deeply evil people in the world that cannot be dealt with via fines, classes, apologies, or other similar techniques.  The Jeffrey Dahmers and Robert Picktons of the world can't just be left alone.  We need prisons for such people.

We also need armed law enforcement.  When somebody has a gun and is ready to shoot other people, we need people who are trained to fight them.

But we need so few of those people, and such a small amount of prison space.  The desperately evil and incorrigibly violent are rare.

Traffic control does not need to be overseen by armed law enforcement.  Responding to people who are drunk or high or otherwise causing a fuss does not require guns and clubs, it requires someone trained in social work.  There are so many police functions that simply should be overseen by somebody else, probably somebody with actual training that applies to the situation at hand.

We could reduce prisons populations and police personnel by 90% and it would make me happy.  We do need those both of those things for the extreme cases, but there are way too many cops and they are way too involved in everyone's everyday life.

Changing how the police operate is certainly a good goal.  There are so many things we could do to try to reduce the damage police do in each interaction.  However, the simple fact is that we can do a tremendous amount of good by drastically slashing the number of interactions the police are involved in, and we do that by stripping away the vast majority of their budget and putting it towards programs that bring far greater benefits and far fewer problems.

Covid and privilege

One thing that the covid crisis has shone a light on is privilege of many sorts.  The death toll goes across all demographics, but the trend is clear - those with less privilege are dying far more often.  Poor people, people of colour, homeless people, these are the ones dying far more often than white rich folks.  As I understand it this is one of the few situations where men don't have extra benefits - they are dying more of covid than women are.

When we talk about the crisis we should think carefully about what privilege we have that impacts it.  I see many people talking about how others ought to behave, and those statements are usually coloured by the speaker's position in life.  Those living with partners strongly object to people seeing anybody outside their home and can't imagine why anyone would.  Certainly there are risks to doing so, but if you are partnered and have somebody around to meet your needs for sex, cuddling, hugging, and whatever else you should be cautious to judge those who don't.

It is easy to talk about never leaving your house when you have somebody at home with you, but telling someone that they should simply never have human contact for months or even a year is a harsh thing when they live alone.  We know that telling teenagers that abstinence is the only way is a failure of strategy, and the same applies here.

That doesn't mean we should all be going to orgies, obviously.  It does mean that we have to accept that human contact is necessary for manypeople, and if you find that easy to get, you should hesitate to judge those who don't.

The same sort of thing applies with wealth.  If you have children and you live in a house with a yard this pandemic is drastically easier than if you are trying to cope with them in a 2 bedroom apartment.  Telling someone that they have to sit in the same physical space as their kids for months or a year is a completely different thing when you can retreat to a study, send them to the yard, or go exercise in the garage.  When you literally can't get more than 4 meters from them, the situation is not the same.

We don't tax people by charging everybody 20k in taxes and just accepting that this crushes the poor and barely tickles the rich.  We charge a percentage, asking those who have more to contribute more.  Something of the same philosophy needs to be considered with the crisis.  Nobody has a pass to going to parties with random people, but people in challenging circumstances should have more flexibility in how they cope than those who have it easier.

There are all kinds of ways we should apply this.  If you are a knowledge worker with highly desirable skills, you need to accept that someone with precarious employment is going to need to return to work sooner.  Surely there are many other kinds of examples, but the general key is to keep in mind that people's circumstances can be wildly different from your own, and that just because you don't find a rule a problem doesn't mean that it is workable for everyone.

I support strong precautions against covid, and I think we should definitely deal with it by implementing universal basic income.  I don't think we should reopen the economy quickly.  I do think though that we should all be careful how we judge others behaviour when they clearly have far less privilege than we do.  Nobody needs parties or conventions, but we do need security and contact, for starters, and we all should put a lot of effort into removing risk, while accepting that someone else may not have the resources to give as much as we do.

How to covid

There are degrees of doing social distancing.  Some people have to go to work and wear face shields.  Some people stay home all day and only leave to get groceries.

And some people work in home offices at their dining table surrounded by cubicle walls made of toilet paper.

This wasn't even done for comedy's sake.  Wendy needed walls to separate out the rest of the place from her work zone, and we didn't have anything else that would make such an appropriate makeshift wall.  The wall needed to be opaque, light, easy to set up and move, and unlikely to fall over.  There is literally nothing else in our place that would do.

Pinkie Pie even made a new Do Not Disturb sign for the wall, but unfortunately our printer is dying so we couldn't print it out effectively.  However, here it is, an example of Pinkie Pie's new proficiency with her graphic design program.

This size of condo seemed ideal back when it was just two people living here.  All the space we would ever need!  But nowadays I am cursing myself for not having invested more in a place with just one more room in it.

Sparkly and clean - for now

Awhile ago I had a battle with pigeons on my balcony.  They were roosting in groups, laid an egg in a flower pot, and had thoroughly coated the balcony with poop.  I pulled all the balcony funiture inside to deny them hiding spots, and they stopped coming by.

A few days ago I decided it was time to get things looking shiny out there again.

After four rounds of mopping, two rounds of sweeping, and two rounds of poop scrubbing, the place finally looks good again.  Getting the railing windows clean was tricky!  I could squeegee the top 80% of the outside, but that last 20% was going to involve significant risk of going over the edge.  Wendy and I managed to do a passable job my bending our arms under the railing though.

And now I can spend some of my quarantine time doing this:

Critter likes hanging out in the sun, and he likes sitting on people, so this is two of his favourite things combined together.  I love being naked, and I love sitting in the heat, but unfortunately people get all flustered when I am naked, so I have a minimal amount of clothing on to avoid confrontations... but I do have the sun on my skin and a fuzzy critter, so all is well.

And now the weather service has announced an upcoming shift towards unseasonably colder weather again.  Bring on the heat, I say!

Here's hoping that with the balcony furniture back outside again we don't get a return of the pigeons.  Neither side will prosper in that particular war.

Algorithms, smart and stupid

Facebook has been shoving a new ad at me.  I am full of ambivalence about it, because I both want to praise the targetting of the ad and also ridicule it.

The ad was for a jaw exercising device.   It looks like a donut shaped piece of silicone, and the idea is that you chew on it to give yourself a chiselled jawline.  The actor in the ad talked about being 48 and how he used the device to get back his youthful jaw.

I am 41, and into fitness, so that much they got right.

Unfortunately for them, they also assumed that I am ignorant and desperate.

You can't fix saggy skin with muscle exercises.  You also can't remove subcutaneous fat with targetted regimens.  You *can* generally remove subcutaneous fat from your body with exercise, but you sure as hell can't pick a spot and nuke the fat right there.  This jaw chiselling device is a ridiculous scam.  It is no different from the Ab Blasters I saw advertised on TV when I was young.  Exercise is good for you, sure, but you can't pick a spot and nuke it!  You can pick a spot and make it strong, but the body removes fat where it wants to.

Facebook is hit and miss with these things.  It does aim a lot of board game and video game ads at me, which is accurate, but it also really tries to sell me trucks, which is a total non starter.

But the truck ads are understandable.  I am in a age and income bracket where buying a vehicle is plausible.  The most outrageous miss I have ever seen is when FB started sending surrogate mother ads at me.  Much as I might like to help infertile people to have children, I lack some key things that are required for that endeavour.  Shouldn't FB have my sex sorted by now?

I can't quite sort out how much to respect algorithms.  Sending a gym rat like me ads for adjustable home dumbbells during a time when I can't go to a gym?  Great idea!  (I am not buying, but it is a well targetted ad.)  But singing lessons?  Not so much.

The algorithms are getting better, and sometimes they do make great decisions, but we are a long way away from Skynet.

Learning from disaster

The ongoing crisis has taught me some things.  While I hang out at home a lot, I apparently chafe at the requirement of staying home.  I suppose that isn't unusual, but present circumstances certainly bring it into stark relief.  I also discovered that while I support substantial restrictions on our collective behaviour to combat covid-19, some of them really grind on me.

Throughout my life a lot of things I try to do have been criticized by people under the umbrella of 'safety'.  Going barefoot, you can't do that because safety!  Polyamory, you can't do that, because safety!  Marijuana, you can't use that, because safety!

My usual response to this is to bristle with indignation and then swing back, hard.  I tend to go on about how those same people yelling about safety happily support all kinds of things that are drastically more dangerous, and argue that their real issue with my behaviour is simply that I am doing something different than they are used to, but they fall back on 'safety' when they have no real arguments.

Sometimes I don't have time for debating the topic and my response boils down to

FUCK YOU I DO WHAT I WANT.

It turns out the restrictions on behaviour because of Covid-19 push my buttons because of this.  I agree that I should stay at home, and I agree that we must endure inconvenience to make grocery shopping less likely to transmit diseases, and I agree with most the things we are doing.

But damn when authorities tell me how to live because 'safety' my instinct is to snarl and tell them to get bent.

Even though those arguments from safety are well grounded these days I have gotten so used to safety being thrown around as a catch all for 'I have no actual reasons or data' that it really winds me up.

This came up in regards to grocery store population caps.  Recently I was really grumpy after a grocery store visit where the security person enforcing store population sat on his phone ignoring everything and occasionally looked up and motioned a random bunch of people into the grocery store.  The cashiers were standing around bored because the security guard wasn't keeping enough people in the store, and the people waiting in the enormous line were standing close together, often chatting with one another.  Keeping us all in line was simply increasing the danger to all of us, not just wasting our time but also *increasing* our risk. 

It bothers me to restrict people's behaviour for no gain, but it *really* burns my bridge when regulations in the name of safety actually make things worse.  It is a tough thing to argue though, because I actually support greater safety measures that are effective, and if I argue against restrictions people will naturally assume I am in denial of some kind, or that I buy into the 'let all the old people die to save the stock market' thing.

While I don't think I will come out of this mess with new skills, I suspect I will end up at least learning a few things about myself.